Every House Is Haunted (29 page)

Brenda stammered. “I . . . I didn’t mean . . .”

But Sally was already running upstairs.

Brenda started after her, then stopped. She stood there, gazing up the stairs with an expression of complete and total bewilderment. She looked over at John, still sitting in his chair with the newspaper draped across his lap. Her mouth opened and he waited for her to blast him for not saying something, for not stopping her, but she didn’t say anything. After a long moment of painful silence, she wandered down the hallway to the kitchen.

John stood up to go after her. He tripped over the cat just as it was coming in from the dining room, and grabbed the wall to keep from falling. He looked down at the cat and for a fleeting moment imagined how life would be so much easier if their roles were reversed. What did a cat have to worry about? Eat, sleep, and sit in the sun all day. Go out hunting every night, drop a dead bird or mouse on the back porch on occasion. When you thought about it, the suburban house cat really had it made.

John preferred not to think about it. Thinking was getting him nowhere.

It was time to
do
something.

The following morning, Saturday, John got up early, showered, put on an old pair of jeans and a paint-spattered sweatshirt, and walked down the street to Kris Dunn’s house.

That was how he thought of it, although Kris must have had parents. Right? John had never seen them—had never even seen Kris Dunn, for that matter—but he assumed the kid was too young to live on his own.

Or was he?

As he passed the Robichaud’s house, then the Smythe’s, John got to wondering just how old was Kris Dunn. As his estimates grew higher, John found himself getting angrier.

His hands were clenched into fists when he arrived at Kris Dunn’s house. The garage door was open and John could see three young men standing inside. They might have been anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five years of age. The one in the middle had a proprietary air about him, and John figured this was Kris Dunn. He was about John’s height, but thinner around the middle, with strong arms, shaggy black hair, and small dark eyes. His friends—a couple of deadbeats, John observed, just like Kris himself—stood on either side of him. The one of the left had blond dreadlocks and a tattoo on his forearm that said
BITCHSLAPPER
. The one on the right was tall and gangly and was wearing a black t-shirt with the word
SLIPKNOT
on it. John thought
Slipknot
was the name of a horror movie.

As he walked up the incline of the driveway, John noticed the three young men had already begun the day’s drinking. Kris and his buddies were each holding a can of beer, and there was a half-empty case on the concrete floor, next to a stack of boxes partially covered with an oil-stained tarpaulin.

It wasn’t even noon yet and these kids—as John thought of them—were already well on their way to getting sloppily drunk. Where the hell were the parents?

John stepped into the garage and immediately noticed a strange smell in the air. At first he thought it was beer, then realized it was something else. It wasn’t a yeasty smell; it was sharper, like turpentine, maybe, or rubbing alcohol.

“Hey, look who it is!”

Kris Dunn and his buddies noticed John standing in the garage doorway. They grinned at him like a pack of jackals.

“How ya doing, Dad?”

“I’m not your dad,” John said.

“Yeah, but we’re like practically related. Sal and I have been getting close, you know.” He covered his mouth in a gesture of mock embarrassment. “Or maybe you don’t.”

Kris’s friends snickered.

“I don’t want you seeing my daughter anymore,” John said. He tried to make his voice sound firm and strong. “Whatever there was between the two of you, it’s over now. I’m not asking you—I’m telling you.”

Kris exchanged a look with his friends, then all three of them burst into loud, troll-like laughter. Kris slapped one hand across his forehead like he had never heard anything so funny. The fluorescent lighting in the garage gleamed on the silver fang-shaped ring he wore on one of his fingers.

“Oh, Dad, you’re
telling
me,” he said, wiping away a faux tear. “That’s great.”

“How old are you anyway?” John asked.

“Old enough, Dad,” Kris replied cryptically. “Old enough.”

“Good, then you should be able to understand that I’m not fucking around here. If I see you with my daughter again, I’ll call the cops and have you charged with statutory rape.”

Kris snickered. “You oughta give your little girl more credit, Dad. She gives head like a champ.”

John’s face darkened. “You little fuck.”

“Shit, man, that girl could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.” Kris winked. “Hey, if you don’t believe me just ask one of these guys—”

John lunged at him.

The kid in the Slipknot t-shirt stepped out of the way, and John thought,
Good, his friends are going to stay out of this. They’re not as stupid as they look.
Then the leg snapped out into John’s path. John tripped over it and did a face-plant on the cold concrete floor. He felt his nose crunch and fill up with blood. He snorted it out as he pulled himself quickly to his feet.

Just in time to catch the arcing, underhand punch thrown by the kid with the blond dreadlocks.

John expected Kris to get in a lick of his own, but it didn’t happen. He staggered backwards, blinking his eyes against the pain in his cheek and nose, and saw that Kris had moved back next to the door leading into the house.

“There’s someone else here who likes your little girl, Dad. I’m sure he’d love to say hello.”

And with that Kris opened the door and an enormous Rottweiler came firing out like a sleek, black-furred torpedo.

John watched the dog coming at him and thought,
What a lousy way to spend a Saturday morning
.

“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” John said, and winced as Brenda pressed the frozen steak against the dark swollen skin puffing up around his left eye.

The kid with the dreadlocks had done that. The one in the Slipknot shirt had hoofed him a good one in the balls, and John figured he’d be spending the next week or so scraping them off the roof of his mouth.

Kris’s dog, Shredder, had bitten him on the right calf, and John felt lucky to have gotten away with just that. The Rotty had looked mean enough to chew nails and spit tacks. Kris had pulled him off after that one love bite, maybe realizing that anything more might get him into serious trouble. Those punk kids had a great sense of self-preservation.

“You look like you got mugged,” Brenda said. “Was it the Girl Guides?”

John gave her a wry look. “Hardy-har.”

“Well, if you’re not going to tell me, I’ll have to come up with something to tell our friends and family. Was it Mr. Petersen? Did he catch you walking on his lawn and beat you with his walker?”

“I’ll beat you in a minute,” John said, without force.

“Please,” Brenda scoffed. “You couldn’t beat up a Care Bear in your condition.”

She touched his ear gingerly, and John hissed in pain. Kris had punched him in the side of the head, and the fanged ring he wore had cut his ear. The blow had knocked John to the ground, and then the three fuckers had quite literally kicked him out of the garage. He didn’t think any ribs were broken, but it wasn’t for their lacking of trying.

“Are you going to call the police?”

John didn’t answer right away. He had thought about calling the police. Of course he had. Kris Dunn had sicced his dog on him. He had been assaulted. He pictured himself telling all of this to the police. Unfortunately he also pictured what would almost certainly happen next. Kris Dunn telling the cops that John had stormed onto his property—
trespassing
was the word he would use—and the dog had attacked him in defence of its owner. Of course, the only injury the dog had caused was the bite on John’s leg, but who’s to say the dog didn’t do the rest of it as well? Especially with two other witnesses who would undoubtedly back up their friend’s story.

John had gone off half-cocked and he had no one to blame but himself.

“I’m not calling the cops,” he said. “I’ll handle this myself.”

“Okay,” Brenda said, a bit coolly. “Then I guess you can take care of yourself, too.” She stood up and put his hand on the frozen steak. “Hold it there. And keep it wrapped. That’s our dinner tonight.”

John watched her leave the room, then his gaze drifted over to the cat. He was standing on the arm of the easy chair, licking his chops and staring at John with an unreadable expression.

“I know what you’re thinking,” John said. “You think you do a better job of protecting this family than I do.” He sighed deeply. “And I think you might be right.”

He looked past the cat at the telephone on the side table.

“Should I call the cops?” he asked himself.

He watched the cat jump off the chair and saunter into the hallway. His gaze drifted up to a pair of pink-socked feet on the top step of the stairs.

He called out “Sally?” and the feet disappeared.

John sighed and picked up the phone.

The cops didn’t find anything.

Brenda served the two uniformed officers coffee while they spoke to John in the living room.

“Are you sure you smelled drugs in the house?” one of the officers asked.

“I wasn’t actually
in
the house,” John clarified. “I was in the garage.”

The officers exchanged a look.

“But you did smell drugs,” the officer prompted.

“I . . . I think so.” John hated the uncertainty in his voice. “I thought so at the time.”

“Was it marijuana that you thought you smelled?”

“No, it was a sharper smell. I couldn’t quite identify it.”

“But you were sure it was drugs.”

John muttered a reply. He could see how this was going, and he wished now that he had made an anonymous call. It was so humiliating. He felt like Ruth Meyers, the old biddy who thought the Girl Guides were putting LSD in the cookies they sold door-to-door every year.

The cops stood up and headed toward the door.

“We appreciate your concern,” said the officer who had done all the talking. “There’s nothing wrong with making a mistake. It’s perfectly harmless.”

John nodded dimly as he saw them off.

Harmless? He’d have to wait and see about that.