Man, F*ck This House (And Other Disasters), page 10
Maybe then the rest of them wouldn’t end up in intensive care, or worse.
The drive through the mountains was pretty, at least. Sabrina still couldn’t get over how blue the sky was, how sweeping the vistas were, compared to Ohio. And when she pulled into the visitor lot at the prison, she had another surprise as well. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, some sort of grim, gothic institution perhaps, but DeFeo State looked a lot like her high school, except bigger and surrounded by barbed wire. Just a series of bland municipal buildings, lacking any particular air of desperation or malice. Maybe it was the snowcapped ridges in the distance or the fresh air that vaguely reminded her of Hal’s body wash.
Sabrina parked and locked the car, wondering if that was even necessary—who steals cars from a prison parking lot?—and followed the signage directing her into the building. Perhaps she should’ve made an appointment, but she hoped the element of surprise would help. This Perryman character probably didn’t get a lot of visitors, judging from his mug shot. Hopefully boredom and curiosity would convince the hardened felon to at least hear her out, if not help her.
Once inside, a pair of guards directed her through a metal detector and searched her purse, opening her lipstick as if she’d hidden a razor blade inside, then signed her in and pointed her to a waiting room. Sabrina entered a cramped, noisy space filled with children playing with the trucks, Legos, and well-worn picture books strewn about the carpet, their mothers waiting silently with drawn faces or breastfeeding infants. None of them met her eyes. Sabrina felt out of place. The other women, and they were all women, were mostly younger, and their dress and demeanor and cheap tattoos marked them as something other, something apart from a woman with a nice husband and mostly nice family and a few years of college under her degreeless belt.
Settling down in a plastic chair in a relatively quiet corner of the cacophonic room, she caught the false sense of superiority with which she regarded her fellow visitors and felt disgusted with herself. Slumming it? Please. There were plenty of times when she was one broken condom away from exactly all this with some idiot Hooters regular. She got lucky finding a guy who wore golf shirts and didn’t swear without also being a religious nut.
Hal.
She hoped he was okay. It was strange. A week ago, they were back in Ohio, and she was so excited—for once—by what the future might hold. That blank envelope. And now, all this—
“Who’re you visiting?”
A boy about Damien’s age stood before her with glasses, a bowl cut, and a figure that could only be described as husky. There was some sort of cartoon llama on his shirt.
“Oh, I—”
“Sergio! Don’t bother that lady,” his mother scolded, marching across the room with a pink-stockinged baby balanced on one hip.
“It’s okay,” Sabrina said.
“I told him you don’t talk to people you don’t know.”
“Strangers. I tell my kids the same thing.”
The woman looked her up and down. “Your kid in here? Or your husband?”
Kid? Those bags under her eyes must’ve looked really bad.
“Neither,” Sabrina started to say, but then a guard with a clipboard called her name. She quickly said goodbye to the kid, Sergio, and his mother, then followed the guard down the hall. Now she entered an area familiar to her from TV and movies. The plexiglass, the phones, the orange-jumpsuited inmates being shuffled in and out by burly, scowling prison guards. She was shown to a station and sat, hands in her lap, trying not to listen to the buzz of conversation around her, mostly about court dates and appeals and entreaties to stay faithful, and sometimes much more colorful language employed by inmates believing their previous entreaties had fallen on deaf ears.
Eventually, a guard brought a large, long-haired man slumping and shuffling down the walkway and sat him down in front of her. Sabrina reached for the phone.
The man brushed hair from his face—red-cheeked, doughy, and very, very familiar.
It was the man from the basement.
Sabrina gaped at Dirk Perryman, who regarded her with a bland expression that hinted at slight but not overwhelming curiosity.
“You’re kinda hot,” Perryman said, his expression no longer quite so bland.
Sabrina couldn’t stop looking at him. He was a dead ringer for the man she’d seen in the basement, but there were subtle differences, too. The convict was slightly older, had much longer hair, and, while still large, had lost some weight, his jumpsuit bulging at the sleeves rather than the waist.
But that wasn’t all. It was his eyes. While the man in the basement had been dull and lifeless, Perryman’s blue orbs retained something of a sparkle despite the years he’d spent behind bars and the horrible things he must’ve seen. Or done.
“Hey, lady,” Perryman said, snapping his fingers in front of the plexiglass. “This ain’t a zoo, and I’m not an orangutan. So quit staring and start talking.”
“Sorry,” Sabrina managed. She was still taken aback, practically struck dumb, but took a breath and tried to gather her thoughts. “Thanks for seeing me.”
Perryman shrugged. “You know how long it’s been since I talked to a woman who doesn’t work here? Figured, what the hey. You one of those Innocence Project types?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Guess not. So if you’re not a lawyer, what do you want with me?”
Sabrina’s free hand worried at the hem of her shawl. “You used to live in my house.”
Perryman’s brows drew together, his eyes nearly disappearing. “Say what?”
“4596 James Circle,” Sabrina said. “We moved in last week. I understand you lived there. A few years ago.”
“Yeah, okay. So what?”
Sabrina loosed a thread and pulled on it, wrapping it around her finger. “I have questions.”
“Well, it’s fifteen minutes till lunch, so why not? What do you want to know? Your hot water heater on the fritz or something?”
That was the problem, wasn’t it? Should she just come out and ask if the house was haunted? If he’d seen anything strange?
She tried a different tack. “The police found your fingerprints in the basement.”
Perryman chuckled. “Course they did. I used to live there.”
“On one of our boxes.”
“Huh?”
“We just moved here. From Columbus. I was unpacking on Monday. Or repacking. Stuff we brought but I didn’t think we needed. I put it all in one of the boxes from the move. I know it was our box because it had the logo of the moving company on the side. I was going to bring it down to the basement for storage.”
Perryman glanced at the clock on the wall. “I don’t exactly have a packed schedule these days, but is there a point here?”
“Yes. Before I could bring the box downstairs, someone did it for me. A man I’d never seen before. In fact, he looked a lot like you.”
“Huh?”
“I thought it was a prowler. Or, or something, I guess. I called the police. They dusted for prints and found yours on our box. They also tell me you’ve been in here a long time. So explain to me how your fingerprints got there?”
Perryman’s eyes narrowed. “Beats me. What, you think they let me out of here on weekends or something? Gimme a hall pass if I play nice?”
“No. I don’t think you left the prints. But they’re yours, all the same. You used to live in the house.” Sabrina leaned closer to the plexiglass. “Did you ever see anything . . . strange?”
Perryman looked away. Maybe at the clock on the wall. Maybe at something else. The sky beyond it. He didn’t say anything for a long time. The woman in the booth next to her was telling what Sabrina presumed was her boyfriend that she’d met someone else. A few rows down, another visitor was crying.
“You know how I ended up in here?” Perryman finally said.
Vehicular manslaughter, Sabrina thought. Instead, she said, “No, how?”
Perryman smiled sadly. “Lot of guys in here, they’ve got stories. What had happened was stories, I call them. You know, I was minding my own business, helping old ladies across the street, but what had happened was I slipped and accidentally sold a fifteen-year-old some crack. What had happened was I tripped and robbed a bank. What had happened was my girl took my fist and slammed it into her own face until all her teeth fell out.” Perryman shook his head. “Always rolled my eyes at stuff like that. First couple times I got locked up, at least. Which happened a lot. They probably told you I was a frequent flier?”
“Something like that.”
“What can I say? I liked drinking. Liked drugs. And I owned it. Every time I landed in the clink, I knew just what I did and how I could’ve avoided it. I couldn’t stop. But at least I didn’t blame anyone else, you know? And the other thing I didn’t do. I never drove drunk.”
“You didn’t?”
“When I was seventeen, a kid in my class, what would’ve been my graduating class if I’d gone that way, wrapped his car around a tree. Kid I knew well. I’d just been at a party with him. One minute, he was chugging a bottle of SoCo. The next, it was just like . . . he got deleted, you know? Gone. I can’t say I did everything right. I did a whole lot of wrong, but I never got behind the wheel when I was drinking. Too much. I’m a big guy, you know?”
Sabrina momentarily flashed back to her old Hooters clientele: guys with Miller Lite running down their chins insisting they were fine. Heck, they could drive better with a couple down the hatch because it relaxed them.
“Anyway. The house was great because I could bring the party to me. Some of the neighbors complained at first—a few of those jail stays I mentioned were courtesy of them Karens—but then two of them moved away, one after the other, and the old lady died, and I was pretty much alone. You know the house backs up on a national park. So yeah, I turned it into party central. We did some real damage in there. But . . .” He trailed off, looking into the distance again. Maybe seeing bygone parties, beer- and sweat-soaked bodies dancing in the living room where Sabrina watched imaginary and narcissistic versions of morning shows, maybe seeing something else altogether.
When Perryman didn’t say anything else, Sabrina prompted, “But what?”
Perryman snapped back from wherever he’d temporarily absconded. “You asked if I ever saw anything strange.” He looked back and forth, leaned in closer, lowering his voice. “I’m guessing you’ve seen something? Aside from the fingerprints?”
“Yes. Aside from the fingerprints.”
Perryman waved dismissively. “I could’ve guessed it. But it’s not the kind of thing you talk about, is it?”
“I guess not.”
“How do you start, right? Everybody’s so worried about people thinking they’re crazy. But out where you are? It’s not the liability it is in here. You don’t want to be crazy here. Anyway. I saw some things, yeah. What they were you can probably guess, but it’s not important. More’n that, though, it was this feeling. Something wasn’t right. Like I wasn’t alone. Like I was being watched.”
Far stranger than any occurrence at the house, for Sabrina Haskins, was the feeling this man she’d just met, this felon, this killer, knew her on a level no one else did. Not Hal. Not her kids. No one.
“It’s not all bad, though,” Perryman said. “It’s hard to explain. Even when things started happening, I never got the sense it was malevolent. More . . . frustrated? Maybe? Like my mom, when I’d come home drunk on a school night, falling all over the kitchen, knocking the toaster off the counter, then she’d flip the light on and I’d ask her to make me a grilled cheese? Like that look. I guess. Just over it. I didn’t notice it at first, but pretty soon I felt eyes on me, something constantly watching. And some of my guests, they had a bad time. Nobody talked about it with me because like I said, how do you talk about something like that? But I knew. The looks in their eyes.
“One day, I’d just gotten a keg from the liquor store. Planned a real blowout. Had it sitting in a plastic tub in the kitchen. I went out to the car to get the plastic cups and the chips and everything else and when I came back, the keg was upside down in the sink. I grabbed it, trying to save it like a drowning kid, but when I touched it, I could feel it was empty. The whole metal top was shorn off, sitting next to the microwave.
“What could do something like that? And why? I knew I was—pardon my French—pissing something off, but I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop. It was MY house, you know? Why shouldn’t I be able to do anything I want? So I went out. Got more kegs. Invited even more people. Maybe two hundred showed up that night. Had a band set up in the living room and everything. We trashed the place. Even though I knew I’d have to clean up, I didn’t care, because I was angry, you know? But the weird thing. The whole time we were partying, music blasting, and girls dancing, I kept hearing this sound underneath it all . . . sounded like moaning.”
Perryman looked down at his hands again. A guard came by and said, “Five minutes.”
Sabrina yanked a thread out of her shawl.
“Next day I get arrested. There’s still people passed out on couches, a thin layer of congealed beer stuck to the floor. I’m asleep in my bedroom with this chick I’d just met. The cops kick the door down—she screams louder’n anything I’d ever heard—and haul me out of bed. My mind’s racing, because I thought all the neighbors were gone. Who called the cops? And why are they shoving me face down on the floor, knees in my kidneys, slapping bracelets around my wrists? You get tickets for this kind of thing. Noise violations, I mean.”
Sabrina frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Perryman grinned sardonically. “Me either. I get hauled in, given the fifth degree. I ask for a lawyer, and then, I finally find out what’s going on. Apparently, the night before, I’d gotten drunk and driven my car through the front window of a Love’s gas station. Killed an elderly clerk named Hazel Eden. Not by hitting her. I guess she had a heart attack when my car crashed through that window and obliterated a magazine stand. Still, law being what it is, they handed me a manslaughter charge. Except”—Perryman held up a finger—“it wasn’t me. I never left the party. Remember I had about two hundred witnesses? None of that mattered because they had me on video, kicking open my car door and running off while Hazel Eden clutched her chest and collapsed to the floor. There was something off about that video, though. It looked like me, yeah, but it wasn’t me. Couldn’t have been. It was my car though.”
Sabrina let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “So, what? What happened?”
Perryman shook his head. “No idea. I wasn’t a great guy, I’ll own that. But I didn’t do what they say I did.”
“It’s not one of those What had happened was stories,” Sabrina said. And meant it. The man before her struck her as utterly without guile. And it wasn’t like she could do anything for him. He had no reason to lie.
Besides, she’d seen his doppelgänger.
Perryman stood up. “Lunchtime. Thanks for coming. But be careful, okay? Come see me again, let me know how things turn out. If you want.”
“I will.”
Perryman hung up, then Sabrina did the same a moment later. She watched him shuffle off toward one of the few events he had to demarcate his day. One of the few things he had to look forward to. Despite it all, she envied him a little.
There was comfort in knowing exactly what to expect.
Jackpot.
Damien got off the bus after an especially long day, one that felt like it might never end. At times, he thought about ditching school, so excited was he that his plan was finally coming together, an event a decade in the making. But no, he chose instead to listen to more of Mr. Tuthill’s middle-aged Middle Ages maunderings—today’s lesson seemingly a recounting of the plot of the 2001 Martin Lawrence vehicle Black Knight—based on the reasoning that while he didn’t believe in karma, knocking on wood, or any central organizing principle to the universe, he knew such things could not be unequivocally disproven either, so it couldn’t hurt to behave himself. So when he exited the bus and saw Sabrina’s car gone from the driveway, he rejoiced.
Damien was alone, finally. No Sabrina, no Michaela, no Hal—not that his father would have noticed anything amiss, anyway.
Now he could begin.
Damien stepped out into the backyard. The shed door was half open—the farmer must’ve left it open the night before when he delivered the supplies. Damien had briefly worried the man would just take off, but no, the man was as good as his word, his country-fried honor binding him to the handshake deal he’d made with a twelve-year-old.
At least there were some people left in the world in which one could put their faith and not find it misplaced.
Damien ran to the shed and stuck his head inside. Something landed in his hair. He yelped and brushed it out. Couldn’t see what—a dark shape skittered under the lawn mower. He thought about yanking the rip cord and pureeing the disgusting little creepy crawly, but he didn’t have time.
Donning a pair of work gloves—shaking them out first, naturally—Damien grabbed the first canister of blood and hauled it bowlegged into the house. He set the vessel in the mudroom, then went back and got the other. Hauling them upstairs proved more of a chore, but with the proper motivation and plenty of naughty words, Damien moved everything into its proper place.
Rigging the device above Sabrina’s bedroom doorway was easy by comparison. He’d designed the contraption with his usual brilliance and had no doubt it would work.
With the trip wire set, he stole one of Michaela’s old baby dolls—the most realistic one he could find—and slathered it in blood. Just a little something to wave around.
Then he went downstairs to enact Phase Three. A little symbology would go a long way. He took a knife from the kitchen, shoved the coffee table out of the way, and started carving a pentagram in the floor.
