Something Is Always Happening Somewhere, page 1
Kelly McClure
Something Is Always Happening Somewhere
First published by WolfieVibes Publications 2022
Copyright © 2022 by Kelly McClure
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Kelly McClure asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Kelly McClure has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.
First edition
ISBN: 978-0-578-36772-9
Cover art by Lindsey Baker
This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy
Find out more at reedsy.com
This book is dedicated to my mom, who taught me to love books. And also to my wife, Lindsey, who taught me how to love.
Acknowledgement
Special thanks to David Reeves for being the first to read this book, and to Lindsey Baker for designing the cover.
Chapter 1
Dale beeps open the locks of her Jeep and opens the door, flinging her purse and work tote onto the passenger seat. Situated behind the wheel, she reaches over to pull her cell phone out so she can text her wife, Gina. Always the cautious driver, she’d hate to die in a crash having “Don’t eat yet. Bringing home Chinese and wine” be the life-ending last words she unknowingly checks out with. She laughs to herself thinking about it, picturing the obituary that would run in the local paper following the fictional crash. “She died as she lived, thinking about food and wine.”
Message safely sent and responded to with her wife’s go-to, a thumbs up emoji, Dale buckles her seat belt and turns the key in the ignition, bringing the car to life with a satisfying rumble. On the short drive from the parking garage of her office building to the hole in the wall Chinese food place that they’ve helped keep in business since they moved to Long Beach six months ago, she lets her mind drift to her favorite cycle of daydreams, while also keeping a percentage of her attention focused on the road in front of her. Moving her small family - which consists, for now, of herself, Gina, and their two cats - from New York to California was the best decision she’d ever made in her still fairly young life. To only be 41 and be a home owner, happily married, and occupy a windowed office at the prestigious advertising company, Gravity & Graphite, was more than her younger self could have imagined obtaining by that age. To think that not even a year ago they were all huddled together in an extremely overpriced studio apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that, more evenings than not, offered views of various neighborhood drug deals and domestic disputes.
Pulling into the only available parking spot at the Chinese place, Dale considered leaving the car running so she could just hurry in, grab the food, and get back on the road. She thought better of it pretty quickly. Long Beach, at first blush, felt safer than New York, but it was just the sunshine and palm trees. Like how, in movies, a blonde man in shorts and a t-shirt will always seem more “good” than a man with dark hair in a dark suit. You had to learn when to look past the window dressing. She just bought that Jeep, using a good chunk of post-move savings to do so, and would hate to see it turned into some shifty teenager’s joy ride.
Locking up and heading in, she became drenched in fluorescent lighting so yellow, she swore she could taste salt in her spit. As though the color of the place brought to her palate what was served inside. Like how the red walls of a hot dog place sometimes made her taste ketchup, and the pink walls of an ice cream shop made her suddenly phlegmy. She paid the $10.12 for their lavish dinner, pure fried trash drizzled in Crayola goo, then made her way to the liquor store conveniently located right next door for the promised and, she would assume, highly anticipated box of wine. It pleased her to know that although her family had more money now than either of them had ever come close to before, they still had simple tastes.
* * *
Before her headlights could even fully illuminate the driveway of their newly mortgaged ranch style home, Dale could tell that something was wrong. The front door was slightly open, which Gina would never in a million years allow to happen, for fear of the cats getting out. Scanning her eyes for whatever she could see, she bundled bags, purse, and wine into one arm so she could navigate her house key, then remembered there was no need for one. Houses and cars needing keys. Muscle memory. One of those fabrics of implied safety, like a parachute, or a seat belt on a roller coaster. We’re not supposed to fall from the sky, but we’re not really supposed to be in the sky in the first place. A belt and a bar keep the feeling of danger away, not the danger itself. When that fabric is pulled from us, nothing feels more real. After spending so much of our lives avoiding terrible things, when they come, it almost feels like a relief, because we know then. We know. That we were right in suspecting that they were always out there waiting for the perfect time. Dale knew that that time, for her, was now.
Pushing open the door, she quietly set all the stuff from the car down on the entryway tile. As she did, her finger brushed against something wet and she momentarily dropped the tension. Mentally cursing the kid who bagged their dinner, figuring a lid must have come loose and created a pool of soy sauce in the bag, which was now leaking all over their clean floor. In a different lifetime. In her own lifetime of yesterday, or ten minutes ago, that would have been the case. But in this new one, it was blood on the floor. Blood in the shape of a shoe print.
Dale stood up, wiping her hand on her pants, and forced her feet to move to the back of the house. Passing the estate sale phone table in their living room ($550 dollars. Gina said she’d have paid double) she saw the decorative letter opener they kept on it, not knowing what the hell else to put on a phone table, since neither of them had had a landline since the 90s. She picked it up and clutched it in her hand so hard that the blood left her knuckles, turning them corpse white.
“Gina?” She called out. No answer.
Almost to the bedroom door, at the end of a minutes long walk that felt like five years, Dale could see that the light from the bedside table was on, casting a man-sized shadow along the wood floors of their hallway. As she moved, ever so slightly to try and see, something rushed towards her from inside the room. The movement caused a waft of stale beer and cigarette smoke to fill her nose.
“Just let me finish,” a terrible voice grunted, slamming her own bedroom door in her face.
Dale backed away quietly, but quickly, and as she did she heard a collection of noises that she will hear for the rest of her life, and probably even after. Gina, her wife, her best friend, who she’s kissed every part of and could name all the sounds from, taking a sharp intake of breath, and then crying out, just once. Their bed frame creaking now under the weight of the damage being done.
Careful not to take her eyes from the door, she maneuvered down the hallway backwards, and exited out to the yard, making her way around the back of the house to the bedroom window. Now crouching outside, she could get a clear view of the bed. Gina’s face came into partial view in nightmarish vignettes. Splayed out on her stomach on top of their bedspread, her small frame rocked forward and back violently with every thrust of the man pinned to the top of her. She was naked only from the waist down and she’d been hurt. Badly.
Gina’s eyes, when able to be seen, were dead. Her body was still alive, but she’d checked out of it a long time ago. Hopefully the minute this monster entered the house. Or at least the minute he entered her. Lost in his trance of senseless violence, the man’s face was bright red with exertion as he worked towards stealing the life of not one person, but two.
Dale realized that at some point she’d started clawing at the window, like an animal begging to come inside after being let out to pee. The man on top of her wife looked up and locked eyes with her. His mouth broke open into a possessed smile revealing small brown teeth, like pieces of gum dug out from under the bench of an old pickup truck. A string of drool rolled out of his gaping maw and hit the back of Gina’s white t-shirt. She winced and then appeared to lose consciousness, as though the tiny weight of it was what finally broke her.
The sound of something shattering clipped the invisible string between them. Dale looked down at her right hand and saw that it clutched a large chunk of landscaping brick that she must have picked up without even realizing it. She entered their bedroom, scraping past the jagged glass of the broken window pane, her eyes only focused on one thing.
The man was only just now crawling off
Dale opened up a dark hidden place deep within her. Some place held on reserve for a night just like this one. A night each of us hopes will never come looking for us, hiding behind our hands, unprepared for all the ugliness that life, and the people that come with it, has to offer. And she screamed.
The deranged intruder who, unbeknownst to him, had just soiled humanity for the last time in his putrid life, laughed in as casual of a way one would while sitting at a bar with friends on a Friday night. He was still laughing when Dale connected the brick in her hand with his teeth.
She followed up the blow to the face by plunging the letter opener, clutched all this time in her other hand, into the side of his neck and he spun, palm flat against the gushing wound, painting the walls and floor with his filth before collapsing with a thud that caused the teeth inside her own head to rattle.
Dale pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket to call the police. She hadn’t wondered until just that moment why she hadn’t just done that in the first place.
* * *
“911, what’s your emergency?” The lady manning the phones that night sounded like she needed to splash some water in her face.
Struggling to grip the phone in a way that felt natural in her hand, sticky with blood, Dale told the woman “Yes, please send someone quickly to 6031 Alhambra Ave. My wife has been hurt.” She disconnected the call before the operator could respond, and slipped her cell phone back into her pocket, checking to make sure the ringer was on before doing so. Approaching the bed, she surveyed the damage.
Gina’s light brown hair, was stuck to her face with blood, spit, and she didn’t want to think what else. Her eyes opened and closed weakly and she struggled against Dale’s attempts to comfort her. Using her last remaining energy to dodge her approaching touch.
Time seemed to both halt and hasten. Tuning back in to the the house, Dale heard the sound of keys and walkie talkies coming down the hall.
“It’s the Long Beach Police,” called out a young sounding male voice. “Is anyone back there?”
“Yes,” Dale called back. “We’re back here.”
The walkie talkie noises hovered a bit in the hall before entering, as though they were all huddled up out there, sniffing the air for danger. Entering the room, they sucked in breath at the same time. The youngest of the team of three adjusted his glasses and took a slow lap around the room with his eyes.
Dale walked from the edge of the bed, where she’d been keeping watch over Gina, and approached the young officer, hand outstretched to shake hello, as though she were at a job interview, and not a crime scene. She couldn’t get a full grip on herself. She put her hand back down to her side when she saw the young officer reach over to unclip his gun.
“Ma,am. If I could just get you to stay right there that would be great,” said the officer.
Dale was close enough to read his badge now. Officer August Bethel.
He looked back at the two other officers flanking him, as if to make sure he was still taking the lead here, and removed a notebook and a pen from his shirt pocket. Dale shuffled her foot a bit and felt something catch in the tread of her Italian loafer. She turned it up to look. A tooth.
“Sorry, I’m a little out of sorts,” Dale said to the officer, tucking a stray brown curl behind her ear.
She could see him consciously stopping himself from replying with “that’s okay,” and pivot to the more professional seeming response, which was to just swallow, and not respond at all.
“Can you tell me what happened here tonight,” Officer Bethel said, pen poised over notebook. “And while you’re getting ready to do so, can I see some ID?”
“My purse is up by the front door,” Dale said. Remembering that she’d dropped it there, along with the wine and the Chinese food, when this whole nightmare first started.
Officer Bethel nodded to one of the other cops, jerking his head to the back of the home to indicate that he should go fetch it.
“Okay, please go on, ma’am. And start from the beginning.”
Dale told the officer, as accurately as she could remember it, every detail of the night. As she did so, the other officer in the room, a healthy-figured woman of about 37, Dale guessed, watched the newly arrived ambulance team take Gina’s vitals and then load her onto a stretcher, and out into a waiting ambulance. The flashing lights flooded the room, giving it the feel of a Moose Lodge haunted house. As they passed, Dale reached out to touch her arm and felt the muscles in it twitch.
“She’s being taken to Long Beach Medical Center,” Officer Bethel told her. “I’ll drive you over there myself once we’re all cleared here.”
“Cleared of what?”
“Well,” the young officer looked around the room, “cleared of me understanding how and why the dead guy next to your bed looks as though he leaned out the window of a truck during the middle of a glass storm.”
Dale looked over at the feet sticking out from the side of the bed. She hadn’t thought of him once since. A second team filled a portion of the room and set to work bagging his body.
“He was hurting my wife. I had to stop him.”
“Ma’am, that’s understood,” the officer said, jotting something down in his notebook, “but when you first arrived home and saw that the front door was open, why didn’t you just call 911 right away?”
“It didn’t occur to me that anyone was around to save her but me,” Dale said, looking at the officer’s ear and hoping, to him, it seemed like she was making direct eye contact. “I had to help her. This is my home. This is our home.”
“I’m thinking it might be best to finish this conversation back at the station,” the officer said. “If it’s not too late when we’re done I’ll still be happy to take you over to the hospital so you can be with your wife.”
Dale reached down for her purse, dutifully retrieved by the other cop, but Officer Bethel swooped it up by a dangling strap.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll hang on to this for the time being. We’ll need to take a look through it.”
Dale shrugged, as though she couldn’t imagine why.
“Whatever you need, but I was going to ask if you could take me through a drive through on the way over. I haven’t eaten and I’m starving. I get dizzy.”
Officer Bethel raised an eyebrow at her request and removed his notebook to make another notation, then led Dale towards the front door.
“Did you need to attend to any animals in the home before we leave?”the officer asked. “I noticed empty food bowls in the kitchen.”
“I have two cats, but I’m afraid they got out,” Dale said. “The front door was open when I got home.”
“We’ll have a car circle the neighborhood a few times,” Office Bethel said. “See if we can’t find them.”
Dale leaned over to pick up the Chinese food bag and walked it over to the kitchen trash.
“I should throw this away. I don’t want it to attract bugs.”
Opening the silver lid of the trash can, purchased at Target the same day as their bedspread, she let out a scream and the bag fell from her hand, tumbling out sticky rice all over the kitchen floor.
Peering up from the dark center of the half-empty trash were the two cats, their heads indented about the width of a man’s boot.
Chapter 2
“This is ridiculous you know, Dale said to the top of Officer Bethel’s head as he sat bent over his desk writing. “I should be at the hospital taking care of my wife. She needs me.”
“What she needs right now is extensive medical treatment, followed by a great deal of rest,” the officer said in return.
“Dale Travers,” Officer Bethel said the name out loud as he wrote it down on another series of reports.
“Yes?”
“Where’s it from?”
“From?”
“Yeah, like my name, Bethel, is Welsh, hence the curly hair,” the officer motioned to the top of his head. “So where’s yours from?”
