Loss, a paranormal thriller (7 page)

She was nearly pastthe gas station when she slammed on the brakes and pulled into the parking lot.  She parked near the door, grabbed her purse, and stormed inside.

Her mouth watered, sour and sweet at the same time, the craving of wine pushing aside all other thoughts.  The watering of her mouth was followed by the haunting metallic tang of Vicodin in her nostrils.  So the world had decided what to do with Angie Chandler, and what it wanted of her was oblivion.

"That asshole!"  Angie slammed her palm against the steering wheel, a short sharp pain in her wrist reminding her that it was still in the process of healing.  She'd left Chase's with a case of wine and a spur-of-the-moment pint of Jack Daniel's.  "Who gives a condescending look like that?  Like I'm a crazed lunatic or something." 

Her voice felt hoarse, but her anger had begun to ebb.  She wasn't mad at Chase.  Not really.  So, he'd given her a dirty look because of her purchase.  For all she knew, he figured she'd been drunk at the time of the car accident.  A dozen rumors were probably making the rounds around Grand View about what really happened that night.  Even the facts would seem like rumor to Angie, since she didn't fully remember what had happened, either.

Sure, she shouldn't be mad at Chase, but rather, at herself.

Angie twisted off the pint's cap and downed half of it before the burning could register.  She coughed and sputtered, tears formed and fell from her eyes, she leaned back and stared at the car's gray ceiling.  Only after she had things under control, when she knew she wouldn't vomit up the whiskey, did she consider making sure no one was observing her illicit behavior.  Luckily, Angie had the parking lot at Chase's all to herself.  She hoped the streets would be similarly empty during the remaining drive home.

A buzz was already building as she pulled back out onto the street.  Without the addition of Vicodin to still her churning thoughts, her mind drifted back to the night of the accident and the memories of traveling this very road and the moment that instantly transformed her from being a devoted wife to forever a widow...

One oxford shoe tipped on its side on the Pilot's hood...

Snowflakes falling through the shattered windshield, melting on contact with Paul's fleeting body heat lingering in the upholstery of the passenger seat...

The man in black standing in the clearing, his feet buried in snow, his shadow falling over her as her body succumbed to shock and the freezing cold...

"No!  Jesus, stop it, Ang.  Just stop!"

The Accord slowed as she pulled into the driveway.  The sight of the house was both welcoming and an emotional torture.

"Living isn't the same as existing," she said aloud, wondering what she meant and where the words had come from. 
Living and existing...
  She pondered the existential bullshit as she hefted the case of booze and made for the door. 
Whatever the fuck... there is no more meaning to anything.

Once inside, she hurriedly dropped her keys in the bowl on the entryway table and set the case next to it just in time to catch Bizzy in her arms as the dog came rushing in from the kitchen.

"You make everything better.  You know that, girl?"

The little dog wriggled in her arms and licked her chin.  Just seeing Bizzy normally put a smile on Angie's face, but not today.  She could feel darkness pulling at her, could feel the tears once again building in her eyes.

She'd failed, on multiple levels, she'd failed.

She'd never made it in to work.  She'd allowed the bizarre memories or distortions of memory to surface.  And seeing the box sitting on the entryway table... the worst failure of all.

Angie set Bizzy down and started for the great room, eyeing the phone sitting on the end table.  She didn't even get halfway to the phone before she returned to the case for the bottle of whiskey.  With Bizzy following her every move, Angie uncapped the bottle as she returned to the great room.  She took a long swig, relishing the liquid burn in her throat, hating herself for not being able to move on with her life.

She dialed with one hand, while tipping the bottle with the other.  By the time the phone started ringing, only dregs remained in the pint.

A click sounded as someone picked up on the other end.

Angie set the empty pint on the end table and turned away from it. 
Out of sight, out of mind.

"Hello?" a voice said.

"Hi, Steph, it's me.  It's Angie..." she started before her voice cracked.  She took a deep breath and continued.  "I was going to come in today.  I really was.  I was going to surprise you and just show up, but I couldn't.  I just couldn't make it."

"Angeline... this is Imogene.  Stephanie is scheduled off today."

"But wait... who's running the office?"

"I am, of course.  Same as always.  Don't worry about coming in.  We have everything working like a fine-tuned watch."

A wave of dizziness made Angie nearly drop the phone.

Imogene
.  That overbearing, controlling harpy.  Why of all people did she have to answer the phone?  Angie remembered her mother-in-law sitting in a cozy recliner near the fireplace at Fletcher's party on the night of the accident.  With her smug look, her snide tone.

Oh, really, Angeline?

Angie could hear Imogene breathing on the other end of the phone.  She had no doubt that she was smiling as well.  Neither spoke for an uncomfortable length of seconds that felt more like minutes.

"I'll be back to work soon.  I just need more time," Angie finally said.  "When I come back, I want to be there 100%.  I want to be back to my normal self."

"I know I said
don't worry
, Angeline, but what I should have said was,
don't bother
."

Chapter 8

Bizzy's frenzied barking woke Angie sometime in the middle of the night.  The moonlight streaming through the windows looked like midday sunlight as a late-season snowfall magnified its intensity.  The flakes, flurrying like those in a shaken snow globe, sparkled like fairy dust sprinkled from the eaves of the house.

Angie groggily pulled herself into a sitting position on the couch, her head spinning with drink and her tongue tasting vile and thick in her mouth.

"Oh, no.  I forgot, didn't I?"  Pressing her palms to her temples, all Angie could think about was how she had failed to take Bizzy for her promised walk, only allowing her a short excursion limited by the length of the tether outside the sliding back door and how long it had taken to open a fresh bottle of wine.

Angie wiped a pasty spit from her lips with the back of her hand.  She stood stiffly, unsteadily, waiting without daring to move, her eyes pressed tightly closed.  With Bizzy still barking a mile a minute, she wondered if her legs would hold her up or if she might vomit.

When she opened her eyes, the first thing she noticed was that an empty wine bottle and a partial second had joined the empty pint on the end table.  Bizzy ran into the great room and nudged Angie's ankle with her cold nose, then scampered off into the kitchen again.

Thinking back, in the jumble of wine, whiskey and pills, she
did
remember putting the dog out.  Bizzy never had to go out in the middle of the night.  Besides, the little fluff ball was afraid of the dark, so much so that she would hold off until morning instead of relieving a painfully full bladder in the dark.  Even inside, she would be a panting bundle of nerves if there wasn't at least a nightlight plugged into the outlet near her dog bed in the kitchen.

"I'm coming.  Just hold your horses.  I'm not in the mood to clean your piddle off the floor." 

Bizzy was frantically pawing the door when Angie entered the kitchen.

"Okay, okay, I'm here."

Angie unlocked the door and slid it open on its track.  Normally she wouldn't let Bizzy out without her tether, but with the dog's fear of the dark she figured there was no risk of her running off.  Plus, the whole idea of bending over, reaching out to find the metal clasp, with how her head was pounding...

Bizzy dashed out into the grass and squatted to pee.  Before she could ever be finished, the little dog stood at attention, and peering off into the dark woods, let out three sharp barks.  She took a lunging stride forward, both paws slamming into the dead turf, and let out the throatiest growl the seven-pounder could muster.

"Come here, girl.  It's okay... just a squirrel."  Angie didn't sound confident, even to her still half-drunk self, and she felt even less so.  Her groggy eyes panned the woods.  The details blurred and started to spin, the liquor still not clear of her system.

"Bizzy.  Come here.  Now!"  Hoping to sound forceful, she only succeeded in making Bizzy glance at her over her shoulder.  But then a noise came from the woods from the direction that had so captured Bizzy's attention

A breaking twig.

Another snap followed the first like an echo. 
No, not like an echo.  Like footsteps.

Bizzy let out a shrill bark and sprinted off into the darkness, her fear be damned.

"Bizzy!  Bizzy, come back here!"  Her voice sounded so small uttered into the vastness of the woods.  Hassled footsteps retreated away from the house, away from Bizzy.  Angie could still hear the dog's panting, an occasional yipping bark, but the sounds were quieting.

Angie hurriedly slipped on the hiking boots she kept by the back door, not bothering with the laces, then rushed outside, trailing the tiny paw prints in the newly falling snow.  She was unwilling to let the last dear thing in her life slip through her fingers.

"Bizzy!  Bizzy, please, come back!"  Angie called out, listened, then called out again.  She'd hear Bizzy's familiar bark off to the right, then after a few minutes charging after it, heard a phantom bark in the opposite direction.  After an hour of zigzagging deeper into the woods, backtracking and trudging off yet deeper into the snowy night, Angie realized that not only could she no longer hear Bizzy, but that she was also totally lost.

The warmth provided by drunkenness had long since disappeared.  Packed snow gathered at her ankles inside her untied boots.  She had washed down her first pills of the evening while still wearing what she had worn in her failed attempt to drive in to work: khaki slacks and a thin blue blouse.  And in that inadequate clothing, her skin prickled with cold, numbness advancing from one sector of her body to the next.  It clouded her judgment, even more so than her earlier alcohol and pill dinner.

At least the moon was still high in the sky, a familiar face peeking above the skeletal trees.  She tried to concentrate, trying to remember if you could determine direction by the angle of the moon.  She didn't think so. 

"That's the sun you're thinking about, idiot," she muttered. 

Her energy had gone.  With the relentless cold seeping into her core, she felt more lethargic just now than when Bizzy's barking had awoken her.  She sat on a felled tree trunk to both rest and try to regain her bearings.  She wondered about the predators that might be lurking in the woods around her.  Fear for herself wasn't her concern.  She had seen for herself the forest-dwelling red-tail foxes and had heard about the occasional coyote sighting.  Bizzy would prove to be a defenseless meal. 

She rubbed her face and could feel neither her hand nor the skin it touched.  As her eyelids hesitated to open, she was overcome with a feeling she hadn't felt in so long: glee.

It'll all soon be over
, she thought. 
If there is a heaven, I'll soon see Paul.  And if there isn't... at least this will all be over.

She let her eyelids fall.  Her shoulders felt like mounds of granite, out of balance with the rest of her body.  She slumped forward, unable to do otherwise, and when she didn't even make an attempt to arrest her descent, she landed limply in the thin layer of snow.

A noise invaded her malaise; footsteps crashing through the underbrush, and raspy breathing, close by.  There was more to it than that, much more, but she no longer cared; her mind was shutting down, and she welcomed the emptiness.

With her mind hazy but serene, she inhaled the crisp winter air, finding comfort in the odor of the earthy loam beneath her.  Paul used to run through these woods every day.  His treads alone had blazed trails that unfurled into the surrounding acres like ribbons draped over Christmas presents.  She sighed, her breaths becoming shallow, more erratic.  If this was to be her final resting place, she thought, it wasn't such a bad place to be.

Angie rolled over from her back to her left shoulder and pulled the blanket up to her chin.  Her legs ached with fatigue and restlessly danced across the soft flannel sheets.  She leaned into the pillow and could tell by its firmness and how it smelled that it was Paul's.  She inhaled deeply, feeling relaxed, truly relaxed and unworried, for the first time since...

In an instant her eyes opened wide, her heart suddenly galloping like a horse leaving a starting gate.  Sunlight beaming through the vertical blinds cast bars of shadow across the bed.  She sat up, seeing the bedroom from this vantage point for the first time since she came home from the hospital.  Her head throbbed with the worst possible headache and all she wanted to do was sink back beneath the welcoming covers and close her eyes. 

"How did I..." she asked, then realized how often she'd been talking to herself lately.  "That's a bad habit, Ang.  You know what they say about people who talk to themselves."

She eased to the edge of the bed, feeling out-of-sorts.  The room spun and her head throbbed even more.

Then she remembered something.  "Bizzy?" she called out, not entirely certain but hopeful the Yorkie would bound into the room, bringing along her manic energy to lift Angie's spirits.  "
Bizzy-girl
?"

The dog never answered her call. 

Looking down at herself, her confusion multiplied.  The flannel pajamas she wore had been relegated to her washday pile.  She couldn't remember the last time she'd worn them.