Bank Owned (2 page)

3.

“Larry, we had a deal, remember? Seven ninety-five. No more than that. We agreed.”

Larry sat up in his chair, cutting off his forehead in the webcam.
“Was it seven ninety-five?”
he flashed a stupid look.
“’Cause I coulda sworn it was nine seventy-five.”

Brian could only giggle. He knew Larry remembered their arranged price. “I’ve got it right here in writing, Larry,” he said despite his inability to stop laughing. Old chowderhead tried this every time.

“You can’t fault a guy for trying. But it’s six in the morning. Why’re you callin’ so early?”

“You think it’s early there? It’s 3 AM here on the west coast.”

“What’re you doin’ up at such an ungodly hour?”

“I always work at this time. Early bird gets the worm. Anyway, I wanted to make sure you shipped today…you
are
ready to ship, aren’t you, Larry?”

Larry shifted again, this time too close to the webcam and fogging the lens a bit. Larry still wasn’t used to Skype. “Sure, we’re ready.”

“Today, Larry?”

“Uh…I’ll get back to you,” and the Skype window went black. Brian reclined in his leather office throne, making eye contact with the orange and white tabby Angie named Marmalade.

“What do you wanna bet he doesn’t ship today?” he said, and Marmalade closed her eyes slowly, sitting up contentedly on Brian’s desk, just to the right of his flat screen. Then Marmalade opened her eyes with a start, and, pupils dilated, peered over his shoulder. Brian refused to look. Cats did that all the time. Probably saw a moth. Or maybe, if Brian was lucky, she saw that mouse, and was seconds from going after it.

He watched the cat watching whatever it was, sitting still, unblinking, unflinching. Marmalade’s eyes widened even further, and just then, she produced the most pitiful, most disconsolate wail Brian had ever heard from a living being. A long, strident cry, almost a call to the dead, so loud and forlorn, he had to stroke and comfort the poor thing lovingly to get her to stop. And when she did stop, he heard something that sent his pulse skipping.

A voice. A man’s voice.

The hair on the cat’s back stood on end, forcing the same reaction from Brian. Prickly and tingly, his skin was electric when a creaking and groaning made him stand straight. He turned to find his door open, the hall darkened. His office occupied the largest bedroom on the second floor. The rest of the rooms were empty, as was the house, so he thought. But the sounds—someone speaking, walking about—they seemed so clear. He had to know for certain. Otherwise he’d never be able to get back to work.

On his way to give the hallway a sound visual inspection, the floor beneath his feet made noise, low and gruff. Similar to what he’d just heard. And, standing next to the window in the hall, he noticed a strong autumn wind rattling the windowpanes and shifting the house slightly. Old home, old bones. He’d have to get used to a host of new noises.

“Come on,” he said to the freaked-out feline. “Let’s get you something to eat. I was about to get a snack, myself,” he tucked Marmalade under an arm and headed to the stairs. He didn’t make it.

A thumping noise startled both man and beast. Marmalade hissed and wriggled free, disappearing into the darkness downstairs. That wasn’t where the noise was coming from. Wood butting against wood, rhythmically, again and again and again. He played a guessing game inside his mind, yet it was only a pathetic distraction. He knew that sound, and it brought his heart into his throat. Still, there was a chance it was something else. A loose shutter banging against the siding. A tree branch rubbing against the roof. Then a different sound altogether stole away all doubt, and his cardiac problems became unbearable.

He heard his wife. Unguarded. Unbridled. A climactic vocal display only reserved for the utmost of private moments. Brian had made her produce those sounds, not much lately. Hearing them drove a spike of both rage and desire through his spine, and had him running up a flight of stairs to the bedroom door. He wasn’t there more than a second when he heard her again, breathing deep and loud. At first he thought she was alone, pleasuring herself. Then the thumping, rattling, fast and firm and repetitive, made him aware of another person. He didn’t know whether or not to burst in and find out for sure, so he put his ear to the door, and had to flinch away at what he detected. A low groan. Faint yet distinctive. A man!

“Angie!” he shouted without thinking, and her sounds of ecstasy only grew more heated, the pounding against the wall harder. “Angie! Is someone in there with you!”

The person with the deep voice mumbled something, and Angie giggled, but the commotion didn’t stop. In fact, it became even more forceful. Her moans of delight became blatant, shameless, wailing in time with the beat. Brian, driven to severe desperation, twisted the doorknob and pushed, but it refused to budge, not even a little. Like a foot-thick sheet of steel. Unyielding, unmoving.

“Angie! What’s going on in there!”

Giggling became laughter. Laughter became shrieks of hysteria. Angie sounded on the verge of delirium. Screeching and screeching, until it became obvious her vocalizations signaled something more than just pleasure. She cried out in pain after a sharp slapping sound, then again after another.

He body-slammed the door, hitting so hard he felt something snap. The pain he ignored. His own suffering didn’t matter. He only pictured his wife, and some intruder, some home invader, someone who’d slipped inside his house in the dark of night.

Then her voice became muffled, garbled, forced. The slaps continued, one after the other, harder and harder. Brian wrenched the doorknob as hard as he could, straining his knuckles, pushing to the limit of his strength. Nothing. Goddam thing was jammed. Finally, after one particularly decisive and hollow
Crack!
he heard Angie no more, and that spiked his blood with so much anxious power, the door became no match. He kicked and punched at the same time, and it flew open and took a divot from the sheetrock, crashing so hard, it startled Angie, who, much to Brian’s shock, was all alone.

“Brian!” she admonished him groggily. “Don’t scare me like that!”

“Are…are you okay?” his vision darted up, down, left, right—searching for the intruder who seemed never to have been there.

“Of course I’m okay,” she didn’t like the way he looked. Sweaty and out of breath. “Are
you
okay?”

He made his way, carefully, to the other side of the bed, and flicked on the lamp. “What? Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”

“You sure? You don’t look fine. You look a little sick. Do you have a fever?”

He checked the windows, each of them closed and latched. He stood to the side of the closet and slid over a group of hangers, taking special notice down low, where he’d surely spot someone trying to hide.

Angie grew impatient. “What are you looking for? Brian?”

He stopped what he was doing and stared at her. Then he strode briskly and pulled down the sheets, inspecting her wrists, her neck. She had on purple pajama bottoms and one of his T-shirts. Her hair was perfect, her skin flawless. Just the way he’d left her.

“What?” she started to feel self-conscious. “Why are you staring at me?”

“You were—” he sat on the bed and stared into nowhere. “But I—”   

She sat up and scooted next to him. “But you what?”

After a time, not too long, he shook his head and laughed through his nose. “It’s nothing,” he stood again, reclaiming his masculinity. “I’m sorry. I was just hearing things. Probably the furnace or something,” he backed out, then, after swinging the door, discovered the hole in the plasterboard. “Shit,” he muttered under his breath, picturing the patch job in front of him.

“You slammed that pretty hard,” she ruminated. “What did you think was going on in here?”

He avoided eye contact. “Never mind. It’s no big deal. Go back to sleep.”

“Brian?” she wanted to know. “Tell me.”

“Go back to sleep,” he caught her gaze just before closing the door. He wanted to believe he’d heard something else. The furnace. That was it. Or the wind, moaning through the house, playing it like an old flute. In a place as ancient and as spacious as this one, random noises and mysterious occurrences were the norm.

After that, Brian had trouble focusing on work, and missed his follow-up call to Larry. He ended up getting nothing constructive done at all. Angie didn’t get much sleep, either. Brian had scared her. A lot. And for the remainder of the night, she had the TV on to give her some company in that big old bedroom. After tossing and turning for two hours, she stumbled out of bed and into the ensuite bath, heading straight for the shower. Waiting for the water to get steamy, she stretched and yawned and winced at her own reflection. She lifted Brian’s T-shirt over her head and was about to step into the bathtub when she caught her backside in the mirror. Long, jagged scratches. Four of them. Dried blood and ruptured flesh.

“BRIAN!”

4.

A dinged fender from a Douglas-fir branch. A chip in the windshield from flying gravel. Her Lexus was taking a beating already from the pothole-ridden, wildlife-infested backcountry roads. She’d begged Brian to trade it in and get an SUV. A Mercedes hybrid, preferably. But buying the house had tapped all their savings. He just didn’t feel comfortable being saddled with more debt. Honestly, neither did she. So, beat up the Lexus she did. It didn’t matter. She loved the house, and a little sacrifice went a long way, as far as she was concerned. She couldn’t explain away the marks on her back, though she tried, and Brian had tried to believe her. Must have happened when they were moving, probably the couch. In an effort to forget, on her way to Portland, she decided to stop at the Coffee Hutch across from milepost 28, on Highway 47.

The early hour afforded her a ticket straight to the front of the line, and the woman inside the drive-up window looked nice. Everyone in Vernonia looked nice.

Angie didn’t need a menu. “Can I get a small, nonfat half caf hazelnut vanilla cappuccino, please?”

“Getting an early start, are ya?” Betty asked. She’d never seen the young woman in the out-of-place import, and that piqued her interest. Somehow, though, she had to keep from sounding too nosy while still satisfying her own curiosity. “Where’re ya’ headed?”

“Huh?” Angie turned down her stereo. “Oh. Portland. Going to work.”

“Oh, really,” Betty glanced at her husband, Earl. He didn’t look up from the newspaper in front of his face. She worked the cappuccino machine like the 23-year veteran she was, and probed further, her curiosity on overdrive. “Just move to the area, or…”

“Oh yeah,” Angie smiled big. She couldn’t help but be proud of her new house, and how great of a deal they got. “My husband and I. We bought the big house up on Pebble Creek Road.”

Betty nudged the frother and spilled foam onto the counter, staining her needlepoint. Earl folded the paper and dropped it on his lap. Angie saw none of this. With Adele playing, she just had to turn it up, even though the radio station came in a little fuzzy.

“You talkin’ about the Castle?”

“What?” she turned the music down again.

“The Castle? On Pebble Creek Road.”

“That’s right,” Angie remembered what the realtor had said. “You know it?”

Betty found it hard to maintain eye contact. So many things she wanted to say to this young, beautiful child. So young. So innocent. Such a shame.

“Yes, dear,” she smiled. “I know it.”

Angie sensed something in the way the older woman spoke, especially that last bit, about her knowing the house. She’d placed a certain emphasis on her words, conveying more meaning than was on the surface.

“What is it?” Angie, now, became the curious one.

Betty snuck another look at her husband. Fifty years of marriage, and she never thought it would come down to this. With her, Betty Crenshaw, pillar of the community, leader of the Baptist Church choir, and grandmotherly figure to scores of young ones—with her old-fashioned rules of morality and human respect—reduced to this. A quivering, spineless jellyfish, chained to a hunk of sweaty pig fat named Earl, and scared shitless. In a glorious moment of spinal self-healing, she found her old self, the one who’d never stand for such outright wickedness, and cleared her throat.

“It’s about that house—” she said before she even knew it, then wished to hell she hadn’t, because the second she did, Earl stood and ended the conversation.

He slammed the service window closed, and started grumbling something to his wife. Angie wanted to say something about how rough the jerk was being, but then thought better of it. Small town. Strange ways. Her watch also got her moving. Long drive to work.