The Orphan (2 page)

‘That’s great. How many bikes do you own now?’

Darren squinted. ‘Mmm, probably a hundred and twenty, maybe one thirty before today. Plus a few road bikes, three motorcycles, a bunch of other stuff. But yeah, around one twenty complete BMX from the Seventies and Eighties.’

‘Wow. So, you’ve been working in cycling all this time? Our editor mentioned something about a company you sold a year or two ago for, like, millions?’

‘Revolver,’ Darren said. ‘That was a fashion apparel label I started, yes. Jeans and shirts and a few other things.’

‘Revolver jeans?’ Kristin lowered her camera. ‘The ones with the blue leather tape inside the fly? You started that company?’

Darren nodded, embarrassed for reasons he didn’t fully understand.

‘No way! I used to love those jeans. Why’d you sell a cool company like Revolver?’

Used to?
Darren bristled. He didn’t want her to turn this into a discussion about his business or their ‘millions’, which weren’t that many, or relevant to today’s event. He attempted to steer the interview back to the bikes.

‘Well, it’s like this. When I was a kid, I spent half my free time at Dave’s Bike Shop, which used to be on 30th Street here in town. There’s nothing like that bike shop smell. Chain oil, bearing grease, fresh rubber tires. Some of my best memories were going down to Dave’s with my dad, or riding down there with a gang of friends. The manager was a guy named Arnie, crazy old Italian with a huge mustache, and he loved us. He’d let us hang out there all afternoon, feed us pizza. Sometimes he’d even come out and ride with us in the vacant lot behind the store. I always dreamed of owning my own bike shop when I grew up, so I could spend my days surrounded by bikes and people who understood the simple, innocent pleasure of riding them.’

Kristen looked a little bored. Was he starting to sound like a flake? Connect the dots for her, he reminded himself. This was about the collection, how we got here today.

‘But in high school I discovered a talent for design, and in college I started screen-printing my own T-shirts, selling them out of my dorm room. A few snowboarding jackets when that sport was still young. My dad saw what I was doing, my knack for design and the entrepreneurial side, and he convinced me to major in business. Why not? I figured I could always keep designing on the side.’

He paused, noticing a man standing about thirty feet behind Kristen, just outside the edge of tent shade, apparently hanging on his every word. Tall, very thin, dressed in plain brown work pants and a white T-shirt, hands stuffed in his pockets. There was a handsome man in there somewhere, but his shaggy hair was no-color brown and he looked like he hadn’t shaved for a month. His skin was pale everywhere but the cheeks and nose, which glowed from sunburn or alcoholism. His eyes were bulging with surprise or disbelief. How long had he been standing there?

‘Anyway,’ Darren continued. ‘Along the way I became an operations manager and a CEO. I was no longer a designer, and I wasn’t having any fun, so I sold the company. Revolver was a cool brand, but once they reach a certain size, every company becomes a company. A corporation. And I never forgot about the bikes.

‘When BMX nearly died in the late Eighties and so many kids switched their allegiances to either mountain biking or skating, bike-shop owners were left sitting on thousands of dollars in “worthless” BMX inventory. So I started making calls, accumulating in bulk. Then eBay happened, all this stuff started showing up online, at relatively sane prices. For a few years there, I actually hired two assistants to monitor auctions, call bike shops around the country, hunt down rarities on my hit list, and in general keep everything organized while enabling their boss’s crazy obsession.’

The onlooker crossed his arms and stiffened, raising his chin like a priest who has just heard the damning portion of the confession. He seemed relatively harmless, but his eyes were still intensely focused. Maybe he always looked that way.

‘So then you retired and rediscovered —’

‘More of a hiatus,’ Darren said, cutting her off. ‘Twenty years later, I finally had enough time to bring everything out of storage, and I couldn’t believe how much stuff I had accumulated. I built a showroom at the house. The bikes are part of me, my history… well, anyway. Maybe too much history isn’t always a good thing. My wife said it was time to put some of it to a good cause.’

‘Fascinating,’ Kristen said a bit too quickly. ‘That’s a great story, and this certainly is a good cause. I hope the auction is a smash success. Thanks for your time.’

‘Don’t you want to talk about Fresh Starts?’

‘I got all that from your wife.’

‘All right. Thanks for coming out.’

Kristen moved off to shoot the bidders who had begun scribbling on the auction forms. Darren was relieved but felt like he had skipped something important. Had he come off like a spoiled rich boy-man with a hoarding obsession? He glanced back toward the stranger with the obscenely large eyes, hoping the guy had moved on.

He was still there. Staring. Not grinning. None of the other twenty or thirty people milling about the tent seemed to have noticed him. He appeared to be on the verge of shouting, but he didn’t. His eyes looked wet and filled with too much white.

Darren maintained eye contact, tilting his head as if to say, Yes, I see you, and you see me. Now what?

After a few seconds, the lanky weirdo mouthed something, just four or five words that Darren failed to understand, and then he smiled so wide Darren could see most of his teeth. It wasn’t a grin. It was predatory, a display.

‘What was that?’ Darren said, loud enough to be heard. Something about the guy was familiar, and not in a good way. ‘You need something?’

The man repeated the phrase in silence, his thick chapped lips forming several ‘O’s’ and, a sharp ‘S’ and, judging by the snarl twisting off at the end, some form of expletive.

You’re such a fucking liar.
 

Stop pretending, you think I’m stupid?
 

You haven’t earned any of this.
 

It could have been any of these things, or none.

But to be sure, and to head off trouble before the guy made a scene in front of Beth’s co-workers, dampening the spirit of the auction, Darren decided to say hello. He took a few steps before Beth grabbed his arm, halting him.

‘Hey, honey, how’d it go? Were you nervous? Raya said you looked too serious.’

Darren blinked down at his wife and instinctively pivoted to put himself between her and the creep.

‘Do me a favor,’ he said. ‘Without being obvious, look past my right shoulder and tell me if that guy who looks like he’s been living in a log cabin for the past ten years is still glaring at me. Is he being weird or do we know him from something?’

Beth frowned, leaned sideways a bit.

‘Don’t give it away,’ Darren said. ‘Pretend you’re scanning the crowd.’

She swept her gaze across the tent slowly, glanced up at Darren again, and then to the other side.

‘What’s he wearing?’

‘Dark pants, white shirt, scruffy wino beard. Manson eyes.’

She stood on her toes. ‘I don’t see anybody like that.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ Darren turned around. Looked directly at the spot outside the tent where the man had been standing, around all the bikes, across the park’s broad expanse of green grass.

The stranger was gone.

‘Who was it?’ Beth said. ‘Did he do something?’

‘He was staring at me during the entire interview. Then he mouthed something, but I couldn’t make out the words. He looked angry, excited in the wrong way.’

‘Did you recognize him?’ she said.

‘Something about him seemed familiar, but I might’ve just assumed that because of the way he was watching me.’

Beth did not seem overly concerned. ‘Probably just some Boulder crackpot. There’s a lot of those around here.’

‘Maybe so.’ But Darren didn’t believe it.

The auction was a smash success. Twenty-two of the twenty-four bikes went for a total of thirty-one thousand and change. The follow-up article in the
Camera
netted a few more inquiries from vintage bike collectors around Colorado and one in Utah, and Darren agreed to let go of five more bikes for an additional eleven thousand. Beth was awarded Hero of the Month at Fresh Starts. Raya earned a hundred-dollar bonus on top of the seventy-six bucks she made hawking lemonade and cookies. She donated it all to the center, and turned the experience into a report for her health studies class at Boulder High, for which she was given an A.

As spring gave way to summer, Darren couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder, wondering who the stranger in the park could have been, and why someone he could not remember might harbor such reserves of ill will.

It was early June when Darren Lynwood fell asleep breathing in the scents of summer rain and wet grass drifting through the master bedroom’s open windows, and awoke several hours later with the deep black smoke of burning wood and charred insulation coiling inside his nostrils. His eyes opened to a stinging furnace of orange and black phantoms feeding their way toward him. Streams of tears immediately blurred his vision and wet his cheeks. He thrashed in bed, tangled as if his limbs were in the grip of invisible forces who wanted him to surrender to the billowing layer of dusty ceiling smoke and the flames licking up his bedroom walls.

He tried to scream but his throat was dry, rough, constricted. His lungs heaved and ached for fresh oxygen. A lattice of fire snaked across the floor, igniting the bedding, up over his legs and flash-fried his hair to oily ash in seconds. His skin blistered and bled in rivers, but still he could not scream. All around him the house fed itself to the roiling inferno, until the walls buckled and the roof caved in, the beams crushing Beth and Raya as they screamed for the help he could no longer provide. Before the searing flames stole his life, he had time for one last coherent thought:

I did this. It was my fault. I started the fire that killed my own family.
 

The flames howled, and death was upon —

Darren bolted awake, unable to breathe or cry out. His fists clenched the sweat-soaked sheet bunched against his throat and he kicked away the thin cotton blanket that had ensnared him. He sat up, swatting at flames that were no longer there, and blinked in the cooling darkness, his eyes and mind working to assert the more peaceful reality of the bedroom.

The bed frame. The tall oak dresser. The dark windows behind their curtains of yellow gauze, rippling with the faintest summer breeze. Tint of rain from the evening, but the rain had stopped now. His throat opened and his lungs resumed their work.

The other half of the blanket was draped over Beth. His wife was sleeping blissfully on her stomach, turned away from him, one arm reaching above her head and over the pillow like a swimmer who’d frozen in ice mid-stroke.

Thank God she’s all right
, he thought.

And with nearly as much relief,
Thank God I didn’t wake her this time
.

Even though he had experienced the same nightmare almost a dozen times in the past five weeks, part of him still refused to believe it was only a dream. The fire had been too real. The nightmare’s intensity, combined with its repetitive nature, convinced him that sooner or later it must come true.

He wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep now, not for hours, so he got up to check the rest of the house. Checking always made him feel better, at least until the next dream inferno occurred. Darren shuffled across the master bedroom, careful to avoid knocking over a lamp or a chair that would wake up the girls. He felt a chill as he pulled on a T-shirt and the heat-sweat from only minutes ago began to dry. He found the doorway and began the trek into the main house.

The master suite, reachable only through a long hall that forked off the main house, had been added to the house six or seven years ago by the previous owners. They must have had kids or a mother-in-law, Darren figured. Someone they wanted to get away from. The hall itself was anything but ordinary, and the girls had taken to calling it ‘the bridge’.

With its bamboo flooring, decorative hand railing and eight-by-four panel windows providing a view to the immediate backyard, it wasn’t difficult to imagine you were standing outside, or maybe staring at a zoo exhibit, waiting for some creature to drag itself from the depths of the koi pond that twisted beneath the floor. A Japanese rock garden ornamented the north view; to the south lay the flagstone patio, flower gardens and the bocce court with its lane of rolled clay and crushed shell. During daylight hours, the views were a reminder to slow down and enjoy the natural splendor of one’s property, find some tranquility.

At night, however, the experience of walking the bridge was more like a spaceman’s journey between pods of unearthly gravities. The series of dim amber-toned night lights set close to the floor were of little help and in fact confused his eyes as to the depth of the actual floor, making him goofy-footed. The massive panes of pitch-black glass only seemed to confirm the tissue-thin membrane standing between his family and the darkness waiting on the other side.

Tonight he was glad to be out of it, back in the house’s true center, where the sunken great room opened to the expansive chef’s kitchen. One visual sweep was enough to confirm there was no fire raging about, but he was still glad he’d left the small halogen lights under the kitchen cabinets turned on to guide him. The kitchen’s slate tile flooring was cold against his bare feet, a welcome sensation that nudged him closer to total alertness.

The black ceramic stove top was not glowing orange at any of the six burners, but he waved a palm over them anyway. Feeling no warmth, he sidled along the granite countertop and ascertained that the espresso machine, four-slot bagel toaster and Raya’s panini press – an item she had picked out of the Williams-Sonoma catalog for her last birthday and now used for grilling Velveeta and smoked prosciutto sandwiches almost daily – were unplugged, as he had left them before going to bed.

He was tempted to check the fire alarms, but he’d changed out the batteries and tested each unit last Sunday while Beth and Raya were out getting frozen yogurt. Darren still possessed enough self-awareness to know that checking them again tonight would confirm he was no longer operating with mere excessive caution but had in fact slipped into the land of outright paranoia and genuine pyrophobia.

He checked the alarm panel in the front foyer instead. The combination burglar alarm and carbon monoxide detector showed only stable green indicators, no red bulb alerts. He checked the front door anyway, making sure it was locked. The door to the attached garage was also locked. What about Raya? What if she’d left a curling iron on? Darren doubted their daughter even used a curling iron, but he was already on his way to what they had come to refer to as Raya’s wing of the house.

Being an only child with a strong independent streak, Raya had inherited her father’s love of good design and her mother’s addiction to reality shows that catered to notions of how to feng shui oneself into a healthier ‘space’ (Beth’s word for moods), and then proceeded to commandeer – and direct the remodeling of – the largest remaining bedroom, the attached full bath, as well as a second room for her office.

It’s not that she’s spoiled, Beth liked to remind him, she just knows how she likes things to be and has her own vision for how to get there. What’s wrong with allowing your daughter to take responsibility for her own environment? Nothing at all, Darren had replied. I’m just not sure it has to cost more than a fast food manager’s annual salary for her to do that.

Darren cupped one ear to her door, listening for what he did not know. The exhale of smoke, hushed cellphone chatter, another of her awful teen romances on the TV. He heard nothing and, in truth, he didn’t really want to know what his daughter got up to after 10 p.m., as long as she was behaving responsibly. Which, Beth always assured him, she was. Even so, he fought the urge to open the door, make sure Raya was home, in bed, safe.

Returning to the kitchen, Darren considered making a coffee, but the espresso machine went off like a Panzer division on maneuvers just to brew four ounces of the stuff, and that was before the hissing choking whine of the milk frother kicked in. 1:17 a.m. according to the clock on the stove. No matter. The last thing he needed was another wake-me-up. He’d never had much use for sleep anyway. Four hours per night were usually enough, even when he had been running the company seventy and eighty hours per week.

He moved to the sliding glass door that faced the back yard, debating whether to venture out to his true den. The house had been built in the Sixties, a long ranch-style home of white brick, with Southwestern archways along the front and rear fascia, something of a hacienda here on Linden Street, in the heart of North Boulder. The two-acre lot lent it more of a rural feel than most properties located within the city limits. On the back half of the long green lawn stood the kind of outbuilding seen on a farm, a place for parking tractors, working on your car, storing tools and other equipment.

And that was where, a full acre away, a light now glowed in the night. The illumination was not, however, the flickering orange of a fire. All three windows along the side of the outbuilding were glowing soft yellow, from the interior.

Darren specifically remembered turning off the lights and setting the alarm out there, as he did every night before turning in, after he finished working on whatever project had captivated him that day.

‘Son of a…’

Someone was in the Bike Cave.

Darren hurried to the laundry room, pulled on a pair of drawstring sweatpants, and slipped into his blue canvas Vans. Taking a flashlight from one of the kitchen drawers, he deactivated the house’s alarm, yanked the sliding glass door open and jogged out across his backyard to confront the intruder.