House, Part One

I was tailing Andy Jeffords down a lonely road somewhere west of Wheaton. Tall dark trees drooped over the road from the right, their branches swaying in the afternoon breeze, leaves dropping across the pavement. On the left, acres of flat empty land stretched toward the horizon, looking like it had been stripped by locusts years ago. The road in front of me was straight and lonely, and I had to stay far back so Jeffords wouldn’t spot me in his black Lexus. 

            Houses were sparse. A dog trotted down the road after Jeffords for a few hundred yards, then turned and headed back to a one-story house with a pickup parked in front, ignoring my Prius as I drove past him. 

            Jeffords was supposed to be playing golf. That’s what he’d been telling his wife, Ashley Jeffords. He’d been playing with the same handful of friends for years, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Except that recently he’d started taking off to “play golf” almost every day, leaving his home for hours. And Judith Maples had asked Ashley in the grocery store last week why Andy had stopped playing with her husband lately. “Ed hasn’t seen him in two weeks,” Ashley told me over the phone when she hired me. “So I asked around, and none of them have played with him. But he still says he’s going golfing with the guys. I don’t know what’s going on. I mean, maybe I think I do . . .”

            They lived in Lombard, west of Chicago, close to Wheaton. Jeffords was a tax lawyer, semi-retired, who worked from their home. So it was easy enough for me to position myself down the street on Thursday afternoon and then follow him down route 64 until he turned off and made his way to the road we were on now, Scout Road, heading north. Without a golf course in sight.

            Finally Jeffords’ Lexus slowed, and the right-hand blinker came on. I pressed my brake gently as he turned and disappeared into the trees.

            I slowed and took a quick look up the path he’d taken. About 20 yards in sat an old house. At a brief glimpse, it looked abandoned and empty, with tall wild grass in front, empty windows, a sagging porch roof, and a fallen chimney.

            Then I turned my eyes back to the road. A hundred yards down, I managed a three-point turn and parked, facing the house from the other side of the road.

            Through the trees and a pair of mini-binoculars, I could see the front and side of the house. A shard of glass dangled from the top of one window; another had been boarded up. The steps up to the porch had rotted, and the front door hung half open on what was left of its top hinge. The roof had lost most of its shingles. Thick weeds and high grass surrounded the house like a defensive wall.

            No sign of Jeffords. Was he inside? What the hell for? This didn’t seem like the place for a lover’s tryst. I took a few pictures, and used the GPS on my phone to get the exact location. Then I sat waiting some more.

            A motorcycle roared past without stopping. Another dog wandered through the trees, stopping to dig into the dirt or sniff at the roots. Birds circled the sky.

            After 20 minutes, Jeffords emerged from the house. Dressed in slacks and a denim jacket, he seemed wobbly, and almost tripped stepping down off the porch. He sat in his car for a few minutes before starting up, and then he backed onto the road and started back the way he’d come.

            I really wanted to check out the house. Ghosts? Dead bodies? Treasure? But he could still be on the way to a tryst, as unlikely as that felt. I owed it to my client to stay with him.

            But he just went back home. We arrived at his house an hour later. I watched him pull into the garage. Puzzled—and hungry, it was close to dinnertime—I sighed and headed down the street for home.

 

Back home in Chicago I grabbed a beer, kissed my girlfriend Rachel, sat down at my computer, and started writing an email to my client. “What’s for dinner?”

            It was Rachel’s night to cook. “Baked Mac and cheese. How was the case?”

            I paused to look over my shoulder at her. Rachel has short red hair and hazelnut eyes, and long legs in skinny jeans. Also, she’s psychic. “Weird. No sex, just a broken-down house in the middle of nowhere. Unless he has some kind of a fetish.”

            “Nothing wrong with a fetish.” She winked at me.

            “I’m a fan.” I finished my email, sipped my beer, and started clicking through my other emails.

            My phone buzzed five minutes later. My client. “I don’t get it,” Ashley Jeffords said. “What would he be doing in some old house? Was there anyone else there?”

            “Is it safe for you to talk?” 

            “Yeah, He’s checking his email back in his office. I don’t get it.”

            I’d sent her the photos I’d taken. “Nothing familiar? I didn’t see any sign of other people. No cars, nothing moving inside, no one outside.”

            “I’ve never seen that place before in my life.” She groaned. “What now?”

            “I’ll check into the property tomorrow,” I told her. “Maybe there’s some connection that’s not obvious.”

            “All right, let me know—oops, he’s coming. Hi, Andy, no it’s just—” She hung up.

            I finished up my emails while Rachel made dinner. “No using this tomorrow night when it’s your turn to cook,” she said as I set the table. 

            “Freeze it. I’ve got a curry recipe I want to try out.” I sat down, Rachel served, and we ate.

            She picked at her food. Rachel’s not usually a chatterbox, but she’s rarely silent, even when she’s working or watching TV. “You’re quiet,” I said.

            “What do you want to talk about? Monkeypox? Saudi Arabia? Climate change? Real Housewives?”

            “Anything but that.” I sipped some water. “Anything wrong? Mad at me?”

            “Always.” Rachel looked at me across the table, and I braced myself, wondering what I’d done now. Then she just shook her head and sighed. “I’m just bored.”

            “With macaroni and cheese? You made it.”

            She glared at me. “With you. Pack your bags. Get out. Just do the dishes first.”

            She was joking. I hoped. “Okay, not mac and cheese. What’s wrong? I didn’t do the laundry right again?”

            Rachel put her fork down. “My job.” She’s a graphic designer. Freelance. “It’s just—one more website, one more conference brochure, another online newsletter—every once in a while there’s something different, but I don’t do porn sites anymore, so—” She shrugged. “I’m thinking about going back to school.”

            “Studying what?”

            She picked up her fork again. “I was thinking psychology.”

            “You’re always saying I need my head examined. Dissected, for that matter.”

            She snorted. “Yeah, I’m going to do my thesis on you.”

            I ate some mac. “You’re a good listener, you notice things, you’re smart—and there’s the whole psychic thing. Unless that would be cheating.”

            She cocked her head. “Maybe. It’s just—all the weird stuff we run into, you know? It might give me a different insight.”

            The weird stuff we run into—vampires, demons, monsters, giant killer chickens (Rachel never lets me forget that one), a flesh-eating monster at a nudist colony, and sometimes worse, if you can imagine that. Yeah, that could give a shrink a unique perspective. “People possessed by demons. And vamps. I know some who could use a good therapist.”

            “That would be a niche.” She sipped some water. “So what do you think?”

            “You don’t need my permission. Do it.”

            “I’m not asking your permission, jerk. Just . . .” She speared some macaroni. “It’s expensive. Plus, in college I always thought people taking psychology really just wanted to solve their own problems before the final exam.”

            “Yeah. I kept hoping that one course I took would help me get over my Oedipus complex in a semester. No luck.”

            She kicked me under the table. “I just—I guess neither of us are exactly normal, are we?”

            I’ve seen a psychiatrist for stress and depression. Sometimes I take medication for it. And, oh yeah, there’s that one time I swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Rachel found me in time.

            Rachel? I don’t know everything about her past. She keeps things tight, and she doesn’t trust people easily. Some of her friends are witches and pagans. But I’ve come to depend on her. And not just for her psychic skills. She keeps me from doing stupid things—or at least she forces me to think them through.

            “Do it,” I said again. “We’ll figure out the money.”

            “I already looked at a couple of schools. I can do it part-time, at least first.” Then she smiled. “Thanks.”

            “For what? I’m for whatever you want to do. Except bondage. I keep forgetting the safe word.”

            “You love it.” She kicked me under the table again. Gently this time. “You still have to do the dishes.”

            I rolled my eyes. “Fine.”