Are You Haunted (part eighteen)

Are You Haunted

(part eighteen)

Summers had with him only a change of clothes, skivvies and socks, a shirt and slacks tailored to a fat man, packed in a cardboard suitcase. Noting the age of the lock assemblies, he hadn’t since moving in bothered with Guy’s housekeys.

“As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to the bedroom. The porch might get a little chilly with the screens. But sure, go on through, see what you think.”

After nodding to Summers’s proposal, Rohdl had left all, choice and speech, to his host. He needed propelling, a mild pressure on the elbow. The sofa had its pillow, and rumpled bedspread Summers was using. The table had a thermos, a stack of manilla files, the lump of an ashtray under newspapers.

“No,” Rohdl answered him. He crouched at the baseboard, examined a cloth-wrapped cord looping from the wall. “Now what is the meaning of this?”

Summers shrugged. The bad wiring belonged to Guy.

Rohdl moved on, looking at the kitchen tiles, the dinette and its taped chairs.

“Cupboard’s bare. I don’t eat here,” Summers said. “We’ll walk out for supper before it gets dark.”

Rohdl pulled the door to the porch. The back screen was torn, the latch hanging unhooked. But inside, the thief had only jimmied the bolt a little, lost courage at breaking the glass. Rohdl’s face grew ruminative, and Summers saw him pantomime this theory. For a second or two his fingers crumbled wire.

At last he lowered a foot to the concrete slab. Brown water lapped the lawn, rippling in gusts of wind, the river’s edge descried by a line of trees. This flooding was why Guy had done nothing with the empty lot next door.

He and Summers had stood in the open, discussing business in a desultory circling of each other, and Guy had stooped, picking up a tin can, a shoe, a wax-paper wrapper, hurling trash dumped on his property into the flow…

The glider would be iffy for sleeping, Summers thought. “You have a bad chest, don’t you, Mr. Rohdl? One night you don’t have to spend in the damp, nice room to yourself, bed and covers. You decide…”

The floodwaters, their unclean smell, had Summers thinking of other Lloyd Guys, making their dispositions along the watershed; of decay, and the impermanent things people built.

“I wish never to be shut in a room,” Rohdl answered.

His danger was that he would fail to see something. And how could you know you had failed to see something?

“Own up.”

Powell started, and pitched the cigarette into the river. They relieved each other silently. Breedman, with his streaming face, whispered, “Kenzie. Rot in hell.”

He felt frozen with the same indecision, could not scrabble from one hole to another, even as the cellar air quivered. He was trying to think.

18

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part nineteen)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)