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As promised, now delivered.

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At about the halfway point between Maastricht and Venlo, Will saw the first hint of trouble. Two dark swatches in the shoulder of the southbound lane, and a layer of gravel spread across the roadway. Fishtail. A short distance further and there was another layer of gravel and corresponding tracks on the shoulder. This time the tracks didn’t lead back to the pavement. They continued into the right side ditch.

“Shit…” Will crossed to the northbound shoulder and parked as far off the roadway as he could. He killed the headlights, flipped on his flashers and grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment. He trotted across the road with a breeze blowing straight into his face. It carried the smell of “wreck”, a mechanical potpourri of oil, antifreeze and fuel. As he neared the opposite shoulder the scent of fresh turned earth and shredded vegetation entered the mix. He switched on the flashlight and aimed the beam into the ditch. It landed on ragged chunks of torn sod and dark furrows of exposed, wet earth. He swung the light, and about one hundred yards from where he stood he saw the car. It was upright but facing the wrong way. It was obvious the car hadn’t been upright for most of its course. The roof was canted toward the passenger side and the windshield was an opaque mosaic that shone white in the beam of the flashlight. The entire body of the vehicle was smeared with mud and swatches of grass. Staying on the shoulder, Will walked toward the car. He came upon the body so quickly it took a moment to register.

It was a man and he appeared to be young—younger than himself, anyway– but Will had seen enough of these types of injuries that, even at the distance between them, he knew they made determining age a difficulty. And even at this distance, the man was at the bottom of the ditch, he also knew there was no question as to whether or not he was dead.

Will moved down the incline. The body lay like a discarded doll and was partially pressed into the ground. The arms were outstretched to either side. There was a bloodless laceration across the man’s forehead deep and broad enough to expose skull. The man’s eyes were half open and aiming the light directly into them triggered no response. His nose was partially flattened and pointed toward the car. His mouth was open and his chin was aimed vaguely in the same direction as his ruined nose. He wore a white T-shirt and a denim jacket, both twisted around his torso to his nipples. The exposed skin below had a faint pink patina, as if it had been lightly scoured, which Will concluded had been the case. Judging the flattened vegetation and pressed mud he was centered in, and his compression into the soggy earth, it appeared the car had rolled, he’d been ejected, and the vehicle, probably on its roof at this point, slid right over him. Will played the light a little lower on the body. The hips were rolled at a right angle to the torso, the legs twisted like a licorice stick. Will stood over the corpse for another moment. He could smell booze. When he at last turned away his feet were soaked. He cursed to himself he couldn’t go fifty feet in any direction in this goddamn county without getting his feet wet. He took out his phone and dialed 9-1-1.

The dispatcher answered after two rings. Will interrupted his opening spiel and stated. “You’ve got an MVA with at least one fatality on County 1 just north of Venlo.” He was walking halfway up the ditch on more or less dry ground, making brisk time to the car. He heard, “Sir… the nature of your emergency?” Will repeated what he’d said.

“Number of vehicles involved?”

“One.”

“Sir, did you say fatality?”

“Yes I did.” He was close enough to the car that he shined the light into the passenger side. Gut instinct had him believing there had only been one occupant, but then again, one could never assume…

“Are you certain about the fatality, sir?”

“Couldn’t be more certain,” Will answered. He played the light about the inside of the car. He saw nothing but fast food wrappers and beer cans in the expected state of disarray. No additional corpses. Not here, anyway. “Is someone on the way?”

“Did you attempt CPR, sir?”

Will stifled a gasp of exasperation. “No, I did not attempt CPR. That, my friend, would be futile.” He pronounced it “few-tile.” “Is a squad coming?”

“One has been dispatched and will arrive shortly sir,” the voice sputtered in his ear. “I need you to remain calm, sir.”

“Calm it is,” Will said and turned the phone off. The car was not emitting any ticks, pings or pops and Will couldn’t sense any radiant heat. It had to be at least a half hour since it left the road. He swept the light around the car again and even peered under it as best he could and saw nothing. He started back toward the point it left the pavement, almost certain there wasn’t another person to add to the body count. What happens when we assume . . . ? He’d taken only a few steps when his phone rang. He answered it but said nothing, just put it to his ear. “Sir I need you to stay on the line.”

“Sure thing,” Will told the dispatcher. He dropped the phone in his pocket without turning it off and continued searching the ditch. The first squad arrived from the direction of Venlo as he was about to take a second turn. He’d found nothing else but more churned earth. The patrol car pulled right up to the front of his truck and cut the head lights. The spotlight on the driver side flared to life and began sweeping the opposite side of the pavement. Will tried to get the deputy’s attention by waving his own light. After a few passes, the lawman popped out of the car.

“Over here,” Will called. He aimed his light toward a spot on the shoulder near where the body was lying. The deputy trotted across the road and pulled his own torch from his belt. With the deputy shining his own light at Will’s face instead into the ditch, Will walked up to him. Shielding his eyes, Will gestured toward the body and without any form of introduction said, “Body’s right down there,” and raising the angle of his arm a slight degree, “and the vehicle’s maybe seventy yards farther up. I’ve been up and down twice and didn’t find anyone else.”

After holding the light to Will’s face for a couple of beats, the deputy turned it toward the ditch. When he located the corpse, he gave a grunt and made as if to charge down the bank. “Don’t knock yourself out,” Will told him, blinking. “He’s finito.” But the deputy had already left the roadside and was scrambling down the edge of the ditch. Will’s eyes readjusted and he saw the deputy crouched beside the flattened driver, holding his wrist.

“How thoroughly did you check this man?”

“Thorough enough,” Will called back. “But, if you find a pulse, please extend my apologies.” Will was impressed. He knew how most cops felt about touching dead people. As he watched the deputy drop the limp arm, he caught blue and red flashes from the corner of his eye. When the deputy returned from the bottom of the ditch, headlights were clearly visible beneath the roof lights. “Cavalry’s here,” Will told him.

The deputy shot him a hard look, and held it on Will as he keyed the microphone on his shoulder. “One three one five on scene,” he said into the mic, “one confirmed fatality, EMS arriving.” An unintelligible answer crackled, which the deputy appeared to have no problem understanding. “Ten-four. Do we have an ETA on State Patrol?” Another squawk and the deputy nodded. He released the transmitter. “Wait right here,” he ordered Will, and walked around him to meet the fire truck that was just pulling up.

Will did as he was ordered and stood scuffing in the gravel, coating his wet feet with a layer of yellowish dust. He watched the deputy shouting up to the cab of the fire truck. Another deputy appeared around the rear of the truck. The two of them spent another minute talking at the open window of the cab, then walked past Will. They both had their flashlights out and were focusing them on the body. Seemingly satisfied with what they were seeing, they swung the direction of the lights up the ditch and made toward the car. Time to leave, Will thought, hop in the truck and skedaddle.

He pushed past the EMS guys who’d piled out of the fire rig and were laying flares, ogling the corpse or heading toward the deputies for a peek at the ruined automobile. Same shit no matter where you go, he thought, two minutes of scrambling and then sit around and wait for the State Patrol. He also thought of other people he’d seen at wrecks, people not wearing uniforms. Shunted off to the side with blank expressions of mixed shock, confusion and numbing boredom: Witnesses, with no idea what to do, no one giving them direction, leaving them unattended and too lost to take control of their own situation. They never dared to make a move until someone with a badge gave them leave to get on with their lives. He wasn’t about to fade into witness purgatory.

He approached the deputies. Not speaking to either one in particular, he announced, “It would seem my civic duty has been fulfilled, so I’ll be on my way.” He gave them a short wave and started across the pavement.

“Hold it.”

Will slowed, but didn’t stop. He looked back over his shoulder. The original responder, the first deputy who’d arrived, took a step toward him. He had his flashlight aimed at Will’s face again. “Yeah?”

“You’re not done yet.”

Will nodded and shrugged, but didn’t stop walking until he was beside his truck.

When the deputy caught up with him he didn’t look pleased. Will looked him straight in the face and raised his eyebrows. “What else?”

“First I’ll need your name.” Will took out his wallet, produced his license and handed it over. The deputy redirected his flashlight from Will’s face to the card. “Where were you driving to, Mister Holliday?”

“Home.”

The deputy glanced up from the plastic. “Seems you’re a long way from ‘home,’ and heading in the wrong direction.”

“I just moved out here,” Will told him, and gave him the address to the farmstead. “I’m just getting the place in shape and haven’t changed my DL yet.”

The deputy cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. He tapped the license. “Give me a minute.” He turned from Will and went to his squad. Will slouched back against his fender and watched as the county cop entered his car and slide Will’s license through the onboard computer. He also watched as the man studied the screen for a few moments, then picked up his radio mic. Will looked up. Even with the glare of the headlights and the flashing roof bars, the stars were starkly visible, filling the sky from horizon to horizon. It was a sight you’d never see in the cities. Wanna screw up the glory of nature? Just add people. His reverie was broken at the slam of the squad door. He looked at the deputy as he approached. I’d better be out of here in two minutes…

“No wants or warrants?” Will asked. The deputy didn’t respond. “I’m keen to take my leave.” He extended his hand for his driver license, but the officer didn’t offer it. Instead, the deputy asked, “Did you witness the incident, sir?”

“Nope.”

“What caused you to stop?”

Will sighed and forced himself not to roll his eyes. “Driving along, came upon a gravel spray, tire tracks on the shoulder, a little bit further and saw a bigger spray and ruts at the edge of the ditch.” He shrugged.

“What time was this?”

“Dispatch will have that answer for you, and right to the second.” He quarter turned and reached for his license. He was well and truly finished with all of this and was afraid this bumpkin was striving for a good reason to stick him in the back of his squad just to prove he could do it. “There’s really nothing more to it, Deputy–” he squinted at the man’s name plate, P-O-E-C-H-M-A-N, “Poach-mun…”

“It’s pronounced ‘Peckman, Mister Holliday.”

“Excuse me,” Will said, and repeated the name, asserting the corrected pronunciation, “Deputy Poechman. Nothing more to offer, really. I’m driving home, see a wreck, call it in. That’s all.”

Deputy Poechman nodded. “Are you a cop?” That inquiry set Will back a bit. And the deputy didn’t stop. “Medic, EMT, fireman?”

Will shook his head, a little stunned.

“This doesn’t seem to rattle you much,” Poechman went on. “Your average guy comes across something like this and they’re more than a little freaked out. You don’t seem to have a problem with it.” He shook his head and added, “’DL,’ ‘MVA,’ ‘dispatch’… That doesn’t pop up in conversation no matter how much time they spend watching cop shows. Not to mention how rude you were to, uh, ‘Dispatch’…”

Will had recovered enough say, “I worked in a hospital for a few years.”

The deputy responded with a doubtful nod and a guarded smile. He offered Will his license. “Thank you Mister Holliday, I think that’s all I’ll need.” Will took it and tucked it away. As he circled his truck and opened the door, the deputy said, “Drive safe, and if there’s anything else we need from you, Dispatch has your phone number. I appreciate your help.”

As Will pulled away he saw another chain of flashing lights in his rearview mirror. Welcome, State Troopers… He had to grudgingly acknowledge, if only to himself, that Deputy Poechman had probably done him a solid by cutting him loose when he did. Will knew some State Troopers could get a little persnickety about not getting firsthand accounts from witnesses.

As he approached the county road crossing that would take him to the house, he scrapped a half-considered plan to go into town and see if the “Muni” was open. He had a gut suspicion the Deputy would make a careful pass by the bar once he was finished at the accident scene. Will didn’t want to afford him any kind of opportunity to find cause for another chat.

Turning in the direction of the house, Will felt a sudden flush of anger. He tried to assign it to missing out on a beer. Driving back from the hotel, he’d talked himself into believing he should establish himself in town, take the plunge and shed that silly need of invisibility. The local watering hole would have been the perfect place to start. Now, a sincere effort to put down some roots had been compromised by a moron who couldn’t hold his liquor and keep his car on the road… As the intersection got farther behind him, he couldn’t hold the facade any more. Why had he acted that way? He didn’t do that crap for a living any more. It was made worse by the fact that, during his entire career at the Medical Examiner, he’d not once encountered a body anyplace other than a funeral home away from work.

The stink of the accident was back in his nose; the hot, sweet odor of antifreeze, the sharp burn of spilled gasoline, an underlying tinge of spilled blood… The smell in his mind was not specific to the wreck he was driving away from, but the imprinted and indelible product of the scores of vehicular catastrophes he’d borne witness to. Olfactory memory was a curse to people like him. Whatever odor your brain decided to conjure up couldn’t be replaced or overpowered by conscious recollection. You couldn’t swap out the re-called smell of a decomposing hooker with something like baking bread, fresh cut grass or an old girlfriend’s sex. Nossir. The subconscious was insidious, fickle and entrenched. It could not be reprogrammed, and if it wanted to trigger a past stench, it was going to do it. There were other things that Will could smell, either on command or popping into his nostrils without warning. Lots of things, and most of them much worse that a wrecked automobile.

 

Long, long, long… but NOT bloated. Want something longer?

https://www.amazon.com/Lunacy-Death-perspective-developed-investigation-ebook/dp/B079DWFH9T/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1529597298&sr=1-1&keywords=lunacy+and+death

 

 

 

 

As well as the usual caveats, I add this: The following is bloated, long and clunkier than I’d like. It was put down with the intent of being only about a thousand words. It just doesn’t work that way, sometimes. I’d run into an idea or a train of thought and couldn’t let it go without, as it reads, taking it too far and, as a result, not a very solid or complete conclusion. The effect is soft, and therefore it reads soft. Yet… YET, I couldn’t dump it. It needs to sit a while, then I can come back and put it on a diet, get the stomach stapled, attack it with a scalpel. That’s how it goes sometimes… Anyhoo, the surprise (!!!) promised in the previous post is coming up next in the next post.

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Will never got another call from Blom. On the other hand, Ken Maartens called him every day, sometimes two or three times. It was usually questions about problems that Will couldn’t visualize or quite comprehend, and it typically ended with him telling the contractor to do what he thought best. He wasn’t sure how to take it. He either enjoyed a sense of security, certain the man had his best interests at heart. Maartens had given no impression other than he thought the house was a magnificent project and whatever was invested in bringing it back to its former glory was money well spent. “Letting that place go all to hell would be nothing short of criminal neglect,” Ken told him. “You should be proud of putting this right. Hell, I’m proud of you. You’re not just doing yourself a favor, you’re doing the whole community a favor.” Will would later find himself agonizing as to whether he was getting the gouging Blom had warned him about, and caught himself thinking the man’s enthusiasm was nothing more than a sleazy pitch. About three weeks after their first conversation, the project had come to the point where aesthetics became the issue. At that same point, his anxiety took off in every direction.

Will had never given anything more than a rat’s ass worth of concern to what kind of faucet his tap water flowed through. Color and composition weren’t words that came to mind when he walked into a room, and the only qualities he could ever find relevant when it came to a counter top was that it should be flat. Ken Maartens, on the other hand, proved himself a man who was deeply concerned.

“You’re going to want it ‘period appropriate,’” he told Will. “What kind of effect would it have on you if you were to step into a nineteen-oh-two Queen Anne and the living area was wall-to-wall Berber carpet and the furnished from an Ikea catalog?”

Such thoughts were alien to Will. “Effect?”

“It ought to make you want to puke. It ought to make you wonder what kind of jerk-off would invest in such a home only to turn it into a chiropractor’s waiting room. I’ve seen that crap happen, and too many times in this part of the world. Particularly in the part of the world.”

They were talking about a kitchen. “I just want a faucet with water coming out of it. And after the water comes out, I want it to drain anywhere but into the river.”

“Well, for now,” Maartens answered, his voice rising a full measure. “I can understand that, of course. But, six months from now you’re going to be ashamed of yourself. You’re going to wonder why you decided to live in a place that’s put together like a Detroit housing project.”

Attempts to argue were futile. “That makes sense, but I’m more of a ‘function over form’ guy.”

“All well and good. I can appreciate that. I’ll tell you this, though, that’s what high-rise condos and public transportation are for,” Maartens said. “You find yourself wanting to go back to crackheads and nightclub shootings and leave the five-tooth tweakers and bowling alley ass kickings behind you, I’m not one to judge. But, that means you’re going to have to sell this place.”

Maartens let it hang a minute. Will let him. When Maartens started talking again, Will was fully expecting a lecture on “half-assing,” which is what he got, sort of.

“I’m going to be honest with you. That place was priced out of this market when the first brick was laid. God knows, I can’t tell you how much I admire that. I truly do—someday you’re going to have to tell me why the walls are so thick—but it wasn’t built with ‘resale’ taken into consideration. No matter what you do with it, you’re going to take a bath. You’re not selling it to anybody who grew up around here, either. These yokels aren’t concerned with character or quality. They can’t afford it. All you’ve got to do is drive by the trailer parks in Maastricht and Venlo. There’s your goddamn ‘new housing market.’ What you hope will happen is you get somebody from Minneapolis with more money than sense, like a retired finance guy who’s got a wife sick of him hiding in the office for most of the marriage. She wants ‘country living’ as seen in a magazine published in New York or L.A. Remember, it’s the wife that’s pushing that lunacy, and the first thing that’s going to tell her she’s in rural paradise is the kitchen and the bathrooms. You might not mind pissing in a stainless-steel trough, but she’s not going to have her grandkids doing that. She sees a kitchen that looks like the last update was in nineteen thirty-three—but it works like the twenty-first century– she’s not going to let the husband walk away without making an offer.”

Will was sure he’d heard all of this before, but with a much different spin. “Alright, alright,” Will said. “You don’t have to make a goddamn speech. Say I do bail out in year or so, how does dumping more cash into the place right now help me out if I’m going to lose money if I sell it, no matter what?”

“Because the money you dump in now, if you do it the right way, is the money you’ll get back. You put bargain fixtures in a place out here, anybody who takes a look won’t have a problem knocking ten grand off a house already listed thirty thousand under reasonable market price.”

Will had never intended to let the price of a fixture or appliance influence his rehabilitation of the house, but he couldn’t let himself get bulldozed into making decisions based on some stranger’s opinions. Up to this point, he’d always agreed with Maartens because any problem reported to him was mechanical or structural. Will could concede all of that was beyond his scope. This discussion had nothing to do with carpentry, plumbing or electrical work. The man had gone from an expert at making the house work properly, to an expert on how it should look.

“I inherited the place,” Will said. “Not only do I not owe a penny on it, I’ve never spent a penny on it—up ‘til now.” Certain he could get one over on the contractor at last, he added, “So, whatever I sell it for, if I ever decide to, is all profit.” He thought that should knock him back a few steps.

There was no hesitation at the other end. Ken Maartens immediately shot back with, “Then why in Christ’s name would you deny a property like this its full potential? Why would you deny yourself?”

If Will had an answer to that, he couldn’t come up with one. How was he supposed to argue against that? He turned Ken Maartens, contractor and repressed interior decorator, loose to do whatever he saw fit. The man appeared to care more about the house than Will did. Which probably isn’t a bad thing, he told himself. Dropping the reins completely might even put himself back in the position that, if he didn’t like the result this far into this madness, he could allow for the idea of packing it up back into his head.

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Will was entering his second month away from the homestead. He bought a calculator in the gift shop and spent an hour or so in his room figuring out how long he could live in a casino before he’d have to look for a job. If he could break about even at the tables and slot machines, he concluded it would be ten years. After a raid on the mini-bar, he thought it only reasonable he try to factor in disastrous fortune and whatever reckless behavior he could add to it, and still came to the conclusion he’d go insane from the place long before he’d have to sleep in bus shelters. He was already half nuts from the atmosphere. Doping out how long it would take him to achieve indigence was a fantasy anyway. A conversation he’d had with his father’s—and now his—financial manager kept coming to mind since he’d surrendered control to Ken Maartens.

“What would it take to go broke?”

The accountant, who was just slightly less dislikable to Will than the attorney, smiled and said, “If you leave it as is, nuclear holocaust or biblical plague.” His smile stretched a little at Will’s confused expression. He shrugged. “It’s just like they say, ‘That kind of money takes care of itself.’ They never add, however, ‘If you leave it alone.’”

“I’m still not clear.”

“That’s a pretty good approach to what I just said,” the accountant told him. “Don’t touch it, and it’ll always be there. You don’t have to be clear, though I recommend you work on that. The account your father left you is set up to take care of itself. It’s more of an entity than a portfolio.”

Will was still lost.

“I’ll try and keep it simple,” the man explained. “You just can’t walk into the bank and ask for a check. And you can’t just sign it over to an organization or individual. There are steps you need to take, and it would be a tedious, time consuming process. It’s not just one big account, but several bound together in various means and degrees of connection. It’s like organs in a body. Some of these accounts are like lungs and a heart, some are a liver, and kidneys and others are spleens. Some parts are more vital than others. You want me to get into detail, we can set aside an entire day, and I’ll explain it from one end to the other. My advice on that would be to wait a minimum of three months before doing so. This type of situation requires a little getting used to, some time to percolate.”

All Will knew for certain was that the cash he’d put in the bank that first day in Venlo was just an installment; part of his “allowance.” The accountant had at least explained that much to him before he went off to percolate.

“There’s a percentage of the account that’s accessible to you pretty much at all times,” he was told. “It’s liquid, and if you find yourself in need of immediate funds all it would take is a few phone calls and a very short waiting period. Otherwise, from that same account, a balance is forwarded to your private savings or checking every quarter. That’s sort of an ‘allowance from your allowance.’”

That’s when Will found himself with a cashier’s check for almost a quarter-million dollars. “That’s not what you’ll receive every three months,” the accountant told him. “Your father’s checking and bank accounts were included. I can show you what the normal amount will be easy enough.”

Will declined, saying he liked surprises.

“That’s a good way to start looking at it,” Will was assured. “If it helps to put things into perspective, those automatic deposits are tonsils.”

He threw the calculator into the trash and went down to eat. Life at the Casino, Spa, Resort and Entertainment Experience had grown tedious well before his last conversation with Maartens. Now it was approaching unbearable. His running, golf and swim routine were easily rationalized as things he’d be doing regardless of his situation. The volume of it, golf in particular, far exceeded what he’d have time for if he was leading a normal life. As much as he loved those diversions, they’d ceased to be diversions. Though he was certain he could never get bored on a golf course, playing the same one as many as three times a day had robbed it of any challenge. Its familiarity was having an unexpected effect. His scores had peaked at about the third week of regular play. Then his game began to deteriorate. He was sloppy, indifferent and easily distracted. He’d considered dropping some rounds from the week and had even eliminated the nine holes after lunch on his non-running days. All that did was give him two extra hours three or four days a week to be sloppy, indifferent and miserably distracted without the pretense of doing something healthy. He’d done the massages, the mani-pedis. He gone to see the shows, but found them so boring and bereft of entertainment he always left early. He simmered in his hot tub, sometimes for hours. About the only thing he hadn’t tried as a means of escape was finding a sexual partner. The opportunities were there. On a few times, they’d literally presented themselves. Will was not a prude. Rejecting sex for any reason other than immediately obvious or even foreseeable unpleasant consequences was not in his character. If certain conditions were met and the situation was comfortable, Will couldn’t conceive of any time in his life he’d ever turned it down. He hadn’t had a relationship that lasted long enough to even to have been considered a relationship since his divorce. Excepting his son, the one positive thing he’d taken from the marriage was a profound understanding of what lousy material he was as a lifelong partner.

There were several factors that contributed to his current choice for celibacy. The atmosphere was one of them. As sanitized and as separate as the place tried present itself in comparison to Las Vegas or Atlantic City—both places where Will had indulged his baser impulses in the past—it was still a place where vice was the sole purpose of its existence. That in and of itself was not a deterrent, but the fact that it wasn’t one island in an archipelago of depravity certainly was. A strong percentage of its clientele were essentially local. Getting reacquainted with a single night bed partner didn’t hold much appeal, and the longer he stayed, the more the risk. Another was his choice of accommodation. Selecting a top floor suite was a bad decision. Remaining for more than three days made a bad decision worse. Staying there for over a month made a bad decision just plain stupid.

In an isolated mecca of vice and irresponsibility, a stay of more than a couple of days meant he became a familiar face, and not just to the staff. Sitting at a blackjack table or a slot machine, an empty chair beside him would soon be occupied. “I’ve seen you here before,” was an introduction that he couldn’t deny. Initially, when a lady presented herself in such a manner, Will could allow for a little intrigue. Under any other circumstances, he would have been keen to play it out, see where it might go. The desire for some anonymity was still pretty strong however, and how easily it had been blown at Blom’s and its resultant effect still rankled.

There was enough uncertainty and unpredictability tossing him around as it was.

Will kept things neutral, answering with something like, “Yes you have,” or “That doesn’t make you wonder what’s wrong with me?” and leaving it at that. If the impression he got was negative for whatever reason, an aloof, “My condolences,” or “No better proof I’ve got a gambling problem,” was usually enough to be left alone. If he got an instant bad vibe, a brusque, “Then you come here way too often,” worked well in chasing someone off.

There were a couple occasions that sudden company was downright enjoyable. Good conversation with an attractive person was always welcome, regardless of circumstance, but Will would never allow it to get past pleasant chit-chat. Any chance of it going any further was left in the dim realm of vague possibility of “next time” or “hope to see you again.” There were times he went to sleep kicking himself.

Things changed with the duration of his stay. Will’s initial spree of outrageous tipping was well intended but ultimately folly. It was a cat let out of a bag, a locked gate after the horse was long gone, and a smashing of Pandora’s box. Will was fawned over, coddled, complimented and treated like an adored celebrity—until he caught himself and tried to bring his gratuities back to a standard range. This, as he should have known, backfired. He went from Robin Hood to Ebenezer Scrooge the first time a tip didn’t exceed twenty per cent. It didn’t halt the perception of his being an eccentric millionaire, hiding out in the hinterlands, it just changed to millionaire who was just as big an asshole as the rest of them. Will began learning what effect the promise of money had on people around him, and subsequently what it had on him. In a place as cash-centric as the Casino, Spa, Resort and Entertainment Experience was, it was impossible not to be seen and treated in accordance of what you brought in, and what you’d leave behind.

This was not just an effect Will felt in the staff’s transition from indulgent welcome to glum familiarity. The initial joy Will took in choosing this place for respite from plaster dust and decay had been based in playing a role he knew his father would find contemptible. He was indulging in behavior of which he’d long been accused. Anything he’d done in his past that flew in the face of his father’s expectations and values hadn’t been enabled by the man’s money, and they weren’t acts of adolescent rebellion. His motivation for a trip to a corn belt Sin City backfired in much the same way his freewheeling shows of generous appreciation had gone. It this was never how he was, why was he behaving so now? Such was the satisfaction gained by thumbing your nose at a dead man.

The longer he was there, the more Will found himself thumbing his nose at himself. Since his first conversations with Maartens, the money jumped back into the forefront. He began not only seeing its effect, but feeling it as well. Now, when approached by a female, he was forced to consider whether it was he who was attractive, or they’d somehow gotten wind of where in the hotel he’d been staying. He began shutting down any potential “good conversation” before it even started. Returning to the room from a run or the golf course, he began checking his belongs to see if anything had been moved or rifled through. Gambling, another distraction at best, as he was never that fond of it, had been completely ruined. No matter what kind outrageous bet he made, win or lose, he felt no different once he realized he’d made up the wager in less than an hour in interest, or lost five times that amount at a tick of the clock if the market was going down. Either way, it wouldn’t affect him.

Will finished his dinner, figured out the bill and added fifteen percent to the check. If Maartens was calling him about faucet selection and “period appropriate” décor, his kitchen and bathroom couldn’t be that far from functional. He looked at the date/time stamp on the bill. He’d been here five and a half weeks. It was almost the second week of May. He plucked his card from the check wallet and went into the bar.

Will had no sooner sat down that he had company. It was not a divorced, single mother from the nearest town, but a diaphoretic real estate agent from Sioux Falls, who was there for a conference. He’d assumed the role of Will’s drinkin’ buddy the night before. Will had allowed for it. He was past three beers when the man first sat down beside him. Will accepted his company, primarily just to talk to somebody. He was happy to have a face in front of him rather than a phone to his ear. That the person didn’t have breasts and wore a wedding ring gave him the signal he could relax. After a couple hours, the gentleman got hostile when Will didn’t buy him a drink.

“Hey, buddy, how’s it going tonight?”

Will looked at the bartender instead, who was about to reach into the cooler for his usual. Will waved him off. He looked at the real estate guy, trying to think of an answer. Instead, he waved, walked out, went to the main desk and checked out.

Yeah, I’ve done better. However, it’s up there, raw and fresh as a vat of fresh-stomped grapes. It’s gotta ferment before I can make it drinkable. I do say this with total confidence: My next installment– (confession time, it was written well before this was, and I’ve gone over it a couple of times)– is more ACTION PACKED! and a smoother, more “connected” reading experience…

 

Not wasting time with qualification or explanations. Wrapped up this chap. and my brain is all about #4

+   +   +

When Will had finished complying with recommendations and following instinct, he found himself with a full cart of stuff he’d never imagine owning, much less using. What was he doing here? The answer to that interminable nagging question wasn’t going to be found at the checkout station. The sudden pounding his chest confirmed that, and a lot more.

Will had always perceived of Bertie Blom as an old man. When he first met him, Will wasn’t more than four years old. Bertie could not have yet hit thirty. The last time Will saw him was the summer he spent with Nan, and Bertie may have been in his mid-forties. That summer had been last time he’d seen Nan alive. It was the first time he’d run away and hid; the first time he’d thought such a thing was possible. Nan had sent him away in the Fall, back to school, convincing him such a thing was never possible. But he would try again: Mexico And again: Vienna. And, for what he thought would be the last time and his most brilliant and perfect hiding place: a medical examiner’s office.

And now that urge was on him– again. Bertie Blom, sixty-something, was sitting in the place where Will had first met him and the last place he’d seen him. Will’s hands tightened on the cart. Ditch this shit and flee… He squeezed hard enough to feel the pulses in his wrists. Fuck mom. Fuck Dad. Fuck… He swallowed. If he was serious, to walk away this time final and forever, with all the means in the world to bury himself in the hole of his choosing and let the rest of his miserable life sputter out in the manner of his choosing, all he had to do was add Gran and Nan.

He relaxed the death grip. He closed his eyes, inhaled until he felt the breath threatening to push into his ears. Release . . . Therapy. He blinked a few times, took a step, and convinced himself the laden cart was pulling him to the cash register.

With no one waiting at the checkout, Will went straight to work. Keeping his head down, he began piling his items on the counter, building a wall. He heard a low whistle and, “Looks like somebody’s got a long day ahead of him.” Will answered with a grunt and a nod, careful not to reveal more than a quarter of face. Bertie had always impressed him as a sharp guy, but was he was so sharp he could recall a face he hadn’t seen for twenty years? Take no chances! he told himself.

As the items were rung up and slid down the counter, dismantling his barrier, Will grabbed them and put them back in the cart. Speed was the key to a clean escape. Be packed and ready to fly. Pay up and dash. No need to get a receipt. The last of his purchases were small, a pair of gloves, a package of filter masks and safety goggles. The old man held them from the end of the counter and leaned beneath the counter and pulled out a bag. Will swapped the bag for a credit card, managing the exchange through the corner of one eye and keeping his face turned away as much as he was able. Instead of hearing the whirr and buzz of his transaction being processed, he heard Bertie call out, “Jared!” Will’s hand again grew tight on the cart when he heard, “I’ll have someone get those out you your vehicle and help load it.” Before Will could decline the offer, “Jared!” was called out again.

Before Will could insist on taking care it himself, the kid was there, bounding around the corner, scabbard dancing at his hip. He came to a halt right in front of Will. “Hi,” he said.

“Would you assist this gentleman in loading his merchandise?”

The boy nodded, looking past Will to the counter. “Sure.” He grabbed the front of the cart, grinning at Will. Will sighed, pointed through the window to his truck with his free hand, and said, “Just toss it in the box. I’ll be out in a minute.”

Watching Jared’s fervent departure with the cart, Will considered it may be a blessing. Keeping his back turned to the register wouldn’t be odd if a man were concerned about the paintjob on his new truck. Then he heard something that shot that hope to pieces.

“Willem Holliday.”

He sagged. Will gave himself a second to collect himself, then turned. Just get it over with, and work to keep it short. He expected to be eye-to-eye with Bertie Blom. Instead, the old man was looking at the credit card.

“Willem,” he repeated, “that’s a name that fits right in around these parts, though I haven’t heard it in years.” Will tried not to flinch when Bertie glanced up at him, but it was just a glance, and his eyes were back on the credit card. “Damn near a lifetime since I’ve heard it, actually.’ He fed the card through the slot in the register. “If you’d have grown up around here, we’d probably call you ‘Wim’.”

In a panic, and hoping it would throw the shopkeeper off the scent, Will blurted, “My mom tagged me with Billie. I just go by Will.”

“Billie Holliday?” Now the man was looking straight at him, eyebrows raised and grinning.

Will offered a weak smile and stretched his arm across the counter for his plastic. “Yeah, she thought it was a hoot.”

For a second it appeared the old man was about to surrender the credit card, but he pulled it back and the eyebrows rose even higher. Then his eyes widened as if trying to catch up. “My goodness,” he sputtered as Will’s heart fell, “you’re Marta Rijbergen’s boy!”

Hearing his mother’s maiden name was like having a stroke, a tiny explosion in his brain, but it passed. “Sure am,” he said, motioning for his card. He knew he wouldn’t get off that easy, but thought it worth a try.

Bertie Blom folded his arms on the counter and leaned toward him, shaking his head. “My goodness.” The cash register began spitting out the receipt. “What could possibly bring you back here?” Will pointed at the paper curling out of the machine. The old man grunted, waited until it finished, and glanced over the paper. He looked from the receipt to Will. “The house?”

Will was going to attempt a few-words-as-possible approach. He nodded. “My God, son, are going to fix that place up?”

“Yeah.”

There was no doubting the old man’s astonishment was genuine. He spent a few moments letting his head turn back and forth while he kept his eyes fixed on Will. He didn’t speak again until Jared came crashing back in with the empty cart—“All loaded up!”—and went galloping off to the back of the store, yelping, “Thank you, and come again!”

“I sent Loren over there a couple times after your grandmother passed,” he told Will, “but I don’t imagine anybody’s been there since.” He stopped shaking his head. “You’ve been there?” Will nodded. “In what kind of shape is it?”

“Pretty rough.” This was okay. Give the man a few minutes to prattle on about the house, then announce he’d better get to it. “The bricks are all where they belong…” Now, he told himself, stand back and wait for a cue. He stood in front of Bertie Blom’s pulpit, nodding along with the words that rolled past him, inserting a “yawp” or a “nawp” where it seemed to fit, marveling at how easily the local vernacular crept back into his speech. At hearing, “You’ve got quite a job ahead of you,” Will found his chance to get out the door.

“That’s a fact,” he said brightly, “and it won’t get anywhere with me standing here.” He lifted a hand in farewell and turned.

“Your card.”

Will turned back, picked the card and the receipt from Blom’s fingers and was about to make for the door.

“Quite the character, your mother.”

The air grew dense, too heavy to push through. Will couldn’t ignore him, or even look away.

“Knew each other all our lives, church, Sunday School, you know, then kindergarten and right on up through high school. I was a year ahead, but the schools were so small, you know, we spent a lot of time in the same classes.” Bertie was smiling as he talked.

Will felt his jaw tighten. The smile is genuine, he told himself. It’s benign, harmless. But, with each word, the clench strengthened, creeping up to his ears, descending into his throat.

“After grammar school we rode the bus together to Maastricht for high school. At least once a week– or whenever we could –we’d pile into a car and go to all the games, football, basketball, even the baseball games, just to get out…”

The words came at him. Will heard them, understood them, but as soon as they made it to his ears, they separated from an old shopkeeper’s reminiscence. They churned, torn away from the context of a past Will had never so much as gotten a glimpse of. The memories of an old friend became septic, poisoned by the fetid gunk of his less than fond recollection.

“A driving license didn’t mean much in those days…”

It took Will a moment to recognize he was sliding into a panic attack. Impossible. How long? A dozen years…? Fifteen. His first week at the morgue as a Tech, unzipping a body bag. Blood, brains and hair… The guy was in his kitchen. Did it in front of his kids… It didn’t hit him until he heard “shotgun.” The tunnel vision was kicking in. The man at the counter shrank back, framed in a blur, the mouth moving. Will’s throat grew tighter, threatening to close. Drowning, with lungs full of air. It was this place, this town, this day. Too much, all at once… Blom’s voice became clear again.

“We never missed a dance…

Which led to what? Your first drink? Your first kiss? First feel… first fuck?

Struggling to steady himself, Will raised a hand. There was nothing he could do to stop the tremors. Blom fell silent. “That Marta Rijsbergen wasn’t the one I knew.” Saying it out loud, the name, helped. It pushed her back in her place. “The Marta Rijsbergen I knew was a crazy person.” The air began to move in his chest. “And she was a terrible mother.”

The storekeeper killed his smile, pursing his lips. He said, “I’m sorry, Mister Holliday. I am. I did hear she had some serious problems later in life.”

Will lowered his hand. He followed it with his eyes until he could focus on his crusted shoes. He studied them until the shaking stopped and his breathing was even. When he looked up, Blom’s face was somber, almost shamed.

“I was just trying to let you know that, when she was younger, she was a wonderful friend. I thought the world of her.”

Will bled the tension out of his neck by nodding. He plucked his credit card and the receipt from the counter. Looking only at the paper and plastic, he said. “I’m sure she was, Mister Blom. I’m sure she was.” Turning to leave, he couldn’t allow himself to take a step before adding: “And I’m glad you thought the world of her. It’s good to hear somebody did.”

He walked out, straight to his truck, without looking back.

Will drove to the house. He left the parking lot with no other destination in mind. His only thought was to be mindful of the speed limit. Down the new driveway. He left the keys in the ignition when he swung from the cab. Walking around the back of the vehicle, he caught the handle of the splitting maul and swung it to rest on his shoulder. He entered the house without a glance to the useless kitchen. He instead turned left. He pounded up the stairway to the second floor. He had no concern for the condition of the steps, felt no fear of rotted flooring or weakened studs when he topped the stairs and crossed to the northeast corner bedroom. The door was ajar, and the hinges held when he kicked it wide open. He took scant notice of the pink, flocked wallpaper, curled, stained and faded. It looked to Will no different than it had when he was a boy. The gloves, safety goggles and filter masks were in the bed of the truck. He didn’t think of them. He just hefted the big hammer and swung.

Hope all had a lovely holiday weekend. Too frigging hot, for my likin’. Deeper into Chap. 3, here. Again, all previous warnings regarding quality and brevity content apply… and this one’s a long one.

Here we go:

Will stepped out of the bank feeling as if he were walking away from  probation hearing. He came in bedraggled, overwhelmed and ambiguous about his future. His arrival was met with cool professionalism mixed with a dash of skepticism. This sort of reception he found understandable, considering the condition of his pants and shoes. Though the first client through the door, he still had to take a seat and wait. Several minutes passed before he was led to an office. A man in a suit greeted him with a handshake and he was offered another seat. The paperwork he provided was reviewed, prompting several personal questions that compelled honest answers. His current state in life was examined with a necessary degree of scrutiny. More questions, this time focused on his future and his plans for it. Then, waiting as a new file was put together. More paper and ink. Will finally excused with another handshake and the agreement he would be reporting back, at least for the near future, on a regular basis. It had taken about an hour. All cool, calm and professional. He departed resolved to adhere to and fulfill the conditions and terms that had landed him here.

As he moved down the steps to the sidewalk, he put his sunglasses back on. Wouldn’t want to be recognized coming out of a place like that. Venlo was in full mid-morning swing. There were people on the sidewalk, cars on the street. The sun was well up and Will shed his jacket as he crossed the square to his truck. The warmth on his back was magnificent. The wave of warm air that hit his face when he opened the cab was a delight. Time in the sun had revived that “new car smell.” The seat wasn’t too hot to sit on, but those days were coming.

If nothing else, Spring was a great time to be in Limburg County.

The familiarity was a stunner. Even the bell over the door was the same, and the jangle it made when Will stepped into Blom’s triggered a deluge of memories. His senses fell into step with them. The smell, the concrete floor, even the fluorescent lighting put him right back at his grandfather’s hip. The town, the diner, the park, even the bank were all places he’d been scores of times, but Blom’s was different, almost magical. It was always the same, but ever changing. The stock reflected the seasons. Now, with the onset of Spring, the front of the store was piled with stacks of fertilizer, potting soil, seeds of every kind, flower or vegetable, ranging anywhere from twenty-pound bags to individual packets. Gas and charcoal grills were on display, as well as lawn mowers, hedge clippers and lawn and garden tools. There was even a part of the floor reserved for the fishing season. It was in the process of being stocked with rods, reels and tackle. As Will grew into his teens, he came to find this display an absurdity, as there wasn’t anything that could be considered more than a pond or sinkhole anywhere in the county. “Anybody tossing a line into the Wahpekute,” his mother had told him, “should be on the lookout for the men in white jackets. Anybody who’d eat a fish out of that cesspool is either suicidal or flat-out crazy.”

Will believed if there was anybody familiar with what qualified a person for admission to a psychiatric unit, it was certainly his mother.

A trip into town for groceries or a stop at the drugstore were routine errands, but a stop at Blom’s was usually tied to an event. His first baseball bat had been purchased here. Odd as it first seemed to Will, you could even buy a dozen live chicks—order on Monday and pick up on Friday– which his grandmother did around this time of year for as long as he could remember, replacing those unfortunate hens that had ended up on the table over the Winter. All the eggs collected at the farm were destined for the frying pan or a cake.

Year-round items, like tools, work clothing and other dull and boring necessities were located toward the rear. This was an area Will avoided whenever possible. There would be no avoiding it today. He chanced a broader view, looking beyond the displays dominating the entrance, trying to remember where the checkout stood. When he finally found it, he instantly chided himself for having had to search at all.

The strangely placed cashier station stood thirty feet off-center from the door, and almost that distance back from the panel of windows that fronted the building. It was a four-foot tall, three-sided booth that faced the entrance at an angle. If it weren’t for the cash register at one corner, a telephone at the other, if the surrounding merchandise could be ignored or hidden behind a curtain, it would have passed for a pulpit. The wash of relief he felt at seeing the spot unoccupied was not an unexpected sensation.

Every place Will had been this morning was familiar, but the people were not. An unfamiliar face in a town like Venlo was a guaranteed cause for attention. It could be conversation fodder for a week.

“Say, Jim, who’s that guy was in Durkin’s yesterday? Bought about twenty gallons of distilled water. Nearly cleaned out the store. He was driving a blue Cutlass.”

“Same guy was up to Blom’s. Asking for the same thing. Wearing a yellow shirt?”

“Yeah. He from Maastricht?”

“Don’t think so. Probably could get all the distilled water a man would ever need right there.”

“What’s he need it for?”

“Couldn’t tell you, never asked him.”

“Think he was from So-Dak?”

“Nope. Had Minnesota plates.”

Will had overheard countless exchanges, from sharing the excitement and mystery as a young boy, to adolescent contempt at the squawking of rubes.

“Yeah, well, any stranger shows up in Venlo, either theyr’re lost or runnin’ from the law.”

Running from something…

Will knew coming in here it was almost certain he’d encounter at least one familiar face. It was one thing to slip in and slip out of town, leaving nothing behind but coffee shop jabber. But, to show up suddenly with a past connection, rekindling a legacy long thought dead, and one so deeply rooted in the local culture, every move he’d make would be done under a magnifying glass as big as the county.

Will was snapped back into the present by the sudden appearance of a kid, a Native American boy about high school age. Will had been so lost in the surroundings he didn’t notice where the kid had come from, or how he’d gotten so close without his being aware of it. He just heard a sharp “Hi,” and there he was, just off to the side of him and no more than three feet away. He couldn’t help being startled. Before he could collect himself, the boy asked, “Can I help you?”

Before Will could answer, the boy twisted at the hips and shouted toward the back of the store, “Uncle Loren!” The kid turned back to face Will. “He’ll be here in just a second.” Another twist at the hips, and another call to “Uncle Loren.” He turned back to Will, an odd smile on is face.

Will couldn’t help but smile back, but the closed-lipped grin he presented felt no less odd than the one he faced. There was something about the kid, a scarcely contained jitteriness crawling beneath his skin like static electricity. Looking at him seemed to fuel it. As they stood there, facing each other, the boy started to rock ever so slightly, as if fighting the urge to dash off in whatever direction he was leaning. He boy kept flicking his head, scarcely tossing his shoulder length, poker straight and jet-black hair away from his face. The Mona Lisa smile never changed, but his eyes wandered, moving around Will, but never focusing directly on him.

Will didn’t quite know where to look either, until he noticed the knife dangling from the young man’s hip. The fringed, beaded buckskin sheath was at least six inches long. The haft was antler, thick, like from an elk or a mule deer. The corona of the horn served as a handguard. The rest of the handle rose from the scabbard in a curve, topped by a flared cap of silver. The kid’s hands were clamped on his skinny hips, and the handle was resting in the crook of the boy’s right wrist. Will had no problem keeping his eyes locked on that.

“Jared.” The voice, not loud but no less commanding, allowed Will to pry his gaze away from the weapon. He looked up to see a man exiting an aisle and coming toward them. Like the boy, he was Native American, but that’s where any resemblance started and stopped. The kid was all gangly adolescence, carrying a lot less meat on a frame than could accommodate another thirty pounds. What there was of him was lost in the drapery of “skater boy” attire; baggy jeans, an overlarge logo T-shirt and a ragged denim vest. While the boy appeared to be a clothes hanger with a head and feet—and an impressive pig-sticker—the man approaching filled every bit of his clothing. It was not a bodybuilder’s physique, all bulges and ripples, but a college wrestler’s; taut, compact, squeezed into a package a quarter size smaller than it should take to contain it. His hair was styled for running a boot camp. As Will saw it, swapping the shop apron he wore for a uniform with stripes his sleeves wouldn’t alter the impression he made. His eyes were on Will, but he approached the boy first.

“Jared,” he repeated, putting a hand on a bony shoulder and turning the boy to face him. “We need to get those pallets unloaded. They’re parked right in front of where all that stuff needs to be stacked. Just pile it up, nice and neat, and inside the markings on the floor. Just like we’ve done a hundred times.” He maneuvered the boy another quarter turn and set him loose with a light slap on the back. As the boy trotted off toward the back of the store, the man called after him, “Boxcutter, Jared. We’ve talked about this. Use the boxcutter.” Will had noticed when the boy was hurrying away, he’d been reaching for the knife. When the kid turned the corner, Will’s eyes drifted back to the guy in the shop apron.

“My nephew,” the man told him. “He’s got FAS, thanks to my sister.” Will nodded his understanding. The man’s expression was amicable, but the hint of reproof was hard to miss.

“He’s harmless, but all people see is the knife.”

Will couldn’t help responding with, “It’s hard to miss.” He was answered with a smile almost identical to the one he’d seen scarcely a minute before.

“It was his grandfather’s.” The smile returned for another moment, then was replaced with, “What can I do for you?”

Will threw a glance toward the counter. Still unoccupied. He allowed himself to think Fate may have thrown him a bone. Bernie’s gone. Retired. Moved to Florida. Died in his sleep. Buried. He was free to fly under the rural radar long enough that he could make his presence known at a time he was in control of the mans and the terms. He looked back. The expression he met was all “customer service.”

“I’m starting a renovation,” he said, “and just found out I’m stuck doing the demolition on my own. All I’ve got right now is my bare hands, and I figured that would make things tougher than I want it to be.”

Uncle Loren told Will was told to grab a cart, and then directed him to follow him with a wave of his hand. The first stop was a display of hammers, scores of them. Will couldn’t even imagine what at least half of them could have been purposed for. “Everything but breakfast, lunch and dinner.” His grandfather’s words popped out before he even knew he was talking.

After a quizzical look from Loren, he was asked, “Are you knocking down a barn, or working on a house?”

“House.”

“Just demolition?
“For now. Just ripping out walls and tearing down counters and cabinets.”

“Are the walls sheet rock or plaster?”

“Plaster and lathe.”

Loren nodded. “My sympathies.” He reached into row of sledgehammers. He pulled out a splitting maul and handed it to Will. Eight pounds. Heavy enough to knock stuff loose, but not so heavy it’ll yank you into the next room of you swing too hard or hit a soft spot.”

Will tapped the wedge side of the head. “Am I going to need this?”

Loren shrugged. “Maybe from time to time. Hit a stubborn section or something. But, trust me, there’s a time coming that your going to want to use it, needed or not.”

Will was directed to add a carpenter’s hammer, a hand maul, a nail ripper and a couple prybars. He was turned loose with a roster of suggestions, and where he could find it. “Need anything or have any more questions, give a holler.”

Will wandered the back of the store, pushing his cart. Alone, he took his time, adding the items recommended, and others he believed would come in handy in his unusual situation. He heard the bell over the door jangle a few times, could hear a few voices, picking out Loren’s, and even thought he could hear the boy, hacking away as he freed up shrink-wrapped merchandise. He didn’t encounter another person as he meandered among the rows of tools, relishing the peace to be found simple tasks performed for simple purpose. Therapy.

Once more I qualify this latest product: Early draft, early draft, early draft. Raw and quite possibly rife with typos and moments of “huh?”  I’ll say no more… other than comments/criticism not only welcome, but solicited. Dive in.

Will’s plan had been to nurse his breakfast for as long as he could to cut down the time he’d have to wait for the bank to open. This idea was abandoned the instant the waitress turned her back. Though he’d lost his appetite, he knew he needed the food. He attacked the sprawling meal that contested the limits of the plate. He shoveled forkful after forkful into his mouth, only sipping enough coffee to propel the food down his throat when his mouth got too dry to swallow. When the waitress showed up for a refill he waved her away, and hoped his bulging cheeks would discourage any attempt at conversation. It appeared to have worked, and when she finally came by with the check, barely a quarter of the food that was delivered remained on the plate. Making a show of chewing, he gave a nod and jammed a piece of toast between his teeth. She didn’t linger. He dropped the fork in relief and bolted the last tepid dregs from the cup. After a few deep breaths, he tucked the check and a twenty-dollar bill—an almost one hundred per cent tip– under the edge of the plate. He wasn’t going to risk a clean getaway by getting hung up at the cash register.

Will slid out of the booth and directly into a brisk walk toward the door. He caught the waitress in the periphery of his vision, taking an order at a center table. As she turned toward him, he waved. “Thanks, gotta run. It’s all on the table.” He was at the door just as somebody coming in pulled it open. With a cheery, “Muchas gracias!” he slipped through. Pulling out his shades, he took a hard right, opposite the direction of both his truck and the bank, and slipped the sunglasses on. He didn’t drop his pace until he was well past the windows of the diner.

Now what . . . ? It would be an hour before the bank doors were open. Will kept walking, toward the end of town, which meant a familiar park, and just beyond that, the Wahpekute River, the border between the “real world and home.”

He crossed the last street, and continued through a wrought iron arch. He followed a flagstone path that branched off in several directions. Unlike the vegetation of his property, the grass here was short. Though still matted from months of snow cover, it was almost solidly green. It would soon be standing straight and in need of a mowing. Will left the path and made for a cement bench just a few yards short of the riverbank.

Will was uneasy. He tried to focus on the band of brown water than moved past. The river was high, almost flush with the bank. On the opposite side, trees and brush stood rows deep in the water, the eddies and ripples around them were the only evidence the water was moving. The view had no calming effect. In his head, the question of his presence here was again begged. What there was for an answer followed, but he still couldn’t find any sense in it.

He was in the long past domain of his mother, but it was his father that had put him here, in the present. Will didn’t even know he owned the goddamn house until three days after the funeral. He heard it from the lawyer—his father’s lawyer—during the execution of the estate and the final disposition of the will. After the preamble and its declaration regarding the soundness of his father’s mind, there was a brief summary of the estate—“high six or low seven figures, depending what day it is…” he was told. He couldn’t ignore the low chuckle when the attorney added. “If he’d lived another year or two, we might well be talking high seven or low eight.” Will hadn’t shared the man’s amusement and killed it with a cold stare. The lawyer sobered, then said, “Your father spent a great deal of time in his final months focused on making this a seamless and simple process.” He paused a moment, as if waiting for a show of appreciation. After a moment, Will nodded, then let what came next flow past his ears as if he were a dog with its head sticking out a car window. The only concern he’d had was how his son was going to come out in this. As it turned out, a good deal of that time spent during those “final months” had been focused on Kurt. The young man had a good head on his shoulders, but no matter how even keeled a twenty-two-year-old might be, adding more than a handful of zeroes to his bank account could put him on the fast track to rehab, prison or a morgue. But, the old man was nothing if not controlling. He’d put enough stipulations on his grandson’s new money that the kid could cash in for a free PhD if he wanted one, but wouldn’t be able to party any harder than a sales clerk for the next eighteen years. As for the rest of it, Will didn’t give a shit. If he’d learned anything in his life, it was that having this kind of money bought nothing short of bondage. It owned you.

The attorney’s droning finally came to an end. Will allowed some life to come back into his expression. The final question he’d been asked was whether he was going to allow the people who’d been managing his father’s money to keep their jobs, or if he had plans to manage it by other means.

Will shrugged. “Leave it where it’s at,” he said. He sat up straighter in his chair and added, “For now, anyway.” He figured he’d need a few weeks to settle down before he decided whether to give it all away, buy an island, or reserve himself a seat on the first manned flight to Mars. Decisions, decisions…

“I’d support that as your best choice,” the attorney commended. Will’s agreement was a shrug. He sleepwalked his way through half a dozen signatures, then sat back and waited for a signal it was time for him to leave. He waited impatiently as the lawyer sent for a secretary to make copies. The first thing he was going to do was make his old man buy him a beer. The lawyer wasn’t through with him quite yet.

“There’s just one more thing,” he told Will. He put a large manila envelope on the desk. “I have some documentation here regarding the house.”

Will looked away from him. “I don’t want anything to do with his fucking house.”

“Oh no,” the attorney said, sounding a little confused. “His residence was sold months ago. Those proceeds were included in the estate.”

Will was forced to face back across the desk. He was more confused than the lawyer. He shook his head and shrugged. His father’s attorney pushed a manila envelope toward him. “Your grandparent’s house,” he said, as if it explained everything. It did not. Will looked down at the envelope, but didn’t touch it. “The only instructions I’d been given regarding this issue was that I remind you of it.”

Still looking at the envelope, Will said, “Remind me? I don’t get it.” It was all he could muster.

He heard the lawyer swallow, but it was almost a minute before he spoke: “It’s… yours. It has been, essentially, since your grandfather’s death.” There was a heavy pause. Will’s eyes darted around the room, he didn’t dare let them focus on any single object. From a thousand miles away, he heard, “You didn’t—”

“Son of a bitch,” he interrupted the distant voice. It felt like a shout, but it came out as a sharp hiss. He found a place to focus his vision, locking his gaze on the attorney. “No. I didn’t know. That son of a bitch never told me.” Will sank back in his chair. He realized he was breathing in way that was causing his entire body to shudder. “That son of a bitch,” he whispered through a ragged exhale. It took him a few minutes to get his breathing—and his brain—back under control. The lawyer sat in silence with a knuckle between his teeth.

Somewhat composed, Will stretched an arm. His hand hovered over the envelope. “It’s all in here?” he asked. The lawyer came back to attention. “All the property details, title, tax records, all of it? Everything?”

The lawyer nodded. “Yes–” He was about to say more, but Will waved the hand in his face and picked up the envelope. He turned without a word and made for the office door.

“Mr. Holliday,” he heard behind him, “the rest of your documents…”

“You’ve got my address,” Will said over his shoulder, and was out.

+   +   +

          Will was fourteen when his grandfather died. He had no reason to believe anything had been bequeathed to him. His grandmother had told him to take anything he wanted of his grandfather’s right after the funeral. Will had been so crushed by his passing that he couldn’t take anything as simple as even a watch or one of his service medals. The time he’d spent with her after that she’d never informed him that he was the actual owner of the farm. Why would she? It was only contingent upon her own death, after all, and Nan would never include as crass a subject as possessions or property when dying was the issue. Such a thing wasn’t discussed.

After leaving the lawyer’s office, Will had scoured the contents of his envelope. The will was simple.

We, Martin Oskar and Anna Willemina Rijsbergen, bequeath all assets, including all properties, monies and possessions without exception, to Willem Martin Holliday (grandson), immediately and forthwith upon contingency of our deaths or debilitation.

That was it. It was signed by both, dated over two years before his grandfather had actually died. His mother was gone almost three years after her father. There’d been no mention of her in the will, or in any of the paperwork included. Neither had there been any mention of his father, though his signatures were all over the documents associated with the execution of the will. All of this had been taken care of in Minneapolis. The witness’s signatures were there as well. It was not the attorney Will had met with, but it was the same firm. Will’s name was on the paperwork as well, just beside his father’s. He hadn’t contributed a drop of ink to the papers. There was an added document, stapled to the will and dated five days after his grandmother’s death. It was a bank statement.

The last bearer of the once affluent and influential, admired and envied Rijsbergen name  ended its history in Limburg County with a little more than six thousand dollars in the bank. Over half of that amount was lost to funeral expenses. An antithesis of his father, had Anna Rijsbergen made it a year or two longer, she would have died flat broke.

What remained was added as a trust fund in Will’s name, collectible upon reaching his age of majority. That hadn’t happened, but there was a record of its addition as a drop in the bucket to the obscene volume of his father’s legacy, and not applied until the very day of his father’s own demise. There was no question this had been planned well in advance– years.

+   +   +

Fucker. Will spat, attempting to add his own drop to the flow of the Wahpekute. His effort fell far short. Regardless of the complexity and distance of their relationship, Will could never claim the father did not know his son well. If Will had known of this at fourteen, he would have been insistent on preserving the place just as he’d always known it. He may even have been goofy enough in his pubescence to have insisted on living there. At eighteen, he’d have sold the place without a second thought. Not for the money, but as a means of deleting half of his past. The agonies of life with mom were still sutured fast in his gut. He was desperate to rid himself of it in any way he could. But now, with the years passed and the last tangible string of family history snapped, there was no way he could let the place go without having at least one final, long and hard look at it. His father knew this. Whatever agenda he had that directed his actions, his father had at last held a hoop he could force Will to jump through. Whatever intention lay behind it, Will knew it was neither sinister or spiteful, but it wasn’t gracious or benign, either. And all that would have mattered to his father was that it would work.

Thus, Will was sitting on a bench in Riverside Park, in Venlo, Limburg County, Minnesota. Both halves of his messy past were now fused together in one messy whole, despite his best and lifelong efforts to prevent it. Now he had to decide what kind of future he was supposed to make of it.

“Fucker,” he repeated, this time out loud. With that epithet firmly in mind, he suddenly thought of a person he could apply it to directly. He pulled out his phone and rang up the contractor. When the ringing stopped, he kept his ear to the phone long enough to be sure it was a live voice at the other end. “Hey! Will Holliday here,” he barked. He gave it an instant to sink in, and lingered a few seconds to allow the man to formulate some kind of excuse. As soon as he heard a voice again, he said, “You’re fired.” He hit “end call” with his thumb. He looked at the phone. He’d expected to gain some modicum of satisfaction from the call, but had not. He caught note of the time before the screen went black, surprised at how long he’d been sitting there. If he paced himself just right, he would be at the doors of the bank right when they opened.

 

 

As previously warned, 90% of what follows is pure first draft. Maybe a little or a lot bloated or awkward.

+ + +

Will pulled out of his driveway and turned east, straight into the rising sun. He felt a flash of happiness. He’d at least made one decision that had shown an immediate, practical use. His overpriced shades cut the glare beautifully. He drove well below the speed limit, appraising the open land on either side of the road. On the left were endless rows of stubble, left over stumps of last years crops, short, dead stalks of corn or sunflowers. There were scattered patches of grey, melting snow. With a cloudless sky overhead, Will knew they would be gone by the afternoon. To the right was a different story. A carpet of flattened brown grass, dotted with young, leafless trees, interspersed with lower, spindly branched bushes he presumed to be sumac. It was an odd contrast to the regimented acreage on the other side of the road. It was when he came to the end of this fallow stretch of agricultural neglect, almost a mile past the driveway, that he realized it was his own land he’d been looking at, gone the way the rest of the property had over the last twenty years. The joy his sunglasses had become fleeting. What, he asked himself for what had to be the dozenth time in the last twenty-four hours, am I doing out here.

Halfway to the intersection that could have either taken him to Maastricht or the Twin Cities, Will turned right on the only paved road between that point and his driveway. It led to Venlo, Limburg County’s “second city.” It was the town that his great granduncle had essentially built, putting to use his skills as a mason, and the place where his grandmother grew up. As a child, Will had always delighted in a trip to Venlo, especially with his grandfather. When he passed the stack of grain elevators he could almost feel the tingle of anticipation that had always come with moving by those pillars of concrete. Whatever errand had brought them into town meant he’d be getting an ice cream, and going home with some silly little toy bought at the five and dime next to the drugstore.

Just past the elevators and to the right was a transit feedlot. What little livestock that had been raised for market in the area had been brought there before being trucked off for slaughter. Will used to hate the lot, its maze of pens and livestock chutes, the rows of barbed wire and raw wooden fencing, the reek of shit, bovine, porcine and ovine. He especially hated it at night with its sick glow of amber HPS lights, made fuzzy by the rising vapor of animal body heat, breath, and fresh urine fogging the chill night air. A terminus of imminent slaughter, it exuded an all too palpable Treblinka vibe.

With only a dirt road as a buffer from the feedlot, there was the trailer park. “If I lived in that,” his mother once remarked, “I’d cross the road, hop a fence and just wait my turn.”

The feedlot was gone, Will noticed, now just a big patch of weeds and wireless utility poles. The trailer park, however, appeared to have tripled in size.

A bit farther and on the left was long wooden building with a gravel parking lot. A sign on the steel roof said: “Blom’s—Farm, Fleet and Feed” His grandparents went to Blom’s at least once a week. “If you need it, Blom’s has got it,” his Grandfather would say, “About all Bertie doesn’t have is breakfast, lunch and dinner.” Will needed to stop there as well, but breakfast was the first thing on the agenda.

With a sign declaring the speed limit was now thirty miles and hour, he entered the town “proper”. Another sign confirmed it: “Venlo, pop. 1230.” The trailer park may have burgeoned since his last visit, but the residential numbers had not. If his memory was sound, the last time he’d been here it had been home to over two thousand people.

The town had come into shape after the first wave of settlers had become securely established. With few roads and the land beginning to deliver on its potential, traveling to Maastricht, centered in the Dutch enclave, for market and resupply was not just a hardship, but an expenditure of time and energy best spent in the field. It was costing the farmer at both ends. Venlo became the commercial and social hub for the western third and southern fringe of the county, and the Rijsbergens put a hard stamp on it. Though not one of the original three brothers who’d settled held any political office or elected position, the affluence that set them apart from their immigrant peers put them in a position to call the shots with little resistance or complaint. If allowed have their way, their money would be used to the benefit of all. They shrewdly financed the construction of the first church and the first bank. They became full partners and provided the building and the seed money for the first mercantile. With the subsequent arrival of peripheral business and services and the sense of permanence becoming reality, the youngest brother arrived in time to place the first bricks.

Venlo was the utter cliché´ of quaint. Sidewalks lined both sides of Main, ornate lampposts stood on every corner, bearing flower baskets in Summer and stars, wreaths and bells when the snow was on the ground. Main street traveled the length of the town, which ran all of eight blocks, entirely fronted by businesses. The residential was tucked behind them on either side. The middle four blocks were set back, making room for a central square featuring a three tiered fountain. Will could never leave town without tossing a penny into it, always aiming for the top basin.

Will’s truck was the only vehicle moving on the street. As far as he could tell, nothing had changed, though he hadn’t spared it much scrutiny. As he entered the square from the north, he turned right, moved another half block and parked. His destination, the diner, was at the other end of the square. There were several vehicles parked directly in front of it. Will appraised this with mixed feelings. One was relief that it indicated the place was open, the other was anxiety as he was certain his presence would be anything but inconspicuous. He glanced back at his truck before crossing the street. Good move, he told himself. Pulling up with a truck with less than a thousand miles on it wasn’t a means of remaining inconspicuous in a town like this. Neither was walking in with Rockstar shades. He tipped them above his forehead, thought a moment, then folded them up and tucked them inside his jacket.

The diner held not even a quarter of what appeared to be its capacity, but when Will stepped through the door, every eye in the restaurant was on him. Even the three guys at the counter, who had to twist themselves into corkscrews to face the door. With plenty of places open, Will didn’t wait to be seated and strode directly to the last open booth of half the dozen that lined the front window. He knew every step he’d taken had been watched. He could feel it. He swung himself in the deepest corner of the diner, and squeezed in even deeper.

Will stared through the window, across the square to the opposite corner from the diner, at the three-story brick building that took up half of the block. The bank. A glance at his watch told him he had just over an hour and a half to kill before it opened. He’d cut himself off from view so effectively that, when the waitress showed up, it seemed she’d just materialized out thin air.

“Coffee?”

Will, trying not to appear startled, said, “Please.”

The cup was on the table before he could finish the word and she was pouring before he’d gotten his mouth closed.

“Cream? Sugar?”

“No . . . thanks.”
His cup was full and there was a menu on the table. Before he could tell her he already knew what he wanted, she was gone. Well, then… He picked up the menu. There were a lot of minutes to kill, and perusing a menu should be good for a few.

The cause of the woman’s abruptness became clear as he studied the folder. The bell above the door had been ringing steadily. It appeared he beat the morning rush. He was grateful for that. He’d also apparently hidden himself effectively, because a couple of times a few people had showed up at the booth ready to sit, only to express surprise it had been taken. He only offered a weak smile as means of apology as they scuttled away for find another spot to eat. When the waitress appeared again, he was ready.

“Number three.” He slid the menu to the edge of the table.

“Eggs?”

“Over easy.”

“Hashbrowns or American fries?”

“Hashbrowns.” He saved her a question and added, “Bacon.”

“Toast or a—”

“Have you got rye?”

Her eyes never left the pad. “Pumpernickel”

“Perfect,” he told her.

She snatched up the menu and was gone, but an instant later was back, filling up his coffee cup right when he was looking at his last gulp. Gone again. He sat back in the corner, giving his fresh cup a moment to cool. Maybe he’d get in and out of here as merely a blip …

With his wait for the bank to open down to less than ninety minutes, Will’s breakfast was placed in front of him. He was suddenly ravenous. “Thank you,” he said as he cup was again refilled. He picked up a fork and just as he was tearing open the yolk of one of his three eggs he heard, “You’re new in here.”

He didn’t let it freeze him, but it stopped his reaching for a slice of toast. Without looking at her directly, he said, “I’m from the Cities.”

“You didn’t walk all that way, did you?”

Will was instantly aware of his sodden feet and the clusters of adhesive seed pods plastered to his pants. There was no possible way she could have seen them while he’d been seated in the booth. She’d taken it all in when he came through the door, and hadn’t so much a caught a glimpse of her when he entered. He was compelled to look at her now. Her smile was unreadable, the arch of her brow even more so. She didn’t linger for a response, but the way she’d left caused him to believe that if he’d given one, she know it was nowhere close to the full story.

+   +   +

Let’s also not forget, ebook on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Lunacy-Death-perspective-developed-investigation-ebook/dp/B079DWFH9T/ref=redir_mobile_desktop?_encoding=UTF8&keywords=lunacy%20and%20death&qid=1526512194&ref_=mp_s_a_1_1&sr=1-1

Thus begins chapter two.  As I previously warned, it may be rough, bloated and sporting some typos. It’s sorta long, so I’ll say no more.

+   +   +

 

As bad nights went, Will had suffered through worse, but wasn’t eager to repeat it. He’d awakened every hour or so, shivering and disoriented. Thanks to modern automotive technology, he was able to start the truck and get the heater running without having to leave his sleeping bag. With the sky shifting to gray dawn he awoke for what he decided would be the last time. His bladder wasn’t going to allow any more sleep. The sharp air that hit him when he opened the door woke him completely. He couldn’t bring himself to pee on his brand new gravel. The ground surrounding the circle wasn’t lacking for moisture and Will had no problem adding to that.

With a relieved belly and his mind kick started by the damp morning chill, he re-evaluated the house. It was a classic, turn of the twentieth century post-Victorian foursquare. The house plan had been ordered out of a Sears-Roebuck catalogue. It was a mid-sized to large plan. Four main rooms on the first floor; kitchen, dining, living room and “sitting room.” The upstairs was accessed by a staircase placed on the outside wall between the kitchen at the rear northeast corner and the sitting room at the southeast, There were four bedrooms on the second floor. Modern minded and foreward thinking, Will’s first American generation maternal great grandparents had built a first and second floor bathroom included in the plan. They’d also had it wired for electricity. They lived in it for a full decade before they were able to enjoy either of those modern amenities.

The house, though a common style found nationwide, was a freak in Limburg County for two reasons. The first was that it was made of brick. At the time, brick was a material that was rare and expensive in this part of the world. It was reserved for use “in town” for the construction of banks, government buildings, and stores owned by well-established and prosperous merchants. Wood was the standard for the working class, and that wasn’t cheap, either. To build such a structure was nothing short of ostentatious. It had doubtless sent a message to the neighbors that they stood no chance in “keeping up with the Rijsbergens,” Will’s maternal ancestors had no problems asserting a certain degree of superiority. Unlike most of the Dutchmen they’d accompanied to the eastern prairie of their new country, they hadn’t arrived broke. Far from it. Another reason brick had been the chosen material was that one of Will’s grand-uncles was a master mason.

The other thing that set this house apart was that it had been built “backwards.” By the time sod houses and ramshackle cabins were being replaced by modern family homes, the transportation infrastructure of the county was well in place. The houses built in the farmland faced whatever roadway that crossed their property. This house faced away from the county road, fronted by the Wahpekute River. This was done, Will’s grandfather told him, because his great-grandmother enjoyed sitting on the porch in the evening and watching the river flow by. “Bullshit” his mother countered when he repeated the story, “you can hardly see that murky creek from the porch. They built the house facing that way because they enjoyed turning their backs on everyone else.”

Will’s eyes settled on the porch. From the edge of his gravel island, and through the screen of leafless, overgrown bushes, he couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to sit there now.

Not without hesitation, Will stepped from the gravel. His shoes and socks had dried overnight with help of the truck heater. Stiff as they’d been when he put them back on, it was infinitely preferable to soggy. He winced with his first step. The water seeping into his footwear seemed colder than the night before. By the time Will was standing in front of the porch he was soaked to the knees. The pillars supporting the outer corners were canted out, and roof was sagging and at either end. The porch roof itself was patchy bed off moss that grew in an odd pattern that matched the pattern of the shingles. Two more wooden pillars were at the center, on either side of the stoop that led from the yard to the deck. They were paintless, and also rotting at the tops. Framed between them at the rear of the porch was the front door. It was a tow inch thick slab of white oak, five feet wide with a window of leaded glass. To Will’s amazement, the glass was intact. His view of the door itself was cut in half by an eight-by-four, nailed into place across the middle of the door into the frame. Curious, he thought. He couldn’t remember his father as having taken any steps to have the place closed-up in any way after his grandmother died.

Will moved closer. The wooden stoop had long collapsed. He could barley make out a pattern of it through a tangle of dead vegetation. He was dissuaded from stepping up by the floor of the porch. The boards were warped and rotted. At the edges, small, naked saplings had sprouted through the rotted wood and stood almost two feet high. In a couple of weeks they’d be showing buds. Two large windows, one for the living room on the left, the other for the parlor on the right. The paint on the frames was almost gone, with a few swatches of white still clinging. Several panes had dropped away, but they were more or less intact.

He moved to the western side, stepping through a tangled mat of dead grass and sodden stalks of collapsed prairie thistle. Crossing the corner, Will noted the brick wall was dead plum. He moved close to the wall. The first side window for the living room was almost gone, both the storm window and the interior one. It did not look like a case of vandalism, however, but simple age and weather. So much for barring the front door. This side of the house took the full brunt of storms from the west. The row of trees, bordering the yard fifty feet away, wasn’t all that effective when wind was blowing steady at thirty miles an hour and gusting to sixty. Feeling a tingle of trepidation, Will looked inside.

The first thing he noticed was all the furniture was gone. He didn’t expect to see any, but at the same time, he couldn’t recall his father taking any steps to clear things out. The carpet was still there, however, a huge oriental rug that centered the room, leaving a border of bare wood floor a foot on every side. The pattern was lost under a thick layer of dust and fallen chunks of plaster. The walls on every side were bulging, stained wallpaper. In some places the paper had either torn or rotted away, the plaster dropping off to expose the lathe. He could see through the arch into the sitting room. It didn’t seem to be in as bad as the living room, but was still in horrible shape. Will looked up to the ceiling. Where the plaster hadn’t dropped, it hung, dangling in chunks of every size and shape, clinging by some invisible strings to the lathe. Where it hadn’t completely dropped or dangled, it bulged. Best not to go in there without a helmet. In the center of it all hung a brass chandelier. Brown with verdigris, it held two rings of porcelain candles, topped by small bulbs shaped like flames. It hung from stretched wires. The ceiling medallion it highlighted was gone. Pieces of thick plaster were caught between the faux candles, the rest of it laying in a scattered pile on the floor directly beneath. It did, however, appear to be completely intact, bulbs and all. Will couldn’t imagine what the price would be for such a piece back in the Cities. I might soon find out, he thought.

He moved along toward the back of the house, every step challenged by clinging vegetation and ending with a little more water working into his shoes. It was the same story at the dining room. The windows nothing more than warped and rotted frames, a few panes, some intact, some cracked broken, still clinging to their places but most of them gone. It was no different for the glass on the second floor.

At the back, the same, though the windows had fared a little better, both at the ground floor and above. Away from the house, looking back toward the county road were a few outbuildings. The closest was an outhouse, a two-seater deluxe model. It was gray and paintless, tilted and twisted heavily to one side, the roof completely collapsed. Will believed he could level the structure with a shove. Further beyond, a four-bay machine shed, a chicken coop, both made of wood, and a brick utility building that had primarily served as a slaughter house for the few chickens, pigs and cattle that were always on hand. All were obscured by the unchecked tangle of growth. Only the roofs were visible, and all but the utility shed were near demise. The slaughterhouse had a tin roof. Will had no desire to give them a closer look.

He trudged across the back yard to the driveway. Acoss the drive, in the northeast corner of the farmyard about one hundred yards away, was the barn. It had been invisible in the darkness when Will had arrived. About a third of the roof was a hole. The shingles and decking around it sagged at the edges, as if being sucked into the barn by an invisible vortex. Will could see daylight through the hole, which indicated the other side of roof was about in the same shape. The sides of the barn, however, held an evident stain of red and appeared to be straight and fully intact.

Back on dry ground, Will looked at the east side of the house again. The windows were in better shape than the rest, but were still nothing more than rotten frames holding about a third of the glass that had been there. The roof, just as the brick shed, was tin. There were no holes, and the only evidence of neglect was the lightning rod that had stood at the peak. It had fallen over and was lying on the slope, held there by the wire at its base. Even under scrutiny at his distance, Will couldn’t see anything disastrous, but he could only assume the grey metal sheets only masked a score of problems just beneath it. There were tar patches at many of the seams, patches that had been made decades ago. The only thing certain was that twenty-plus years of brutal summer sun, sub-zero winters, rain, ice and wind had created countless gaps that went untended.

His gaze held the full side of the house, then zeroed in on the open side door. He knew he should go inside. Check out the bedrooms on the second floor, and probably work up enough guts to take a peak at the basement. He shivered, but the only cold he felt was in his feet. In fact, it felt to him the temperature had gone up at least ten degrees since he gotten out of the truck. He stared at the doorway, an open black void. Not now, he told himself. Any more inspection could well crumble the resolve he’d mustered the night before. It had been tested strongly enough by what he’d seen already. Nope. Enough.

He turned his eyes away from the door and looked at his watch. Six A.M. He was hungry. There had been a diner in Venlo that opened at six. He had no reason to believe it wouldn’t still be there. And he had to go into town anyway. The cell service out here was spotty, and his first order of business was to fire the contractor, who’d made a more complete shambles of an already worthless kitchen. He also had to go to the bank. There were at least two hours before that was open, so he’d just have to make slow work of his breakfast.

Before entering his truck, he looked at his feet. They were soaked, mud smeared and coated with an impressive amount of dead vegetable matter. His pants were wet to his knees, and covered with dead leaves and stickers of every size and variety he bent and plucked off a dozen balls of burdock. He thought about changing, but his extra shoes and socks were at the bottom of one of the totes in the box of the truck. He didn’t want to dig through it. He sighed and looked back at the house. His attire was a perfect match for his dwelling. He got in the cab and hoped the heater would dry his feet off enough that he wouldn’t squelch with every step he took. Put on his sunglasses and started the truck. As he turned in his beautiful driveway, he figured there wasn’t anybody in town that would know him, and nobody he’d concern himself with when it came to first impressions.

+   +   +

Like I said, long. 2nd half coming in just a few short days… Don’t be shy in telling me what you think.