January 8, 2023
9:20 a.m.
A week. It had been a whole week.
I’d filmed every inch of the motel, I’d done countless drawings, I’d read craft book after craft book.
Now I was supposed to write.
I had to.
Up out of bed. Rinse out the kombucha glass in the sink. Brush teeth. Water on face. Jeans and a cozy sweater.
At the desk opposite the bed, I sat down, all business. I flicked through my notebook, the pages in no particular order. I was always just opening to one page or another and starting a sketch. Order would come in Final Draft, promise.
I looked at the drawing I’d done the day before, a body splayed across the bottom of an empty pool. A figure, fleeing into the woods.
Another page, this one of one of the women, one who could possibly become a main character. Returning to it now, it looked embarrassingly like Kerry, right down to the mole above her lip. Yikes. I had no idea where Kerry was, and I had no desire to know where Kerry was. I was done with drunks. It was too easy for them to break your heart. And yet obviously I missed her. Here I was, drawing her without even meaning to.
Another page. This one just a shadow of a figure, big and looming, dominating the frame. Another, the figure larger, spilling off the page, the charcoal even more sketchy. Like a child’s nightmare. Another page, and more of the same.
See them like this, and all you’d really think was that someone had a morbid imagination. There was no narrative. Nothing even remotely approaching a storyboard. Just a through line of not even all that original deaths (freezer bodies! empty pools!) and ones that represented the distinct feeling of being watched.
One that hadn’t gone away. Despite me telling myself everything was fine.
I pushed back the chair and stood, rinsed the charcoal off my hands, and brewed some coffee. I would go on my little walk, and then I would write. That was a good plan, right?
Of course, I could do my caretaking duties—about as good a way as any to procrastinate—but the rooms themselves remained entirely ordinary. Once I’d filmed them all, noting any differences in decor, in layout, cataloging which ones would be best for shooting in, going into each one every day had begun to feel like overkill. The thermostats were set right, there hadn’t been any signs of critters, and they were all locked up tight. I figured if Maisy had omitted details—like a property dispute that led to not one but two angry neighbors—it didn’t matter all that much if I said I was checking each room daily if I didn’t.
Instead, in the mornings, I liked to pour myself a cup, add a good splash of half-and-half, and circle the grounds. I told myself it was to appreciate the beauty of the rural land—one I didn’t have easy access to living in Downtown Brooklyn, with the sounds of delivery trucks, city buses, and idling cabs much more common than songbirds or crowing roosters—but in reality, it made me feel a teensy bit safer. A little bit in control, a military captain securing the perimeter. Watching for anyone who may approach. For flickers of movement in the woods (one I’d spotted the day before and had chalked up to a deer, or at least I was telling myself that). For more trash bags littered on the lawn (so far, so good). For anything that felt out of the ordinary.
I slipped into my coat and grabbed my thermos of coffee, opened the door, took a quick step, and—
Splat.
I crashed onto the patio, my thermos shooting out of my hands and rolling into the gravel parking lot, my palms skinned and a tear already forming in the left knee of my jeans.
I checked myself for blood—nothing—then pushed myself up, my knees aching, turned back to the door.
It was a small, cardboard package, little more than nine by twelve inches—and yet enough to send me smashing into concrete.
“What in the world?” I asked no one in particular as I grabbed a dusty edge, lifted it up.
The mail typically went straight into a slot at the main office. One of my duties, one I wasn’t shirking, was to sort out the junk, open and organize any deliveries, all that. I’d done it just the day before, but the postwoman came in the afternoon.
Still, I guess a package was different. Could be FedEx, UPS, an Amazon truck, one I somehow hadn’t heard? And why here, way down in front of my room? The whole thing seemed strange, like it was meant, somehow, for me. There was no address on the back, only that silvery striped tape. I flipped it over, found the usual stamps and markings, then seized up at the name on the package.
Jeremy Gallo.
Jeremy had been the name of the next-door neighbor, the one who kept to himself, whom Tyler had mentioned.
I gave the package a quick shake. Whatever was inside sounded small, potentially valuable. I thought about leaving it, putting it in Maisy’s office for her to deal with, but a part of me also relished the excuse to see the property, get a look at this man, confirm that he’d had a surveyor—or someone—come out the other day.
After all, I was set to be here another three weeks, and then another weekend after that. Putting that instance out of my mind, tying it into a neat little bow, would make me feel better, wouldn’t it? Another tick in the nothing-is-wrong-here-you’re-just-a-fish-out-of-water-with-horror-on-the-mind column.
Besides, I could explain to him that I wasn’t Maisy. That I didn’t care at all about some property line to-do. There was no need for people to run from me if I saw them in the woods.
I took a sip of coffee, tucked the package under my arm, and began to walk.
Up the gravel drive. Onto the road. Tyler had said the guy’s driveway was only a quarter mile up. Just a friendly little visit. Correcting a UPS mistake.
There wasn’t much of a shoulder, but the road unfolded rather straight up to the right. Wide enough shoulder that I didn’t have to worry about getting smashed to bits by a car swerving to avoid hitting a deer and hitting me instead (another movie cliché).
One step and then another, across a bed of withered grass and crunched-up leaves. Woods butted up to both sides of the road, and the mountains peeked up on the left side, like they were watching me. The walk was a tiny bit claustrophobic, the evergreens and scraggly conifers blocking me like walls.
The sun was bright, making it feel almost warmish, and after a few minutes of walking, there it was.
I spy with my little eye a matte hunter green mailbox, sleek and rectangular and nearly blending into the trees around it. Stylish. Modern. Incredibly easy to miss.
A sigh of relief. The most likely explanation was that the delivery driver had cruised right past this box, not seen it, and landed at the motel instead. Maybe he’d noticed the address discrepancy, maybe he hadn’t—either way, he’d left it at my door, the only one with a car parked in front. That meant no creepy strangers prowling around my room and dropping off mysterious packages. Good.
I hesitated at the mailbox, debating. The package was too big to fit in, but still. There was no reason I couldn’t leave it here at the bottom of the post, having done my neighborly duty. I set it down, there among the grasses, was about to turn away when I picked it back up and stepped onto the gravel drive.
Shouldn’t I know who this guy was? How much the property dispute was bothering him? Then at least if I saw someone on the property again, I’d know what was up.
Surely I could handle some reclusive neighbor.
It was fine. Just fine.
The drive sloped immediately downward, then turned on a curve.
I looked back, could no longer see the road, which meant passing cars—rare as they were—couldn’t see me. I ambled past the PRIVATE PROPERTY signs tacked onto the trees, remembering the stories that had dominated the news the previous spring, about people pulling cars into the wrong house and being shot point-blank, but I was determined not to turn back. To get this over with.
A few more steps, another curve in the road, and then—holy shit—there it was.
The house was such a surprise, the thermos of coffee and the dusty package nearly dropped from my hands.
I’d expected a country home, something run-down, paint peeling, wood porch sinking, the works.
No sirree. This was not that.
The house was a collection of shapes, sharp geometrical angles reaching up to a clear blue sky, evergreen trees framing it like some sort of modernist painting. Vertical wooden slats formed the face of it, a face that was mostly filled with enormous windows that looked into a living room dominated by a fantastic glass chandelier and a dining table that could have come straight out of the Museum of Modern Art.
The car, a BMW SUV that could have been the car I saw parked on the road, was nested into an open garage whose roof slanted from one side of the home and all the way to a ground manicured with some sort of shrub that was hearty enough to survive the winter, as it was still mostly green.
The whole thing looked like a child had stacked blocks every which way, and somehow, miraculously, it worked.
The home was almost a dare.
You say I can’t build a house of trapezoids and triangles? Okay, I’m calling your bluff.
Smooth concrete steps led up to a matte hunter green door, the same exact color as the mailbox, and a single rectangular window atop it.
For a moment, one that made me question my own morality, I felt a bit safer than I had before. Some hedge funder from the city wasn’t likely to be a gun nut who would shoot me on the spot, right?
But then, through the main windows, a figure. Tall and thin. I jolted, holding the package close, and in that moment, I wanted to turn on my heel, flee back to the motel, and leave the thing at his mailbox like I probably should have from the start.
It was too late; the door was opening. The man was stepping out.
He wore deep-blue indigo jeans and a clean black sweater that had to be cashmere. His leather loafers were the color of sugar caramelized in a Le Creuset pan.
“Can I help you?” he asked, his voice gruff, impatient.
My limbs tensed, and I felt silly, classist, for feeling more secure only a moment before. As if wealth and status prevented crime. Hell, if I’d learned anything from more than a decade in New York City, it was that a hedge fund guy was more likely to be a psychopath than just about anyone else.
I held out the box like an offering. “Your package was delivered to the motel. Just returning it.”
The man’s shoulders softened, and he took a couple of steps forward, and so did I. I passed him the package, and he took it with a ringless hand.
“Thank you,” he said, looking down. “I was waiting for this.”
“I could have left it at the mailbox, but I didn’t want it to get taken. I didn’t know if it was valuable or anything.” I tried my best not to glance at the BMW, at the expensive-as-hell clothing, at the modernist house.
“I appreciate that.” He was maybe six feet tall. Thin, but decently ripped. Probably the kind of Manhattan guy who got to the gym at five a.m., hours before the markets opened for the day. His head was shaved, his skin pale olive—maybe Italian, come to think of it the last name did sound a bit Italian, maybe from one of those old New York families, raised helping out at the family restaurant in Brooklyn before moving across the East River for a flashier life? Either way, he fit the profile of the guy I’d seen on my camera decently enough. He smiled, and I noticed a slight drift of his eyes down my body before landing back on my face. “Is there anything else?”
I felt myself blushing, feeling, somehow, a tension between us, a something, and I wondered if he felt it, too. But I knew I’d feel better if I cleared this up.
“I just have to ask,” I started. “Were you out by the motel a few days ago? I saw a man, about your height, and I tried to say hello, but you might not have heard me…”
The man’s shoulders seized up, and whatever energy had passed between us fizzled instantly. Pop! “Are you accusing me of being somewhere I shouldn’t?”
“Whoa,” I said, tossing up my hands.
“Because I don’t appreciate the implication. It’s my property, you know, right up to the edge of the woods.”
“I know,” I said, taking a step back. “I’m not talking about the property dispute. I have no skin in that game. Promise.”
“Dispute.” He scoffed. “The legal side of things is pretty cut-and-dry. And if Maisy had hired a surveyor to come do an inspection before she bought the place, we wouldn’t have to be going through all this, would we?”
“Right,” I said. “Like I said, I have nothing to do with that. But it was you, then? Or someone you hired?”
“I think we’re done here,” the man snapped. “Thanks for the package.”
He turned on his heel and slammed the door behind him.
Leaving me staring, shocked and alone.
And maybe—scratch that, definitely—more freaked out than I was before.