Her. Chapter Four

Chapter 4
“No, it’s God. Where the hell are you?” she asks.
“I’m at work. Where the hell are you? You’re…you’re at not home, are you?”
“Not exactly,” she says. She is about three blocks from home.
“Like hell. You know how to get in. I’ll see you after work.” Her brother hangs up the phone. She snorts at her brother’s sad attempt at being tough and flings the phone in her purse. She drives through the subdivision. Nothing has changed. Kids still flood the streets instead of riding their bikes and skateboards on the sidewalks, and parents still sit their asses in broken, plastic lawn chairs in their driveways with nothing better to do but smoke, drink, and pretend to be watching their children. She doesn’t miss any of this. One, two, three, there goes another pink flamingo lawn ornament, she misses New York.
She pulls the car into the drive way of her home. It has a few minor changes to it, but overall, it is still the same home she left. The branches of the willow out front sway and extend and contract, asking her what has taken her so long to come. On all outward appearances, the house does not look like a house of death.
She steps out of the car and walks up to the front porch. She lifts up a statue of a content, fat frog with a large grin to find the spare key to the house. She can hear the neighbors across the street, the rumors are already starting. Is that so and so? I thought she died? I heard she ran off to have an illegitimate love child? Has she gained weight? Has she lost weight? Bastards. She no longer has to be polite for the sake of her parents. She turns around and yells at the spying neighborhoods, particularly the older, rounder one directly across the street whose children and their ugly, stupid friends have been the pain in her parents’ asses ever since they first moved into the subdivision.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” she asks them, extending her arms in challenge. The nosey observers immediately retreat back to their front porches. That’s right; she is home so you better back the hell off. She unlocks the front door and steps inside.
She has entered a time portal, doing back two years to when she visited home for Thanksgiving. The smell of scented candles, microwaved meals, and cut flowers still lingers in the air, hidden behind the minuscule dust particles bumbling through the air. The house is still the same as it was a couple of years ago. A cat emerges from a hallway and meows at her.
“Where have you been?” she asks in her unique cat language. The cat rubs her body against the female’s legs. The female bends over and scoops up the cat in her arms. She still regrets leaving her here, but she couldn’t bring companion with her to New York. She couldn’t separate the feline from her family just because her human had a bit of a break down.
The female, with cat in arms, walks around the home. She senses nothing unusual. How long have her parents been dead? She knows the feeling of death. She knows the sensations that filled her senses when death is near. Death is not near.
“Kin, you son of a bitch,” she says to herself, burying her face into warm, soft fur of her companion. “Tell me my folks are dead after I complete my job.” She walks up the stairs to her bedroom. Nothing has been changed, nothing touched. Her room is a no longer a bedroom and hasn’t been one for some time. The room now serves as a reminder that someone once lived here; a foolish girl once lived here. The walls are still filled with pictures of her favorite flavor of celebrity eye candy. She looks at the pictures and pictures she has collected over the walls. Yep, he is still good looking and she regrets none of the many hours it took her to create this masterpiece of obsession, devotion, weak self-identity, and low self-esteem. Ah, good times. She strips off her clothing and takes a shower. It would be awhile before her brother got home from work.
The shower’s warm water tries its best to remove the tension in her body but fails. She is successful however, in scrubbing a good layer of dead skin from limbs. Her showering in not a private affair between her and the water, she has an audience. The three cats of the household are watching her from the bathroom door. She pulls back the shower curtain to look at them. They all tilt their heads in confusion about their older sister returning home after so long.
She walks out of the shower, water dripping all over the tiled floor. She searches for a towel and wraps the thing around her body. The towel is clean, prevents her from indecent exposure, and is not as soft as she remembers the bathroom towels to be. The towel rubs her new, clean skin like sandpaper but she endures the irritation for the sake of having something from home wrapped around her flesh.
She looks in her room for clothes and finds another sweatshirt to cover herself with. She pulls on a pair of old, baggy jeans and brushes her hair back and out of her face. She falls to her knees and reaches her arm under the bed. She pulls out another handgun similar to one she owns back in New York. She left the gun here when she secretly visited home last Christmas as a precaution in case she had to come home and didn’t want to attempt sneaking a gun on her flight home.
She tucks the gun in the back of jeans and makes sure she can grab the gun with ease. She is a good shot, with four eyes instead of two, and as evident from before, her hands and arms are solid. She looks at herself in the mirror in her bedroom. She humorously flews her arms and make a few funny faces in the mirror. She imagines herself back when this room used to be a sanctuary when she would return home from school for a weekend or holiday break. Everything is so much different now. This room is no longer a sanctuary but an outdated version of her past, deceased self. Her folks should have turned this room into a library or plant room or a room for the damn cats or something instead of keeping the room of the daughter that had left them.
She goes though all of her mother’s possessions and boxes up all of her books. She’ll have all of these sent back to New York. She is going to have to get a couple of bookshelves. She continues to search the house for anything out of place, nothing. She grabs a beer out of the refrigerator and sits on the couch in the living room. The cats jump on the couch and surround her. This sucks. She had been expecting to find at least something to hint what had happened in the house. She thinks about calling Kin but decides to wait till he calls her. She is still steaming over Kin not telling her about her parents’ deaths sooner.
She finishes her beer and inspects the backyard, letting the cats accompany her. Her cat walks over to the corner of the yard and begins to yawl for her older sister. The female walks over to the corner and looks at the ground. There are multiple little mounds of dirt. The female grabs a little shovel from her mother’s pottery bench and begins to dig. Fourteen. Fourteen little bird graves are unearthed. The bodies are still very fresh, little signs of decay. They haven’t been in the ground for long.
“Good girl,” she says to the cat, petting her on the head. The cat could care less about her sister’s approval; she just wants the bird bodies. The female doesn’t know what the dead birds mean, but it is something unusual. At least she has found something unusual. She checks the rest of the yard for anymore graves but finds nothing else.
Back inside the house, she turns on her family’s computer and searches the local newspaper’s website. She finds the article on her parents’ deaths. They died over a week ago. What was she doing a week ago? She was finishing a job and starting another, the one she recently just finished. She was enjoying herself while her parents were murdered.
“Both died of natural causes,” she reads to herself. “No further investigations.” The front door opens and her brother enters the house. She turns from the computer screen to see if he has changed since she last saw a couple of years ago. Her brother is tall, around 6ft 4’, with dark brown hair and gray eyes. His hair is cut shorter and apart from being an inch taller than last time she saw him, he hasn’t changed much.
“You look like shit,” he says. Can you feel the sibling bond here?
“Don’t worry, I’m not staying long,” she says. “Just tell me where Mom and Dad are buried, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“That’s it?”
“What?”
“You come home after two years of being almost dead and that’s it? Mom and Dad are dead. Don’t you care?”
“Of course I care, idiot. Why else would I be here?” She is now standing up, ready the reassert her older sibling status over her snappy, little brother.
“Can’t you two go three seconds without fighting with each other?” asks her Mom.
“He/she started it,” both siblings say, fingers pointing to the other.
“I had reasons for leaving,” she says. “And I have reasons for not staying long. Mom and Dad were murdered, Luke, and I’m going to find out how and by whom.”
“Where have you been?” he asks, now sitting on the other couch of the living room.
“Can’t say,” she says, sitting back down on the other couch.
“What have you been doing?”
“A little bit of this and a little bit of that,” she says, knowing her brother would take the hint she hasn’t been a law abiding citizen, in the absolute sense.
Her brother knows nothing about the reasons she had for leaving home. All he knew is that she had left and wasn’t going to be returning anytime soon. He has adapted without an older sibling quite well. He is on his last year at college, majoring in engineering, and is unaware she was planning on attending his graduation as a surprise. No telling if this is the case now, her lack-of-a-plan lifestyle is now with a purpose: revenge. She now has no idea when she will see her brother again. If she seeks out her need for revenge to its fullest, she will probably not be seeing him again for a long time.
“What do you want?” he asks. A vague question in hoping his sister would give some info about why she has returned home over a week after their parents’ deaths.
“I just found out about their deaths, Luke,” she explains, knowing her brother is cheesed off about her tardiness.
“How?”
“That doesn’t matter,” she says. “I just need to know some things and then I have to get out of here.”
“Like what?”
“You found them after it happened?”
“Yeah, I got home from work at ‘round 3am and thought they were sleeping. When I left for school the next afternoon, they were still sleeping. Is it strange, Sis?”
“What?”
“I don’t feel like it’s creepy that I slept in a house with two dead people.”
“It is—was Mom and Dad, Luke. There’s nothing creepy about it. You’re not creepy, just abnormally tall and weird looking.” Luke half heartedly smiles, his older sister is still capable of cheering him up.
“What’s with the bird graveyard out back?” she asks.
“Random much,” he snorts.
“Just answer the question, idiot. I found a whole shit load of them back there.”
“Found a bunch of dead birds out by the tree, nothing big. What’s with all the boxes?” He has just noticed the walls of boxes she has filled up with Mom’s books.
“I’m taking Mom’s books unless you want your shirtless pirate and Englishmen fix.”
“Fine by me. How do you plan on taking all of this in your, I would like to say ‘car’ but since when do you drive foreign?” Luke, of course, is referring to the little wind-up blue Toyota parked in the driveway.
“Someone will come and pick them up,” she says. She’ll have Kin ship them home for her. She is too impatient to deal with UPS or the post office. She stands up and grabs her purse.
“You’re already leaving?” asks Luke, surprised his sister I already leaving him.
“I have to. The longer I stay here, the more danger I’m putting you in. Where’s Mom and Dad?”
“The cemetery where Gramps is buried. They’re not buried though they’re—”
“I know, cremated,” she finishes. “Mom is scared of being buried six feet under.” She opens the front door and looks at her brother over her shoulder.
“You look good, Luke,” she says and leaves. Luke doesn’t follow, he knows better. His sister has ended the conversation and that is it, nothing more could be done. He sits in the living room, for a minute, thinking over his quick reunion with his long lost sister. She may have looked a little different from the last time he saw her, but she is still the sister he remembered. What could have caused her to drop off the face of the Earth so suddenly? Luke has always imagined his sister graduating from college, making millions doing something that required no human contact, and then gradually dropping off the face of the Earth from family and friends.
He walks up the stairs to his room and finds his bedroom door slightly ajar. Fear immediately comes over him for some reason and he leans his body against the hallway’s wall, as if someone or thing is waiting for him in his room. Why is he thinking such thoughts? Does he really think his sister is involved in something sinister or that something sinister is after her and now will use him as a bargaining tool or act or message of revenge. He slowly pokes his head into room and surprise! Not one person or thing is waiting for him in his room. He investigates his room and finds a pink post-it note on the picture frame of him and his girlfriend. He grabs the post-it and reads: Here’s my cell number…call me whenever you want…burn this note.
“My sister’s a secret agent,” he says to himself, smiling while he says it.
“Your sister loves you very much,” says Mom.
“I know,” he says. “Is she really a secret agent, Mom?”
“Hell if I know, nobody tells me anything.” Luke smiles, saves his sister’s number in his cell phone, and reluctantly burns the note. The post-it serves as proof his sister is still alive. Regardless of the reluctance he feels while the note burns and curls up into ash, he is still an obedient little brother.
She knows this and is saddened about leaving her brother only after a minute of reunion. She drives to the cemetery to visit Mom and Dad, nervous more about this reunion than the earlier one with her brother. The lateness of the day is finally taking its toll on her. She is exhausted but does not have time for a nap or any rest. She grips the steering wheel tightly and blasts the satellite radio of the car as loud as she can to stay focus and alert. How does a piece of shit, little matchbox car have satellite radio. Talk about priorities…
She arrives at the cemetery and does a drive by to determine who else is at the place. Besides from a couple visiting a grave, the place is deserted. She parks the car and searches the rows and columns of cremation slabs, looking for her parents. Far down the shrine of the dead, a small bouquet of flowers calls her attention. That must be them. Luke actually left flowers for them.
She looks at the two rectangle slabs of granite with her parents’ names etched into the stone. She apologizes to the granite and promises revenge to whoever did this to them. She does not cry. She tries to control the emotions in her head so the couple visiting a grave would not have to feel anymore grief. She distracts herself by smelling the bouquet of flowers. She notices something on the ribbon holding the bouquet together. She unties the bouquet and plops the colorful flowers back into the vase. The red ribbon has writing on it. Your move, it reads.
The flowers in the vase begin to welt; petals dying before ever touching the ground. The couple at the graves falls to the ground in mental anguish, both holding each as their knees dig into the ground. The cars passing the cemetery swerve and slow down as drivers try to keep their cars on the road.
She looks around the cemetery and can only hear and see the couple visiting the grave. If anyone else is here, she would have heard him or her scream in mental pain by now. She and the couple are the only people here, damn. Someone is playing with her. Someone is a coward and went after family instead of her directly.
“Whoever left this is long gone. Calm down,” she tells herself, trying to calm down in a manner that would make Kin proud. It isn’t working. She clinches her hand, trying to remember how her hand felt with Kin’s at the restaurant. This helps. She wraps the ribbon around her wrist and ties it tightly into a knot with her mouth and teeth. She would not remove this ribbon till she destroys her enemy. She leaves the cemetery, the couple at the grave is in the initial stages of recovery, and the drivers on the road become less hazardous.
She calls Kin, no longer patient enough to wait for him. Kin answers the phone after only one ring; he must have been waiting for her.
“I’m on my way back,” she says. “And when I get there, I want to know everything you know, Kin.” She hangs up the phone, makes one stop, and drives to another airport slightly farther away than the one she had arrived at. After all, she is still driving around in a stolen car.
One hour has passed since Luke saw his lost sister. Ever since his sister left when he was a sophomore in college, the young man has become far more independent and mature. His parent’s house is now legally his house and with the mortgage paid off on the house, it is practically a free home. Luke hasn’t connected the time in which the mortgage on the house was paid off and his sister’s disappearance, but it doesn’t really concern him. He holds a job at Best Buy as a member of the Geek Squad during the late afternoon and evening and attends classes in the morning and early afternoon.
His college is pretty much paid for by an unheard of scholarship he had won his sophomore year in college. He is not sure what the scholarship is for, but it pays for his tuition in full, so again, he isn’t too concerned with it or the time period in which he won it.
Luke is cooking dinner for himself when the doorbell rings. He optimistically thinks it might be his sister and is disappointed when he opens the front door to find his neighbor, Christina, with a shoebox wrapped in newspaper.
“Package for you, Luke,” she says.
“From who?”
“Your sister,” she says. “Told me to give this to you went I got off work.” She hands him the box, Luke thanks her, and closes the door. He waits for Christina to leave before he opens the box. Christina is an old high school buddy of his sister and lives a block down the subdivision.
He opens the package and after the newspaper has been ripped off and the top of shoebox removed, he drops the box. The box bounces once on the floor and the handgun bounces out of the box. Luke picks up the gun and reads the attached note.
“Keep this in a safe spot,” he reads, holding the handgun away from his body to avoid contamination. The cats have already begun to fight over the box, all too big or fat to fit into the actual box.
“She really is a secret agent,” he says again, amused by the thought. He folds the note and rushes upstairs to hide the note in a drawer.
Of course, his sister is not really a secret agent. She is something else that is just as secretive. Not known to him, his sister had driven to a Wal-Greens she remembered her old friend used to work at. She guessed her friend would still be working there, having no support for college from her family. She was right. She had paid Christina twenty dollars to drop off the package to her little brother.
She arrives at a different, larger airport and boards a flight back to New York. She naps a little on the flight back, but the anger of the ribbon wrapped around her wrist keeps her awake and agitated. How long has the ribbon been at her parents’ graves? How far behind in the game is she?
The police find an abandoned car in a high school parking lot. The car is the very same car that was reported stolen earlier in the day from an area about an hour away. With the crappy security cameras of the high school parking lot, no one can tell who has left the car there. Most likely the car thief lives nearby or has found other means of transportation like the numerous bus stops nearby. Perhaps the car thief took a bus downtown to the major airport and left the state. That is a strong possibility.