Page 14
“Arch, we can barely get the taxes paid on time, let alone hire a lawyer. That’s why we took the job. So that Yeye will have things easier financially. We can’t quit, and I honestly don’t want to give my father the satisfaction of being able to call me a coward and a quitter ever again.”
His grip on the wheel was tight now.
“He’s called you that before?” I chanced to ask. His jaw locked as his head bobbed. “I’m so sorry for his ignorance. You’re one of the bravest men I know.”
Sad blue eyes flickered over to me, a wobbly smile pulling at his kissable lips. “Thanks. I guess he’s never seen us dealing with supernaturally pissed off entities.”
“Guess not.” A flashback to the sanatorium sent a shiver down my spine. I rolled up my window and flipped on the heat to drive the chill in my marrow away. “Right, so, anyway, fuck the senator and his tie pin.” Phil snorted. “So, there’s a wide range of monsters listed in the back but nothing that sounds like our red-eyed bear.” I tossed the Bigfoot book aside to pick up a thinner tome, well-read, and started thumbing through it. Mötley Crüe was shouting at the devil, but not one from Jersey, I was pretty sure. Midway through the second book, I found a sickly chapter about a creature known as a hidebehind. “This has promise. A hidebehind. Located in deep woods, it seems to have preyed mostly on lumberjacks in ye olden days. No one has ever seen it because when you turn around to see what’s making noise behind you, it quickly darts behind a tree, a rock, or even your back.”
“Hey, that kind of sounds like those statues on Dr. Who,” he said with a small bit of his usual exuberance. “Remember that one?”
“I do, sure. How could I forget? I think the premise was that you couldn’t close your eyes or they’d get you, but they did seem to pop up behind people, so yeah, totally see that being similar.” He nodded, a tiny smile appearing. “According to legends, it’s a pretty large beast that can flatten itself to hide behind narrow tree trunks. The author cites that the monster abhors the smell of alcohol, so early loggers used that rationale to drink to keep the monster away.”
“Wow, drunken lumberjacks and chainsaws. Sounds like a winning combination,” Phil commented as the song changed to a power ballad.
“Not sure they had chainsaws back in the early days of logging, but they had hand saws for sure. Imagine staggering through the woods, lit like a beacon, and you fall on your own saw.” I looked up from the odd drawing of a creature that was supposed to be a hidebehind. Long arms, sharp teeth, no fur at all. Hmmm, so the bear with mange could still be a solid explanation. A drunk logger sees a furless bear that stands up on its hind legs. Yep, could be a monster. Maybe the drunken lumberjack falls on his saw. The bear then drags him off to a den to eat him. “I’m leaning more and more into this whole thing being a bear sighting that the men working for the senator experienced. Probably what started this whole logger-eating monster thing back in the late 1800s too.”
“There was mention of pot smoking, but that could have just been my father being a racist.”
“Yeah, that’s a good possibility.” I tore my sight from the drawing to Phil. “Sorry. I mean…I’m sorry he’s that way and that you have to deal with it.”
“I don’t deal with it anymore. They can wallow in their fetid bog of hate. I’m living my best life with the man I love and a real family that accepts and loves me just as I am.”
He gave my knee a squeeze then returned his hand to the wheel.
“You’re easy to love, Phil Kestrel.”
He blushed slightly. I leaned over to kiss his cheek. I’d have done more to show him how much I adored him, but we were on the turnpike. We didn’t need a ticket for erratic driving to have to explain to Yeye. He didn’t even know I’d closed the shop for a few days. Lies, lies, lies. Once you told a single one, they started to pile up like dirty socks. Smelled just as bad too.
***
We sat in the truck and stared at the visage of the Rootbound Motor Lodge.
I glanced at my boyfriend. Phil tore his wide blue gaze from the rundown strip of a motel to meet mine.
“So is it just me or does this place strike a macabre sort of blend of the Rosebud Motel in Schitt’s Creek and the Bates Motel in Psycho?” I asked and got a vapid sort of nod from Phil.
“If anyone comes into our room while we’re showering, I hope it’s David Rose and not Norman Bates,” he quietly replied as if the plump, spectral figure in an old maid’s uniform moving from one room in the strip mall of a motel to the other with a vacuum might hear us. She couldn’t, not from this distance. Also, she was dead, so she was more concerned with cleaning rooms than what two dorks from Liverswell were talking about.
“There’s a ghost,” I whispered so as not to alarm Phil. Not that he got spooked easily. He’d been my boyfriend for long enough now that random FIAs didn’t cause him any concern. “She’s an old maid. Uniform is dated around the forties or fifties. I don’t see any signs of a violent death, so maybe she just died while dusting?”
“Can I ask a serious question?” I glanced from the ghostly maid to Phil and nodded. “Do you think we could find another motel in Bloodroot Ridge? I know the senator paid for this one, but I’m feeling a bad vibe.”
“We can check.” I pulled out my phone, gaped at the one measly bar, and brought up a search engine. It took forever to bring up a page with a total of three hotels in the greater Bloodroot Ridge area. Each one seemed to be booked full. I lifted my sight from the phone to Phil.
“I can tell by the sad look we’re stuck here. Fine. But if I have nightmares, that’s one more thing to add to my ‘Why I hate my father’ list.” He blew out a breath that billowed his cheeks. “Let’s get registered and then go get some dinner. I want to blow his stipend.”
“We can do that.” Exiting the truck, we made our way into the office, an overly stuffy room with a desk, a sofa that could be the twin to our purple couch at the bookstore, and a water fountain with a bottle that was empty save for a spider that had built a web inside the large plastic container. I walked up to the desk, Phil at my side with our gear and overnight bags. We wanted to travel light, aside from our equipment. A day or two max to get this damn job done, then we could put it behind us. We’d have the senator’s cash in the bank for Yeye. Phil even agreeing to this just showed what a fundamentally good human being he was. I’d never be able to explain just how much I loved him, but I planned to show him every day for as long as I drew breath.
“I’m leery of ringing the bell,” I confessed but slapped it anyway. An elderly man with a hooked nose leaking silver hairs, a pointed head with no hair, and thick glasses tottered out from a back room, the door creaking as loudly as his hips.
“Welcome to the Rootbound Motor Lodge. I’m Klingon, and I’ll be your valet for your stay.”
He pulled a wrinkled green cap from the back pocket of his wrinkled trousers and dropped it on his hairless head. It fell over his oddly shaped flat ears, which also had silver hairs growing out of them like roots trying to escape a too-small pot. This guy needed a grooming trimmer badly. “Just need you to sign the register.”
He pulled out a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper with a single loose-leaf page in it.
“Sorry. Did you say your name was Klingon?” I asked, shooting a confused look at Phil, who, it seemed, was just as befuddled as I was. I quickly signed our names under a scribbled line of what might have been chicken scratch.
