They had driven home in silence.
A week later, Mack had gotten drunk and smashed Diane’s glass swan under his boot.
When Diane left with her bag, Mack had still believed it wasn’t the last, last time. People in denial never do. He’d seen it with his own drunken dad a dozen times, at least. His mother bruised, lips bleeding, insisted she was done, her husband could go to hell. She’d pack their things and rush her little family out the door.
Two weeks later, Mack, his little sister Kate, and their mom would move back in. His dad would have bought flowers, cleaned the house, and put on a white button-down shirt.
Two weeks after that, he’d stumble in, stinking of whiskey, with a mad gaze searching for someone or something to punch.
Mack’s mom finally left after his father broke her arm. He grabbed her and snapped her wrist because she’d poured out a bottle of scotch she’d found in his sock drawer. Mack was fifteen by then, and despite his insistence he’d never be like his dad, the damage was done. Somewhere in his brain, wires had fused together, telling him just a little nip took the edge off.
His mom died five years after her flee to freedom in a car accident, and his father, dead now two years himself, had mourned her for a decade.
It was a sad story, and a confusing story that Mack never quite got the lesson out of. His mother, after finally liberating herself from the monster, died at the start of her new life, burned slowly in a heap of twisted metal as rescuers attempted to save her and failed.
Mack threw Peyton Place on the floor and went to the cupboard. Three half-bottles of booze stood inside. He selected the Johnnie Walker scotch and poured a glass to the brim, swallowing half in a single gulp. Fire roared through his belly. The loneliness rising up at the memories of Diane, and his mother, coiled back down and went to sleep.
He finished the bottle and walked with surprising steadiness to his bed, closing the door and not bothering with the lock. His drunkenness made the previous day’s fears into a mirage of the mind, no greater terror than the terror itself. He laid in his bed, fully dressed, planting a foot on the floor to steady the swaying of the room. Misty hopped in the chair, curled her tail over her face, and they both fell asleep.
He couldn’t say what woke him, but it wasn’t the need to piss. More like the strand of a dream jumping across the void into the here and now, rousing Mack from a deep, inebriated sleep.
“Huh?” he said, as if in answer to a question that hadn’t been asked.
And then to his bleary dismay, a guttural whisper replied.
“Mine…” the voice rasped.
Misty growled from the corner, and Mack fought up from the abyss of sleep, eyes blinking in the darkness; his head was impossibly heavy on the pillow.
As his eyes adjusted, a figure took shape, and Mack froze.
The man towered over him, and in the pale light of the moon, Mack could make out portions of his shadowy face: skeletal, flesh hanging loose, sunken eyes in a bone-white skull.
“Mine…” the thing told him, and Mack knew that it was the dead man at his bedside.
The dead man from the woods.
Misty had not moved from her chair, but she stood, ears raised, emitting a deep growl.
Mack watched thread of saliva, silvery in the moon’s glow, drip from her muzzle.
“Mine,” the man hissed.
Mack smelled the dead man’s decayed breath as it blew out icy cold from his lipless mouth.
He rolled from the bed and thudded to the floor.
Terror poked tiny holes in the veil of drunkenness that blanketed Mack as he crawled toward the door, jumped up, and wrenched it open.
Groggily, he ran to his bag and ripped the satchel from within.
Misty followed him, barking.
Mack hurled the pouch into the darkened bedroom.
Running forward, and not pausing to think, he reached out and yanked the bedroom door shut.
He stood, heart hammering and eyes fixed on the door. Misty stood beside him; eyes locked on that door too, waiting for it to open.
But it didn’t open, and after several minutes, fatigue and the start of a hangover led Mack to the couch.
He laid on his side, legs awkwardly pulled up, and rested a hand on Misty’s back as she curled on the floor beside him.
He watched and waited until his eyes turned gritty. When he could hold them open no longer, Mack fell asleep.
The bright morning sun brought its usual wash of clarity. The night’s events drifted surreal at the back of Mack’s mind.
He didn’t open the bedroom door.
His back and hips ached from sleeping on the couch, and Misty seemed slow-moving and weary.
He made coffee and bacon, mechanically forcing food into his mouth.
Without entering the bedroom, he packed his bag and walked to his truck, holding open the passenger door for Misty to jump inside.
He had intended to return the satchel to the police, but to do so, he had to open the door.
Instead, he left it.
Maybe he’d call and let them know where to find it.
He bypassed Tina’s house and drove around town, filling his tank with gas, picking up a set of nails, and finally landing outside Henderson Excavating, where Diane worked as a receptionist for her brother.
He let the engine idle and watched the sun glint off the glass door, not sure why he’d driven there knowing he couldn’t possibly go in.
A rap on his window startled him, and when he shrank away from the sound, he found Dennis grinning beside his driver’s window. Mack rolled the window down.
“Mack Gallagher, yours was the last face I was expecting to see today. How ya doing?” Dennis held out his hand, and Mack shook it.
“I’m all right,” Mack told him, heart still a pace above normal.
“How’s the gig?” Dennis asked.
Mack nodded, gazed at the front door of the office and wondered if Diane was watching them.
“Still paying,” Mack shrugged. “Don’t ask for much more than that.”
Mack owned a roofing and painting company. They roofed in summer and painted in winter. Business was steady, and Mack liked it well enough, but since his divorce, even the work had changed. He struggled to get through the hours, his foreman’s bad jokes grating on his last nerve. If a homeowner so much as looked at him sideways, he left the job and went to the bar.
“How about you?” he asked Dennis.
“Sweet, real sweet. Big job coming up for the city next spring. Winding down now, but Rachel’s overjoyed I’ll be home more.”
“And Rachel and the kids?”
“They’re real good. Itchin’ to drive to Florida for Christmas.”
“And Diane?” Mack asked, trying to sound casual, knowing that Dennis could see right through him.
“Diane’s good, happy. She’s got a boyfriend and a beagle puppy called Snoopy. Is that why you’re here, Mack? To see Diane?” Dennis’s tone told Mack what he thought of the idea. He liked Mack, but he didn’t like him messing things up for his baby sister.
“Nah, I don’t know why,” Mack laughed and brushed a hand through his red hair, already showing strands of silver at thirty-four years old. “I was at the cabin and… well, I’m trying not to go home.”
Dennis studied him.
“I heard you found yourself a real wildcat. She givin’ ya trouble?”
Mack grinned and leaned his head back.
“Diane knows? About Tina?”
Dennis cocked an eyebrow.
“In this town? Diane knew about Tina the night you met her. But don’t let that get you down. What do you care if your ex-wife hears about your girlfriend?”