Anonymous Read online

  Title Page

  ANONYMOUS

  By

  Christine Benedict

  Loconeal Select

  Amherst, OH

  Copyright Page

  ANONYMOUS

  Anonymous is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and events in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Christine Benedict

  Cover Photo by Jennifer L. Orr

  Author Photo by Kristy Steeves

  Published by Loconeal Select.

  Smashwords Edition: July, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored, archived or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.

  For more information about the author, visit www.AuthorChristineBenedict.com

  Anonymous is available in print at most online booksellers.

  Print ISBN 978-1-940466-13-2

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my husband Bob, my daughter & son, Becki & Nathan, my sister Lynn Anderson, and to my mom & dad, Frank & Mary Lou Wilson. Thank you for all your support. Thank you for believing in me.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Dr. Neal Chandler, Toni Thayer, Beth Sump, Heidi Corso, Jeannie Wagner, Huda Al-Marashi, Jeremy Proehl, Janet Wells, Jennifer Weinbrecht, Laura Walter, and Alison Widen for your invaluable assistance and encouragement throughout the writing process of Anonymous.

  Thank you my dearest friends Stella Trujillo & Judy Yantz for being there through all the ups and downs it took to get Anonymous published. No one has read as many rewrites as the two of you throughout the evolution of this story.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Author Information

  Chapter 1

  It was 1984; the year Debra turned twenty-one. Debra could see the farmhouse as they drove up the gravel road, the lightning rods rising above the battered roof. The catalpa tree towering over a gingerbread gable and a sunken porch. They had traveled five hundred miles to get here, to this relic, to these fourteen rooms amid fifty acres of pokeweed and thistle and blackberry barbs. This their new home.

  A runaway from foster care, she married Greg right out of high school. She thought she loved him, and maybe she did, the best she could ever love anyone.

  The car rolled into the driveway, the trailer hitch jangling, as though each were unstoppable carnival cars chinking to the crest of a free-fall. She never wanted to come here, much less buy this house, a haunted-looking monstrosity. But she never came right out and said the word ‘no,’ a forbidden word from where she’d been, a word worth tasting blood in her mouth. It wasn’t that way with Greg though. That’s what she liked about him. She would have said no if she wanted to. But she wanted to make him happy. The way family is supposed to be.

  “. . . got the keys?” Greg jammed the gear in park, the old Pontiac grinding in turn.

  She opened the glove compartment. The heavy door slammed open and the keys fell out into her lap. That’s when she saw a half-melted Reese’s Cup. “Got something just for the occasion,” she said, her bid to support him. “Want some?” They took turns biting off a chunk, him licking his fingers, the two of them eyeing their buy. Inside she felt like that child again, the nomad running away from each foster home, her things at first in a brown paper grocery bag she remembered—a bag that tore first off. A black garbage bag replaced that, snagging so badly her things would fall out. After that she stored her things in a cardboard box, the last of which was in the back seat, the logo Exxon Motor Oil bleeding through masking tape.

  From the car to the house, she stepped onto the buckled porch and through the century-old doorway into the smell of rotted wood and dead animal stench. Standing there, her shoes sticking to the yellowed floor, she felt a crack in the wall as though it were a bloodline to a pulse. The wall itself seemed to Ouija board-guide her hand over the pitted molding and to the kitchen where she saw the unmistakable gnawing of rats. Barely touching a grimy cupboard knob, she opened the cupboard under the sink. There were no drainpipes, just a bucket-size potato chip tin, all rusted and sticky. Debra moved the tin and choked back a breath when carpenter ants bubbled out like lava.

  They would be living here in thirty days which was all they’d paid for to stay in a cheap hotel. Greg could work here on weekends, but only nights during the week. She would come alone on those days, to what masqueraded as a handyman special—a blacklisted house in such ill-repair, she still couldn’t understand how they got the loan. It was a recession and banks weren’t partial to self-employed contractors like Greg, even if he’d worked construction. Six banks had turned them down; an omen to stop from her point of view, a quest from Greg’s. Surprisingly the seventh bank approved the loan, mandating twenty-percent down, charging thirteen-percent interest—a bank with a reputation for mortgaging and repossessing that dated back to the depression. Between points, closing costs, and scant building supplies, their savings was near about nothing.

  “I can’t believe this is finally ours,” Greg said, a beacon of smiles.

  “I can’t believe it either . . .” she said, a game face of wonderment.

  Crowbar in hand he pried a kitchen cabinet off the wall, unfazed by the ants scattering to the corners of the floor.

  Debra took it all in, the chill in the air, the spooky aura, and her husband who was oblivious to all of it. She did not believe in things such as haunted houses, although it was tempting right now.

  “I’m not sure where to start,” Debra said, her eyes following a crack in the wall.

  “How ’bout here,” he said, tossing down bits of rotted wood. “Drag whatever you can outside.”

>   Weary of ants and whatever else might crawl out, she stacked as much as she could carry in a trashcan, hauled it outside, and emptied it in a dumpster, one chunk at a time. What did it matter where they lived? She thought to herself. He was the only real family she’d ever had. And he was good to her, a gentle man, not like her stepfather, the man her mother killed. Really, she told herself, that’s all that matters, not this place. They would fix up their new home and be happy here. She would make sure of it.

  Debra and Greg worked steady for six days to prepare the walls for drywall, having agreed on fixing five rooms for now, enough to live in. Listening to the sound of his hammer against the ceiling, she watched him, his focus only on plasterboard held in place by his head from the top of a ladder. She’d never seen him so quiet, different somehow. But Debra wouldn’t make anything of it. Anyone would be anxious on a project like this, she thought to herself.

  Alone today for the first time Debra trudged up the quarry-stone steps. Greg was working on a job, a paying job, and couldn’t be with her—something she’d have to get used to. She looked in the window as if everything could have magically changed, and felt cheated somehow because nothing had. Inside she opened the bucket of white mud, the finishing goop that sealed seams and imbedded nails in the drywall. Which dried like chalk, which she sanded by hand.

  Her hands were small, delicate, the kind of hands that could fit inside a mayonnaise jar. She’d bitten her fingernails down to the quick; so she’d picked at her cuticles and bit them, too, tearing fine strips of skin. She wanted so badly to stop. It was ugly. It hurt. But she would bite them anyway.

  She scooped a glob into a finishing trowel and she spread it over a sunken nail head. The old water pump kicked on. The cracked windows whistled, each in their own haunting pitch. ‘So what if you’re alone,’ she told herself. ‘You’ve been on your own before.’ Smoothing her strokes against the drywall, she tried to imagine it completely done, all painted, the molding varnished. The smell of new carpet. A place where friends would come. She wanted so badly to have a friend here. At least someone to tell her how silly it was to get the spooks.

  The water pump kicked off, and she was startled by a heavy-fisted, ‘thump.’ Eyes wide, she stood erect. She scanned the long vertical window, the cracked glass, her reflection in the glare; and thought to open it, but knew the window frame was painted shut like all the rest.

  Hesitant, she picked up the trowel again.

  Another sound startled her, a heavy ‘tap, tap, tap.’ The scrape of fingernails inside the wall. A shadow flashed in the window. That’s all she needed to push her outside, onto the porch where she stood, searching for all that was holy to explain it. “Hello?” she called out. She waited. No one replied.

  ‘It was just a bird,’ she told herself. ‘A bird must have flown smack dab into the window pane. Dumb thing.’ She would stay out here a little while longer, just till the scared was gone.

  She watched two cats dart across the yard. Then a third; a black silhouette of a cat rubbed up against the catalpa tree. She called out, “kitty, kitty,” thinking she’d name it Midnight. But instead of lingering, it turned to the field. Wanting to be outside she followed its hurried gait to the end of the property line where an old barn was barely standing. She could see the farmhouse from here, an acre distant, at the very back, where people must have moved in and out as often as they dropped off unwanted cats. She saw a tabby cat climb through a hole in the bug-eaten barn, and looked inside. Another cat, too big to be a kitten, nudged the tabby until the tabby let it suckle on a teat. A dozen or more cats were crouched on a tree branch that had fallen through the barn’s roof. And something up high hung from a rafter, a mangled mess of fur. A mutilated cat. A noose around its neck. She stared at it like in a dream or in a nightmare, where you don’t want to believe, but there it is, right in front of you.

  She wrenched barn siding off in pieces and crumbs, and squeezed inside, the structure creaking as it swayed. Amid great piles of ceiling and roof and branches, she prayed for the poor wretched animal. But try as she might to reach it she couldn’t. Maybe it was best not to disturb it for when the police would come.

  She’d been waiting an hour, and then an hour more, for the Lorain County Sheriff. Evidently the township had no police. All the while scooping and spreading white mud on nail heads. The longer she waited the harder she slapped the trowel on the wall. She scooped another glob and venomously ground it into the drywall as if she were punishing this place for bringing her here. Who was she kidding, she thought, no one would come. That’s the way it always was. No one ever came until it was too late.

  A silent rant to empty walls was suddenly diverted when she heard floorboards creak. She stood very still. The sound of floorboards, footsteps, came from upstairs. She went outside again more mad and scared, and stopped short on the porch, nothing but fields wherever she looked. “Breathe-breathe-breathe-breathe,” she said in succession, cupping her mouth in her hands. She watched the sky, her breaths shallow, not knowing what to think. A great flock of geese flew overhead, their distant honking like the sound of city street traffic. She knew it was an odd way to look at it, and maybe no one else would have seen it that way—no one else—except maybe her mother. A terribly disturbing thought. Her mother heard things—things that weren’t there.

  Her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic, a manic-depressive—a hereditary trait. That’s what doctors had said. No one suspected the things her mother had done, not until the authorities came. One of the reasons for foster care, a supposedly safe haven for Debra.

  Debra knew she wasn’t hearing things. She couldn’t be. She would fight the odds of heredity. She went back inside and looked up the stairs from the bottom. Something or someone was making that noise. Maybe a raccoon got inside, or maybe . . . . She gripped a pointing trowel from Greg’s toolbox, as sharp as any knife, and crept up the stairs the same way she tip-toed when her stepfather was drunk. His face ablaze, she would feel his eyes upon her and would fold her arms against the soft swell of her bosoms, having been ashamed of how they lifted her blouse.

  At the top of the stairs, she looked down the long narrow hallway toward the first bedroom door, and turned the glass knob. The opening door swayed a net of cobwebs. A 1920s bedroom set triggered her to see people who had slept on it decades ago, people who were probably dead by now. This was her bed now, her bedroom. An eerie quiet stilled the cobwebs, the dust on a sunray. A fresh chill in the making, she backed out of the bedroom and despairingly approached another bedroom door, the second of five.

  Suddenly a door slammed, jolting her very core, an angry-handed slam. She inched out of the room, out of the hallway, and ran down the stairs, all the way to the front door. Her hand on the knob, the door opened all by itself, and she stood face to face with Greg.

  “You scared me half to death!” She held her chest.

  “I came home early so I could work on the plumbing.”

  “I’m so glad you’re here. I swear someone’s upstairs. Either this house is haunted or . . . . Someone slammed a door up there.”

  “That was no door. I tossed some plywood out of the truck.”

  “It wasn’t plywood. I heard the floorboards creaking at first. Look upstairs. See if there’s something up there.”

  “I know what it was.” His face lit up. “It’s that knurly tree branch,” he said, as if they were embarking on some sort of funhouse ride. “It scrapes the window up there when the wind hits it just right.” He settled his hands on her shoulders, carefree, content for all times.

  “No. That wasn’t it . . .”

  “Trust me. It’s just a tree branch.” He ran his hand down her back. He pulled her into himself, hugging her like an overzealous lover, in affection for all he knew. And pinned her there.

  “Don’t! Stop!” she yelled.

  “Don’t stop?” he said, his breath warm on her neck. He hugged her so tightly she couldn’t move within the smell of tar and chimney soot, trapped
in the sweat of a working man. The memory flashed of how she would hear her bedroom door click-lock in the night, of hearing her stepfather pull off his belt in the dark. Her body squirming struggling against Greg’s, she hated him right now. She hated how he touched her.

  “I mean it.” She could have hurt him just then, she could have jerked up her knee or bit him hard but she swiped her nubbin fingernails under his shirt, one dull pass, one nail sharp enough to draw blood.

  “Hey.” He pulled back. “What cha do that for? I wasn’t hurting you.”

  “Why do you have to be such an ape? Why do you have to be all over me?”

  “Look what you did.” He looked confused, hurt, wiping blood on his tar-stained shirt. “I got up at six o’clock this morning to fit everything in today. I was just playing around.”

  Guilt suddenly washed over her. The whole thing started with a hug; all of it under a minute. He’d been doing so much, working so hard. “I can’t believe I did that.” Her hand outstretched, he stepped back, redirecting himself to the chalk-dusted sandpaper.

  She knew she’d acted on impulse—maybe over reacted—yes, something ingrained to survive. But he was all she wanted right now, the man who pillow-whispered to her in the night, for that ease to fall over her, like when the dentist says you’re done and you finally unclench your fists. “Greg. Listen to me. Someone killed a cat out in that barn. I just wanted you to look upstairs.”

  “You should have told me that.”

  “I need a gun. I’ll take the rifle if I have to.”

  “Oh come on. You don’t need a gun.”

  “I mean it . . .” she suddenly heard floorboards creaking, slow and deliberate. “There it is again,” she said, her eyes on the ceiling. “You can’t tell me that’s a tree.”

  His face blank, he was listening for it, she could tell. Watching him gnaw on it as though she’d asked him to pull a grape flavor out of timothy weed.