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Back THE HOUSE Save as PDF
Chapters (42)
  1. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  2. PROLOGUE
  3. PART I
  4. ONE
  5. TWO
  6. THREE
  7. FOUR
  8. FIVE
  9. SIX
  10. SEVEN
  11. EIGHT
  12. NINE
  13. TEN
  14. ELEVEN
  15. TWELVE
  16. THIRTEEN
  17. FOURTEEN
  18. FIFTEEN
  19. PART II
  20. ONE
  21. TWO
  22. THREE
  23. FOUR
  24. FIVE
  25. SIX
  26. SEVEN
  27. EIGHT
  28. NINE
  29. TEN
  30. ELEVEN
  31. TWELVE
  32. THIRTEEN
  33. FOURTEEN
  34. FIFTEEN
  35. SIXTEEN
  36. SEVENTEEN
  37. EIGHTEEN
  38. NINETEEN
  39. TWENTY
  40. TWENTY-ONE
  41. TWENTY-TWO
  42. EPILOGUE

“Hello, Billingson,” Norton said, trying to keep the quiver from his voice. “May I come in?”

FOURTEEN

Stormy

Roberta was gone.

There’d been no hint, no warning, no indication that she’d been planning on leaving him. She’d been even colder and more diffident to him than usual after the misunderstanding with the Finnigan brothers’ bankruptcy lawyer, but that wasn’t a drastic departure from her typical pattern of behavior, and it had hardly registered on his emotional radar.

But he’d come home on Monday and she hadn’t been there, and now she’d been gone for three days. There’d been no note, he hadn’t heard from her, and since she’d packed several suitcases and taken the Saab, he assumed that she’d left him.

And he found that he didn’t really care.

He cared about the hanging threads, of course. The unresolved details. He didn’t like loose ends, didn’t like having anything hanging over his head. But he assumed she’d talk to a lawyer at some point and the lawyer would contact him and they’d work out some sort of settlement.

Then he’d be free.

It was a strange feeling and he wasn’t entirely used to it yet. Everyone was telling him good riddance, even Joan, and both Rance and Ken had offered to reintroduce him to the singles’ scene, teach him the ropes, but the truth was that he was not ready to start dating again. Not yet. His friends’ descriptions of one-night stands with young nubile women willing to do anything, no matter how kinky, were admittedly tempting, and even at his fringe of the entertainment industry the opportunities were there, but he just didn’t seem to be in the mood to immediately jump back into the social whirl, to begin forming new emotional attachments. He felt tired, drained, a little burned out, and he wanted to collect himself, charge his batteries a bit before starting up again.

Fruit salad in the toilet.

Rose and cheese in the sink drain.

Those images had never been very far from his mind, and he supposed that was one reason why he was so reluctant to commit to anything new. He’d been haunted by his experience in the theater. He’d been having dreams ever since that day, dreams of his parents’ old house in Chicago. Nightmares filled with recurring images: living dolls and walking dead fathers and dirty sex-crazed children.