Page 154 of Mess With Me

He must see the anger in my eyes, even in the dark. “Hey now, it don’t matter anymore. It was a long time ago.”

“It matters to me.”

“Anyway, she was young, and she left me when I was around seven years old. I just woke up one day with a note next to the little bedroll I slept on that saidI’m sorry. Manager took me to an orphanage, just like the daughter of your Eleanor Cleary.”

Tears stream down my cheeks. “Oh, Chester.” Still, I’m surprised he remembered the detail about Clea when he was so out of it that day I told him.

“I never got adopted, so when I was old enough, I just left. Thumbed my way across the country. I thought I was a musician back then—had a guitar and all, but I was never much good at it. I came this way ’cause the fishin’ was good. In the summer, I could sleep in the woods and not bother anyone. One day I stumbled across this place, purely by accident. There wasn’t even a road up here back then. I’d been fishing along the river and hiked up on a deer trail through the trees. I thought I was far enough out of town not to come across no one, but ho-lee shit, here was a little cabin. I knew there was someone here, ’cause there was wood on the back porch. But when I stepped outta the trees to look closer, Joseph nearly shot me off his lawn.” He chuckles again. “I was a stubborn kid, though. I thought he was livin’ the Shangri-la lifestyle out here all by himself. I slept out in the woods and tried again the next day. Told him I was good with the chickens, stuff around the yard. Said I didn’t even need a paycheck, just a place to lay my head.”

He rocks again. “Joseph let me stay one night, then two. After that, he stopped mentioning me leavin’, and I just never left.”

Chester’s contemplative for a bit. He stares out at the stars.

“Joseph was a quiet old guy. Though he was in his sixties when I met him, so younger than me now.” He guffaws, then coughs hard. When he recovers, he says, “He barely talked to me for the first whole year I was here. I thought he was just a run-of-the-mill hermit. But after a while, I started to think maybe he didn’t really want to be alone the way he ended up.”

He puffs on his cigar again, and for a moment, there’s a lull in the crickets. His cigar smoke permeates the air around me, smelling almost woodsy.

“He loved it when I brought him a newspaper from town. Read it front to back. Looked especially hard at the pages about local goings-on.”

I think about what Chester told me about his father that first day.

“It was Joseph who had his heart broken, wasn’t it?”

Chester meets my eye. “That’s exactly it, sweetheart.”

He looks like he’s waiting for me to get something, but I’m still trying to process everything he’s told me.

After a moment, he puffs on his cigar. Then he goes stiff, his eyes squinting at something over my shoulder.

It’s then I see the flicker in his eyes. Not something internal, but a flash of light. It’s a reflection…

I turn around, and what I see makes my blood run cold. “Chester,” I say. “Is that—”

“Fire!” he hollers.

At first I think it’s a forest fire. Then I realize it’s contained to a single point.

“Oh my God!” I leap up. It’s Griffin’s cabin.

I take off at a sprint.

“Sasha! No!” Chester yells after me.

“Call 911!” I yell over my shoulder at him. Then I tear across the grass and onto the path.

Except I didn’t account for how dark it would be. The last time I came through here at night, it was with Griffin, and we had a flashlight.

And Griffin.

“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no…” There’s a glow in the distance, but where I am, it’s pitch-black. I should have taken the truck. I reach for my pocket, but I don’t have my phone to light my way. My toe hooks on a root, and I nearly fall. I hold my hands up after that, waving them in front of me so I don’t smash into trees. It’s a fifteen-minute walk between the two properties. Running, I could probably make it in a third of that. But I can’t run. I trip every other step, on roots and stones and who knows what. At one point, I trip hard and can’t stop myself from falling flat on my face, pain zinging up from my knees and hands. My chin whacks the ground, too, and I bite my tongue. Blood fills my mouth, but I hardly notice.

I don’t know what I’m going to be able to do showing up there. Maybe I can get the hose on—and what, put a house fire out with a garden hose? The light grows bigger, and now I can hear it. It’s loud, roaring and crackling and popping.

Finally I emerge from the path into the yard and gasp out loud.

Flames fully consume the cabin, so bright and hot as I stumble toward it I have to hold my hands up in front of my face.

But my hands up are why I don’t see the hulking figure step from the shadows behind me until I catch movement from the corner of my eye. I don’t even have time to scream before something hits the side of my head so hard I’m knocked sideways, stars obscuring my vision before everything falls into blackness.

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