Best laid plans, p.1
Best Laid Plans, page 1
Also available from Roan Parrish
and Carina Press
The Garnet Run series
Better Than People
Also available from Roan Parrish
The Middle of Somewhere series
In the Middle of Somewhere
Out of Nowhere
Where We Left Off
The Small Change series
Small Change
Invitation to the Blues
The Riven series
Riven
Rend
Raze
Standalones
The Remaking of Corbin Wale
Natural Enemies
Heart of the Steal
Thrall
Best Laid Plans
Roan Parrish
For Timmi.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from The Beautiful Things Shoppe by Philip William Stover
Excerpt from Better Than People by Roan Parrish
Chapter One
Rye
After sixteen hours of driving and a miracle that prevented his car from dying, Rye Janssen was exhausted and slap-happy, but hopeful.
Around hour three, his cat, Marmot, had realized she could squeeze between the headrest and Rye’s neck and bat at his hair as he drove. By hour nine, Rye had consumed so much gas station coffee he was practically vibrating and Marmot had exhausted herself and curled up on the dashboard, snoozing in the sun.
As the road spooled out behind him and before him, Rye felt like he could breathe for the first time in years. He used to love Seattle. As a child, the city had felt like a world of possibility. When had it become claustrophobic?
His car stereo had broken ages ago, so Rye hummed to himself. Then he sang, loud, belting words he hadn’t thought of in years, letting the wind rushing by his open windows snatch the sound away.
When Marmot crawled onto his lap and looked up at him with her alien eyes, he realized he was crying. Marmot licked at his chin and he smiled.
“Best decision I ever made, pulling you out of that oil can,” he told her fondly.
And it was.
Rye only hoped the decision he was currently making turned out anywhere near as well.
* * *
When Rye had gotten the call three days before, informing him that he’d inherited a house from a grandfather he’d never met, Rye assumed it was some kind of scam. He hung up, irritated it hadn’t been someone calling about one of the many job applications he had submitted. But after several more hours of phone tag and internet research, eventually Rye believed it.
He had inherited a house in some town he’d never heard of in Wyoming, a state he wasn’t absolutely positive he could point to on a map.
In the end, the decision was surprisingly simple. Rye was broke. He’d been crashing with different groups of friends every week since he and his housemates had been evicted two months before. It had been his third eviction, and this time there were no more places to scrape together first, last, and security for.
Throw in the fact that he was pretty much out of cat-friendly couches when he wore out his welcome on this one, and suddenly a house of his own sounded pretty damn appealing. Maybe he didn’t know anyone there; maybe he had to google map it; but at least he’d have a roof over his head.
So Rye had packed his few belongings into his untrustworthy Beretta, grabbed Marmot, and hit the road as the sun set over the bay.
* * *
When he arrived at the address the lawyer had given him in Garnet Run, Wyoming, Rye thought he’d been punked. Hoped he had been, because if this was what he’d just left Seattle for, Rye was utterly screwed.
The house stood in a wind-blasted field surrounded on two sides by woods, with nothing around but a horror movie scarecrow clinging to its post and a pack of chipmunks that seemed intent on taking over the world. Were there tornadoes in Wyoming? Because it looked like one had hit the house.
Rye crept cautiously in the open front door, hoping the roof wasn’t about to cave in. Marmot sniffed delicately, sneezed, hissed at her own sneeze, then scampered off to explore.
The interior appeared to be held together by spiderwebs, dust, and a few rusty nails that looked like they’d originated in the Lincoln administration. The walls sagged, the ceiling sagged; the whole damn house looked like it was being pulled straight down to hell by some central sinkhole beneath it. To the right was a narrow staircase, presumably to the second floor, but Rye would be goddamned if he was setting one foot on that obvious death trap.
A doorway beyond that led into a small kitchen, and through that another door led outside, where a porch even saggier than the house drooped. From the back of the house, far away, Rye could see the peak of one solitary rooftop. Had he moved to some kind of ghost town?
He walked a little ways away (because, seriously, the house—god, his house—looked like it could collapse at any second) and sank into a crouch, hand clasped across his mouth to keep in the sound of his panicked breathing.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” He squeezed his eyes shut. “What did I do?”
He was a thousand miles from the only place he’d ever lived. No one knew where he was except the friends he’d been crashing with and some lawyer he’d never met. What little money he had wouldn’t last more than a week if he spent it on a hotel, and he didn’t even know where a grocery store was. The house would clearly make an excellent playground for Marmot, but Rye would rather sleep in a cozy open grave.
A hush came through the grass and Marmot jumped onto his shoulder and butted his head. Her orange tail flicked his back like a windshield wiper.
“Mrew?” Her tiny voice matched her small form but not her fierceness.
“It’ll be okay,” he assured her. “I’ll figure something out.”
Rye stood slowly so he wouldn’t displace Marmot and did what he’d learned to do over years of evictions, challenging roommates, getting fired, getting robbed, and getting dumped. He looked at the situation and chose to acknowledge all the dimensions of it.
Dimensions (as he thought of them) weren’t positive or negative. They were simply the truth of how he felt about things.
“It smells good here, hmm? Fresh air and trees and shit,” Rye said firmly, eyes searching the landscape.
Marmot purred against his neck.
“And we’ve got all this space to ourselves. I bet we could yell and no one would care.” The sinister implications of that hung in the air, and Rye acknowledged them too. “I could walk around naked whenever I want. Once it gets warmer, anyway. And, hey, we could barbecue outside. I’ll just, like, learn how to make a fire. And barbecue.”
Marmot perked up at that.
“Yeah, I’ll make you chicken. Or... I dunno...wild birds? Maybe you’ll catch a bird and...well, then you’d probably just eat it raw. Gross, dude. Still, we can make s’mores. And...and...”
Rye wracked his brain for more dimensions.
He couldn’t stay in a hotel. He wasn’t about to go back to Seattle, where nothing awaited him but no job and the search for another couch to crash on. This property and the crumbling ruin on it were all he had.
“Marmot,” Rye said. “We’re gonna figure out how to build a house.”
* * *
Rye unrolled his sleeping bag in the corner of the living room that looked in least imminent danger of collapse. Marmot curled inside the sleeping bag with him, her tiny weight a great comfort.
Then Rye did what anyone who’d spent their whole life figuring shit out for themselves would do: he went on YouTube and looked up how to build a house.
The results were overwhelming, and mainly featured teams of very strong-looking men hoisting walls in groups of seven or eight, so Rye refined his search.
How to fix a house that’s falling down alone.
Not good.
How to fix a house that’s been abandoned alone.
Very not good.
How to fix a hell site that’s clearly been blasted by an otherworldly curse. Alone.
Interesting ghost hunter videos that he bookmarked for later perusal, but not useful.
Rye sighed. He didn’t want to waste his phone battery but panic was starting to creep in again, so he put on Riven’s first album and let himself listen to his favorite three tracks to distract himself enough to go to sleep.
Theo Decker’s voice sank into him, honey warm and sharp as a razor. The album was years old, but it soothe
They definitely weren’t the creepy scarecrow becoming animate in the moonlight and hunting for prey. They certainly were not wolves or bears or whateverthefuck terrifying animals lived in Wyoming coming to eat him and Marmot. And they absolutely, one hundred percent, weren’t a mob of torch-wielding villagers coming to spit the clueless city boy and roast him over their ravenous flames. Nope.
“Everything’s fine. It’s just nature,” Rye told Marmot, whose sleeping purrs indicated that she wasn’t the one who required reassurance.
Theo Decker sang, and Rye fixed his whole attention on the music, squeezed his eyes closed tight against the darkness, pulled the sleeping bag over his ears, and tried to sleep in the crumbling house that was now his only home.
Chapter Two
Charlie
In the thin light of dawn, Charlie Matheson woke up gasping. The dream was an old, familiar haunt of meat and bones and loss, and he shook it loose like a spiderweb. It didn’t do any good to linger on dreams, good or bad.
Instead, he ran. Out his kitchen door and through woods springing to life after winter’s long spell. Up and up the rock-strewn path to the promontory, Lake Linea still half-frozen far below. Up here, the air was thin, and Charlie’s temples pounded with exertion. Up here, he was a dot, blasted to nothingness by immensity.
Not responsible for anything or anyone.
But as the sun crested the trees, Charlie couldn’t afford to be nothing anymore. He was responsible for things, so he made himself head for home.
Inside the kitchen door sat Jane, waiting impatiently for her breakfast. Her black and gray fur was ruffled like she’d just writhed herself awake, but the tufts at the tips of her ears stood straight up as always. She meowed at him, a sound like tearing metal, and he bent to offer her his hand. She twined herself around his ankles instead, rumbling a purr of welcome and demand.
“Hi, baby,” he cooed to the huge cat, and scratched between her tufty ears.
A drop of sweat dripped off his nose and landed on her paw. She looked up at him as if he’d defiled her.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” he soothed, and Jane, placated, jumped onto the counter so she was at kissing height.
Charlie had never let anyone else see him do this. He couldn’t be sure, but he’d always imagined that the sight of a very large man exchanging nose bumps and whisker kisses with a very large cat might be cause for amusement. And Charlie and Jane took the ritual seriously.
Even on the counter, Jane had to go up on her back legs and Charlie had to bend down. They locked eyes, Jane’s glittering green to Charlie’s placid hazel, and Jane ever so slowly bumped Charlie’s nose with her own—a tiny, cool press, her luminous eyes so close to his own that Charlie imagined he might follow the rivers of color inside her. He slow-blinked once, and she slow-blinked back to him. Then she brushed her whiskers over his beard and he kissed the top of her furry head, right between her ears.
Ritual completed, Jane yipped—a sound very similar to her metal-tearing meow, but shorter and more demanding—and Charlie poured her food.
“I’m gonna take a shower and then get to the store,” he told her.
She crunched her breakfast.
“I saw a hawk out at the promontory,” he told her.
She crunched her breakfast.
“I’m gonna put you on a leash someday and take you out there with me,” he told her.
She crunched her breakfast.
“Okay, maybe I’ll just take you to the store and you can be a shop cat and get pet by strangers,” he told her.
Her meow of protest rang through the house and Charlie smiled as he stepped into the shower.
* * *
Matheson’s Hardware and Lumber opened at eight, and Charlie arrived by 7:30 to make sure things were in order. There was always something: the register was out of receipt tape; 12d nails had found their way into the 16d nail bin; the key-cutting machine was out of blanks; someone had spilled coffee in aisle three.
Charlie walked the store, plucking this screw out of that bin, straightening coils of wire, and sometimes just running his fingers over the shelves he’d installed and the inventory he’d ordered. He knew every inch of this place, and there was a comfort to its predictability, even if it sometimes smothered him.
Marie arrived as he was turning on the lights, carrying her blue camping thermos of coffee. She high-fived him, tied on her apron, and shooed him out from behind the cash wrap. She never spoke until a customer entered, saving every iota of energy for the day’s interactions.
He’d known Marie for ten years and she was the best manager he’d ever had. Also his best friend. Fine, his only friend. Marie didn’t lie and she didn’t sugarcoat—mainly because she didn’t say much. But when she did, it was considered, concise, and final.
Charlie spent the first few hours of business squeezed into the desk in his tiny office at the back of the shop. It had been a closet when his father ran the store, and Charlie’s broad shoulders barely cleared the walls. His father had done all his bookkeeping at home on the kitchen table—perhaps why, when Charlie took over the business, the books had been a hopeless mess.
He processed orders and filed receipts, answered a few emails and returned some calls. This part of the job wasn’t something he enjoyed, but it had to be done and he was the only one to do it.
When Marie took her lunch break, Charlie went into the store to do what he liked more: helping customers find the right tools for their projects. He listened carefully to what they wanted to achieve, then walked with them, gathering the things they’d need and explaining different ways they might proceed. He loved problem-solving; the more arcane the project, the better he liked it.
He was just walking Bill Duff through replacing his garbage disposal when he heard a clanking and scraping sound from outside.
Through the glass front door, Charlie saw an ominously smoking car grind to a halt in the parking lot. It looked like it had originally been a late-eighties two-door Chevy Beretta but had since been Frankensteined of multiple vehicles’ pieces, many of them different colors and some of them clinging desperately together, helped only by electrical tape and grime.
Charlie winced, fingers itching to put the car together properly—or, perhaps more practically, drive it to the junkyard and put it out of its misery.
Marie was bagging Bill Duff’s purchases when the door burst open. In stepped a man Charlie’d never seen before.
He certainly would have remembered.
Long, dark hair fell messily over his shoulders. He was slim and angular, with a slinky walk that made him look like he was made of hips and shoulders. The cuffs and collar of his long-sleeved T-shirt were worn rough and the knees of his jeans blown out. He looked like ten miles of dirt road.
Charlie raised a hand at the newcomer.
“Welcome to Matheson’s. I’m Charlie. Can I help you find anything?”
The man’s light, kohl-lined eyes darted around, as if Charlie might be talking to someone else, then, looking confused, said, “Uh. No.”
He hurried off down aisle one and Charlie let him alone. Some people didn’t want help or attention while they shopped, and Charlie was just glad of a new customer—and a young one at that. Business was okay, but with each passing year overnight shipping and Amazon ate further into his profit margin, particularly with customers under forty.
The stranger walked up and down the aisles, muttering inaudibly, swearing audibly, and consulting his phone every minute or so, as if the answers he wouldn’t accept from Charlie lay there.
After the better part of half an hour, he approached the register, arms full, though there were baskets and small carts available.
“Find everything okay?” Charlie asked as the man dumped his purchases on the counter.
“Uh, sure.”
He sounded distracted and was glaring at the items he’d chosen.
“You need any help with...” Charlie gestured at the hardware equivalent to marshmallows, cheese, and spaghetti before him.
The man raised a dramatic dark eyebrow but didn’t say anything. His eyes, Charlie could see now, were gray, and his skin was pale, as if he were a black-and-white image in a color world.
