Page 14 of Nothing Ever Happens Here

“Stay here,” I tell Linus and Nugget as they jump at me in excitement. I walk out into the darkness and trudge through the deep, powdery snow around the side of the house. Snow is falling into the opening of my slippers and wind is cutting through my flimsy fleece robe.

“Fuckedy fuck,” I mutter until I reach the back and see what I expected to see. The cellar door that opens from the back of the house with stairs leading down to the basement is wide-open. Okay, I didn’t exactly expect to see that since it’s been padlocked closed for a decade, but nothing else can explain wind coming up the basement stairs.

I lumber through the deep snow until I reach the open doors, thinking maybe the lock rusted and these winds finally broke it off, but when I see the lock up close, it’s clear it was cut clean through. These doors must have been open all day, which explains why it’s so cold in the house. Someone was here when I was at work. I feel my heart thump and the cold makes me shake, and I’m too afraid to shut the doors now, because what if I’m locking someone into my house? I’ll stay out here and freeze to death while I call the police first—have them clear the place, I think. But shit, my phone is inside. I consider walking the quarter mile to the next house, but I’d probably die from frostbite in this robe. Why didn’t I put on the boots by the front door? There’s no way. I have to go back in.

Then I hear something. A tiny sound—like a whimper, or crying. I try to look down into the basement with only the small bit of moonlight behind me and the pilot light from the water heater down there to see anything by.I see movement. I’m frozen in fear for a moment, but before I can run, or think, or anything, the light catches two small eyes and I scream so bloodcurdlingly loud that I wonder if the neighbors might have heard and might come to help.

Then to my shock, I realize it’s not a psychopath waiting to murder me. It’s an animal. It cries again, and my instinct to help a hurt animal—an instinct that overrides almost all else in life—takes over, and I rush down the stairs to see what’s happened.

It backs up and hides under the stairs, and I pull the cord for the basement light on and follow it. Once I see it cowering in the corner of the staircase I hold out my hand, and it doesn’t come to me. It backs up into the concrete wall to the side of the stairs and presses its little forehead into it, but there is aBraveheartposter hanging there from a million years ago when Leo was gonna make this area a man cave until he gave up on the idea. The poster tears with the weight of the dog backing into it. The poor, sweet dog stands wet and shivering as I move toward it, and I realize the tear in the poster leads to an opening behind it. I rip the poster off the wall and see something that shocks me to my core.

It’s a crawl space or hidey-hole or whatever you want to call it that’s been chiseled out of concrete and covered with a Mel fucking Gibson poster. To hide…what?

I see only a couple of cardboard boxes inside. Holy shit. Leo went to a lot of trouble to hide something to the extent that even police detectives couldn’t find it. Not that they looked very hard. “He left of his own accord” is the consensus, so they’re not searching my basement for hiding spots to solve the mystery, that’s for sure. First, I approach the dog, and it doesn’t run now that I have it gently cornered and I’m speaking to him in the obnoxious baby voice I speak to my other dogs in, telling it to “come to mama.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” I say, reaching out and stroking its head.“Poor baby.” It lets me pick it up and wrap it in my robe, so I climb the stairs on the opposite side of the basement that leads to the door off the kitchen, and I’m greeted by Linus and Nugget growling and barking at the bundle in my arms.

“Oh, calm down guys,” I grunt as I bring the dog into my bedroom and wrap him in blankets by the fireplace. When I go back downstairs, I carry a flashlight and an old padlock. I close the cellar doors and lock them again, this time from the inside so the lock can’t be cut. Then I pull the boxes out of the crawl space and balance them one on top of the other, teeth chattering as I get the hell out of this awful dungeon and run up the stairs, back to the warmth of my kitchen as fast as I can manage.

Now that I know there’s nobody in the basement and my adrenaline is pumping, I clear the rest of the house myself. My gut tells me whoever was in here came when I was away and is long gone. The dogs would have been losing their minds barking all night if there was still someone here, and this realization makes me feel a whole lot calmer.

Still I go room by room, whipping open closet doors and shower curtains, even kitchen cabinets as if some psychopath would contort themselves to lie in wait in my cereal cupboard, but you never know, so I check everything. Once I am confident it’s all clear, I check all the door locks one more time and double-check the basement door off the kitchen too.

If somebody got through the cellar locks, they had to have been inside my house, and the thought sends waves of nausea through me. What did they want? What the hell were they looking for?This?I stare at the boxes. They are both filled with stacks of paper. That’s it. Paper. Not body parts or gold bars, or a secret key to some safe-deposit box with a billion dollars in it. So what the hell was he hiding all this for?

Before I wrap my head around starting to sift through it all, I pour a bowl of food for the stray pup and grab some towels to dry off this little guy. Once he settles, I put down bowls for Nugget and Linus and after they sniff the new guy for a minute,they calm down and eat. All of us sit on the floor in front of the fireplace and I begin sifting through the boxes I found.

“Where did you come from?” I ask as he leans into me, shivering. I tuck the blanket around him and hold him close to me. Of course he was looking for a warm place if he was out in this weather. He’s probably a Lab mix, and I’m guessing wandered over from the Millers’ farm because they always seem to have a dozen dogs they can’t take care of.

“You look like a Gus,” I tell him, and I keep him in my arms as we all warm up together, and I stare again at the boxes in front of me. My instinct should be to tear them open so I know what the hell could possibly be so important, but there’s a bigger part of me that doesn’t really want to know. Because right now there is still… I don’t know, hope, I guess. But something in there might change everything. Did he have a mistress? Is he on the dark web as some sort of pedophile? A serial rapist? My mind is reeling. There was a moment I thought that maybe that crawl space was from the previous owner, but I can see Leonard Connolly written on every visible file poking out, so it’s his, and my stomach lurches again.

The first files I look through are a few debts I didn’t know about, and high interest loans he took out to pay them back. His work bag went missing when he did, and I’ve always found that hard to understand because he was out for drinks before he disappeared, so why would his work bag be gone? And I have always wondered if he kept all of his financial papers in his work bag to hide this shit from me…once I discovered all his debt the hard way, long after he was gone. I still wonder what’s with his missing bag, but there are a lot of documents that he went to great trouble to make sure I never saw, so I guess most of this I probably already figured out by other means and online accounts I discovered. What else is there thathasn’talready blown up in my face?

Then I see a file about the Oleander Terrace. I try to put Gus on the floor, but he presses his head into my chest again and I can’t bear to put him down, poor baby, so I open the file with one hand, patting Gus’s little back with the other, and page through the papers on the floor. I don’t really understand what I’m looking at. I know Leo bought the Oleander’s when his mother moved in there as some grand gesture, back when all his investments were doing well. His mother passed soon after that, but he kept the business, and as far as I know, it’s still afloat. Even though Shelby, who had been there years before Leo and a partner bought it up, complains about it barely staying in business.

Leo always said most facilities like that are privately owned. Most are struggling or understaffed already, and he was gonna turn that around—a labor of love for his mother because he was thriving and thought he could do anything in business in those days. After his other investments went under and the Oleander’s started to struggle, he blamed it on COVID like he did everything else, citing ninety percent of facilities were grappling with devastating losses, etcetera, etcetera, and I’m sure he planned to unload the place like every other one of his investments until…he vanished.

But what doesn’t make sense is that it looks like the residents’ personal checks to fund their stay, and the Medicare and Medicaid checks, are filtered through a bank account at Northview Bank. The deposit amounts don’t match funds paid out to the Oleander’s and Leo did all of his business banking through Affinity Plus. So what is all this? I truly cannot make sense of it, but it’s something. And I know who might be able to make sense of it.

Miles Kessler was his business partner when they bought the place, but Miles didn’t last more than six months, and now that I see this, I need to know why he left. Leo said it was because of Miles’s problem with alcohol—that Leo needed to buy him out because it was affecting the business.Fair enough. I bet that if I call down to the Trout right now and ask for Miles Kessler, I’ll be told he’s hunched over an old-fashioned at the end of the bar next to the scratch-off booth, coat still on, by himself, and intermittently crying, like almost every night. He’s a permanent fixture.

“Okay,” I say to Gus. “You stay here and I’ll be back,” but he whimpers when I try to put him down and my heart breaks. I try again. “Come on, bubs, you can stay by the fire. Look, I have a puppy cookie,” I say, taking out one of the boys’ biscuits from my robe pocket. Linus sits up and gives me a look. Gus just leans his head into my chest.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I say. And I know I won’t leave him alone. He’s still a puppy—a pretty big puppy, but still young, and scared after what he must have been through in the cold to wander all the way over here. So I find my big parka with the fuzzy hood, and I tuck him inside and he sits on my lap in the car as we drive through the snowy streets over to the Trout to find Miles at the end of the bar.

When I arrive, the place is busting at the seams with body heat and everyone’s big coats and drunk voices. Strings of Christmas lights and garland still hang from neon beer signs and decorate the sides of the pool table. A woman sings a Pat Benatar song on the karaoke stage and it’s warm and inviting as ever. I spot Miles immediately, as I knew I would.

Then I spot Billy behind the bar with a martini shaker in hand.

“Looks the same to me,” I say, bellying up to the bar top as he serves cosmos to a couple of twentysomethings who look ridiculous in their light leather jackets and heels the way only young women can get away with when it’s subzero outside, but attracting male attention is still more important than pneumonia.

“Thought I would wait until things thawed out in the spring before bothering to do any updates,” he says smiling. And it’s nice that he doesn’t make my appearance here awkward since he did apologize a dozen times for his father this morning and I still sort of just ran out of the place without saying anything to him after I got the footage I needed,leaving him two Bloody Marys to himself. He doesn’t mention it.

Then, to my horror, I notice I’m still wearing my house slippers and I don’t have a stitch of makeup on and I’m suddenly very conscious of how disheveled I must look. I can feel myself blushing in front of him and simultaneously questioning why I care so much.

“You have a dog,” he says without a note of judgment and I become a bit less self-conscious and remember that’s really part of the reason I stay here. A woman in fuzzy slippers and a man’s parka with a dog hidden inside doesn’t really turn heads in these parts.

“This is Gus. He has no owner, apparently. It’s a long story. Can I buy some jerky from you?” I ask, pointing to the jar on the counter.

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