Page 28 of Halloween Haunting
Grace’s eyes went wide. “Y-You’re – you’re – you’re –”
“Clint Hayes.” He knelt on one knee in front of her. The blue hue from the security cameras lit up his face and she jerked back, smacking her head against the wooden desk’s leg. “Sorry,” he mumbled sheepishly, one hand scratching the back of his head. “Kids love clowns on Halloween, you know?”
Clint was dressed from head to toe in a clown costume. Not the stereotypical happy clown with a honking red nose, not the clown with wide shoes and a pillowing outfit. Not the clown with a rumbling belly that shook every time he laughed. Makeup was hastily colored over his long, solemn face, but his beard stood out more than anything else. Red paint coursed down his cheeks, like scarlet tears, matching the striped patterns in his torn clothes. Within the darkness of the room, with the cameras sending harsh shadows across his face, Clint looked more frightening than he actually sounded.
Grace shakily pressed a hand to her heart. It slammed against her ribs, desperate to no longer be cornered by the man whopossiblycommitted murder. “You’re sorry?” she whispered with a shake of her head. “F-For what?”
“Scaring you, of course!” Clint’s brow furrowed. “It’s just, I-I didn’t kill anyone, lady! Honest!” One hand flew up andslammed against his forehead, the sound echoing through the room and pulling a sharp flinch out of Grace. He mumbled something to himself before sliding his hand back down, his face looking even longer than before with his clown makeup blatantly smudged. “I-I know why you’re here, alright? You and Bryant. You’re a psychic, aren’t you?”
Grace pressed her lips together to stop her teeth from chattering when she spoke. “Yes,” she whispered. “I-I saw –”
He raised one hand to stop her. “Honestly, I don’t want to know how my best friend was…was…” Clint shuddered. “God, I can’t believe this is happening again. All over again.”
The fear stammered as Grace watched Clint’s face fall. Grace hadn’t yet received a vision about Clint, but something about him made her believe him. The devastation overtaking his expression felt as real as her own fright. “M-My name is Grace.”
Clint’s eyes raised and softened slightly. “Grace,” he whispered. “C-Can you listen to me, Grace? Just before Bryant decides to tear me a new one on the spot.”
She hesitated. Perhaps there was a rhyme and reason to Bryant’s cold exterior. Where Clint found his chase terrifying and unwarranted, it could’ve been the one thing keeping him from killing anyone else. But Grace couldn’t deny her gut instinct: Clint was not at all a pleasure to be in front of – especially after being abducted by him – but he did not carry the air of a murderer.
What classifies as the air of a murderer?Grace asked herself and racked her brain, knowing that the old PI she used to work for had his own answer for it.
Cruelty shows itself in more ways than one,he used to say.It is more than an expression, it is more than a simple action. You will know it when it looks you in the eye.
And when she looked Clint in the eye, that was not what Grace saw.
“Alright,” she said. “I’ll listen to you.”
Clint was silent for a moment, staring at her with a slack jaw, as though he didn’t expect her to agree. But as the silence pressed on, he cleared his throat and remembered the reality of the situation.
“Tommy Briggs is –wasmy best friend,” Clint began.
“Witnesses said you two got in a fight.”
He sighed. “I won’t deny it. We…we got into a fistfight outside of the mansion.”
“But if you were such good friends, why hurt each other like that?”
“I know how it looks,” Clint defended. “But there’s something worse than just knuckles to knuckles, you know? Tommy was dating my ex, knowing how it would make me feel. Things just…things reached a certain point recently, a head that violently burst free. But you know what? By the time it was over, we were breathless and patting each other on the back, realizing howstupidit was to fight in the first place.” He lifted his shoulders, eyes wistful. “We were back to being best friends, just like that.”
Grace watched him closely. “And then what?”
“I left. Who was I to get so pissed about Tommy finding a girl, when I had an even better one already waiting for me?”
She nodded her head slowly. “So you went to see your girlfriend.”
“That’s right. And she’ll be the first to tell you that, too.”
“I’m not sure it’ll be me you’ll need to convince.”
Clint leaned closer. “You believe me, then? That I didn’t kill him?”
Up close, Grace was seconds away from saying that she changed her mind. Clint’s Halloween attire was enough to change her frightful mind. But she kept that behind her teeth, and shrugged one shoulder at him. “I believe that you loved your best friend,” she replied. “I believe that something bad happenedto you both a long time ago, something that’s resurfacing. Trauma like that can mess people up, but I don’t think it messed you up like that.”
His lips parted, but only air managed to escape. The longer the silence stretched on, the easier it was for despair to cloud his vision. He reached for his neck, pulling a silver chain over his head and letting the golden coin at the bottom rest delicately at the center of his dirty palm. Clint’s thumb ran over it slowly, his brow furrowing tightly the longer he stared. Memories seemed to pass over his eyes as he looked over the memento, the words trapped behind his lips. Though Grace was curious, she remained as silent as possible, only watching.
Clint lifted his head after a few more moments, his eyes glossy and wet with unfallen tears. “I wouldn’t wish this sort of pain on anyone. Not anyone in the entire world.” He gazed back down at the coin. “Ten years ago, when…when everything happened with Sam, we were left pretty broken. Tommy and I especially had a hard time reconnecting. We reminded each other about what we lost, about what we would never have again. That was enough to keep us away from each other for quite some time.”
“But you reconnected?”
