“Take a left at the light,” she replied softly. “You know, you should just stay with Benji. I mean, he needs you to watch him twenty-four seven anyway, and his house is small, but it’s right on the river, and he says it’s soothing at night.”
“River?” I had missed a few things, skimming through my information packet. “I thought the town was on Neacoxie Creek.”
“No, we’re on the Skipanon River, which is a tributary of the Columbia River, and it crosses through Rune, and some houses are right there on the water,” she informed me. “Mom says that she and Dad looked at a house there a long time ago, but it’s expensive upkeep, making sure your house doesn’t get swept away when the rains come.”
“Makes sense.”
“Benji’s renting now, but what he really wants is to buy a cottage in the Odal Woods.”
“And what do you think about that?” I asked.
I didn’t care, but I’d been told more than once that not listening to others was right up there with not remembering names. The issue was, I was very much a bullet-point guy. Hit me with the important bits in as brief and succinct a conversation as possible and I was happy. The whole having a deep, introspective talk about, well, anything, was enough to give me hives. My father often said that someday there would be someone, not a member of my family or a friend, who would hold enough of my interest to make me stop and pay attention. Not so far, and I had enough friends, so I had started ignoring most people. Was it a good way to be? No, but it was expedient, and I leapfrogged over a lot of the clusterfucks my buddies—both men and women—got caught up in. I was a fixer in my personal life, as well as professionally.
For family and friends, I was the guy you took with you when you needed muscle to move stuff, put the fear of God into someone, or plain old resolve whatever the issue was. At work, I went out on the jobs where the problem and solution were clear as day. No one weeded through crap and got to the heart of the matter faster than me. I liked to put things into the win column as expediently as possible. So the whole discussion on where Benji lived now, where he wanted to live in the future… I didn’t care, not even a little, but I couldn’t imagine I’d be seeing much more of Delly after today, so I let her talk.
“Sian thinks it’s too far from town, and she worries that there’s no internet up there,” she explained, not answering my question, which was what she thought, not Sian.
“Sian sounds like a smart woman,” I commented. If there really was an issue with Benji Grace, to get Jared Colter to send a fixer out here to investigate was quite clever. She’d spun a good enough tale to capture the man’s attention, and my boss was not someone who could ever be called gullible. Whatever this was, he’d heard something that piqued his interest and concern.
“Plus, you know,” she said, her voice falling to a whisper, “the woods are haunted.”
Why not?
“I suggested we all go in together on the Stabler Manor instead.”
“And why’s that?”
“We could turn it into an office on the first floor and all live together on the second.”
“That seems reasonable,” I remarked, just to be saying something. “How big is this manor? Is there enough room for all that?”
“There is. I mean, I’m saying manor because that’s what it’s been called for ages, but it’s a mansion. It’s gigantic. More castle than anything else.”
“There’s a mansion in this town?” This was a surprise. Rune was a tiny town situated between Warrenton and Gearhart, close to Seaside, and from the dossier Owen, our research/tech guy, had given me, people were reliant almost exclusively on tourism, most of the retail culminating from visitor sales. Rune had a large number of art galleries that featured local painters, potters, and sculptors in a wide variety of mediums. There was a slew of restaurants, occult shops, crystal and gem stores, the marijuana dispensary, one place to get coffee, the Daily Grind, that stayed open round the clock and was next door to the medical clinic, a couple of pubs, and all manner of quirky, whimsical boutiques and apothecaries. It wasn’t a fishing town, a lumber town, or anything else as far as I could tell.
“Shaw?”
I’d tuned out on her. “Sorry, go on about the mansion.”
“Well, the Stabler family, they used to be in lumber, and they owned all the land. They would cut down the trees and then use barges to move it all downriver to the mill. The logging industry was big here.”
“Not anymore?”
“No. The family lost all their money when the stock market crashed, and that was it. They picked up and left Rune.”