Rites of Spring

Chapter 2-2

At the same time, Cameron couldn’t just roll over for him. Cameron had spent most of his life getting pushed around whether it was his mother or her creepy friends or the system. He had his own home now; he wasn’t going to let some reject from West Side Story push him out of it. It wasn’t just himself and his space that he needed to protect. He had the Shaladis to think about too. What if this Jason guy decided to go after them? What if he tried to rob them, or hurt the kids?

As if the thought summoned her, Mrs. Shaladi appeared on the front porch, phone in hand. “I call police,” she said, in a flinty tone. “They are coming.”

Jason snarled. Cameron could have sworn that he saw fangs, actual fangs, in his enemy’s mouth. It had to be a trick of the light, though, because when he stepped back from Cameron he looked normal, though it was clear he was angry. “Have fun in your haunted house,” he said with a sneer, and strutted away.

The adrenaline left Cameron and he sagged against the trunk of his car. Sirens wailed in the distance, and Cameron gave Mrs. Shaladi a little smile. “Thank you,” he said, as she descended the stairs.

She smiled back. Her smile looked forced, but it was there. Cameron would take comfort from that and not focus on the weakness at the corners of her mouth. “He said ‘haunted?’ There are ghosts here?”

Cameron snickered. “I don’t believe in ghosts. He and his buddy—his friend—are trying to get into the house by pretending to be ghost hunters.” He rubbed his temples. “I don’t know what they want, but he’s obviously dangerous.”

She nodded, looking down. “I will get Ali. He will talk to the police.” Cameron noticed her hand shaking as she turned around and went back into the house, and his guts twisted. It must have been terrifying to her, to have to call the police. Cameron preferred not to involve the police because as a brown-skinned gay man he knew that his safety was not a priority for many police officers. His interactions with the police were best described as minor annoyances, and while he knew that they could go bad at any time, he’d avoided anything seriously wrong so far.

Mrs. Shaladi had come to Plymouth from Libya. Cameron didn’t ask about her experiences, he didn’t want to trigger her or anything, but most folks didn’t leave their country and start new lives someplace where they didn’t speak the language if things were going well for them in the old country. And she avoided law enforcement like the plague.

Four squad cars arrived, although only two stayed for any length of time. The other two took off in pursuit of Jason, whose description they already had on file from the last incident. Cameron tried to keep himself between Mrs. Shaladi and the police, but officers insisted on taking separate statements from both of them. They were willing to speak to them within eye sight of each other, which seemed to make Mrs. Shaladi more comfortable.

Cameron had to speak with two uniformed officers, an Officer Parrino and an Officer Rourke. He explained what had happened as patiently as he could and he bit his tongue when they exchanged smirks at his story. “So you punched him in the face when he grabbed you?” Rourke said.

“He’d already threatened me, I’ve already reported him and his friend showing up as prowlers once trying to pull some scam. Now I come home to find him hiding in the rhododendron and you think it’s unreasonable for me to feel threatened?” Cameron crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the cop.

Parrino raised his eyebrow. “Not at all. I guess we’re just surprised that you took such firm action. Most homeowners in a similar situation would have been a lot more passive.”

Cameron counted to ten. “I guess I’ve learned that being passive doesn’t get you anywhere.”

“And you’re sure that you don’t know this guy from anywhere?” Rourke tapped his pencil against his notepad. “Maybe a bar, maybe a lover’s quarrel?”

Cameron rolled his eyes. “I can give you a detailed s****l history if you need it, but it’ll come through my lawyer. I don’t know the guy. I’ve never seen the guy before last week, and it’s not a ‘lover’s quarrel’ if one party is trying to break into the other party’s house. That’s stalking, no matter what genders are involved. I have no idea why this guy is trying to get into my house but I’m concerned for my safety and I’m concerned for my tenants’ safety. There are three children living in that unit. What if he hurts them?”

Parrino grinned openly at his partner when Cameron threatened them with the lawyer, and Cameron wondered if he shouldn’t maybe revise his opinions about cops. He could probably stand to open his own mind a little bit, at least. “We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that he doesn’t, Mr. Teixeira. We’ve got two units out looking for him now; hopefully they’ll shake him out of the bushes before too long. We’ll also be stepping up patrols on your street.” He glanced back at the cops interviewing Mrs. Shaladi. “Your tenants—do you think this could be aimed at them?”

Cameron sighed, following his gaze. “It’s hard to say. I don’t think so. Neither one of these guys has looked at the Shaladis or approached them. Even when Mrs. Shaladi interrupted us, Jason didn’t go after her and he didn’t say anything to her.” He licked his lips. “I’ve only lived here for a few months; I inherited the place from my grandfather. He’s the one that signed the lease with them, so I don’t know their history before I got here. I’m not going to pretend that they haven’t been hassled when they’re off the property; Plymouth is a decent place to be, but it’s not made up entirely of saints, you know? But they’ve been left alone at home, as far as I know, since I moved in. These guys had done enough research to ask for me by name, and not enough to realize that I was the property owner.”

Rourke lifted his eyebrows at that. “That’s screwed up. I can’t wrap my head around that. It’s like they got an anonymous tip and were too lazy to look into it before they acted on it.” He wrote the notes down. “I guess that’ll turn into a clue, eventually. For now it’s just dumb.”

Parrino snorted. “We never meet the smart criminals.” He shook hands with Cameron and the pair left.

The officers interviewing Mrs. Shaladi were just wrapping up. Cameron approached slowly, trying not to give the impression that he was interrupting or interfering, and gave a little smile to Mrs. Shaladi. Her grip on Ali’s arm was so tight that her knuckles were white, and for a moment guilt warred with the rage building inside of Cameron. This thing, whatever those two con men wanted, was Cameron’s issue. It shouldn’t be spilling over the wall between their units. It shouldn’t make Mrs. Shaladi so afraid that she left bruises on her little boy’s shoulder.

He could almost hear the voice of the therapist from the group home echoing in his head. He did not need to feel guilty about this. He had done nothing to bring this on. He’d inherited a house from a relative he’d been pretty sure had forgotten he existed; that was all. He hadn’t bragged about his inheritance; he hadn’t been indiscreet about it. It sucked that the Shaladis were getting pulled into Cameron’s drama, but it was not his fault.

The cops nodded to him on their way out, and he returned the gesture before heading over to Mrs. Shaladi. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

She looked up at him with huge, terrified brown eyes and bit her lip. He wanted to wrap her up in his arms and promise safety, but she’d never been at all tactile and he was pretty sure that she wouldn’t take that as a welcoming gesture. She just nodded and let go of Ali’s shoulder. “The man is gone now, yes?”

“For now.” Cameron swallowed. “Hopefully the cops will get him.” He tugged at his collar and reminded himself, again, that this was not his fault. “I have some water for you and the kids. Want me to bring it inside?” Funny how the whole incident with the faucets seemed like it had happened days ago. It had been maybe an hour and a half, and they still needed clean water for the night.

Cameron carried three cases of water into the Shaladis’ unit and got Ali to carry the bleach. Then he brought his own water inside and hunkered down.

The first thing he did was bleach everything that the contaminated water had touched. It didn’t matter that it hadn’t been real blood. He’d seen it as blood, and his brain had done the rest. He’d never be able to use any of those rooms again if he didn’t scrub them down and make them pure. He could hear his mother laughing at him in the back of his mind, mocking his efforts just like she had when he’d been a boy. “Do you really think a piece of filth like you could ever make something clean, boy?”

He pushed the intrusive thoughts away. His mother was gone, locked away where she couldn’t hurt anyone again. Cameron wasn’t dirty or filthy, he never had been. He was a grown man, and he was a grown man who was in control of himself and his environment. He wasn’t trying to placate his mother, he was just doing what any other adult would do under the same circumstances. That was reasonable. It wasn’t irrational, and Cameron was okay. If he repeated that to himself often enough, he could calm his mind enough to get through the rest of the day.

When he finished scrubbing, he fixed himself some dinner and sat down to get some more work done. If he wanted to put a good spin on today’s events, he could try to think of the water disaster as good inspiration for some of the horror illustration opportunities that came his way. Maybe he could use some of them as inspiration for his paintings, too.

He didn’t have to let it get to him. He didn’t have to let it leave him cowering under the duvet, hoping that the monsters would think that he was asleep, like he had when he was younger. He could use it, make it work for him.

He grabbed a sketchbook and started to draw. If he liked what he got, he’d translate it to canvas and start working on it, but he always started out with a sketch of his concept. He forced his body to relax and pushed all thoughts of the fight with Jason out of his mind. Right now, he only wanted to think about the blood.

A face took shape under his pencil. He watched, almost detached from himself, as a pair of wide, round eyes appeared on either side of a flat, broad nose. Ashley didn’t have classically beautiful features, but she’d been a pretty little girl and she would have grown into a stunning woman if she’d had a chance. Cameron drew her as she’d been not long before she died, around twelve years old, wearing her long hair in a hairstyle at least ten years too old for her and with earrings that still screamed “child.” She’d loved to try to make herself look older than she was, as though she’d somehow known she’d never reach womanhood for real, but sometimes she’d missed little details.

The blood dripping from the faucet was harder to convey. It was hard to show the stuff as blood without color, or the depth of paint, but he thought he was doing okay for the medium at hand. After an hour, his rough sketch looked enough like what he wanted that he’d be able to tell if it was worth translating to canvas and pursuing.

He set it aside. He’d sleep on it, think about it for a few days, and come back to it with fresh eyes. In the meantime, he’d cleared his head enough to devote some thought to the fight with Jason.

It hadn’t been much of a fight. Cameron had bruised his knuckles on Jason’s face, but Jason didn’t seem to have been much troubled by the blow. Cameron knew he packed a decent punch, even if he wasn’t much of a brawler. That punch should have at least left a bruise. It had affected Jason’s speech, but Cameron hadn’t hit him in any way that speech should have been a problem. Did he maybe have a glass jaw?