The Fixer Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the door and yellow wallpaper patterned with miscellaneous fruits, its Kenmore range and refrigerator, looked perfectly preserved, identical to the way it had looked when Rick and Jeff were kids. Rick slipped the copies of the contract under the door, along with a check written on one of the new bank accounts. He thought about knocking on the window and asking about the change, the money terms they hadn’t agreed to, but decided it was better not to get into it. Jeff had seen something; he’d seen the money, that was obvious. But it was only a glimpse. He had no idea how much there was.
    Rick was already zipping up his sleeping bag and arranging himself uncomfortably on the couch when the realization hit him, like a clap of thunder: He didn’t have to stay here anymore. He didn’t have to live like the impoverished, scraping person he used to be. He could stay in a hotel. He could stay in the Four Seasons if he wanted to.
    Tomorrow he’d find someplace decent to stay. Tonight he’d relish his last night in the sleeping bag on the leather sofa in his father’s office. Now that he had a choice whether to sleep here or not, he could think of it as slumming, as camping out.
    He got back off the couch and walked through the rooms on the ground floor. It smelled faintly of natural gas down here—not squirrel piss—but not alarmingly so. An odor put out by the gas stove, maybe a minuscule leak from the pilot. Behind the stove, the wallpaper was scorched where there’d been a cooking accident years ago. A grease fire from when Wendy had experimented with deep-frying a turkey.
    He found the place outside the kitchen pantry where his and his sister’s growth was recorded in horizontal lines made with pen or marker. They’d stopped measuring by the time he and Wendy got to high school. Maybe he and his sister had refused to submit to the indignity any longer, the ruler on top of the head, all that. He didn’t remember anymore.
    He had no nostalgia for the house but couldn’t help feeling a slight pang when he saw those lines. R ICK— M ARCH 2 ’85—50"  . . . R ICK— N OV. 14 ’92—64"  . . . Between the ages of seven and fourteen he’d had his major growth spurt. The marker on the pantry wall showed it. Soon that would be gone, the wallpaper stripped off, the walls repainted, along with the scorch mark in the kitchen and the divots and dings and scrapes of a house where two kids had grown up.
    He went back upstairs, turning off the lights behind him. He cranked up the space heater and settled down to sleep on the leather sofa.
    In the middle of the night a creaking noise woke him up.
    He opened his eyes. The only light in the room came from the streetlight on Clayton Street. The noise had sounded as if it came from inside the house, maybe down one flight.
    Someone on the stairs?
    He waited, listened. The house was old and had always made odd, random settling sounds throughout the day, like an old person sitting down stiffly in an armchair. You noticed it more at night when everything was quiet. That was probably all it was.
    He turned over, closed his eyes. The leather sofa squeaked as he moved.
    He heard it again, and this time it definitely seemed to be coming from the stairs. The sound of a footstep, a heavy tread taken carefully. No mistaking it.
    He sat up, felt his heart start clattering, slipped out of the sleeping bag, and then got to his feet softly, quietly. He listened.
    Another creak.
    It sounded as if it was coming from right outside the closed door to his father’s study. He slid barefoot along the floor, carefully—the floor in here creaked just as much as the stairs—until he reached his father’s desk. He looked for a weapon, or something that could function as a weapon. There was his father’s ancient computer, an IBM, under a plastic dust cover. He slid open the center drawer, looking for something, a pair of scissors, a paper cutter, a stapler, something heavy or sharp.