Riley Thorn and the Corpse in the Closet by Lucy Score
36
11:20 a.m., Tuesday, August 18
The silence in the Jeep was oppressive as Riley navigated across the bridge toward her parents’ home on the West Shore. Elanora sat in the passenger seat, clutching her purse in her lap, her face painted in frown lines.
“Awkward,”Uncle Jimmy sang in her head.
“That was nice of you to help Nick and Kellen,” Riley ventured.
“One does not use their gifts to be nice. One uses their gifts to be useful,” her grandmother snapped.
“Has anyone ever told her she looks like Grumpy Cat?” UncleJimmy wondered.
“Still. You didn’t have to help Nick with his case.”
“Getting justice for the dead is a noble pursuit. When one is properly trained,” Elanora said pointedly.
“You don’t have to be so judgmental all the time, you know,” Riley said.
“You should respect your elders. Even the crabby ones,”Uncle Jimmy chimed in.
“Who is this person who haunts your vehicle?” Elanora asked with a disapproving frown.
“My uncle Jimmy. My dad’s brother. You can hear him too?”
“You will leave us in peace,” Elanora ordered, presumably to the spirit of her dead uncle.
“Look, I know you like being in charge. But he’s my uncle, and you can’t tell him to leave my Jeep,” Riley pointed out.
“You do not need any more distractions in your life. You have been blessed with great gifts that you seem determined to squander.”
Riley clenched her teeth. “Just because I don’t want to live my life the way you live yours doesn’t mean I’m doing it wrong.”
“That’s precisely what it means,” Elanora clipped. “You waste your time ‘living your life’ while ignoring your duty to hone your gifts, to be of service to this world.”
“I’m not interested in only being of service, Grandmother. I am a human being. That means I get to have a life.”
“A life,” she scoffed. “Look at what you’ve done to my most promising pupil. Gabe used to be practically inhuman in his focus. His mind was sharp, his body toned. His entire being was dedicated to service. Now he eats ice cream and lusts after my granddaughter. He’s soft and useless.”
“He’s sitting in the back seat,” Riley said, glancing at Gabe in the rearview mirror. He looked like someone had just ripped the head off his favorite teddy bear and then drop kicked it off the roof of a building.
“I do not concern myself with the feelings of others.”
“No shit,” Riley snapped.
“You will not take that tone with me, young lady.”
“I’ll take that tone if you’ve earned that tone. Maybe you’re happy being a servant to your gifts, which I doubt seeing how miserable you are all the time. But that’s not how I want to live, and it’s not how Gabe has to live either. I appreciate your knowledge, what little you’ve decided to share with me. But you don’t get to tell us how to live our lives.”
Riley was still fuming when she turned onto her parents’ street and almost missed the catastrophe.
“What disaster is this?” Elanora demanded as Riley slammed on her brakes in the middle of the street.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Riley groaned.
Her parents’ fence was horizontal, crushing an entire row of boxwoods on the Strump side of the property line.
Daisy the spite cow was grazing happily on the buffet of orange Zinnias in the middle of the front yard. Chelsea Strump, dressed in pink tennis shorts and a white polo, was standing in front of the cow, screaming bloody murder. Her helmet-like hair didn’t budge as she shouted and waved her arms like a deranged marionette.
“You stupid walking hamburger! I’m going to shoot you between the eyes and turn you into a roast!” the woman howled.
Suddenly, Riley felt the swoop in her gut and found herself staring at Chelsea through cotton candy clouds. “Oh, hell,” she murmured.
Her vision narrowed on Chelsea until there was a sudden burst of air and glitter rained down.
“You have got to be kidding me!” Chelsea Strump, cow-hating neighbor, was apparently Glitter Guy’s next target.
Riley fought off her seatbelt and jumped out of the Jeep.
“I do not have time for this ridiculousness. I want my steak,” Elanora announced, climbing out the other side and stomping toward Riley’s parents’ house.
“Chelsea!” Riley yelled, running into the yard.
Chelsea responded by turning the hose on her.
“Get off my lawn and take your stupid livestock with you. Unless you want me to butcher it in the front yard!”
“Chelsea, this is very important. Have you been glitter bombed yet?” Riley asked, looping an arm around the cow’s thick neck and trying to hip check it out of the flower bed.
“Your illegal family farm is destroying my yard!” Chelsea howled, waving the hose wildly and managing to soak herself in the process. “I have tried to be tolerant. I’ve tried being polite.”
“Really? When?”
Daisy meandered out of the flower bed.
“But you people are the worst! I hate every last one of you, and I hope you all get some kind of incurable disease and die tomorrow!”
If the woman was comfortable saying it to her face, Riley could only imagine what she’d said to people online.
“Stay where you are!” Chelsea screamed, firing the hose over Riley’s shoulder.
Gabe took the deluge of water to the face heroically. “May I be of assistance, Riley?” he sputtered.
“I will call the police right now if you don’t get off my grass!”
“Good! Yes. Do that,” Riley said, deciding she’d rather take her chances explaining things to the local police than having Chelsea get herself murdered. Even if she was an asshole.
Daisy wandered over to the plantings around Chelsea’s front porch and helped herself.
“Stop devouring my begonias,” Chelsea screeched, dropping the hose and gripping her hair.
Riley pushed at Daisy’s sternum, trying to back the cow out of the flower bed to no avail.
“Gabe, give me a hand here,” she called, then looked back at Chelsea. “Look! This is really important. Have you received a glitter bomb in the mail?”
Chelsea glared at her. “Is that what your father’s next power move is? Well, I can assure you, I won’t be opening anything. And I’ll be suing your entire family for harassment, property damage, and emotional suffering.”
Gabe made clucking noises that had Daisy lifting her head and giving a curious “Moo?”
“Keep doing that,” Riley encouraged.
Chelsea flounced into her house without closing the door, most likely to call the cops or to find a cow-sized weapon.
Riley abandoned the cow who was trotting after Gabe like a puppy and followed her.
She’d never been in the Strump house before. The front door opened directly into a dark living room with white carpet. There were twin arm chairs, both upholstered in a mauve velour, that faced the TV and a white brick fireplace. A long, low couch in a dusky pink squatted along one wall decorated with a shrine-like photographic timeline of the Strump family. Both boys had picked colleges on the West Coast, presumably to put as much distance between themselves and their helicoptering mother as possible.
Riley didn’t blame them one bit.
Chelsea stormed back into the living room with her cell phone in one hand and a shotgun in the other. “Take off your shoes! I just steam cleaned the carpet, you barnyard animal!”
Riley threw her hands up in the air and kicked off her flip-flops. “Don’t shoot!”
“You should have thought of that before you trespassed,” the woman snarled. She tried to pump the handle but couldn’t do it with her phone in her hand. “Here. Hold this.” She thrust the phone at Riley.
Not wanting to get shot, Riley did as she was told.
Chelsea awkwardly pumped the lever. It fell off the gun onto the snow-white carpet. Both women stared down at it.
“Why is the universe against me?” she wailed. “Why do people like your idiotic parents get to live happily ever after, and I’m the one who suffers? I go to church and tell Reverend Clampeter all about the sins other congregation members commit. I sit on the school board so I can weed out bad seeds in the district. Once I even bought Girl Scout cookies from an Asian scout. Yet I am saddled with Neanderthals for neighbors!”
Riley was getting nudges from her spirit guides at an alarming rate. She was seeing coffee and Channel 50’s building followed by one of those psychic explosions. Only this time, there was no glitter.
“Maybe it’s more of an attitude problem?” Riley suggested.
Chelsea put down the shotgun, picked up a pink tufted pillow from the couch, and screamed into it.
“Look, I’m sorry about the cow and the damage. I’m sure my parents will work something out with you, but I really need to know if you’ve gotten any strange packages in the mail or noticed anyone following you—”
“A glitter bomb. How tacky. Your parents know the pride I take in my home. Of course they would attack me there. Well, this time the joke is on them. I’m just going to burn their house down!” Her eyes were wide under her blonde helmet of hair. “That’s it! I’ll just get my mower gas and a lighter, and I won’t have to listen to your stupid cow having a conversation with your idiot father ever again. I won’t have to smell incense burning or see that disgusting neon sign lit up every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday!”
Chelsea let out an unhinged high-pitched giggle that made the hair on Riley’s neck stand up.
“Maybe arson is going a little far,” Riley suggested.
“Maybe arson is going a little far,” Chelsea mimicked.
Riley was tempted to walk out the door and let Glitter Guy finish his business. But then she remembered Dickie. She’d made an effort, sort of, to keep her gross neighbor from getting shot, but he’d still ended up dead.
If she wanted to look at herself in the mirror, she probably needed to do her best to save Chelsea’s life. Even if the woman was horrible.
“Do you post comments on Channel 50’s social media?” Riley asked.
But Chelsea was mid-rage. The woman stomped into the kitchen and started yanking open drawers. The counter tops gleamed white. There were no stray fingerprints on the refrigerator door. The dish towels were looped over the oven handle at precise 90-degree angles.
“A ha!” Chelsea produced a long lighter triumphantly from a drawer filled with birthday candles organized by number.
Riley stepped in front of her. “You can’t just burn my parents’ house down.”
“Why not? Everyone else on this block does whatever the hell they feel like. The Hollenbachs don’t mow their lawn until it’s four inches high. Four inches!” she repeated like it was a personal affront. “Then there’s the Hummels who leave their garbage cans out for twenty-four hours. What is this? A homeless encampment?” The unhinged laughter was back. “Maybe I’ll just burn down the entire neighborhood!”
Chelsea barreled into Riley, a woman on a mission.
“Gabe!” Riley yelled.
His hulking form appeared respectfully on the doorstep. “May I come in?” he asked politely. Daisy the cow was nowhere to be seen through Chelsea’s open door or front windows.
“Don’t you dare set one sweaty foot across that threshold or I’ll set you on fire too,” Chelsea howled. “You and your bulging muscles and your flawless skin! It’s not normal, I tell you!”
“Can you stop threatening everyone for a minute? I think you’re in danger and—”
“Of course I’m in danger! I live next door to a hippie circus. It’s amazing I’m still alive. Your mother hangs her laundry out to dry in the backyard! Who does that? What kind of monsters raised you?”
Fresh, line-dried sheets were the best to crawl between at night, but Riley didn’t feel like that information was pertinent to the conversation.
“Now, Chelsea,” Riley said, holding up her hands and trying to look non-threatening.
Gabe did the same thing. Except his eyes rolled back in his head, and for a moment, he stood completely still. And then his gigantic body keeled over face-first onto the carpet.
“Don’t you drool on my carpet! I just steam-cleaned it yesterday!” Chelsea shrieked.
But Riley’s attention was on the figure behind Gabe. The figure holding a now-empty syringe in one hand and a gun in the other. He was glaring at Riley.
“You’re ruining everything!” he shouted.
