That evening after work, he planted the mystery roses next to the steps of his miniscule back porch before cooking himself a steak for dinner.
By now, he was used to the fact that there was a spirit in his home, but it still bugged him whenever he was taking meat out of the refrigerator and the whole large fridge shook and went off before sluggishly starting itself again with another shudder.
“Do youmind?” He’d gathered—quite fast, and he was proud of that fact—that Sal was a vegetarian. Or a vegan, maybe? “Hey, were you vegan? You don’t fuck with my appliances when I fry eggs, but taking the bacon out of the fridge makes you mad.” Ben smirked slightly at the thought of pissing Sal off. “Serves you right, ass-starer.”
Again, the kitchen lights flickered in a way thatfeltsarcastic. Then again, Ben was pretty sure he was imagining things, projecting. Not Sal, though. Sal was real, and he’d long accepted it, but how much could a ghost communicate through flashing lights alone?
Once he’d stuffed himself with the rib eye and some mashed potatoes, he placed the dishes to soak in the sink while going to his trusty, albeit old, laptop.
“Let’s see… Adrian DuBois…,” Ben murmured as he typed the search into Google. Then he pressed enter.
And there he was, Adrian DuBois, with a professional website, a Facebook fan page, even a Twitter—not that Ben knew much about the last one. He rarely logged into Facebook these days.
Browsing through DuBois’s website proved problematic. For one, his artwork scattered around the informative pages was whimsical and gorgeous and something so different from what Ben was used to that it made his head hurt, and two, Ben had hoped the guy lived far enough away for him to not have to go through with this, whatever this was. But no, no such luck; DuBois lived “on a little farm twenty miles from Lexington, Kentucky, in the middle of the most inspiring scenery there is for his particular style.”
“Well, fuck.”
The overhead light in the kitchen went off and then decidedly came on a couple of heartbeats later.
Ben logged into Facebook and went to DuBois’s page. From what he could tell, an assistant of some sort ran the page, but it seemed like the artist himself commented on a few posts as well because there were the occasional initials added after one post or another.
Wondering what he should do, Ben closed the browser tab and did the dishes instead. Then he went to water the roses—and hoped they wouldn’t drown—and when there was nothing else to procrastinate with, he walked back to the kitchen and did some more research on where exactly he could find this DuBois guy.
***
Two days later when it was finally his day off, Ben got into his practical old truck and looked at the painting on the floor, leaning against the passenger seat.
“Here we go, then. Whether he believes me or not, I’ll leave you with him. You can stare at him instead of me. Like the sound of that?” He began the forty-five-minute drive to the opposite side of Lexington.
Singing tunelessly along with the country channel on the radio, Ben tried to come up with something to say to the artist. Nothing came to mind.
Ben was thirty-seven, and from what he’d figured out online, the artist was a bit younger. Early thirties, he’d guessed from a recent photo taken at some event. DuBois was a bear of a man, one of those guys who would look excellent in plaid with an ax on his shoulder. Ben hadn’t expected the guy to be so buff, being an artist and all.
Ben thought he might be shorter than DuBois, but more evenly muscular. One of his coworkers, Louis, was gay and called him a bear, making Ben feel uncomfortable at best, but if the shoe fit…. Adrian DuBois seemed taller. His close-cropped beard had a red tint to it, where Ben’s cheeks were stubbled and his hair was already going gray at the temples.
He hadn’t seen a recent photo of DuBois’s hairstyle—there’d been a dark fedora on his head in the most recent photo—but Ben wore his as short as possible. It was best for the work he did and kept him cooler too.
Looking down at himself, Ben wondered if he was wearing the right thing. The dark green T-shirt stretched across his chest, and the tight sleeves made his biceps appear a little bigger. His cargo shorts were good for the sunny Kentucky summer and for the fact that his truck’s AC worked when it wanted to, which was code for “occasionally.”
The GPS told him to take the next exit off the interstate, and then fifteen minutes later, he was driving along the winding road to a small ranch-style house with a couple of outbuildings and a few horses in a pasture behind them.
“You have arrived at your destination,” the posh British bastard of a navigator said, and Ben shivered with the impending sense of being eyed as if he was psychotic or dangerous or at least completely bonkers.
You still have time to just dump the painting here and drive back home.His mind provided him with an out. Or at least he assumed that was what it was trying to do.
Instead of taking it, he turned off the engine and glanced at the painting. “Here goes nothing, Sal. Hope he doesn’t kick me off the property or call the cops.”
Ben got out of the pickup and looked around again. There was soft music, it sounded like country, drifting to him in the breeze. Tilting his head, Ben tried to figure out where it came from. There were two barns he could see, and the music came from the closest one to the house. Sighing, Ben started to walk toward his doom.
He got maybe twenty yards from the barn doors, when a growl sounded from behind him. The sound was somewhere between ravenous and dirty, and not in a fun way. Slowly, Ben turned his head to glance at the source from the corner of his eye.
The dog seemed old as dirt, and it was a mutt of some sort, it certainly didn’t look like any kind of dog he’d seen before. Careful not to stare the dog in the eyes, Ben forced himself to relax.
The loud-as-hell barking made him jump and tense up again.
"Spike!" A loud voice boomed from the barn right before the sound of someone stomping closer hid the music and even part of the persistent, low growling.
Ben felt himself color a bit, the blush hopefully hidden by his stubble, when he slowly turned his head to peer at the man standing at the barn doors, wiping his hands on a rag splattered with paint, wearing equally colorful overalls.
