Abel

Carmella pulled up to the house and cut the engine of her small red car. With the car’s rhythmic thrumming gone, the serene silence felt light and refreshing. Lucia, her little sister, gasped slightly beside her. The two stared up at the house through the windshield in awe.

In actuality, it was more of a house than a cabin. It was tall, multiple floors, and seemed almost crooked. It looked almost as though it had been abandoned for a couple of months, except that the driveway was shoveled and the extra snow was piled in heaps on the weedy front yard. Bare trees piled with heavy snow bent their branches toward the ground. Carmella shivered excitedly. 

There were ravens. They perched on the windowsills and clung to the fence. They grouped on the roof and hopped above the snow.  

Lucia had a slightly dreamy, sad look on her face. 

“Ravens are omens of death, you know,” she said, her voice hushed. 

Carmella opened the car door slightly, and a bitter chill slid into the car. 

“Oh please. Hocus-pocus.”

They both grabbed big, puffy jackets from the back seat and looked at each other breathlessly. Then they twisted around to grab their duffles from the backseat and jumped out of the car to step into the rental house for the first time. 

***

Inside the house, the wallpapers were mismatched and peeling, the rugs faded with old patterns and clashing colors. The furniture was mixed as well, and both the floorboards and staircase creaked loudly whenever Carmella placed even just a toe on them. 

They had both chosen their favorites out of the 6 rooms. Carmella chose one with a deep violet rug, a pea-green quilt and sheet set, and a pink floral rocking chair in the corner. 

She left Lucia to unpack in her own room and opened her backpack. She reached in for her phone and tried to call her mom. 

“Right. No internet. No place to charge this either.” she mumbled, wondering why she had even brought it. While booking, her mom had told her all these things, all the restrictions and limitations being here would bring. 

“You’re going to have to feed Lucia, too,” She had said. “You’ll have to make sure she’s okay if she gets hurt, know where everything is…are you sure you want to do this?” She had asked, over and over. 

Carmella heard the rumble of a car approaching the house. She stuffed the phone into the bag and shoved the bag in the chest. She looked through the frosty window above the chest down at the driveway, curious. 

An elderly couple had parked next to Carmella’s beat-up car, in a snow-covered Jeep. They walked with surprising bounce for being so old. Carmella watched them hop out of their car and point confusedly to each other at Carmella’s red one. Carmella ran downstairs and opened the door. The house had no heater, so she was already squished into layers upon layers of jackets. 

“Hello?” she called. 

“He-hello? What are you doing here?” The woman called, in a cordial but slightly scratchy voice. Cold air escaped her mouth and faded away in the air.  

“I-my sister and I booked this cabin for the week,” Carmella said. 

“What do you mean? We have this place booked for the week as well.”

“Could you show me the receipts? On your phone or something?” Carmella said, before remembering with a jolt the house’s lack of service or internet. “Oh, never mind.”

“I’m Elizabeth Adler,” the woman said. “And this is my husband, Rick.” Carmella felt a friendly warmth from Mrs. Adler, something that made her trust her. 

“Hi, Mrs. Adler.” 

“Well, what should we do?” Mr. Adler said. 

“I guess...we can share the house?” Carmella hesitated, wondering briefly if she was endangering Lucia by saying this. “There’s a lot of space.”

“Oh, well,” Mrs. Adler said, turning towards Mr. Adler, who gave her a small reassuring smile, “That seems fine. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, I don’t know how this happened. We can leave if it’s-”

“Oh, no,” Carmella assured them, feeling terrible, all hesitations gone. “No, that’s completely fine. You can stay.” 

Another car pulled up to the house, as Mr. Adler was shuffling inside with their bags and Mrs. Adler was upstairs choosing from the remaining four bedrooms. This car was a family-sized silver van. Out stepped two kids, an older girl and a small boy, and two women, presumably their parents. 

“This place was booked? But we booked it!” The first mother, who had introduced herself as Matilde, said, scratching his head. The other mother, Raina, nodded along.

Carmella agreed to let them stay, as did Lucia and the elderly couple. They moved in, occupying the last 3 bedrooms. Carmella hoped nobody else would show up, frustrated at the renter’s mistakes.

***

As the Cruz family was bringing their luggage to the bedrooms, Carmella heard a loud, “Hey! Give that back!” from the staircase. It was Mr. Adler, at Abel, who had reached into Mrs. Adler’s small purse and stolen her wallet. Leonor ran in with Matilde and Raina. Matilde immediately launched into a profuse apology while Raina tried to explain that he was a kleptomaniac, and he didn’t usually steal such valuable things.

He stole from everyone, including his own family, who were used to his behavior. Small things, like Carmella’s toothbrush and Mrs. Adler’s bookmarks. A few minutes after he took things he would give them back, red-faced and eyes on the verge of tears, muttering sorries and looking ashamed. Carmella usually noticed his guilt before others did, and she would console him, gently saying, “Hey, it’s alright. Just return it and say sorry and it’ll all be okay. Don’t worry, okay?” His eyes would tear up and he’d nod sadly. Then he would reach for Carmella’s hand, and she’d squeeze his small, ten-year-old hand tightly, a common routine they had established in only the first two days. 

Abel took things from Mr. Adler less than from others, but Mr. Adler was very unforgiving and often glared at Abel fiercely reducing him to tears and running to Carmella or Leonor for a comforting hug. Carmella couldn’t fathom how someone like Mr. Adler could be married to someone like Mrs. Adler, who wouldn’t dream of speaking even a little bit unkindly towards Abel.  

Carmella had never roomed with strangers before, and she wasn’t thrilled about it, but she was glad she had found Abel.

Then, on the sixth out of the ten days Carmella and Lucia would be staying at the house, they heard a loud noise from the kitchen. 

***

Carmella, Lucia, and Leonor were upstairs playing card games. Carmella was leaning against the wooden bedposts, waiting for her, when a sudden boom seemed to shake the whole house. The three girls all looked at each other for a brief second before rushing downstairs, skipping steps and even jumping over the last three to land on the ground hard. Leonor reached the doorway to the kitchen first. She skidded to a stop, and then suddenly opened her mouth and screamed, a loud noise that pierced the air and wailed like a siren. 

Matilde and Raina ran past Carmella into the kitchen where Leonor stood, shell shocked, with tears running down her cheeks. Carmella reached the doorway and pushed past everyone, while Lucia gently wove her fingers through Leonor’s and rubbed her arm comfortingly. 

The kitchen was a mess. The battery-operated fridge was just a frame, and shards of metal covered the floor, the ceiling. The cabinets were doorless or had doors hanging by only one hinge, the wood blasted to another part of the kitchen. Drawers were crashed on the floors, spoons and forks sprinkled among the wreckage. 

Right in the middle of everything was a figure, on the floor. Matilde and Raina crouched over him. Abel. The Adlers stood in the doorway with Leonor and Lucia, Mrs. Adler with her hand over her mouth and a few tears escaping her blue eyes and running down her wrinkled, papery skin. Even Mr. Adler was clutching Mrs. Adler's arms, looking scared and sad. 

Carmella pushed in between Matilde and Raina to look at Abel. He seemed to have been knocked over by the explosion, twisted into an odd shape. Carmella’s heart twisted as she looked at the long metal piece sticking out of his chest, blood streaming over his sides, his shirt soaked and the floor around him red and wet. Raina was shaking him, clutching his thin, limp shoulders. Matilde was checking his pulse, her hand over his chest frantically searching for a nonexistent heartbeat. 

“Come on, Abel, come on...” Matilde begged, her voice cracking. Carmella stood up, feeling like her heart had been split down the center, and ran from the room, pushing past the group in the doorway and into the living room. A dull emptiness washing over her. 

Alone in the living room, Carmella paced back and forth over the worn carpet as her surroundings seemed to blur. 

Get a grip on yourself. She wiped her eyes with the arm of her thick, cable knit sweater. She knew that was a fridge explosion. She had read about them, one time, years ago. I’ve got to go in there. I’ve got to investigate. 

Because Carmella knew, she knew, that this was murder. The chance of a fridge just exploding like that was slim to none. Someone could have- Carmella screwed her face in concentration, trying to remember exactly what the article had said- set the back of the fridge on fire, or somehow, make it hot, or something, which would cause the coils to contract, I think, and trap the gas…”

She opened her eyes, frustrated. How could someone have made the back of the fridge hot? 

She couldn’t focus. Her stomach flipped. She steeled herself for seeing Abel again, maybe even having to get close to his body. 

She returned to the kitchen. As she walked, Leonor brushed past her and collapsed on the couch, Lucia hot on her tail. Carmella grabbed Lucia’s arm. 

“I think she wants to be alone right now, okay?”

Lucia nodded slowly and switched directions. Mrs. Adler was still standing in the doorway, but Mr. Adler was gone. Matilde was holding Raina on the tiled floor as they sobbed into each other, a bit farther back from Abel’s body than they had been before. 

“Let me check. I’ve got to check,” Carmella said, repeating over and over, and they moved back a little more, allowing her to crouch over Abel’s chest. His tiny body looked like it had a sheen on it. She started to look over the rest of his body, but a pounding headache erupted inside her as she saw his blank eyes staring up at the ceiling. She stood up, slightly dizzy. 

Carmella turned away to the frame of the fridge, loose pieces hanging onto it and parts scattered on the floor under it.

She reached behind the fridge until she felt a smooth, curved bit of metal with jagged edges. It was black, and Carmella guessed that it would have been part of a dome. But the rest of it was gone, reduced to unrecognizable rubble. If someone had done this on purpose, they did a good job. 

But who? Why would someone want to kill Abel? The first thought in Carmella’s mind was Mr. Adler. But she pushed that thought out of her head. He could be unkind, but he wasn’t a murderer. 

Actually, she thought, nobody in the house seemed like a murderer. She looked at Matilde and Raina, broken, Mrs. and Mr. Adler covering their faces with their hands. She thought of Leonor’s screams and Lucia’s tears. And then there was Abel, dead on the floor. 

***

“The manual...the manual...battery operated fridge...”

Carmella thumbed through the bookshelf in the living room, where many pamphlets were stacked in heaps of paper. 

“No, no no,” she said, throwing an irrelevant one on the ground frustratedly. 

Matilde, Raina, and Leonor were already gone. Gone just hours after Abel had died. Carmella had wanted to do interrogations, talk to people about where they’d been and what they’d done, but they were gone. And she couldn’t have brought herself to talk about it with them, who’d known him all his life, anyway. 

But she still had the Adlers, though Mr. Adler hardly came out of his bedroom anymore. Mrs. Adler had stopped moving chairs, sitting in the same fluffy, brown rocking chair underneath bundles of blankets, with books stacked next to her, without moving except for the bathroom and what food Carmella managed to half-heartedly come up with.  

Carmella kept looking, thinking that if she found the manual, she could deduce how the perpetrator might have caused it to explode. 

She found it, behind a small carved wood statue of a dog. She dropped into the couch and flipped it open. It was thick, but small, and could easily fit into the palm of Carmella’s hand. She scanned it, looking, thinking….

And she found it. “Caution: Clogged Compressor Coils Could Lead to an Explosion. Take care to unclog every once in a while.”

Carmella looked up to see Lucia behind her. She had appeared silently, the only person who could walk over the floorboards without making a ruckus, and was bending over Carmella’s shoulder to read the tiny print. 

“Sounds like they should’ve cleaned out the coils,” Lucia said. “Then maybe it would never have exploded, and….” She stopped talking and left the room quickly. 

“It wasn’t what Lucia said. Someone clogged them on purpose,” Carmella whispered to herself. “I just know it.” She crunched the manual in her hand and joined Lucia upstairs. 

***

It was 2 am on the eighth out of the ten days they would spend in the cabin, but Carmella was wide awake. She had made little progress in the last two days, having accomplished nothing more than finding and reading the fridge manual and interviewing Mr. Adler. 

When she had sat Mr. Adler down to talk, he had already been cross with her, as she had accidentally woken him up from his afternoon nap by knocking on their bedroom door. The interview had lasted less than two minutes. 

“So, Mr. Adler,” she had asked, notepad in hand. They were sitting in Leonor’s now empty bedroom. “What were you doing the hour before Abel...died?” She shook her head, pretending this was just a crime show. Abel would be waiting for her after the interview, his watery brown eyes blinking happily and greeting her with that small crooked smile of his. 

How was it possible to love someone so much after only three days?

“Why’re you asking me this?” Mr. Adler’s gruff voice jolted Carmella out of her thoughts, bringing her back to this time, this day, where Abel was dead and his eyes were gone forever. 

“Answer the question, please,” she responded.

Mr. Adler had grunted and said, “Oh, I don’t know. Probably out walking for most of it. But I don’t do that...anymore...” his voice trailed off and he stopped talking.

“Do you know what Mrs. Adler was doing?”

“Reading. She’s always reading, she reads more than she talks to me.” 

“In the living room?”

“That’s where she was when I got back. I remember she asked me how cold it was outside.”

“Hmmm..” Carmella scribbled this down. “Then, wouldn’t she have seen someone go into the kitchen?” 

“I don’t know. She doesn’t look up much when she’s reading. But you can ask her, not me.” Mr. Adler got up from his chair. “Can I go now?” 

Now Carmella got up from her bed. The floorboards creaked under her feet, as they always did, but they seemed so much louder in the stillness. She sat in the pink rocking chair in the corner of her room. She got up and moved to the edge of her bed. Then back to the rocking chair. Every step she took echoed through the house. 

As she settled back in her bed, but in a sitting position, she felt a presence, small breaths in the doorway. 

“Lucia?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” Lucia’s voice floated across the dark room like a soft wind. “Why are you walking around so much?” 

“Trying to figure things out. I’ve got to talk to Ms. Adler, you know why. See if she saw anyone go into the kitchen.”

Lucia sat next to her on the bed. They were both bundled in clothes, but there was a chill in the air that Carmella could feel on her uncovered face. 

“You know, even if she did, that’s not enough evidence to say they did it,” Lucia said. 

“I know. But...it’s a start right?”

“And, how would they have known that it would be Abel who would go in next, at exactly the right time?”

“Maybe they-” Carmella was desperate, searching for something, anything, to prove to Lucia that she was right. 

“Carmella. Have you ever thought that maybe it was just an accident?”

Carmella felt her nose and cheeks starting to burn. 

“It wasn't, I- I can tell. I just know.”

Lucia grasped Carmella’s hands. They were soft and reassuring. “Maybe you should let this go.”

Carmella yanked her hands out of Lucia’s and covered her face. She felt hot tears trail down her cheeks and drip onto her sweater. 

“Abel isn’t going to come back to life if you find out that someone did it,” Lucia said the words hesitantly, but it felt like a stab in the chest. 

“That’s not- that isn’t what this is-” 

“It is.” Lucia interrupted.

Carmella fell silent, and Lucia peeled her hand away from her face and clutched it to her chest.