Thirty-eight Years Ago Today

Dennis didn’t notice the letter until after he finished his dinner. He brought the mail inside sometime during the middle of the afternoon as he always did on the days he worked from home. The office was trying to get everyone to go back in at least three days a week, but he was determined to keep it to two days, just as the main office in Seattle announced in the waning days of the pandemic. Like so many others, Dennis took advantage of the situation that presented itself in the early months of the lockdown and he was able to get out of San Francisco and buy a house in a much smaller town about seventy-five miles north of the city. He knew he was fortunate. When his parents both passed away within three months of each other in 2018, both he and his sister Jeanette received an inheritance beyond what they expected. Neither had any idea that their parents had managed to put so much money aside. They had made a few smart investments too. They were comfortable growing up and both he and Jeanette went to college without having to bury themselves in student loans, but their day-to-day lives and upbringing consisted of relatively modest circumstances where they rarely traveled, went to restaurants, or bought anything that anyone would refer to as “fancy”.

           Dennis didn’t know what to do with the $228,620 check he received a few weeks after his mother’s passing, aside from taking a three week trip to Mexico and Central America shortly after. The rest of it went into a savings account until shortly after the world closed down in early 2020. He drove up to the house he soon bought on a Sunday afternoon and was while the place was in need of a lot of repairs, most of them were cosmetic and most of the structure, plumbing, and electricity were in good working order. The size of the place, just over 1600 square feet with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, a dining room, a garage, and an attic worked well for him too. He also liked that it was at the end of a street and next to a couple of vacant lots. That he got in early before a lot of others got the same idea to get out of the city, enabled him to get the house at a good price and to have a project to keep him occupied during the long years of 2020 and 2021.

           Right after finishing and cleaning up after dinner, he went through the mail; the usual stack of advertisements, solicitations, and flyers that he received most days that almost entirely ended up in the recycling bin. Right as he was about to put it all into the smaller bin he kept in the kitchen pantry, a letter that had gotten inside of the local grocery store’s weekly mini newspaper slipped out and fell to the floor. Dennis saw right away that there was something different about it, that it was something truly out of the ordinary. It looked older, a white envelope that became yellowed, and he guessed that it might be brittle and one he should handle carefully. As he picked it up what he noticed first was that the postmark date: October third, 1985, was exactly thirty-eight years ago to the day. It was addressed to an Arlene Bryant.

           “What the hell?” he muttered out loud.

           He placed the envelope on the kitchen table and stared at it. What was he to do with it? The chances of tracking down Arlene Bryant seemed very remote, and he couldn’t get over the fact that it had been postmarked exactly thirty-eight years earlier. The city where it was postmarked was smudged and he couldn’t make it out, other than it looked it was probably somewhere in California. The more he looked at it, the more curious he became.

           He googled the name Arlene Bryant and the main results were an interior decorator, an attorney, three women with that name who had died in the past few months, and most intriguingly, a cold case file about one who had disappeared in 1986 with little additional information beyond that she was twenty-four years old and had been living in Northern California, just a few miles from the house he now had. The more Dennis looked at the letter, the more curious he became. Assuming the woman in the cold case was the same Arlene Bryant, and how many could there have been in a small relatively isolated town, something must have driven her from the house and led to her disappearance. After a few more moments of consideration, Dennis couldn’t resist the temptation any longer and he slowly and carefully opened the letter and began reading.

Dear Arlene,

I hope this letter finds you well. I should have written you long ago, but ever since your mother left us I have not been in a good place. That is why I had to get out of that house and live somewhere else. You probably still don’t believe me about the voices, but it was the voices that made me have to get out of that house. They were coming from everywhere. From the attic, from the living room, from everywhere around me anytime I walked around outside. The trouble was I could never quite make out what they were saying, but the more it went on, the more I kept on thinking that they weren’t saying anything good. It was the worst anytime I sat down under the sycamore tree at the end of the lot. I don’t know what it is about that spot but it was always getting worse there and that I could only ever make out a few words from whoever it was only made it harder and harder for me to be there. That no one, not you, not your father, and not your brother ever believed me only added to that. I had to get out of there. Only after getting away from there could I do my job well and start having normal conversations again.

           I don’t know if you ever hear about me or not. I still come into town sometimes and I only live about fifteen miles away. There are a couple of people who will tell me a little bit about you, mainly Carlton and Helena, but that’s about it, even though the police are finally leaving me alone and not asking me about your mother anymore.

           Now that I’m finally feeling better about things, I want to come by the house so I can pick up the rest of my things. Mainly it is some clothes in the spare room, some tools I left in the garage, and some other odds and ends I want to get out of your way. Write to me at the address on the envelope to let me know when a good time would be for me to come by.

I am wondering about the voices now that it’s been a few months. I wonder if I will still hear them. If I do, I want to be able to understand them better this time. I wonder if I’ll still hear them the best when I’m under the sycamore tree. Whether I can or not, I will be coming by the house sometime in the next couple of weeks to get my things and I’m hoping that I’ll see you too. This has been a rough time for all of us and there are a few things with you that I want to put right.

Sincerely,

Walter

Dennis folded the letter, put it back in the envelope, and wondered exactly what had gone on in that house with those people. There wasn’t anything unusual or suspicious in the disclosures when he bought the house, though it had gone through four owners over the previous forty years and he could see how something strange or horrific could have been lost or forgotten. Or completely covered up at the time.

He went back to his computer and spent the next two hours googling and researching hoping to come up with something more, but every time he thought he was on his way to finding something out, the trail stopped cold and he hit a dead end. At the end of each search, he went back to the beginning and once again entered “Arlene Bryant” into the search engine and started reading about her disappearance again. Where he always got hung up was with Walter and who he was exactly. The name Walter did not appear on any of the ownership records and finally he realized the gap in the records meant that Walter, Arlene, and her mother were probably squatters during the time they lived there.

He read the letter again and he realized where he needed to look: under the sycamore tree. After a mostly sleepless night, at dawn Dennis grabbed a shovel from the garage and went to the tree. He poked around the area with the shovel wondering if that was where Arlene’s body had buried, where she would now be nothing but a skeleton, possibly with a few clothing remnants. He couldn’t get the idea of her remains being there out of his head. After an hour of going back and forth wondering what he should do, he started to dig.