A voice, faint, the echo at the bottom of a deep well, a remnant of a recurring dream, whispered, “Perfect.”

“Leave me alone! Just leave me the hell alone!”

He found the whiskey bottle and smashed it against the wall. Shards of glass stabbed at his face. Dropping to his knees, he buried his face in the mattress and wept.

Chapter Three

“Can you please answer your phone?” Angela pleaded. She pressed the trigger on the nail gun, securing a support beam in place with several nails. “It’s driving me crazy.”

Jessica Backman tightened the red bandana on her head, peering at the phone she’d left atop an upturned plastic bucket. “It’s my aunt. I’ll call her back later.”

“You’re going to give the woman heart failure. That’s the fifth time she’s called this morning.”

Jessica replied by flipping plastic goggles over her eyes and firing up the circular saw. Foot-long blocks of wood clattered onto the unfinished flooring. When she was finished with the first batch, she scooped them up and loaded them into a barrel. She noticed Angela’s concerned stare, choosing to bite her tongue, and fished her Sennheiser wireless headphones out of her backpack. The pounding beat of Tesla’s Mechanical Resonance drowned everything out, including her thoughts. Especially her thoughts.

The Sunny Wisconsin afternoon had a crisp edge to it, making it feel more like the start of fall than summer. Dozens of volunteers purposely worked around her, most doing true handiwork for the first time in their lives. This was her fifth house for Habitat for Humanity so far this year.

Since inheriting her father’s lottery fortune a year earlier, she’d taken her Hofstra degree in anthropology and her checkbook, jumped into her battered Jeep and headed out on the road. A lot of graduates dreamed of traversing Europe to explore life and eventually find themselves. Jessica had no interest in seeing other countries until she’d fully explored her own. The pot at the end of her rainbow wasn’t discovery. It was no great and terrible secret. She was out to lose herself. A Buddhist monk she’d met in a diner in Ohio, of all places, had told her the best way to avoid suffering was to invest oneself in the wellbeing of others. His orange and tan robes made him an uncomfortable standout in the small town eatery, but the man couldn’t stop smiling.

“You wear your suffering on your face,” he’d said. “It runs deep, so deep you can no longer hold it inside.”

She’d cried, right there in the middle of the place for everyone to gawk at. The horror. Jessica didn’t cry in private, much less amidst a packed diner that smelled like burned coffee and fried food. She paid the check for both of them, offering him a ride to his home, which he accepted on one condition. She was to return the next day to his meditation center, a small storefront flanked by a hardware store and a nail salon, and meditate with him.

It seemed a harmless thing to ask, so she did it. She never quieted the noise in her head to enter anything closely resembling a meditative state. She made her frustration apparent. “If it came easy, we wouldn’t need to dedicate lifetimes to the practice,” he said, cushioning her irritation.

She used to employ breathing exercises, though at the time she didn’t equate it with Buddhism and meditation, when she was alone on paranormal investigations. It was a way to clear her mind of clutter, to pace herself, and most of all, to fight the need for flight in the face of the unknown. It had worked back then. But that was when there were far less demons and doubts waiting in the dark of corners of her conscious mind. Noise - noise and constant movement kept them there, unseen, unheard and therefore, unable to hurt her.

The monk thanked her for trying, with the hope she would establish a practice routine. “Unless of course, you have grown attached to your suffering,” he said with a small, knowing smile. “Give it time, Jessica. As much time as it needs.”

She had the time, in fact, all the time in the world. After meeting the monk, she realized she also had the means to abandon her suffering, offering it up—or drowning it out—with good intentions.

Habitat for Humanity was overwhelmed by her offer to pay for all the materials for the five houses just outside Green Bay city limits. They were even more shocked when she told them she wanted to help build every one. A few months later, she discovered she was pretty good with a saw and enjoyed building something with her own hands. Writing a check and leaving would never have given her the satisfaction and peace of mind the actual work had provided.

As an added benefit, her skin was like polished bronze. She’d never been in better shape. When she met Angela at the airport last week, her best friend had exclaimed, “Holy crap, girl, your muscles have muscles. Have you been taking PEDs?”

If Angela only knew how different a person she’d become since leaving Long Island.

Nothing was the same. No going back now.

It wasn’t all bad. She was, after all, doing some damn good work, charitable work, life-affirming work. The smell of sawdust had become intoxicating to her. Even now, she breathed as deep as she could, savoring the sweet scent of freshly shorn wood.

She jumped when someone tapped her shoulder.

“Jesus!”

Angela smiled. “Yes, we know he loves you. Break time. You can feel free to take me to that awesome hot dog truck you keep telling me about. I’ve been dreaming of a slaw dog with mustard and chili dog with cheese and red pepper relish ever since I got here.”

Jessica pulled off her work gloves. Her friend’s arms and cheeks were beet red from the sun. She poked her in the belly. It had been a few months since she’d last seen her, but she couldn’t remember Angela being so soft in the middle before.

“You sure you can handle it?” Jessica joked.

“We can’t all be human vacuums with hummingbird metabolisms. You’re such a hard body right now, if you tuck all your hair under that bandana and keep that tool belt on, people will think I’m out with a construction dude.”

Jessica winced. “Ouch. I call a foul on that one.”

“Tit for tat, bitch,” Angela said, a laugh sputtering over her lips.

Jessica’s Jeep roared to life, crunching gravel as she pulled away from the construction zone. The hot dog truck, which was actually a converted Winnebago, was just a mile down the road. A line of blue and white collar people of every age queued up for the delicious dogs. Twenty minutes later, they sat in the Jeep’s open rear compartment, eating and people watching.

“Oh my God, these are even better than you said,” Angela cooed. Shreds of coleslaw clung to the sides of her mouth.

“Told you they were worth the trip.” A bus whizzed by, casting a hard breeze over them.

Angela placed a hand on her knee. “You are what’s worth the trip. I miss you. Your aunt misses you. Hell, I even heard Liam say he wished you were around.”

Jessica’s Aunt Eve had become her adopted mother when her father died in Alaska during a paranormal investigation that went horribly wrong. She was six at the time. Her mother had passed away in her sleep when she was just a baby. Eve was really the only parent she knew—though she did have spotty communication with her deceased father through EVP sessions for a few years. Until Eddie…

“Hello. You disappeared again,” Angela said, snapping her fingers in her face.

Jessica sighed, took a bite of her hot dog and pulled the bandana from her head. It felt good to get out from under the sweaty rag.

“I still can’t get over the whole blond hair thing,” Angela said. “Did you go into witness protection without telling me?”

“It’s a girl’s prerogative to change her hair color.” She shook her flaxen locks in Angela’s face. “Part of the new me.”