All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 155

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The next day he drove a large track excavator down the street and straight into the front of the house. Neighbors gathered and watched as the scoop reduced what was left to rubble.

He stood atop the small mountain for a moment, then brought in a bulldozer and began to strip the land back.

Patch slept in his car, did not shave, washed up in the lake, and ate his meals with whoever would have him, more often than not Saint and her grandmother.

“What do you do now?” Saint asked, over a dinner of fried chicken,

macaroni and cheese, and cornbread.

“I build,” Patch said.

Saint glanced at her grandmother, who shook her head like the bearded man had mislaid the last of his marbles.

He did not hire an architect, instead worked from paintings, from a memory he knew could not fully be trusted.

Wood was delivered on the back of tractor-trailers that rumbled the town and shook the neighbors awake at ungodly hours. To make amends Patch promised to throw open the doors for a party the second it was done.

“It’ll likely collapse if more than two people climb the stairs,” Sammy said, from his place on the lawn, where each afternoon he would sit on a folding chair and drink and watch the mad man, complete with toolbelt, handsaw, various hammers, chisels, and drills look through a series of sketches and scratch his head beneath the fearsome midday sun.

When funds ran short he would walk around the gallery and select another painting to part with, each time losing a piece of her world he could

not reclaim.

Misty brought Charlotte to the gallery, and Patch told her of the missing girls and a little of his plight.

“Batshit crazy,” the girl said to her mother, who could do little but agree.

He spent a small fortune on a lathe, a bigger fortune on timber and glass.

He dug foundations by hand, from sunrise to down, one time bringing in industrial floodlighting and attempting to work through the night before the neighbors got together, led by a nervous looking Mitch Evans, and told him not one of them could sleep. Patch scratched his beard, then offered to black out all their windows with newspaper and tape.

Soon enough Misty stopped by daily with Charlotte on their walk back from Monta Clare Elementary, and the two would look at the beard, now dropping almost to his chest, the mess of hair and the tanned skin, and they would tut at each other.

Sammy, tiring of the spectacle, brought in several architects from the city, who looked at Patch’s drawings, frowned, and shook their heads. And several builders, who Patch allowed to assist on the condition that if they suggested a single design change they would be made to walk the long plank that jutted from beneath the towering gable.

“You can’t threaten contractors,” Saint said, over burnt ends and slaw.

Patch nodded.

“Real fine looking house though,” her grandmother said, as the portico took shape, the colonnade so tall Patch took to hauling tiles up with a system of pulleys that often failed and sent Sammy running for cover as slate rained from the Monta Clare sky.

He took such a deviation from building codes that he held his breath when the building inspector, a man more wire than flesh, his limbs like spindles fixed to a rake of a body, peered over the top of his spectacles and shook his head several times.

Saint took the man by his arm and told him a little of the story of how the house had come to be. A couple of amendments and a token fine, and

Patch was back to work that same day.

Work slowed each winter as the ground froze. The sky whitened, and Patch wore a woolen hat Charlotte gave him for Christmas. In return he gave Charlotte a portrait of her and her mother as they stood before the burning house. Charlotte accused him of making her eyes too large, then quietly hung it in her bedroom when she learned of the monetary value.

He accompanied Misty and her mother to Charlotte’s piano recital, the frost beginning its thaw across town, though not between Patch and Mrs.

Meyer, who did not once acknowledge him.

He put down tools whenever the weakest of leads presented itself.

Sometimes in the dead of night his battered Camaro would pare the street and aim for the highway, cross a thousand miles so he could speak with aging parents clutching at slim chance, less sagacious, more hopeful. It was a compromise of sorts. He would not let Grace go, but he would prove to Misty that he would always return.

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