The Acreage - Part 1
THE ACREAGE
By
Gerry Chadwick
Part 1: The Fire and the Farmhouse
101 - Arabella
101 - Arabella
It was cold and wet when Arabella arrived home, as she crossed the street she saw a woman climb out of a car on the corner and walk away towards the east end of the building. The woman looked pretty drunk and stumbled a little as she walked, the car drove away.
Arabella entered the building from the west entrance and walked to her door. She heard the east door open and saw the drunk woman enter and take an immediate left turn up the staircase. The building had three floors, Arabella nodded to herself, she thought she had seen the woman before. She was another resident of the Acreage.
The Acreage was a fairly large, flat roofed building, a halfway house for former patients of the Psychiatric hospital next door. Arabella had been there for three years now and was recovering from a breakdown, other residents had been here longer than that, some shorter. Her treatment had been a long and painful road back to a place where she could function well enough to be considered part of society again, wasn’t that considerate of society, she thought.
Last year she had taken on the role of caretaker for the building and those in it, she was in the process of completing a college course on mental health care and mentoring, which was why she was arriving home so late. Entering her own apartment she took off her shoes and hung up her wet coat, then dumped her bag on the sofa.
She wandered over to the fridge and retrieved a can from inside, popping the tab she took a long drink before closing the door, burping, and then consulting the outside of the appliance. This was where three sheets of A4 paper were held in place by fridge magnets, mostly saying “I heart something” the most common being Chicago or Michigan, state, and lake. These were the furthest places Arabella went these days.
The sheets of A4 contained a map of the building, one sheet for each floor level, eight apartments on each floor. Her grey eyes narrowed on floor number two, room two, zero, five, Caroline.
Arabella’s plan showed the name of each resident, she didn’t know a lot about Caroline but would report the drinking to Doctor Kelly on Monday when they had their meeting. Doctor Moira Kelly oversaw the Acreage and Arabella always told her of any unusual behavior she observed in the building and someone coming home intoxicated was very unusual indeed.
She made herself some coffee, the beans were cheap but she still ground them sparingly and dealt with the bitterness by adding a small amount of sugar. Taking a sip and putting the mug on her scratched and dented coffee table, no coasters required, she sat on the two-seat sofa, opened her backpack and took out her college books and notepad. Arabella specialised in cut price everything, she had to just to make ends meet and most months they only just made it. Occasionally they were a long way apart.
She looked at the pen in her hand, that was free from college, the notepad, cheapest Staples could supply in a pack of five. Course book, purchased online from a previous years student and it had still cost a lot, that was one month where the ends were streets away from meeting. Her backpack, second hand thrift store, as were her clothes. Everything else in the apartment came with the apartment.
She sighed, thanks goodness she had insurance otherwise she would never have been able to afford all the psychiatric care and medication she had needed over the past six years. One of the few things her dumbass husband had got right, shame about everything else though.
Arabella threw her college work back into her bag and tossed that over the back of the sofa, there would be no point in trying to work tonight, she knew that when she felt like this and started to think this way that the only thing to do was finish her coffee, take her medication and head for bed, with luck she would get some decent sleep before she did her building checks in the morning and then headed out to college for her first class.
Putting her feet up on the sofa she sipped at her coffee, yeah, thanks for the insurance Nick. Everything else had gone with the collapse of the business. House, cars, fancy clothes and furniture, holidays, all lost by Nick.
Nick the great investor, give him your money and he would double it, triple it and more. Except he didn’t, he had spent it all on house, cars, fancy……. well, you get the picture. So when investors wanted to see some of their returns, the pot was empty, so Nick decided that if Arabella died, her insurance payout would solve all of his problems.
What he didn’t seem to foresee was that Arabella didn’t want to die. Nick had tried to poison her. I mean really, who did that these days, maybe in an Agatha Christie novel but not in real life. So, she had thrown up a lot and then had found Nick waiting outside the bathroom with a hammer!
They had fought and chased each other around the house like Tom and Jerry for quite a while, long enough, in fact, for their neighbours to hear the screaming row and call the police. Who arrived, heard the noise for themselves and had burst through the front door into the hallway just as Nick had felled Arabella with a couple of glancing blows to the head and was about to deliver the final one when the police kicked in the door.
Nick then proved how monumentally stupid he really was by raising the hammer and running, screaming at the two police officers standing, with guns drawn, in the doorway. The two cops fired twice each with deadly accuracy and basically vaporised the top of her husbands head, removing any last vestige of intelligence and spraying it all over the hallway.
Arabella woke up in hospital where she was told the news of her husbands death by the police, who then passed her on to a lawyer who told her that she was broke and homeless. Court cases followed, so now she was penniless, homeless and bankrupt. At that point her own brain switched off and she had a complete breakdown.
By the time she had recovered, all the legal wrangling was done and she was still penniless. But, thanks to the health insurance that Nick had set up, she was cared for, helped and had finally ended up here, on a sofa. She still had nightmares, fits of depression, but she coped.
Arabella finished her coffee, took her medication with a glass of bottled water and put on her only pair of pajamas before finally climbing into bed. With luck she would sleep.
She awoke with a start and looked at the clock, it was three fifteen and dark. Blearily she stared at the numbers on the clock, what was that noise? It was distant but piercing and persistent. She sat bolt upright! It was a smoke alarm!
Reaching out to her bedside lamp she flicked the switch. In the lamplight Arabella leaped out of bed and opened the small wardrobe in the corner of her room, she knew she didn’t have time to dress so she threw on her warmest coat and slipped her feet into some second hand (second foot?) boots he had managed to grab a couple of years ago. Then, she opened the small door in her bedside cabinet and took out a large flashlight that she kept in there in case of a power outage, it lit brightly when she turned it on, good, so far.
On top of the cupboard was a yellow hair scrunchie, she grabbed it and used it to tie her hair back moving into the main living area of the apartment. She switched on the main light and walked over to the door.
As Arabella opened the door, all the lights went out. She peered into the main corridor, dimly lit by emergency lighting which came on in the event of a power failure, they were on a backup, battery circuit.
She looked down the corridor and gasped as a wave of thick smoke swept towards her, did she hear a scream or someone call out, maybe both. The smoke alarm in her own apartment shrieked into life making her jump. Coughing and with panic building in her chest, she pulled the door shut behind herself, she clicked the flashlight on again and ran to the exit speedily. Passing through both sets of doors she found herself out in the cool night air.
Arabella doubled over, coughing onto the path. Gulping in fresh air she looked around, at times like these she wished she could afford a cell phone, no hopes of that. What to do? She turned, the outer door was a heavy one with a small rectangular window above the lock, wedging the flashlight under her arm and cupping her hands around her face she looked through it.
The smoke was thick, through the inner glass door she could see the dimly lit corridor but only down as far as the first two apartment doors, hers was on the left, beyond that it was like peering into a dense fog.
At that moment the right-hand door opened and a figure appeared, it was Zak, her neighbour across the corridor. She watches as he raises a bright light, it shines off his dark, shaved head. He is wearing a long heavy-duty coat with reflective panels around the bottom and across the back, of course, she remembered, he was an ex-firefighter who had retired early, she watched as he slowly moved into the smoke, it looked like he was wearing some sort of mask. He was quickly swallowed by
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Texte: Gerry Chadwick
Bildmaterialien: Gerry Chadwick
Cover: Gerry Chadwick
Lektorat: Gerry Chadwick
Korrektorat: Gerry Chadwick
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 19.04.2023
ISBN: 978-3-7554-3956-1
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