Beneath His Stolen Skin

Chapter 1: The Tenant Upstairs There was something rather peculiar about the young man in the upstairs bedroom, but Nolan Baxter couldn’t exactly put a finger on it. The man was so quiet and kept to himself, a prisoner within his own cell. One who Nolan believed to be solitary, introverted, and very much afraid of the world and its unfolding events around him. Rarely did he come out of his room when the other two tenants were present. Almost never did he leave the brownstone without a hat on, long-sleeved shirt, and gloves, even when it was considerably warm outside. Yet, Nolan found the young man’s peculiarities rather attractive, perhaps magnetic, and he only wanted to get to know the tenant even more, substantially better, and build a certain amount of trust and friendship with him. The room on the second floor was the tiniest in the lakeshore house. One window overlooked Lake Erie to the north. The closet was a foot deep and two feet wide, which was hardly useable. A full-size bed barely fit inside the room with a four-drawer dresser and a writing table—all were crammed against the available walls like children in a foster home. The man’s rent was a mere three hundred dollars a month since the room was miniscule. Had it offered more space for the tenant, Nolan would have charged a considerable amount more. Zeb Thursday, that was the strange man’s name, kept the room tidy. Regularly he swept the oak floor, washed his bed sheets, and used window cleaner on the single window. Never was there a hideous aroma that escaped his confines like unwashed clothes or three-day old pizza. Zeb was clean by all means, Nolan had noted. One of his cleanest tenants, if the truth be told. Nolan knew the young man’s age: twenty-three. He knew where he had come from: Cincinnati, Ohio. He believed Zeb’s parents had passed away, although he wasn’t quite positive. Zeb did not do drugs. He did not paint or play video games. Oftentimes he liked to take walks at night around Erie and Nolan sometimes followed him. The young man enjoyed Joyce Carol Oates novels, John Updike stories, and poetry by Sylvia Plath. Never was he seen with a Grisham or King novel tucked in his palms. He didn’t smoke, nor did he drink. Never did he have a visitor at 1287 Medford Street—a certain somebody in his life who climbed the sixteen steps to his second floor room to spend an hour or a night. He wasn’t a graduate of Edinboro or West End Colleges. He didn’t work, Nolan surmised, but his monthly rent for the room was never late, and always in cash. Honestly, Zeb Thursday wasn’t a problem at all. Strange, but not a nuisance like some of the other tenants Nolan housed throughout the last three years. In fact, Zeb was desired, in more ways than one, but those details of Nolan’s fixation were tamped and unprofessional.