Garden Grove: 6 Vandals Strike Again – Stanley by LV Gaudet

As dawn broke over the horizon, adding an orange glow to the darkness, trucks and cars started lining up along the still unpaved road going into the Garden Grove site where new homes would soon start sprouting from the ground.

The large sign at the entrance announcing the coming of sleek and stylish homes and the promise of country-city living in the new Garden Grove Meadows development sported a new and rather rude crudely drawn caricature of what appeared to be intended as the foreman overseeing the job.

Stanley Rutthers stopped his truck to look at the vandalized billboard sign.  He shook his head with a chuckle at the drawing of himself splashed across the sign in large swatches of paint in a color that suggested someone had bought the wrong paint and rushed to the store in horror for a new color, leaving the unused paint to eventually find its way here.

“Kids,” he muttered.

Yelling from the site caught his attention.

He continued on into the jobsite to park closer, wondering what he will find this time.  This constant vandalism has gone well beyond being tiresome.

He parked near the scene of the commotion where one of the men was pounding senselessly on the door of one of the blue plastic portable toilets and swearing loudly.

As Stanley got out of his truck, the man ran off down the road, jumped into a truck, and tore out of there, the truck’s tires spitting dirt as he gunned the engine in a big hurry.

Stanley watched him go and stared down the road in mute surprise for a moment after he was out of sight before he turned and looked at the men standing around, their reactions ranging from laughter to shock and fear.  It was obvious there was an issue with the toilets and the man really had to go.

He headed over to them to find out what is going on.

“The doors are all glued shut,” one of the men said as he approached.

Stanley turned and walked away shaking his head.  He did not know if he should laugh or cry.

He walked towards the little portable trailer that serves as a jobsite office, digging his keys out of his pocket on the way.

Stanley paused just before reaching the trailer, looking around.  A chill feeling of dread ran down his back and the words of an old saying from his childhood, “someone just walked over my grave,” came to his mind.  He’d heard the phrase many times in response to that sudden unexplained shiver that sometimes takes people by surprise.

He has the uneasy feeling that someone is watching, and that it is not just a casual observer.  He can feel the intent to harm in that stare and for just a moment he could not shake the feeling that he was the mouse the cat is about to sink its claws into.

Stanley turned and stared at the section of woods that they had not yet cleared.  He has a sense he is being watched from there.  He studied the woods, looking for any sign of movement.  There is none except the muted shaking of the trees’ branches in the wind.

The uneasy feeling would not go away.

He continued on and stopped at the trailer door, grasping the padlock in one hand and bringing the key to it.

The key resisted going into the padlock.  The keyhole seemed to be blocked by something.

“Glue?” he wondered.  If someone glued the toilet doors, they could have glued the lock too.

He knelt down, examining the lock.  He thought he saw something pink inside it.

He tried shoving the key in again.  There was resistance, but he could force it part of the way in.  He could not get it even half way in.

He pulled the key back out.

Some kind of pink substance came out in small chunks, scraped out of the lock by the key.

He sniffed it.

Bubblegum.

“Shit!” he muttered.

Stanley is in a foul mood now as he headed back to his truck.  He has to go to the company office for a pair of bolt cutters to cut through the padlock and a new lock.

“Hey, what are you going to do about the toilets?” one of the crew called after him.

Stanley paused and turned back to meet the expectant stares of his men.

“Hell if I care,” he grumbled.  “Cut the damned doors off.”

He was turning away again and thought better of it.  These guys probably would cut the doors off.  He turned back to them again.

“I’ll get the office to call the company to bring out new ones.  They can cut their owned damned doors off.”

He turned away and went to his truck, driving out of there a little too fast in his anger.

 

GARDEN GROVE IS AVAILABLE ON KINDLE AND IN PAPERBACK ON AMAZON

 

Available on Kindle and in paperback on Amazon:

The McAllister Series

 

Where the Bodies Are

 

The McAllister Farm

 

Hunting Michael Underwood

 

 

And  for the teens and middle years kids who like middle years/teen drama and monsters, a fantasy psychological thriller.