by Michael Koryta
The couple from Florida moved in on the Fourth of July, and the first time Janice Jardine saw either of them was when their pug ran into her yard and took a dump not ten feet away from the grill where her barbecued chicken was cooking.
Janice lifted a spatula and prepared to utter a creative oath that her grandfather had perfected back in the days when Port Hope, Maine, was still a shipbuilder’s town, but before she could let it fly a petite blonde woman stepped between the birch trees and entered Janice’s yard with a smile and an apology.
Janice matched the smile. Janice was swell at putting on a smiling mask when her heart was a cold black fist and her mind a whirlpool of red tides.
“I’m so sorry!” the blonde said, showing white teeth against her tan, unlined skin. She was wearing white capri pants and a pink tank top and probably weighed little more than the spatula in Janice’s upraised hand.
“Adam John!” the blonde hissed at the pug, snapping her fingers. “Come here, right now!”
The canine kettlebell straightened from his hunker and galloped across the yard toward her, but not before scratching a couple swaths of soil over his mess. Janice had just cut the grass for the holiday, and now there were ruts and dog turds in it.
“Well, this is no way to meet a neighbor,” the blonde said, laughing and gathering the dog into her arms. Good thing she was a nimble little thing; you could throw your back out, hoisting that pug. “I apologize. Let me get him home and I’ll be right back with a poop bag.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Janice said, still with the smile plastered across her broad face. She didn’t see much to like about the dog or the woman, but what Janice did like was intel, as she had always called it despite her husband’s exasperated sighs in the days before he died of a heart attack.
It’s gossip, Steve would say. It’s yapping over the back fence about somebody else’s business. It’s a lot of things, but it sure isn’t intel, intelligence or intelligent. Quit trying to dignify it.
But Steve benefitted from Janice’s intel. Most of the neighbors did. The Jardine family didn’t run Happy Hills without Janice’s intel-gathering ways, and somebody had to keep an eye on the neighborhood or it would go straight to hell.
You gathered intel best when you offered kindness, Janice knew, and so she bustled her bulk down the steps from the deck and served a handshake alongside the smile.
“Don’t you ever worry about letting that little cutie into my yard,” she said.
“I’ve got to clean up his—”
“Oh, please.” Janice waved her off. “I’m a pet person, honey.”
She was a cat person, truth be told. She didn’t care for dogs and she despised small dogs especially, and purebred small dogs with flat faces? Oh, they were just the worst. All five of Janice’s cats knew how to use a darned litter box, but this curly-tailed mongrel had sashayed into her immaculate yard and crapped while looking her dead in the eye.
Janice smiled and reached out to pet the ugly thing. He grunted in that way that pugs did and then shoved his face forward and licked barbecue sauce off the spatula.
Janice’s forced laugh came out high and shrill, but the blonde didn’t know how unnatural that sound was. The blonde nymph was new in the neighborhood.
“Adorable,” Janice said. “Isn’t he just precious? And he knows good sauce!”
“I’m so sorry,” the nymph said, pulling the grunting little cur back. “We were unloading the U-Haul and I thought the front door was closed but he snuck right—”
“You need to learn how to stop apologizing if you’re living in Port Hope, Maine!” Janice said, laughing again and extending the spatula to the dog. “Welcome to Happy Hills. The name may seem silly, but it really is happy up here. I’m Janice Jardine.”
The nymph put her child-sized hand into Janice’s palm and said, “Lily Goodwin. My husband, Riley, is still unloading.”
Janice had a niece named Riley. She’d never cared for it as a man’s name. Well, you met all kinds these days. Janice had noticed plenty of liberal bumper stickers in town of late. Election years had a way of grinding her gears. At least she didn’t need to worry about the political yard signs anymore. She’d fixed that with a few trips to the town office, clutching copies of the subdivision covenants in her hand.
“Well, it is so good to meet you—and to have the chance to send you home with some barbecued chicken!” Janice told the nymph, beaming.
“We couldn’t possibly—”
“You can and you will. I cook so darn much, if you guys don’t take it, I just wouldn’t know what to do with the leftovers!”
The nymph smiled. “You’re very kind. That’s a relief because we’re strangers in town. You never know how that will go until you move in, right?”
“You never do,” Janice agreed, watching the ugly dog nuzzle up against the nymph’s neck, leaving a smear of sauce on her suntanned skin. Janice did not tan, she either burned or freckled, but Janice was also smart enough to wear some gosh-darned deet in the summertime in Maine, and a layer of deet would teach a dog not to lick your neck.
“I was planning to come over and greet you,” she told the nymph, “but I didn’t know when exactly you’d be arriving, and I hadn’t counted on it being right on the holiday. I saw the For Sale sign come down a couple weeks back, but I never did get a chance to talk to the Realtor.”
In truth, the Realtor refused to speak to Janice. They’d had a few standoffs over the years, and that was just fine. If it was up to Janice, nobody would sell a house in Happy Hills without checking in with the neighbors first. It was the respectful thing to do. Janice also avoided the Realtor’s recent trips because he’d wanted the spare keys back. Janice had a way of acquiring keys. Everyone needed the occasional favor done, and if you were the first one to offer, you were usually on the receiving end of an in-case-of-emergency key.
Janice didn’t mind doing the favors. Feed a cat or water a plant, fine, happy to do it, because you never got a better intel-gathering opportunity than from a few precious unmonitored minutes in someone else’s home. Why, she hadn’t even known Sherrie Holmes was allergic to gluten until she had the chance to go through her pantry and review some recipe cards, and there wasn’t a soul in the neighborhood who’d known about Bob Louden’s depression until Janice got a glimpse of the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom.
“It seems like a very peaceful neighborhood,” the nymph said, admiring the towering pines and birches and taking a deep breath of air that had been tinged with the scent of freshly cut grass right up until the pug poop wafted into the wind.
“It brings your blood pressure down, living here,” Janice said. “You guys will be so happy here. Lily and Riley Goodwin, of Port Hope, Maine.” She put a cheerful lilt into it. “That does have a nice sound. Now, did I hear you call that dog Adam John?”
The nymph laughed. “It’s a strange name for a dog, right? He was called Bosco when we got him from the breeder, but we were watching him as a puppy, joking about the dumb things he’d do that reminded us of my brothers, and so we just started blending their names.” She shrugged. “It stuck with me.”
It stuck with you because it’s stupid, Janice thought while she put on a show of hearty laughter. It stuck with you because you’ve got no brains, little missy, and now you’re my neighbor, a brainless blonde with an ugly little dog who poops in my lawn. Happy Fourth of July, Janice Jardine!
“Well, isn’t that adorable,” Janice said. “Where are you all from, anyhow?”
“Florida,” the nymph said.
“Florida! How lovely!” Janice lied with gusto. “All that sunshine and the palm trees.”
Oh, heaven help her, they were From Away. In Maine, there were two kinds of people: natives, and People From Away, the dreaded P.F.A.s, as she and Steve had always called them.
“Palm trees, yes, but I sure don’t miss the humidity,” the nymph said. Janice could picture her doing yoga on some beach while a stereo blared unholy hip-hop music and muscle-bound millennials spent their parent’s hard-earned money on cocktails with umbrellas but declined the bread before dinner because they were counting carbs. Oh, she could see it, no trouble at all.
“I bet you’ll miss that humidity in February,” she said. “When the first nor’easter blows in, you’ll miss Florida plenty!”
She was still laughing when the nymph said, “Well, we’re actually going to have to head back down for the winter. Riley can work from home year-round, but I’ve got to be back in the office for the academic year.”
Heaven help me, they’re not just from away, they’re seasonal! Janice realized with mounting horror.
She swallowed, got the smile back, and then said, “Lucky ducks! What I wouldn’t give for that chance. Maine and Florida. That’s a good combination, right there.”
Janice didn’t like leaving the neighborhood for long stretches, even on vacation. Anything could happen if you weren’t watching. Anything at all.
“Do you have kids?” she asked.
“Not just yet.” Lily smiled a tight smile, the kind that might have meant a little privacy, please to some folks, but Janice had never been bothered by social cues.
“When the time is right,” she assured the nymph, and then said, “Let me get you that plate of chicken. You all have been moving furniture, you guys must be famished.”
“You really don’t need to—”
“It’s what I want to do that matters,” Janice warned her. “Not what I need to do.”
That, as the residents of Happy Hills had learned, was the gospel truth.
She turned and heaved her prodigious hips back through the open gate at the base of the deck steps. She went inside and got two foil pans and came back out to check the chicken. When she was sure that Lily Goodwin wasn’t looking, Janice used the spatula that the dog had licked to move three lovely pieces of barbecued chicken into one of the foil pans. Those she brought down to Lily with a smile.
“You’re too kind,” the nymph said. “Really.”
“It’s called being neighborly. I look forward to getting to know you guys. You’ll have to bring your husband by sometime.”
She gave the nymph a little wave and a cheerful goodbye and then she stood on the deck and watched her disappear through the trees toward the old Thomas house. The Thomases had been good people, good Mainers who made maple syrup and gave out their house keys without hesitation. Left the doors unlocked, most times. You could trust a person who left their doors unlocked.
Janice turned off the propane and used clean tongs to move the remains of the chicken into a fresh pan, gave the dog turd in the lawn one last glare, and then went inside. The cats swarmed at her feet.
“I met the neighbor,” she told them. “Got a chance to chat when her silly dog waddled right into our yard and took a dump.”
The cats yowled in commiseration. Janice took five cans of Fancy Feast out of the pantry and went for the can opener. The cats trailed at her heels.
“P.F.A.s,” Janice announced grimly. Out-of-staters. Pains in the behind, you could count on it.
The cats meowed, and Janice nodded as if they’d spoken.
“Ayuh. Florida. Little blonde thing looks like she just got blown in from the beach. Only be here for the summer, she says. Acted like she’s got a job, but she doesn’t seem like the working type to me.”
She fed the cats and then set to work fixing salad and corn on the cob to pair with the chicken. She was alone on a holiday, but that was the way it had been since Steve died. He’d had a heart attack one day when she was explaining a utility easement concern to him, just up and died on her. Her son didn’t come back to visit his mother the way he should, but that was his wife’s fault, and Janice had a plan to fix it.
The Thomas family who lived next door had been part of the plan, but then they’d sold their house without so much as a word to her, almost as if to spite her, all because of a little dustup over the green space on the other side of their property. Foolish, when you considered that she’d set out to help them. The pond in that green space was a gosh-darned liability, and she was willing to move it out of neighborhood care and convert it into a private lot.
One for her son, Bobby. Bring the family back to the neighborhood. That way Janice could keep an eye on them. The green space was a prime building lot but for some reason the Thomases hadn’t seen it that way. Well, the blonde nymph from Florida was good news in this respect. She and her husband would understand the situation once Janice explained it properly.
She could be convincing. Or exhausting. Either way, what Janice Jardine wanted, she got.
She ate her Fourth of July barbecue alone, gazing out the window. In the yard, Adam John’s offering still sat, steaming. Apparently, the nymph had taken Janice seriously about it being no big deal.
P.F.A.s from Florida. Couldn’t be too surprised at anything they did. The good news, though, was that they were bound to be stupid. And that was important because the green space conversion required their signed letter of assent. The Thomases, for all of their maple-syrup making, hadn’t been good neighbors when it came to signing that simple letter. If you believed the gossip, Janice’s efforts to claim the green space were actually one of the reasons they’d moved. But Janice knew better than to believe gossip. She dealt in the realities of legal research, and her legal research said that property could be converted once she had the approval of the abutters. There was some other legalese in there, sure, but most of Janice’s enemies at the town hall had died and now she’d hectored old Sam Jones, the town planner, into consenting to rezone it as a building lot—provided Janice could get signatures of approval from each resident in Happy Hills, including the abutters. She could count on twelve of them, but the new neighbors were unlucky number thirteen. She’d been concerned about that until she’d seen the blonde with the pug.
Janice smiled and licked barbecue sauce off the fuzz above her upper lip. P.F.A.s. This would be easy. The nymph would sign, and once the lot was rezoned as a buildable property, Janice could claim it for nothing more than the tax bill. She’d worked that out with Sam Jones. Once it was hers? Well, a house would go up for Bobby then. He was married now and had two kids of his own and that little shrew of a—
Stop it, Janice, that’s your daughter-in-law, the mother of your grandchildren.
That lovely little lady of his was strangely averse to visiting. Ever since the ridiculous argument about Janice perusing their check register—an entirely innocent mistake because what was it doing in the top drawer of the breakfast nook, anyhow, where any stranger in the house was likely to find it?—her son and his family had kept their distance.
But Janice knew what they were saving their money for: a building lot. Bobby had told her that plenty of times. They wanted a few acres in a nice, peaceful neighborhood with old-growth trees. Janice had those requirements on the record, from Bobby and Sarah both. Well...
Merry Christmas, kids.
The nymph would sign. Oh, yes, she would.
Janice waited a week before she arrived at their door with the pie and the paperwork.
The Goodwins seemed pleased to see her, even if the husband, Riley, looked a bit perplexed at her unannounced arrival. Get used to it, folks; you’re not in Florida anymore. People in Port Hope were neighborly. You shared pies. And house keys.
“The secret to the crust is adding just a pinch of sea salt,” Janice said, and then she launched into the recipe while she slid the letter of assent onto their kitchen counter. The letter was partially obscured with a large Post-it Note with Janice’s phone number and the words: “Call anytime, for anything! Welcome, welcome, welcome!!”
She stayed on the subject of pies for most of the conversation cyclone that she blew through the Goodwins’ kitchen. She got all the way through the history of the farm out in Union where she’d gotten the blueberries before she even mentioned the paperwork. Then, she treated it as if it was an afterthought.
“Oh—and this. Ugh. You guys, you don’t know how lucky you are to be arriving now, after this headache is done.”
Riley cocked an eyebrow that arched up over his glasses. He was a bookish-looking man who’d probably never had a callus in his life.
“What headache?”
Janice gave a dismissive wave. “Oh, you don’t even want to hear about it, trust me! Just one of those neighborhood things, someone has to take charge, and I was drafted!” She gave her most put-upon sigh. “But I got it handled.”
“Got what handled?” Riley asked.
“The green space,” she said, pointing in the general direction of the vacant wooded lot beside them where Bobby would soon live. “There’s a stormwater pond back there, though you’d hardly know it, the thing is so small and overgrown. But it is a liability. There’s a drain pipe that must be three feet in diameter, and it goes all the way under the pines and down to the river at the back of the property. There’s not so much as a grate over it to keep the debris out. If you two had little ones, I’d be worried sick just thinking about what might happen if they fell in.” She shuddered. “But you don’t need to be worried about it, because we finally got that white elephant out of the collective hair of Happy Hills.”
“How’s that?” Riley said. He was looking at Janice, but Lily, the nymph, was reading the signature page. Janice had whited-out the page number when she made the copy, so they wouldn’t know that there were five pages prior to this one.
“The county’s going to convert it, some sort of annexation thing, I don’t need to bore you with it all, but the good news is, it is done and you guys won’t have to worry about it, thank goodness, it was all done before you even moved in! But you’ll have to sign to show you’re aware, that’s all.”
“It needs to be notarized,” the nymph said.
Janice smiled. “Good news,” she said, and took her notary stamp out of her purse. “I actually am a notary.”
This was true; she’d had to take the course and pay the fee to expedite some paperwork on a little easement dispute with the Abel family who’d lived up the road until a few years ago, when they moved out in a huff.
“Where’s the rest of the document?” the nymph asked.
Janice’s smile faltered. “Pardon?”
The nymph lifted the signature page. “This would be the last page of the document. It would follow the text that we have supposedly read and understood and agreed to.”
“There’s really not much else but a parcel map, but I’ll see that you get a copy,” Janice said, uncapping her pen. “You guys really are lucky, you know. You got here at the right time. Won’t have to sit in any of those endless zoning board meetings!”
She offered the nymph the pen and a 100-watt smile.
The nymph returned the smile but didn’t take the pen.
“It’s a protected green space,” the nymph said. “That’s in the deed and covenants. So what would it be converted into?”
Well, well, the little P.F.A. could read. Good for her.
“Converted into a taxable parcel,” Janice said. “That means it’s no longer part of the subdivision, which means it’s no longer your headache. The liability insurance on that pond won’t cost you one thin dime.”
“Who’s paying the tax?” the nymph asked.
Janice wet her lips, trying to keep the smile in place.
“It’s not something I’m advertising, because I don’t want people to feel bad for me, but...I agreed to pay it. You know, it isn’t so much, and I’ve got some savings, so I just figured, if I can remove this problem from everyone else, well, that’s what my mother would’ve called the neighborly thing and I want to live like my—”
“So you’d own the property.” The nymph stated this flatly and without much warmth. Riley blinked behind his bifocals, clueless.
“Technically, I guess.” Janice pursed her lips, as if this notion of ownership had just occurred to her. “The way to look at it is, I would own the liability, really. When you two have little ones, you won’t have to worry about that pond. I’ll make sure there’s fencing put in.”
“It’s a green space,” the nymph said. “It belongs to all of us. That’s in the covenants.”
She must have run out of issues of O magazine to read on the drive up from Florida if she’d spent this much time perusing the gosh-darned covenants.
Janice said, “It used to be. But we all agreed to convert it, so the liability issues wouldn’t be hanging over everyone’s head all the time.”
The nymph said, “This is not something we can support.”
The smile returned to Janice’s face, but it was a different smile, not the mask, oh, no, this time it was the real deal. It was cold and it was unyielding. Janice Jardine had been playing the long game in this neighborhood since before the nymph hit puberty. She’d run into a few folks who cared to read legalese before. Most of them had moved out. All of them had signed.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said with a sigh, “but the problem, you guys, is that all of this is already done. See, there are thirteen lot owners that make up the neighborhood, and a majority of Happy Hills’ residents agreed long ago that the best thing was—”
“Majority doesn’t matter,” the nymph said.
Her husband made a soft sigh, the sort of sound a downtrodden man makes without being aware of it, and wandered off to the fridge, opened it and got out a beer. Of course, he was a drinker. Janice Jardine didn’t touch alcohol. It dulled the mind.
Drink up, buddy, she thought, and then returned her focus to the nymph.
“I’m not sure how it worked in Florida,” she said patiently, “but you guys are in Maine now. We have a different legal system. Trust me, it is one ugly mess. I was a paralegal for twenty-five years, and I spent a lot of time unwinding big balls of messy knots. Up here in Maine it’s all about town ordinances and planning boards and then you’ve got the county to deal with, and then there’s the state, because the DEP has an interest in that stormwater pond, so it’s a very different process from the nice and polite little HOAs you guys probably had down in—”
“Majority doesn’t matter,” the nymph said again. “It’s a shared asset. It belongs to all of the homeowners. That means all of the homeowners have to agree.”
“And all of them have agreed,” Janice said. “It’s already been decided.”
The nymph showed her perfect little white teeth. “Not all of them.”
Janice wanted to smack those teeth into the back of her little blond head.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t want to see you guys get off on the wrong foot in this town. It’s a welcoming place but I’ll be honest, some folks don’t exactly love the snowbirds, okay? People from away can get on the wrong side pretty easily here, and I would hate to see that happen for you over something so silly as a—”
“It’s not silly,” the nymph said. “It’s privacy. We chose this house because it is private. We will not sign anything that removes that privacy. We like to be left alone.”
Oh, did they now? Did they come north in search of a little privacy in Vacationland? Wasn’t that sweet. Wasn’t that just the sweetest thing Janice Jardine had ever heard!
“See,” Janice said, “the only thing that really matters is what the law says. That’s all I’m doing here—explaining what the law says. Don’t shoot the messenger! But Mr. Jones with the town planning board can explain that—”
“I’ll give him a call.”
Janice took a deep breath. Watched the husband drink his beer. He gave her a little shrug, like, My wife, what can I tell ya?
“It’s the law,” Janice repeated. “So it’s not really a matter of opinion, or what you were hoping the place would be like, okay? This all began a long time ago, and it is something for lawyers to argue about, not neighbors.”
The nymph showed her teeth again. “Good news,” she said. “I’m a law professor.”
For a moment, it was silent. Janice looked down at the pen in her hand, and at the pie she’d spent the morning on, and then she capped the pen and put it back in her purse with her notary stamp.
“Well,” she said, “I can see it will take a day or two to sort this out.”
She smiled. The nymph smiled. The husband drank his beer and looked from one of them to the other as if tumbleweeds were blowing between them and they each had hands floating just above their gun belts.
“Enjoy that pie,” Janice told them, and then she left the house.
So the nymph was a law professor. Wasn’t that cute? A law professor who lived in Florida. Not licensed in the great state of Maine. Janice Jardine knew quite a few attorneys in Maine. She needed to bake a few more blueberry pies, she decided. One for each of the lawyers.
And one for Adam John, the pug.
The dog died that night, and Janice sat on the deck beneath the citronella torches and sipped iced tea and listened to the sobs. The husband, Riley, was talking about heart attacks and strokes. Lily the Nymph Law Professor kept saying she wanted to go to a veterinarian.
Little late for that, Janice thought, but then she heard the nymph’s faint voice add an interesting word: necropsy.
Janice stopped swinging on the porch glider so that the yard was completely quiet and listened for more.
“That’s not necessary,” Riley was saying, and oh, how Janice agreed with him. It was absolutely not necessary. Dogs with flat faces had breathing defects; tragedies happened to those breeds all the time. They didn’t have the longevity of a cat.
The nymph was still talking and still crying but Janice could no longer make out the words. She heard a screen door open and close and then the woods were quiet. After a long time, she returned to swinging in the glider.
Necropsy. That wasn’t a word most people threw around. What kind of law did the Florida nymph teach, exactly?
Janice took out her iPhone and entered “Lily Goodwin” into a search. Scrolled through the options and didn’t find the right match. She returned to the search page and put in “Lily Goodwin” and “Florida.” Still no matches. “Lily Goodwin” and “Florida” and “law professor.” Nothing.
Must be a diploma mill she teaches at, Janice thought with pleasure. I knew there were no brains to her. I knew exactly who she was the first time I laid eyes on her.
Surely, there was an online directory for the Florida State Bar Association.
Janice stood up from the swing and went inside. She wanted to use the desktop computer. Outside, the mosquitoes were beginning to buzz and soon would bite.
She sat at the computer for two hours. At first, she was incredulous, but then that morphed into delight. Pure, unadulterated delight.
P.F.A. indeed. A Person From Away, yes, but also a phony fraud attorney!
There was no Lily Goodwin licensed to practice law in the state of Florida. There was no Lily Goodwin on the faculty of any of the colleges in Florida that had a law school. In fact, there was no Lily on any law school faculty, period, so even if she used her maiden name professionally, Janice would have found her.
She thought of that smug little white-toothed smile and heard the little chipmunk voice saying, Majority doesn’t matter and Good news—I’m a law professor.
The little liar. That filthy little bleached-blonde liar!
In the morning, Janice would pay a visit. She would bring the signature sheet again, and her notary stamp, and this time she would not bring a pie.
“We’ll get to thirteen signatures,” Janice told the cats. “Oh, ayuh. We will most certainly get to thirteen.”
She took her time the next morning, savoring her coffee and watching the cats watch the birds. It was a beautiful day. Cobalt sky and a light breeze off the sea that had the birch leaves shimmering. Maine. A good place to be from. A tough place to barge into when you didn’t know how a small Yankee town worked.
She heard a car engine start next door and went to the window in time to see Riley Goodwin drive off in his Jeep, alone. Wonderful. It would be just Janice and the nymph, as it should be. The husband had never been anything more than a bit player in this brief little neighborhood drama. Husbands rarely were, in Janice’s experience.
She hadn’t even had a chance to knock on the door when it swung open. The nymph stood there, staring at her with red-rimmed eyes. It had been a long and emotional night for the poor thing.
“Good morning,” Janice said. “May I speak to you and Riley for a moment?”
“Riley is gone,” the nymph said tonelessly. Her eyes seared Janice like hot daggers. “He is taking Adam John to the vet for a necropsy.”
Janice put a hand to her breast.
“Do you know what a necropsy is?” the nymph asked, still in that empty voice.
“Of course. To determine cause of death. Oh, no. Oh, dear. Oh, I’m so—”
“Shut up,” the nymph said. “I don’t want to hear it. The only thing I want to hear is the result of that necropsy. If it’s what I think it is, then you’ll be hearing from me soon enough. They can put old ladies in jail, you know. Yes, they can.”
Janice Jardine smiled. The little lady from Florida thought she had some leverage here. Oh, how much she needed to learn about Port Hope, Maine.
“Where is it that you teach law?” Janice asked.
The nymph tried to hide the flicker of apprehension, but Janice saw it, and her smile widened.
“Where?” Janice repeated.
The nymph tried to gather herself. Gripped the door frame and said, “The University of Southern Florida. Now get the hell off my—”
“Under what name?”
Pause. A blink. “I am telling you to get off—”
“You don’t teach law. Not at USF or anywhere else. You don’t practice law. You never passed the bar in Florida. You’re a fraud and a liar and I think people around here will be very interested to learn a little about you. I don’t know it all yet. But I will, honey. You rest assured. I will.”
She turned and walked away then, calling out over her shoulder, “You just give me a ring when you’re ready to sign. I left my phone number with the paperwork.”
She didn’t even have time to sit down. The phone was ringing almost before she’d closed her front door. She stood in the center of the living room and listened to it ring and she smiled. Then she picked it up.
“Yes, dear?”
“Come back, please.”
“What’s that?”
“Please. I will sign it. I will sign whatever you want.”
“I know you will, dear,” Janice said kindly. “I’ll be right over.”
Janice Jardine hung up the phone, sat on her rocking chair and lit a cigarette. She allowed herself six per year, on special occasions.
Victory, she told the cats, was a special friggin’ occasion.
When the cigarette was gone, she flicked the butt into the sink, washed it down the garbage disposal, gathered her notary supplies and returned to her new neighbors’ home.
The nymph who called herself Lily Goodwin was waiting on the front porch, sitting on the step. She wore sweatpants and an oversize hooded sweatshirt and her hair was a mess. Those red-rimmed eyes appeared to have fresh tears in them, poor thing.
“We didn’t have to do it the hard way,” Janice told her. “I hated to do that to you guys. But...” She gave a sad sigh. “You kinda forced my hand there, you know?”
The nymph nodded. Looked up at Janice and spoke in a soft, thick voice. “Will you show me the pond? I’d like to take a walk and...” She swallowed with an effort. “Tell you a few things about us. About me.”
“Oh, hon,” Janice said. “You can trust me. Really, you can. I don’t want to be the bad guy. I just want to look after all of my neighbors, okay?”
“Okay.”
So they left the yard and walked through the pines together, into the five-acre, wedge-shaped lot where soon Bobby and Sarah and the grandkids would live, right down the road, under Janice’s watchful eye, as it always should have been. For once, Janice let silence linger. She rarely favored this approach, but she knew a broken woman when she saw one, and Lily Goodwin was toast.
“Do you know my real name yet?” the nymph finally asked.
“No,” Janice said. “But you should tell me. Because I will find out, hon. Trust me on that.”
“I do.” The nymph made a sad, choked laugh in the back of her throat. “That’s the problem. I really don’t think you’d ever stop, would you?”
Janice just smiled. They were headed downhill now, stepping over the snaking roots that interrupted the pine needle–strewn ground like miniature mountain ranges. Janice knew every step. She’d been scouting this property since long before the “Goodwin” family first crossed the Piscataqua River. The stormwater drainage flowed beside them, riding a natural ridge of granite on its way down to the retention pond. When the water was high—and it was now, after an unusually wet spring with a lot of snowmelt—the water in the pond poured into a massive drainpipe and vanished below ground, funneled deep beneath the hill, and emptied out into the river below. From there, the water drifted on to Bell Pond, where soon Janice would teach her grandchildren to swim while they watched their new house go up.
Long game. You had to play it ruthlessly to win, but it was all worth it in the end.
“Do you have your phone?” the nymph said.
“What?”
“Your phone. Did you bring it?”
“Yes.”
The nymph stopped walking above the pond and sighed. Wiped at her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
“Google the name Robin Ross,” she said.
“Why don’t you just tell me, dear?”
But the nymph shook her head, and Janice could tell she was in no condition to speak. If she parted those foolish lips again all that was going to come out was a lot of blubbering and tears. A shame, and so unnecessary. Janice Jardine wasn’t hard to get along with. All she’d needed was a silly signature.
“I’ll look it up,” she said, “but first? You really do need to sign my paper.”
The nymph nodded. Janice offered her the signature page and a pen.
“Put down whatever name you’d like,” she said. “But ideally it would match the name on the deed.”
She laughed at that, but the nymph didn’t join in. She just rested the paper against a tree trunk so she could scribble her name on it.
“That’s the last of them?” she asked. “Now it’s just a matter of paying the tax bill and it’s free and clear?”
“That’s right,” Janice said, taking the signature sheet back. She almost felt bad for the silly little thing. “People from away don’t understand our little towns, you know. It’s so much better to learn how things already work in a place than to come in and try to change them.”
Lucky number thirteen was in the bag. Janice would call the excavator tomorrow. The excavator would do his work cheap because Janice happened to know a few things about his son’s heroin habit that the man would rather not have shared around town.
“Put the name in on your phone, please,” the nymph said. “Robin Ross.”
Now that the long game was won, Janice had only passing interest in whatever foolishness the little twit had gotten caught up in back in Florida, but she was always willing to gather more intel, so she humored her, and took out her phone.
“You were right about me,” the nymph said.
“Of course, I was.” Janice opened the web browser.
“I don’t teach law.”
“Of course, you don’t.” Janice put “Robin Ross” into the search bar.
“I haven’t passed the bar.”
“Of course, you haven’t.” Janice pressed Enter.
“But, in the immortal words of Jay-Z, ‘I know a little bit.’”
Janice didn’t know what that meant, but her attention was on the screen, anyhow. It had just refreshed, and there was a picture of the woman who now stood in front of her. In the photo, she was much paler and had brown hair, but the face was undeniable, and so was the caption beneath it, from a newspaper in Billings, Montana.
Accused Murderers Robin and James Ross Still Missing.
Janice looked up from the phone and into the nymph’s bright smile and the muzzle of the gun in her hand.
“As I think I told you,” the nymph said, “we picked this house because we wanted privacy.”
Janice dropped the phone and the signature page. Took one step backward. Began to say, You guys don’t need to worry about me, I will never tell a soul, I promise, but got only as far as “You guys—” before the first bullet punched between her eyes.
The second blew through her heart. The gunshots were loud, but the sound faded into the pines without drawing any attention. The best thing about Happy Hills was its solitude.
Robin Ross put the gun back into the pocket of her hoodie. She knew she hadn’t needed the second shot, but her dog had demanded she take it. One bullet for business, one bullet for vengeance.
She threw Janice Jardine’s phone into the pond. Watched the current tug it toward that fat, gaping drainpipe as it sank.
“That thing is a liability,” she said aloud.
She reached for Janice’s purse next but stopped herself before throwing it in. She removed a sheaf of paperwork and flipped through it. Twelve signed letters of assent to convert the designated green space property into a building lot. Lily Goodwin’s made thirteen.
She thought it would be wise to wait a few weeks before she called the town planner to discuss the property, but in time, that was the thing to do.
The more privacy, the better.
She set the letters aside and rolled Janice Jardine into the pond. Even rolling her downhill, it wasn’t easy. Janice was a sizable presence, dead or alive. Once she was in the water, the current helped. It took a few minutes of guiding the corpse with a long branch, but eventually, water and gravity conspired together, and Janice Jardine was gone.
Robin climbed back up the hill, gathered the letters of assent and started home. She figured it would be a few days before anyone dropped by with questions. Janice Jardine had seemed like a lonely lady. Her absence might be noted, but she wouldn’t be missed, exactly. Janice Jardine, she thought, might have an enemy or two in Port Hope.
She looked forward to hearing some of the theories. She thought that people would share them happily and without much restraint.
Nothing brought strangers together faster than a good murder story.