7

my first instinct, in the hours following the discovery of Spender's body, even without knowing exactly how he'd died, was to give everyone a security lecture. Don't talk to strangers or pick up hitchhikers, make sure you haven't left the keys in the door, make sure you throw the deadbolt, obey your “walk” and “don't walk” signals, don't use the electric hair dryer while you're sitting in the bathtub, wait an hour after eating before swimming, never run with scissors.

But I sensed this was the wrong way to go. It had only been a couple days since the hidden car incident, and now that Sarah and I were speaking to each other again, I didn't want to set things back. My goal was tolerance. I would not let things get to me. I would let things go. Like water off a duck's back. I'd stop telling everyone how to behave. I'd mellow out.

I'd learn to chill.

When Paul and Angie got home, I told them what had happened down by the creek. Angie said, “Are you sure the guy was dead? Maybe he was just pretending to be dead to teach you a lesson about safe hiking.” Then she ran for her camera and persuaded her brother to come with her so she could take her first pictures of a crime scene. On their way out, Sarah shoved a twenty into her hand and told her to buy her brother and herself some pizza for dinner, and to eat it at the restaurant, not bring it home.

“Oh God,” Paul said under his breath to his sister. “They're going to go at it.”

After Sarah and I had picked the drywall out of our fettuccine, and had dinner, Paul's worst fears were realized. There's nothing like brushing up against death to reinvigorate the lovemaking process. My disposition was definitely improving.

My resolve to be less of a know-it-all jerk was tested early the next morning, when I found the front door unlocked. Once Angie and Paul had returned from dinner, Paul had gone back out with his friend Hakim, sneaking from one movie to another at the multiplex, buying tickets for a PG show and then slipping into the theater showing an R-rated slasher pic where women with heaving bosoms kept falling down while trying to run away, so he wasn't in until after midnight. When I went down in the morning to get The Metropolitan, the bolt on the door hadn't been turned. And there, sitting within an arm's reach of it, was Sarah's purse. I nearly mentioned it to him at breakfast, but didn't. Next time, I'd just wait until Paul was home and go down and check the door myself.

Paul left for school at the regular time, but Angie hung in, going downstairs to put the finishing touches to a photography assignment. I noticed a hot smell as I walked past her bedroom. She'd left her curling iron on, which was resting atop her dresser, the cord still plugged into the wall. So I unplugged it. Made no mental note to rent a smoke machine to send dark billowing clouds out of her bedroom window, or arrange to have a fire truck parked at the curb for when she came home.

“Let it go,” I said aloud as I emerged from her bedroom on my way downstairs to the study to get to work.

From the basement, she called to me. Her voice, coming from behind a door, was muffled. “Dad! Come down for a sec!”

In the brochure, Valley Forest Estates had called it a “wine cellar” or “cold room,” a place to keep fresh vegetables or store fine bottles of white and red. The room was no more than five by seven feet in size, and we had turned it into a darkroom.

“Hang on,” she said, making sure her film was safe from any invading light, then opened the door to admit me into the blackness. My eyes adjusted to the soft red light, the smell of developing fluid swirling up my nostrils. I was brought in occasionally as a technical adviser, having spent a lot of time in a darkroom when I worked in newspapers, but this time Angie just wanted me to see what she was doing.

“What's the assignment?” I asked.

“Just wait,” she said, moving the white paper back and forth in the solution. Gradually, images began to take shape. “I love this part,” Angie said. “It's like watching something being born. A lot of the kids, they've got these digital cameras, they do everything on the screen. It's kind of cool, but there's no suspense, you know? This way, half the fun is in the anticipation.”

A street sign came into view. “Chancery Park.” Then houses.

“It's our neighborhood,” I said. “You took some pictures of the street. Isn't that nice.”

But as each shot materialized, it became clear that Angie was up to much more than that. The pictures, all black-and-white, had a starkness about them.

“There are no people,” I said. “The streets are empty.”

“Yeah,” said Angie. “I captured them just the way they are. And see how the trees look like twigs, and in this shot, I've lined up the houses so you can see how they're all exactly the same.”

“Very effective,” I said.

“I'm calling it ‘Dying in Suburbia: A Study in Redundancy.'”

“It's good,” I said quietly. “It's very good.”

Angie was still on the same theme as I drove her to school later, since she'd missed the bus. She said, “How much longer are we going to live out here?”

“Excuse me?”

“How much longer? We've been out here, like, almost two years and when are we going to move back into the city? Would we be able to buy back the house on Crandall? It wouldn't have to be that house, although it would be nice, unless the new owners are, like, a bunch of psycho goths who've ripped out the walls and painted the ceilings black or something.”

“Where did you get the idea we were moving back into the city?”

“I just figured, sooner or later, you'd see what a terrible mistake it was to move out here and we'd go back.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, glancing over at Angie as I pulled away from a stop sign. “Who said this was a terrible mistake?”

“Well, first of all, the house is falling apart and—”

“The house is not falling apart.”

“Mom said last night the ceiling fell right into the pasta.”

“The ceiling did not fall. A small chunk of it fell because it was wet because there's a leak in the upstairs shower, which can be fixed, which does not mean the house is falling apart. And the builder has some two-year warranty or something, so don't worry about it.”

Angie looked out her window and said nothing.

“I go to school with a bunch of losers,” she said, finally.

I let that one hang out there for a while. “What do you mean, losers?”

She shrugged, a kind of like-this-needs-an-explanation? shrug. “I know you and Mom thought moving out here would mean you'd never have to worry again about schools, about drugs and all that shit. But you have no idea. We've got the Crips, and crackheads, and—I mean, look at Columbine. That was, like, the middle of nowhere. That wasn't some inner-city school or something. And look what happened there.”

“What are you saying? That there are guys in long black coats waiting to shoot up the school?” I had shifted into parental overdrive.

“No, no, jeez, no, God, don't go all hyper on me. All I'm saying is just because we moved out of the city doesn't mean that there aren't still weird people in my school. There's weird people wherever you go. Just 'cause we've moved doesn't mean we're never going to run into crazy people again. It's really no different out here than anyplace else, at least from that point of view. But you don't have people willing to be eccentric.”

“Okay, you've lost me. We've got weird, but we don't have eccentric.”

“I mean, like, remember my friend Jan? The one with the boots, and the tears in her stockings, and the orange skirts?”

“And the thing in her tongue?”

“Yeah. Like, she barely rated a second glance at my old school, but if you moved her out here, where everyone's wearing their Abercrombie & Fitch, they'd think she was totally strange.”

“She was totally strange.”

“Yeah, but that's the point. She kind of was, but no one noticed? You could do that downtown, and no one really thought about it. Out here, there's this suburban thing, where you have to be borderline normal all the time.”

In some inexplicable way, I knew what she was talking about.

“That's why, for example, Paul wants to get a tattoo,” Angie said. “So he can be just a little edgy out here.”

“Paul wants a tattoo?”

Angie glanced at me, realizing she'd broken a confidence. “He didn't tell you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You didn't hear it from me, but he's thinking about it. There's a place, in the plaza, that'll do them.”

“He can't get a tattoo. He's not even sixteen yet. They wouldn't do it.”

Angie rolled her eyes. We were almost to the school. “Is there more?” I asked.

Angie was quiet.

“Haven't you made any friends here?”

Angie shifted her chin around, a nod in disguise. “Not really. I had friends at Bannerman, like Krista, and Molly, and Denny, but I had to leave them because it wasn't safe there, we had to move to a neighborhood where everything would be okay.” There was a mocking tone. “Well, so what if there was a flasher and a few hookers or some needles on the sidewalk? At least it was interesting.”

“You know you're welcome to have your friends out here any time you want,” I offered. “Invite them on Friday or Saturday, do a sleepover thing in the basement.”

Angie looked at me as though I'd just stepped out of an episode of Ozzie and Harriet. “God, Dad, I'm not five. And, like, they just can't wait to come out here.”

I stopped the car out front of the school. “I hate this place,” Angie said, slipping out the door and closing it behind her.

 

i swung by kenny's hobby shop to see whether a model I'd ordered, of the dropship the Marines use to fly from the mother ship to the planet's surface in the movie Aliens, had come in. I could have phoned, but going in person to check gave me an excuse to wander the shop and see whether any other new things had arrived. Kenny catered to a variety of hobbyists—model railroaders, slot car fans, fliers of radio-control airplanes—but his selection of SF-related kits was fairly extensive for a full-range hobby store.

My model hadn't shown up. “Maybe next week,” said Kenny, who was leaning over the counter, mini-screwdriver in hand, trying to reattach a wheel to a metal reproduction of an old Ford Thunderbird. “You ever wonder,” Kenny asked, not taking his eyes from his work, “why men have nipples?”

I thought about that for a moment. Not about the question itself, but at the sorts of things that preoccupied Kenny. “Not really.”

Kenny bit his lip and held his breath, not wanting the tiny screw to slip from its hole. “It just doesn't make any sense at all. They don't do anything, they serve no purpose.” Then: “How's the house?”

“Shower's still leaking into the ceiling in the kitchen, drywall's falling into the kitchen. The tub taps drip, the wind whistles sometimes around the sliding glass doors. The caulking around our bedroom window is useless. I don't even bother to take down the ladder. I'm squeezing caulking in every couple of weeks.”

“There's another guy, lives in your neighborhood, says he's had trouble with his windows, and wiring problems, you know? Breakers popping, that kind of thing.”

“We haven't had that. Yet.”

I asked Kenny if he had the latest issue of Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models, which he didn't, so I said I'd see him later and got back in the car.

Driving home, my thoughts turned to Angie. Our problems with shoddy house construction were minor compared to hers. Her world was falling apart. Paul had adapted to our move out here much better. He made friends more easily, didn't place a lot of demands on them. As long as they were interested in playing video games and didn't have any moral qualms about sneaking into movies that they weren't supposed to see, that was good enough for him. He'd even struck up that semi-friendship with Earl, developed an interest in gardening and landscaping. Not that things were perfect with Paul. His marks were lousy. School bored him. There was that upcoming appointment with his science teacher. And now, there was this new development about Paul wanting to get a tattoo.

He and I would have to talk.

Maybe, I thought as I drove through the streets of Valley Forest Estates, I'd made a terrible mistake. I'd dragged us out here out of fear and delivered us into mediocrity. And then I shook my head and decided that my initial instincts had been right—the recent corner store robbery downtown reinforced my decision. Just because the suburban architecture was bland didn't mean our lives had to be. We still had our interests and our passions no matter where we lived. We didn't have to give those up just because we no longer lived downtown.

The evidence that we were safer here than downtown was still overwhelming, and I had that thought in mind when our house came into view and I spotted the unmarked police car parked at the curb out front.

 

“did you see anyone else near the creek before you found Mr. Spender's body?”

His name was Flint. Detective Flint. Short, squat, in an ill-fitting suit, wearing a hat like you'd expect to see on Lee Marvin back in the 1960s. He was sitting across from me at the kitchen table, and he'd turned down my offer of coffee. His hands were busy making notes in a small reporter's pad.

“Uh, no, I didn't see anyone,” I said.

“Not coming out of the woods as you were going in, headed for the creek?”

“No, I didn't see anyone at all. You think he was down there with someone?”

“Well, there was someone else down there with him at some point,” Detective Flint said, pushing his hat back further on his head. “Mr. Spender didn't bash his own head in.”

I stared at him for a moment. “So you're thinking now that it wasn't an accident?”

“Mr. Walker, we've never thought it was an accident. Mr. Spender was a victim of homicide.”

“I'd been thinking it was an accident,” I said. Okay, maybe I'd been hoping it was an accident. I'd been telling myself it was probably an accident. That he'd tripped, bashed his head on a rock, then rolled over into the water. “You're sure?” I said.

Detective Flint poked the inside of his cheek with his tongue. His cheek bubbled out like he was Kojak eating a Tootsie Pop. “We have some experience with this kind of thing,” he said.

“No, I wasn't suggesting you didn't, it's just, this isn't exactly downtown, you know? You don't expect this sort of thing around here.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes we're a bit behind, but we do our best to catch up,” Detective Flint said with sarcasm. “Mr. Spender was struck on the back of his skull with a blunt object with considerable force. There wasn't even any water in his lungs. He was dead before he fell into the water.”

“I see.”

“So you didn't see anyone at all.”

“No.”

“I understand from Officer Greslow that you knew the deceased.”

“Not personally. But I knew who he was. That he was a naturalist, environmentalist-type person.”

“You know anyone who might want to do Mr. Spender any harm?”

I half-laughed. “Of course not. Like I say, I hardly knew him, and . . .” And I thought back to that day when our paths had crossed at the Valley Forest Estates offices, and I'd had to hold Don Greenway back from lunging at him.

“What?”

“It's nothing. I'm sure it's nothing.”

“Why don't you let me be the judge of that?”

“Well, I don't want to go around accusing people of murder, I mean, that's pretty serious.”

“Yes. It is.”

“Well, you must know that he didn't have a very good relationship with the people at Valley Forest Estates. It was in the paper, letters and articles.”

“Yes, we were aware of that. Do you know anything about that beyond what's been in the papers?”

I hesitated. Sure, Don Greenway was angry that day. But it's one thing to get a little hot under the collar, and another thing altogether to whack a guy in the head so hard his brains leak out. And not only that, if I sent homicide cops after Greenway, would I ever get my leaky shower fixed?

“One day,” I said slowly, waving my hand in the air like it wasn't that big a deal, “when I was over at the Valley Forest Estates offices, I saw Spender and Don Greenway get into quite an argument.”

“Greenway.”

“He's the head of the company, I think. We bought this house from him. Our street's even named after him.”

“What was this argument about?”

I told him. Flint made some notes in his book, flipped the cover over, and slipped it into his jacket.

“Do you think,” I said, hesitantly, “that you could not mention that I told you this, if you're talking to Mr. Greenway? He's, uh, supposed to fix some things around the house here, and he might not be so inclined to do it if he knew I was, you know, ratting him out.”

Flint's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. “Ratting him out,” he repeated.

“Yeah. Isn't that what you call it? Or squealed? Is it squealed?”

“Ratting him out is good,” said Flint, who showed himself out.

 

i might not have my police terminology down pat, but I knew the words to describe how I felt: freaked out.

My friend Jeff might have found a dead guy, but I'd found a dead guy who'd been murdered. Surely this beat a guy who just got his head stuck in a storm drain and drowned. And yet I didn't feel even the slightest bit full of myself. What I felt was scared.

By how long had I missed encountering Samuel Spender's killer? Just because I'd seen him have an argument with Greenway didn't mean that had anything to do with his death. What if Spender had been the victim of some nutbar who would have been just as happy to kill me if I'd come along a little earlier? And what if that nutbar was still roaming around the neighborhood, which, up to now, had always been a crime-free paradise?

I needed someone to talk to about this. I tried Sarah at work.

“Dan. City.”

I hung up. I was not talking to that asshole again. I walked to the front window, where Detective Flint was still sitting in the front seat of his cruiser, making some more notes before pulling away from the curb. Across the street, Earl's truck caught my eye. He was home.

He'd want to know about this.

The pickup was backed up to the garage, which was open, and the door from the garage to the laundry room was propped open. Earl was either loading up the truck or taking things into the house. It made no sense to ring the front doorbell, so I entered the garage, mounted the two steps to the laundry room door, and called in, “Earl?”

No answer. Maybe he was lugging plants or something through the kitchen and out the sliding glass doors to the backyard. Most of the houses in this neighborhood had the same basic floor plan; you could go blindfolded into one you'd never been in before and find your way around.

I took half a step into the laundry room, called his name again, and noticed that in the space where I would have expected to find a washer and dryer, there was nothing. How long had Earl lived here? I guessed he was the kind of guy who liked to hang out in laundromats.

A gust of warm air went past me into the garage. The house was hot. Humid, really. “Earl?”

I heard some banging about in the basement. He was making enough noise that he couldn't hear me. I took a few more tentative steps into the house and could see moisture dripping down the insides of the windows. The basement door was only a couple of steps away, and I stood in its frame, feeling the warm humidity drifting up from there.

“Earl?” I shouted over the banging.

And then it stopped, abruptly. There was a moment's silence, then Earl's voice: “Who is it?” There was an edge to his voice.

I walked halfway down, to the landing where the stairs turned. “Earl, it's okay, it's Zack. I just had this detective over to my place, asking about that guy—”

“Don't come down here!”

But by then I'd reached the bottom step and could see that Earl's windows were not fogged as a result of some manufacturing defect.

He was on a short ladder, stripped to the waist, working on a string of lights suspended across the room, dangling a few inches below the unfinished ceiling. There was a network of temporary ductwork that looked like dryer hose, but ten times as thick. I could hear ventilation fans, and the glare from the dozens of light fixtures was nearly blinding. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, but when they did I was able to focus on what appeared to be hundreds of long-leafed plants that took up nearly every square inch of floor space. I've never been much of a horticulturalist, but I knew enough to know these were not prize-winning orchids.

I don't know much about guns either, but I recognized what Earl had in his right hand, pointed straight at me.

“Jesus, Zack,” Earl said. “You ever heard of fucking knocking? And what's this about a detective?”