CHAPTER THREE

Yeah, The Greer died.

Her death was as odd as everything else about the old woman.

For the last month or so, maybe twice a week a delivery boy wearing a uniform shirt from the pharmacy a mile away would bicycle up to her front walk and hop off, letting the bike wobble on under its own power until it thudded down on the straggly grass, front wheel still slowly turning, looking for all the world like something dying…or just dead. He would take the porch steps two at a time and hammer on her door. Nick could hear him clear across the lawn, so he could imagine what it must have sounded like to her. Apparently she never complained because the kid did the same thing each time and Nick never heard her yell at him. There would be the hammering, then silence, then the delivery boy clumping down the stairs to retrieve his bike and pedal off. The last few times he took the steps with less energy than usual but rode off faster. The kid never looked back.

On the last day, a thunderstorm built up in the northwest late in the afternoon, something unusual for Tamarind Valley in the early summer. The air was stifling, heavy; it had topped ninety degrees by eight a.m. and for most of the day it seemed like nothing was moving—no clouds, no insects, no birds, no breath of wind. Nick was working his way through a particularly wearisome stack of freshman papers, typing intermittently on a short story when the reading got too tedious to bear. In the background, his little portable Sony® TV chattered quietly—a creature-feature on Channel 9, full of moans and groans and creaking doors punctuated by shrieks. Just the right thing for the batch of papers that he really had to finish by the next day.

The temperature climbed steadily. The portable fan he had picked up on sale at Builder’s Best® for $19.95 stirred barely more than a breath; when it did the hot air was almost worse than no circulation at all. He was stripped to his shorts, and already even they were uncomfortably clammy and sweat-damp around the elastic. His back stuck to the imitation leather of the chair. He thought about going to the bathroom for a towel to throw over the chair but the imagined benefits didn’t seem worth the exertion required. Sweat beaded on his lips and forehead and neck; the saltiness stung where he had nicked himself shaving that morning. He could smell himself and the idea of a shower—or better yet a long, cool bath with a favorite book propped on the cracked porcelain tub—sounded better and better.

“One more paper,” he promised himself, muttering into the silence. “Just one more.”

At that moment, as suddenly as if the house had heard his resolve and decided to thwart him, the lights blinked out. The fan blades stuttered to a standstill. With a final shriek that tapered into static, then silence, the TV died.

Nick looked up. “What the hell!”

In the first moments of a power failure, things don’t always register right. Whenever it happened to Nick, he habitually toggled the nearest light switch even though it would be obvious from the darkness everywhere in the house around him that it wasn’t a problem with just one fixture.

This time was no exception. He jumped up, almost upsetting his chair, and slapped the light switch by the door. Up. Down. Up. Down. Pause.

Up-Down. Up-Down. Pause again.

UpDownUpDownUpDown.

Nothing.

He glanced out the window again to see if anyone else was having problems. It was difficult to tell in the daylight, but old habits die hard and Nick always checked at night when the power went off. His eyes weren’t adjusted to the brightness outside; he blinked a couple of times but even so he thought he saw sparks and blue fingers of current dancing on the leads to The Greer’s.

He crossed the room and leaned across the cluttered desk for a closer look.

Nothing.

He rubbed his eyes. They burned when the sweat touched them. The sticky heat was worse without the fan.

The sparks were just imagination, he finally decided. Imagination and fatigue—or boredom.

He heard a jingling whir and looked out again in time to see the delivery boy plow across the lawn, a packet tucked in the back pocket of his worn jeans so the white end of the pharmacy envelope stuck out like a surrender flag. The kid jumped onto the porch and began pounding on and off for three or four minutes. Nick was just about to yell out the window for him to be quiet when the boy stopped, jumped down the steps, and jogged to the back, cutting between Nick’s place and The Greer’s. Nick could see that the kid’s forehead glistened with sweat. Dark patches crept from under his arms, along the back of his neck, and around his waist. He disappeared around the back corner.

Seconds later, before Nick had time to settle into his chair, the kid was back, running along the side of the house. He grabbed his bike and peddled up the road like the Creature from the Black Lagoon was just around the corner. Still wearing only his shorts, Nick ran through the house and onto his front porch, staying hidden in the deep shadow of the porch. The boy raced past two or three houses, stopped, turned, and pedaled slowly toward The Greer’s. He stopped one house beyond hers—the place belonged to the Harrisons, an elderly couple who smiled and nodded to Nick whenever they saw him. The boy raced up to their door. He knocked, the door opened, and after a second he disappeared inside.

Everything’s all right, Nick thought. The kid just forgot a delivery for the Harrisons.

But there had only been one packet, and when the kid entered the Harrisons’ house, he wasn’t carrying anything in his hands.

Nick shrugged and went inside. The fan was running again. The TV cut to an iced-tea commercial with some has-been football player falling backwards into a swimming pool. At least he would be cool. Nick’s mind kept trying to argue that the boy had just forgotten that second delivery, that he had a message from the pharmacist for the Harrisons that he had remembered at the last second. Something like that.

But later, remembering that afternoon—the heat, the almost tangible sense of oppression, the chill that invaded his spine as he sat down and glimpsed the corner of The Greer’s house and the electrical wires shimmering in the heat-waves—Nick realized that even then, even before he saw the white-shrouded corpse, something deep inside was telling him that he didn’t want to go over to that house…ever.

He wasn’t surprised when the siren wound up Greensward and died to a whine outside his window. He pulled on a pair of ragged cut-offs and went outside. Two men in blue shirts jumped out of a paramedic truck, grabbed bags and satchels, and ran up the walk. By the time they disappeared around the back corner, a police car had arrived as well, its bubble-gum lights flashing, siren wailing. Two or three minutes later, the ambulance pulled up.

Nick waited, watching the house, watching the knots of curious people that clustered here and there along the block. Not a soul ventured closer than the edge of The Greer’s property. Most of the people were old and acted as if they were slightly more than curious about seeing death close up. Dress rehearsal for the real thing, Nick thought. Couples leaned against each other. One old woman, so thin that even from his porch Nick could see blue veins on her hands and arms, plucked nervously at a seam on her husband’s shirt as if to ward off this implicit threat of his (or her) approaching mortality. The Harrisons stood near their front door next to the delivery boy. Nick could see that the kid was white and shaken. Cops were talking to the three of them.

Mr. Harrison looked up and, across the expanse of The Greer’s lawn, caught Nick’s eye. For a moment, Nick intuited panic…relief…fear—a complex of emotions captured in those eyes. The Harrisons walked every night in good weather, out their door, then right, up the sidewalk and away from The Greer’s. They returned the same way: He never saw them walk in front of her house.

He started off the porch, intending to cross The Greer’s lawn and speak to them. Mr. Harrison whispered something to his wife. She looked up, shot a single glance at Nick, and shook her head violently, then grabbed Mr. Harrison’s arm. They said something quick to the cop and hurried inside the shadows of their own home.

Later, Nick grew increasingly convinced that he should have kept going and talked with them. He might have saved their lives.

Or maybe lost his own.

But he didn’t go. Instead he retreated into the shade, sweating in the growing heat but unable to go inside...yet.

Fifteen minutes passed before the stretcher reappeared. He expected the paramedics to come through the front door of the house but they didn’t. It was as if no one really wanted to stay inside. Instead, the two paramedics pulled the clumsy apparatus over the uneven grass from the back yard around the corner of the house and across the lawn toward the waiting ambulance. They moved slowly, as if speed wasn’t a priority any more. The body was covered with a sheet and tied down in three places with black webbing.

The Greer was dead.

Nick had never once seen her.

Several days later, he received formal notice from Mr. Cleveland Brown that her heir, one Payne Gunnison, would take possession of the house at 1477 Greensward Lane. All agreements between Mr. Wheeler and the late Emilia Greer would be honored by Mr. Gunnison until the expiration of the lease, at which time they would be re-negotiated as necessary. Rent was due, as always, on the first of the month.

Nick didn’t want to meet Payne Gunnison. If he was anything like The Greer, life on Greensward Lane might remain unsettling.

Or—given the right conjunction of nightmares—he could be worse.