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1
for years, I envied my friend Jeff Conklin, who, at the age of eleven, found a dead guy.
We were in Grade 6, in Mr. Findley's class, and most days we walked home together, Jeff and I, but this particular day my mom picked me up after school not only because it was raining pretty hard, but also because I had a checkup booked with Dr. Murphy, our family dentist. Jeff didn't have the kind of mom who cared about picking him up at school when it was raining, so he struck out for home, no umbrella, no raincoat, stomping through all the puddles in his sneakers.
At one point, the heavens opened up and the rain came down so hard the streets flooded. I remember as we were pulling into the dentist's parking lot you couldn't see past the windshield, even with the wipers going full blast, thwacking back and forth on our 1965 Dodge Polara. It was like we weren't in a car, but in the Maid of the Mist, right under Niagara Falls.
Meanwhile, the worst of the rain had let up a bit as Jeff, now as wet as if he'd done ten laps at the community pool, rounded the corner onto Gilmour Street. Up ahead there was a blue Ford Galaxie pulled up close to the curb, and stretched out on the pavement next to it, on his stomach, was a man.
At first Jeff thought it was a kid, but kids didn't wear nice raincoats or dress pants or fancy shoes. It was a very small man. Jeff approached slowly, then stopped. The man's short legs were stretched out into the street, shoes angled awkwardly, and from where Jeff stood, it looked like his head was cut off at the curb, which really creeped Jeff out.
He took a few more steps, the world engulfed in the sound of rain, and shouted, "Mister?"
The little man said nothing, and didn't move.
"Mister? You okay?"
Now Jeff was standing right over him, and he could see that the man's chest was positioned over a storm drain where water was coursing around him and disappearing. His right arm and head were wedged into the drain. Now Jeff could see why it appeared that the man's head had been cut off.
"Mister?" he shouted one last time. Jeff confided to me that he wet his pants then, but it was okay, because he was already soaked and no one would be able to tell the difference. He ran to the closest house, banged on the door, and told the elderly man who answered that there was a dead man's head in the storm sewer. The old man had a look at the weather and decided to call the police rather than conduct his own investigation.
As best as the police could tell, this was what happened: The man--his name was Archie Roget, and he was an accountant--had left work early and was planning to run a few errands on the way home. He could tell by the approaching clouds that the light rain was about to turn into a deluge, so he pulled over to the curb to get his raincoat out of the trunk. (His wife told police he never went anywhere without a raincoat in the trunk, or a cushion on the front seat to help him see over the steering wheel.) He opened the trunk with his keys from the ignition--this was in the days before remote trunk releases--slipped on the coat, and slammed the trunk shut. Then, somehow or other, he lost his grip on the car keys, which slipped between the iron bars of the storm sewer grate. It was the kind that hugged the curb, where there was a broader vertical opening wide enough to slip an arm in, at least.
Roget got down on his hands and knees, must have been able to see his keys, and reached in. But his arm, like the rest of him, was a few inches too short, so to get a bit more length, he wedged in his head, which was, like the rest of him, tiny.
And his head got stuck.
And then the downpour struck.
Just as the wipers on my mom's car couldn't stay ahead of the rain, the storm drains couldn't empty the streets fast enough. They backed up, and Archie Roget's lungs filled with rainwater.
The circumstances of the man's death were so bizarre that the story made the papers, even hitting the wires. Jeff was interviewed not only by local reporters, but by newspapers from as far away as Spokane and Miami. He was, at least at Wendell Hills Public School, a celebrity. And if it hadn't been for my dental appointment, I might have been there to share the spotlight. This was my introduction to the cruelties of fate.
I moped around the house for nearly a week. How come I never got to find a dead guy? Why did Jeff get all the breaks? Everyone wanted to be his friend, and I tried to bask in his reflected glory. I'd tell my friends at Scouts, a different group of boys from my school friends, "You know that story, about the guy who drowned with his head in the storm drain? Well, that was my best friend who found him, and I woulda been with him, but I had to go to the dentist." No cavities, by the way. A perfect checkup. I could have skipped the appointment and it wouldn't have mattered. The ironies were enough to make an eleven-year-old's head spin.
My dad felt there was at least one lesson to be learned. "When you grow up, Zack, you remember to join the triple A. It's like insurance. If that man had belonged to the auto club, someone else would have come and got his keys for him and he'd be alive today. Don't you forget." This may have been when I started developing my lifelong obsession with safety, but more about that later.
The reason this whole thing with Jeff was such a big deal, of course, is that finding a dead body's not the sort of thing that happens to you every day. Other than Jeff, I can't think of a single friend or acquaintance who's ever stumbled upon a corpse. Not that I've asked them all. It's hardly necessary. If one of your friends finds a body, chances are good that the next time you see them, they're going to mention it. Right away. It's a great conversation starter. As in: "Oh my God, you won't believe what happened on Friday. I was taking a shortcut, that alley behind the deli? And there's these legs sticking out from behind a garbage can."
There are some body-finding circumstances I don't count. Like if you go to check on your ninety-nine-year-old Aunt Hilda, who lives alone and hasn't answered the phone for three days, and find her rigid in her favorite chair, the TV on, the remote on the floor by her feet, the cat climbing the curtains in hunger. That kind of thing happens. That's natural.
And there are certain lines of work where discovering a dead body's no big thing. Police officers come to mind. A lot of times, they're looking for a body before they actually find it, so you lose the element of surprise. Finding a body when you're already looking for a dead body isn't quite the same as when you're just out for a stroll. "Finally, there it is. Now we can get some lunch."
I'm an unlikely candidate to find a body. First of all, I'm not, unlike a police detective, in a line of work where finding a victim of foul play is a common occurrence, unless you know something about science fiction authors that I don't. And second, when I found a body, I wasn't living in some big city, where, if you believe what you see on TV, people come across dead people about as often as they go out for bagels.
I found my body in the suburbs, where, although I do not have actual statistics to back this up, people are more likely to die of boredom than run into someone nasty. I came across a corpse in as tranquil and beautiful a spot as you could hope to find.
Willow Creek, to be exact. Where my wanderings often take me. Listening to shallow water cascading over small rocks can clear the mind and help one work out plot problems. But when you're engaged in thoughts of interplanetary exploration and whether God can spread himself thin enough to oversee worlds other than our own, there's nothing like finding a guy with his skull bashed in to bring you back to reality.
He was face down, in the creek. And, unlike your typical Law & Order extra who comes upon a stranger who's had a date with destiny, I actually knew who this man was, and who might actually want him dead.
A couple of things. Despite how I envied Jeff as a kid, I'd have been happy to go through life without ever finding a dead guy. Because this discovery didn't come with the kind of notoriety Jeff received, but did carry with it the burden of adult responsibility.
And here's the other thing. If this body had been the first and last I'd ever come upon, well, this story would be much shorter. There wouldn't be all that much to tell.
But that's not the way it turned out.
2
You won't get very far into this before you start thinking that I am, not to put too fine a point on it, an asshole. At the very least, a jerk. I don't happen to think I'm an asshole, but I'm also willing to acknowledge your typical asshole's not blessed in the self-awareness department. How many assholes know they're assholes? So I guess what I'm saying is that if I know I've behaved like an asshole on certain occasions, then there's no way I could actually be one. But I'd understand if you remain unconvinced. By the time you've heard this story, you might say, "Man, that Zack Walker, he's a major one."
Let's say my motivations haven't always been fully understood or appreciated, although that sounds a bit like boneheaded politicians who lose because they fail to "communicate their message." It's fair to say my methods of instruction, of trying to teach my loved ones how to conduct themselves more responsibly, could have been better thought out. But overall, I'm not a bad guy. I've always loved my family, and all I've ever wanted was the best for them. A good life, happiness, and, above all, security. It's just that my efforts to make sure they live their lives mindful of the risks that exist out there may have occasionally overstepped the bounds, or even backfired. So I won't blame you for coming away with the impression that I've behaved as a know-it-all, a dickhead --- an asshole, if you will --- who, rather than going around trying to tell everyone else how to run their lives, could have benefitted from minding his own business.
My married history is littered with examples of what an enlightened asshole I am, but the pertinent examples really begin with the day I was walking back to our new home from the corner of Chancery Park and Lilac Lane, where I'd just dropped a check for our latest property tax installment into the mailbox.
The housecoat lady was watering her driveway. She did this almost daily, sometimes more than once in a given twenty-four hour period, usually decked out in a flowered housecoat. She'd unreel the hose from its wheel beside the garage, grip the nozzle, and squeeze, forcing lawn clippings and other microscopic bits of debris down the asphalt slope toward the street. She and her husband fussed a lot with their yard, weeding, tidying up the line where lawn meets sidewalk. "Thou shalt edge" was one of their commandments, but having a perfectly clean driveway was the ultimate virtue. Free of oil stains, and, usually, of cars, it would have been an excellent place to perform surgery on a sunny day. I waved to her as I walked past and shouted "Looking good!" over the sound of the spray.
Our house is at the corner of Chancery and Greenway Lane, fronting on Greenway, and approaching our driveway I could see something shiny at the front door. Looking more closely, I could see a set of keys hanging there.
My wife Sarah's Toyota Camry had been parked beside my aging Civic while I was gone. She'd evidently gotten home from work, and must have had her hands full with her briefcase or groceries, because her keys were still hanging from the front lock. The house key was fully inserted, and dangling from the ring were the keys to her car (an actual key plus a big plastic remote thingie with buttons for doors and trunk and a red strip that would set off the alarm if you pressed it hard enough), my Civic key, and one that opened her locker at the newspaper's workout room.
This wasn't the first time she'd left the keys in the door. One morning about six weeks ago, when I went down to get the paper that not only provides us with the news, but also pays Sarah's salary, I'd found her keys hanging from the lock. She'd gotten home from work about eight the night before, which meant the keys had been dangling there more than ten hours. Not only could someone have had access to the house, but they could have stolen both cars from the driveway. I'd strolled into the kitchen with The Metropolitan and tossed it, along with the keys, onto the table in front of Sarah. She recognized the error of her ways and I got a reluctant confession out of her.
The trouble was, even this wasn't the first time. A couple of months before that, our son Paul, who's fifteen, had found her keys in the door, about five minutes after she'd come home. But that time she claimed she knew, and that she'd come through the door carrying the dry cleaning and was headed back to get them when Paul came in. Nobody bought it, but there remained an element of reasonable doubt. We weren't going to get a conviction.
Maybe that was what had happened this time. It was still possible that at any moment she'd reappear to retrieve her keys, so I decided to give her a chance. I leaned up against the rear fender of her Camry, waiting, and gazed up and down our street.
There's not much to obstruct your view. The town of Oakwood planted maples on the boulevards, between the sidewalk and the curb, to give every homeowner a tree --- two, if you had a corner lot as we did --- but they'd only put them in a year ago. You could wrap your hand around the trunk, thumb and index finger touching. Someday, long after Sarah and I --- and probably our kids, too --- are gone from the planet, they may throw a lot of shade, but for now, they're the kind of trees that create little work for neighborhood youngsters looking for raking money. And there are few cars parked on the street, except for the ones in front of Trixie's place, two doors down. She runs an accounting business from home and has clients dropping in. Many of the houses come with double, or even triple, garages, and no one's renting out their basement.
While I waited to see whether Sarah would remember to retrieve her keys, Earl, the guy who lives across from Trixie's, came around the corner in his pickup. He backed into his driveway, got out, opened the garage, and started unloading bags of potting soil from the back of the pickup. When he spotted me leaning against the Camry, I waved, and he nodded back, but not all that invitingly. It had been my intention to stroll over and shoot the breeze, but now I held back. Then Earl looked over his shoulder, I guess to see whether I was still watching him.
When he saw that I was, I suddenly felt awkward. So I said, "Hey."
He nodded again, kind of shrugged, and when he didn't turn away, I crossed the street.
"Hey, Zack," he said. Earl wasn't big on conversation. You had to drag it out of him. His head, which he shaved, gleamed with sweat, and his T-shirt was damp. The end of a cigarette was stuck between his lips. Earl was never without a smoke.
I shrugged. "Hey. How's things?"
He waved his hand dismissively. "Keeping busy."
We were both quiet for a moment. I broke the silence with a question of startling brilliance.
"Back from the garden center again?"
Earl smiled. "Oh yeah. Never a day I'm not down there." He paused. "So how goes the writing?"
"Not a bad day." I think Earl had a hard time understanding how I can make a living sitting inside the house all day, not getting my hands dirty. I said, "Walked down to the corner, sent off my property taxes."
Earl looked off in the direction of the mailbox. "How's the house?"
I shook my head. "I've gone through three tubes of caulking on our bedroom window. I don't even bother to put the ladder away. Every time it rains, a little more water gets in."
"You complain?"
"I've phoned the developer. They say they're going to come, nothing happens. I'm gonna drop by the office; maybe appearing in person will make a difference. You hear that thing on the news?"
"What?"
"Guy comes into a variety store, shoots the owner right in the head, right in front of his wife."
"Jesus. Here?" He tossed his butt onto his driveway, reached through the front window of his truck to grab a pack up on the dash.
"No. Downtown. Sarah phoned from work, she'd sent a reporter and a photographer out to cover it, was telling me about it, then I heard it on the radio."
"Jesus," Earl said again. "I'd never live downtown." He stuck a new cigarette into his mouth, lit it, took a long drag, then blew the smoke out through his nose. Earl's history, as he'd explained it to me, involved living out on the East Coast, a bit of time out west. He was divorced, had no children, and seemed an unlikely candidate for the neighborhood, rattling around in a big, new house all by himself. But he'd told me he felt he needed to put some roots down somewhere, and a new subdivision, where a lot of people could use his talents as a landscaper, seemed as good a place as any to make a living. Paul had called on him several times for advice, although "pestered" might be a better word. Earl had been reluctant at first to let my son into his world, but finally, maybe just to get Paul off his back, he'd agreed to give him a few tips, and a couple of times on weekends I'd noticed Earl and Paul shirtless and sweating under a cloudless sky in the far corner of our yard, digging holes and planting small bushes.
"Well, we've been that route," I said. "Living downtown. It was a worry, especially with kids, you know? Teenagers? There's so much they can get into in the city."
"Not that they can't get into trouble out here," Earl said.
"You know kids, they'll find trouble wherever they are. Who's that clown?"
Earl had been looking down the opposite side of the street, a couple of houses past Trixie's. It was a guy going door to door. Tall and thin, short gray hair, about fifty I figured, armed with a clipboard. He was too casually dressed, in jeans and hiking boots and a plaid shirt, to be anyone official.
"Beats me," I said. He had drawn a woman to the door, who listened, hanging her head out while she held the door open a foot, while he went through some spiel.
"I'm betting driveway resurfacing," Earl said. "Every other day, some asshole wants to resurface my driveway."
The woman was shaking her head no, and the man took it well, nodding politely. He was moving on to the next house when he saw me and Earl. "Hey," he said, waving.
"Or ducts," Earl said to me. "Maybe he want to clean your ducts."
"I don't have any ducks," I said. "I don't even have chickens."
"You guys got a moment?" the man said, only a couple of yards away now. We shrugged, sure.
"My name's Samuel Spender," he said. "I'm with the Willow Creek Preservation Society."
"Uh-huh," I said. I didn't give my name. Earl didn't give his either.
"I'm trying to collect names for a petition," Spender said. "To protect the creek."
"From what?" I asked.
"From development. Willow Creek is an environmentally sensitive area and one of the last unspoiled areas in Oakwood, but there are plans to build hundreds of homes backing right onto the creek, which will threaten a variety of species, including the Mississauga salamander."
"Who?" It was the first word from Earl.
"Here's a picture," Spender said, releasing a snapshot from under the clip of his clipboard. We looked at a four-legged, pale green creature with oversized eyes resting in a person's hand.
"Looks like a lizard," Earl said.
"It's a salamander," Spender said. "Very rare. And threatened by greedy developers who value profit over the environment." He thrust the clipboard toward us, which held a lined sheet with about twenty signatures on it. There were other pages underneath, but whether they were blank or filled with names I couldn't tell.
I hate signing petitions, even for things I believe in. But when it's an issue where I don't feel fully informed, I have a standard dodge. I said to Spender, "Do you have any literature you could leave me, so I could read up on it?"
"Yeah," said Earl. "Likewise."
Something died in Spender's eyes. He knew he'd lost us. "Just read The Suburban. They've been following the story pretty closely. The big-city papers, like The Metropolitan, they don't give a shit because they're owned by the same corporations that put up the money for these developments."
This didn't seem like a good time to mention where my wife worked. Spender thanked us for our time and turned back for the sidewalk to resume door-knocking. "That house?" I said, pointing. "That's mine, so you can skip it."
"Salamanders," Earl said to me quietly. "Think you can barbecue them?"
"They'd probably slip through the grills," I said.
We chatted a moment longer. I told Earl, even though he hadn't asked, that Paul intended to pursue his interest in landscaping, maybe go to college someday for landscape design. It was, for me, a surprising development. Most kids his age wanted to design video games.
"He's good," Earl offered. "He doesn't mind getting his hands in the dirt."
"It's not my thing. Writers, you put a shovel in our hands, we start whining about blisters after five minutes."
It was looking very much as though Sarah was not going to come to our front door and retrieve her keys. I felt I'd given her long enough to redeem herself, told Earl I had to go, and headed back to our house. On my way in, I took Sarah's set of keys from the lock and slid them into the front pocket of my jeans. I could hear her in the kitchen, and called out, "Hey!"
"Back here," she said. It was a good-sized kitchen, with a bay window looking out onto the backyard, lots of counter space, and a dark spot in the ceiling above the double sink, where water from our improperly tiled shower stall had dripped down over several months. I tried not to look up at it too often; it made me crazy. I had to go over to the home sales office and make a fuss.
My earlier theory that Sarah had come through the front door weighed down with groceries was right. Empty bags littered the top of the kitchen counter. Some carrots and milk still had to be put into the fridge.
I turned to the fridge, which I seemed to recall was white, but was covered with so many magnets and pizza coupons and snapshots that it was hard to be sure. A large part of the door was taken up by a calendar that mapped out our lives a month at a time. It was on here that we recorded dental appointments,
Sarah's shifts, lunches with my editor, dinners with friends, all in erasable marker. I noticed, just before I opened the door to put away the carrots and milk, that we were to attend an interview with Paul's science teacher in a little over a week. And a couple of days after that, Sarah's birthday was indicated with stars and exclamation points, drawn by her.
"Hey," she said.
"I heard about the thing, the shooting, on the radio," I said.
Sarah shrugged. "They're gonna take one story for the front, do a color piece for the front of Metro."
"Uh-huh." I had my hand in my pocket, running my fingers over the keys. "You got anything left out in the car that needs to come in?"
"Nope, that's it, I'm done. I shopped, you can cook. I've had it." She'd worked nearly a double shift in the newsroom.
"What am I making?"
"There's chicken, I got some burgers, salad, whatever. I'm beat."
This particular week, Sarah was on a shift where she had to be at the office by six, which meant she was up by half past four in the morning.
"Did you bring in your briefcase?" I thought mentioning the items she typically carries into the house with her might help jog her memory about the keys.
"I got it," she said, sitting down on one of the kitchen chairs and taking off her shoes.
"You wanna beer?" I asked.
"If it comes with a foot massage," Sarah said. I grabbed one from the fridge, twisted off the cap, and handed it to her.
"Massage to follow," I said. "I got something I gotta do. Back in a minute."
Sarah didn't bother to ask what, and took a sip of the beer instead. I slipped out the front door, used her keys to unlock her Camry, and backed out of the drive. I didn't need to go very far. Just down to the end of Chancery, then a right onto Lilac, just down from the mailbox. Far enough around the corner that the car wouldn't be visible from our place, even if you went and stood at the end of the driveway. I pulled it up close to the curb, made sure all the windows were up, locked it, and jogged back to the house, passing Spender, Defender of the Salamander, on the way. Sarah was still at the kitchen table when I came in.
"Where'd you go?"
"I bought some printer paper today and left it in the car," I lied. "And then I saw Earl and got talking to him."
Sarah nodded. She didn't know the neighbors as well as I did, and she'd never taken to Earl.
Her mind was still back at the office. "So this guy, the clerk, his wife's right there when he gets it."
"The variety store thing. Yeah, awful."
"Sometimes you're right."
"Huh?"
"Moving out here. The last thing I wanted to do was move out of the city, but I'll admit I'm not looking over my shoulder out here like we did on Crandall. There's not addicts leaving their needles all over the slides at the playground, girls giving blowjobs in the backs of cars for fifty bucks, no guy waving his dick at you on the corner --- "
"I remember him. What was his name?"
"Terry? Something like that? I always just thought of him as
Mr. Dickout."
"I ran into him once at the Italian bakery. He was buying some cannolis. Think there's a connection?"
"God, cannolis," Sarah said, taking another swig from the beer bottle. "I looked, on the way home, at the grocery store, for some. They don't have them out here. No cannolis. It's so hard to find anything like that. Twinkies, those I can get. You want white bread, I can get that for you."
"I know," I said, quietly.
"And there's no place to get decent Chinese," Sarah said. "The kids are always complaining that there's no decent Chinese out here, or Indian. The other night, Paul says he'd kill for a samosa. What happened to my foot massage?"
I was unwrapping some lean ground beef, not thinking about meal preparation so much as the plan I had put into motion. Later that night, maybe, or the next morning, when she got ready to leave for work, there'd be the payoff. At some point Sarah would happen to look out the window, or step out into the night air, and it would dawn on her that her car had gone AWOL. She'd dismiss it at first, figure I or our seventeen-year old daughter Angie had it, and then she'd realize that I was in my study rereading what I had written that day, and that Angie was up in her room, or fighting with her brother, and she'd take a sudden, cold breath and say quietly, "Oh no."
And right about then she'd picture her car keys in the door, and it would all come together for her.
"I can form burgers, or I can rub your feet," I said. "Or I could do both, but I think I can speak for the rest of the family when I say the burgers should be done first."
There's a set of sliding glass doors that open out from the kitchen to our small backyard deck. I went out there and opened the lid of the barbecue, unscrewed the tap atop the propane tank nestled underneath, and turned the dial for the grill's right side. When I heard the gas seeping in, I pressed the red button on the front panel to ignite the gas.
I clicked it once, then again, then a third time. "This thing doesn't work worth a shit," I said to Sarah through the glass. I tried a fourth time, without success, and now I could smell the unignited gas, wafting up into my face. I turned the dial back to the "off " position and went into the kitchen for a pack of matches. I had done this before --- dropped a lit match into the bottom of the barbecue, then turned on the gas. Worked every bit as well as the red ignition button, when the red ignition button was working.
I struck a match and dropped it in, thinking that the gas that had been there a moment earlier would have dissipated by now. But when the air around the grills erupted with a loud "WHOOMPFF!" and took the hair off the back of my right hand, I understood that I'd been mistaken.
I jumped back so abruptly it caught Sarah's attention. She threw open the door. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," I said, shaking my hand and feeling like an idiot. "Man, that smarts."
The leftover propane was definitely gone now, so I tried a second time, dropping a lit match into the barbecue, then turning the dial. The flame caught with a smaller "whoompf " and I closed the lid.
"You want something for your hand?" Sarah asked.
"No, I think it's okay."
"Let me get something for it." She headed upstairs to our bathroom, where she keeps first-aid supplies. From there she called down, "I've got some aloe here somewhere!"
The front door opened and Paul walked in. "Hey," I said, standing in the front hall, holding my right hand with my left.
"Uhhn," he said, walking past me. Then he noticed that the back of my hand was bright red. "Whadja do?"
"Barbecue," I said.
"That button doesn't work," Paul said.
"I know."
"When's Mom getting home?"
"She's home. She's upstairs."
"Car's not here." He tipped his head in the direction of the driveway.
"I know. But don't say anything."
"About what?"
"That the car's not there. She doesn't know the car's not there."
Paul looked at me. "What happened? Did you smash it up or something? Because I was gonna ask her to drive me over to Hakim's after dinner."
"I didn't smash it up. I just moved it."
Now he looked at me harder. "You're doing something, aren't you?"
"Maybe."
"Don't do another one of your lame-ass things, Dad. Are you trying to teach her a lesson or something? Because, like, we're all tired of that kind of thing. What'd she do? Leave the keys in the car?"
"Not quite. But sort of. Just go into the kitchen and butter some hamburger buns."
"I'm not hungry."
"I didn't ask if you were hungry. I asked you to butter --- "
"I can't find the aloe!" Sarah shouted from the bathroom.
"Don't worry about it," I said, but the truth was, the back of my hand was really stinging. "Maybe we've got something else. Like, I don't know, isn't butter supposed to help?"
"Butter? Where'd you hear that?"
"I don't know. I just thought I had."
"I'm going to go out and get some aloe." She was coming down the stairs now, reaching into the closet for her jacket, grabbing her purse on the bench by the front door.
"Really, it'll be fine."
But Sarah wasn't listening. She was rooting around in her purse, looking for her keys.
"Where the hell are my . . ." she muttered. She threw her purse back on the bench and strode into the kitchen. "I must have left them in here when I brought in the groceries. . . ."
I hadn't planned to make my point about the keys this quickly. Things were ahead of schedule because I'd burned my hand and Sarah was frantic to ease my suffering. It was starting to look as though my timing could have been a bit better.
"I wonder if I left them in the car," Sarah said, more to herself than anyone else. "Except I remember unlocking the door and --- "
The bulb went off. You could see it in her eyes. She knew exactly where to find those keys. She strode confidently through the front hall to the front door, opened it, her eyes drawn to the lock.
Things did not turn out as she'd expected.
"Oh shit," she said. "I was sure I'd left them there. Did you leave the door unlocked when you went out?"
"I don't think so," I said.
"Then they have to be in the car." She took one step out of the house and froze. I couldn't see her face at that point, with her back to me and all. But I had a pretty good idea how she must have looked. Dumbfounded. Dumbstruck. Panicked.
"Zack," she said. Not screaming. More tentative. "Zack, Angie's not home yet, is she?"
"No," I said. As far as she knew, I was unaware that her Camry was no longer in the driveway. I came up behind her.
"Listen," I said, shaking my hand at my side, trying to make the sting go away. "I should tell you --- "
"Shit! Shit! Shit! You were right! Shit! I did it! It's all my fault. Jesus! Oh shit!"
She spun around and pushed by me on her way back into the house. She was headed straight for the kitchen, and I nearly had to run to catch up with her. She had the phone in her hand.
"I'm going to have to call the police."
"Sarah." I didn't want her to make the call. The last thing I wanted was the 911 operator getting another false alarm from this address.
"The car's been stolen," she confessed to me. "Shit, I can't believe this. I don't even know what I had in there. What did we have in the car? We had that stuff, from the trip, those Triptiks from the auto club, and a bag of old clothes in the trunk I was going to drop off at the Goodwill, and --- "
"Don't call," I said.
" --- not that that's very valuable, but Jesus, we were going to give those to people who needed them, not some asshole who steals --- "
"Put the phone down," I said. But she wasn't listening. She was about to punch in the number, so I reached down into my pocket, pulled out her set of keys, and set them on the kitchen counter where she could see them.
She stared at them a moment, not comprehending. If her car had been stolen, how could I have the keys?
"It's around the corner," I said, softly.
"I don't understand," Sarah said. "You were using the car?"
"It's around the corner," I repeated, whispering. "I moved it. Everything's fine."
Sarah replaced the receiver, her face red, her breathing rapid and shallow. "Why did you move my car around the corner? And why have you got my keys?"
"Okay, you see, what happened is . . . you know how you thought you'd left your keys in the door?"
Sarah nodded.
"And you know how I've mentioned that to you before?" Sarah nodded again, a bit more slowly this time.
"Anyway, when I came home, a couple of minutes after you . . ."
"I'd just come in with the groceries," Sarah said slowly. "I stopped for them on my way home, even though I had a totally crappy day at the office, did five extra hours because Kozlowski booked off sick and we had the variety store thing, and picked up some things so we could have dinner."
This was not good. Sarah was developing a tone. That meant she was already ahead of me. She knew where this story was going and how it was going to end. But I decided to tell the rest of it anyway. "So when I came up the driveway, I saw that your keys were hanging from the door, you know, where anyone could find them. This is the thing. You know, it's lucky for you, really, when you think about it, lucky for you that it was me coming up the driveway then, and not some, you know, crazy axe murderer or car thief or something instead, because that's what could have happened. You know I've mentioned this before, about you leaving your keys in the lock, and all I was trying to do was make a point, you see, to help you, so that you wouldn't do this sort of thing again and expose us to any, I guess you could say, unnecessary risk."
Sarah was breathing much more slowly now. And just staring at me.
"So, you see, that's why I did what I did."
"Which was what, exactly?"
"I moved the car, just, you know, just a little ways down the street. Like, around the corner."
"Where I wouldn't be able to see it."
"Yes. That, that was the plan."
"And when I went to look for the keys, I wouldn't be able to find them, and then when I saw that the car was missing, I'd think it was stolen, and would have a fucking heart attack so that you could make a point, is that about right?"
"It was never my intention to give you a heart attack or anything. It was merely intended as a, well, as a lesson."
"A lesson."
I swallowed. "Yes."
"I'm finished with school, Zack. I graduated. I have a university degree. I'm an adult now, and the last person I need to take lessons from is you."
"I just felt that this might help you remember in the future."
"You know what else might have helped me remember in the future? You could have taken my keys out of the door, walked up to me, and said something like 'Here, honey, you left your keys in the door.' And I would have been grateful, and said, 'Thank you very much, next time I'll try to be more careful.' "
"Well, in fact, the first time you did it, that's exactly what
I --- "
"And here's the part that really gets me. I'm running around this house, trying to find my keys, so I can race over to the drugstore, to get you some fucking ointment so you can put it on your stupid hand where you burned it because you dropped a lit match into a gas-filled barbecue, which, if memory serves me, I have told you before never to do!"
Paul had been standing at the door to the kitchen the whole time, and now that there was a brief pause in the screaming, he decided it was safe to navigate his way between us so he could get to the fridge. "Nice going, Dad," he said. "It's the backpack thing all over again."
Before sending me out to fetch her car, Sarah said to me, "God, you are such an asshole."
You see what I mean. You're not the only one.
Bad Move
3
Despite the priority I've always put on security, it's not like I always dreamed of making a life for ourselves in the suburbs. We liked living in the city on Crandall. It was a neighborhood rich in history and character. Most of the houses dated back to at least the 1940s, and there were always renovators' vans parked out front of someone's place, bringing a house up to code, tearing out old wiring and replacing it with new, blowing out an attic to make a guest room or den or plant-filled sunroom, gutting a first floor to put in a new kitchen, living and dining room. Narrow lanes separated one house from the other, and garages, often too small to house sport utility vehicles or too full of junk to park even a reasonably sized import, were tucked around back. You could walk to just about everything. The elementary school Paul and Angie attended was five blocks away, and when they moved on to high school they had a ten-block hike that didn't take them any more than fifteen minutes. At the end of our street, which intersected with a main thoroughfare, there was a deli, a used-book store and, a block away, a bookshop that sold nothing but SF (that's science fiction to nonregular), a great Chinese place where Paul always had three of their egg rolls with the paper-thin batter just for starters, a Thai restaurant (nice to have nearby, but too spicy for me), and an Italian bakery where Sarah would often pick up those cannolis on the way home plus a loaf of the best bread I've ever eaten. There was also a diner that didn't appear to have changed in fifty years, with narrow booths, counter stools that spun, and cracked black-and-white-square linoleum. You could get a breakfast of three eggs, sausage, home fries, and toast for $4.99. There was a secondhand dress shop, a tattoo joint, a head shop, an independent pizza place, and a video store that was sure to have the latest titles directed by Woody Allen or John Sayles or John Waters or Edward Burns. There was Angelo's Fruit Market, where you probably paid a little more for seedless grapes or a head of romaine than you did at one of those massive chain grocery stores where the produce section has its own area code, but you'd never get to meet Angelo's daughter Marissa at a place like that, who at age four could ring up your order, make change, and say something like "Be sure to say hello to your lovely wife Sarah." I'd have paid ten dollars a bunch for bananas for the pleasure of her conversation.
The neighborhood didn't empty out through the day, not like the suburbs everyone left behind to work in the city. It wasn't a place people used only for sleeping. There were young families, old retirees, and everything in between. Every morning, Mrs. Hayden, whose husband died back in the sixties in a
Pennsylvania mine cave-in, would walk past our front porch on her way to the corner, where she would buy her morning paper. We thought it was sweet when Mrs. Hayden said she started buying The Metropolitan in honor of Sarah, but it was a mixed blessing, because Mrs. Hayden would invariably stop when she saw Sarah out on the porch to point out grammatical, factual, and spelling errors she'd encountered in that week's various editions. And sometimes the crossword was all screwed up.
But Sarah was used to this sort of thing. She would explain patiently to Mrs. Hayden that newspapers must gather, interpret, and present thousands of facts in a very limited time, and what was amazing, to quote one of the paper's esteemed and now deceased editors, was not how much newspapers got wrong, but how much they managed to get right. And Mrs. Hayden would listen politely and say, "But why doesn't your political cartoonist know the difference between 'its' and 'it's'?" Sarah would then ask Mrs. Hayden if she would like a cup of tea or a glass of cold lemonade, and Mrs. Hayden would invariably say yes.
One of our neighbors was an actor who did a lot of TV series work and shared stories about Oliver Stone after getting a minor role in one of his movies, and the man who lived behind us was an artist with an attic studio illuminated by skylights. One block over was the extremely famous woman who'd won that incredibly prestigious literary prize for that book everyone raved about even though I'd never met anyone who'd gotten to the end of it. You'd see her occasionally down at Angelo's, or carrying home some Chinese takeout. One day, Sarah saw her in the secondhand dress store. "What did the paper say she got for an advance on her last book? One point two mil? And she's looking through five-year-old DKNY stuff?"
We only had one car when we lived on Crandall, which could sit for several days behind the house, depending on which shift Sarah was working. When she was on days, she'd walk down to the end of the street, hang a left, and catch the subway two blocks away. It dropped her off within three blocks of the paper. She'd take the car if she had to work evenings. She's a lot less paranoid about personal safety than I, but even she recognizes the risks associated with hanging out at bus stops and on subway platforms late at night.
It was a great place to live in so many ways. Culturally and artistically rich. Architecturally diverse. A place where you knew your neighbors. Convenient to schools and transportation.
Then the needles started showing up.
Discarded plastic syringes on the edge of the curb. You'd hear noises under the streetlamps after you'd gone to bed. You'd look out the window and see half a dozen young people huddled around a lamppost, not sure what they were doing exactly, but you suspected it wasn't anything good. The next morning you'd go out, and maybe there'd be a scratch down the side of your car, or a back window smashed. I went outside once, around one in the morning, when they were gathered at the end of our driveway, and from about twenty feet away asked them to move on. One of them turned slowly and looked at me with eyes that were at once sleepy and menacing, and invited me to come over, drop to my knees, and perform an intimate service on him.
I turned to go back in, but as I did, I could sense a stirring within the group, a heightened level of conversation, as though they were formulating a course of action, and there was every reason to believe it involved me. I didn't want to break into a run, figuring that would attract them, the way sudden movements will provoke a pack of dogs to attack. I tried to walk faster without appearing to do so. I was climbing the three steps to the porch when I glanced over my shoulder and saw them moving, as a group, in my direction, so I bolted the last couple of steps to the door, flung it open, and yanked it shut behind me, the slam loud enough to wake everyone in the house and probably everybody on the street. And my pursuers stopped and began to laugh, high-fiving triumphantly, congratulating themselves at how easily they'd intimidated me. My heart was pounding, my face hot with shame.
And there were the hookers. There was an area they worked fairly regularly, three streets to the east, and after that neighborhood's residents' association appeared before the city council and embarrassed the mayor into doing something about it, the police swept the area for several nights in a row. The residents proclaimed victory. They had driven the prostitutes from their streets. What they didn't know was that they'd driven them three blocks west over to ours.
A woman who lived down near the corner who was a lot more politically active than I'd ever been got the ball rolling, drawing up a petition and getting nearly everyone on Crandall to sign it, but not before the street was littered with used condoms, and several Grade 2 students on their way home from school got an education in oral sex when they spotted a man getting his money's worth in the back of a Jetta. So the police did a sweep of our street, and the action no doubt moved westward again. At this rate, in about four months, the hookers would be working out of the Glen River and have to trade in their spike heels for hip waders.
The principal at our kids' high school, using a massive set of bolt cutters, snapped the combination lock off the locker next to Paul's and found two handguns that had been used in a home invasion. The kid whose locker it was gets his daily instruction in a different institution now.
One day, Angie said she was followed home by a guy in a long raincoat. We drove her to school for three weeks until the cops arrested some old guy for flashing.
Another time, a sixteen-year-old broke into Mrs. Hayden's place, punched her in the face, and made off with her purse containing eleven dollars.
I guess that's when I began hounding Sarah and Paul and Angie to make sure the front door was always locked. Not just when we were out. All the time. I demonstrated how, when anything of value was left near the front door, like a purse, anyone could step in, grab the item, turn around and be gone, and no one would hear a thing. Certainly not if we were upstairs, or in the basement. But even in the first-floor kitchen, you didn't always hear someone come in. We could be on one side of the wall while some stranger ripped us off on the other.
And don't leave packages visible in the car, I said. Angie had a backpack she would leave on the front seat until she needed something from inside it later. "Someone'll smash the window to grab that," I'd tell her.
"There's nothing in it," she'd say, convinced I was a total moron. "It's not like I get some huge allowance. There's no money in it."
At which point I would explain that most thieves did not have X-ray vision, and wouldn't realize the backpack was worthless until after they'd smashed in the car window and run off with it. And Angie would roll her eyes and say something like "You are becoming totally paranoid, Dad. Isn't there, you know, some medication you could take or something?"
And then there was Jesse.
None of these signs of the neighborhood's deterioration prepared us for the murder of Jesse Shuttleworth.
When I saw her picture on The Metropolitan's front page, I recognized her instantly. I had seen her, often, shopping at Angelo's with her mother. Five years old, curly red hair, a fondness for bananas. Loved to be read Robert Munsch stories, hated Barney the dinosaur.
Last seen alive on a Wednesday afternoon, around four- fifteen, at the mini-park one block over from ours. Mother had looked out the window, seen Jesse on the swing, looked out again two minutes later, the swing empty but still swaying.
After looking for her for half an hour, the mother called the police, and they swarmed the neighborhood. There was a command center set up within a couple of hours, dozens of cops going door to door, looking behind hedges, checking garages. Volunteer teams of searchers were set up who walked through the nearby ravines. Sarah, who oversaw the team of reporters covering the disappearance, was uncharacteristically quiet about work when she came home. She sat in front of the TV and watched Seinfeld reruns and went to bed early, but woke around three, unable to get back to sleep.
Four days later they found her body in a refrigerator in a second-floor apartment rented by a man, supposedly from out west, who had been going by the name Devlin Smythe. There was a composite sketch. Shaggy headed, moustache, strong chin. Stocky build, they said. A man he'd done some electrical work for recalled seeing a Salvador Dali-inspired melted watch on Smythe's shoulder ("body art," the man called it) when he'd rolled up the short sleeves of his T-shirt on a hot day. "He rewired my house," the man said of Smythe. "He did good work."
His landlady called the police to say she hadn't seen him, not since that little girl disappeared, and that he was overdue with the rent. A string of minor break-ins in the neighborhood came to an end about the same time. The police figured she hadn't lived much more than an hour after her disappearance from the playground. She'd been suffocated.
I followed the case closely, clipping every story, with the idea that I might write about it someday. Maybe take a break from science fiction and write a true-crime story, or a novel based on the incident. But this was a story without an ending, without an arrest, and so my clipping file got buried in the bottom drawer of my desk.
It was also the story that pushed me over the edge, that convinced me it was time to make a life for ourselves someplace else, someplace safer, someplace where we didn't have to be looking over our shoulder twenty-four hours a day. But as unnerved as Sarah was by Jesse's murder, it never occurred to her that we should pull up stakes. These things happened. You moved on.
I found myself looking at the ads in the Sunday paper's real estate section.
"Did you know," I'd tell Sarah, who was reading through the news pages, criticizing headlines, "that if we moved, like, twenty minutes out of the city, we could get a place twice this size?"
Sarah said, "I can't believe this. How hard can it be to include a location? This guy gets mugged, we couldn't give the closest cross streets? People want to know if these things happen in their neighborhoods." I think, sometimes, working at a newspaper takes all the fun out of reading one.
Instead of responding, I said, "Like this place, out in Oakwood?" I had been drawn to the ads about Oakwood because I had driven out there several times. There was a hobby shop out that way, Kenny's, that carried a full line of SF-type model kits. "It's got a master bedroom with an en suite, three other bedrooms, one of which could be turned into a study, and a full basement. I bet we could carve off part of that for a darkroom for Angie. She keeps up this interest in photography, she'll want that. I might even get back into it. And there's a two-car garage. Can you imagine if we had a two-car garage? And a driveway? No more sharing an alley with the Murchisons?"
We could get more for our money. The kids could have larger bedrooms. A rec room where they could entertain their friends. I didn't have to mention anything about how crackheads, hookers, and child murderers weren't common fixtures at the corners of streets with names like Green Valley Drive and Rustling Pines Lane.
Sarah agreed, one Sunday, to drive out and have a look. We got on the expressway, drove twenty miles, and took the exit that delivered us to Valley Forest Estates in the town of Oakwood. Despite what its name suggested, the development was well above sea level, and there wasn't a tree in sight. The subdivision was in its early stages, giving it a kind of post-nuclear attack look. Mounds of dirt, foundation holes, stacks of lumber, cement trucks rumbling by. As I turned into the parking lot for the model homes, Sarah surveyed the landscape and said, "Do you think we need moon suits? Will there be a breathable atmosphere?"
At the sales office, a woman in a pale yellow linen suit, standing at the most high-tech photocopying machine I'd ever seen, ran us off spec sheets and artists' conceptions and floor plans of all the different models, with details on square footage, custom detailing, broadloom choices, warranties, proximity to commuter rail lines.
"We have many features that can be roughed in, like intercom systems, central vac."
"Central vac," I said, in case Sarah hadn't heard. I did most of the vacuuming in our house, but I figured she'd still be impressed.
"It's very convenient," the woman said. "You just empty the canister whenever it's full. It's mounted in the garage, just by the door into the laundry room."
Something clicked for Sarah. "Laundry room?"
"Well, of course."
"But it's off the garage?"
"Yes. You can use it like a mudroom, of course, have the kids come in that way. They can slip off their boots and snowpants and enter the house from the laundry room area." Even when they were little, we'd been unable to get our children to wear snowpants or boots. It was a mix of seasonal denial and a resistance to anything geeklike.
"So let me understand this," said Sarah. "There's a laundry room, on the ground floor?"
"Yes, just around the corner from the kitchen."
"Do you have a model we could look through?" she asked.
I was going to great lengths to mask my real motives in getting us to move out of the city, convincing her that it had nothing to do with paranoia and everything to do with having more space for us and the kids. Meanwhile, Sarah was blatant in her willingness to turn her back on everything the city offered to get a ground-floor laundry room. No more trudging down a narrow flight of stairs to a damp basement.
"You have no idea how great that would be," she whispered to me as the saleslady walked us through the model homes next to the sales office. I couldn't tell for sure, but she seemed to be getting turned on.
It didn't matter which model home we strolled through, they all had ground-floor laundry rooms. And once Sarah became sold on that idea, she was more open to other features, like more cupboard space in the kitchen, two sinks in the en suite bathroom, a walk-in closet ("Oh my God"), and a skylight over where our bed would be. "Great when there are full moons," the saleswoman pointed out when she noticed Sarah looking skyward.
"Is there a high school nearby?" Sarah asked.
"Well," the saleswoman said, hesitantly, "not yet. But I'm sure once the neighborhood grows, and demand for educational facilities becomes great, the school board will have no choice but to build one. But there is a bus that goes by and gets them where they have to go."
We brought the kids out the next week to show them around.
"Kill me now," Paul said.
"What's the name of this development again?" Angie asked.
"Loserville Acres?"
Now that I had Sarah onboard ("No more traipsing up and down stairs with laundry baskets," she said on the drive home from our first tour, sliding her hand up the inside of my thigh), we worked on the kids as a team. Bigger bedrooms, huge basement rec room, extra space in the driveway for when the kids got their own cars ---
"We're going to get cars?"
Overselling can get you into trouble. There was some slight backtracking. "If you get jobs, and make enough money, and want to buy yourselves cars, there will be a place to park them."
Now that it was clear that a new house would not come with a pair of Mazda Miatas for them, the kids remained opposed, especially Angie, who had a tight circle of friends. But I knew, in my heart, that getting out of the city was the best thing for them, and for us. I didn't want my son's locker to be next to a home invader's. I didn't want my daughter hopscotching her way around used condoms and syringes on her way home. I wanted Sarah to be able to head out the door to work in the morning without running into some punk who'd run off with her purse.
We met with a Mr. Don Greenway, who closed the deals. If you'd been taken into his office blindfolded, you'd have thought it was in some elegant downtown complex. Plush carpeting, track lighting, a massive map along one wall showing the various phases of the housing development. You'd never have known you were in a complex of mobile homes bolted together as a temporary sales office.
"You're making an excellent life decision," said Greenway. I wondered whether it was his real name. It sounded like one of the streets in Phase Two. And then I remembered, it was the name of the street where we'd looked at an available lot.
I pointed to the map. The areas where construction was under way were shaded green. But several networks of streets, which surrounded a small creek that meandered through the area, remained in white.
"Are you not going to build there?" I asked.
"Eventually," said Greenway. "Those are subject to zoning approval by the town council. Some of the council members seem concerned by its proximity to an environmentally sensitive area, that some little salamander is at risk, but they don't understand that Valley Forest Estates will complement the natural attributes of this area, not detract from them. Now, will you be wanting a bidet? We find many customers, particularly those who've come from Europe, like to have at least one." I was unfamiliar with the sensation of having my ass hosed down from below, and said we would be fine with conventional American fixtures.
We put our house on Crandall up on the market, and sold it in two days. There was a brief bidding war. There were, evidently, people who wanted into our neighborhood as much as we wanted out. We got $20,000 more than our asking price, moved to the new house once the builders had completed it, with no mortgage, and a bit of money left over in the bank. In the basement, we created a walk-in-closet-sized darkroom for Angie, and then finished off the rest of it so the kids would have someplace to hang out with their friends.
"If we make any," said Angie, struggling to show her gratitude about the darkroom. "I bet everyone who lives out here is a loser."
I should have felt liberated once we settled in, free of my downtown paranoia. But I still took precautions, still locked the car when I parked at the nearby plaza on a milk run, still insisted on driving Angie to her friends' houses once it was dark. Sarah, on the other hand, thought she could let her guard down now that we lived in the suburbs. A key left in the front door was no big deal. Hey, there's no crime out here. No one's stuffing little girls into refrigerators. "What's the point in living in this godforsaken sterile Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip world if we have to be looking over our shoulders as much as when we lived on
Crandall?" she asked.
I guess with me, old habits die hard.
So here we are. It's been nearly two years now, and the reviews are mixed. There's no decent Chinese takeout nearby, no SF bookshops, no Mrs. Hayden, no walking to work, no walking to school. A pound of butter means a five-minute drive to the closest convenience store. We live in a house that is indistinguishable from any other on the street, prompting Paul to rename the subdivision Clone Valley. It was this struggle to distinguish our home from the others that spawned his sudden interest in gardening. The massive garage jutting toward the sidewalk like a whale's mouth trying to swallow passersby is the predominant architectural feature of our home. There isn't a tree within a fifteen-block radius that could cast a shadow. And the closest video store has one hundred copies of the car crash movie The Fast and the Furious, but if you asked the kid behind the counter for that Irish flick where the townsfolk conspire to trick the lottery officials that the local winner is still alive, he'd say, "Is that the one by Tarantino?"
I wouldn't deny that there were tradeoffs, that we had given up eclectic for sterile for the sake of a ground-floor laundry room. But I had something now that I couldn't count on when we lived on Crandall.
I had peace of mind. We had minimized our risks.
Excerpted from BAD MOVE © Copyright 2004 by Linwood Barclay. Reprinted with permission by Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
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