“Their cars aren’t there.”
“Well, good God, they’ve probably gone to a movie, and the boys have the other one out. We’ll give them a call later on—”
“No,” I said, and was out of the car before he stopped it, and running across the wet night lawn. I could not see through the shuttered windows, and the front door is solid, but I knew that the French windows from the den onto the back patio had shutters, and I ran around the house, stumbling down the little flight of brick stairs at the side and onto the patio. The shutters on the back windows weren’t fastened. I pressed my face to the cold glass. The light from the Harpers’ upstairs bedroom window next door filtered wanly through their drawn curtains, and after a moment I could see into Claire and Roger’s house. There was nothing there. Claire’s prized old random-oak boards, polished lovingly once a week and left bare, were empty of furniture and drifted with a fine skin of dust and balls of slut’s wool. The walls were naked except for light, ghostly rectangles where pictures had hung. A roped bale of magazines stood in the middle of the emptiness. Nothing of Claire and Roger remained.
I met Walter in the driveway coming after me. I snatched his hand and pulled him back to the car.
“Get me home,” I gasped. “Right now. They’re gone, and the Greenes have gone, and something else has happened. I know it. I’ve got to find out where they are.”
He said nothing. He drove back to our house, and I was into the kitchen and dialing information before he had wrestled the first suitcase into the house. I stood there in my coat and dialed. It seemed forever before the operator answered.
“A new listing for Roger Swanson,” I said. There was a long silence, and then she was back.
“Would that be Roger Swanson on Marywood?”
“No. I don’t know. They’ve just moved in the last week—it might be R. C. or maybe Roger C.—”
“This must be it,” she said. “Roger C. Swanson, on Brittany Village Way. It’s a condominium development.”
I knew the place—shoddy, pretentious, cramped, and overpriced. It had been built a couple of years before when a great old estate on the fringes of our neighborhood was sold to a developer and carved into a ghastly, rococo parody of a Breton fishing village. We had all mourned when the great old hardwoods had come down and the red earth had bled through and the sterile, ridiculous town houses had begun to rise. Claire hated it so much that she found another, longer route to the shopping center.
“That can’t be right,” I said.
“It’s the only Roger C. Swanson in new listings, ma’am.”
I dialed the number she gave me. It rang and rang and then Claire answered.
“What in the name of God has happened to you?” I shouted without identifying myself, weeping without knowing that I wept.
“Colquitt,” she said after a moment. Her voice sounded frail and thin. It was the way Claire would sound when she was very old.
She told me then, briefly and remotely; it was only later that I learned any details, and then mostly from the newspapers. She and Roger had gone over early on the night of Norman Greene’s reception for the visiting Russian, and had waited with them in the living room, with the house glowing and immaculate around them, the child sleeping peacefully upstairs, the bartender busily polishing and repolishing his glasses, the uniformed maid shuffling primly behind the laden buffet table. They waited for the guests to arrive. They never came. The minutes stretched out and conversation died. Norman Greene’s face had swelled, gone radiant and incandescent with rage. Susan Greene had brought drinks and passed nuts and chattered desperately and then had fallen silent. Norman Greene had gone to the telephone and made a call, and then another, and another, and had come back into the living room, his face wiped clean of anything but a pure, silver fury.
“They didn’t get their invitations,” he said. “The invitations never got there.”
Stiffly he had wheeled and walked to the silly fantasy of an escritoire in the downstairs bedroom, and opened the drawer, and brought the double handfuls of creamy, stamped envelopes back into the living room. Susan had dropped her head and begun to cry silently.
“I thought I mailed them,” she said. “As God is my witness, Norman, I thought I mailed them three weeks ago at the post office at the center. I was on my way to the doctor’s with Melissa, and—”
“Melissa,” he howled. “Melissa! It’s always Melissa, isn’t it, Susan? That dirty, stinking, reeking, whining little bastard, that little illegitimate bastard that I gave my name to, my name, when your own family had thrown you out, when your own family wouldn’t have you and your bastard under their roof—”
“That was it all along, Colquitt,” Claire said dully into the telephone. “That was why she put up with him all along. It was gratitude. She had a child out of wedlock, probably while she was in art school, and kept it—it must have been practically over her family’s dead bodies—and he met her and married her and gave her illegitimate child his name, and she was grateful to him for it. On top of all her money she gave him her gratitude. Her own family threw her out, but he took her in, and she spent the rest of her life being grateful.”
Norman Greene had started to scream then.
Claire and Roger had not stayed to soothe, to mediate. They had snatched their coats from the bedroom and fled, blindly, into the night.
They were almost to their own driveway when they heard the shots. Three of them—two close together, and then, in a moment, another. Flat, trivial poppings that might have been firecrackers but could not have been anything but what they were. They had stood still in the street until they heard the high, endless screaming begin, and then they had run back to the house and into the empty living room, where the hired maid was pressed against the wall, eyes closed, screaming as though she would never stop. They heard the bartender on the telephone.
They had run up the stairs to the bedrooms on the second level, but they were empty. They climbed the stairs to the child’s room on the third floor. The room that hung cradled so gently in the enfolding trees. Pie Harralson’s baby’s room.
The Greenes were there. Norman Greene lay on his back, one arm dangling into the open toy chest that stood against the inside wall. Susan Greene lay on the bed, on her side, one arm flung across the child, who lay with her arms still reaching out toward her mother. Her eyes were open, as if in surprise.
The newspapers reconstructed it neatly the next day. After a domestic argument, Mrs. Susan Greene, of 1114 March Valley Road, N.W., had shot her husband and her eight-year-old child with her husband’s service revolver and then had turned the gun on herself. All three were dead on arrival at Townsend Memorial Hospital.
24
I DON’T REMEMBER the rest of that night. To this day I cannot tell you precisely how we came to the decision we finally reached. I know we did not sleep. I do remember that when dawn came, soft and swollen with rain and the sense of unseen things budding in the woods, we took fresh cups of coffee and sat on the steps to the patio, breathing in the fragrant steam and sitting quietly for the first time since I had hung up the phone on Claire’s listless monotone. We were both still in the clothes we had put on the morning before in that faraway green-and-cream room in the St. Regis.
We were not the same people we had been the night before. The long hours of anguish and horror had birthed an implacable new sense of resolution in us. We became a simple one-purposed organism. Time—our past, our future—ceased to exist for us that night; there was before us only a single, unending now. When Walter said, irrelevantly, pointing to my barren zinnia beds, “That should all be dug up and fertilized before we plant this spring,” I looked at him as though he were discussing a rice paddy. Flowers and tennis and shopping and Colquitt and Walter, the appreciators, the enrichers, were gone. I did not mourn them then, and I don’t think he did either. There was nothing left to mourn with. We have both had flashes of regret for those vanished, golden people since, but they’ve been only that—flas
hes, a gently aching nostalgia as for people known and loved long ago in a distant youth. It is not nearly so bad as I had feared it might be. You only grieve for roads not taken by choice, not for those you have passed by because only one is left to you.
I went first to Claire. The Breton fisherman’s cottage was just as awful inside as out. Roger and the boys were out, and Claire was still in her flannel nightgown. Her hair was bent into spikes around her face from her pillow, and her face was dull and old. She looked at me for a moment as if she did not know me.
“Colquitt,” she said. And finally, “Would you like to come in?”
She murmured something about coffee and disappeared into her kitchen. I looked around the living room. A few of her lovely old pieces stood about the walls, lined up as if they had been left where the movers set them down. They dwarfed the low-ceilinged little room. There were piles of newspapers and magazines on the sofa and coffee table, and overflowing ashtrays, and a pair of sneakers and a hockey stick on the credenza in the little foyer. The carpet was the raw, opaque green of unwashed emeralds. I could see down a narrow hall and through the kitchen out to a small walled patio. Rog and Tommy’s bicycles leaned against the wall, and two plastic garbage cans sat in square cement holes, dug apparently for the purpose. A flash of wiry brindle whisked through my line of vision: Buzzy, a chain affixed to his collar and some out-of-sight tethering post.
Claire came back into the room in a pair of Levi’s and a sweat shirt and rubber shower clogs, damp comb tracks in her subdued hair. She carried a silver tray with two mugs of coffee on it.
“Is instant all right?” she asked. “I can’t find the percolator. Black for you, right?” She shoved a pile of magazines off the coffee table and set the tray down. We sat facing each other at opposite ends of the sofa.
“Well, what do you think of our new little nest?” she said.
“I—it’s not bad at all.”
“It’s a goddamn horror, and you know it,” she said. “But it will do until we can find something bigger.”
“When did you move?” I said.
“We moved the next day,” she said unemphatically. I did not have to ask her the day after what.
“It took some string-pulling on Roger’s part,” she said, “but he knows the developer, and he got a bank truck and some of the maintenance guys to move us. We were in by nine o’clock that night. I had the rest of the furniture stored.”
We drank our coffee in silence, then she said, “This isn’t a social call, is it, Colquitt?”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t a social call. I came to ask you if you would help us, Claire. It’s time now.”
“No. No, I won’t help you, whatever it is you’re planning to do. I told you that before. I’m not going to help you, I’m not going to talk about it, I’m not going to think about it. I guess you mean to try and warn people now, don’t you?”
“Yes. We’re going to see Chick Herren at the paper first, and then the radio and TV stations. I don’t know who after that, but whoever it takes. But, Claire, we need your help, we need it desperately. You’re the only ones who’ve been…touched…who are around to corroborate what we say. People might pooh-pooh Walter and me, but they couldn’t ignore you and Roger too. It’s not enough just to say the house is dangerous, unfit to live in; we’ll have to tell why. We’ll have to show how it happened.”
“No.”
“Claire, that house has killed now. It’s done the worst thing; it’s taken life. Do you think it will settle for anything less next time?”
Her face lit into fury. “Are you telling me it’s killed? Do you think I’ll ever forget what we saw in that bedroom for one minute as long as I live on this earth? Do you think I want to come in one day and find Roger and Tommy and Rog with…their heads splattered on the wall? Leave me alone, Colquitt! You do any damn thing you want to about that house, you say anything about it you want to! Rent a billboard, hire a sky writer, write your congressman! I don’t care what you do. Just leave me and my family alone!” She began to cry. I moved to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged away.
“Claire, baby,” I said, “you don’t have to be afraid of it anymore. You’re away from it. It can’t hurt you if you don’t go near it.”
“You don’t know that! You don’t know what it can do! For all I know, there’s some kind of…contagion that comes from it, some horrible kind of virus, some thing that spreads in the air. I could be carrying it right now; you certainly could be, as close as you are to it—”
She lifted her streaming eyes to me and they were not quite sane.
“At least,” I said, “let me tell people what you believe, if you aren’t willing to tell it yourself, Claire. What if it goes on the market again? What then? What if somebody buys it? What about those people?”
“I don’t care about those people or any other people! Hear me well, Colquitt, because I’m not going to say it again. If you mention my name in connection with that house, I will swear on my mother’s grave that you are lying and crazy and—and whatever else I have to say. If I ever hear that you have said one word about me and my family, we will sue you. We will take you to court. I want you to leave now, and I don’t want you to come here again. I don’t want to see you again, I don’t want you to call me. If we run into you anywhere, we will leave that moment, because you are too close to it, and if you stay there, you are both as good as dead, and I will not let it get at my family through you!”
“Claire,” I said. “Claire—”
She jumped up from the sofa and balled her small hands into fists and began to scream. She started toward me, her fists raised, her eyes blind. I backed toward the door.
“Get out of my house,” she shrieked. “Get out of my house! You’re dead, Colquitt, you’re a walking dead woman! Get out of my house!”
I turned and ran through the door and slammed it and stumbled down the little cobbled walkway to my car. Behind me I could hear her still screaming.
“You’re dead, you’re walking around dead, you’re dead—”
I drove home, thinking only, mildly, “Claire is gone. I’m going to miss Claire.”
That was on a Sunday morning. That afternoon Walter and I went up to the big Safeway in the shopping center that is open twenty-four hours a day, every day, and stocked up on groceries. We were out of nearly everything, since we’d been away a week. I had a list, and we went methodically up one aisle and down another, slowly filling the cart with the items I needed. The store had that damp, dingy, white Sunday look to it, and the people who were shopping were not the same people I ran into during the week. There were no tanned, hard-legged matrons in tennis clothes, no harried young mothers with small children in tow, no shoals of drifting blue-haired old ladies, no grave-faced chauffeurs with lists. The people were young, and many of the men were bearded, and all had the same damp, dingy white look the store wore.
“It’s a whole different subculture,” said Walter, looking around.
I caught sight of us in the mirror over the meat counter, two tall, slender, graceful people in well-cut slacks and heavy sweaters. I thought we looked like attractive strangers, people you see on the streets and in restaurants or passing cars whom you do not know but know instinctively are of you, one of your own. I thought too that Walter and I looked far more alike than I had ever realized. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps the single-minded unity that had sprung between us that night showed, somehow, on our faces.
In the gourmet department, where Walter was foraging for the almond-stuffed olives he favors for martinis, we ran into Eloise Jennings clutching a round wooden box of Brie. Semmes’s touch, I knew. Eloise is Cheez-Whiz material.
“Colquitt! Have you heard about that perfectly awful thing with the Greenes?” Eloise was so full of the news that she did not even greet us. Her entire body twitched with it.
“Yes,” I said. “Claire told me when we got back. It’s horrible, isn’t it?” I glanced desperately at Walter to see if he was through
and we could escape, but he was studying a display of mustard pickles with his back to us, across the alcove. His back was rigid with interest and concentration on the pickles. He could not have failed to hear Eloise’s piercing voice, and I could have shaken him.
“Oh, it’s just dreadful, just unbelievable,” shrilled Eloise. “She seemed so normal, but of course you can’t judge a book by its cover, I always say—and the poor little girl! Had they been fighting, do you know? The paper said there was an argument—”
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Well, you’re lucky you were gone, otherwise you might have been the ones to—I understand Claire and Roger found them. I wonder if there was a lot of, you know…mess?”
“I expect so, Eloise. I doubt if many shootings are very tidy,” I snapped, close to tears for the first time since the night we had heard about it. Would she never shut up?
“Awful for Claire and Roger, of course. You said you’d talked to her—where on earth are they? They didn’t tell a soul they’d moved. I guess she just couldn’t stand living there, with that house to remind her every time she passed it.”
“They’ve taken a town house nearby. They had a buyer for the house, a very good offer, and the people wanted to take immediate occupancy, so they got out as quickly as possible. The town house is just temporary,” I lied.
“Well, you’d think she’d tell somebody. I never heard a word about it. Speaking of houses, will the Greenes’ go back on the market, do you know? Gwen said his brother came down and moved their things and took the…remains…back to Boston or wherever it is. There wasn’t an inquest, Gwen said; it was perfectly apparent what had happened. The gun was still in her hand. I suppose the house will go to the brother.”
“I don’t know about the house. I don’t know a thing more than you do,” I said. “Walter,” I called, “hurry up. I want to get this frozen stuff home before it melts. Will you excuse us, Eloise?”
House Next Door Page 26