Stranger in the House

by MacDonald, Patricia

  Edward nodded indifferently. “Take your time.”

  “Don’t forget about Paul,” said Iris, turning back to him.

  “What?” he said sharply.

  “I told Anna he could call if he needed anything. Remember?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I won’t forget. Don’t look so worried.”

  Iris hesitated as if she had more to say, but then she turned and left the library. Edward waited until he heard the slam of her car door and the sound of the car leaving the driveway. Then he looked out the library window toward the windmill. He could not see it from that window, but in his mind he visualized it. Tapping the letter opener on his palm, he went over all his tools in his mind, trying to decide which one to use. The idea was to use a tool that a burglar might have. He would break into the house, take care of the boy, and then mess the place up. Ransack it and take a few valuables, to make it look as if the boy had been killed in the course of a robbery. It was simple, and it made sense. These houses were isolated and clearly affluent. There was always the danger of burglary. A crowbar might be a good weapon, he thought, but it was large to carry. He didn’t own a gun. He had thought of a chisel, but it did not seem part of a burglar’s equipment. The best bet was probably a knife. In the windmill he had a set of large hunting knives he sometimes used. That would do, he decided. He could put it in a sheath under his jacket. It would be messy, but that was all right. He kept a change of clothes in the windmill anyway. He would just wait for a little while and then…

  Lost in thought, he did not hear Lorraine enter the room and did not notice her until she appeared beside him like a dark ghost. He jumped a little as she said his name.

  “What is it?” he demanded.

  “You said you wouldn’t be needing me…my brother is here to pick me up,” the maid said.

  “Fine,” said Edward. “We’ll see you next week then.” He walked with her to the door after she had picked up her suitcase in the foyer. He waited in the gloom until the taillights of Lorraine’s brother’s car had disappeared. Sweat gathered under his arms as he stood there in the silent house. He was keenly aware of each passing minute. His blood was singing in his ears, but the rest of the house was tomblike. Without bothering to turn on a light, he walked back through the house, headed out the patio doors and into the night.

  16

  Paul studied the TV Guide as the sounds of Anna’s car faded away. Using the remote, he flipped the channels for a few minutes and then he turned the set off. There was nothing on that he wanted to watch. He wandered through the house to the living room, where he sank into a chair and picked up a magazine from the brass rack beside it. He thumbed the pages restlessly and then dropped it back in the rack and got up again.

  Anna had made him some dinner before she left, but he still felt hungry. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Help yourself, she always told him. And there certainly was plenty to eat. His mother’s refrigerator had never looked like that, except for the freezer, which had stacks of frozen dinners in trays in turquoise boxes with pictures of the food on the front. Dorothy Lee always worked the three to eleven shift at the hospital; he’d heat one up and eat it quick so he could be done before his father came around. Paul looked down at the shelf and saw a piece of cream pie left in a pie pan. He could have eaten the whole thing standing there, but he felt uncomfortable about it. After getting out a knife and plate, he cut off about a third of the piece, only an inch across the back, and ate that. It was gone in an instant, and he thought about taking more; but he closed the door instead.

  After taking his plate and utensils to the sink, he washed and dried them and put them back in their places. He surveyed the kitchen and then hung up the towel, satisfied that no one would be able to tell that he had taken anything.

  The house was quiet, still seemed strange to him, and for a moment he wished, more than anything, that he had someone to talk to. He thought of Sam and then sighed, and tried to dismiss the thought of his lost pet.

  He walked idly from room to room, looking at the furniture, the plants, and the pictures. It was like something from a magazine, he thought, or that you saw on TV. Probably if anyone from Hawley had seen him in this house, they would have thought he was the luckiest person on earth, living in a place like that.

  Paul wandered to the living room window and pulled back the drapes. He looked out into the darkness. Every day he thought about running away. Every single day. He could just pack his few things in his bag and go. Maybe if he got away from here, the headaches would stop. And no one would miss him. Well, the mother maybe.

  He sighed, realizing that he wouldn’t know where to run. And he had no money, so he couldn’t get far. There was probably money in this house, but he didn’t want to steal from them. As much as he hated to admit it to himself, he was afraid to run. Yet he cringed at the thought of staying. I don’t belong here, he thought.

  There was no answer in the darkening yard. He dropped the curtain and turned back into the room, to look for something to do.

  Pressed against the window, the boy’s pale face appeared to be melting against the pane. Edward’s cold eyes focused on the mournful visage as he crouched below the porch, looking up at him. He had been making a circuit of the house, scouting the best point of entry when he saw the boy’s face appear at the window. For a moment he thought the boy had heard him in the yard, but as he watched, trying to quiet his racing heartbeat, he could see that the boy was not searching the yard but simply staring, his thoughts far away.

  Edward’s knees ached as he crouched there, his pants cutting into his legs. The indignity of the position made him feel angry and impatient. He wished the kid would hurry up and get away from the window. He did not feel like hiding in the damp grass much longer. He wished to be done with it and safely back in his studio.

  The curtain dropped, and Edward breathed more freely as he rose to his feet. He knew how he was going to get in. At knee level there was a set of windows that opened into the basement. He had seen them from the inside and knew that they were latched with only a simple sliding fastener. It would be easy enough to open one of them and slide inside the house. With the aid of his penlight he had seen a sturdy chair below one of them. That was the window he would choose. As he stole around the house to the window, he repeated his plan to himself. The basement adjoined a playroom. He would go through the door into the playroom and up the stairs into the house. Edward reached the window that he wanted and bent down beside it. He slipped his knife blade through the side of the frame and began to worry it around until he caught the hook. Carefully he jimmied it with the knife point. After a moment the fastening began to move.

  Paul passed by the door to the playroom stairs and stopped, remembering that there was a CD player down there. The silence of the empty house oppressed him, and he thought that perhaps some music would help. He opened the door and started down the stairs. An unfamiliar noise reached him, and he stopped on the steps, listening. It was quiet. Hearing things, he thought. Baby.

  He wondered, as he shuffled down the stairs, how the big reunion was going. That story she had told about the father’s carrying down the elephant had made him feel prickly at the back of his neck. He thought that the elephant seemed familiar. Maybe the father wasn’t so bad. The mother was nice, and she liked him.

  There was no telling why people liked each other. He had never been able to figure out his parents…the Rambos. His father had always been weird and crazy, although Dorothy Lee never said anything bad about him. Still, it had been so humiliating in school and all. Paul had actually been relieved to find out that Albert wasn’t his real father. For a minute Paul felt a wave of pity, followed quickly by revulsion, at the thought of his father’s hanging himself all alone in that hotel room. What a way to end up.

  Paul cocked his head to one side and read the titles on the edges of the CDs arranged in a plastic tower. Most of the good ones were Tracy’s and they were up in her room. He didn’t wa
nt to go up there. But there were a few good things in the playroom CD tower. Paul picked out a Beatles anthology and examined it. At home, or in her truck, his mother played country music. No one he knew in Hawley ever listened to much rock ’n’ roll, but he had always secretly liked it. He’d heard of the Beatles and he knew they were an old group from the sixties that people still listened to. He’d heard a lot of their songs. Curious, he put the CD into the player and plugged in a headset, planning to lie back on the rug to listen. Just then he noticed, on the bookshelf above the CD tower, a pair of fat brown leather books with photos sticking out under the covers. He reached up curiously and pulled the top one down, still holding the headset in his hand as the lyrics of “Norwegian Wood” squawked. He opened the unwieldy book, and an envelope of snapshots fell out. The album was full of photographs neatly mounted and captioned. Crossing his legs Indian style, Paul opened the album on his knees and then settled the headset over his ears. Absorbed in the pictures, he did not see the door of the playroom across the room opening behind him a millimeter at a time.

  The bright faces of the people in the pictures smiled, heedless of their images, which were fading with time. They were like people waving from the deck of a ship that was disappearing out to sea. Paul turned the pages carefully, tapping his foot and gazing at the photographs. There were pictures of Thomas and Anna toasting at their wedding and shy, smiling pictures of them, tanned shoulders touching, on a honeymoon in Bermuda. She was always smiling out at the camera, while Thomas kept his gaze on her face.

  On the next page a baby appeared, and Paul realized, with a start, that it was himself. He traced the outline of the strange baby’s head, which the infant struggled to lift from a blanket. There were pictures of him in every imaginable pose, one or the other of his parents holding him, in and around a house which was not this one. He laughed out loud at a picture captioned PAUL’S 2ND BIRTHDAY, in which he, a toddler now, was perched behind a lit cake, sporting, at an angle, a shiny, pointed foil hat. An older, dark-haired boy behind him was blowing a noisemaker right into his eager, squinting face. The music drummed in his ears as the Beatles sang about seeing a face they couldn’t forget.

  A shadow fell like a scythe’s blow over the page, darkening the cheery faces in one swipe. Paul’s head jerked up as he felt the presence behind him. He yanked off the headset and twisted around to stare at the figure that loomed above him. For a moment he looked up, bewildered. Then he spoke.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  Tracy cocked her head and glanced at the book he was holding. “I brought you something,” she said.

  Paul looked at her in confusion as she shrugged her backpack off her shoulders and carefully opened it. She reached in and pulled out the struggling, crying gray-and-black-striped cat.

  “Sam!” Paul exclaimed. “Where’d you get him?” He lifted the animal from her grasp and crushed it to his chest. The cat protested angrily and leaped away from him.

  “He turned up tonight at the animal shelter,” Tracy announced with a satisfied smile. “They let me come home early, to bring him.”

  Paul’s gaze lingered on the cat, which had jumped up on the sofa. “Thanks,” he said softly.

  “That’s okay.” Tracy flopped down on the daybed. “You looking at those old pictures?”

  Paul nodded.

  Behind them the door to the playroom began to close, imperceptibly slowly.

  “Would you like to walk a little?” asked Thomas, as they left the restaurant.

  “Yes, why don’t we?” Anna agreed.

  “I could use a walk,” said Tom. “The food there is so rich. The sauces and all.”

  Anna murmured agreement, although she had noticed during dinner that he hardly touched his meal.

  They set off walking down Columbus Avenue, joining the meandering stream of pedestrians taking the night air on the West Side’s most fashionable avenue. Although it was warm, it was not humid, and a few stars were visible in the city sky. The dinner conversation had been halting and Anna felt, as she faced him over the table, that she really understood the meaning of the word “estranged.” Now, however, as they made their way side by side down the avenue, she felt more normal, their steps meshing neatly, turning automatically at the same corners, even though they had no stated destination. They both heeded the flashing DON’T WALK signs, while the New Yorkers around them spilled contemptuously into the intersections.

  Anna stole a glance at her husband’s profile as they waited on one corner. He had ordinary, rather blunt features except for his eyes, which were clear and expressive. The expression in them now was one of anxiety and a trace of sadness. She felt an impulse to slip her arm through his, but she restrained herself.

  “Shall we go over to Lincoln Center?” he asked. “It’s only a few blocks down.”

  Anna nodded. “I’d like to see the fountain.”

  They walked along in awkward silence. “Is that a new tie?” Anna asked him.

  Thomas reached up and fingered the knot at his throat. “Yes.” He cupped her elbow. “Our light,” he said.

  Anna noticed a slightly guilty expression on his face as he propelled her across the street.

  “I didn’t pack too well,” he said when they reached the opposite curb. “I’ve got to go to Boston tomorrow on the ten o’clock shuttle, and I don’t have the clothes I needed for the trip.”

  “Are you going for long?” she asked coolly.

  “Just overnight.”

  She stifled the impulse to say that he should have asked her to bring what he needed. He left you, she reminded herself. Walked out, remember? But she could not muster her anger against him. He seemed vulnerable to her. His hand burned on her arm. “Where are you staying?” she asked.

  “In Boston, you mean?”

  “No, here.”

  Thomas squirmed visibly at the question. “On the East Side. Not far from work.”

  They crossed the street and climbed the steps to the plaza in front of Lincoln Center. Anna caught her breath as she always did at the sight. The murals in the opera house were a giddy burst of color, the chandeliers sparkling through the huge panels of glass. In the center of the plaza ringed by theaters, a round fountain gave off sprays of water and light. Thomas and Anna walked slowly toward the gushing fountain.

  Thomas gave Anna a tight, pained smile and offered her a seat on the fountain’s edge.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Another silence fell between them, and Anna had the sense that their time was running out without their having made any progress. She cast about in her mind for some way of reaching him without starting a fight.

  Suddenly Tom spoke. “I was really relieved to hear about Paul today,” he said.

  Anna looked at him in surprise. It was the first mention of the boy between them that evening. She thought of just agreeing with him but decided to plunge in instead. “We talked about you before I came down tonight.”

  “You and Paul?” he asked.

  “Yes. He thinks you hate him.”

  Thomas closed his eyes, and Anna could see the pain in the grim lines around his mouth. He swallowed hard, as if trying to ingest some bitter tonic.

  “I told him that wasn’t true,” she said.

  Thomas looked at her in surprise. “You did?”

  Anna nodded. “I was trying to explain to him. I was telling him about you. About when he was born and how you adored him. Things like that.”

  Thomas stared out across the plaza, as music lovers hurried toward the theaters. His gaze was pained. “How could I hate him?” he said. “Poor kid.” He was quiet for a long time. Anna watched him helplessly, wishing he would look at her. Finally he spoke. “I think I hate myself,” he said.

  “Tom,” she protested, “don’t say that.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t know how I feel,” he said. “It’s different for you.”

  “What’s different?”

  “Oh, you. You were always so sur
e he’d come back. Always believing he was still alive. Hopeful. Even the tiniest thing would make you hopeful.” He turned and looked at her for the first time.

  “I never was hopeful, Anna. I never expected to see that boy again.”

  “But you had no way of knowing. Nobody did.”

  “I gave up on him, Anna. My own son.” Thomas sighed and bent forward at the waist. He looked away from his wife and held himself around the middle, as if he were going to be sick. “When I see him, I feel so…I don’t know. I feel so guilty—”

  “Guilty! Tom!” Anna exclaimed. “You have no reason to feel guilty.”

  “I did love him,” he said. “It’s not as if I didn’t.”

  “I know that,” she said. “He knows it, too. I’m sure he does. Or he will. It will just take a little time.”

  “I hated the way you were always looking for some good sign, finding reasons to hope,” he said.

  “I just had to,” she said.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I wanted to scream at you because of it. But how could I? You were the noble one, the one who refused to give up.”

  She groped for the words to try to explain it to him. “I didn’t do it to be noble,” she said. “I often thought it was a delusion. But I had to cling to it. I couldn’t have gone on living without hope.”

  Thomas reached over and put his hand on hers. They sat quietly at the fountain’s edge. The meshing of their fingers was like a circuit completed. The consolation, the connection in their touch made Anna feel a sudden, fierce desire for him—her husband, her man. She closed her eyes and felt the heat throughout her body. She imagined turning to him, burying her face in the curve of his neck, feeling his hands on her again. She was trying to think of a way to say, “Come home.” And then she realized that “Come home” was all she needed to say. She did not think she could speak aloud. She decided she could manage to say it in a whisper.

  Suddenly Thomas released her hand. “That’s not all I have to feel guilty about,” he said quietly.