by Steve Richer
“He’s doing his best. Finding his feet again.” Tom had been a middle executive at Pierson Newport until the pressures had all gotten too much for him a year ago. If he’d still been here, he’d have been the one trying to land the Mapleview account. He’d be the one gunning for vice president.
“He’s getting transcription work online. And we have the investment property undergoing renovation, over on Whitetail Lane.”
“You decided what you’re going to do with that?” Walter sipped on his double espresso, wincing at the bitter caffeine kick.
“Tom wants to sell for a fast buck.”
“And you want to rent.” The two laughed. They’d had this conversation before and Alice knew Walter was on the side of a quick sale for profit.
“I know,” she said. “You’re always telling me rental’s a trap. Too many complications and you can never find—”
“The perfect tenant.” They both finished the sentence in unison.
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” Alice went on, playing her trump card. “You remember that basement apartment we have?”
“Plan B?” That’s what they’d called it: if all else fails, we’ll rent out the basement apartment.
“Our tenant moved in this week. Professional, polite, friendly. She’s the quietest thing. She really is the perfect tenant you say is an impossibility.”
Walter just looked at her, eyebrows raised to indicate his disbelief.
“She’s hiding something,” he said at last. “She’s a psychopath or a war criminal, or she has really bad taste in interior decoration that you’ll only discover when she’s fled without paying rent. Really, Ali, you know there’s no such thing—”
“As the perfect tenant!”
They laughed again, before Alice said, believing every word, “Honestly, though, Walter. I think we’ve struck gold with this one. She really is the quietest thing.”
~ ~ ~ ~
The guy had zero interest in conversation, which suited Libbie just fine.
He bought her another negroni to replace the one he’d jogged when he’d been so distracted by her dancing he’d bumped into her drink arm. After that, they did shots.
She knew she’d drunk too much. Three months behind locked doors with only coffee and palmed sedatives to alter her mind had seriously reduced her alcohol tolerance levels.
She shook her head when the guy nudged their empty shot glasses toward the bartender. Grabbed him by the arm and led him back onto the dancefloor.
She had so much catching up to do.
She had to laugh when she recalled telling perfect Tom and perfect Alice how quiet and reclusive a life she led.
And that was when she realized where all this was leading.
The guy—did he even have a name?—was staring. She could tell he was unnerved by her directness and by the way she had just laughed at nothing, but he couldn’t just turn away. He knew he had a chance with her, and no guy would turn away from that.
They were all the same. Every last one of them, whatever they claimed.
Not long later, they were out in the street. Fast food places, bars, and locked-up shops crowded the street. This wasn’t an attractive part of town to be out in after dark.
As soon as they were outside and the cold air hit, Libbie grabbed the guy and drew him into a deep kiss. Long and intense, right up against the metal grille of a locked sportswear store.
There was a dark cross-street here and the guy tried to steer her down there, but that wasn’t the plan.
She took his hand and led him to where she’d parked the Toyota.
As soon as they were seated he was all over her again, his mouth on hers, his hands taking all they could grab. After a couple of minutes, she broke free and gunned the engine. Soon they were cruising through the leafy streets on the nicer side of town.
“So…”
She silenced him with a glare. He was fit, he danced and kissed well, and he bought her drinks. She didn’t need him spoiling any of that with conversation right now. Every guy she’d ever known had been a downhill route to disappointment.
“I—”
She slammed on the brakes, twisted in her seat and took his face in the tight grip of one hand, his stubble scraping on her skin. She thought he might run and felt his body tensing as he weighed his options.
Kissing him killed that thought.
Guys. Always the same.
A short time later, they pulled up at the curb outside the Granger residence. The lights were on, but Alice’s Ford Focus was still gone. Libbie had bumped into her as she was leaving earlier, some feeble excuse about pressure of work.
She gunned the engine again before killing it and, sure enough, like any good neighbor, within seconds Tom was at the window of the den looking out.
Would he recognize it as her car by now, parked out in the street? Maybe. She didn’t care.
She turned to nameless dude, who was studying her, judging his move.
“We going in or what?” he drawled.
“What.”
This time when she kissed him, she swung herself over to straddle him. The extra space in this model of Toyota had to be good for something, she figured.
“Oh, baby,” she purred into the guy’s ear. “You like a gal who knows just what she wants?”
He reached up for her face, trying to take control, but she slapped his hands away, pinning him against the car seat.
When she glanced off to the side, she saw that the house window was empty. What the…? Why wasn’t he even watching? Was he that uninterested?
She swung back, her butt coming to rest against the dash. Stretching back like this the streetlights fell on her like a spotlight and for an instant the guy paused. Then he reached again and started to paw at her, pulling at her clothing, until with a roll of the shoulders she reached up and pulled the halterneck top of her dress free and let it fall.
And with one free arm she swung, bumping a fist against the horn.
The guy below her flinched at the sound, but Libbie didn’t care. She stretched back again, arching her spine, letting that street spotlight fall on her exposed body.
And when she looked, Tom was silhouetted in the window once again.
She smiled.
Let him look.
Let him dream.
Let him see her naked form every time he closed his eyes, every time he looked at his wife and felt guilty, every time he looked at that sixteen-year-old neighbor he had the hots for.
The mind games were only just getting started.
Chapter 10
Tom sat alone in the den, a half-consumed bottle of beer on a coffee table before him. His face was lit by the glow of his open laptop.
Libbie couldn’t tell what was holding his interest so intently. She couldn’t see the screen from this angle, peering through the window as she was. Facebook? Games? Porn? Was that what he did when he was all alone at home? When his perfect wife was out working all hours to earn their joint living?
She couldn’t even remember how long she’d been standing here, but she was cold now. Didn’t know how long it was since she’d sent that guy striding off down the road, cursing her for using him and abandoning him like that. As if he’d ever think twice about doing that to a woman!
She still didn’t know his name.
She’d had fun. Surprisingly so. It had been a while. But she was done with the guy. She had been as soon as he’d opened his mouth to speak afterward, as if that was suddenly the time for conversation. So she’d sent him on his way. She’d scratched that itch tonight.
Now was time to return to a longer standing one.
She moved away from the window and paused, gathering herself. And then she went up onto the porch, reached out and knocked on the door.
“I… Hi,” she said, giving her best attempt at a clumsy, shy smile when he opened the door.
Tom’s mouth fell open as soon as he saw her. He looked slightly alarmed, as if he assumed the only reason
she might knock was that something was wrong. And awkward, too, his eyes flitting, not knowing where to rest. Libbie didn’t help him by the way she stood there, her arms folded under her breasts, knowing how that both framed them and pushed them up, emphasizing her exposed cleavage.
Such a contrast with the last guy, who’d known exactly where to look!
“I just came to apologize,” she said, letting him out of his misery. “For earlier. In case you saw anything… inappropriate. That’s not like me. I don’t quite know what came over me.”
He didn’t want to be having this conversation. He clearly didn’t know what to say, or what to think.
Or, rather, he knew exactly what to think. Libbie thoroughly understood that simply by standing here like this, apologizing and telling him to forget all about it, his mind was drawn inevitably back to what he had seen, what she had been doing.
Sometimes this was such an easy game to play.
“I hope I haven’t caused any problems by this little lapse,” she said. “I’d hate to make things hard for you.”
She smiled. Waited. His turn. She wasn’t going to cut him any slack now.
“I… No. I mean. It’s none of my business, is it?” He clearly believed it was, judging by how long he’d spent looking earlier.
“I don’t mean to lower the tone of the neighborhood,” she assured him. “Oh dear. I’ve gotten off to such a bad start, haven’t I? Can we maybe just draw a line under this? Start over again?”
“Of course. Of course.” So suburban of him. Politeness always triumphed.
“I’m sure Alice doesn’t even need to know, does she?” Libbie said. “I’d hate her to think badly of me, just when we’d gotten off to such a great start.”
“I…”
He must know this was a trap. One whose doors had already closed on him.
“Our little secret,” she added. A smile. A shrug of the shoulders that drew her folded arms up, and drew his eyes down again.
“I…” He couldn’t wriggle out of it. He smiled, then, as if conceding defeat. “What goes on tour stays on tour, right?” he said.
“Or out in the street.” Make it into a bad joke, one he had to respond to with at least another smile, and she was reeling him in.
So easy!
“I hope I didn’t disturb you?”
She peered past him into the house, and saw that he’d put his laptop down on the console table inside the door, the screen still frustratingly turned away from her scrutiny.
Tom followed her gaze and instinctively reached across to flip the lid closed.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Everyone has a secret, don’t they?”
“Oh no,” he said hurriedly. “No secrets. Just an automatic thing, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” she told him, twisting the knife deeper with another innocent smile. “Really, though, it’s fine. Whatever you were doing. Whatever your little secret is. You do have one, don’t you?”
He opened his mouth to answer, then stopped himself. That was answer enough for Libbie. He was hiding something! Maybe she’d been right about the porn, or maybe there was something else.
How interesting.
“I’ll leave you in peace,” she said, taking a step back but still facing him, encouraging his eyes to roam again. “And that thing you saw earlier… Just put it from your mind, okay?”
And then she turned, and with a sway of the hips walked around the corner of the house to her apartment.
~ ~ ~ ~
Sunday morning, Libbie was downstairs on the L-shaped couch in her den. Alice and Tom were out—Alice at the office again and Tom visiting their investment property on the other side of town. Libbie liked to know these things, and the half-conversations drifting down that ugly air vent were a godsend when it came to snooping.
Knowing she was safe from any intrusion, she got the scrapbook out.
It was such a safe, suburban hobby, scrapbooking. One they’d encouraged at the secure hospital. Self-expression. Handicraft skills. Design and creativity. Research. So many skills that could be developed through such a simple activity. Dr. Holt had been delighted when she’d taken to it with enthusiasm.
And like any man, the good doctor had been easily fooled.
Back then, her scrapbooks had been filled with images cut from magazines of the lifestyle Libbie had once had, and missed so sorely in the institutional grayness of the hospital. A delightful Luis Vuitton purse on one page, a pair of Christian Louboutin stilettos on another, one shoe tipped on its side to reveal the red-lacquered sole. A pair of Jimmy Choo patent leather slingbacks on another page, and on the next a Michael Kors lace-up jumpsuit almost identical to the one she’d worn on the day they’d brought her to the hospital.
Dr. Holt had been so impressed with her industry and creativity.
He might not have been quite so impressed with the direction her hobby had taken since getting out of that pointless place.
Libbie looked down at the open spread before her and smiled. A different one to the innocent smile she’d used to tantalize and confuse Tom Granger last night. This smile had a hard, cruel edge to it.
Unknown to Dr. Holt, Libbie had been into scrapbooking long before her unwanted stay in his establishment, and this particular scrapbook was nearly complete. Only a few more pages to go.
She’d started it years ago, with pictures she’d found in a variety of places. A school yearbook stolen from an old friend of Alice’s. Photocopies from a couple of newspaper stories—a charity fundraiser Alice had organized, a big real estate deal that had promised to rejuvenate an entire district from when Tom had worked at Pierson Newport.
Wedding photos taken from Tom’s Facebook page. Such a happy, well-loved couple!
Vacation snaps, taken from the same source. Alice looked good in a bikini. She should tell her that sometime. And Tom in his swim trunks. They really were a well-matched couple.
They looked so good together.
Even with their faces scratched out. Even with the distracting way someone had scrawled words like bitch and dirty secrets and revenge all over the scrapbook, so that the words covered both the pages and the photographs themselves.
Looking at the artful arrangements on the pages, somewhere between graffiti and collage, she had to acknowledge the creativity that had gone into this project. An aesthetic underscored by hatred and violence. It really was quite beautiful.
She reached for the picture she’d just retrieved from the printer.
Like many of the photographs in the scrapbook, it was one she’d taken herself. She may not be the professional photographer she’d claimed she was to Alice and Tom, but what she lacked in professional skills she made up for in dogged dedication.
The picture showed Tom sitting in his den, the bottle of beer held close to his mouth, tipped at a jaunty forty-five degree angle. Face and beer were both lit only by the glow from the laptop’s screen.
If you ignored the fuzzy pixelation of the image, it really was quite artistic.
Maybe when this was all done she’d have to find another creative outlet, perhaps even photography.
She glued the back of the photograph and positioned it on the page. She reached for a sharpened piece of wood and stabbed the point down sharply into Tom’s eye.
The picture twisted on the page under the impact and she repositioned it carefully, lining it up with the edges of the page.
This time, when she scraped the point to gouge a line across Tom’s face, she held the photograph in place, mindful of the glue not yet set.
She really was good at this.
Dr. Holt would be so proud.
~ ~ ~ ~
The sound of a doorbell took her by surprise. She instantly reached for the scrapbook and flipped it shut, before sweeping up her paraphernalia of scissors, glue, pens, ribbons, and a sharpened sliver of wood into a canvas bag.
It was a second or two before her mind caught up and she realized that the sound came from upstairs, perhaps ma
de louder by carrying down the air vent. Was the doorbell’s speaker positioned close to that vent upstairs in the house?
She hadn’t had visitors here yet and so didn’t know the sound of her own bell, or even if she had one. Now that she thought about it, wasn’t there just a knocker on the apartment door? All this was new to her. It was natural to get confused.
She went to the door now and peered through the window next to it, but the corner of the house hid the callers from her view.
Probably a salesman, or snotty kids selling cookies or something, she thought. But she was curious. No aspect of Tom and Alice’s lives should escape her scrutiny. There was gold to be found everywhere.
She went to her room to retrieve the house key and then went outside.
“Hey there.” She gave her best suburban smile. Tried to do that thing Alice did so well—the being nice to strangers thing. “Can I help you guys?”
A kid in a suit, his hair slicked down. A girl in a prim little dress. Each of them carrying clipboards. A school project, Libbie guessed. Dull.
“Ma’am,” said the guy, taking the lead. So predictable. “Would you be the homeowner? We’re here on behalf of the Jackson campaign for the city council and we’d like to share with you what Mr. Jackson has to offer—”
“I’m not the homeowner,” she said, trying hard not to snap at the kid. How old were they? It made her feel old that she’d thought them kids.
She forced another of those mindless suburban smiles onto her face. “That is to say, I’m not quite moved in yet. I’m just in the process of buying the place.” She shrugged apologetically. “It’s a bit of a fixer-upper, I know. Needs lots of work. But hey, what’s a girl to do with her time?” She waved the key at them. “I just borrowed this so I can measure up.”
“Well, in that case—”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to stop you there. Things to do, you know. Must rush out.”
She stepped past them onto the porch, and before she had time to think she’d slipped the key easily into the lock, twisted, and pushed her way inside.
Seconds later, she stood with her back pressed hard against the closed door, trying to calm her racing heart.