The Woman in Our House

by Andrew Hart

  “That’s great,” I said, processing the familiar aromas coming from the kitchen. “What are we having?”

  Oaklynn gave me the smallest look of puzzlement, as if she had already explained this in great detail.

  “Tuscan chicken,” she remarked, as if that should be obvious.

  “Like we had at the dinner party?” I said, momentarily baffled, though I managed not to jokingly suggest we serve it with canned beets.

  “Yes,” she said, pleased, then caught something in my face and hesitated. “That’s OK, right? You like it?”

  I nodded quickly.

  “Of course!” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “I love it.”

  She watched me levelly so that I felt transparent, then said, in a cooler tone entirely, “Perhaps you would prefer something else?”

  “No!” I protested. “Tuscan chicken. Awesome.”

  She held me in her steady, appraising eyes, then nodded, her trademark smile snapping into place.

  “Great,” she said. “Dinner in twenty minutes, or just as soon as I’ve gotten these little ladies taken care of.” She stooped to take Grace’s hand, then turned to Vronny. “You can’t wash your hands with that on, so I’ll be spoon-feeding you tonight like your baby sister.”

  “Yay!” said Veronica, as if this were a treat she had angled for in the past and been refused.

  I watched them busying themselves with preparations for dinner as the scent of Tuscan chicken filled the kitchen, and for the briefest of moments, I felt like I had walked into someone else’s house. It was an uncanny, dreamlike sensation, as if I were the stranger who didn’t belong even though everything there—the faces, the furniture—all felt so familiar. Just a moment. It was, as Josh had said, a madness brewed from guilt and anxiety, and it passed almost as quickly as it had come, but for that one moment, it felt as bright and hot as a poker pulled from a fire.

  The phone rang, and I answered it.

  “Mrs. Klein? This is Officer Randall. From the hospital.”

  “Yes. Is there any news?”

  “Not really, ma’am. I returned to the park and found what I think was the hole in the slide, but the screw was not there.”

  “Not there?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Someone took it away then,” I said. “That’s weird, right? Maybe whoever did it thought you would be able to pull fingerprints or something, maybe.”

  “I guess that’s possible.”

  He didn’t sound convinced.

  “So now what?”

  “Well, I’d say go about your life. Keep your eyes open for anything suspicious, but try not to worry too much. There’s no reason to think your daughter was targeted. This was just a random event. Best to treat it as such. I’ll leave you my number in case you have questions or see anything, you know, out of the ordinary, but otherwise . . .”

  Otherwise, it’s as you were.

  I wrote the number down, thanked him for the call, and went upstairs for a quick shower. The hospital air—sanitized but also somehow stale—seemed to linger in my hair and clothes, and I wanted to put it—all of it—behind me. It felt good, cleansing in more ways than one, and I emerged with a sense of closure and relief that I hadn’t gotten from talking to the cop.

  I was coming downstairs, toweling my hair dry, dressed in soft cotton and flannel, and listening to Veronica chattering away as Oaklynn fed her, when the doorbell rang. For a moment, I thought it might be Mary Beth. My heart leaped, and not only because I could use a little wine and gossip after today.

  But it wasn’t Mary Beth, and I felt her conspicuous and coincidental absence knocking me slightly out of my good mood. It was Tammy Ward. She was smiling in that slightly embarrassed way of hers, but it was clear there was something on her mind.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you’d seen Angus?”

  Her annoying terrier. I cast my mind back, shaking my head.

  “Not for a day or so,” I said. “He’s missing?”

  “He must have gotten through the fence when I let him out this morning.” She made a childish what-are-you-gonna-do? gesture with both hands, waggling her head and framing a goofy smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She was upset.

  “How long has he been missing?”

  “Almost twelve hours,” she said, shedding some of the pretense and letting her concern shine through. “He’s probably fine, but with those coyotes around . . .”

  “Yeah, I haven’t seen him,” I said, trying to look and sound sad. I didn’t really like the dog, and Josh and I had complained to each other a dozen times about the way it ran wild in the neighborhood, particularly after the incident with Mr. Quietly, but I still felt bad for her. Tammy’s life was no picnic, and the dog—irritating though the rest of us thought it—was one of its bright spots. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll keep an eye out. Have you called animal control or the local vets?”

  Tammy suppressed a shudder of alarm.

  “Not yet,” she said, still smiling, though her eyes were welling up. “Someone reported him once before, so I’d rather not talk to the police unless we really need to. Tommy says not to worry, that he’ll be back as soon as he gets hungry, but that’s men for you. Never a care.”

  She managed another smile, and I tried to match it, though her husband’s casualness and the way she accepted it both annoyed me.

  “You want to come in, have a drink?” I asked.

  “Thanks, but no,” Tammy replied. “I want to walk around the neighborhood a bit. See if I see him. I have some of his favorite treats.” She showed me a sad little plastic bag and attempted the smile again. “You have my cell number if you see him. Not that we can get much signal around here.”

  “Tell me about it,” I agreed. The lousy cell reception down by the creek was one of our only true gripes about the neighborhood.

  “OK.” She took a step back. “Let me know if you see him. If it’s OK, I’ll leave a couple of these with you in case it takes me a moment to get over,” she said, fishing a couple of mealy biscuits shaped like cartoon bones out of the bag and handing them to me. I took them between finger and thumb and held them away from my body.

  “Have you tried Mary Beth?” I asked.

  “She’s out of town. Visiting family, she said. Kurt, too. I looked around their yard, but . . .” She shook her head.

  Visiting family, I thought. I’ve never heard of Mary Beth choosing to visit family. If she had, why hadn’t I been subjected to a lengthy diatribe on the subject beforehand?

  More paranoia. Kurt was gone, too. Mary Beth had clearly taken a trip with her husband, not mine. I was being irrational. Combined with the earlier Oaklynn business, I was starting to wonder if maybe I was the crazy one.

  “Right,” I said, forcing myself back to the matter at hand. “Well, if I see it . . . I mean, him, I’ll let you know.”

  Tammy nodded again but apparently didn’t trust herself to speak. On impulse, I leaned forward and pulled her into a hug—amiable and encouraging (complete with back pats of the kind Josh might use) rather than truly intimate—then waved her on her way. She was wearing pink stretch pants and sneakers that made her feet look huge and childish, and as she toddled away, gazing about randomly for her lost dog, I felt a pang of pity for her and regret that I hadn’t been able to do more. In the same instant, I remembered the accident up on Wendover that Oaklynn and the girls had witnessed, the dog that had been hit by the car. I had promised to keep calling the local vets to find out what had happened but hadn’t done so. It had slipped my mind or—perhaps—I had screened it out, not wanting to upset the girls.

  Too late now.

  I wondered if Oaklynn had followed up with the vets by herself but felt sure she would have said something. She had been so upset. Strange that she would then forget about it . . .

  I went back to Ben Lodging’s latest chapters, put aside in the park and temporarily forgotten because of all the drama since.
My head felt clearer now than it had, and I returned to the place I had left off, keen to see if the new material would make the book’s outcome clearer. I felt a twinge of discomfort—a kind of emotional flashback—when I traced the story back to where Carried had gotten off the bus and was sitting in a park, watching children play, but I got over it and kept reading. It was fine for almost an entire paragraph, and then I read this sentence:

  I watched the two little girls with the women, one the mother, I assumed, the other a friend or nanny, until the smallest of the girls left the sandbox where she had been playing to investigate the massive steam locomotive that sat between the parking lot and the sports fields.

  I stared at the words, rereading the sentence over and over as my heart rate quickened.

  How was this possible? Two girls, two women, and a park with an old steam train? This was more than coincidence. I put the laptop down with unsteady fingers and got quickly to my feet, pacing the study floor with a rising sense of agitation. I remembered being in the park, looking around for people watching us, one of whom had then turned the slide into a nasty little booby trap for my daughter. I put a hand to my heart and stared blankly out of the window as horror put the words in my head, clear as if I had just read them.

  Ben Lodging is watching us.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  ANNA

  But Ben Lodging couldn’t be watching me. It didn’t make sense. He had sent that excerpt the night before we had gone to the park. I had been reading it while I sat there, moments before the slide incident. It wasn’t an account of something the author had witnessed because it hadn’t happened when he’d written it. I had never even been to that park when he sent it.

  As to the similarity of the place, the park with an old steam train left as a historical curiosity, there must be countless such places dotted throughout the country. I did a Google Image search for park steam engine and pulled up dozens of pictures of trains quite different from the one in Freedom Park.

  Coincidence, then.

  It must be. As to the idea of two girls with two women, that, too, meant nothing. I stared at the picture of the train again, then reread the lines in Lodging’s manuscript, thinking as I did so of what Josh had said about my turning the accident into something from one of my clients’ mystery novels . . .

  He was right. Of course, he was. I was being paranoid again, and while I had good reason to be, given the day I had experienced, there was no more to it than that. I forced myself to read the rest of the chapter and, finding nothing more that seemed directly relevant to my own situation, decided I was being stupid.

  Suddenly, I felt exhausted and badly in need of a drink, though that would have to wait until after Oaklynn’s famous Tuscan chicken. I was in no mood to be judged by my teetotaler nanny.

  More paranoia, I thought irritably, and decided to pour myself a little glass of dry sherry just to make the point, though whether I was proving something to Oaklynn or myself, I wasn’t sure.

  Dinner managed to be both delicious and odd. The girls were already in bed by the time we sat down to eat, and the house felt curiously still and silent, magnifying every word and gesture Oaklynn and I exchanged. I asked her to put some music on, which lifted some of the pressure a little, though I quickly realized that what came over the little speakers was the playlist that included that Imagine Dragons song about the inner demons. If that came on, I’d have to excuse myself and go to the bathroom. After my previous rush of paranoid suspicion, I didn’t think I could look at her while that played.

  The song didn’t come on, and as we ate, I began to relax again. The meal was an exact replica of the first time Oaklynn had cooked for us and was therefore a monument to both her skill and her eccentricity, but the meat was so tender and the flavors so perfectly balanced that I was able to see even the repetition as comforting rather than merely bizarre. Still, even having banished my previous doubts about Oaklynn, I’d be lying if I said I felt comfortable with her in the ways I had in those first weeks after her arrival. We were, I suppose, just too different, so that even the things I liked about her—her efficiency, her motherly devotion to the girls—made it harder to connect with her as someone I understood. And that was without the moments—rare but pointed—when her amiable niceness seemed to slip, and I felt like she was watching me the way a child watches an animal in a zoo, as something fascinating to them but foreign. I saw it in her eyes, a level watchfulness, sometimes puzzled, sometimes critical, always—at least for the second or so that it lasted—seeming to come from far away.

  “This one is from before your time,” she remarked, as a woman’s voice started crooning over a showily meditative piano riff. “Bonnie Tyler.”

  I listened and started to shake my head, then caught myself.

  “I’ve heard it,” I said. I concentrated on the song as it unwound from the speakers. It was repetitive, labored in its anthemic, ballady glory but had, I supposed, a kind of emotional power. The lyrics were overwrought and the synthesizers just a bit too eighties for my taste, but I remembered the words of the title just before the singer got to them.

  “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” I said, jolted out of myself by the sense of something significant that I couldn’t quite place.

  Oaklynn gave me one of those strange looks, smiling, knowing but remote, like she was watching me through a telescope, seeing into my head, my past, the strange moment in August when the sun had been blotted out and I had made the decision to hire . . . her.

  Eclipsed.

  I sat there, my mouth half-open, not knowing what to say, thinking vaguely, distractedly, of screwdrivers and remembering how Veronica had once said Oaklynn was a witch in more than her shoes. As if on cue, she looked off and away to the window, paused in absent thought, and pronounced, “Gonna be weather.”

  There was. By the time Oaklynn was closing the dishwasher and turning it on, a storm had blown up from the southwest. Sometimes squalls like this parted around the city, but this one pushed through, bringing driving rain and sheet lightning that lit the swaying pecan tree behind the house like a strobe. The windows streamed as if there were a hose playing straight onto them, and I stood with my face pressed to the glass, trying to see through the darkness to the creek that was, I knew, rising fast. It had never breached since we had moved in, but I’d heard stories of the water creeping up what was now our backyard, the bottom ten feet of which was marked as being within the hundred-year floodplain. Like the coyotes, it reminded me of how unlike New York this place was, how close to a version of nature that was ancient, wild, and powerful.

  “Poor Angus,” Oaklynn observed. I had told her about the missing terrier over dinner. “If he’s still out there, he’s going to have a lousy night.”

  “Surely, the rain will make him go home,” I said.

  Neither of us said that he might have been killed on the roads—something we knew was a possibility from all-too-recent experience—let alone falling prey to the coyotes or the rapid waters of the swollen creek. The terrier hadn’t been missing long, and it wasn’t like he would get lost in unknown territory. He was always getting out. I considered calling Tammy to check in, but it was getting late, and I didn’t want to upset her right before bed. I’d call in the morning. There was a good chance that Angus would have skulked home to get out of the rain by then, and it would all be over.

  That turned out to be wishful thinking.

  Morning came, and though the storm was gone, the ground was saturated and the creek flowing fast and brown just below the floodmark. Tammy’s dog had not returned, and though I called her twice and saw her padding disconsolately around the sodden neighborhood, I became increasingly sure that he never would.

  The heavy rain had pushed the stormwater controls to their limits, and one of the drains that ran down Tanglewood Lane had been clogged with fallen leaves and other debris so that the road had turned into a steady brook where it met Brandon Circle. I went out with Oaklynn and the girls to survey the dam
age and get a little air. A crew from the city was already on-site. They had opened one of the manholes, and I was revolted to see forty or fifty fat brown cockroaches clinging to the underside of the cover. Veronica shrieked and hid her eyes, making the burly white guy who seemed to be in charge laugh. He had a beard and a hard hat and looked us over with something like amusement.

  “Yeah, you don’t wanna go down there, little girl,” he said.

  I didn’t like the leering amusement in his tone and stepped between him and the girls, watching critically as he began feeding some kind of device on a cable into the manhole. As we walked past and up the street, it emitted a strange and resonating tone like a distant foghorn that seemed to vibrate through the ground. I turned back to look at him, but before I could say anything, he remarked simply, “Sonar. Helps us find the blockages.”

  “Wow,” said Oaklynn. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Pretty cool.”

  When we came back about twenty minutes later, they were still working on the sewer line, and the roadway was swimming in foul-smelling water. Tammy Ward was hovering on the periphery, watching with a handkerchief clamped to her nose. She was wearing pink sweats and stained sneakers and looked both pathetic and slightly ridiculous. She gave me a half-hearted wave as I passed but didn’t say anything, and I hadn’t the heart to ask if there was any sign of Angus. She was clearly waiting to hear that somewhere among the storm drain’s blockage of silt and leaves and fertilizer runoff was the body of a small dog. I gave Oaklynn a look, but instead of seeing sympathy and concern in the nanny’s face, I caught something hard and appraising.

  I thought of her fury when little Angus had come tearing through our yard after Mr. Quietly. I thought of the crossbow with which she was so proficient, and once more, unbidden, the image of a Phillips-head screwdriver popped into my head. I took a deep breath, trying to shrug it off as my ever-increasing paranoia, but when I looked back at Oaklynn, I saw something else in her gaze—something like triumph.