The People Next Door Read online

  Wait … what? Five seconds ago it had been on top, in the corner. Now there was only the pile of black canvas bags. She hadn’t felt the minivan swerve, but …

  ‘Everything all right?’ Dave said.

  ‘Yeah, one sec …’ She leaned way over the cargo area, patting the bags, reached for a corner of white … and her arm shot back up as if scalded. She hissed, her skin breaking out in ripples of revulsion. The white patch was not a pillow. It was cold and firm and slimy, like a fish. That would explain the weird smell.

  ‘Did you find it?’ Dave said.

  ‘Uhm …’ They went fishing is all. It’s a big bass in a cooler or something gross like that. Stop being such a baby.

  Dave was mumbling to Sheila. Great, they’d woken her up too. Keelie didn’t even want the pillow any more, but it would be weird if she came back without it now, and Dave might think she’d messed up his fragile work stuff.

  ‘You can use my pillow, Keelie.’ Sheila’s voice seemed too loud. Too alert for someone who just woke up. ‘I don’t need it.’

  Keelie plopped down on the third row seat. ‘That’s okay. I have my pack.’

  In the rearview mirror, Dave’s eyes were two black dots. They went from the mirror to the road and back like one of those cat clocks.

  The van cruised.

  A couple miles later, Dave and Sheila had become very still. There was something cold in the air now, a weird vibe. Reminded Keelie of being in the check-out line when her mom was taking for ever to write a check that everyone – like all eight people waiting behind them and the cashier – knew damn well was going to bounce anyway. The vibe coming from Mr and Mrs Galloway was like that, except Keelie was the one behind them. How could you feel people with their backs to you staring at you?

  Keelie focused on the road. Where were they now? The Interstate was straight and flat, had to be deep into Nebraska. The minivan sluiced the night in ear-drum popping silence. Miles, so many miles to go.

  Her eyelids grew heavy. She was about to let them close when she noticed something odd. Up ahead on the highway, the slashes of white lane paint were changing. Hurling toward them in a single blurred line at first, then thickening and thinning, coming slower with breaks in between, until they were just ticking by and the black clarity between each slash was agonizing. Keelie sat up.

  The van was edging onto the shoulder.

  She gripped the back of the seat. ‘You don’t have to stop for me.’

  They didn’t respond.

  ‘I didn’t move anything. The pillow just fell over, so I left it.’

  The van was inching forward at a crawl, the tires crunching gravel and weeds. It stopped. There were no cars passing in either direction. There was no rest stop. There were no fast food places or Kum N Gos. There was nothing. Only black night outside. They were going to throw her out, leave her here in the middle of nowhere.

  Dave was holding the wheel with both hands, staring at the road.

  Sheila was sitting up straight, staring at the road.

  A minute passed. Why wouldn’t they answer her? The smell was horrible now. Like a whole basket of dead fish that had been laying in the sun, and something else that smelled like a cooked battery. Burning metal, tickling her throat.

  Keelie heard herself whimper. ‘I’m sorry, okay?’

  They did not acknowledge her. Another minute of silence, the longest she had ever known. Time stretched, stopped. There was no more time. She was in the car with statues, mannequins posed in a display window. She had never felt so alone in the presence of people.

  Keelie screamed. Again, until her throat hurt.

  They did not flinch. They did not speak. She might as well have screamed at a family on a billboard. The white stone faces of Mt Rushmore.

  Her breathing grew hoarse. Her legs wouldn’t move. She reached for her phone in her pocket, her thumb sliding around the buttons. She might have pressed a 9 before the sound of canvas scraping against more canvas startled her. Her hand slipped and the phone thumped onto the floor.

  She was about to lean down when Mr Galloway reached into the console and plucked something from the drink holder. It shined briefly, a small flash of silver that disappeared into his mouth. He bit down and there was a single clack.

  Together, as if their heads were attached to the same rubber cord, husband and wife turned all the way around in their seats and stared at her.

  They weren’t the same people that picked her up, and Keelie Kennerly wasn’t the same girl ever again.

  PART ONE

  On the Lake

  Death is a friend of ours; and he that is

  not ready to entertain him is not at home.

  FRANCIS BACON

  1

  Mick Nash, a man well into the third year of what he had come to think of as a total life-hangover, stood on the boat trailer’s fender, attempting to raise forty gallons of rainwater from the canvas cover. He knew damn well using a bucket would simplify the task, but he didn’t want to stand here all morning bailing water onto his driveway like a feeble castaway in a punctured rubber raft. He wanted to overpower the laws of physics, heave the weather right back in Mother Nature’s face.

  Jamie, his youngest server – filling in today for his shift leader, Tanya, who had called in sick because her autistic son, Drew, had a tummy ache and, well, autism – was pelting him with questions from the cell phone pinched between his shoulder and ear, but he would not be lured back in.

  The last two hundred days, sure. The next five years, fine.

  But not today.

  He raised his arms like Moses, knuckles whitening as the canvas fiber mashed the pads of his fingers into his short nails. Perhaps a cupful of water sloshed overboard. He needed a waterfall.

  Jamie said, ‘Okay but how am I supposed to load the receipt tape—’

  ‘Purple stripe on the left. One sec, Jamie.’

  Mick’s neck cobra-tented with exertion. The water surged, retreated, rolled forward in a triumphant tide …

  Until his flip-flop slipped from the fender, the canvas slipped from his fingertips, and the water rushed back as his elbow banged on the steel cleat bolted to the fiberglass gunwale, shooting tickle pins up to his neck. His arms windmilled, squirting the phone out like a minnow into the small pond now pouring into his boat. He unspooled a string of profanity that equated the boat’s design and functionality with certain amounts of excrement and which suggested the vessel had a history of performing lewd sexual acts for money.

  ‘What on earth are you screaming at?’ his wife said behind him. Amy was still in her pajamas, despite being awake for nearly five hours.

  ‘Stormed last night. The runoff pole thing fell down. My fucking phone just went in the drink.’

  ‘Do you need some help?’

  ‘Can’t get one day here. They won’t leave me alone.’

  ‘They?’

  The sound of a cow urinating on a piece of shale directed their attention to the stern, where the water was now fanning down the driveway, around Mick’s feet.

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘Jesus, Mick, if it’s going to be like this,’ Amy said.

  ‘We’re going to the lake. So don’t even.’

  She stared at him with her you’re-being-an-asshole look.

  ‘Come on, Ames,’ he said. ‘And why don’t I hear a lawn mower?’

  ‘He’s still in bed.’

  Mick looked at his rubber watch: 10:22 a.m. Pathetic. This is how empires fall. He said, ‘I asked you to wake him up two hours ago. Supposed to be a lesson here, or have we bagged that too?’

  Amy rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve got my hands full with B and I still have to make the sandwiches. You want your son to mow the lawn, you wake him up.’

  She walked back into the house. Mick climbed up and pulled his phone from the wet carpeted floor. The screen was blank, a flat pool of water sliding beneath the glass like one of those puzzle toys. He put it in his pocket, then rolled the wet cover over the bow a
nd threw it on the driveway. A cloudless sky, the morning already eighty-some degrees. A Wednesday, so with any luck the lake wouldn’t have more than a dozen boats. Their first real day of summer together. Last chance to enjoy the boat before it went up on Craigslist. Hard not to be a little steamed about that part of it, especially with the monstrosity on the next lot watching over him.

  That house. The gall of it.

  Built deep on the old, six-acre Jenkins property, its three stories, double-balcony windows with ogival arches, and wide mouth of a terrace with its toothy columned parapet, The Eyesore (as the residents around Juhls Drive called it) loomed over the Nash spread like the grinning face of fuck-you money. Amy said it was a modern interpretation of a Venetian palazzo.

  Mick thought the estate – set against the backdrop of Boulder’s foothills, in their loose and spacious neighborhood of low ranches, A-frames, and log cabin homes – was about as tasteful and subtle as a clown at a daycare center. Construction had begun last fall, with interior work continuing through winter, and the last of the landscapers – men who knew nothing of the owners or move-in date – had drifted away by Easter.

  Voila, a palace.

  Almost three months later it was still vacant. The three arched mahogany garage doors set under the house’s main floor had yet to admit a vehicle (Mick had a bet going with Amy one of them would be a Jaguar), and the wrought-iron gates at the end of the long, brushed travertine drive were secured electronically, cameras mounted every fifty feet along the stucco perimeter wall. Nobody came, nobody went. It just sat there waiting, its peach walls and terracotta tiled roof shooting them a blinding glare of solar stink-eye. Mick imagined the owner would be a short, cherubic pirate of a CEO, with a large waist and florid cheeks, a kind of twenty-first-century Roman general returning to paradise after sacking one final company of lesser men.

  God love Boulder. For these wealthy outsiders, Mick’s scenic, overpriced, health-obsessed hometown had become shit for flies.

  He kicked his son’s bedroom door open. ‘Get up, Kyle. We’re running late.’

  The boy appeared to have fallen face-first from a building.

  ‘Up, I said. You don’t mow, I’m not pulling you around the lake.’

  Kyle groaned into his pillow.

  ‘Work before play, champ. When I was fifteen my old man used to make me mow and trim the lawn, clean the boat, sweep the garage, and clean my room, and we were always on the lake by eight a.m.’

  ‘But do I have to go?’

  Okay, what? He’d rather sleep than go waterskiing with his father now?

  ‘You don’t want to spend the day with your family, fine. I’m throwing your Xbox in the lake, you ungrateful little shit.’ Mick walked away.

  Kyle scrambled out of bed. ‘Okay, Jesus. I’m up, I’m up.’

  2

  Amy Nash stood before the mirror behind her bathroom door, studying her new green swimsuit. Full coverage, the catalog said, but she didn’t feel covered fully, or look like the laughing woman in the photo. She felt like a hippopotamus sculpted from butter pecan ice cream. The bra support was good, though, padded and secure. Still got my girls. Nevertheless, she pulled on a sweatshirt and yoga pants and wrapped a beach towel the size of New Mexico around her waist.

  The door banged open and Briela stood in the hall, fists bunched at her sides, face screwed up. ‘My swimsuit hurts!’

  Mine too, baby. ‘That’s because it’s on inside out, honey. That tan thing down there? Not a pocket.’

  Briela looked down in horror and ran back to her room.

  In the kitchen, Amy filled a canvas tote with shoestring potatoes, a Ziploc of carrot and celery sticks none of them would touch, a bag of sunflower seeds Mick would spit all over the lake, two questionable oranges, her large bottle of Pellegrino. Her book club paperback, the one about the dysfunctional family of carnies, a sort of Salinger’s Nine Stories with flipper hands and hunch-backs.

  She ran the opener around two large cans of albacore, the escaped stench somewhat revolting. Threw it into a plastic bowl, stirred in the relish and tabasco, added a shot of parmesan. Smeared the mix in large goops over the seven-grain nut wheat bread, wrapped them in wax paper. The jar of peperoncinis. She really wished for once they could just beach it in front of the concession stands and send the kids up for burgers and fries and floats, but Mick was a fanatic about his boating traditions. What exactly he was trying to instill by making them eat peppers and canned tuna she did not know.

  When she finally emerged from the house, the rest of them were loaded into Blue Thunder, the trailer hitched, everyone suddenly waiting on her. Even Kyle, apparently excused from lawn duty. Amy set the cooler and tote in the truck’s bed, next to the other cooler loaded with Mick’s beer.

  ‘All set?’ Mick drummed his fingers. He was wearing his pith helmet again. His Hawaiian shirt. And his ‘hilarious’ mirrored cop sunglasses.

  ‘Oh, shit, forgot the sunscreen.’

  ‘That was a cuss,’ Briela said from the king cab as Amy ran back to the house.

  She found the SPF 30, the 45, and the Bullfrog for B’s nose. Melanoma? Mela-not on my watch. Anything else? She halted at the door. Forgot to feed Thom. She ran back in, poured kibble, topped off his water, hurried back out.

  The nearest gas station was the old Sinclair on the Diagonal. Mick pulled in, filled Blue Thunder with sixty-eight dollars, then nudged the truck forward, turned it off again, and pumped another eighty-four into the boat. He went inside. The old man who maybe lived there ran the card on a machine screwed to the wall. It took forever. Mick’s lips moved. Grandpa shrugged. Amy started to feel sick again.

  ‘Kyle, would you turn up the A/C?’

  He did, then leaned his head against the window. What time had he come home? He probably snuck in through the basement again. And what was that smell? Fruit cocktail?

  Mick came out of the station, sheepish.

  Amy powered her window down. ‘What?’

  ‘That old machine can’t read the stripe. Need one of your cards.’

  Amy tilted her head. He was maxed out again. Mick looked at the kids and back to her – don’t start. She thrust a hand into her purse, held out her wallet.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mick said, pinching Briela’s cheek through the rear window. ‘Wanna candy bar, sweetheart?’

  ‘Snickers, please!’ the daughter shouted.

  Amy gritted her teeth.

  3

  Kyle was standing in two feet of chilly-ass water, bow line in hand, sandals slipping on the mossy ramp. He forgot to pee before leaving the house and now his bladder was killing him, but he was not quite in deep enough to let it go. His head was a washing machine full of last night’s gin and his punishment for leaving his Revos at Shaheen’s crib was the sun beating him across the temples with a baseball bat.

  His dad barked out the truck window. ‘You paying attention back there? Huh!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let me know when the fenders are below the surface. Two inches below!’

  ‘I know!’ Kyle glared at the back of his father’s head. Dad thought he was a fucking retard. Mom and B were on the dock right behind him, watching every move, which only made it worse. A line of trucks above, waiting to unload. Soon as the boat started to float off the trailer, Kyle was supposed hand Mom the bow line, climb onto the dock, and walk it all the way to the end, because blocking the entrance was bad etiquette. They’d only done this a hundred and fifty times, but for some reason it was always a fiasco that made his dad blow his stack.

  The truck reversed. Kyle stared at the trailer’s wheel going under. His mind drifted to Michelle Harper, the way she’d dragged her nails in a slow line up his arm last night when they were standing next to the keg beside Shaheen’s pool. Shaheen was awesome, his house was awesome, his weed was awesome, his parents were always in Dubai. Kyle blinked, realizing the fender was six inches underwater.

  ‘Stop! Stop! That’s good!’

  The truck braked. H
is dad’s face bobbed in the side mirrors.

  ‘You’re doing a super job, Kyle,’ Briela said behind him, giggling.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘You shut up, butthole.’

  ‘Knock it off,’ Mom said. ‘Don’t say that word, Briela. It’s ugly.’

  ‘All clear?’ Dad shouted.

  The boat drifted. Kyle checked the rubber fenders, the amount of play in the bow line, the wind. ‘We’re good.’

  The truck eased up the ramp and the bow line went taut, pulling Kyle off his feet. He fell in the water up to his neck, shocking him awake.

  ‘Stop!’ Amy shouted. ‘Stop, stop!’

  Kyle popped up, rope in hand. Dad braked and jumped out. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Kyle peed into the lake a little.

  Dad tromped down the ramp, removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes. A serpent of gray strapping lay in the water, leading up to the trailer’s manual winch.

  ‘Jesus Livin’ Christ, Kyle. You forgot to unhook the tow strap. I almost dragged the goddamn boat up the concrete ramp.’

  Shame climbed into his cheeks. ‘If you let me drive it off … I’m juggling a hundred things at once down here.’

  ‘Yeah, right. And what happens when you lower the drive onto the ramp and break a four-hundred dollar prop?’

  ‘I’m sorry, okay?’

  ‘Mick, come on,’ Mom said. ‘You’re making it worse.’

  Dad sighed and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘All right, all right. Everybody calm down. Did you hurt yourself?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ His knee was bleeding but he pulled away, afraid his dad would smell gin fumes oozing from his pores.