The People Next Door Read online

  I lay there sweating on the bed, watching the blades of the ceiling fan turning above us, listening for more. Maybe it was the roosters, I lied to myself. Traces of a nightmare I had been having. I couldn’t be sure of what I’d heard between the crash and hiss of the waves down below and the lightning and thunder. I tell myself now that if I had heard the screams just one more time,I would have gotten up. I might have gotten there in time to prevent something, save someone. But they didn’t come.

  Eventually the storm lulled me back to sleep.

  I was under for scarcely more than a few minutes when something strong and cold took hold of my leg at the ankle, shaking it. I sat up violently to find Bob Percy standing at the end of the bed. He was an enormous shadow, just standing there watching us.

  How I refrained from screaming at the sight of Bob Percy watching my wife and me sleep, I am not sure, but I did. My wife did not stir when Bob said in a low, even voice, ‘Come on, you have to see this,’ and then turned and walked out of the bedroom.

  I put on my sneakers, pants and the thin jacket from earlier, and found Bob waiting for me in the living room. He was holding a flashlight. He pointed it at his arm and then lit himself from under the chin. ‘It’s gone,’ he said. He was right about that. There was no sign of the silver iridescence I had seen earlier on or in his skin. He looked the same as he had yesterday, pink from too much sun.

  I was relieved but sensed this news was not the reason he had woken me. Reluctantly I followed him out into the night. He would not answer my questions as we walked, only repeated the phrase, ‘You’ll see, you’ll see.’ The rain had subsided but the ground was wet all around us and we tracked through the mud of the dirt road, leaving footprints on the main driveway that forked to the other villas. I was sure something had gone wrong with Lynn and the kids, but Bob did not lead me to his place. Instead he veered to the opposite end, to the last villa in his row of six. He went up the sidewalk and opened the front door without knocking.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, halting on the porch. ‘Tell me what it is first.’

  Bob only shook his head, his expression far colder than any I had seen in the previous days. You won’t believe me, his eyes seemed to say. You have to see it for yourself.

  My curiosity had the better of me. I followed him inside. The villa was similar to ours, with two suites upstairs and two smaller bedrooms at the back of the first floor, a kitchen and bathroom in the center, and a living space near the front where we entered. He showed me the lower bathroom first. The pink tile floor and scalloped stucco walls had been transformed into an abattoir. The bathtub was clogged with something that looked like a lot of black human hair and it was filled nearly to the rim with blood. The walls were streaked with red handprints, and something had managed to spray the ceiling. The basin sink, the mirror, the floor. Even in my shocked state, I understood this could not have come from one person. What we were seeing was the product of several people. There was gallons of it.

  ‘Where are they?’ I croaked.

  Bob did not answer but led me through the rest of the house. Each time we entered another room, I prepared myself (as if such a thing were possible) for the sight of exploded bodies, leaking orifices, something out of a cholera or ebola epidemic. But all of the remaining rooms were empty and clean. The people who had rented this villa, the Greenwald family of Nevada, were nowhere to be found.

  We searched the second villa in the row. There were four bedrooms – two master suites, a double, and one with bunk beds for the kids, for a total of five beds. All five beds were soaked through to the mattresses with blood. The bedding was streaked with pieces of what was unquestionably human flesh and what I could only assume were traces of organ lining. Trails of blood had been dripped across the floors, down the stairway, splashing the walls, and I had no doubt that the Robertson family, who had checked in five days ago from Charlotte, North Carolina, were dead. Dead and more than likely drained.

  ‘Did you call the police? A hospital?’ I asked Bob Percy, and it was a wonder I still had the capacity for speech by then, because I was in shock and terrified beyond the ability to think rationally.

  ‘The lines are down,’ he said, nodding at the ceiling as if the phone lines were in there.

  ‘What about cell phones?’

  ‘Mine doesn’t work down here. Does yours?’

  I patted my pocket before realizing I’d left it plugged into the wall back in our bedroom. But I had used it on the island a few times and the service was fine in most locations.

  ‘Mine works,’ I told Bob, and began to walk away, but he stopped me, once again grabbing my arm.

  ‘Don’t leave me alone with this,’ Bob said. ‘We need to see about the others first. Tracking down the police at this hour is going to take a while. If you go now it might be too late.’

  Bob was calm. I guess you could say he was in charge at that moment. ‘It won’t take long,’ he said. ‘We do this first, then you go make sure your family is safe.’

  That sounded so reasonable at the time.

  The third villa was the same as the other two, except this time all the carnage was confined to the kitchen and dining area. The Chavezes, a wealthy family who split time between Miami and San Juan but took long weekends every couple of months on Vieques, had been enjoying a locally prepared dinner of whole chicken in a sofrito and fried plantains when it – whatever it was – came for them.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said to Bob. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Not who,’ he said. ‘What.’

  I stared at him in the darkened Chavez villa, waiting for an explanation.

  Bob led me to the fourth villa. I did not want to go inside.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I told Bob, waiting on the porch.

  ‘They were all in the bathroom,’ he said. ‘Trying to get rid of it. The whole family ran in there and it just accelerated, took them down like a goddamn blood hurricane.’

  Four. Four dead families.

  ‘The Weavers caught it too,’ he said, gesturing at the fifth villa. Five dead families. ‘They all did.’

  ‘But where are the bodies?’ I asked him. ‘Did you move them?’

  I won’t say Bob Percy smiled, but his mouth twitched slightly, one side curling. ‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘This is where it gets interesting.’

  ‘Bob, no, I don’t want to see. We need to call the police now, no more.’

  I think I was yelling at him at this point, I’m not sure, but at any rate he slapped me. Hard across the mouth.

  ‘Get a hold of yourself. We can’t call anybody until you understand.’

  I was angry, frightened to the point of shaking, but I followed him. He led me to the last villa, his own. We entered the larger of the two master suites, both of which were clean. We walked past the bed, out onto the balcony. They had a spectacular ocean view, and the balcony was large enough to seat half a dozen people. There were four chairs and a small table with candles that had been snuffed by rain. The ocean before us was roiling black under the black and gray clouds.

  ‘We were having drinks, watching the storm,’ Bob said. ‘We don’t even remember it coming on. We just came around knowing it had happened.’

  Only then did I look down and see that we were standing on a floor of blood. In the dark it was black and I had mistaken the wetness for rain. There was a grated drain in the center, which was even at that moment funneling the rainwater and some of the blood down a drainpipe, onto the lawn. I was very glad to be wearing sneakers and I noted that Bob was still standing in his flip-flops and that his toes and ankles were speckled with more black dots and splashes.

  I backed away from him, reaching for the sliding door to keep from tripping as I turned, but Bob took hold of my arm again and refused to let me go. He shoved me to the terrace’s wall and pointed down.

  Thirty feet below us, in the swimming pool, were the people.

  49

  Her husband had spent the past three d
ays skulking around the house, beaten and bruised. He’d come home late last night looking like shit again. Maybe he had been with Vince. Maybe he was out carousing, drowning his sorrows as a failed businessman. Either way, she had indulged his wound-licking too long. When he finished mowing the lawn, Amy would sit him down for the most important State of the Union address the Nash administration had ever faced.

  She was watching him now, through the kitchen window. Bouncing around the yard on his John Deere, a can of beer hanging in the nifty cup-holder he had mounted to the mower’s dash. Trundling around out there in his Forrest Gump state of rectangular idiocy, punishing himself, she couldn’t help thinking of desert beetles, mining slaves, some kind of life form feeding the soil of its own miserable existence.

  Finally he buzzed the last strip and steered the mower back to the garage. His eyes under the brim of his baseball cap were small and black, like a skink’s. He disappeared into the garage and the mower’s engine sputtered off. She took her seat at the breakfast table. Five minutes later he came through the laundry room and paused at the second fridge. A bottle cap tinkled on the floor. He entered the kitchen, stopped, stared at her. He used his T-shirt to wipe his armpits, then lobbed it back into the laundry room. He sat across from her, holding his beer with both hands.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and waited for her to begin.

  The contents of Amy’s speech appeared like a PowerPoint presentation in her mind. In all the squares were their finances, expenses, savings, everything down to the water bill. She had mental flow charts designed to help him see the big picture. She had the web addresses of several job sites printed for him. She had an outline of their options, pros and cons. She had her closing arguments rehearsed. And watching him stare at her dumbly, with one eye still blackened, his hands smelling of gasoline and grass and the swine sweat of two days without a shower – all of this carefully prepared material dissolved as if it had been written in disappearing ink.

  ‘I want you to move out,’ Amy said.

  Mick did not respond. She positioned Tami Larson’s medical bill so that he could read the sum ($17,566.22) at the bottom. He blinked at the figure but said nothing.

  ‘To the pool house,’ she said. ‘You can use that as an apartment until the end of the summer. When the kids go back to school. You’ll need to come up with the money to pay for Tami Larson’s emergency room visit – no, the homeowner’s policy doesn’t cover it, because you let it lapse, just like you did with the health insurance. I’ll take care of the regular bills and worry about handling the kids. In the meantime, I suggest you take this opportunity to come up with a new plan. I don’t really care what it is. But I’m not giving up this house or this land.’

  He opened his mouth in protest.

  Amy cut him off. ‘Trust me, it’s better this way.’

  Mick looked past her, out the window facing the pool, to the Render house. He closed his eyes and a small smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. He was in his own dreamland again and she wondered if he might fall from his chair.

  ‘You have no idea,’ he said softly. ‘You are in the worst form of denial about what’s happened to us. I saw this coming years ago. I knew we could never sustain it, but you, you act like nothing’s changed. You understand nothing about who we have become.’

  ‘I understand you closed the restaurant without consulting me. You need to decide what role you would like to play in this family, and I need some space. You’re hiding things and I can’t live with this anger. Or do you want to tell me what happened the other night? Want to tell me about Myra Blaylock?’

  This got to him. His eyes widened, but he said nothing.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I don’t care where you eat or spend the days, but I can’t sleep with you creeping in and out of the bedroom at all hours. I hope you understand, you did this to yourself, Mick. For the first time in our lives, you quit. I married a lot of things when I married you, but a quitter wasn’t one of them.’ She could see that this wounded him, and she almost regretted saying it.

  He went to the sink, filled a glass with water, but instead of drinking it he poured it down the drain.

  He said, ‘Ten years I brought home an average annual income of two hundred thousand dollars while you hid in the sweet little fairytale world of your classroom. What’s your paycheck going to be this year, Amy? Thirty-two-five? Forty with the knuckleheads at Vo-Tech?’

  ‘You’re the reason I had to take the Vo-Tech job, Mick. The restaurant hasn’t turned a profit in almost three years. We’re surviving on fumes.’

  ‘You have a bad day when Scooter doesn’t return a playground ball at the end of recess. When your budget can’t cover nine months’ worth of chalk. Do you want to hear about my bad days, Amy? Do you want to know what I face every day?’

  ‘I’ve heard it all before.’

  ‘In the past five years I’ve been sued, robbed at gun-point, embezzled by my accountant. I’ve got five national chain dining concepts within a quarter mile, in a town with over a hundred bars. I’ve got a negative equity building in the deadest shopping plaza in Boulder because you were afraid to invest in that space on the mall.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to lose more money,’ she said. ‘The bank said you didn’t have the brand profile to make it downtown.’

  ‘My weekly budget is more than your entire annual salary. I am a human resources manager, a bartender, waiter, janitor, marketing chief, cook and CEO. I’m on my feet sixteen hours a day. I put in eighty-hour weeks to your thirty-five. You think I work nights because I don’t want to be home for dinner? I work nights so you don’t have to find a real job. You could be a professor at CU but you don’t want that because reading Make Way for Ducklings just drives you to the brink.’

  For a moment, Amy could not see. The world was black with her rage. ‘That is beyond unfair, you shit. You wanted me at the same school as our daughter—’

  ‘Yes, and you wanted me to work days, nights, and everything else so that we can send Kyle to any college in the country, so you can shop for a whole new wardrobe every time you gain or lose ten pounds, and keep your Boulder Country Club membership, even though you haven’t set foot on a golf course or tennis court in six years and have no friends to play with. But that’s all irrelevant now, because we’ve had a couple bad years and I’m the dead weight. The economy goes into the shitter and I’m no longer a good provider. I hope you understand how disgusting you’re being right now.’

  ‘You’re a bastard,’ Amy said. She was crying and she hated him for making her cry. ‘You blew it. You squandered a fortune.’

  He was no longer speaking quietly. ‘I squandered it on you! Now, I’m sorry I didn’t share the decision to close the Straw. But did it ever occur to you I’ve been trying to protect you?’

  ‘From what? I don’t need protecting. I need a husband!’

  ‘What do you think this is?’ he said, smiling in a way that frightened her. ‘A setback? A rough week, a bad month? This is a death match. The country is fucking crumbling into dust and all those people out there – all those poor fuckers on the news? That’s us. We’re them now. We are the idiots who refinanced our home up to our tits so you could have a kitchen out of a magazine. We are the idiots who didn’t save a year’s pay. We’re the idiots that had to have more more more. You want me to make everything better, but you won’t cut back a god-damn thing. You want me to get out of your way and not come back until I solve all our problems. Fine, you got it, lady. But while I’m out there in the doghouse, you might want to look into what’s making you so bitter and fat. It’s not your weight. That’s a symptom. I don’t give a shit about your weight. You’ve given me two beautiful children and I love you and I don’t care how big your ass is. I like big asses. I love you and I want to be your husband. I tried to give you a decent life, but you’re not content with that. You want that’ – he pointed to the Render house. ‘You want to be perfect, in that top one per cent. Well, guess what? It’s never going to
happen. This is it. We’re in the shit now and all we have is each other. Had each other. What will you do when I’m gone? Have you thought of that yet? What will you do with all your hate when I’m gone?’

  He was right. She hated him. With every cell in her body.

  ‘Move out,’ he said, laughing. ‘Yeah, we’ll see what happens at the end of the summer. We’ll talk to a judge about how much of my parents’ money you’ve flushed down the toilet and he’ll have a good laugh, and then I’ll fucking sell this place right out from under you and you’ll never see a red cent. “Move out.” That’s the funniest fuckin’ thing I’ve heard all week.’

  He strutted across the kitchen. Amy stood, picked up his beer bottle, and threw it as hard as she could. It spun and shattered against the back of his skull. She saw blood there immediately and she thought maybe now he would come over and hit her. But he only turned and stared at her, murderous amusement in his eyes.

  ‘That’s assault,’ he said. ‘And if you really want to take me out, you’re going to have to do better than that.’ He walked out.

  Amy went to the bedroom and gathered his clothes and shoes from the walk-in closet and began throwing them onto the back lawn. It crossed her mind – as she was hurling his cigar box of watches and pocket knives onto the flagstone patio – that maybe she shouldn’t have taken Cassandra Render’s advice so literally.

  But this was a fleeting thought, one Amy banished as quickly as it appeared. Because even though she was crying and screaming hysterically and wished her husband dead, fucking dead in the ground with ants in his eyes, this felt good. It felt really good to let it all out. It was an almost sexual release of raw anger, and about that part of it at least, Cass had been one hundred per cent correct.

  50

  Why couldn’t she see that he was trying to protect her? Preserve what was left of their lives? Keep her safe from this dirty man’s business? There was a time when she trusted him, could tell by glancing at him it was better not to push. But they had strayed too far from one another. The bond was breaking, or broken. She couldn’t know how much trouble he was in, and so she hated him for ‘allowing’ their security to fall to pieces. Maybe he would have to tell her the truth eventually but, for now, let her hate him. Let the kids wonder if Mom and Dad were getting a divorce. It was a horrible thing to stand by and watch, but it was better than involving them in what was quickly becoming a game of murder by proxy.