The People Next Door Page 4

  ‘B, honey, wind the rope, would you?’ Mick said. She crawled onto the swim deck and began hauling the rope in. Kyle was paddling feebly toward them as Amy unlatched the ladder. ‘What happened, bud?’

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Kyle said, blowing water from his nose, eyes scrunched in pain. Mick frowned, killing the engine. Kyle pointed toward Roger’s boat some two hundred feet behind them. ‘Someone’s hurt … blood … all over the place.’

  ‘His head is cut,’ Amy said. ‘Oh my God.’

  Kyle ran a hand over his wet hair. ‘I think the ski’s fin nicked me.’

  They helped him in, easing him onto the back seat. Amy made him sit still while she inspected his scalp.

  ‘It’s deep. He’s going to need stitches. Where’s the first-aid kit?’

  Mick searched under dash, found the orange plastic box. Band-Aids, a roll of gauze, a tube of ointment, a packet of Advil. A boo-boo kit, not a holy-shit-emergency kit. But this wasn’t too bad, right? His son looked okay. Amy fumbled the contents onto the seat. Her hands were shaking, Kyle’s blood on her fingers.

  ‘This is useless,’ Amy said. The Band-Aids didn’t stick to wet hair.

  ‘I’m sorry, champ,’ Mick said, knowing this was all his fault.

  ‘Guys, I’m fine.’ Kyle pushed his mother away. ‘There’s something wrong on their boat. I saw someone struggling. You didn’t see the blood?’

  ‘Blood,’ Amy said. ‘On Roger’s boat?’

  Mick said, ‘Jesus, I guess we better go have a look.’

  Amy grabbed his arm. ‘We’re not going near that sicko. Kyle needs medical attention.’

  ‘I said I’m fine!’

  ‘He says he’s fine,’ Mick said, smirking with pride.

  Amy fumed at him. ‘Take us in now.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Let’s get the ski, then I’ll radio the lake patrol on the way in. Swim ladder up?’

  Briela latched the ladder in place. Amy wrapped a towel around Kyle’s head and pressed. If the boy was in pain, he wasn’t letting them see it.

  Mick started the motor. ‘Tough stuff, Kyle. Damned if you didn’t do it. I’m so proud of you, son.’

  Kyle grinned.

  Mick found the handheld CB radio in the glove compartment. He set the channel to 16, pressed the buttons, but the light didn’t come on. ‘Brand-new radio,’ he said.

  ‘Did you put batteries in it?’ Amy said.

  Mick opened the case. Nope. ‘I have my cell,’ he said, removing it from his pocket. The screen was still full of water. He jammed the buttons. ‘Hunk of shit.’

  ‘Mick,’ Amy said.

  ‘I know,’ he snapped. He opened the throttle and circled back to fetch the ski. ‘B, sweetie, do you think you can lean over and grab it?’

  ‘It’s too heavy for her,’ Kyle said.

  Amy tromped into the bow. Briela scampered out of her way and bumped her knee on the corner of the opened windshield frame. ‘Owie!’ She burst into tears.

  Mick inspected her knee. A little curl of cut gray skin, no blood. ‘You’re okay, B.’

  ‘Slow down,’ Amy said, leaning over the bow.

  Mick popped the shifter into neutral and held his breath. Amy grunted, snatched it up. She raised the ski and the bindings emptied cold water onto her head. She growled with contained fury. Mick slid the ski into the locker, made another steep turn, and raced for shore, everyone shooting each other unpleasant looks. He dropped them at the end of the dock.

  ‘Find Coach Wisneski in the boat house,’ Mick said. ‘Tell him to send out a lake patrol unit. Get the kids in the truck, pull the trailer around, and wait for me at the top of the ramp. Be right back.’

  ‘Hurry,’ Amy said.

  ‘Daddy?’ Briela said.

  ‘What, sweetie?’

  ‘Be careful.’ His daughter appeared seasick, in some form of shock.

  ‘I will. Go on now with your mother.’

  He chugged impatiently through the No Wake Zone, then aimed for the northwest corner and opened it wide.

  9

  A hundred feet from the SS Laughing Gas, Mick dropped the throttle and stood at the helm to inspect the situation. He saw no one on board, but Roger’s ridiculously outfitted Glastron was a cuddy, not a bow rider, so it was possible the couple were below decks. He completed a slow circle, checking for signs of blood, but the exterior was clean. He turned off the motor and floated to port.

  ‘Roger? Hey, Roger, you in there?’ No one answered. ‘Yo, Dr Lertz! It’s Mick Nash. You on board or what?’

  The boat was drifting, unanchored. There were no watercraft within a quarter of a mile. The dam was at a swimmable distance, but it was just a slanting, three-meter rock wall with a lot of empty grassland behind it. If Roger wanted to sneak off and screw his new girlfriend on dry land, there were plenty of trees and sand inlets with privacy on the west side.

  So, where’d they go? Were they under right now, lungs filling with water? Mick peered into the depth finder, as if a tiny gray version of Roger might appear on screen, floating sideways with X’s in his eyes. Nothing moved. Depth: 36.7 feet. He could dive in, but too much time had passed and the reservoir’s visibility was maybe six or eight feet. Come on, boss, what are we doing here? The family is waiting. No time to play Jacques Cousteau. He would make a brief inspection, then bug out.

  ‘Roger, I’m boarding you now,’ Mick called, feeling like an idiot. ‘So if you’re down there fooling around with Bonnie, now would be the time to stop and let me know you’re okay.’ His voice echoed across the lake. The sun twinkled off the Glastron’s high white walls and chrome detailing.

  Mick threw both port fenders over, and used a gaff to inch the boats parallel. He cleated a twelve-foot section of pink nautical rope to Roger’s stern. Slipped into his deck shoes and climbed from swim platform to swim platform. The craft bobbed gently under his weight. The white leatherette seats were clean, as was the wood floor. A few bottles of Beck’s in the cup-holders. A wet towel and Bonnie’s bikini top draped over one chair. Well, that explained it. They got drunk and Roger took her into the cabin for a check-up. He should get out of here and leave well enough alone.

  Except that his son said there was a struggle. Blood. And while he had caught the ski across the top of his head, Kyle wasn’t loopy or prone to exaggeration. He was lucid and if he had a concussion, it was minor. And something here just plain felt wrong. The lake was too calm, the boat too recently abandoned. It didn’t feel abandoned at all.

  Go on. One peek inside the cabin. You won’t be able to sleep tonight unless you know. Something awful happens to Bonnie, how’s that going to sit on your conscience?

  Mick high-stepped over the bench seat and made the cabin in three long strides. For a moment he stood outside, one hand on the chrome handle, feeling sick to his stomach. What are you afraid of, champ? A little blood?

  He opened the door. At first he could see nothing. There were too many shadows and the angle was wrong. He stepped back and leaned down, removing his sunglasses. He stared for perhaps three seconds, sorting through shapes and forms set deep in the dark berth. Something was moving in there … maybe … no. Like a holographic photo that has been tilted, the illusion escaped him before he was even aware that there had been one.

  He frowned, concentrating, and a single white flash strobed his eyes, obliterating the bulkhead, the boat, the lake. Mick recoiled, the light spreading white wings that flapped inside his skull, and it was now, with his eyes scrunched shut and temples throbbing, that they became visible.

  Bonnie and Roger were sprawled on the floor and seat cushions, and hanging over the table, limbs severed, skin slashed in dozens of places, the cabin transformed into a slaughterhouse. The floor was drenched, pooled with black and deep maroon that leaked from open wounds, their ears and eyes. Their eyes were black, their faces without expression, as if they had died peacefully a moment before being butchered.

  Mick screamed and staggered back, blinking against the sun glare. A wave
of cold air funneled out, enveloping him, his head pounding as a rotten stench like dead raccoons on the side of a summer highway broke over him in a thick cottony wave. He covered his mouth and gagged and then he was turning with tears in his eyes, careening to the back of the boat. He could almost feel their hands reaching for him, pulling at his shirt, their fingertips dragging down the back of his legs. His knee slammed into one of the seats and he halted as though he had been slapped.

  He gasped, rubbing his eyes as the lightning storm in his brain abated. The air was clean, the day bright. When he forced himself to look back, the cabin was empty. The bodies were gone. The room was clean, free of blood. There were no passengers on or inside the boat. Just the padded bench seats and the small table.

  Jesus Christ, what was that? What the hell is the matter with you? Okay, you’re just suffering a panic attack of some kind. You let your imagination run away. Focus on your family. Tamp it down. Forget about Roger and Bonnie. They’re not here …

  And you have to go home.

  He climbed back onto his boat. His hand was on the ignition key when he remembered he had tied off at Roger’s stern. He turned back to cast off and climbed over the seats one more time. He kneeled on the Bayliner’s platform, reached for the loop of nautical line, and the Glastron’s cabin door slammed open. He jerked up, a scream trapped in his throat.

  But it was only the breeze. The wooden door was swaying with a creaking patience. No one was coming for him.

  Nerves. The stress. Enough.

  Mick tossed the line into the Bayliner. He turned and set his right foot on the wet seat back and the siped rubber sole of his boat shoe held for a split second, then shot from under him. He fell forward and his forehead bounced off a corner of fiberglass. He saw stars like static electricity and flopped to his chest and rolled left, groping for a hold on something as he spun backside down. The water caught him like a net, cupped high around him, and filled his startled eyes and open mouth. His head pounded once terribly and the bright blue sky retreated, darkening, funneling into a cone, blue turning to green, green turning to brown, darkening until it was all black, and then he was slack and sinking all the way to the bottom.

  10

  In the darkness, which was cold and infinite and absolute, he was no longer aware of himself. There was no Mick, no Amy, no children. His house, his business, his problems and all of the memories that had been weaved into the tapestry of his life, disintegrated. He was without thought, without conscience. He was outside of time.

  But he was not alone.

  ‘I found you,’ a quiet but very deep voice said. ‘Don’t worry now. You’re safe with me. No one’s going to hurt you. I promise.’

  It was the voice one hears through the wall of a motel room at four in the morning. It sounded like death.

  ‘I only want to help you. We can help each other. There are possibilities, all kinds of possibilities.’

  He did not understand and could not answer. A small bulb of emotion throbbed deep within him. He did not want to stay here forever, alone in the black void. The other presence cradled him, raised him up, whispering promises, pledging life.

  ‘I’ve waited so long for this day. We’re going to do beautiful things together.’

  Slowly the darkness ebbed.

  11

  Mick regained consciousness on a dirt road. Weeds brushed his elbows and hot sunlight turned his eyelids into veined paisley curtains. His body was sodden and his mouth was dry.

  Amy was above him, wedging a towel under his neck, smoothing his wet hair. He realized had been somewhere else, she had been waiting for him. He tried to recall where he had gone off to, but when his mind probed back in time, it ran into a black wall. He was tired but not in pain. His lips felt sealed. Something bad had happened.

  Behind Amy, holding a towel to the top of his head, was Kyle. His son appeared at peace, not at all worried, and there was comfort in this. They had been in an accident together, but it was going to be all right now.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Briela was standing further back, chucking rocks into a body of water, and for a moment Mick was sure they were on an island somewhere, on a beach beside the sea. ‘Mom, he moved his eyes.’

  ‘I know, honey. I told you he was going to be fine.’

  What happened? His memory skipped to this morning – which seemed to be some other morning, a long time ago – when he had been unrolling the cover from the boat, throwing it onto his driveway. Between then and now there was no yawning chasm, not even a crack in the sidewalk. The splice in time was seamless.

  ‘Welcome back,’ Amy said, taking his cold hand. Her face was drawn, angry. ‘Don’t you dare do that again. You scared the shit out of me, Mick.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  His wife smiled thinly, glancing at the kids. ‘You had an accident on the boat. Coach Wisneski rescued you.’

  It took a moment for Mick to remember that his former wrestling coach from Boulder High had become, in his retirement, the head administrator of Boulder Reservoir’s on-site maintenance staff, a lifeguard and a certified member of the lake patrol. Memories of the growling old bastard came back, the way he always lumbered around the beaches and boat house in his orange shorts, the metal whistle carried over from his wrestling days dangling on a cord in front of his bald, baby-smooth chest, his legs and torso the color of fudge. Wisneski was six-four, lean, with vain Tom Petty hair, and he had been forced into early retirement ostensibly for breaking a clipboard over the forehead of one of his athletes, a hardass who couldn’t evolve with the times.

  ‘Rescued me,’ he said, the words coming out in a papery whistle. ‘From what?’

  Amy shook her head, unable to say it.

  ‘Dad, you drowned,’ Briela said, chipper even in her awe of him. ‘You held your breath for the longest time. How did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, sweetie. But I’m happy to see you.’ Mick forced himself to sit up. ‘Where’s Coach?’

  ‘There was some confusion,’ Amy said, meeting his eyes as if trying to impart something she could not explain in front of the children. ‘One of his eardrums burst when he was diving for you. When I got here you were conscious and he was in shock. I told the first ambulance to take him. He’s older and you were coherent before you blacked out again. Do you want to wait for the second ambulance?’

  ‘No. No, I’m good.’ The thought of an ambulance ride, the hospital with its sick and dying, its probing doctors, revolted him. It wasn’t just the lapse in health insurance. He did not trust them. ‘Help me up.’

  ‘But honey—’ she started.

  ‘But nothing. We’re going home.’

  ‘But what if—’

  ‘I said I’m fine, goddamn it.’

  Amy looked away, shaking her head.

  As they headed to the truck, his children hugged him and talked over each other in their relief. Mick smiled and put on a brave face, ruffling their hair and telling them he was really okay, but inside he was still recoiling from something, repressing tremors.

  He did not understand why, but something about his family did not seem real. He felt duped, tricked by some dark hand of fate. For a moment, as they touched him and kissed his cheeks, he was certain that these people, while bearing every hallmark of his pairing and making, were not his real family at all, but others hiding beneath clever masks of artificial skin.

  12

  After stopping at the pharmacy to buy a better first-aid kit and patching up Kyle’s scalp in the truck (the bleeding had stopped and the cut was much shallower than it had seemed during their panic on the boat), they stopped for take-out subs at Deli Zone. Most of the staff had coffee-break bong smoke wafting from their beards and the order took so long and they were all so hungry, they decided to eat dinner in one of the small booths, chewing in happy silence.

  After, Briela was dying to watch a movie she couldn’t wait for their
Netflix queue to deliver, so they wasted another forty minutes in Blockbuster, loading up on candy and popcorn. Kyle milked his head injury for three action-packed Blu Rays and Amy bought two pints of ice cream. The rules had been suspended. Tonight they could have whatever they wanted.

  They got home a little before nine and the kids ran inside. It was difficult to lift himself out of the truck and, after his first attempt, Mick sank back into the seat with a sigh. Amy had driven them home in Blue Thunder. She told him the Lake Patrol had already towed the boat in and would dock it until Mick felt like retrieving it.

  Amy opened her door but paused. ‘I don’t feel good about this.’

  ‘I’m sorry I gave you a scare. If anything changes, I promise I’ll …’

  ‘Go to the doctor?’

  He forced a smile. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Mick.’

  ‘What do you want me to say? You know our situation.’

  Amy leaned her head against the steering wheel. ‘Nothing ever changes.’

  ‘It will.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘That’s what you always say, but it just gets worse.’

  ‘I need you to trust me, Amy.’

  She stared at him. ‘Myra Blaylock. Should I trust you about her too?’

  This was out of the blue. ‘What’s she got to do with anything?’

  ‘You said her name while you were … half-comatose or unconscious or whatever it is you were doing lying there on the dam, swooning.’

  ‘I have no idea why,’ he said, feeling neither guilt nor alarm. ‘What else did I say?’

  ‘“I’ve been looking for you.” You said, “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.” And then, “We’re going to do beautiful things together” … several times.’

  Mick shook his head. ‘I doubt it means anything.’

  ‘You haven’t seen her?’

  ‘All that was a long time ago, Amy. You know that.’

  Amy nodded, but he knew she was not convinced.