The People Next Door Read online

  ‘She has breast cancer,’ he added, surprised by his own words. ‘Doesn’t she?’

  ‘I have no idea. Where did you hear that?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Uh-huh. But she didn’t tell you herself.’

  ‘No, I swear. I would remember that.’

  Amy stared at him as if he had just given her a box of ammunition but taken away the gun.

  ‘Maybe I’m confused,’ Mick said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I think you should walk yourself inside.’ She ejected herself from the truck and slammed the door.

  Mick exited the Silverado and stood in the night air for a moment, waiting for his equilibrium to falter, but it didn’t. He felt sound on the ground. He headed for the back doors off the living room and breakfast area, but paused on the patio. He looked out over his back acreage, to the palazzo looming behind them. He didn’t see any cars, but new rows of lights were jutting from the mulch berms to illuminate the driveway like a landing strip. Inside the house, at the back west corner of the first floor, several windows glowed warmly.

  They’re here.

  Higher, up on the terrace, a solitary figure in dark clothes stood watching over him. The figure did not move, but its stance was that of a lookout, a kind of sentinel. Mick knew it was absurd, but he had the strangest feeling that the figure had been there all evening, waiting for him to come home.

  It was alone, its size hard to estimate. The lower half was obscured by the parapet, and it was too far away for him to guess at its gender, but he assumed it was a man, the man of the house. Mick watched for a cigarette ember, a task, anything that would suggest a purpose to what appeared to be blatant lurking, but there was nothing of the sort. He was prepared to accept that it was a statue, maybe a gargoyle or knight, but when he started toward his own back door, the figure moved with him. Mick took six or seven steps and the figure moved sideways along the terrace an equal number, though its own steps were not discernible as such, but rather a smooth sliding motion, a shadow pacing in a mirror placed half a football field away.

  Mick halted. The figure on the terrace halted.

  Mick waved and the figure waved. Not back, but at the same time.

  With the same right arm.

  ‘Sonofa …’ The man was taunting him. He had half a mind to go over there and rattle the gates, introduce himself to this paranoid asshole. He headed back toward his truck and, sure enough, after only two paces the man – had to be a man, some macho peacock strutting his feathers – was matching Mick’s every stride.

  He stopped. His neighbor stopped.

  ‘Hey, bite me!’

  The sentinel did not respond.

  ‘You want something from me?’ Mick called out. ‘Why don’t you fuck off back into your ugly house!’ The sound of his own voice made him giggle.

  ‘Mick?’

  He turned. Amy was standing at the open sliding glass door.

  ‘Are you coming in?’

  ‘Be right there.’

  ‘Who were you talking to?’

  ‘This asshole thinks he can …’ Mick pointed, but the terrace was vacant from end to end. And the house was dark, not a single window was glowing, even though just seconds ago the entire back half of the house seemed to be filled with light. He lowered his arm.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Forget it. I’m just tired.’

  But he suspected already that this was not true.

  13

  He watched half a movie with Kyle before nodding off. Amy tugged his ear gently and he rose from the couch. She carried his boat shoes in one hand as they went down the hall, her fingers under the tongues like hooks in fish gills, and he wished she would throw them away. She set them on the carpet, just inside the master’s walk-in closet and he suppressed the urge to walk over and shut the door.

  Those are the shoes I almost drowned in. I don’t ever want to see them again.

  He sat on the bed, feeling stoned.

  ‘I did some research online,’ Amy said. She had some papers in hand. She was always probing around on WebMD, reading about symptoms and treatments on various internet forums frequented by people who loved playing their own doctor. ‘When someone suffocates in a body of warm water,’ she told him, glancing at the printouts, ‘damage at the cellular level is swift. The most common danger is hypoxemia, lack of oxygen in the blood, which deprives the brain.’

  ‘My brain is fine,’ Mick said.

  Amy squished the papers at her side. ‘You were out there all alone for at least ten and possibly as long as eighteen minutes, Mick. You could have serious problems we aren’t even aware of.’

  ‘You’re overreacting. I hit my head, is all.’ He pointed to his forehead, which was not bleeding or bruised, only swollen. ‘Does this look serious?’

  Amy read from her papers again. ‘Dizziness, auditory hallucinations, physical tremors, lapses in memory, fatigue, mania, lethargy, foreign smells, loss of motor control, clumsy limbs, rage, depression, mood swings, PTSD, seeing things out of the corner of your eye. This goes on and on. Do not lie to me, Mick.’

  ‘Is that all? I’ve had most of those symptoms for years.’

  ‘That’s supposed to be funny?’

  Mick shrugged. The fight went out of them both. His thoughts then leapt to something so alarming, he could not believe Amy hadn’t said something earlier.

  ‘What happened to Roger?’ He noticed how she stiffened. ‘Him and the woman. Something happened to them, didn’t it?’

  Amy tugged at her sleeves, avoiding his eyes. ‘You’re remembering this now or it’s just a …’ She made a whirling motion with her fingers.

  ‘It’s more than a feeling and less than a memory.’

  Amy cleared her throat. ‘We saw them, earlier in the day. We were tied off at the dock when he stopped by. Typical Roger, in party-guy mode. He was with Bonnie Abrahams, one of his hygienists. No one knows where they went.’

  ‘Was he there on the boat when I went to check on them?’

  Amy hesitated before saying, ‘No.’

  Something was wrong with that. ‘You’re not sure,’ Mick said. ‘Because I don’t remember. And Wisneski didn’t see them when he saw me fall in. Jesus, Amy, do you think I did something to them?’

  ‘Of course not.’ But she sounded like she was considering just that.

  ‘Right. Did someone call the police?’

  Amy nodded. ‘Coach was talking to Terry Fielding before the ambulance took him away. Terry will be by to see you in the next day or two, to get a formal statement.’

  Sergeant Terrance Fielding of the Boulder Police Department was a former friend and classmate of Mick’s from their CU days. They had circled some of the same parties together as undergrads, and Terry used to stop by the Straw for a beer every couple of weeks before he quit drinking. Mick hadn’t seen the small but intense cop in a year or so, and he didn’t want to see him now.

  ‘He wants to question me,’ Mick said. ‘There’s going to be an investigation.’

  ‘And you’re not going to be a suspect in it,’ Amy said. ‘Don’t start down this road and get yourself all worked up. It won’t help, so just don’t.’

  ‘Two people are missing and I’m the last person who saw them. Kyle said there was a struggle and I drowned and Roger and Bonnie are probably having their eyeballs eaten out of their heads at the bottom of Boulder Reservoir right now, but I’m not a suspect. That’s a relief.’

  ‘Stop it.’ Amy’s voice was shrill, not quite a scream. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘But you don’t know that.’

  ‘Why would you want to hurt Roger?’ she said.

  ‘Maybe he was doing something to Bonnie. Maybe I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see.’ He was suddenly very tired of talking to her.

  ‘No one found any blood,’ Amy said. ‘His boat was clean. Kyle probably saw them fucking and got excited. He plays too many video games and watches those awful movies.’ She returned
to her post at the doorway, folding her hands together. ‘I’m sure Roger will turn up and, when he does, this will all seem ridiculous.’

  ‘You’re not sleeping in here,’ he surmised.

  ‘I’ll be in the guest room. I have a big day tomorrow and you’ll sleep better without me tossing and turning beside you.’

  He guessed that Myra Blaylock escaping from his lips had something to do with it, but not all of it. Amy was disturbed by the entire episode. He had scared her and was still scaring her, in a number of ways.

  ‘I’ll be back at work tomorrow,’ he said with more hope than promise.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Just call me if you need anything.’

  He eased back on top of the sheets, still dressed in his sweats, and admitted to himself that he was afraid to close his eyes. The thought of going under again, in any way, made his stomach queasy, as if he were standing on line to ride the roller coaster at a shoddy amusement park.

  Eleven to eighteen minutes, he kept thinking. I might have been clinically dead, gone, out of this world for eleven to eighteen minutes. He didn’t know what to make of that, there was no context for it. It was just a new fact, a piece of trivia that had been inserted into his life without his permission, like learning he had a felonious third cousin somewhere in Indiana. He wasn’t worried, but he wasn’t about to invite it over for a reunion, either.

  He watched the enormous window they had cut into the bedroom’s south-facing wall, a six-by-four-foot postcard view of the Foothills, half of his backyard and, in the far left corner, somewhere behind the lamp’s glare, the mansion that had been constructed.

  He thought about the shadowy figure he had seen on the terrace. The house had looked empty yesterday and this morning, before the accident. Why hadn’t he asked Amy when they had moved in? Told her about the man he had seen on the terrace? It seemed important in the moment, but he felt foolish, like maybe he was imagining seeing the guy up there.

  You’re worried there’s something wrong with you, that’s why. But you’re fine. Walking, talking, thinking clearly. Why wouldn’t you be fine? You hit your head, fell in the lake, took on too much water. Your hard drive crashed and rebooted, but everything is back online now, running smooth. Leave it at that.

  Or maybe there are no new neighbors.

  Maybe whatever you saw, it wasn’t real. Maybe he’s not even a real man.

  But that was silly, wasn’t it? What else could he be?

  There are possibilities. All kinds of possibilities.

  Well, there was one very simple way to resolve this non-mystery. Tomorrow morning he would take a short stroll around his backyard and see what he could see. And maybe, if he was feeling up to it – and why shouldn’t he feel up to it, he was in fine health – he might just walk up the driveway and knock on the door. Hello, I’m Mick Nash, that’s my house right there, my family lives here. I thought it was time we had ourselves a nice neighborly greeting. Stop by for a beer sometime, bring the wife and kids, but in the meantime stop fucking standing there watching my house like a creep, all right? That would be that, and then he would know.

  Unless of course no one answered the door, no one had moved in, and the house was empty. How about that, Mickey? What would that mean? It would mean you are seeing things. It would mean you need to tell Amy we have a problem with the machinery, time to explore some unpleasant medical possibilities. Right? Right.

  I’ve been looking for you for a long time.

  The sound of the voice echoing in his head lowered his core temperature so abruptly he felt as though he had just stepped out of the shower on a January morning between furnace cycles. For the first time since waking up, the gravity of what had happened – and what had almost happened, the lake pinning him to the wrestling mat of eternity – hit him full force. The very end of Mick Nash was no longer an idea, a distant event. It was right outside his window, stretching itself around his neighborhood, and it wanted to come in, cozy up with him, reach its fingers in and close his eyes for good. He could feel it out there, beckoning. There was no logic to it, but it had something to do with that obstruction sitting in the dark, and the man who had been watching him.

  Mick turned away from the window and crawled back onto the bed. He pulled the covers up, balling them in his fists. He closed his eyes and experienced an echo of the unnatural feeling when his family had hugged him, kissed his cheeks. None of it felt real. Today did not feel real. His life did not feel real. He wondered what had really happened out there during the missing eleven to eighteen minutes. He wondered where he had gone and what he had seen.

  He wondered what he might have brought back.

  14

  Mick sat up some hours later, in middle-of-the-night darkness, tangled in the bedding, feeling trapped. He hadn’t heard a door creak or window breaking. He simply surfaced from a shallow pool of near-sleep and with primitive certainty knew.

  Someone was in his cave.

  He surveyed the bedroom, catching the scent of stale water and something muddied, like silt at the bottom of a lake. He turned to shake Amy, but her side of the bed was empty; right, she was in the guest room. Outside the big window, the five largest Flatirons stood risen from the earth like stone tents crooked with time.

  He got out of bed and found the three-foot scrap of stainless-steel pipe he kept behind the walk-in closet door. The gummy handle wrapped in electrical tape was comforting. Nice heft. You want it, you got it, fuck-o.

  He took a few steps toward the open bedroom door and cocked his ear. He imagined the sound of drawers opening and closing, the telltale creak of a floorboard, but nothing came. The scent of fetid water was less potent now, as if it had originated in the bedroom and since moved on.

  He stepped into the hall. The carpet was wet in places near the door. He went further, feeling around with his bare toes, spots of it squishing under his feet. He looked up, to the end of the hall where it opened into the foyer and front living room. A large whitish form was standing there, squared off as if blocking the exit, waiting for him. It was a man. Mick’s soft insides seemed to swell and shudder, his head began to throb. The man did not move but there was a steady pat pat pat on the carpet where water yet dripped from his arms and sodden shorts. Mick couldn’t see the face, but something about the man’s posture – the set of his shoulders, the slight bend in the left knee, blocky head – was disturbingly familiar.

  ‘Come on, Mickey,’ the pale figure said, and though he was still twenty feet away, the dentist’s voice carried as if he were whispering in Mick’s ear. ‘We have to go now.’

  The steel pipe slipped from Mick’s fist, thudding on the floor. Roger Lertz wasn’t supposed to be here. Not in the middle of the night, not in his wet swimsuit.

  ‘What do you want?’ Mick said in a dull croak.

  ‘This is your fault. You owe me. If you don’t come with me now, it’s all going to be very bad for you. For Amy and the kids.’

  The bald fact of Roger’s presence here at this hour carried Mick forward. Whatever the hell Roger wanted, he did not need to be here, inside the house. Mick had to get him out before Amy woke up and this turned into some kind of scene. He approached slowly on unsteady legs.

  Up close, Roger’s hair was matted to his skull. The lake smell was on him, and something sweetly decaying with it. His skin was so pallid in the darkness it seemed cold blue. Gaping wounds in the flesh appeared like plaster impressions taken from sharks. Three of his ribs were exposed and his throat was slit, ragged near the ears. His mustache and chin hair were a deep amber, sodden over his plump lips, and the eyes were filmed over with a cotton glazing that reminded Mick of old dogs, searching, caressing Mick with a gentle desperation.

  What happened to you? Mick said or thought. He could not hear his own voice beneath the ringing panic in his ears.

  The dentist leaned closer. ‘My demons caught up with me. Soon yours will too.’

  Mick did not know what that meant but he knew Roger was dead, which me
ant this could not be happening, which meant it was a nightmare and he would wake up any second now. He thought about waking up, willed it to happen, but Roger only stared at him with his filmy eyes and nothing changed.

  ‘You’re not supposed to …’ Mick couldn’t finish. It was too awful to speak of.

  ‘You’re in a lot of trouble,’ Roger said and, without waiting for a reply, turned and walked away. Mick followed him across the first floor, out into the backyard. The air was warm. They moved past the pool and the guest house, toward the row of pine trees at Mick’s property border, then down the old Jenkins driveway that had been repaved for the new house. The ground seemed to move under them, the borders of his property retreating in great gaps and strides, and the land beneath his feet changed – fresh asphalt to cracked dry dirt, then grass again, then back to dirt and the rocky prairie of Boulder’s open space. Seconds turned to minutes and Mick began to think in terms of acres, a country mile, with no sense of direction.

  This is exactly how location and distance get warped in dreams.

  The thought was not comforting, but it was enough to allow him to continue.

  No owls hooted, no dogs barked. If they crossed near prairie dog holes and darting foxes and bull snakes nestling beneath rotting timber, the fauna called no attention to itself. The land felt barren, cooling as night progressed. There were fields and the occasional tree far off in the distance, but no other houses, and Mick found this to be further proof he was dreaming.

  Roger continued with purpose, a man in a wet swimsuit out for a brisk hike, off to some newer, better beach. ‘That’s it. This is how we do it, Mickey, you see? You know the way.’

  Soon they were crossing a dirt lane, moving into a field dotted with thistle and small cacti and rocks, but Mick felt nothing under his feet. The clouds moved overhead, letting moonlight glow at Roger’s back. Though they had been outdoors for what seemed like half an hour, the dentist’s bathing trunks – pink and chocolate in a flower motif – were still dripping, the water running off the hems in rivulets that coursed down his legs, pasting the hair to his hamstrings in dark whorls.