Good Neighbors(46)
“No, Mom.” Charlie backed away, one foot after the other, until he was out of the well-lit study, and in the dark hall.
He approached Sally Mom after that. “We have to stand up for them. They’re innocent,” he said.
Sally looked up from her papers, the model of practicality. She was shut up in her home office, her printer singing as it pooped out another land-use proposal. She did property law and he saw her for maybe a half hour a day. But he liked her. If they were strangers, he’d seek her out, and he had a feeling she felt the same. This wasn’t love, necessarily. It was that lucky thing you have when two people understand each other utterly.
“This isn’t our problem. If they didn’t do it, no one’ll file charges. We’ll all forget about it in six months. Not even Rhea Schroeder can hold a grudge that long when she’s in the wrong.”
“But someone threw a brick at them!”
“And the police have been hunting them down all morning. Let Margie Mom have her way on this. Trust me. This kind of accusation isn’t something people like us can fight.”
* * *
Dave Harrison sucked it up and approached both his mom and his dad. This wasn’t a pleasant endeavor. They really had divided the house with a black Sharpie marker.
He started with his dad, Tim, who hadn’t worked in years. Some days he was dizzy, other days he ached. There were fevers and chills. He’d been sick for so long that everything scared him. He was scared of public places and too hot days and anyone with a cough or head cold. He was especially scared of the hole—afraid it was radiating cancer. The doctors and Dave’s mom called it hypochondria. Long ago, they’d stopped believing his complaints, so he’d turned to hypnotists and aura readers and scammers who’d promised cures and never delivered. Dave didn’t think it was hypochondria. The old man really was sick. But after more than a decade of sharing his body with an enemy he couldn’t evict, he’d lost faith.
“It’s gone too far,” Dave said. They were in the den with the old, Scotchgard-covered couches made of chemicals that were now banned in forty states. His dad’s shoes had tracked bitumen everywhere. The floor was sticky goo. This whole crescent was seeped with it.
Tim blew a lazy raspberry, eyes closed, as he lay on the couch. The only channel that got reception was local news. The static-riddled story was about a potential pedophile on Maple Street, implicated in Shelly’s death, whom sources claimed was the ex-rocker Arlo Wilde. The camera showed footage of the Wilde house, and of the hole, too. Nobody except Rhea Schroeder was available for comment. I can’t tell you anything for certain, she exclaimed, her eyes bright and fanatic. But there’s no way Shelly went out into that park, unless she was running from something.
“FJ Schroeder threw that brick, didn’t he?” Dave asked. “Were you there?”
Tim’s face was puffy from the Chinese herbs his holistic healer had given him. He smelled like plum flower.
“God, Dad. I told you it was all a lie. What’s wrong with you?”
Tim finally opened his eyes: creepy green lights, focused on nothing, clots of luminescent sand oil in their crevices. “You don’t understand the kind of evil a person can do,” he answered. “I’m protecting you.”
“Dad, were you out there last night? Did you help them throw that brick?”
“You don’t want to tattle. Imagine what would happen if they took me away.”
Dave imagined. His life would be a lot easier with one of them gone. He’d have a whole house again.
Tim read his mind. “You’d have the house, but you and Adam would be all alone with her. No buffer.”
Dave approached his mom after that. Jane was his practical parent, who paid bills and got groceries and set boundaries. When Tim first got sick, she’d been really upset. Cried herself to sleep and all that. But she cried herself dry. All her sympathy ran out. And not just her sympathy for Tim.
Jane wore her hair in a loose bun and dressed in pretty floral outfits and spoke softly because she was the headmaster of the Hillcock Preschool. She read lots of child rearing books and had a PhD in early childhood education, too. You never got the real Jane when you talked to her; just this textbook automaton semblance of sweet compassion.
He found Jane in his parents’ bedroom. The fucked-up part? They’d even split the bed. Some nights, neither giving an inch, they both slept in it. Her side was made and she was sitting, papers neatly stacked all around. She kept her things clean, in order. No bitumen. No crumbs.
“We should go to the police before anyone else gets hurt.”
Ringlets of hair streamed down from her loose bun. She was going through a roster for next year’s class. “You think we should go to the police?”
“Yeah. Because it’s not true. That story about Mr. Wilde. It’s not true. But everybody’s acting like it is true. We don’t even know for sure that Shelly’s dead. You went to a service for her and we don’t even know for sure.”
“You think Mr. Wilde is innocent?”
“I told you that. I’ve always been telling you that.”
Same calm voice. Except she wasn’t a calm person, not really. Because she’d been the one to divide the house with a Sharpie. It went all the way into the kitchen, bisecting it so they each used different cupboards. He got the microwave; she got the stove. They’d been to court only once. The lawyers said it would last for years unless she signed a paper allowing him half of everything, including her huge inheritance, because he was too sick to work. But she wouldn’t do that. She just kept redrawing the lines every time the Sharpie smudged. She used an online ruler app to make them perfect.