Good Neighbors(71)
She pulled back onto the road.
118 Maple Street
Saturday, July 31
Rhea sped into the driveway. Gertie watched her stride from her car to the back door in a frenzy.
“We’re gonna die!” Ella hissed in blind panic.
Gertie didn’t have time to replace the lockbox. Still holding it, barefoot, she rushed out of Rhea’s office just as Rhea yanked open the back door. It rammed the opposite wall, shivering.
“What are you doing in my office?” she shouted.
Heavy-bellied, Gertie stood as still as she knew how in the archway between the dining room and hall. Clearly visible, if Rhea looked.
“You know you’re not allowed in there!”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Ella’s soft voice answered. “I thought I heard Hammy.”
“Who?”
“Hammy. He got out?”
“I don’t want a hamster in my office!”
Gertie was on tiptoe. In the hall. So slow. She made it to the front door in plain sight.
“I’m sorry,” Ella said.
“Sorry doesn’t cover it. Now come here!”
“?’Kay.”
Gertie opened the front door. Stayed in the threshold. Down the long hall, Rhea was in the kitchen, her back to Gertie. Ella was on the other side, facing them both.
Rhea raised her hand high.
She slapped herself: wholp!
Gertie gasped.
Rhea didn’t hear, because Ella yelped at the same time.
Gertie took a step back inside the hall. Her adrenaline rushed so fast that even Guppy had noticed and was swimming.
Rhea took Ella’s hands in hers. “Calm down,” she said. “You’re not the one who’s hurt.”
Ella nodded.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Rhea said. “I’m just sad about what the Wildes did to Shelly. I bet you’re sad, too. I bet you could just kill them.”
“Yes.”
Rhea pulled the girl in and squeezed until she stopped fighting. Until she went along with the hug. Until, finally, she returned it, and stroked Rhea’s back with her tense little fingers. “Don’t be sad, Momma.”
They rested like that. A wisteria and oak, intertwined. The one strangling the other, in order to survive. Ella watched Gertie all the while. But she wasn’t like Shelly. She didn’t plead for help.
Gertie backed out of the house. Shut the door softly. Maybe the cop stationed there saw her. Maybe he didn’t. Holding the lockbox, she jogged with bouncing belly down the walk, past the naked topiary, to her house. Her run-down house, which didn’t smell like cheap perfume.
118 Maple Street
Saturday, July 31
Back in the Schroeder house, Rhea poured herself a nooner of wine. Glugged, hoping to find some relief for this excruciating pain in her knee. Red and rage-eyed, she searched with her daughter for Hammy, who really was missing. They checked all the usual places, and when that didn’t work they checked the basement, where bitumen had gathered and someone had left footprints all over the tile. They found Hammy there, trapped in oil that had seeped up.
Ella cried.
Rhea intuited that Ella could not tolerate one more indignity. She needed this animal. So she waded through the muck. She lifted Hammy and rinsed him gently with detergent. Got into the car and drove with Ella and Hammy to the East Williston Veterinary Clinic, where he was declared healthy. Or she? Who knew. Who cared. It was a rodent.
“You see?” she asked. “We found him and he’s fine.”
Ella began to cry uncontrollably at that, but she was in the back seat, and Rhea up front. There was too much traffic to pull over.
When they got home from the veterinarian’s office, Rhea limped back down to the basement. Something had bothered her that she couldn’t place. A scratch carved into her memory; something not quite right.
She returned to the footprints. They were bigger than hers, but narrow. Feminine. For the briefest of moments, she turned flush, thinking it was Shelly, come home at last.
But then, beside the stairs, tucked neatly in a shadow, were Gertie Wilde’s cute and practical Payless walkers.
116 Maple Street
Saturday, July 31
Shelly’s phone. It had no signal. Wasn’t on network. Gertie charged it. Went through all the applications. Only one of them had files—the photo app. She flicked through the dozens of images she found there. Some showed shoulders. Others a side, or a stomach, or a bottom. But most showed a back. All were fresh, taken soon after whatever blow had been issued. Viewing the pictures felt pornographic, as if the simple act of seeing made her guilty, too.
Gertie remembered Rhea’s words from that night months ago: Shelly can’t keep her hair neat. It goads me. I’d like to talk about it with you, because I know you like Shelly. I know you like me. I know you won’t judge.
It came to her that the oval-clustered bruises in these photos were from a brush.
In the quiet of that den, where she’d pinned so many hopes for a better life, Gertie curled up on herself and cried.
She might have gone to the police. But to get this evidence, Gertie had broken the law. The bruises, all inside Shelly’s bathing suit line, did not have an obvious author. None were more than a year old. In other words, none preexisted the Wildes.