Love in the Time of Serial Killers(7)

“What?” I asked, turning back.

“Sam,” he said. “My name is just Sam.”

“Well, just Sam,” I said. “If you just put your house number on your mailbox, the mix-up probably wouldn’t have happened.”

That sounded really bitchy, the way it came out. I hadn’t meant it to. But then again, how had I thought it would land, a criticism of this guy’s mailbox, of all things? It had just been so unsettling, being back in my dad’s house, and I felt on edge all the time. Still, there was no reason to take it out on this guy. If anything, it was a good idea to stay on your neighbors’ good side. I’d read that story about the New Jersey family who received all those cryptic notes from “the Watcher” until eventually they had to move out.

I took a breath, and tried to start again.

“Thank you, by the way,” I said. Even that came out grudging and a little churlish. I gestured vaguely toward my car, and his brows knitted together as he stared at me. “For helping with the desk.”

He leaned against the doorway, and I tried to ignore that he was actually kind of hot. He was turning the box over and over in his hands, and the movement made the muscles of his forearms flex under the light dusting of dark hair. Maybe it was my recent celibacy talking, but I felt my palms going clammy.

“You’re Phoebe,” he said finally.

Okay, maybe he needed a new nickname. The Sidewalk Snoop. The Psychic Stalker. You’d have to say that one aloud to really get the alliterative effect, though.

He must’ve seen my confused expression, because he blew his hair out of his eyes, giving a self-deprecating shake of his head. Turned out his eyes were blue. “I was at the funeral,” he said. “Back in January. I’m sorry about your dad.”

Oh. I guessed that made sense—he would’ve been my dad’s neighbor, after all. Still, the thought that he’d been there, that he’d had all that time to observe me and my family, before I even knew that he existed . . . it made me feel prickly and self-conscious. And sure, he had no reason to pay any particular attention to me. But I couldn’t help but see myself as I’d been that day through a stranger’s eyes, and I didn’t like what I saw.

I’d looked like shit, for one thing. Conner and I, in a rare moment of sibling bonding, had decided to get drunk together the night before. We’d both rolled into the funeral hungover, but while Conner still looked like a human being, I looked like I was wearing Halloween makeup, I was so pale with purple circles under my eyes.

I’d also forgotten to pack the right shoes to go with my black dress, so I’d ended up wearing these gold sparkly pointy-toed flats that had been like a flashing neon sign in the midst of all the somber clothes. This, from a woman who dressed in black ninety-five percent of the time. I shouldn’t have been able to fuck that part up, of all things.

The dress itself had been made of this draped, diaphanous gauze that looked ethereal on the size 2 model in the sponsored post. On me, it looked like I was carrying an entire dance troupe’s costumes around my body. When I sat down, I worried people would throw dirty laundry on me.

But worse, perhaps, I didn’t know if I’d looked . . . grief-stricken. The entire funeral had been a blur. My dad’s death had come as a shock—he was still in his fifties, he was supposed to have plenty of time left. But the whole day had felt surreal, like I was in a dream, or in someone else’s life. I hadn’t known what to say or how to act, and so I’d just kind of shut down, retreated inside myself to the place I could always go as a kid when I needed some quiet.

And now people were always saying this kind of thing to me. My dissertation advisor, when she heard why I’d need to push our meeting back. A couple people in my program, when I let it slip at a board game night hosted by a professor and his partner. My landlord, when I’d told him why I was leaving for Florida.

This time it was Sam, saying the words he’d probably said to me at the funeral, too, although I didn’t remember. I didn’t know what to say now any more than I had then. We weren’t that close? Actually, he hadn’t been a part of my life since I was a teenager? He wasn’t that nice to me?

“Thanks,” I said instead, because it was the safest response, the one that most people wanted so we could move on to the next topic.

But Sam was looking at me, and for a minute I worried that it all showed on my face—my ambivalence, my guilt, my anger. I did a finger-gun gesture toward the box in his hands that would haunt me for the rest of my life.

“If that’s a severed head, I’m going to be very upset,” I said, and then, at his confused expression, I added, “That’s a Wayne’s World reference. Never mind.”

He started to say something, but I was suddenly desperate to get out of there. So, before I could make the exchange any weirder, I turned on my heel and headed back.



* * *





?OVER THE REST of the week, I didn’t have much other opportunity to observe Sam further. His comings and goings were still baffling to me. He’d leave the house dressed in that same bland business casual attire—sometimes he was gone only for an hour or so, while other times he could be out half the day. On Wednesday a nondescript sedan parked in front of his house, but I missed seeing the person it belonged to either entering or exiting his house, so no leads there.