House Next Door Read online

  Unreasoning anger surged through me; unreasoning tears flooded the back of my throat with salt.

  “I certainly never figured you for a quitter, Kim,” I said fiercely.

  “Blessed is he who knows when to quit,” he said.

  “I think you’re feeling sorry for yourself. I think you’re acting like a child. I think you don’t have any right to just throw away what you have and go play around Europe like some…spoiled rich kid.”

  He looked at me, hurt and anger in his eyes. And something else. Betrayal? Pain sang in my ears.

  “And I think you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he flared. “Besides, that’s what I am, isn’t it? A spoiled rich kid. Who got hooked on his Lincoln Logs and thought he could be an architect.”

  The evening was broken, and soon he went away. We went to bed, heavily. Walter was silent, and soon turned off his reading lamp and turned over on his side, his back to me. I did not know if he was asleep or not. I lay still in the darkness, in pain and sorrow. The depth of it surprised me.

  That Sunday Pie came over alone just as I was starting dinner. Walter was playing a last set of tennis at the club with Martin Sawyer, and the sun was setting behind our woods. I offered a drink, which she refused.

  “I just came over to unlock the door for the carpet people,” she said. “And I thought I’d come tell you about my party. Buddy and Luke are coming back from the office for supper, so I can’t stay long. Is it all right if I fasten Casey’s leash to the patio table? He’s all over mud.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Do you think it’s wise to leave the door unlocked all night, though? And what party?”

  “There’s nothing in the house that isn’t nailed down,” she said. “And I can’t get here in the morning as early as the carpet people are coming. And the party—I think I’m going to have the biggest house-warming party in the world, Colquitt, as soon as we’re in and settled. Do you think the people on the street would think I was presumptuous? I want to get to know everybody over here, and I want to have the people from the firm, and Mother and Daddy of course, and anybody else who’ll come. I’m going to ask Kim Dougherty too; I thought he’d like to see his house all shined up for a party. Will you and Walter come?”

  “I think it’s a lovely idea, and of course we’ll come. Nobody will think you’re presumptuous. We all love parties, and everybody will want to see the house. Nobody talks about anything else. I want to meet Buddy’s partners too.”

  “Not partners yet,” she said, dimpling. “But soon. That’s a secret, Colquitt, but Luke says he’s doing so well he wouldn’t be surprised if he was made a junior partner by fall. That’s just unheard of at Buddy’s age. And it’s all because of Luke. I just can’t believe that darling man is being so nice to us.”

  “He certainly is a nice guy, isn’t he?” I said. “Buddy’s lucky to have his guidance and you’re both lucky to have him for a friend. He’ll be there of course.”

  “Oh, sure. His wife and daughter may be down for it. He’s got a couple of houses he wants them to look at, and if we time it right, it should be about the time of his daughter’s spring break. He’s even offered to bartend or get a bartender from the club. I think that would be fancier, sort of, don’t you?”

  “By all means.”

  “Who’s bartending? Can he spare an aging athlete a little booze?” said Walter, coming in damp and flushed from the kitchen, a soggy club towel around his neck.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” I said.

  “Too busy girl-talking,” he said smugly, knowing I hate that term.

  We sat in the darkness, fully dropped by now, and Pie told him all about her party and Buddy’s impending partnership, and then rose to leave. We went out onto the patio with her. The green leash was still affixed to the patio table, but the puppy was gone.

  “Oh, my God,” Pie yelped in distress. “I’ll never find him in this dark. Oh, Buddy will kill me! He thinks the sun rises and sets in that dog. Oh, please, will you help me look for him?”

  “Of course,” Walter said. “I doubt if he’s gotten far. Let me get the flashlight, and we’ll scout around.”

  Casey wasn’t in our backyard, and he did not come in from the woods when we called and whistled. He wasn’t around the gray Mercedes either, or in the front yard.

  “Maybe he’s strayed over to your house,” Walter said, and we picked our way up the bank and into Pie’s yard. Pie darted ahead, whistling and calling, her voice high and childish with fright. Walter followed, swinging the flashlight back and forth methodically, sweeping orderly sections of the yard.

  In the end it was I who found the puppy. I stepped on him in the darkness—or on what was left of him. Hearing my soft grunt, Walter swung the light over to me, shining it on my feet so I could see what I had stumbled over. If I had not known the color of his fur, I would not have known what it was. The puppy was literally destroyed.

  Claire Swanson told me later she could hear Pie screaming all the way into her den, where she and Roger were watching television.

  We looked into it, of course. We called the animal-control division of the Humane Society the next morning, and the police. There was something killing ruthlessly in our woods and we could not ignore it. A car with two large young officers came, and the men prowled the woods all that morning, guns drawn, looking out of place and somehow frightening in our quiet morning neighborhood. A team of young men from animal control came too, in a caged truck, and for the better part of the day we could see them among the near-naked trees and hear them calling out to one another, beating systematically through the woods behind our house and all the houses on the street. They went as far as the houses on the next street over, and in the afternoon they went from house to house asking if anyone had noticed anything unusual, seen any strange and large unknown dogs, any unknown animals at all. No one had.

  Whatever it had been was never found. Kim Dougherty and his crew discovered no more small murders at the Harralson house. It was as though the murderer, having made some small point to the Harralsons, had moved on.

  7

  THE DAY OF Pie’s housewarming was as perfect a day as late April can produce here. There had been a small chiming rain in the night, but it had stopped before dawn, and when I let the cats out the back door that morning the pure sweetness and greenness of the day washed over me like a wave on a summer sea. Sunlight dappled the lawn with that gold-green light that is always gone by May, birds were ruffling and caroling in the trees and around the bird feeder, chipmunks and squirrels were whisking busily and prissily about their morning chores.

  “It looks like Disney World,” said Walter over my shoulder, standing with a cup of coffee and breathing the day.

  “Or ‘The Peaceable Kingdom,’” I said, watching Razz and Foster pad, high-hipped, across the yard and into the woods, ignoring the birds and squirrels and chipmunks, who ignored them in return.

  “What’s on for today? You got tennis, or shall we go out and dig up some more rocks for the rock garden?”

  “Whatever. We’ve got the Harralsons’ party tonight.”

  “Ah, yes. The social event of the season. What shall I wear, the gold lamé jumpsuit? My old school tie?”

  We were in and out all that day, but between trips we caught glimpses of the city’s most favored caterer’s truck disgorging men with round white plastic trays swathed in foil, cases of red and white wine, cardboard boxes. None of them bore the institutional silver trays and chafing dishes that most of us have come to know as well as our own over the years. Pie had a formidable array of wedding-present silver, I knew, and had spent a full week polishing it. She’d only borrowed a couple of trays from me and two dozen highball glasses.

  That afternoon, as we were returning home from our last jaunt, Buddy and Lucas Abbott appeared, laboring under cases of liquor. The Harralson driveway and front walk had been swept to skeletal bareness, the newly green front yard raked and mowed, the creek banks raked. With the hardwo
ods full and blooming-green and the fledgling shrubs around the foundations glistening from a recent hosing, the house looked dressed and combed. A debutante, a bride on the threshold of the aisle.

  “You’ve got enough booze there to keep the entire north side of town in bed till noon tomorrow,” Walter called from our driveway. “Need some help?”

  He went over to help them wrestle the last two cases into the kitchen, and I carried my bags of groceries into our house and came back out. They were standing at the edge of the pristine driveway and Pie had joined them. She was breathless and a little pale in faded Levi’s and a sweat shirt with her sorority’s Greek letters on it.

  “How’s it going?” I asked. “Need any help at all?”

  “No, this is the last thing until the bartender comes,” Pie said. “I’m just scared to death, Colquitt. Mother and Daddy are driving up, but they won’t get here until about six—they’re going to spend the night with us—and I’m just terrified that nobody’s going to come and the ones who do are going to hate it. What am I going to say to the first people who get here?”

  “Why don’t Walter and I come over early and be there when they do?” I said. “We know everybody on the street, of course, and some of the people at Buddy’s firm. Would that make you feel better?”

  “Loads better! Would you?”

  “Of course,” I said to her, and to Lucas Abbott, “Your family must think you’ve deserted them. Why don’t you go on and let Walter and me help with the last-minute details? Did they have a good trip, by the way?”

  “A fine trip,” he said. “They got in at noon, and I dropped them at the hotel and left them in a pile of underclothes and stockings and shampoo. I don’t think they’ve missed me yet. They’ll be here a few days more, so we’ll have plenty of time to get reacquainted. I’m going to take them out tomorrow and show them the house I picked out, and I plan to take a couple of days off and show them the sights.”

  “They’ll be here tonight, won’t they?” Walter asked.

  “Oh, yes. Wouldn’t miss it. I imagine they’re fussing about what to wear right now.”

  “Well, we look forward to meeting them,” I said.

  We were there by a quarter to five. James, a magisterial bartender from our club, permitted himself a small smile at the sight of us and made us drinks from behind his white-clothed bastion. The bar had been set up at the end of the living room in front of the sheer expanse of glass that let in a wall-sized panorama of woods, creek, and the first-level balcony. The room looked born of air and green light, wild and glorious in the slanting sunlight. Flowers glowed everywhere and candles shimmered.

  “It looks gorgeous,” I told Pie. “Everything does. You’ve done a sensational job. Your table looks like something right out of a Cunard ad, and you look like something out of Vogue.” She was in silky pyjamas of apple-green crepe de chine and did look beautiful, fragile and very young. One long strand of creamy pearls, unmistakably real, was her only jewelry.

  “Thanks. Do you really like the pyjamas? They’re not exactly my kind of thing, but Buddy bought them for me just for tonight. Only I’ll bet Luke picked them out. Buddy likes full skirts and waists.”

  “They’re great, and Luke knew just what he was doing, if indeed he’s responsible for them,” Walter said. “You’re a lucky gal to have your own resident Pygmalion.”

  “Who?”

  “Just an old Greek who had a thing for statues,” Walter said, draining his drink and not looking at me. “Pay no attention to me. James is out to get me drunk tonight.”

  James tittered and the doorbell rang and Buddy came down the stairs, resplendent in a correct lightweight blue blazer and with damp comb tracks in his hair, and Pie went to greet the first of her guests.

  It started out well enough. People on our street trickled in first, knowing instinctively that their early presence would please and reassure the young Harralsons. None of them except us, the Swansons, and Charles and Virginia Guthrie to their left had seen the inside of the house, and with the white sorcery of the candlelight and the fading sunset and the splendid table and James’s alchemy at the bar, the house took on an almost enchanted air, like Morgan Le Fay’s Castle Chariot in its fairy aspect. I could hear soft gasps of pleasure and admiration from the knots of people at the bar and around the buffet table, and murmured compliments. In the face of our capitulation, in the first flush of her success, Pie’s little-girl party manners gave way to happy chatter and small flirtings and exuberant gestures. Buddy alternately beamed and frowned with suppressed pride, and kept glasses refilled, and agreed, yes, it was a pretty good house if he did say so himself. Pie took platoons of women up the stairs to see the top two levels, and raised a radiant face to me as the bell rang more and more frequently, and once made me a small, gay circle with her thumb and forefinger. Okay. Going well.

  A few of the people from the law firm came, and then more. Between us, all the people from the street seemed to know all of them, and the young Harralsons wove and bobbed and smiled among the groups that formed and broke and reformed around the table, all talking of comfortable small things and half-forgotten sillinesses, as people will who have known each other for a long time. Before the downstairs became too crowded and clotted with smoke, in that lovely, golden time when a good party is trembling on the verge of becoming whatever it will become and expectation seems to thrill in the air like a fine silver wire, I looked around and wished that Kim Dougherty were here. It seemed to me then that the house at this moment might somehow have healed him, restored him. But he hadn’t come yet.

  Pie’s mother and father came then, and I watched Pie’s evening swell and crown and burst into joy. She ran to the door with small squeals of pure delight, and ushered them into her beautiful, ringing house, an arm around each one of them. Her head tossed as if plumes were affixed to it. Her skin glowed like her incandescent pearls. Look, Mama and Daddy. Look what I did. Look what I have. Look what I am. Her mother, a tiny, plump woman in harlequin glasses and shoes dyed to match her teal-blue silk, beamed back and breathed in this overwhelming aura of daughter, audibly. Pie clung to Matt Gladney’s arm, giving it small, quick pressures, dimpling up at him. His face was florid once more, and the small blue eyes twinkled, and he smiled broadly, but I felt a small finger of unease watching him. Somehow, I thought, he disliked this moment. He shook hands firmly with Buddy, but his gaze was already beyond the boy, measuring the house and the room and the guests like an inchworm. A duller, deeper flush crept up his broad neck into his face.

  “Ain’t no white columns here tonight,” Walter murmured to me, and I saw that he too had been watching Matt Gladney. “I think he hates baby’s castle—what do you think?”

  “Well, it doesn’t have very good associations for him,” I said, thinking of those basement stairs that had bled his grandchild away. “And if he’s a stickler for columns and Chippendale, all this would hardly enchant him. This white and chrome and leather is pretty overwhelming. He’ll come around, since she’s so proud of it.”

  Pie herded them up to the bar, and Buddy introduced them, correctly and gravely, to a knot of the firm’s senior members who stood around it. Many of them seemed to know Matt Gladney—the legislature, I remembered. Their wives moved in to encircle Pie’s mother, welcoming and assessing at the same time. I saw Virginia Guthrie break away from a group of neighborhood women and join the women around Mrs. Gladney. She looked stunning and imperial in the gunmetal silk that almost precisely matched her prematurely gray hair. Charles’s emeralds, the twenty-fifth-anniversary present she so treasured, caught a last shaft of sunlight and sprang into fire. She smiled and held out her hand to Mrs. Gladney, and I thought once again what a beautiful woman Virginia is, even though she’s closer to fifty than any of us really know, and has raised and sent out into the world three children. Not just handsome, or beautiful for her age, but really beautiful, period. Virginia ought to soften up that shark’s grin on Daddy, I thought. Virginia plus those emeralds.
He’s got to approve of all that, even if the rest of us leave him colder than a mackerel. I thought we probably did. His neck had grown redder and his voice louder, even though his voice was hearty and his feral smile never wavered.

  “What the hell is Big Daddy so mad about?” Claire Swanson asked me as we stood at the buffet table. “He looks like his face is going to explode. You can feel the mad like a cloud of smoke. There’s just no reason for it that I can see. I think Pie’s doing very well tonight.”

  “Too well, I’d say.” Walter appeared beside us wearing the half-satanic, half-cherubic smirk he gets when he’s had just a trifle too much to drink. “She did the whole schmeer all by herself, without Daddy and with just old Buddy-baby. Can’t have that. It smacks of treachery and insurrection. I bet he’d just love to see his cherished son-in-law with his fly open, or wearing a lampshade on his head, or going berserk and pouring a drink down Eloise’s utterly astounding cleavage.”

  Claire and I looked over at Eloise Jennings, whose sun-speckled breasts were in imminent danger of spilling out of her deep-V’d black caftan. We snickered.

  “Save the whales,” said Walter, pleased with himself.

  “Go eat something,” I said. “Go have some of that top grade sirloin steak tartare. You’re a disgrace.”

  Lucas Abbott and his family came in last, along with Kim Dougherty. The party was throbbing by then, showing no signs of abating. You knew that it probably would soon, that someone—an older couple—would drift away, murmuring thanks and compliments, and then another, and others would follow. The alchemy of a party is a strange and individual thing, though; you learn early to read them. This one would lose a considerable number of guests before long but none of its momentum. A hard core of neighborhood people and younger guests would stay and drink late into the night. People would remember this party as a good one.