Caveat Emptor and Other Stories (6 page)

I still wasn't sure what to make of her as she brought in a listless child, rolled out a sleeping bag for him in a corner, and kissed him good-night.

“So you bought the Sticklemann house?” I asked her as we sat down at the kitchen table.

She took a sip of coffee and nodded. “It seemed smart, even though my ex can't remember to send his child-support payments. I never finished my degree, so I decided to move back here and take classes. I was going to rent an apartment, but then Mr. Wafford explained how I could buy a house and build up equity. After the three or four years it'll take to graduate, I can sell the house and make a small profit. Cody's used to having a yard.”

“How long since the divorce?” I asked.

“A year.” Sarah put down her cup. “I know this is an imposition, Mrs.…?”

“James, honey, but you call me Deanna. I know what you're going through. My daughter got divorced four years ago, and she had a real tough time before she threw up her hands and moved back in with me. Now she has a job, a good one, at an insurance office in town. She's dating a real polite boy she knew back in high school. Her daughter Amy's eight, so she's in bed. It's not a good idea having three generations of women in the same house, but we do what we got to do. You have a job, Sarah?”

“As a teacher's aide,” she said with a shrug. “It's minimum wage, but the house payment's not much more than what I'd be paying in rent. Mr. Wafford is financing the sale privately, since I probably couldn't have qualified for a loan. Even if I had, I'd have been charged closing costs of more than three thousand dollars. This way, I only had to put down five percent, which left me enough to pay for the rental truck and the utility deposits.”

“It'll work out,” I said soothingly, although I had my doubts. My daughter had needed food stamps and welfare and everything else she could get until she'd found a job. I would have helped her out, but all I had were my monthly disability checks.

I made her a bed on the sofa, then sat and gazed out my bedroom window at the Sticklemann place, wondering just how much Jeremiah (“Call me ‘Jem'”) Wafford had told this nice young woman.

Not nearly enough, I suspected.

I watched her from the porch the next day. I would have liked to help her haul in suitcases and furniture, but my back wasn't up to it. Her boy did what he could, trying to be the man of the family; finally, Perniski from up the road took pity on her and carried boxes, mattresses, bed frames, and mismatched chairs inside the house. All the same, she did most of the work, and I could see she had spirit.

Cody proved to be a mannersome child, and he ended up most weekday afternoons with Amy, watching movies on the television. Sarah tried to pay me for looking after him. I refused, saying that he was no trouble. He wasn't.

A month after she moved in, she came knocking on my front door. I could tell right off that she was upset, but I pretended not to notice and said, “You have time for coffee?”

“What's the deal with the water lines?” she said, close to sputtering with outrage. “The toilet backed up and flooded the bathroom. The plumber says that all the houses out here have substandard pipes from the nineteen-fifties, and there's nothing he can do short of replacing everything from the house to the main sewer line. Where am I going to find a thousand dollars?”

I sat her down on the porch swing. “There are some things Wafford didn't tell you, honey. After he bought the house, he slapped fresh paint on it and put down new linoleum—but it's still an old house. Don't be surprised if the roof leaks when it rains. Mrs. Sticklemann had to put pots and pans in every room.”

Sarah stared at me. “What can I do? I called Mr. Wafford, but he reminded me that he recommended I pay for an inspection. It would have cost three hundred dollars. All I could hear him talking about were the possibilities for flower beds and a vegetable garden, and how Cody could play in the creek.”

“Don't let him do that,” I said. “Clover Creek may sound charming, but it's downstream from a poultry plant. Some government men were out here last spring, trying to figure out why all the fish bellied up.”

“Anything else I should know?” she asked grimly.

I hoped she wasn't the sort to blame the messenger. “There's been some trouble with the folks in the house up at the corner. A couple of months ago the cops raided it and arrested them for selling drugs. One's doing time in the state prison, but two of them are back. That's why I walk up to where the school bus lets the children off in the afternoons. I've warned Cody about them too.”

“Thanks, Deanna. I'd better go check the mailbox. Maybe this is the year I win a million-dollar sweepstakes.”

We didn't talk for a long while after this, but only because she was busy with her job and her late-afternoon classes. Cody always kept a watch for her out the window, and as soon as her car pulled into the driveway, he'd say good-bye and dart across the road to help her carry in groceries. She and my daughter were friendly enough, but they didn't really hit it off. Amy, on the other hand, was crazy about Cody; he returned her affection with the lofty sophistication of an older man.

Sarah continued having trouble with the house. When I asked Cody about an exterminator's van, he said the carpet in his bedroom had fleas and showed me welts on his legs. On another day, he told me that his mother had called Mr. Wafford and then banged down the receiver and apologized for using “naughty” words.

She had spirit all right, I thought. Too bad she hadn't had common sense as well when she signed the papers in Wafford's office. It wasn't hard to imagine how he'd conned her, though. He was a slick one behind his hearty laugh and grandfatherly face. He'd owned half the houses along the road at one time or another. Most of the folks who'd fallen for his “equity” pitch had discovered a whole new side to him when they fell behind on their payments. There was a reason why he drove a flashy Cadillac.

“You're not going to believe this,” Sarah said one evening while we watched Amy and Cody play on a tire swing in the yard. “There are bats in the attic. I saw them streaming out from under an eave last night.”

“You have mice in the garage, don't you? Bats are nothing more than mice with wings.”

She shuddered. “I called Wafford, and he said the same thing, then gave me a lecture about how they eat insects. From the way he carried on, I thought I was expected to thank him for providing mosquito control. What if one gets downstairs?”

“Mrs. Sticklemann kept a tennis racket in the hall. I don't think she ever had to use it, though.”

“That's comforting,” she said dryly. “I was waiting for you to say she died of rabies.”

“Nothing like that,” I said, then stood up and raised my voice. “Amy, you need to get busy on your spelling words for the test on Friday. Go on in the house and get out your book.”

Sarah gave me a look like she knew darn well I was tiptoeing around something, but she called to Cody and they left. I felt bad not telling her, but she had more than enough problems. Sometimes when you buy a lemon, you can squeeze it till your face turns blue, but you still can't make lemonade.

Later that evening when the telephone rang, I answered it without enthusiasm, expecting my daughter to give me some cockamamie story about how she had to work late.

“Deanna,” Sarah said abruptly, “go into your living room. Don't turn on the light. There's a man out on the road, staring at my house. He's been there for at least half an hour. Should I call the police?”

“Hold on.” I put down the receiver and did as she'd asked, then came back and picked it up. “I see him, honey. You say he's been there half an hour?”

“That's when I first noticed him. Could he be confused and think I'm our neighborhood drug dealer?”

“No,” I said, “that's not his problem. You call the police if you want, Sarah, but I don't think it'll do much good.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“Yes, I do. You come over tomorrow after you get home from work and I'll tell you about him. In the meantime, just ignore him. He'll go away before too long.”

“Who is he?” she demanded. “How do you know he'll go away? What if he breaks into the house?”

“He won't come any closer than he already is,” I said. “You and Cody are perfectly safe. I'll see you tomorrow.”

I hung up and went back to the window. The figure was still there, all slouched over with his hands in his pockets, looking like a marble statue in the glow from the streetlight. I felt bad about making Sarah wait, but it was going to take a lot of time to explain it all in such a way that she wouldn't get too panicky.

“Damn that Jem Wafford,” I said under my breath.

“Who is he?” Sarah demanded as soon as Cody and Amy ran around the corner of the house.

“Gerald Sticklemann,” I said. “It's a long story. Are you sure you don't want coffee or a glass of iced tea?”

“Just tell me—okay?”

“Well, Gerald never was what you'd call normal. I knew the first time I laid eyes on him that there was something wrong. That was thirty years ago, when Hank and I bought this house. Gerald was close to the same age as my boys, but he never rode a bicycle or came over to play baseball in the summers. A little yellow bus came every day to take him to a special school for children that couldn't learn like they were supposed to. I made sure none of my children ever teased him, but there were some teenage boys up the road who used to call him ugly names and throw rocks at him when they rode their bicycles past the house.”

“That doesn't explain why he was here last night.”

“I'm getting to it,” I said. “Mr. Sticklemann died not more than two years after we moved in, leaving his wife with a small income from a life insurance policy. She cleaned houses and made enough for her and Gerald to get by. There wasn't any question of him getting a proper job after he finished with that school. The only times I saw him were when he went walking down that path that leads down to the creek.”

“This is all very touching, Deanna, but I need to fix dinner and get Cody started on his homework.”

I held up my hands. “I'm just trying to make you understand about him. Over the years, families came and went, but the Sticklemanns stayed the same, like a soap opera without a plot. Eventually, she got too old to work and spent a lot of time with her vegetable garden. Wafford tried on occasion to convince her to sell him the house. I'd see him on the porch, his hat in his hands, grinning like a mule with a mouthful of briars, but I don't think he ever made it into the living room.”

Sarah looked at her watch. “Will you please get to the point?”

“Mrs. Sticklemann died five years ago. Nobody knows exactly when because Gerald never said a word to anybody and kept doing what he always did, day in and day out. It was at least six weeks before one of her old friends came out to find out what was going on. I was in my yard when the woman came stumbling back outside, as bug-eyed and green as a bullfrog. I brought her over here so she could use my telephone, and while we waited for the police, she told me that Gerald had left his mother's body in her bed. It was in the late summer, and the flies and the stench were something awful.”

“Did she die of natural causes?” Sarah asked in a tremulous voice.

“Oh, yes, there was never any question about that. The real question was what to do about Gerald. The only crime he'd committed was not notifying anybody when his mother died. He ended up in some sort of sheltered home with others of his kind. A distant cousin who was managing Gerald's affairs sold the house to Wafford. The problem is that Gerald slips out every now and then and comes back here, looking for his mother. He doesn't mean any harm.”

Sarah stared at the house, her mouth so tight her lips were invisible. After a long moment, she said, “This is too much. Wafford not only forgot to tell me about the faulty plumbing, the fleas and bats, the rotten floorboards under the linoleum, the drug dealers up the street, the contaminated water in the—” She broke off and rubbed her face as though she could erase the sight of the house across the street. “I can't believe he didn't warn me about any of this! I don't have enough money to move to an apartment and put up two months' rent and a security deposit. It's all well and good for you to say this middle-aged child won't try to come into the house some night when we're asleep, but you can't be sure.”

“As long as you lock your doors and windows before you go to bed, you and Cody will be all right,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

Sarah swung around to look at me. “Wafford knew all about Gerald, didn't he? Doesn't his failure to tell me constitute fraud?”

“You'll have to ask a lawyer, but I wouldn't count on it. Wafford first sold the house to a nice young couple with a baby. They weren't any happier than you when they discovered all the problems, including Gerald. Wafford and the husband had such a heated argument in the driveway one afternoon that I almost called the police. Not long after that the couple packed up and left. The next day Wafford put a ‘For Sale' sign in the yard. He was whistling.”

Cody and Amy came running into the front yard with a bird's egg they'd found and we changed the subject.

“A policeman came to our house last night,” Cody confided in me as he, Amy, and I walked back from the bus stop a week later.

“He did?” I murmured.

“He went into the kitchen with my mother. They talked for a long time, but I couldn't hear what they said.”

“Did he arrest her?” asked Amy.

Cody made a face at her. “No, nitwit. They just talked, and then he left. My mother was mad, but she wouldn't tell me why.”

I knew why, having seen Gerald at the edge of the road when I went into the front room to find my reading glasses. I'd considered calling Sarah to remind her to check the locks, but then I'd seen her in an upstairs window. Her face had been as pale as Gerald's.