The Haunted (2 page)

“Don’t go outside, Dad. Please!”

“Get some ’nads,” Megan told him. She was sitting on the couch watching TV—a tween show on the Disney Channel—and she smiled derisively at her brother before turning back to her program. The two of them
fought constantly, and even before Claire had become pregnant with James, Julian had known this would happen. He and his brother had battled throughout their entire childhood, especially during the teenage years, when his dad would sometimes have to break up honest-to-God fistfights. They still didn’t get along today. But Claire had read in some parenting book that it was better for siblings to be near in age, and she insisted that if they were going to have two children, the kids had to be spaced twelve to fourteen months apart. “That way,” she told him, “they’ll be closer. And when they grow up, they’ll be friends.” She’d since seen the error of her ways, although, of course, she would never admit that she’d been wrong.

“Did you hear what she said?” James cried, pointing at his sister.

“I heard. Megan, knock it off,” Julian admonished.

She snickered.

“Megan,” he warned.

“Ground her!” James said.

Julian opened the front door. “Both of you. Stop.” Walking outside, he closed the door behind him. On the driveway, the three teenage boys were spinning in circles, the backs of their boards scraping the ground, the fronts thrusting proudly in the air. He recognized one of them as Tom Willet’s kid from down the street, and though he didn’t know the other two boys, they were the same ones he’d had to kick off his property yesterday. “Excuse me!” he said loudly.

The Willet boy glanced casually over at him, spinning around. “Hey, dude, where are your daughters?” He stressed the plural, laughing, and Julian hoped James wasn’t listening.

“Get off my driveway.”

The three skateboarders ignored him.

“Now.”

“Make us.” The Willet kid stared back defiantly, still spinning.

Julian felt a hot rush of anger course through him, though he knew the boy had him trapped. He could yell at the skateboarders until his voice was hoarse, but if they didn’t listen, there was nothing he could do, since any attempt he made to physically remove them would have their parents calling the cops and filing assault charges. A middle solution suddenly came to him and, without saying a word, he walked over to the faucet at the end of Claire’s flower bed, turned on the water and picked up the hose. He twisted the nozzle three clicks, from “shower” to “jet,” and squeezed the trigger handle. A stream of water hit first one skateboard, then the others, as he swung his arm from side to side. He aimed higher, and the water shot into the boys’ legs.

The skateboarders started yelling.

“Hey!”

“What are you doing?”

“What the hell?”

“I’m hosing off my driveway,” he said calmly.

The boys quickly boarded down the driveway to the sidewalk.

“You squirted us!”

“On purpose!”

“I’m hosing off my driveway,” he repeated. “You happened to be in the way.” He smiled. “I
told
you to leave,” he said innocently.

“Fuck you!”

“Douche!”

Middle fingers raised in defiance, the kids sped away, racing down the sidewalk. Still smiling, Julian remained where he was for several minutes, until he was sure that the skateboarders were gone and not coming back.
Finally, he walked over to the flower bed, turned off the faucet, switched the nozzle back to “shower” and drained the rest of the water, dripping the last of it onto Claire’s chrysanthemums.

When he walked back into the house, James was grinning. “That was great, Dad!”

He smiled back at his son. “That’s my job.”

Claire was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, looking concerned. “I don’t like this,” she said.

Julian nodded, saying nothing, not having to. They’d talked about the situation before. It wasn’t just the teenagers. It was everything. The entire neighborhood was going downhill. There’d been several foreclosures over the past few years, and more than half of the houses were now rentals. The kids who lived in them were much rougher than the kids who had been there before.

“Maybe we should move,” Claire suggested.

He’d been thinking along the same lines, though he’d hesitated to bring it up. Claire was sentimental, and not only was this the house they’d picked out together when they’d moved to Jardine, but both Megan and James had spent their entire lives in this place. There were a lot of memories here. The neighborhood
was
getting bad, however, and despite the terrible economy, their family was actually in pretty good financial shape right now. He and Claire were both employed, their house was worth much more than when they’d bought it fifteen years ago, and if they were ever going to move, this was probably the time to do it. There were bargains to be had, and they were in the fortunate position of being able to take advantage of that.

“I think we could do it if we wanted to,” Julian said.

“No!” Megan shouted, overhearing the discussion. “I don’t want to move!”

“I do,” James said.

Julian looked over at his son, and their eyes met. A wave of sympathy washed over him. The past few years had been hard on the boy. Due to budget cuts, school boundary lines had been changed, and at the start of fifth grade, James had been plopped down in a new school, where he didn’t know anyone and where he hadn’t really made any friends. The year before, his two best buddies, Omar and Logan, had moved: Omar to Phoenix, where his dad had gotten a job, and Logan to Santa Fe, to live with his grandmother when his dad had
lost
his job. His other friend, Robbie, was still around, but Robbie was enrolled in a series of camps this summer because both of his parents worked and he needed someone to watch him during the day. So, since school let out, James had been spending most of his time alone, indoors, on the computer or in front of the television.

Julian could relate to his son’s situation. He was out of his element as well. He’d grown up in California, in a large metropolitan area, and he’d moved here only because this was where Claire wanted to live. She was from Jardine, and since her parents were getting older, her sister lived here and many of her childhood friends had remained behind to work or get married or both, she’d been longing to return for as long as they’d known each other. As a Web designer, he could work anywhere, and after what had happened had … happened, after he’d quit his job at Automated Interface and gone freelance, after she’d decided to leave the Los Angeles law firm where she worked in order to set up her own private practice, he’d finally agreed to move to New Mexico with her. It meant downsizing their lifestyle, but they were both still young, and if they weren’t willing to take a chance now, when would they be?

Unfortunately, Jardine didn’t offer quite the bucolic rural experience he’d expected. He’d pictured himself
waking up to the sound of birdsong and walking downtown with his laptop to sip flavored coffee at a cute café next to an art gallery on a tree-lined street. But the city was bigger than he’d thought it would be and resembled one of the lesser Los Angeles suburbs more than the cinematic country burg he’d imagined.

He wasn’t unhappy, though, and he realized that, with two kids, their family would probably have exactly the same sort of lifestyle no matter where they lived.

“I like it here,” Megan whined. “I don’t want to live somewhere else.”

“We’re not moving,” Claire reassured her daughter. “We’re just talking.”

But it was more than just talk, and that night in bed when Julian brought it up again, Claire admitted that she’d actually gone online the other day to look up available local properties. “I wasn’t really
looking
,” she said. “It was more like … browsing. I was just checking to see what was out there. No real reason. But …” She let the thought trail off.

Julian saw in his mind those teenagers flipping him off, thought about James spending his summer hiding in the house. “Maybe we
should
start looking,” he said.

She smiled, kissed him. “Maybe we should.”

They’d narrowed the choices down to three, and though Claire was leaning toward a foreclosed McMansion that was part of the new DesertView development on the south end of the city, Julian thought they should be more prudent. Just because they were in good financial shape at the moment, it didn’t mean they always would be. Claire’s office had seen a slight downturn in clients recently, and the Web design business was notoriously fickle. If they ended up overextended, someone might be buying
their
foreclosed home in a year or two.

Personally, he liked a ranch-style house only a mile or so away from where they lived now, in a nicer version of their present neighborhood. It was slightly smaller than their current home, with one bedroom fewer, which meant that his office would probably have to be moved into the garage, but it was situated in the middle of a double-size lot, which meant they would have quite a bit of land. On the east side of the property was what amounted to a small orchard, with two lemon trees, two orange trees, an avocado tree and a fig tree. The previous owner had also had a large vegetable garden, and though it was overgrown and full of weeds, with a little work it could easily be restored to its former glory. Claire wasn’t thrilled with the fact that the house was smaller than the
one they had now, but, as he’d been telling her, if things continued to go well for them, they could always add on.

“If we got that house, you’d be back to your old school,” he told James, trying to lure the boy over to his side.

“I don’t want to change schools,” Megan said, overhearing them.

“
You’ll
be going to the same junior high either way,” Julian pointed out.

“I like Mom’s house better,” Megan insisted. “It has a pool.”

“I like pools,” James admitted.

The pool was another strike against the McMansion, as far as Julian was concerned. Maybe he was just being paranoid because all summer the Albuquerque newscasts had kept a running tally of backyard drownings, but to his mind the benefit of being able to swim and have fun was more than offset by the potential for serious injury and death.

There were three houses in the running, and the dark-horse candidate was an older two-story home within walking distance of the historic downtown district. It was big enough for Claire, had yard enough for Julian, and while it was not the first choice for either of them, it had no major drawbacks to which the other could object.

The real estate agent was the one who’d suggested they look at the property, and it was she who suggested another walk-through when, after a week, and despite her numerous high-pressure phone calls, it became obvious that they were no closer to choosing a house than they had been the first day. “I’ve been in this business for over ten years,” she said, “and I’m pretty good at matching home to homeowner. Let me take you through the house one more time. I think, looking at it with fresh
eyes, you might see some very positive attributes that you may have overlooked before.”

So, Saturday morning, Julian, Claire and the kids all piled into the van to meet the realtor at the house.

“I still like the one in DesertView,” Claire said.

“And I like the one with the fruit trees. But it can’t hurt to check things out again. In fact, maybe we should look at all three of them today and see what we think. Besides, we don’t have to decide right now. If we can’t agree on one of these, we can just wait a month or so. I’m sure there’ll be more homes up for sale.”

It was only a five-minute drive, but Megan still brought along her iPod, and her earbuds were in before Julian even put the van into gear.

He glanced at her in the rearview mirror as he drove down the street. It occurred to him that while this generation had access to an almost unlimited amount of music over the Internet, they were much more narrowly focused in their interests than had been the kids of his day—or even his parents’ day. When his mom and dad had been growing up, as they’d never failed to tell him, Top 40 radio played everything from rock to country to easy listening. They’d been exposed to the Beatles and Ray Charles and Glen Campbell and Neil Diamond, all on the same station. When Julian was a teenager, he and his friends had not only listened to music on radio, records, CDs and mix tapes borrowed from their peers, but they’d also been able to raid their parents’ and grandparents’ stacks of old albums and discover for themselves gems from the past. Now that avenue of discovery was completely cut off, for the simple reason that kids today did not have devices on which to play records or, in some cases, even CDs. The music could not be physically translated from those media, and that surreptitious passing down of knowledge—done behind parents’ backs, which made it somehow
more acceptable than when adults tried to turn kids on to a song themselves—no longer occurred.

Next to Megan, James could have been playing with his DS—but he wasn’t. Instead, he stared happily out the window, and Julian smiled. As far as he was concerned, the boy was turning out okay.

Julian drove down the street. The Willet kid was skateboarding at the end of the block, and he grinned at the van as it passed, no doubt planning to head back and play in their driveway as soon as they were gone, probably with his punk friends.

Julian was going to be glad to get out of this neighborhood.

There was an accident blocking traffic on Carson Street, so they took the highway and got off two exits down. Now that he thought about it, this house did have the most convenient location of the three. And the neighborhood was nice, with well-maintained homes and people who had probably lived there forever. He could not recall seeing any teenagers or skateboards.

Claire seemed to be giving the house more serious consideration as well. “It has a good yard, as I recall. And I like the fireplace in the living room.” She glanced over at him. “What do you think?”

They drove slowly up Old Main. “Good location,” Julian pointed out as they drove past the brick building that housed Claire’s law office. “You’d be within walking distance of work.”