The People Next Door (24 page)

‘I’m glad you think this is funny.’

Render turned serious. ‘Wait, do you believe in creatures with special powers?’

Mick glanced at Render’s shoulder, saw no blood. ‘He shot you.’

‘There are no real monsters, Mick. You know that. We are sensible men in a world where nothing is more dangerous. You understand
there are no superheroes or stock villains, only the wide spectrum of humanity in all its glory. Average men like you and
me, vying for our piece of the dream.’

‘What is it, then?’ Mick said, fed up. ‘What is this? What is the point of you?’

‘Come on, Mick. Stop pretending. You know I know.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

Render looked at the stars. He was quiet for a moment, then began slowly reciting names as if identifying constellations.
‘Robertson. Percy. Chavez. Greenwald. Weaver. Render.’ He lowered his gaze. ‘And Nash. What do these surnames have in common?’

Mick saw no point in humoring this sociopath.

‘Well, it’s a sorrowful turn,’ Render said. ‘All of these families were strangers to one another, until three years ago. They
were brought together by chance, or maybe it was the need to escape the ordinary they shared. Regardless, they found one another
and, like good neighbors, they became friendly if not quite friends. It was a magical week. Some were in love, some were fighting,
but all had the time of their lives. And then … well, of course something bad happened. Something abominable and unprecedented.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but these families, good families all, were never the same again. They went their separate ways
and forgot about what happened that night. They forgot about what they stumbled onto, what they unleashed. And now, it pains
me to say, four of those families have disappeared. They ride on the wings of the night. But there are two families left,
Mick. And one of them needs your help. I need your help. You owe me your help. You may not care to remember what happened,
but I will never forget. I don’t have that luxury.’

At any other time Mick would have laughed, but the situation had moved beyond control into outright lunacy. If it was a kind
of blackmail, and it had to be, then all of it was building toward some unimaginable demand.

‘Listen to me, you fucking psychopath,’ he said. ‘Everything coming out of your mouth is either a delusion or a lie. I don’t
know those people and I’ve never met you. You have the wrong family. I don’t know what it is you want from me, and I have
nothing to give. Whatever it is, I can’t help you. I won’t help you.’

Render stared at him for a long time. ‘Okay, Mick. It’s late. Your wife is irate and she needs you now.’ Render turned and
went a few paces, then paused and looked back. ‘Amy and the kids are coming to the barbecue. A week from today, two o’clock.
I hope, for your sake, you will join us. Good night.’

Mick stood in the quiet summer night for a while, staring at the money. His mind raced in a panic of questions with no answers
and then slowed to a crawl. There was no decision, only movement. The immediate next steps were all he could focus on. His
life had gone from one day at a time to one minute at a time.

He stripped off his bloody jeans and shirt and threw them in the trash bin beside the garage. He carried the
duffle bag into the basement and set it behind the crawlspace door, then used the guest suite shower to rinse away the blood.
He set the water to cold, letting it numb him until he was shivering. He toweled off, feeling little or no pain. His nose
was no longer leaking and it did not appear to be broken, though he was certain it had been. He inspected the rest of his
body in the mirror. At least two or three ribs had felt fractured in the truck, but he could breathe much easier. His ankle,
which had felt shattered, throbbed dully.

On his way out of the bathroom, something furry brushed against his ankles, yipping, and he almost screamed before realizing
it was Thom. The Yorkshire hustled by and a few seconds later Mick heard him bumping up the stairs.

Hard plastic bit into his bare foot, then he slipped on paper smeared with cold mush. He went a few more steps through the
wreckage before finding a light switch. The room came into focus. Party hats, cake on his feet. Amy’s cold silence all week
as he ignored her reminders. While Mick had been covering shifts and waging a battle in the parking lot, their daughter had
turned nine.
Some father you are, champ
.

Ten minutes later he was wrapped in a towel, standing over the kitchen island, forking a pile of leftover pasta with heavy
cream sauce and spicy sausage into his gob as fast as possible short of choking. He had almost laughed when Render said he
needed to eat something, but the man knew what he was talking about. He felt like he hadn’t eaten in a month. He dumped more
shredded
asiago over the steaming mess, shoveling it up between chugs of milk from the jug. He tore a hunk of bread from a stale French
loaf and swabbed his plate.

Kyle’s skeleton shambled into the kitchen and opened the fridge. His son wasn’t wearing a shirt or shorts, just boxers and
his sneakers, the cold freezer light slanting across his frail torso and sad, boy nipple hairs. He hadn’t noticed his father
standing there in the dark and Mick felt no urge to disturb him.

Kyle hauled the carton of Breyer’s mint chocolate chip out, foraged a spoon from the drawer, and began to cram a flotilla
of it into his mouth. He looked up, saw his father, and tensed. His eyes were red and puffy and Mick wondered if he had been
crying or was stoned.

Mick waved for the tub. Kyle handed it over, his eyes widening as he inspected his father’s battered frame. Mick dug in with
his fork and the cold against his teeth and upper palate was divine. He thought if he wasn’t careful he might just eat this
entire bucket. Kyle was shaking, on the verge of tears, scared, probably had done something bad tonight, or maybe gotten more
than he bargained for. Mick watched him, waiting for it. Kyle opened his mouth, but before he could speak he saw something
over the island, and both of them turned to the great room.

Briela was standing in her pajamas, rubbing her eyes. She smiled her gigantic smile and ran to her father. She hugged his
leg as if she hadn’t seen him in months. As if she wanted to make sure he was real.

‘Daddy’s home, Daddy’s home …’

‘Shush, honey,’ he said softly. ‘You’ll wake Mommy.’

‘I’m awake.’ Amy was standing by the hearth, arms crossed, fury drawing her face into a mask Mick barely recognized. ‘Well?’

Mick looked down at his daughter. ‘I’m sorry I missed your birthday, B. There’s no excuse. I was a jerk. I promise to make
it up to you.’

Briela smiled, his presence more than enough.

Amy said, ‘Have you lost your fucking mind?’

‘Amy. Not tonight.’

‘Yes, Mick. Tonight. We’re all here for a change. Tell your daughter what was so important you couldn’t be here for her birthday.
Tell your family why you haven’t taken a meal with us for the past two years. What was it this time? Did you get in a bar
fight? Are you drunk again? Why are you even home?
What is it?
’

Mick looked at Kyle, who was piecing something crucial together and curious to see what was coming. He looked down at Briela,
thinking of the years he had left to provide for all of them. He looked at his wife and knew she was at the edge of her own
abyss. And altogether, as awful as it seemed, this place they were heading, he felt something like tremendous relief blow
over him. There was no going back. They had crossed a barrier and everything was going to change now.

Everything.

He wiped his lips and licked one finger, enjoying the last of the sweet cream until every drop had been absorbed into his
tongue.

‘I lost the restaurant.’

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

After spending the next thirty-six hours holed up in her bedroom with the doors locked and the TV turned down as low as it
could go while still allowing her to hear scenes of hushed dialogue from the
Witches Lane
marathon she had recorded, Melanie Smith awoke before sunrise on Monday morning, hot and itching, her insides begging for
something she couldn’t have.

Rayell had called her back last night and apologized; she claimed to have been locked in an all-night study session with her
phone off, and though her voice was croaky, she promised her mother everything was fine. No, no one had threatened her or
been following her. Yes, she still had her mace keychain, stop worrying so much, Mom, you’re being paranoid again. Melanie
thought her daughter had been up all night smoking cigarettes and drinking keg beer, but she was so relieved to hear Rayell’s
voice, and her grades from last semester were holding up her 3.6 average, Melanie didn’t pry. The girl had better sense than
her mother ever had at that age and Melanie didn’t want to worry her further, so she agreed: she probably
was
being paranoid.

She kept replaying the incident after Briela’s birthday party in her mind, seeing that unstable (
Go ahead, call her a psycho cunt, if there ever was one, she was it
) Render woman’s rolled-back eyes and crooked finger, and every instinct inside her confirmed she had not been imagining it
– the woman was evil. She had not, of course, put a spell on Melanie or Rayell. That was ludicrous, the stuff of cable soap
opera (case in point: Melanie had probably been watching too many episodes of
Witches Lane
than was healthy). But evil came in human forms too.

Amy had not returned her calls. Melanie had tossed and turned all Thursday night, spent most of Friday with the phone in one
hand, debating calling the police but resisting out of fear of retribution, until she finally fell asleep around lunchtime
and slept for almost seventeen hours.

Now it was a little after four in the morning, and after a snack of yogurt and granola and a glass of pineapple juice, Melanie
was going stir crazy. She hadn’t been confined indoors this long since her Ben & Jerry’s days. Her body needed to flex and
surge, to feel the bounce of the road. Was it possible she had overreacted, just a little? Maybe. Maybe not.

But she couldn’t spend the rest of her life, or even another day, living with this fear, hiding like a refugee. She would
tuck her cell phone in her fanny pack in case of an emergency, or even anything suspicious, and that settled it.

She used the bathroom, drank two glasses of water. She sat nude on the trunk where she had draped her running pants and sports
bra, her clean ankle socks and
new favorite pair of Asics Gel running shoes. Sleeved herself in Lycra. Tied the shoes, nice and snug. Clipped the pack around
her washboard and turned it until it sat on the firm shelf of her ass. Her hair was short for summer, but she tied it back
anyway, creating a bristly brown spike. She knew it would be cool for the first mile, but after that the temperature would
not matter, so she left her long-sleeved jersey behind.

She didn’t bother with stretching. A recent article in
Runner’s World
had cleverly pointed out that stretching was responsible for as many injuries as actual training or competing. And anyway
she was up to fifty-five miles per week; running eight or ten miles no longer made her sore. She would warm her way into a
high-viscosity burn. Her muscles shivered in anticipation, blood racing on the tide of her brave decision, her mind as alert
as if she had consumed a venti latte from Starbucks.

She stepped out, the land still dark under a sky turning whale blue. She bounded over the lawn, up toward the elbow turn on
Independence Road. No cars, the asphalt worn and cool, the pre-dawn greeting her like an old friend. Welcome, it said. Come
and run with me, while the rest of the lazy world sleeps.

She ran toward the Foothills, Boulder Municipal Airport’s small landing strip and parked Cessnas and sail planes off to her
left. To her right was a great field of undeveloped land, the giant willow trees by the stream, a few houses, including that
Eyesore blocking the Nash place. Where the crazy c-word woman and her family were squatting. After her run, she would try
Amy one
more time, make sure everything was okay, and then together they could decide whether to call the police. Or maybe Melanie
would simply stop at a pay phone, place an anonymous call. But only after her run. Right now belonged to her and the road.

Melanie’s breath flowed silently, her legs full of burgeoning power. The break in her training had been good for her body,
if not her mind. She felt as if she could run to Lyons today. When she reached 47th, she would take the overpass north to
Jay, run eastbound to the fire station, then out to Reservoir Road where she hoped to reach the beach by sunrise. Her running
shoes made pleasant wicking sounds on the asphalt. She grooved.

For as long as she could remember, Melanie’s life had been a series of cravings. As a child she coveted toys and other children’s
playthings with a ferocity that drove her mother to tears for all that she could not provide, and got Melanie sent to the
principal’s office dozens of times. By ten it was clothes, the advertisements torn out of
Seventeen
and
Vogue
, glued to her bedroom walls. She learned to shoplift at malls by age twelve, and lost friends in junior high for refusing
to give back a Polo sweater, a pair of Benetton jeans, those Guess overalls her mother could not afford.

At fourteen she met alcohol, and she proceeded to loot liquor cabinets around the neighborhood, her nose keen to the scent
of parents away for the weekend. Sixteen was pot, and the things she did for high school and college boys – the boys being
another craving in their own right – who knew how to get the good stuff.
Then acid. Coke. Heroin twice. Crack for a winter. And on it went, into her twenties and early motherhood, two marriages,
her life a series of seemingly bottomless longings.

At twenty-eight, after crashing her Mustang into a dry cleaner’s storefront, sobriety came easily, immediately replaced by
food addictions. She liked to order twenty-four cheese-and-bacon-loaded potato skins from Bennigan’s and eat them in the car
on the way home. A dozen glazed donuts for breakfast. In the middle of the night, an entire bag of Ruffles, a tub of cottage
cheese for the dip. Bacon cheeseburgers and Pizza Hut Meat Lover’s pan pizzas in pairs, the stupor of greasy food her antidote
to the straight life. On her thirtieth birthday she weighed two hundred and eighty-seven pounds.

She tried everything to combat her hungers, but in the end realized she should consider herself blessed that she had the willpower
to switch the object of her desire, if not quench the desire itself. It was – she realized by age thirty-six, having declared
bankruptcy for the second time – a matter of choosing healthier targets. So drugs, alcohol, food, and expensive clothes became
fresh fruit, gym memberships, yoga attire and videos, supplements and smoothies, infomercial meal plans, bicycles, high colonics
and a battalion of running shoes.

Running seemed to be the final solution. It was the only physical activity Melanie had found – short of sex with Keith Darden,
who died in a drunk-driving accident four years ago, may God rest his eight-inch wonder dick – with the power to cleanse all
negative thought and
physical need. She had been running regularly for a little more than seven years – the same period of time required, it is
said, for the human body to replace every cell, becoming entirely new. She was no longer the poisoned glutton of her past
but literally a whole new being. Healthy, happy, self-forgiven.

Of course she knew that running was her new drug, and that there was always a risk of over-exertion. But she also knew that
running was the reason she had lost one hundred and forty pounds, quit smoking, and developed toned muscles and new curves
where there used to be sagging corners and flat cliffs. Running was responsible for shearing the wild peaks and valleys off
her moods, leveling her mental state into something that was lucid and energized but calm. She was doing better at the office,
where it was rumored she would soon be up for a promotion to field sales rep with profit sharing (Preferred Paper sold shipping
supplies, boxes and foam peanuts, and she had been an office manager for seven years). Even her relationship with Rayell had
improved, mother–daughter competition giving way to mutual respect and support of each other’s unique traits, quirks, and
life adventures.

She was cresting the big hill on Reservoir Road when the first cramp began to bare its teeth in her right side. She had only
gone four miles or so, and was planning on an easy ten, so this minor stitch was troubling. She slowed, the flat plane below
her rib cage clenching with a dull, twisting ache. Funny how it was never your legs or feet, the parts that were taking the
brunt of the abuse.
It had to be something inside, a layer of muscle that felt like some kind of rarely utilized organ you never knew you had.
She had taken her potassium last night and she was not dehydrated. There was no reason for this dang nuisance (except maybe
for that psycho rhymes-with-punt who had forced her to spend the weekend like a shut-in). She beat the cramp back with willpower
and plowed on, the reservoir’s white entrance gates coming into view, then retreating as she continued on 51st, where it turned
to dirt and curved around the lake’s west bank.

But whatever it was, the pain spiked again, bringing her down to a fast walk. Melanie hated fast-walking. She was only forty-three.
She could fast-walk when she was sixty-three, not now. She would give it five minutes.

The entrance to Eagle Trail off of 51st appeared and she was glad to see there were no cars parked in the turnaround. She
would have the lollipop route to herself, looping around the wide field before turning back to the lake for a six a.m. dip.
She walked through the cramp, remembering her tomboy years, the summer she spent catching sunfish with Danny and Luke, then
using the sunfish to trap a giant snapping turtle. Good times, kissing boys and playing with fish, learning how to hook a
worm while teaching them how to unhook a JC Penny D-cup. The cramp had vanished and Melanie was back to her normal cruising
speed.

Farmland opened on all sides. Fresh planes of light diluted the indigo sky, but the land was still dark, the weeds waist-high
around the gravel path, the occasional
grasshopper springing out of her way, armor clicking. She was a little less than a mile along the lollipop when she heard
the nubby gravel crunching sounds behind her. The buzzing approach came out of nowhere, moving fast, and she veered to the
right edge of the path. Her ankle twisted on the loose shoulder, but her tendons there were strung by good muscle, and she
righted herself with no problem. She glanced left and saw a thin bicycle wheel, a flash of handlebars with small pale hands
on the taped grips, and then something jabbed her in the hip bone, knocking her off stride.

Her cell phone popped out of her fanny pack into the dirt and Melanie cried out, more in surprise than pain, as she stumbled
into the weeds. She threw her hands out for balance as the bicycle flashed ahead, the short figure hunched and pedaling as
if in a sprint for the ribbon.

‘What the hell …’ Melanie came to a halt in the weeds, just shy of a nearly invisible irrigation ditch. ‘Jesus, watch it!’

The road bike – silver, tall, a man’s – was a ways ahead of her, the thin wheels wobbling. The person sitting atop the saddle
had short hair, the head as pale as the thin white legs jutting from a bunched-up dress or some kind of skirt – not the attire
of a serious cyclist. The bare feet barely reached the pedals. The bike had no lights or reflectors on it. Hadn’t the woman
seen her? Was this an accident or some kind of harassment?

Melanie’s anger walked her back onto the path. The woman on the bike was slowing, swerving wildly, probably drunk.

‘An apology would be nice!’ Melanie hollered, dipping into the pack for her phone. It wasn’t there. ‘Idiot.’

The woman disappeared around the bend. Weed buds twisted in the dark, the head sliding out of view. She turned the pack around
to her front and dug into it, but the phone was gone. She scanned the ground, during which time it occurred to her that this
might not be a random idiot at all, but Cassandra Render.

No, it couldn’t be. A confrontation at a neighborhood birthday party was one thing. Following a stranger you had exchanged
harsh words with out into the country at four-thirty in the morning was something else. Rich bitches like Cassandra Render
didn’t ride bicycles and take out their grudges this way. They manipulated your friends, shunned you from dinner parties,
spread gossip about your finances.

Another minute passed and her phone was not on the path. She could hear Rayell again.
You’re being paranoid, Mom. Chill
.

Melanie heard the bike returning before she saw it, and then it was hewing to the outside edge of the lane on its way back.
The wheel, the loose dress, the lowered pale head. It was coming for her.

She halted and spread her feet at shoulder width, wondering what the possible outcomes were here. An apology she’d asked for,
but now she hoped the drunken twat would ride off and leave her alone. And if it was Cassandra Render, well, maybe it was
time the woman learned what happened when you messed with a
member of your own gender who had you by six inches and fifty pounds.

The bike was a hundred feet off and closing, its rider leaning over the bars as if studying the ground, afraid of dumping
it at any moment. The tires pinched pebbles that sprang with
doink
and
pling
sounds. My God, Melanie thought, this derelict doesn’t even know how to ride a bike. She has to be wasted.

She was still debating whether to run toward the bike and get ahead of it or turn back for the road when the woman rose off
the seat and began to pedal furiously. The bike found balance with the speed, and as it closed the distance Melanie realized
this was not Cassandra Render – it wasn’t even a woman.