The Good Neighbor

by A. J. Banner

  I had no idea what to say. A stranger had never fallen apart in front of me. “I’m sorry” was all I could manage. “You did the best you could.”

  “Yeah.” He wiped his eyes and strode to the door, his face red with embarrassment. “Sorry. That was crazy.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s okay. We’re all human.”

  He opened the door, then looked back at me. “You got a house yet?” He looked toward the Minkowskis’ A-frame, then back at me.

  “No. Why?”

  “When you get a house, move as far from this town as you can.”

  “Why would we want to do that?” Numbness spread inward from my fingertips. “Do you know something about the fire? Why would we want to leave town?”

  He seemed to snap out of his trance. He looked at me, his eyes bloodshot, haunted. “If I was you, and I knew some crazy asshole was trying to burn me down, I’d want to get the heck out of Dodge.” He strode to his truck, and I ran after him.

  “Is that what you wanted to tell me before?”

  He got in, started the engine with the door still open. “Don’t tell anyone I said that, okay?”

  “But why?”

  He sighed, closing the door. He rolled the window down. “All’s I know is, if it was me, I would be gone.” And then he was.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “But you and Johnny can’t leave town!” Eris had come over to take me for a hike. She wore a heavy knit sweater, hiking slacks, and boots. Even in outdoor gear, she looked perfectly dressed, like a catalogue model for L.L.Bean.

  “Why do you think Todd would say that?” I felt ordinary in a heavy red sweater, jeans, and running shoes.

  “He knows arsonists try again. Happened once on his watch. Jealous boyfriend tried to burn down his girlfriend’s house, succeeded the second time, before they caught him. Todd was called out on that incident.”

  “That might explain things. But who knows what the motive was for the fire on Sitka Lane?”

  “He’s being protective. He has a soft side to him. The day after the fire, he didn’t come over to work on the deck. He said he wasn’t feeling well.”

  “The poor man. He shouldn’t feel responsible.”

  “He shouldn’t, but . . . it wears on him.”

  “I left a message for the fire marshal. I thought he should know about my conversation with Todd.”

  Eris nodded thoughtfully as she led me across the street, into the cool, crisp day. The edges of the clouds glowed, but there was still no sign of rain. We passed the Minkowskis’ house, the garden strewn with toys and a small bicycle. The cars were gone. Then Eris veered right, into the thickest part of the woods.

  “The trail widens a ways down,” she said, “but for now, we have to walk single file.”

  I followed her, watching her jerky, athletic strides, her determination, as if she were late for an appointment.

  As the road disappeared behind us, we seemed suddenly to enter deep wilderness, miles from civilization, the birds twittering, clicks and chirps beneath the huckleberry bushes. The smells of the forest pulled me back to childhood, when I’d spent much of my time in the woods, looking for wildlife, little field mice and caterpillars, writing notes in my journal. In my new journal, a postfire diary, I’d started jotting notes, emotions, impressions.

  The rush of the river grew closer, louder beyond the thick forest of firs and cedars.

  “This whole area is greenbelt,” Eris called over her shoulder. “The Shadow Cove reserve right down to the river.”

  “Beautiful!” I shouted back. The trail was wide enough now for me to catch up and fall into step beside her. The air smelled of leaves and moss, sweet and clean.

  “What happened with Todd’s wife?” I asked.

  “Up and left him. He was so in love with her when they first met, he said, but then she changed. Do we change after we’re married?”

  “Johnny and I stayed pretty much the same, I think.” But did we?

  “How did the two of you meet?” Eris stopped at the high bank of the river. The dark water flowed below in complex currents.

  “Annual polar bear plunge. He’s got a T-shirt commemorating the occasion.”

  Eris grinned, her face lighting up. “I love the plunge. I’ve done it twice, got a T-shirt, too.”

  “You’re brave. I never had the guts to make the leap. The water’s too cold. But I watched other brave souls dive in.” I shivered at the memory. “I gave Johnny a beach towel. He’d forgotten his. Can you believe it? That was how we started talking.”

  “Over ice water. Romantic. I met my ex-husband at the county fair on the hippo ride. We squeezed into the same booth. The other booths were all taken. I held on to him as the darned thing swung around and around.”

  “That’s quite a story; trumps mine.”

  “I specialize in trumping.” We followed the meandering trail along the high bank, the occasional path branching off down toward the river. “In the end, stories didn’t help us,” she continued after a bit. “We’re still mired in our nasty divorce.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s better this way. We weren’t meant to be together.”

  Were Johnny and I meant to be together? I’d accepted his marriage proposal after much thought, after we’d fallen deeply, irrevocably, fiercely in love. But now I wondered, had I waited long enough? It would not do to entertain any questions. Not when we’d lost everything and needed to be strong together.

  Eris led me to a spectacular waterfall. A spray of white water cast a mist through the air, a faint rainbow hovering in the sky. The river dropped off precipitously here, churning at the bottom of the rocky falls, then grew calmer a distance downstream.

  She pointed out a narrow trail offshoot up on the right. “That way goes to the Minkowskis’ place. You have to remember all the turns. I accidentally went that way once and eventually got dumped into their garden. I’ve practiced retracing the route. Easy to get lost on the way.” The entrance to the trail was marked by a lush wild rhododendron.

  “Johnny would love this trail,” I said.

  “Oh, he already knows it. This is where I saw him that day he was running.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I was a ways behind him. Couldn’t catch up. But when I got to the end of the route, there he was, in the Minkowskis’ garden, chatting with Theresa.”

  “Maybe he had gotten lost. You know, guys hate to ask for directions until it’s too late.”

  We both laughed, but my laughter felt forced. The air grew colder, the breeze turning into a strong wind. Yes, Johnny had done exactly what Eris had done. He’d gotten lost, wandered off onto the wrong trail, the one that circuitously led to the Minkowskis’ yard, entirely by accident.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The next morning, when Johnny left for his jog, I watched him race across the street to the trail. What made me leave my coffee mug on the counter, throw on my running shoes, and follow him? A cool autumn wind whipped through the trees, muffling my footfalls. The Minkowski house was dark, no cars in the driveway.

  As I sprinted down the trail, I scanned the woods for Johnny, but I couldn’t see him. What if he’d turned off onto another trail? I picked up my pace, my lungs protesting. How could I have fallen so far out of shape?

  Towhees twittered in the underbrush. Where the trail descended toward the river, I spotted Johnny far ahead. As he slowed to look at his cell phone, I slipped behind a tree. Just catch up with him, talk to him, I thought, but some primal instinct held me back.

  He tapped the phone with his thumbs, texting someone, then he veered sharply to the right, disappearing into the forest. I raced to catch up. I followed a distance behind as Johnny took several turnoffs. I tried to remember the way. Eventually, he climbed a hill and disappeared on the other side. I stopped at the top, the damp breeze in my hair portending a storm. I hid behind a fir tree, half in shadow, and watched him descend into the Minkowskis’ backyard. It was as though I were wat
ching a stranger. He looked so unfamiliar, the way he hunched his shoulders, glancing furtively right and left, then scuttled to the Minkowskis’ back door.

  I held my breath, the scene in front of me surreal. Theresa answered the door in a shiny pink robe and slippers, her luxurious hair a tousled mess. Instinctively, I reached up to touch my own hair. I could run down the hillside right now, drag everything out into the open. I had half believed, had wanted to believe, that Eris had not seen Johnny take this particular route.

  Theresa ushered Johnny inside. He took off his knit jogging cap, ducked his head, and went in the back door. He shut the door behind him.

  I remained on the hill, the wind cold on my skin. What would I find if I went down to the Minkowskis’ house? Johnny and Theresa might be in bed together, their clothes strewn across the floor. Theresa might answer the door naked, or in only a robe. Or not at all. Could Johnny truly be capable of this type of deception? Could he live two lives?

  If I had not trampled through the rubble of our house on Sitka Lane, if the walls had not burned down, would I ever have found the photograph of the unidentified woman, the one who had written my love on the back of the picture? Would I have ended up here, at the cottage, watching Johnny go in the back door of some strange, married woman’s house?

  As I stood on that shadowy, wooded hillside, I decided not to make a scene. I would wait until he got home and simply ask him the question, give him the benefit of the doubt.

  I didn’t want to walk through the Minkowskis’ yard—Theresa and Johnny might see me through the window, and he would know I’d been following him. So I turned around and headed back down the trail, my face wet with tears and the first raindrops of autumn.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I retraced my path through the woods. The sky darkened, the rain forming a translucent curtain across the trail. Minuscule droplets of water hit the leaves in staccato beats, like the tiny footfalls of invisible creatures. The river rushed in the distance, fed high in the foothills by Lake Wakhiakum. Now, mingling with the sound of rain, the noise of the waterfall seemed to come from numerous directions, as if its route changed with the wind.

  Perhaps I should’ve taken a different path. I had already broken a promise by clandestinely following my husband. You can always trust me, he’d said on our honeymoon. Never question my love for you. I had replied, I promise, and he had squeezed my hand, his gaze clear and unflinching. I want this marriage to work, so you have to talk to me. Tell me everything that’s on your mind. Right away. Don’t hide anything. Don’t omit any details. Johnny would have a good explanation.

  The branching paths seemed to multiply in the quickening rain. Which turns had he taken? Eris had known the way as well, but then, she’d lived in her house for a while. We had only just moved into the cottage. If Johnny had wanted to talk to Theresa, why hadn’t he simply taken the road again?

  Without the compass on my cell phone, I lost all sense of direction. Usually, my brain kept north, south, east, and west roughly in place, but without the sun or landmarks, and without my usual sharpness of thought, I must’ve passed the first turnoff. The needle point of a headache pierced the back of my skull. The aftereffects of the concussion still addled my judgment. Made me lose my way.

  I came upon a vine maple, a splash of bright red in the dreariness of autumn. I had not passed the tree on my way in, or perhaps I had, but I hadn’t noticed it, so intent had I been on keeping Johnny in view. Vine maples proliferated in my mother’s garden in Portland, an oasis of wilderness outside the city limits.

  I love the fall colors in the woods here! Natalie had said to me on the phone, after she had moved to Shadow Cove to work as a hospital nutritionist. I’d still been living in Seattle, had snagged my first book contract, and I’d longed to escape the city, to return to the forest, where my mind could find room to create stories. You would love it here, Natalie had said. So many flowers and trees, right on the ocean. And so I had moved to Shadow Cove, where my career had blossomed, where I had met Dr. Johnny McDonald. I’d been barely twenty-five; he’d been thirty-four, establishing a private dermatology clinic with two male colleagues. Dr. Johnny McDonald, a dashing bachelor, friend of Natalie’s husband, Daniel Kemp, family physician. They had all gone to the annual polar bear plunge, where my offer of a towel to Johnny had set our love in motion. We got married nearly two years later.

  Now I could hear the river in motion below. I’d taken an unfamiliar, narrow trail that descended over rocky ground toward the shore. I was going the wrong way, but if I could reach the riverbank, I could turn left and follow the waterline back to the main trail.

  The rain had let up by the time I reached the bottom of the trail. I’d wandered off course, downstream from the dangerous waterfall. Here, the river widened into a deceptively serene, glassy pool, although I could sense the current underneath, discernible in faint ripples reaching the surface. The waterfall crashed and roared a distance to my left on the route back to the cottage.

  Johnny would surely be ready for work by the time I returned. He would be the one with questions. I imagined him bouncing his car keys in his hand, the way he did when he was impatient, ready to go. Where have you been? Were you following me?

  At the riverbank, the path flattened, scuffed by many footprints. A thick rope hung from a tree leaning over the water. The embankment descended gently to a narrow, sandy beach. On the opposite bank, an abandoned wooden canoe lay upside down in the grass, its blue paint peeling. And several yards to the right of the boat was a makeshift dock with a broken-down building perched on top. There was something familiar about the layout of the scene—the dock, the building, the cedar and fir trees in the background. The shed was made of weathered, grayed wood, the roof buckling in places, the small, square windows like hollowed-out eyes. An old fisherman’s hut, I thought. Chum salmon had once numbered in the thousands, returning from the sea to spawn along the river each winter, drawn by some unknown force of nature, driven to mate, lay their eggs, and die. The salmon would return again in a month or two, but their numbers had diminished.

  My sense of reality had diminished, too, wavering on the edge of a dream. I realized, now, why the vista looked familiar. If I were to replace the mist with a brilliant blue summer sky, I could see Johnny sitting on that dock, dangling his feet in the water, the stunning woman in the black bikini sitting beside him, her arm touching his. I could see the fisherman’s shed in the background. But no, this could not be the place where the photograph had been taken. There were many rivers in the state, hundreds of lakes, many broken-down shacks. Johnny would have remembered if the photograph had been taken here, so close to the cottage, on the Shadow River.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I had expected to find Johnny ready for work, but when I arrived at the cottage, shivering in my thin outerwear, he was whistling in the shower. How could he act so casual? Maybe he had nothing to hide, and I was the one seeing the world through a tinted lens, my distrustful mind damaged by tragedy and head trauma.

  The clock on the kitchen wall indicated that only forty-five minutes had passed since I’d left. Somehow, I thought I’d been gone much longer. Time had slowed in the forest. But inside the cottage, the day sped up. The air thickened, warm and oppressively humid. Johnny ran the shower too hot. Steam emanated from the bathroom, fogging up the living room windows. The smell of lavender soap filled the air.

  I’d left the photograph on the table in the second bedroom, the room he now used as an office, but I could not find the picture anywhere. I needed to compare the image to the scene at the river. But no luck.

  I went into the bathroom. “I’m back,” I said with false cheer. “How was your run?”

  “How was your walk? Long one today.”

  “I got lost,” I said. “I ended up on a strange path.”

  “Bad girl. You didn’t take your phone.”

  “I didn’t think I would need it.”

  “Always take your phone.”

&n
bsp; “I will next time.”

  He peered out from behind the shower curtain. His hair was full of soap, water running down his body, flattening the dark hair on his chest. “Is it raining out there?”

  “Yes.” I looked down at myself, and I realized I was soaked.

  “Get in with me. Hurry.” He grinned at me in his devilish way. Come on, a quickie.

  I peeled off my clothes and joined him beneath the hot, soothing water. The cold and rain had sunk into my bones; I leaned back into him, closed my eyes, and felt his hands caressing my body, awakening my nerve endings in the heat. Gradually, I stopped shivering. “I saw you,” I said, as he kissed the back of my neck.

  “Mmm,” he said, kissing my shoulder.

  “I mean I followed you,” I said.

  He kissed my neck again, cupped my breasts in his hands. “Why didn’t you yell at me? I would’ve waited for you.”

  “I followed you all the way to the Minkowskis’ yard and I saw you go in the back door. I saw her let you in.”

  His hands dropped away from me. “You did?”

  “What were you doing there?” I turned to face him. The tub was too small for both of us. Too small and slippery. I could so easily fall and hit my head again.

  He blinked, his eyes darkening. “She asked me to stop by,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “I took a look at Kadin Junior. She was nearly hysterical about his rash. Allergic reaction. He’ll be fine.”

  “She’s lucky you’re willing to make house calls.” Was he telling me the truth? I realized, looking into his eyes, that I could not read him.