Bad Neighbors

by Maia Chance

  A little before ten o’clock that night, Effie and I rolled through Naneda’s quiet, dark streets in the Caddy. Effie was in head-to-toe black, including a slouchy beret with a huge pom-pom that I privately thought looked more cat toy than cat burglar. I was in sneakers, dark-wash jeans, and, since the night was nippy, my black puffer jacket. The key to Mikey’s house was in my right-hand jacket pocket, and a pair of latex gloves and a small flashlight were in my left. Effie had gloves and a flashlight, too.

  We went down Birch Street, passing the lit-up B and B.

  “I wonder how Belinda is doing,” I said.

  “She loathed Clifford.”

  “Yeah, well, it would still be pretty freaky to have your spouse murdered. And to learn that he was keeping a bunch of money secret from you. Not to mention a secret Volkswagen van. Do you think Belinda has found out about that yet?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I feel bad for her.”

  “She could be the murderer, Agnes.”

  Oh, yeah.

  Effie turned onto D Street.

  “Let’s park further up,” I said. “It will look suspicious if we’re right out in front of Mikey’s house.”

  Effie stopped in front of the next house, switched off the engine, and took a last drag of her cigarette. The orange tip crackled and glowed.

  “I was thinking of buying you a present,” I said. “An electronic cigarette.”

  “Just as soon as we catch this murderer.”

  “Way to put the pressure on.”

  “I can’t quit my Bensons when I’m under strain.”

  “Then you’re never going to quit.”

  “I am.” She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “I’ve tried before, you know. Countless times. Back in my modeling days, each time I quit for a while, I’d put on a few pounds and have photographers and fitters and agents yelling at me to start smoking again.”

  “That’s awful!”

  “I know. Nowadays people point to women’s figures from earlier decades and howl about how women didn’t use to be so very fat, how they were so much more virtuous—but guess what? We all smoked. Same with French women even nowadays. People write entire books about Frenchwomen’s wonderful lifestyles that keep them slim, but walking down any sidewalk in France is like walking into a hookah parlor. Their secret to slimness isn’t joie de vivre. It’s Gauloises.”

  “So you’re smoking to stay skinny.” I snapped on my latex gloves.

  “Not really. But I do have many, many thousands of dollars’ worth of designer apparel that’s just one plate of rigatoni away from not fitting.” Effie was pulling on her own gloves. “It would be a shame to waste them.”

  I opened my door. “Your shoes would still fit.”

  We walked slowly down the sidewalk. Butterflies flitted in my stomach, and I held the key tight in my gloved fist.

  This was insane, right? Totally insane.

  Obviously, the porch light at Mikey’s wasn’t on, but there was a streetlamp on the corner that lit things up fairly well. If someone in the house across the street happened to look out their window, they’d see us.

  We’d have to take that chance.

  Effie and went up the saggy steps. I opened the screen door and, my pulse racing, put the key to the deadbolt. At first, it seemed as if it wasn’t going to fit, but then it slid home. I twisted, and the door was opening.

  We darted inside and shut the door behind us.

  “It smells like dirty socks in here,” Effie whispered.

  “I’m picking up on more of a Hot Pockets odor,” I whispered back.

  “What about the key?”

  “Oh. Well, let’s just leave it in the lock. We have to lock up before we go, right?”

  “That’s efficient, I suppose.”

  We both dug out our flashlights and switched them on. The beams swung around a combination living/dining room, which was open to a small kitchen on one side. A hallway branched off on the other side of the dining table.

  “What a pigsty,” Effie said. “What’s all this white stuff?”

  “Fingerprint powder. The police have already been over everything.” I felt pretty proud that I knew what fingerprint powder was, and that I’d thought to buy us the gloves. Gold star!

  “What are we looking for, exactly?” Effie whispered.

  “I don’t know. Something.”

  “I’ll search this room, then. You can take whatever is down that hallway.”

  “Don’t forget the garbage in the kitchen.”

  “What a disgusting thought.”

  “That’s what detectives do. They look through the trash.”

  “Oh, fine.”

  Effie went over to the living area, which consisted of a massive flat-screen TV with various gaming consoles enshrined in front of it, and one of those squashy black faux leather couches that seem to be requisite in any bachelor pad.

  I took a deep breath and walked slowly toward the hallway. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling of being watched. But all the curtains were closed.

  The hallway led to a laundry closet, two small bedrooms, and a tiny bathroom. One of the bedrooms was chock full of exercise equipment—a treadmill, an Olympic barbell set—off of which dangled towels and sweatshirts. The other bedroom was taken up by a king-size mattress on the floor.

  I knew I was supposed to go in these rooms and look through Mikey’s stuff. That was the plan. But it was freaky to be in a dead man’s house, and my heart was tripping over its own beat.

  I forced myself to step into Mikey’s bedroom. It was pretty bare-bones. There was the low, tangly bed that smelled, shall we say, unlaundered, and crushed Genesee beer cans were scattered across the wall-to-wall carpet. The closet’s sliding doors were open to reveal a pile of dirty clothes and, up on the closet shelf, glimmery gold objects.

  My flashlight beam illuminated a row of athletic trophies, their little figurines frozen in the act of catching footballs or wrestling. I stepped closer. MIKEY BROWN was engraved on the plaques along with NANEDA HIGH SCHOOL, or REGIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS, or ALL-STATE, as well as dates that corresponded to when Mikey had been in high school.

  Sadness hit me. Mikey had peaked in high school. To me, high school had felt like a rodeo holding pen more than anything else. For Mikey, that had been it. And now he was dead.

  I poked the toe of my sneaker around in the dirty clothes pile before I realized that the police must have already picked through it. Maybe this snooping mission wasn’t going to bear fruit.

  I crossed the hallway and went into the bathroom. My flashlight beam caught a filthy toilet with a stack of Sports Illustrated beside it. The window above the toilet had crooked miniblinds that were only half down. Light from a streetlamp hit the blinds’ slats with a weird orange glow.

  Aaaand … there it was again: the tingly feeling of being watched.

  There was a flesh-tone shower/tub combo with a yellow curtain and a vinyl-topped vanity. I glimpsed a pale face and gasped, adrenaline shooting into my veins, then realized that the apparition with the patchy eyebrows was my own reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror.

  Okay, then. On the plus side, I was all ready for Halloween.

  I opened the medicine cabinet. It was sparsely occupied by a bottle of Tylenol, a bottle of NyQuil, a crunched tube of antifungal cream, and Gold Bond Medicated Powder. There was also an unopened box of toothpaste, which seemed like a surprising stroke of foresight on Mikey’s part. A worn-down toothbrush and a twisted tube of Colgate lay on top of the vanity.

  I was closing the medicine cabinet when I saw something else behind the box of toothpaste. Something black.

  I opened the cabinet again and nudged the toothpaste box aside.

  The black thing was a hair elastic.

  I stared at it for a couple seconds. A hair elastic. Mikey had had short hair.

  I picked up the elastic between by gloved thumb and forefinger. I shone the flashlight beam.

  A long hair—a
long blonde hair—was tangled up in the elastic.

  Holy hollandaise sauce, Batman. Because who had long blonde hair? Delilah Fortune, that’s who.

  There was a thunk outside the bathroom window.

  Zing went the adrenaline into my veins again. I fumbled the flashlight off.

  A pumpkinhead was staring in the window, streetlamp glow bouncing off the bulbous side of its head. Its triangular eyes and jagged, leering mouth were deep black pits.

  I screamed and backed out of the bathroom, stumbling on my own feet and slamming my shoulder into the doorframe.

  “Agnes?” Effie called from the living room. “Agnes, what’s wrong?”

  I staggered down the hallway, my body humming with horror and my thoughts pinging haphazardly like electrons.

  “Agnes, what is it?”

  “Turn off your flashlight!” I croaked.

  Effie switched it off, plunging us into darkness.

  Crud. This is way worse.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered.

  “There’s someone outside,” I whispered. My voice quavered. “Someone looking in through the window. A pumpkinhead.”

  “A what?”

  “Someone with one of those Headless Horseman masks on.”

  “Oh my lord.” A pause, during which I knew with one hundred percent confidence that Effie was thinking about cigarettes. Then she whispered, “What do we do?”

  “Obviously, we can’t call the police.”

  “Probably not.”

  “So we have two options. Stay in here and wait it out, or run.”

  A pause. Then we both said at the same time, “Run.”

  We went to the front door and slipped out into the cool night. My heart was hammering so hard, I couldn’t hear much else. I swung my head to the corner of the house, fully expecting to see Pumpkinhead peering around.

  Nope.

  Effie and I skittered down the porch steps and along the sidewalk to the Caddy and leapt in. While Effie was fumbling the car keys into the ignition, I peered into my side view mirror.

  Nothing.

  What if … what if I had only imagined the pumpkinhead peering in through the window? Maybe I was just cracking up. Maybe the strain of having wrecked my relationship with Otis before it even got started, coupled with the Stagecoach Inn drama and all this stupid, stupid sleuthing, had made me go insane— Effie gassed the Caddy out into the street.

  “Slow down,” I cried, clawing the dashboard. “The last thing we need is a traffic stop.”

  Effie slowed up a notch. “Where to?”

  “The inn, I guess. We should get some sleep.”

  Yeah, right. Sleep was unimaginable with the amount of adrenaline frolicking through my system.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “We left the key in the lock.”

  “What!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Oh, diddle. Well, I’ll turn around. We can’t leave it there. It’ll have some of your fingerprints on it, won’t it?”

  Oh, no. “Yeah,” I said. “It will. I was holding it before I put my gloves on. Turn around.”

  Effie pulled into someone’s driveway, reversed with a squeal of rubber, and we were heading back toward Mikey’s house.

  “This is the moment in the horror movie when people in the audience smear their fingers down their cheeks and groan, Don’t do it!” I said.

  “Nonsense. It would be more unwise by far to leave that key in the lock for someone to find. And if there was someone watching you through the window”—she slid me a sidelong look—“they’re probably gone by now.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” I said.

  “Of course I believe you.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I—”

  “No, no, it’s fine.” I held up a hand. “Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if I imagined it.”

  Effie slid the Caddy to a stop in front of Mikey’s house.

  Feeling exposed and all creepy-crawly, I got out, trotted up the front walk, up the front steps, opened the screen door …

  The key was gone.

  I twirled around, stampeded back to the Caddy, and dumped myself in. “Drive!” I yelped.

  “What—”

  “Go.”

  Effie lurched into drive.

  We hadn’t gone more than a third of a block when lights flared up in the rearview mirror. I twisted around. A car, headlamps blazing, was coming after us.

  “Omigosh,” I breathed. “Someone’s following us!”

  “Calm down, Agnes. It could be a coincidence.”

  “But the key wasn’t in the lock! There was someone watching me—and I bet that’s them following us right now!”

  “In that case—” Effie fumbled a cigarette from the pack next to the parking brake. “—light this for me, darling.”

  I rolled my eyes, but I put the cigarette to my lips and, with shaking fingers, lit it. I don’t like to be an enabler. However, Effie focused best while smoking, Effie was behind the wheel, and those headlights were getting bigger and brighter by the second. Lung disease wasn’t exactly number one on my list of concerns that very second.

  I passed her the lit cig.

  “Perhaps we should drive to the police station,” Effie said once she’d taken a drag. “We could run in and say we’re frightened.”

  “Um, no? Whoever is in that car saw us trespassing in Mikey’s house. They have the door key that has my fingerprints on it, and do I need to remind you that the Naneda Police Department just so happens to have a complete set of prints from both of us after that craziness last month?”

  “Well then, we’ll simply have to evade them.” Effie stepped harder on the gas. The headlights in the mirror shrank, but then grew larger again as our pursuer sped up, too.

  “We should just drive back to the inn,” I said. “That creep won’t dare park in our driveway and get out.” I hope. “They’re trying to intimidate us, that’s all.”

  “Fine.” Effie turned onto Main Street. There was more traffic here, and more light. The vehicle right behind us was a black SUV, with a puffy-haired lady behind the wheel.

  “That can’t be who was following us,” I said.

  “It isn’t,” Effie said. “That SUV just turned out from a side street. Our charming stalker is in a white Buick.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “I got a pretty good look at it. I’d know that make and model anywhere. A Buick LeSabre. I once drove across Mexico in one of those. Don’t ask.”

  “I only know one person who drives a white Buick LeSabre,” I said, feeling sick. “Otis’s Grandma Bee.”

  “She can’t be the only person in town who owns one.”

  I craned my neck, struggling to get a better look at the Buick behind the SUV, but I couldn’t.

  We left the downtown blocks, with their storefronts, plentiful streetlamps, and four-way stops, and then Main Street’s speed limit went up to twenty-five miles per hour and we were passing old houses with big trees set well back from the road. Our headlights flashed on white picket fences and leaf-blanketed front lawns.

  A pair of headlights was rapidly advancing behind us.

  More adrenaline. At this rate, I was going to run out. Something to look forward to.

  The headlights were bigger. Bigger.

  “What are they doing?” I cried. “They must be going fifty miles an hour! Effie, be careful! Pull over or something!”

  “I can’t pull over here—the ditch is too deep!”

  “Then turn into someone’s driveway or something! Hurry! Omigosh, they’re—”

  The car behind us roared up so close, its headlamps flooded the Caddy’s interior with retina-scorching whiteness.

  Effie, her cigarette dangling from her lips, panicked and veered off to the right. We didn’t plunge into the ditch because there just so happened to be a driveway there. And a big tree.

  Effie slammed on the brakes.

  The other car was passing us, and I swun
g my head just in time to catch the briefest glimpse of the car sailing past, behind the wheel of which was someone with a big, round pumpkin head.

  We hit the tree with a sickening smash. My spine did a Slinky maneuver. The airbags poofed up. Something was hissing. Wait—that was my lungs.

  I punched the airbag away from my face. My nerves jangled like a xylophone. “Effie! Are you okay?”

  “Mm. Yes. I believe so.” A pause. “I’ll probably need to visit the chiropractor tomorrow, though.”

  We disentangled ourselves from airbags and seat belts and got out.

  The Caddy’s hood was sort of wrapped around the tree trunk.

  “Poor tree,” I said stupidly. “That’s gotta hurt.”

  “Hey!” someone yelled. A figure was running down the driveway from the direction of the house. “Is everyone okay?”

  “What’s the story?” I whispered to Effie.

  “Did you see who was in that car?”

  “Pumpkinhead. You know—the person who knows we broke into Mikey’s house?”

  “Diddle.”

  “Yeah.”

  We would either have to lie about the accident or lie about how and why that pumpkinhead freak had followed us in the first place. Plus, if Pumpkinhead really had been tooling around in Grandma Bee’s Buick, that would give the police yet another reason to be suspicious of Otis.

  Effie read my mind. “Let’s go with single-car accident,” she said.

  *

  We had to do the whole police report thing, lying through our teeth, although Officer Torres seemed to believe every word of Effie’s story about how she’d dropped hot cigarette ash on her leg, causing her to crash the car into the tree. Lucky for us, Officer Torres didn’t ask to see the fictitious burn on Effie’s slacks.

  “Seniors like you gotta get your eyes checked if you want to keep driving,” Officer Torres said.

  “Senior?” Effie said it like you’d say goose poop. “I’ll have you know, I very recently had laser surgery on my eyes, and I’ve got the eyesight of a hawk.”

  “Okay, okay.” Officer Torres chuckled. “Say, you two should go to the hospital and get checked out.”

  Effie looked at me.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Except I have a couple extra inches between my neck vertebrae now.”

  “We’ll go to the chiropractor tomorrow,” Effie said to Officer Torres.