The Stranger Next Door

by Joy Fielding

  But nothing in the bedroom indicated Lance might still be in residence. No shirts in the drawers, no suitcase in the closet, no shaving kit in the medicine cabinet. I even checked under the bed. “Nothing,” I said to the reflection that flickered at me from the long, sharp blade of the knife. Was it possible he was really gone, that he’d taken off with Denise, just as Alison had claimed?

  If so, then why was K.C. still around? What was his connection to Alison?

  I laid the knife across the top of the white wicker dresser, watched it wobble against the uneven surface as I rifled through each drawer. But the drawers were mostly empty—a few push-up bras from Victoria’s Secret, half a dozen pairs of panties, several uncomfortable-looking thongs, and a pair of yellow cotton pajamas decorated with images from I Love Lucy.

  Where was her journal? Surely that would tell me something.

  Only after searching through every drawer several times did I spot the damn thing sitting on the night table beside the bed. “Stupid,” I said in my mother’s voice. “It was right there the whole time. Open your eyes.” I marched to the nightstand, grabbed the journal, turned swiftly to its final entry.

  Everything’s falling apart, I read.

  As if on cue, a series of loud bangs, like small explosions, erupted from the street, followed by an even louder voice, then more banging. “Terry!” the voice shouted. “Terry, I know you’re in there. Terry, please! Open the door!”

  I dropped the journal onto the bed, raced to the side window, watched as Alison came running around the side of my house from the front to the back door, K.C. at her heels.

  “Terry!” she persisted, banging repeatedly on my back door with her open palm. “Terry, please. Open up. We have to talk.”

  “She’s not there,” K.C. said.

  “She is there. Terry, please. Open the door.”

  Suddenly Alison was vaulting toward the cottage. Had she seen me watching from the window? I spun around in helpless circles, knowing there was nowhere for me to go.

  I was trapped.

  I ran toward the closet, noting only at the last second the journal I’d carelessly dropped on Alison’s bed. I hurried back, scooped it up, and returned it to its rightful place on the nightstand, then scrambled across the bed toward the closet, bringing the door closed after me just as Alison’s key turned in the front lock.

  It was then, my fingers tightly curled around the doorknob, that I realized I’d left the knife—the foot-long behemoth with its tapered two-inch blade—lying on top of the dresser. Stupid, stupid girl! my mother whispered in my ear. She’s not likely to miss that, is she?

  “Maybe it wasn’t her car,” K.C. was saying from the next room. “There are lots of black Nissans.”

  “It was her car,” Alison insisted, confusion bracketing her words. “Why would she park it around the block and not in the driveway?”

  “Maybe she’s visiting a friend.”

  “She doesn’t have any friends. I’m the only friend she’s got.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

  There followed a long pause in which we all seemed to be holding our breath.

  “What are you talking about?” Alison asked.

  I heard the shuffling sounds of two wary people walking around in circles. How long before one of them stepped into the bedroom, saw the knife? How long before Alison checked the closet for bogeymen?

  “Look, Alison, there are some things I have to tell you.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Another pause, this one even longer than the first. “I haven’t been very honest with you.”

  “Welcome to the club,” Alison muttered. “Listen, on second thought, I don’t think I’m up for this discussion right now.”

  “No—you need to hear me out.”

  “I need to pee.”

  Dear God, I thought, as I shot from the closet like a yo-yo on a string. I grabbed the knife, the blade slicing across my palm as my fingers closed around it. Then I leaped back inside the closet, the door closing after me just as Alison entered the room.

  I stuffed my wounded hand inside my mouth, sucked at the steady stream of blood issuing from my palm, and tried not to cry out. From the bathroom, I heard Alison grumbling as she relieved herself. “What in the world is going on here?” she kept repeating over and over. “What in the world is going on?”

  Alison flushed the toilet, washed her hands, and reentered the bedroom, then stopped, as if not sure of her next move. Or had something suspicious caught her eye? A drop of blood on the dresser? A suspicious footprint in the carpet? Was her journal lying wrong-side up? I raised my knife, steeled my body for her approach.

  “Alison?” K.C. called from the living room. “Are you all right?”

  “That depends.” A pronounced sigh of resignation. “What is it you want to tell me?”

  K.C.’s voice drew closer. I felt him standing in the doorway. “Maybe you should sit down.”

  Alison obediently plopped down on her bed. “I’m liking this less and less.”

  “For starters, my name isn’t K.C.”

  “It isn’t,” Alison said, more statement than question.

  “It’s Charlie. Charlie Kentish.”

  Charlie Kentish? Where had I heard that name before?

  “Charlie Kentish,” Alison repeated, as if thinking the same thing. “Not K.C., short for Kenneth Charles.”

  “No.”

  “No wonder nobody ever calls you that,” she observed wryly, and I almost laughed. “I don’t understand,” she continued in almost the same breath. “Why would you lie about your name?”

  “Because I didn’t know if I could trust you.”

  “Why wouldn’t you trust me?”

  I felt him shrug. “I’m not sure where to start.” Another shrug, perhaps a shake of his head.

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t bother.” Alison jumped to her feet. I felt her moving around, pacing back and forth in front of the bed. “Maybe it’s not important who you really are or what you have to tell me. Maybe you should just leave, so that you can get on with your life, whose ever it is, and I’ll get on with mine, and we can all live happily ever after. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”

  “Only if you come with me.”

  “Come with you?”

  “You’re in danger if you stay here.”

  “I’m in danger?” Alison laughed. “Are you completely nuts?”

  “Please listen to me—”

  “No,” Alison said resolutely. “You’re starting to scare me, and I want you to leave.”

  “It’s not me you have to worry about.”

  “Listen, K.C., or Charlie, or whoever the hell you really are—”

  “I’m Charlie Kentish.”

  Charlie Kentish, I repeated. Why was that name so damn familiar?

  “I don’t want to have this conversation. If you don’t leave, I’m going to call the police.”

  “Erica Hollander is my fiancée.”

  “What?”

  “The woman who used to live here.”

  “I know who Erica Hollander is.”

  So that’s where I knew the name. Of course. Charlie Kentish. Erica’s fiancé, the one she was always going on about. Charlie this. Charlie that. Charlie’s so handsome. Charlie’s so smart. Charlie’s got this great job in Japan for a year. Charlie and I are getting married as soon as he comes home.

  “Your precious fiancée ran out on Terry in the middle of the night, owing several months’ rent,” Alison said.

  “She didn’t go anywhere.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, she didn’t go anywhere,” he repeated, as if that explained everything.

  “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Tell you what? I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe if you’d stop pacing for two minutes and sit down . . .”


  “I don’t want to sit down.”

  “Please. Just hear me out.”

  “And then you’ll leave?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  I heard the bed squeak as Alison resumed her former position. “I’m listening,” she said in a tone that indicated she’d rather not be.

  “Erica and I had been living together for about six months when I got this great job offer to work in Japan for a year. We decided I should go, and she’d stay here, move into a cheaper apartment, and we’d save our money so we could get married as soon as I got home.”

  “I thought you were from Texas.”

  “Originally, yes. I moved here after college.”

  “Okay, so off you went to Japan,” Alison said, getting back on track.

  “And Erica e-mailed me about finding this great little place, a small cottage behind a house belonging to a nurse. She was thrilled.”

  “I’m sure she was.”

  “Everything seemed perfect. I’d get these glowing E-mails telling me how wonderful Terry was, how she was always inviting Erica over for dinner, doing little things for her. Erica’s mother died a couple of years ago, and her father had remarried and moved to Arizona, so I guess she was just really grateful to have someone like Terry in her life.”

  “So she could take advantage of her.”

  “Erica wasn’t like that. She was the sweetest—” His voice cracked, threatened to break. “Then things started to change.”

  “What do you mean? What things?”

  “The letters stopped being so positive. Erica wrote that Terry was starting to behave strangely, that she seemed fixated on some biker Erica once said hello to in a restaurant, that she was getting paranoid.”

  “Paranoid? In what way?”

  “She never went into detail. She just said that Terry was starting to make her feel uncomfortable, that she was afraid she might have to start looking for another place.”

  “So she skipped out in the middle of the night.”

  “No. I was due back in a few months. We decided she might as well stay put until I got back to Delray and we could look for a place together. But then, the E-mails suddenly stopped. I tried calling her cell phone, but no one ever answered. That’s when I started calling Terry. She told me Erica had moved out.”

  “You didn’t believe her?”

  “It seemed odd that Erica would move out without telling me, let alone go anywhere without leaving a forwarding address.”

  “Terry told me she was hanging out with a bad crowd.”

  “No.”

  “That she met someone else.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Things like that happen every day.”

  “I’m sure they do. But that’s not what happened here.”

  “Did you check with her employer?”

  “Erica didn’t have a regular employer. She worked for Kelly Services. They hadn’t heard from her in weeks.”

  “Did you go to the police?”

  “I called them from Japan. There wasn’t much they could do long-distance. They contacted Terry. She gave them the same story she gave me.”

  “Which you can’t accept.”

  “Because it isn’t true.”

  “Did you go to the police when you got back home?”

  “As soon as I got off the plane. They reacted pretty much the same way you are now. ‘She found somebody else, buddy. Move on.’ ”

  “But you can’t.”

  “Not till I find out what happened to her.”

  “And you think Terry is somehow involved? That I’m involved?”

  “I thought that in the beginning.”

  “The beginning?”

  “When you first moved in.”

  I could almost feel the quizzical look on Alison’s face.

  “I’d been watching the house for about a month at that point,” K.C. explained. “After you moved in, I started following you. You got a job at that gallery, and I started hanging around. I almost had a heart attack when I saw you wearing Erica’s necklace. I gave her that necklace.”

  “I found it under the bed,” Alison protested.

  “I believe you. But in the beginning, I didn’t know what to think. I had to find out the extent of your involvement, how much you knew. I tried flirting with you, but you weren’t interested, so I hit on Denise, convinced her to let me tag along for Thanksgiving dinner. I realized pretty quickly that you had nothing to do with Erica’s disappearance. But the more I got to know Terry, the more convinced I became she did.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because there’s something very weird about that lady.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’ve been watching her for months, phoning her, following her in my car, trying to spook her, anything to get her to slip up. And she’s starting to crack. I can feel it.”

  So it hadn’t been my imagination. Someone had been watching me. And not just today. K.C. was the shifting shadow outside my window, the anonymous, yet strangely familiar, voice on my telephone. That subtle Texas twang he couldn’t quite disguise—how had I failed to recognize it before now?

  “You’ve been harassing her for months,” Alison stated, “and you’re surprised she’s acting strangely?”

  “Terry knows what happened to Erica. Damn it, she’s responsible.”

  “Are you finished? Because if you’re finished, then it’s time for you to leave.”

  “Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said?”

  “You haven’t said anything,” Alison shot back. “Your girlfriend pulled a disappearing act. I’m sorry. I know being dumped is a hard thing to accept. But what you’re suggesting is outrageous. And I’ve heard quite enough, thank you. I want you to go now.”

  There was a second’s silence, then the sound of feet shuffling reluctantly toward the front door.

  “Wait!” Alison called out, and I held my breath, inched forward, leaned my head against the closet door. “You should have this.” She walked around the side of the bed, pulled open the drawer of the nightstand. “You said you gave it to her. You should have it back.”

  I pictured Alison walking toward him, Erica’s thin gold necklace dangling from her fingertips.

  “Come with me,” he urged. “It’s not safe for you to stay here.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she told him flatly. “I’ll be fine.”

  I heard the front door open as I crept out of the closet and inched along the side of the dresser, my palm leaving a bloody trail on the white wicker as I balanced against it.

  “Be careful,” the man calling himself K.C. warned the young woman who called herself Alison Simms.

  And then he was gone.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I don’t know how long I stood there, my breath caught somewhere between my lungs and my mouth, my hand pulsating with pain as I pressed the handle of the knife against my torn flesh, like a branding iron. Could I really use this knife against Alison, even in self-defense?

  “What the hell is going on here?” Alison demanded suddenly, and I lunged forward in response, my arm instinctively arcing into the air, while blood from my palm streaked down my arm, as if someone had outlined the path of one of my veins in red ink.

  But Alison hadn’t been speaking to me, and she was already out the door and on her way to the main house when I emerged from the shadows, her anguished, unanswered question vibrating against the still air, like smoke from a discarded cigarette. “Terry!” I heard her shouting, as once more she pounded on my kitchen door. “Terry, open the door. I know you’re in there.”

  I watched as she backed away from the door, her head tilted toward my bedroom. “Terry!” she shouted, her voice targeting my window like a well-aimed stone, before she gave up in defeat. What now? I wondered, swallowing what little air I could find, holding it hostage against my lungs.

  Alison stood very still for what seemed an excruciatingly long time. Weighing he
r options, I thought. Just like me. Ultimately she decided to give it one last try, turning on her heels and running around the side of the house to the front. Only then did I push open the cottage door and creep into the night, a sudden breeze scratching at my neck, like the tongue of a cat. As Alison banged on the front door, I was opening the back.

  In the next instant, I was inside my kitchen, the aroma of freshly baked chocolate cake settling about my head, like a bridal veil. I slid the bloody knife back into its triangular wooden holder, then wrapped my bleeding palm inside a dishcloth as Alison returned to the back door, her eyes widening with shock as I flipped on the light and opened the door to let her in.

  “Terry! What’s going on? Where have you been? I’ve been so worried.”

  “I was taking a nap,” I answered sleepily, in a voice not quite my own. Hell, K.C. wasn’t the only one capable of disguising his voice.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” I waved my hand into the air, as if to dismiss her concerns.

  “My God, what happened to your hand?”

  I glanced at my injured arm, as if seeing it for the first time. Blood had already soaked through the thin, cotton towel. “I cut it. It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing. Let me have a look at it.” She unwrapped the towel before I could protest further. “Oh, my God! This is awful. Maybe we should go to the hospital.”

  “Alison, it’s just a little cut.”

  “It’s not just a little cut. You might need stitches.” She pulled me toward the sink, ran the cold water, guided my hand under the steady stream. “How long has it been bleeding like this?”

  “Not long.” I winced as the water hit my palm, pushing the blood aside, and exposing the fragile white line of my wound. My wounded lifeline, I thought, as blood continued to wash across the inside of my hand.

  “What’s that smell?” Alison looked toward the stove.

  “Terry’s magic chocolate cake,” I said with a shrug.

  Confusion brought her eyebrows together at the bridge of her nose. “I don’t understand. When did you have time to bake? I’ve been waiting for you for hours. When did you get back? And what’s your car doing parked around the corner?” The questions were coming faster now, out of her mouth as soon as they entered her head, one piled on top of the other, like pancakes. Alison shut off the water, grabbed a handful of paper towels from the roll on the wall, and pressed the absorbent white towels into my cupped hand. “Tell me what’s going on, Terry.”