A House by the Side of the Road

by Jan Gleiter

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Also by Jan Gleiter

  Copyright

  For my children,

  Healy, Cooper, and Spenser Thompson,

  who are kind and funny and smart,

  who can whack heck out of a high, inside pitch,

  and who have indescribably enriched my life.

  Acknowledgments

  It’s amazing how much I don’t know. Consequently, I am deeply grateful for the gracious help of the following people, who were kind enough to walk me through everything from medical issues to fast cars: Mark Stolar, Laura Lenzi, Dale Shepp, Phil Emmert, Wallace Eldridge, Mike Troccoli, Ed Kirby, and Tony Boshnjaku.

  Two Paul Thompsons (only one of whom is my husband), Michael Nowak, Bob Gallman, and Caroline Gleiter were encouraging and hard to please—a good combination. My sister Karin and sister-in-law Kathleen Thompson were, again, of inestimable value.

  I’d like to especially acknowledge my dad, Ted Gleiter—a dedicated and knowledgeable beekeeper (and a wonderful guy, though that quality is less relevant here).

  Thanks also to my agent, Jane Chelius, for her competence, support, nudging, and cheerfulness, and to my excellent editor, Ruth Cavin.

  One

  Hannah Ehrlich watched her young neighbor carefully. “It’s all in the fingers, dear,” she said. “Just hold the crochet hook like this…” She demonstrated. “And ease it through the loop.”

  Jane Ruschman caught the thread and tentatively drew it back. “Like that?”

  “Exactly,” said Mrs. Ehrlich, nodding encouragingly. “You just keep going. I think we need more cookies.”

  She put her hands on the edge of the table and pushed herself up. She had read that a good way to disguise advancing age was to spring to one’s feet. “Scootch to the edge of your seat, get your feet under you, gather yourself, and then just spring up!” the article cheerfully advised. “You will seem years younger.” Well and good, if you could manage it.

  She walked across the kitchen. She didn’t have too much trouble walking, aside from twinges in her left hip. The arthritis in her wrists and fingers seemed to have been completely cured by the regimen of bee stings she had undergone in the late summer and early fall. Jane had been horrified.

  “You’re going to make those bees sting you?” she’d asked. “Why? Yowtch!”

  “Not for fun, my dear,” Mrs. Ehrlich had replied. “But bee venom helps your immune system get going. It does wonders for arthritis. Don’t watch, child, if it bothers you.”

  She had used a long tweezers to remove a bee from the jar and placed it on the back of her wrist until it stung her.

  Jane stared at the procedure, fascinated. “But doesn’t it hurt?”

  “Lots of things hurt,” said Mrs. Ehrlich. “At least this hurting does some good. You just wait. By October, I’ll be stirring up sugar cookies again like nobody’s business.”

  Now it was October, and her prediction had come true. When spring arrived and brought the bees out from their winter hiding places, she would work on her hip. Maybe she’d get to the point where she could start springing to her feet the way the article said. She’d have to find her own supply of bees—she certainly wouldn’t ask John Eppler for any more of his—but with the feast her garden provided for them, that shouldn’t be difficult.

  Just the idea of spring always helped her get through the winter. She would think about the crocuses under the frozen topsoil patiently waiting for the mysterious signal to grow. She would gaze out at the wren houses and imagine the energetic little birds darting in and out as soon as the weather warmed. This next spring would be even more exciting than usual, revealing as it would the flowers from the special bulbs she had planted.

  The older she got, the more she realized that life was to be lived each and every day. She had good insurance, even the outrageously expensive home-care insurance that she’d kept up the payments on over the years for fear of being shuttled into a nursing home. She had cash in the bank and plenty of investments in reliable stocks, passed down from her husband’s parents to him, and from him to her. Regrettably, there were no children or grandchildren, but at least that meant there was no reason not to indulge herself in the things that gave her pleasure. So spending a sizable amount of money on the new narcissus had been a perfectly pragmatic decision. They would be beautiful, and thinking about them would make the times that weren’t so pleasant easier to bear.

  She arranged cookies on the china plate. It wasn’t one of her best. Those, like her best silver, she had carefully stored in the attic. Since she had stopped entertaining, except for having Jane or Teddy or Christine over for cookies and tea, she saw no reason to expose her precious china to the risk of her clumsiness. The silver wouldn’t break, but it was easy to transport and far too valuable to lose to a burglar. One gleamingly ornate spoon she kept in her bedside table, for the liquid medicine she occasionally took when she had a cough.

  Luckily, she didn’t have a cough now, though her arrhythmia had been acting up, her heart startling her with sudden and irregular thumps and skips. She wondered how much of it was caused by worry. Probably all of it, and it would go away when she had confronted the situation she needed to confront and dealt with it. It was foolish to take her health for granted. It was foolish to take anything for granted.

  She glanced at the child working industriously at the table, her dark gold hair falling forward, her hands busy. She was growing up and looking more and more like her mother. She would be confident like her mother, and cheerful and sensitive. She already was.

  “How does this look?” asked Jane, holding up a crooked chain.

  Mrs. Ehrlich put down the plate of cookies and refilled the two teacups. “Very good,” she lied. “Let me show you how to turn your work and start back with the second row.”

  She moved her chair to sit closer to the child but was interrupted by a meow at the back door. “There’s Charlie,” she said, taking the few steps to the door and pulling it open. A muscularly compact black cat walked in and rubbed against her legs as she shut and locked the door.

  “I’m locking the door,” she said.

  “What?” said Jane.

  “Nothing, dear,” said Mrs. Ehrlich. “I just said, ‘I’m locking the door.’”

  “Why?” said Jane.

  “You’ll know when you’re eighty-five,” said Mrs. Ehrlich, seating herself at the table and guiding Jane’s hands to turn the chain of stitches. “When you’re my age, you’ll find that just as soon as you’re all settled in your nice cozy bed, and the chill is gone
from the sheets, you realize you don’t remember if you locked the door when you let the cat in. You’ll know you let the cat in, because he’ll be curled up in his spot next to you, but you won’t know if you locked the door. You’ll be pretty sure you did and just hate the thought of getting up and putting on your slippers and going to check, but you won’t be sure, and since you’re not sure, you’ll have to do it. So, eventually, you figure out that if you take all those habitual actions and comment on them when you do them, you’ll make them memorable. ‘I’m turning off the oven’ is a good one. ‘I’m locking the door’ is another. There are lots of them.”

  Jane put down her crocheting, took a cookie, and grinned at her neighbor. “Or you could just reach for the phone and call me up, and I’d put on my jacket and come over and check.”

  Mrs. Ehrlich laughed. “You would, too,” she said, “because you’re the perfect neighbor.”

  Jane looked slyly at her from the corners of her eyes. “And if we’re gone on vacation or something, you could call Angie Morrison,” she suggested, unsuccessfully trying not to giggle.

  Hannah Ehrlich, struck by the vision of Angie, in the skimpiest possible negligee, racing down the road in her purple sports car to help out a neighbor, laughed again.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “We shouldn’t be unkind. If we got to know her better, maybe we’d find out that she’s really a very nice person.”

  Jane shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Children are funny creatures, thought Hannah Ehrlich, regarding the girl, who was hard at work again on the gradually lengthening strip of tight loops. There wasn’t a bit of a chance that getting to know Angie better would reveal any niceness at all, of any kind, and Jane somehow knew it. What if Angie were the only neighbor on this long road? What a thought.

  “I wonder,” said Jane, looking up at her neighbor, “if Mrs. Marriott knows Angie very well.”

  “Angie’s not Louise’s type of person, is she? Poor Louise. I doubt that she knows Angie at all.”

  “When you’ve visited her at the nursing home, did you ever tell her about Angie?”

  “Well, no, child. What would be the point? I’m sure Louise would have rented her house to a more sedate lady…”

  Jane frowned slightly.

  “…a more proper lady, if she’d known. But Angie doesn’t do any damage to the place, so far as I know. And Louise will never be living in that house again, anyway. She doesn’t need more worries than she already has.”

  Hannah had not been close to Louise Marriott, but she had enjoyed having another elderly woman nearby. Well, at least she had the Ruschmans; she had Jane. And she felt blessed in that. Not every trusted person turned out to be worthy. Her heart lurched, again, at the prospect of the conversation she was going to have to initiate.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Jane, looking up, startled and concerned.

  “Nothing, dear, why?”

  “You sighed. A really big sigh,” said the child. “Do you feel all right?”

  “I feel just fine,” said Mrs. Ehrlich. But she didn’t feel fine at all.

  Two

  Angie Morrison slid one long, slim leg over the sill, bent to avoid hitting her pretty head on the window frame she was holding up with one hand, and maneuvered herself into the room. It had been a simple matter to unlock the window the day before. Everything was working perfectly. The ground was firm and dry—no snow even though it was January—and would leave no sign of the crate she had stood on to raise the window and slip inside.

  All she had to do now was to find the right place to leave what she needed to leave. Near the couch, but not where it would be discovered if the couch was unfolded into a bed, which Angie was sure it would be.

  It hurt her to have to take these steps. People who loved each other should trust each other. She wanted nothing more than a reason to trust. Instead, she had ample reason not to.

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Just being in a room where he spent so much time made her feel fluttery. Every woman in town wanted him; she could see it in their eyes. She felt their desire throbbing in the air around them, heard the breathiness it brought to their voices when they spoke to him. But she was the one who had him, and, if they had known, they would have hated her for it. She wanted—oh, how she wanted—to let them know. She didn’t care if they hated her. She didn’t care at all.

  Instead, she had to settle for stolen time, completely insufficient and unsatisfying. Seeing him so infrequently, only in secret, was like never being able to adjust to the temperature of deep, cold water. It was always a leap from the dock. Every moment a new leap, a leap without a history, the first leap, again and again.

  When she first arrived, she had dated every available man in town, and several who were not supposed to be available at all. She’d enjoyed their pathetic efforts to impress her, to please her, to intrigue her. But no one had succeeded for quite some time. And then she had met him.

  Being in this room, his room with his things, was painful. How could he be so cavalier about her? He loved her; she was sure of it. She had seen the look in his eyes when he watched her move across a room to greet him. She had felt his hands on her skin. Yes, he loved her. Yet, for some reason, he was moving away from her emotionally, and she suspected it had to do with the woman who would be visiting him today.

  She had heard the husky, purring voice on the answering machine before he had a chance to turn it off. He had responded to her suspicion with a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he’d said, encircling her with one arm. “That’s my cousin, Debra. She’s coming to stay with me, just for a night. Didn’t I tell you?”

  Angie had pulled away, fear clutching at her. No, he hadn’t mentioned it. She wouldn’t have believed him if he had; she surely didn’t believe him now. One look at him, at his wary eyes, convinced her it would be wiser to pretend to a faith she suddenly did not feel.

  If the woman was his cousin, if their relationship was as innocent as he pretended, she would know soon enough. If not … well, she’d have time to think about what to do.

  They would be here soon, if this was where they were coming. Angie was sure this was where they were coming. She didn’t want to waste any of the precious two hours of tape, so she would wait to turn on the machine until she daren’t delay leaving any longer.

  She found the perfect place to put the small recorder. He would never see it. He would certainly never hear it. It was expensively silent even while its spools were turning, to give her the proof she needed, the proof she would soon have, about whether he was who he pretended to be or whether he would have to change.

  She had to know, so she could figure out how to change him.

  * * *

  Two days later, listening to what had been recorded, Angie felt sick. She had thought she was prepared, that the depth of her doubt had made her ready for its confirmation. She had been wrong. Twenty minutes into the tape, she slammed the “off” switch savagely and paced her bedroom, kicking discarded clothing out of the way, her eyes furious. She picked up the machine to hurl it against the wall and then stopped, driven to know it all, to put herself through whatever she needed to endure in order to know it all.

  She poured a glass of bourbon, fortification against the pain. Within a short time, she was very glad she had been so brave. She had suffered, but she had also discovered how to make sure she’d never suffer again.

  Three

  Angie didn’t notice the clean smell of the April night that came through her open window. She rarely noticed anything so subtle, besides she was busy looking at herself in the bedroom mirror with satisfaction as she ran a brush through her shining hair. Her reflection in her tight jeans was worth the discomfort they caused. She hooked her thumbs in her belt and tipped one hip, her cropped shirt revealing a few inches of smooth midriff and the top of her flat stomach above the large, solid silver buckle of her belt. She looked … what would be the right word? Delicious.

  She s
miled, narrowing her eyes at her image, and then glanced at the photograph on the dresser. The man in the picture gazed back, caught forever in a moment, a not atypical moment, of self-assurance. Other than the photograph, the dresser top was bare. Most of her personal belongings, and a few that supposedly went with the house, had been packed into cartons and carried away, that afternoon, by the movers. Unfortunately, other than a few old prints that she’d taken for their frames, the house hadn’t contained much beyond her own possessions that was worth moving.

  When she had first learned that her landlady had inconveniently died and, worse, that the new owner intended to live in the house, Angie had been furious. Later, as she thought about the situation, she realized how well it suited her purposes. Tonight, those purposes were much on her mind. She picked up the photograph and stood holding it. He would never give her what she wanted, what she needed, while he was living in Harrison. He needed a fresh start as much as she did, and the sudden requirement that she move would provide it for both of them. She had been clever enough to take advantage of the situation and plan a move, not of several miles, but of several hundred.

  “You,” she said, addressing the picture, “are going to have a very pleasant time tonight.”

  She put the photograph away in the dresser. He didn’t know she had it; undoubtedly he thought it was still in the drawer where she had discovered it. She’d had no qualms about taking it, but if he knew she had, he would take it back. And then, at least for the present, she wouldn’t be able to lie in bed at night with the feeling that he was in the room.

  She went into the bathroom, took a small bottle of cologne from her makeup bag, and sprayed the scent into the air, stepping into it. Just a hint of lilies of the valley clinging to her hair, to her clothes. He liked just a hint. She wouldn’t miss the bathroom with its immovable window and inadequate shower. She would, however, miss the huge, claw-footed bathtub, which was, as well she knew, big enough for two.