Clooney barked at her.
“I’m not a duck!” shouted Mimi.
Clooney barked again.
“You all right?” said the man. His voice reminded Mimi of a gate that needed greasing.
“I’m fine,” she snapped. She was rooting around in the snye for her running shoes. She had taken them off and they had fallen into the water, which was so stirred up she couldn’t see a thing.
“Clooney has a habit of sneaking up on her quarry,” said the man. “Don’t you, girl?”
Clooney barked and licked his face.
If this genial display was meant to endear the dog to Mimi, it failed. She had found her shoes, which she chucked into the long grass on the bank. She struggled out of her flotation device.
There.
She sniffed and wiped her hair back off her face, rubbed the water out of her eyes, and tried to stand up straight. When she looked at the stranger, he was ogling her chest. She crossed her arms, shivering from the chill.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
“The name’s Peters,” he said. “Stooley Peters, from up the road. Just came by to see the lad. Got him my bill for the snowplowing.”
“Snowplowing?”
The man nodded. “From last winter, eh? I done his drive for him.”
Right. Peters, the keeper of Paradise. What a laugh! She’d noticed the name on his mailbox when she was out jogging.
“I’m not much at the paperwork side of things,” he said. “Takes me a good long while, you know, to get around to it. What with the seeding and chores and such.”
“Jay’s on his way,” she said. “He should be here pretty soon.”
He nodded. “Good, then we can just wait and get to know one another.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Why don’t you just leave your bill in the mailbox.”
He scratched his chin. “If that’s the way you want it,” he said.
She maneuvered her way around the kayak, grabbing the towline in her fist, and splashed toward the bridge.
“Your shoes,” he said. He was behind her now and held her sopping running shoes in one meaty hand.
She reached out to get them and he handed them to her, though he didn’t let go right away, so that she had to tug to release them from his grip. Having a good old time, she thought.
Peters stepped onto the bank, dragging the dog with him. Clooney barked.
“And you, ” said Mimi to the dog, “can just shut up.”
“Boy,” said Peters, wagging his head. “You’re quite the snappish thing, aren’t you?”
She turned to him, pushing back a wing of hair from her eyes. “I’m a regular sweetheart, Mr. Peters, unless someone and his dog scare the shit out of me.”
“Well, we’re sure sorry about that, aren’t we, Clooney?”
Clooney wiggled and whimpered and jumped up to lick her master’s face again.
“Yeah, well, you’re not as sorry as me,” said Mimi. She had been keeping ahead of Peters, not wanting him staring at her breasts, which is what he seemed determined to do, as he kept pace with her along the bank.
Her headache was back with a vengeance. She felt like a fool. A wet fool.
“Around these parts,” said Stooley Peters, “we put a fair amount of stock in neighborliness. Maybe where you come from it ain’t the same.”
Mimi nodded. “Damn right. Where I come from, we shoot neighbors,” she said. It turned out to be a good mood breaker.
Peters slapped his knee and laughed, a dry, barely audible laugh. “But, honest now,” he said. “We look out for one another. It’s pretty far off the beaten path and all, being as the Upper Valentine don’t go nowhere no more.”
“What with the bridge out and all,” Mimi muttered under her breath, aping his thick accent.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, well, nothing’s pretty well what I thought I heard,” he said.
Mimi hauled the kayak up onto the shore on the opposite bank from him. “Look,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude just now. I’m having a really bad day. Okay?”
“Happens,” he said, nodding his head vigorously. “Seen a few of ’em myself.”
Quite a few, she thought. But his face didn’t seem so malevolent, now that there was a stream between them. There was a bit of a twinkle in his dark eyes. And the dog seemed to like him.
“You can let her go,” Mimi said. “I’m not afraid of dogs. Just don’t like it when they attack.”
Peters let go of the dog, which immediately tore off toward the road. For some reason, Mimi felt more vulnerable now that there was just the two of them. She wrapped her arms more tightly about her.
“I’ll leave you to get yourself sorted out,” he said. “You know where I am if you need anything.”
“Paradise,” she said.
“Right.” He laughed. Then he tipped an imaginary hat and turned to walk back to his truck, bending to grab at a stalk of grass as he walked.
“Mr. Peters,” she called.
He turned. “Call me Stooley,” he shouted back to her across the little stream.
“Stooley,” she said. “Have you seen anyone poking around here?”
“Poking around?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You know, just hanging around the snye.”
He scratched his head. “Well, there’s the Page boy, of course.”
“Not him. Someone else.”
“What kind of someone?”
Mimi shrugged. This was getting nowhere. “Someone’s been kind of…” What was she supposed to say? “You know, messing with stuff.”
“You have anything stole?”
“Yeah.”
He pursed his lips. “Well, if it’s big stuff, I’d say call the police. But maybe it’s just a prank, eh? Kids, you know.”
Right. Kids.
She realized, too late, that it had been a mistake to ask him a question. He had taken it as an invitation and was heading back toward her, about to cross the snye.
“Well, thanks, anyway,” she said. “I’ve got to be going now.”
He stopped, up to his ankles in the stream. “If I see anything, I’ll be sure to let you know.” He tapped his brow with his finger. “I’ll keep an eye out,” he said.
But she could tell well enough what he was keeping an eye out for.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The idea came to Cramer at the computer store, as he was tearing the hard drive out of an old PC. He abandoned the job, the electronic guts spread out all over his workplace, and went online to the Mac site, where he surfed for a few minutes. Then he sat back down at his desk, deep in thought.
“You okay, Cramer?”
It was Hank. He had just come into the back room with a handful of invoices.
“Oh, yeah. I was just daydreaming.”
Hank chuckled. “Well, it’s good to see you not doing something for a change.”
“Sorry.”
Hank waved off the apology, a good-natured expression on his face. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay holding down the fort next week?”
“Absolutely,” said Cramer. “Really, I was just-”
“Just taking a wee break,” said Hank. “People do take breaks, young man.”
“Thanks,” said Cramer, returning his attention to the job in front of him. But not all of his attention.
Working day and night didn’t leave much room in Cramer’s life for more than daydreaming. But, finally, Saturday came and he had the day before him, although he had to be at the plant by eight. When he woke up around noon, Mavis was out. He was glad. He didn’t want any confrontations, not today. He made his way down Butchard’s Creek and out onto the Eden, enjoying more than ever the freedom of the moment and filled with anticipation of what lay ahead. As much as he longed to see Mimi, he was almost hoping she wouldn’t be there. The sooner he had a chance to get into her house, the better. He was going to g
et the ball rolling. It was time to make a move.
There were curtains up. They hadn’t been there last time. Yellow curtains, open for the day. There also seemed to be a party going on. A white Toyota Camry was parked behind Mimi’s car, and loud music was coming from the place.
He circled the house by cover of the brush. But after a while he ventured nearer, drawn by the music, the laughter, until he was crouching under the kitchen window.
There were only three people, as far as he could tell: Jay, Mimi, and another female. They were in the front room. He peeked over the sill. The table was littered with dishes. Then a girl wandered into the kitchen, heading toward the bathroom.
Cramer ducked out of sight and slid down the wall to a crouching position. Iris Xu. Did that mean she and Jay were still together?
Somebody whooped with laughter. Cramer swatted at a mosquito. They were thicker near the ground, in the shadows. Then he heard voices entering the kitchen, and he skedaddled to the brush behind the shed. Taking a wide berth, he made his way back toward the snye. He was almost at the stream when he heard the back door opening and he hid behind a tree.
It was Mimi. She was in the yellow sundress she’d been wearing in the documentary on her JVC. One of the thin straps hung across her arm. Her feet were bare, her arms heavy with colorful bangles. She was alone. And Cramer allowed himself to believe she had known he was there. She had sensed his presence, sensed the power of his attraction to her. He had wished her outside and she had come. It was a sign. His luck was turning.
She walked away from the house, down the lawn-down toward him-punching in a number on her cell phone. Cramer held his breath, pressed himself against the trunk of the tree.
“I got your message,” she said, so near, it was almost as if she were talking to him, as if she knew he was the one who had scribbled his sentiments on the dewy windshield of her car.
“Yes, all the messages,” she said, her voice testy.
He hoped it wasn’t him she was talking to, not like that.
“No… No, you listen to me for a change.”
But the person on the other end of the line didn’t seem to want to listen. Cramer dared to look. She was three or four meters away, hunched over her phone, her free hand covering her other ear, the better to concentrate. Her hair concealed her face.
“Yes,” she said. “I hear you. I hear you loud and clear!”
She grumbled. “So? So? You were worried. Fine. You wanted to know I’d arrived safely. Fine. I get it. Thanks. But you know what, Lazar? That might have been genuinely touching if you had phoned just the once and left a message. But you phoned twenty times, and you know what occurred to me? I’ll tell you. It occurred to me that you weren’t phoning to see if I was okay, Lazar. You were phoning because you were not okay. Because-”
But she didn’t get any further. And as Cramer watched, her body stiffened.
“There is no way,” she said. She laughed but there wasn’t any humor in it. “There is no fucking way!”
Cramer pressed his head against the rough bark. He could imagine a voice at the other end of the line pleading with her, desperate.
“Listen, I’ll tell you why I haven’t phoned, if you want to know.”
But, apparently, Lazar didn’t want to know. And when Cramer looked again, Mimi was holding the phone away from her face, staring at it with her mouth hanging open. Then she brought the receiver back to her ear.
“Enough, already!” she shouted, stamping her foot on the sandy ground. “You say you can’t get over me. But that’s not it at all. What you can’t get over is yourself. ”
There was silence then. The music at the house stopped pounding, the snye stopped gurgling, the birds stopped singing, the insects stopped buzzing. All Cramer could hear was the pulse in his head. Peering out again from his hiding place, he saw Mimi shake her head back and forth. When she finally spoke again, there was no passion left in her voice, only what sounded to Cramer like resignation.
“I tried to do it right,” she said. “I really tried.”
She listened, rolled her eyes, sighed, and then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Yes. Yes.” There was another pause and then she said “yes” one last time before closing the phone without a good-bye.
She stood, her shoulders drooping, staring down toward the snye. She looked so little and so weary. Cramer was west of her, downwind, and he could almost- almost — smell her. He wanted so much to walk over to her now and take her in his arms. He wouldn’t have to say anything-he wouldn’t need any clever speech. He would hold her, and she would realize that he meant her no harm, that he would look after her, that she was loved. The idea took hold of him. It was as if this was meant to happen, he told himself. He was a neighbor, after all. He could pretend he had just arrived there and seen her in distress. Was it so farfetched?
But then he heard the back door open and shut, and Iris appeared and headed down the lawn toward Mimi, who turned to greet her, though she said nothing.
“Nice dodge on doing the dishes,” said Iris.
Mimi laughed. “Yeah, well, I’d rather have been doing dishes.”
Iris touched her arm. “Did you do the deed?”
Mimi shrugged. “Sort of. He says he needs closure. So I said why don’t you closure yourself in a mine somewhere.”
“Really?”
“No.” Mimi sniffed. “I said he could call again.”
“Ah.” Iris looked disappointed. “So it’s not quite over.”
Then Mimi smiled devilishly. “I said he could call again. However, I’m getting a new SIM card today. ”
“You are so bad, girl.”
Mimi nodded, but her smile slipped. “I needed to know, Iris. Where he was at. Whether he was dealing with this.”
“And he isn’t?”
Mimi shook her head. “I don’t know how I never saw it, but the man is a total wack job.” Her voice broke a little as she spoke.
And Iris took Mimi in her arms and rocked her back and forth. “You still want to come with us?”
“Uh-huh,” said Mimi, pulling away from the embrace at last. “How soon can we go? Like how about an hour ago?”
“Fine with me. It looks to me like you need a megadose of lying on a raft, soaking up the sun.”
Mimi laughed. “Well, a megadose of something.”
She laughed and the two of them headed back toward the house.
Twenty minutes later, they left, the three of them. Mimi was carrying a backpack. It looked to Cramer as if they were going to be gone for quite a while. They drove off in the Camry, and as soon as the car was out of sight, Cramer headed toward the house. He hadn’t gone but a few feet when he heard a loud snap behind him. He spun around and looked toward the snye. His eyes scanned the underbrush. Someone was there. He walked slowly down to the stream, his ears peeled. Nothing. A deer maybe. A rotten branch falling? He waited a full ten minutes before he headed up to the house.
CHAPTER TWENTY
They had gone to Iris’s cottage on Saturday. Mimi had tried to beg off initially, but Iris had insisted.
“Are you sure?” Mimi looked from one to the other, but her gaze ended up on Jay. He could tell she wanted his blessing-he could see it in her eyes. He nodded and was quick about it. She was sharp and any delay would give him away. She would think he didn’t want her along and she’d be wrong.
“Hey, if I want you to buzz off, I’ll give you a quarter,” he said.
“It’ll cost more than that, bud.”
The bantering didn’t quite fool him, and soon enough she changed her mind. “You know, on second thought, I’m really on a roll with this new scene I’m writing. I think I’ll pass.”
So Jay got down on his knees and wrapped his long arms around her legs and pleaded until she just about fell over and agreed to come. Everyone was laughing. The happy trio. But she looked at him funny, all the same, as if she knew there was something up. She was right, but he wasn’t sure himself what was up. He and Iris didn’
t desperately need to be alone. They wouldn’t be, anyway, at her parents’ cottage. It was Mimi alone that he was worried about. The house at the snye was secure; he had to believe that. It was Mimi he was worried about. She had been alone a lot lately. Maybe too much.
Jay had seen a movie about the composer Gustav Mahler. The opening shot was of a lake in the mountains somewhere: a dock, a boathouse, and early morning mist swirling on the water. Quiet. The camera dollied in on the boathouse, and suddenly the whole place exploded. He found himself thinking about that as he and Mimi waded back across the snye bright and early Monday morning. They’d had a good time, but halfway through the weekend, he had started worrying about the house. The girls had called him on it.
“First you want me to come along because you’re worried about leaving me alone,” said Mimi. “Then you wish you’d left me there because you’re worried about the house.”
“Jackson is just a worrier,” said Iris.
“Yeah, well, worry about this,” said Mimi, and handed him her fishing rod, which was all snarled. They had been sitting in the middle of the lake with fishing rods as an excuse for doing nothing. So he had picked away at the knots and tangles and kept his worrying to himself for the rest of the weekend.
They’d left Iris at the lawyer’s office in Ladybank where she had a summer job. Jay was driving the Camry. He was going to drop Mimi off and make sure everything was okay before heading back into town. And everything did look okay. Pretty as a picture, with the tall grass and wildflowers nodding in a light breeze. But Jay watched the house carefully, waiting for the whole thing to blow up.
Mimi babbled on about a scene she was going to rewrite, but he hardly heard her. They had arrived at the shed by then, and he stopped in his tracks.
“What?” she said.
He pointed.
The back door was ajar.
Jay ran for the stairs, Mimi to her desk. “Oh, thank you, God, thank you, thank you,” he heard her say as he charged upstairs, two steps at a time. Presumably her computer was still there. His computer was still there, too, and he breathed a long sigh of relief, leaning on his knees to catch his breath. Mimi joined him and gasped.
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