The Uninvited

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “And what about Stooley Peters?” Mimi asked.

  But he had nothing on Peters. The man had no record. And he had been forthcoming with the police. “I went back a second time,” said Roach, which surprised Mimi. “I have to say that Peters seems like a dead end.”

  Mimi didn’t argue. It seemed like a pretty good description of the old fart.

  Jay was fatalistic. “Maybe it’s the gods of music telling me to get serious.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He shrugged. “I want to be a composer, not a pop star. I want to be taken seriously. The electric guitar is… it’s adolescent.”

  “It sounded great to me.”

  “Thanks, but that’s not the point. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and the only valid way you could incorporate a guitar solo into a piece of serious music is ironically.”

  Mimi looked perplexed. “Or how about because it sounded good?”

  He threw up his hands. He was doing a lot of that lately. “You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not that simple.”

  And Mimi was about to remind him that the name of his new piece was Simple, but he wandered off. She had wanted to add that the real point was someone owed him a few thousand bucks. And she had also wanted to say that what were the gods of cinema trying to tell her by letting her movie camera get stolen?

  “And then he crawled off somewhere to be morose” was how Mimi described the scene to Iris. The two of them had stumbled on a craft fair down by the basin in the heart of Ladybank. It was a hot and sunny summer afternoon, with just enough breeze off the water to convince Iris that a craft fair was a better option than the air-conditioned coffeehouse by the park. It was more of a rummage sale and pretty chintzy, but Mimi loved it and only wished she had her camcorder with her.

  “Jay likes to make people happy,” said Iris.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He likes to give people what he thinks they want, especially teachers. He compartmentalizes. You’ve got your rock and roll here and your serious music here. And these people listen to this, and those people listen to that.”

  “But that’s garbage,” said Mimi. “What about passion? What about your ‘inner music,’ or whatever?”

  “That would be good,” said Iris. And Mimi wondered if she was blowing her off, but actually she had spotted an enormous red sun hat.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “It looks like a UFO,” said Mimi. Iris bought it anyway and put it on. It dwarfed her but cast a beautiful woven shadow over her face.

  “It’s ten degrees cooler under here,” she said.

  “And you look ten degrees cooler,” said Mimi. Then she spotted the worst baseball cap she had ever seen. It had fishermen’s excuses written all over it and badly drawn cartoons. “I have so got to get this for my friend Rodney,” she said.

  “Does he like to fish?”

  “Only for compliments.”

  At the next booth Iris found a game of Mouse Trap, all set up. “The cheese is missing,” said the lady behind the table. “But that way you can supply your own.”

  “You think it would work with Asiago?” Mimi asked.

  The woman nodded. “Or Limburger, if you can stand the smell.”

  “I like that,” said Mimi, but what she really liked was the woman’s pitch. She bought the game, and the woman said she’d pack it up for them while they continued shopping.

  “Shopping,” said Mimi with a sigh. “That’s what’s been missing from my life.” At another booth she found a knitted EpiPen holder that you could attach to your belt. She bought it and put her canister of mace in it.

  “You look like a cowboy,” said Iris.

  “The fastest draw in the East,” said Mimi practicing a few times. And then her eyes strayed to a table of bobble heads, and she gasped with delight.

  “A bobble-head Mountie,” she cried. “I promised Jamila a Mountie.” She couldn’t believe her luck and immediately text-messaged her friend to let her know the good news. Then she followed Iris to a display of carved duck decoys, which is where she was standing, wondering about the whole idea of making something beautiful like a decoy in order to trick ducks so you could blow them to bits, when Jamila texted her back. ran into l.c. asked where u were.

  “Uh-oh,” said Iris.

  Mimi was furious. There was no way Lazar accidentally “ran into her.” She fled the fair and made her way to a quiet spot down by the water. Iris, wisely, stayed behind. Mimi could barely talk she was so angry. She had bought a new SIM card, but she was going to have to let Lazar know her new number, anyway. He did not answer, so she left a message. “Phone me,” she said. “ And stay the fuck away from my friends! ”

  The others were going out that night, but Mimi opted to stay home. There had been no further disturbances at the house, which might have been because they seldom left it unattended. In any case, she was not afraid. Part of her believed that Constable Roach was right, that the perp had toyed with them for a while and then made a hit and was gone. If he was a local, maybe he saw the cop car there and got cold feet. Good. But part of Mimi still dreamed of a confrontation, of whipping out her mace canister and, when the bastard was stumbling around blind, hitting him senseless with a chair or something.

  She was watching When Harry Met Sally and missing New York when Lazar phoned her back.

  “What are you doing stalking my friends?”

  “Mimi, calm down.”

  “Do not tell me to calm down. This is not about me. You are a pervert. Do you realize that?”

  “That is not the case. And I was not, as you say, stalking your friend.”

  “Lazar,” she said. Then paused to take a weary breath. On the screen Meg Ryan had her finger raised at Billy Crystal, about to give him a lecture. Then the image dissolved into a screen saver of a rain forest. Behind Lazar she heard urban sounds, an echoey loudspeaker voice-the subway, maybe?

  “I want to come up there,” he said.

  “You don’t even know where ‘there’ is,” she said.

  “Actually, I do.”

  Mimi sat up a little straighter. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means what it means.”

  “So help me, Lazar, I am this close to calling the NYPD.”

  “I was not stalking your friend, all right? Why won’t you believe me?”

  Mimi was breathing hard, a little frantic. “All Jamila knows is that I’m in Canada. News flash, Lazar, Canada is a BIG PLACE.”

  “You’re right, of course,” he said. “But she did mention that there was this house where you are staying that your father owns. So I took the liberty of calling him.”

  Mimi froze.

  “Meem? Are you still there?”

  “You what?”

  “I talked to him, and he was kind enough to give me your address.”

  Mimi thought her head was going to explode. Blood pounded against her skull like a tsunami against some fragile island wharf.

  “Meem?”

  “He did not tell you where I am,” she said in a voice only just above a whisper.

  “Meem-”

  “Stop calling me that!”

  “Mimi,” he said, “things have changed. Big things. Sophia has gone to see her parents in Chicago.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “She and I are separating. I have told her about you.”

  It was like a nightmare. Every sentence seemed more improbable than the last.

  “I am coming,” he said.

  “No! You are not. And if you do, you won’t find me here.”

  Her face felt like it might burst spontaneously into flames. She could barely breathe, and into the blood-pounding silence came a noise. A noise that was not in the subway or some shopping concourse in Manhattan but nearby. Outside the house. It sounded like a struggle of some kind. Was that a shout? She peered through the curtains.

  “We will talk, face-to-face,�
� he said. “It will be different.”

  She heard a voice cry out.

  “Lazar, I’ve got to go.”

  She was on her feet now and moving toward the kitchen.

  “You wait and see,” said Lazar, his voice buoyant, filled with easy good humor. “It will be good between us. As good as it was.”

  Through the kitchen window, Mimi could see a shadowy flurry of activity just beyond the illumination from the kitchen light.

  “Lazar-”

  “I understand, Mimi,” he said, interrupting her. And he went on talking, but she wasn’t listening anymore. She only heard him dimly, a background noise to the struggle in the bushes. She pressed her face against the glass.

  Then she gasped.

  “What is it?” the voice on the phone demanded, but she hung up. All her attention was on the figure lying facedown in the long grass just past the shed, his old head poking out of the shadows into the light.

  Stooley Peters. By the time Mimi had grabbed a flashlight and her mace, he was on his knees, groaning. He looked like some mangy animal.

  “Mr. Peters?”

  He groaned again. Groggily, he clamped his hand over his head. In the flashlight beam, she could see blood. His skull was bleeding!

  For a moment she didn’t know what to do. She was afraid to relinquish her hold on her mace canister and certainly not on the flashlight. Nervously, she aimed it at the bushes, seeing nothing but foliage in every direction. But foliage by flashlight had never been the same since The Blair Witch Project. She swung around, as if maybe the old man’s assailant had sneaked up behind her. But there was nothing-only the shed with its own jumble of shadows lit by the light pouring out of the kitchen door.

  Peters groaned again and mumbled something.

  “Shhh!” she said, because she had heard another sound. Yes. The sound of something or someone crashing through the bush, quite far away now. She listened to the sound recede until it was gone. It could have been an animal, spooked by all the noise. She didn’t think so. Summoning up her courage, she holstered her mace and knelt on one knee beside the old man.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “Hell, no!” he said. “Give me a hand?”

  He weighed a ton. And he stank. She wondered if he had pissed himself.

  It took all her effort to get him to an upright position. She had to shove the flashlight in the waist of her jeans, and it shone up at them, underlighting his bony old face like some ghoul. He was as dizzy as a drunk, though she couldn’t smell alcohol on him. Only fear and hot anger and the disagreeable odor of someone who didn’t wash any too often. She scrunched her nose shut as she placed his arm over her shoulder and staggered back toward the house. But he couldn’t be too injured, she realized. It was not by chance that his limp hand brushed against her breast. At least it wasn’t chance the second time it happened.

  When she had deposited him, as quickly as she could, in a chair at the kitchen table, she found a facecloth and doused it in cold water to clean the wound on the back of the old man’s head.

  He was bent over the table, his head on his arms. But the moment the facecloth touched his scalp, his head flew up and Mimi jumped back, his nobbly skull just missing her jaw. The man reached up and took her hand in an iron grip and wrestled the cloth from her. She pulled away, rubbing her hands on her jeans.

  “What happened?” she said.

  He stared at her, his eyes unfocused. “What do you think happened?” he said. “I got my head stoved in is what happened.”

  “By who?”

  Peters didn’t answer her. He took the cloth, now smeared with blood, and staggered to the sink.

  “Let me do that,” said Mimi. But the old man paid her no attention. He turned on the tap, and bending his long frame forward, he splashed his face with cold water, getting a great deal of it on the linoleum floor while he was at it. Mimi leaned on the other end of the counter, still trying to catch her breath. After a few moments, the old man stood up straight and turned off the tap. Mimi handed him a towel. He took it from her with shaking hands, muttering the whole time, and began to dry himself off. There was a lot of blood on the facecloth and towel, but the wound on Peters’s head did not look too deep, as far as she could tell. He walked by her and examined his head in the mirror in the bathroom-seemed to know his way there, she thought, but then the door was open so maybe she was wrong. She watched him from the doorway. His crowlike eyes were darting back and forth in the mirror as he felt the welt on his head with his gnarled fingers.

  “Hit me with a two-by-four,” said the old man after a while.

  “You saw him?”

  “No,” he snapped. “Saw it, though. Just as it come at me-the two-by-four-out of the corner of my eye. The bastard.”

  Now that he was on his feet again, he was feisty, ready for a fight. His face scowled at her from the mirror as if she was somehow responsible for what had happened.

  “That’s the one who’s been stealing from you,” he said. “Not me!” He poked himself hard in the chest, and the cold expression on his face left no doubt he was referring to the visit he’d had from the cops.

  “Would you like a drink or something?” she asked.

  He turned from his ministrations and looked her up and down as if she had propositioned him. She stepped back, wishing now she had left him outside. He was tall and farm-hardened. His forearms were leathery and strong.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got a dram of rye,” he said.

  She shook her head. There was wine and a can or two of light beer, but she didn’t want him to get any ideas. He shambled out of the bathroom, across the kitchen to the window, where he pulled back the curtain and scanned the darkened yard.

  “He’ll be long gone,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “That right son of a bitch who crowned me.” He shook his head and winced. Then he turned to look at her. “Maybe if I had a little lie-down,” he said. “I’m feeling a bit woozy is all.”

  Mimi moved away from him until she bumped up against the counter.

  “How about I call 911?” she said.

  He grinned. “With this?” he said. He reached down and picked up her phone, but he didn’t hold it out to her. His eyes said, Come and get it.

  “Mr. Peters,” she said. “You’d better get home.”

  “And how am I going to do that?” he said, leaning hard on the table as if any minute he was going to faint. It was a feeble performance. “Maybe you could drive me?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Jay’s phone is just upstairs. How about I go and phone the cops, and they can drive you home?”

  He glared at her. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said. “You like siccing the cops on your neighbors.”

  “That’s not how it was,” she said.

  “Oh? So how was it?” he said.

  “Mr. Peters-”

  But he cut her off. He poked himself in the chest again. “You owe me, girl,” he said, and mingled with the hostility in his eyes was a strong dash of lechery.

  Mimi saw it clearly, and any misgivings she had vanished.

  “He’s been watching you,” he said, pointing his thumb back over his shoulder. “That critter, whoever he is.”

  “Really?” she said.

  He nodded. Made himself tall, tucked in the tails of his pewter-colored work shirt, with its worn and oil-stained cuffs.

  “So let me get this straight,” she said. “This guy was watching me, but it was you who got hit over the head from behind.”

  He stopped tucking in his shirt and glowered at her from under steel-gray eyebrows. “I was passing by on the road, when I seen someone.”

  “Really?”

  “Damn right. Some shadowy figure messing around that pipsqueak car of yours. I stopped, see. Come back to take a look.”

  “Lucky me,” she said, and she made no attempt to hide her contempt.

  He took a step toward her, and her hand immediately
went to her hip. She slid out her trusty mace and held it where he could see it. His eyes swayed from the canister to her face. And she wondered if he could read in her eyes just how ready she was to use it.

  “You sure got yourself a heap of attitude,” he said.

  “I’m not in the market for a Peeping Tom, Mr. Peters.”

  He glared at her but didn’t say another word. He sniffed and headed past her to the door. With every bit of courage she could muster, she stayed put. Just let him so much as touch her and she’d fill his lecherous eyes with something really hot!

  He stopped at the doorway, turned, and pointed a finger at her.

  “A word of advice,” he said. “You keep parading around with next to nothing on, you’re going to have more than you bargained for. You hear me? More action than a feral cat in heat.”

  Mimi stepped toward him with the canister aimed and watched him flinch, throwing up his arm to guard his face. “What I wear parading around in my own house with the curtains drawn is my fucking business. Now get out of here and don’t come back. Ever.”

  He left, muttering darkly. She slammed the door after him and locked it. And as soon as he was good and gone-as soon as she heard the engine of his truck roaring-she gave in to gravity. She slid down the face of the door all the way to the floor and burst into tears.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Harry never did actually get together with Sally. Not that night. Mimi was already in bed when she realized she had left the two of them frozen there on the screen. She crawled into the front room, to her desk, and shut down the computer. Then she crawled back.

  “Why am I crawling?” she wondered out loud.

  So as not to be a silhouette on the curtains, that’s why.

  She lay in bed, reliving the scene over and over.

  She had no doubt that Stooley Peters would have tried something if she hadn’t stood up to him. But what about the other person? There had been someone else there. Peters didn’t strike himself on the back of the head with a two-by-four. And she had heard someone fleeing. So who was watching whom? And why, suddenly, was she the attention of sneaks and creeps? She had run away from New York to escape the increasingly alarming focus of an ex-lover. But it seemed as if her safe house in the pretty forest was anything but! And that made her think a disturbing thought. Watching Hitchcock’s Psycho, she had come to the morbid conclusion that the Bates Motel was what the Janet Leigh character deserved for her crime. She’d only robbed a bank, but, still, the Bates Motel became her own personal hell. Was that what Mimi was getting? Shit. And why did she have to start thinking about Psycho!