by Jane Haddam
“This is terrible,” Horace said. “This is worse than terrible. Have you heard anything? Was there any kind of break-in? I don’t believe a system just went on the glitch like that for no reason. Has there been a robbery?”
“Not that I’ve heard about.”
“Has there been anything else?” Horace shuddered. “I hate to think of what else we could have had last night. But somebody must have done it deliberately. It’s the only explanation. And if that isn’t the explanation, we’ll be in court with a suit in five minutes. We may be there even if somebody did it deliberately. Go get him, Miss Vaile. Go get him. I have to think.”
Miss Vaile pinched her nose again, then turned on her heel and was gone. Horace got up and walked to his windows, looking out on what seemed to him to be a perfectly tranquil scene. None of the houses that ringed the golf course had burned down. There was no sign of vandalism on the tennis courts. The caution tape was still up in front of the pool house. Best of all, there was no sign of little clutches of women with their heads together, gossiping about everything.
If there had been an incident overnight, those women would know about it. Those women would talk about it. Those women would get him into an enormous amount of trouble with the governing board.
Horace Wingard had no use at all for the governing board, or for any governing board anywhere. They were all alike, these things. Everybody was convinced that democracy was the answer. Everybody was always wrong. You couldn’t leave the governing of a place like Waldorf Pines up to people who cared only that they got to say they lived here.
Horace went back to his desk, sat down, and brought up his file on the security company on the computer. People thought he was a silly little man, but they underestimated him. He hadn’t gotten this job because he’d changed his name or bought his suits at J. Press, custom tailored so that he looked as much like Clifton Webb as possible. He’d managed three other luxury developments before he’d landed at this one, and he was very good at his work.
If it turned out that somebody who shouldn’t have been was on the grounds of Waldorf Pines last night, he’d find him, he’d get hold of him, and he’d make his life not worth living.
Horace Wingard knew a lot about making people’s lives not worth living.
6
Walter Dunbar did not rely on the Waldorf Pines security system to keep himself and his family safe. Walter Dunbar did not rely on anybody for anything, if he could help it, and he could usually help it. It was the army that had made him that way, back when the army was something everybody had to put up with, whether they wanted to or not. If it had been up to him, they would have reinstituted the draft years ago, and sent young idiots like that Michael Platte off to South Carolina to march with packs on their backs. That was what was wrong with these kids these days. They didn’t have any sense of discipline. They didn’t have any sense of purpose. They didn’t have anything to hate to the very bone, and that was why they didn’t have any motivation.
Walter’s motivation, at the moment, was “doing something” about the Waldorf Pines governing board. He was never more explicit than that, even inside his own head, but he had no doubt that anybody who heard him would know exactly what he meant. Walter had been on the governing boards of every gated community he’d ever lived in, and every country club he’d ever belonged to, and every professional association he’d ever decided was worth his while. He’d been on every one of them, but he’d never been on any of them more than once. That was because people didn’t like reality anymore, even if they said they did. They liked fairy tales. They liked anything but to hear the truth spoken without fear or favor.
At the moment, what none of these people wanted to hear was that there was something wrong with their vaunted manager, although Walter didn’t know how they could miss it when they looked at him. Horace Wingard, for God’s sake. Walter had spoken to a very discreet private detective he knew—you had to get discreet ones; you never knew what you could be sued for. Walter had spoken to the man, at any rate, and it turned out that Horace Wingard had started his life as Bobby Testaverde in Levittown. Levittown. It was practically the symbol of post-War lower-middle-class blight, full of little houses made of ticky tacky that all looked just the same. Walter had grown up on the Main Line and gone to good private schools before being packed off to Colgate by a father who knew better. Walter thought anybody ought to know better. It was almost stunning how ignorant most people were.
Unfortunately, even the very discreet private detective couldn’t perform miracles. Walter had asked him to look into the background of that Martha Heydreich, but he hadn’t been able to come up with anything at all. It was, he wanted Walter to know, very unusual. People left traces of themselves around. They left trails.
If it had been up to Walter Dunbar, he would have required a full background check for anybody who wanted to buy a house in Waldorf Pines. What was the point in having a security system, with having cameras and locks and guards, if you were harboring a snake within your own bosom? That’s what they were, these people like Michael Platte. Snakes. That’s what that woman was, too.
Walter was standing on his deck, looking down at a garden hose. It was not his garden hose, and he had no idea where it had come from. He might even have thought it was his own if he hadn’t been able to see his own, still coiled up properly around the outdoor faucet. This one was just lying around, as if somebody had tossed it there as he walked by on the golf course. Except, of course, that nobody ever walked along the golf course with a garden hose in his hand. Most of these idiots could barely handle their own clubs.
Walter looked up the fairway, into the blank distance that was the course unoccupied by a single questing golfer.
Then he turned around and went through the sliding glass doors to his own family room. It wasn’t much of a family room. He had one of the smallest houses in Waldorf Pines. That was because his family was himself and his wife, Jessica. They had never had any children. Jessica had wanted them, the way women always did, but Walter had been smarter than that.
The family room was empty. It consisted of a cramped little room divided from the kitchen by a curving countertop. The countertop hid the sink, just in case the lady of the house didn’t feel like doing the dishes and wanted to hide the mess. Jessica would never do that, because she knew he’d pitch a fit.
Sometimes you had to yell and scream to get what you wanted. Sometimes you had to threaten. Sometimes you had to call the lawyers and be done with it. Walter thought he was at the lawyer stage.
“Jessie,” he shouted, pointing into the house and hoping he wouldn’t have to call out more than once. That almost never worked. He didn’t know where Jessie disappeared to, but she disappeared. “Jessie,” he shouted again.
There was a faint little squeaking noise, coming from back there somewhere. Jessie was over in the part of the house with the two extra bedrooms. Walter had no idea what she thought she was doing there. They didn’t have children, or grandchildren, or guests. They only had the extra bedrooms because it was always better for the resale value to have three bedrooms rather than one.
He walked off into the house. The walls were painted green. The floors were thick matte terra-cotta tile. He never really noticed where he was living, unless something went wrong with it.
Jessica was in the larger of the two extra bedrooms, changing the sheets. Walter didn’t understand why she had to change sheets in this bedroom. It wasn’t as if they had to worry about somebody complaining about the dirt.
Jessica looked up when he came into the room and then sat down on the side of the bed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just thought I’d get some work done while I had a free morning. Didn’t you want to go out to the farmer’s market this afternoon? It’s the last of the sweet corn we’re going to get this year.”
“There’s a garden hose on our deck,” Walter said.
Jessica blinked. Jessica was something of an idiot. Walter had known tha
t for years.
“Not our garden hose,” Walter said, in the voice he thought of as “patient.” “Our garden hose is where it’s always been. There’s a strange garden hose on our deck, just thrown there willy-nilly. Just lying there.”
Jessica blinked again. “Why?” she said finally.
Walter sighed. “I don’t know why, do I? I just found it there this morning. This minute, really. A garden hose, plain as day, when it’s obvious no garden hose belongs there. Somebody was on our deck last night. Either that, or somebody was on the course, and they threw the garden hose up from there.”
“But why would they?” Jessica said. “Why would anybody want to throw a garden hose onto our deck? And does it really matter, Walter? I can’t imagine a garden hose did us any harm.”
“That isn’t the point, is it? It’s not if the garden hose did us any harm, this time. It’s the fact that anybody can get into this place and do anything he wants. Or else he’s already here. This is supposed to be a secure place. It’s supposed to provide us all with peace of mind. That’s what we paid for. It’s not living up to its part of the bargain.”
Jessica twisted her hands in her lap. “I wish you wouldn’t do these things,” she said. “You just get everybody all angry, and it never changes things anyway. Except that they don’t like us anymore, and we don’t get invited to things.”
“I paid for my house to be secure, I want it to be secure,” Walter said. “You’re too easy on people, Jessie. You let them walk all over you.”
“Just once I’d like to move to a place and settle in,” Jessie said. “I’d like to be just like everybody else. I’d like to have friends.”
“People just won’t listen,” Walter said. “They like to live in their illusions. I tried to tell them we were in for trouble, and here we are.”
“A garden hose isn’t trouble,” Jessica said desperately.
“It’s just the beginning,” Walter said. “That Michael Platte is a criminal, plain and simple, and I’d be willing to bet everything I have that Martha Heydreich isn’t the housewife she pretends to be. Well, we already know that. She’s hiding something. She has to be. What good does it do to have security cameras and security locks and guards and all the rest of it when you’ve got the danger living right here in your own backyard? We’re not protected from them, Jessie. We’ve got nothing to protect us from them.”
“Martha Heydreich seems like a very nice woman,” Jessica said. “She’s a little extreme, you know, in the way she dresses, and her mannerisms, and that kind of thing, but she still seems like a very nice woman. And she has such beautiful hands.”
“She has small hands,” Walter said. “I never trust anyone with small hands. They don’t know how to work, that’s what that is. They don’t do honest work.”
Jessica ignored him. “As for Michael Platte,” she said.
“He was arrested for possession of cocaine,” Walter said. “If his father hadn’t been willing to pay through the nose to get him off, he’d be sitting in prison right now.”
Jessica sighed. “Yes, Walter, I know. But it was never a secret, was it? They weren’t trying to hide it. And what does it matter, anyway? He’s had a little trouble. He’s young. Maybe he’ll grow out of it—”
“Maybe he’s been wandering around this place all night throwing garden hoses on our deck. I’m telling you, Jessie. There’s a problem out there. There’s a very big problem. And pretending it isn’t there isn’t going to make it go away.”
“Yes,” Jessica said. “I understand.”
“They’re going to regret it,” Walter said. “They’re going to see this mess they’ve gotten themselves into, and they’re going to regret it. It’s going to be too late then. They’re going to be murdered in their beds, and that’s if they’re lucky.”
“Yes,” Jessica said again.
She wasn’t twisting her hands anymore. She wasn’t looking at him, either. She was just sitting on the bed, looking at the floor, doing nothing and saying nothing and showing no emotion.
Walter felt a wave of dislike hit him, a huge tsunami of rage that went all the way down to the soles of his feet. Why had he married this woman? What had possessed him, all those years ago, to first propose to her and then to walk her down the aisle? Maybe it had been nothing more than the need to appear mature and responsible, the way you’d had to do in the days before all the nonsense started. Maybe it had been nothing at all. He really couldn’t remember. There were just times when he wanted to put the heel of his shoe onto this woman’s face and grind it and grind it and grind it until the blood spurted out or she started to say something.
He turned away and went back into the hall. They’d voted him off the governing board this last set of elections, and now they were reaping what they sowed. It served every last one of them right.
7
Fanny Bullman had a problem. It was not the kind of problem she would have talked to her friends about, or to her husband about. It was not the kind of problem most other people would think of as a “problem” at all. Problems were hard and material and intractable. They were not having enough money to pay the bills, or having an incurable disease, or losing your job. Sometimes they were smaller things, like having the car in the shop on a day you had to use it to go to your daughter’s dance rehearsal, or having to find a way to make three hundred cupcakes for the Brownie Christmas party when you only had two cupcake pans that cooked six cupcakes each. Problems were like puzzles. You took all the elements of them and stretched them out in front of you. Then you put the elements together in different ways until you came up with either a solution, or a course of action. This problem was nothing like that, and Fanny didn’t know what a solution would look like if she found it.
It didn’t help, of course, that the house felt more than empty. It felt hollowed out. It felt as if nobody was in it, not even herself. And Charlie hadn’t even been gone that long, this time.
The children were all wrapped up in their barn jackets now. Their backpacks were packed and zipped up and ready to go. Now it was only necessary to walk them out to the bus stop and wait until the school bus came along. Fanny did this every day, because she didn’t trust the Marsh girl from across the golf course. Whoever had decided to give that girl an automobile must have been crazy. She zipped around as if she were on a racetrack, and then came to screeching halts for no reason Fanny could see.
Sometimes Fanny tried to think her way back to what it had been like in high school, but she couldn’t really remember it. She couldn’t really remember college, either. It was all out in back there in the mist. It was not about things that had happened, but about the way she had been. And that, of course, was the problem.
Mindy’s backpack was pink and had Strawberry Shortcake on it. Josh’s backpack was black and had Darth Vader on it. Some of their friends were surprised that she allowed Josh to have Darth Vader on his backpack when he was only seven. She just couldn’t see the point in fighting the inevitable. Kids got the backpacks they wanted in the end. They got the video games they wanted, too. You could talk all you wanted about how it was a parent’s responsibility to choose what her children ate and watched and read, but the real world didn’t work that way.
She opened each of the backpacks in turn and carefully checked the contents of the brown paper bags she’d wrapped their lunches in. There were all kinds of rules for lunches these days, even though Josh and Mindy went to a public school. They were not allowed to have anything with peanuts, because one of the other children might be allergic. They were not allowed to have “junk food,” like bags of chips or candy. They were not allowed to have soda. Fanny was fairly sure that wasn’t the way it had been in her time, but all she could remember of her school lunches were the few times her mother had sent her in with sandwiches of cream cheese and jelly. She had really loved cream cheese and jelly. She had really hated peanut butter.
The lunch bags had bottles of Frutopia in them, and oranges, and bologna sandw
iches with mustard on whole wheat bread. The school didn’t like bologna sandwiches, but there was a point where you had to make compromises. Josh and Mindy wouldn’t eat sandwiches made out of nothing but vegetables, and they wouldn’t eat the multigrain everybody was supposed to prefer these days to keep them from getting fat.
Fanny zipped the backpacks up again and went into the family room. Josh and Mindy had turned the television on and were watching some kind of cartoon. The cartoon looked depressing and dull, but the children seemed riveted.
“Come on,” Fanny said. “If we don’t hurry, we’ll miss the bus. I don’t want to have to drive you to school today.”
She went over to the television set and turned it off. It was the only way she could get them to listen.
“Come on now,” she said.
The children got up off the floor, slowly, rolling a little and looking back at the dead black screen as if it were about to burst back into animation.
Fanny held out the backpacks and they took them, making some halfhearted whining complaints in the process. The complaints were so halfhearted, Fanny couldn’t figure out if they were about school or each other.
“Let’s go,” she said again. Then she double-checked to make sure their jackets were buttoned.
They would look, today, like every other child at the bus stop. That’s what elementary school was all about. Everybody wore the same clothes, and ate the same food, and played the same games. Everybody had the same birthday parties, too, and gave the same presents.
Fanny stopped for a moment and considered the possibility that she was going insane. The odd thing was, she didn’t think so. Her days drifted past her, one after the other, and nothing happened in them, but that did not make her insane. It couldn’t be insane to wonder about Charlie, or to wonder if the children would start asking where he had gone.
Mindy was looking through her jacket pockets, pulling out bits and pieces of Kleenex and stubs of pencils. She was frowning.
“It was boring this morning,” she said. “The lady with the pink car didn’t come.”
