EQMM, March-April 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  First, let me preface my story by telling you that none of us liked Wicked. He was an obnoxious little yappy dog, with long curly white hair that needed trimming and a propensity for peeing on anything vaguely foodlike, from a bag of groceries in the open trunk of a car to the kibble set out for the neighborhood cats. He barked most of the time he was awake. When he wasn't barking, he was yipping, a sad little high-pitched sound that was twice as annoying as any bark could be.

  Even Isabel, the dog he lived with, an elderly female mix about the size of a Lab, hated him. Isabel, who faithfully guarded our neighborhood hilltop for the past thirteen years, would slink away whenever Wicked was outside, as if to say, Don't look at me. I have nothing to do with that smelly, undisciplined little thing.

  None of us had much to do with Wicked, not even his so-called owner, Ike Maize. Ike had inherited the dog from his daughter, Roxy, who was going through a messy divorce. Ike and his wife Stella promised to care for Wicked while Roxy went back to California to move her things to Oregon.

  I had assumed Roxy would get an apartment when she got to Oregon. Instead, she showed up with the furniture and a six-month-old no one had told me about. The divorce wiped her out financially, so she moved in with her parents.

  And that meant Wicked stayed, too.

  I work at home and am usually immune to the neighborhood noise pollution. I'm not the kind of man who investigates each blaring radio or early- morning chain saw. Normally, I play my own stereo so loud that I don't hear much during the day.

  But I could hear Wicked. Nonstop. Barking, barking, yipping, and barking.

  By the end of the first day, I wanted to strangle the little thing. By the end of the third day, I spent more time glaring at Wicked than I did working. By the end of the week, I was actively plotting the dog's death.

  I'm an inventive plotter. The critics say that's one of my (only) strengths as a novelist. In fact, they claim I've been on the bestseller list for the past ten years because I can plot better than anyone else in the business.

  Outwardly, my home does not reflect the wealth that my plotting skills have brought me. I kept the same footprint—as my realtor likes to say—and built up to make three full stories. It's quite a redesign, but it fits into the neighborhood—or it pretends to.

  And that's all that matters to me.

  Because I don't want to leave the Crest Hill subdivision. This is the first house I ever bought—and I vowed not to sell it. Back then, it was a simple split level, built in 1972, and not remodeled in twenty years. I pulled up the orange and green shag carpeting, remodeled the kitchen by myself, and turned the free-standing garage into my writing office, which I still use without many modifications.

  In fact, the free-standing garage/office is the problem. The walls are thin because here on the temperate Oregon Coast, houses don't need insulation. I haven't replaced the cheap windows I put in during my first redesign, which is why I can hear that early morning chain saw and the blaring truck radio.

  Normally, I don't mind.

  But that was before Wicked.

  It was all before Wicked, who, oddly enough, changed my view of the neighborhood forever.

  * * * *

  The Crest Hill subdivision was built on a sandy ridgeline, 700 feet above sea level, several blocks east of the Pacific Ocean. The story of the subdivision is a story of neighbors—common in most places around the country, but extremely uncommon here on the Oregon Coast. In Seavy Village, three out of four houses are vacation rentals or second homes. These houses are full every Fourth of July. Two-thirds are full on Thanksgiving. A third are full during spring break.

  Seavy Village has housing for forty thousand people, and hotel rooms for twice that many, but its year-round population is 7,000. Most neighborhoods are entirely empty most of the time or have only one year-round family residing on their quiet streets.

  Crest Hill subdivision has always been different. We are a small enclave in a sea of empty houses. All twenty houses in Crest Hill are owner-occupied.

  For the most part, we get along. We have an annual barbeque at Dave the plumber's. When we see each other during the rest of the year, we always wave. If we have time, we stop on the street and chat.

  Not a week goes by without a group of us gathered in front of the mailboxes, exchanging the village gossip and catching up on each other's lives. We watch out for each other as best we can, and sometimes we even babysit each other's children or feed the pets during the occasional long weekend.

  When my money started pouring in—and it did pour: one minute I was scrambling to make my mortgage, the next I was talking to my broker about various places to store excess cash—I could have built a true mansion on a cliff face overlooking the ocean. But every bare piece of property I looked at, every tumbledown house that could be replaced with something better, existed in that sea of empty houses.

  I didn't like that much isolation, so I stayed in Crest Hill, along with Ike and Stella next-door, the Sandersons one house up, old Mrs. Gailton across the street, and Annalita Carmica on the corner. We formed the foundation of the neighborhood, and over time we acquired even more full-timers. Dave the plumber and his wife (whose name I always forget), Joyce the Hollywood producer who retired to her dream house, and the McMillians who bought, for a song, a McMansion that lost its view to the six-plex.

  We were a pretty quiet bunch who lived in a very safe place—or so I thought, in those days before Wicked moved in.

  * * * *

  The morning Wicked disappeared seemed like any other. I had trudged through the rain from my back door to my free-standing office, a hot mug of coffee in one hand and an offering to the Goddess in the other.

  The Goddess was the elderly cat who lived alone in my office. She bit the hand that fed her each and every day. I was inordinately fond of her, enough that I put up with her nasty temper and her inability to get along with anyone, including me.

  She spent that morning in the library window, watching Wicked, as she often did. She hated the barking more than I did. Once, she had seen him peeing on one of her dishes that I had set down outside. She had pushed the screen out of the window, then attacked him, tearing him up so thoroughly that I had to go over to Ike and Stella's and offer to pay for Wicked's trip to the vet.

  That's when I learned how much Ike hated Wicked.

  "Let the damn dog suffer,” he said. “He's got to learn that the world isn't his toilet."

  During Wicked's stay on the hilltop, the Goddess glared out the library window—the only room in my office that had a good view of Wicked's yard—and occasionally made little growling noises. Mostly, she seemed to believe if she stared hard enough, Wicked would feel her anger and shut up.

  It spoke to my desperation that daily I wished she did have magical powers. I wanted something to shut that damn dog up.

  About eleven o'clock that morning, I got my wish. Wicked let out one of his sad yips, followed by the strangest bark I'd ever heard. It was high-pitched and sharp, almost sounding startled. Then he let out a long half-bark, half-yowl that seemed more like a human scream than a noise any dog was trained to make.

  That sound didn't end. It got cut off. I leaned back in my office chair and listened, waiting for the barking to begin again.

  It didn't.

  Instead, I heard the squeal of truck tires against gravel. Rocks pelted my newly built fence (good fences make good neighbors; they also keep out little peeing yappy dogs).

  Then silence.

  After a moment, the Goddess sprinted across my desk. She landed in my lap, meowed in my face, and pawed at my hands. I hadn't seen her that agitated since a yellow tom sprayed one of the rose bushes outside the office's sliding glass doors. So I followed her into the library.

  She jumped onto the window ledge and pressed her face against the glass.

  I peered out. From this one window, I could see over the fence and into the Maizes’ yard. No truck sat in the driveway, even though I had heard one. Isabel, th
e elderly dog, was sitting on the walkway to the back door, head tilted to one side.

  I didn't see Wicked.

  The Goddess was murping, a sound she made when something in her universe was out of order. I frowned, my stomach knotting in a little ball.

  I realized I recognized that sequence of sounds.

  I hadn't heard it in years, not since the Maizes’ daughter was little and Ike drove up the driveway too fast one afternoon, running over one of their cats.

  He scooped the bleeding, broken creature into his arms, placed it on the floor of the truck, and then backed out of the driveway, peeling away as fast as his old Ford one-ton could go.

  He made it to the vet's in record time, but it was still too late. He'd crushed his daughter's favorite cat beneath the wheels of his truck and it took months for her to forgive him.

  Now, I figured the same thing had happened. Right in the middle of her messy divorce, one that threatened to spill into a long custody battle over her own daughter, her father runs over the dog she has loved since she moved away from home.

  Ike had to be devastated.

  I really didn't want to be there for him—there are some things that are beyond neighborly, even in Crest Hill subdivision—but I knew I had to investigate, just in case my writerly imagination had leaped to the wrong conclusion.

  I let myself out of the office. The morning rain had turned into a light drizzle, the kind that looks harmless but actually can soak you within five minutes.

  Red and gold leaves littered my driveway. Sometime during the night, a raccoon had clearly pulled part of a white plastic trash bag through the slight hole in my garbage can's lid, scattering plastic food containers and paper plates across the yard.

  I ignored the mess and walked to the fence. It was a picket fence, painted brown, with the pickets rising over six feet, so that few people could see over the top of them. I pulled open the gate in the center and stepped onto the Maizes’ unpaved driveway.

  The rainstorm had left the ground so wet that the retreating truck had torn deep grooves in the muck. I walked to the edge of them, expecting to see some pieces of white curly hair ground into the dirt or maybe a bit of blood on the already wet rocks. Maybe even a smashed collar or the impression of a small dog's body in the dirt.

  To my disappointment, I saw none of that. I didn't even see Ike's footprints in the muddy gravel, although mine were clearly visible.

  I frowned and looked up. Isabel, who was used to me, stared at me, a matching frown on her large doggy face. I couldn't tell if she was perplexed to see me standing on her driveway or if the truck's quick retreat had surprised her.

  I clasped my hands behind my back and walked farther up the driveway, so that I could peer inside the garage. No injured Wicked lying on his side on the concrete. No impish brown eyes peering at me through the small window beside the garage door.

  Nothing barked, nothing yipped.

  The silence was profound.

  Isabel sighed, seemingly in relief, and put her head between her paws. Again, I couldn't understand the reason for her emotion. Relief that a human was on the case? Or relief that Wicked had finally shut up?

  Or both?

  I felt no relief. The depth of my Wicked hatred surprised me. Part of me really wanted to see that dog dead. I had never actively wished anything dead before, not even the raccoons who constantly defeated each garbage can I bought.

  I had hoped to find evidence of that dog's demise.

  Finding none disappointed me.

  But at least something had forced Wicked to become quiet. As I peered into my neighbor's garage, I realized I should accept the gift.

  I hurried back to my office—after stopping briefly to clean up after the raccoons—and had the most productive day I'd had in the month and a half since Wicked had moved in.

  * * * *

  The silence didn't last.

  As I microwaved the takeout I picked up for dinner, someone knocked on my door. Even though our neighborhood was close, very few people knocked. The UPS guy knocked every morning, and the newspaper delivery boy knocked once a month, but almost no one else came to the door.

  I pressed Stop on the microwave and walked to the door. The door was solid- core, with no peephole, something I'd meant to remedy. So opening it always contained, for me, a small bit of adventure.

  Someday, my vivid thriller-writer's imagination told me, the person on the other side of that knock would be a serial killer, coming to attack me. My logical mind told me that serial killers didn't knock, but my vivid imagination would counter with the fact that thieves often did, just to see if someone was home.

  Fortunately, the person waiting on my stoop wasn't a serial killer or a thief.

  It was Ike.

  He was a big man with long, graying hair that showed his hippie roots. He slouched on a good day, but this evening, he was nearly bent in half.

  He gave me a sheepish half-smile. “I don't suppose I can ask you a question."

  "Sure,” I said. “Come on in."

  I stepped back and he walked in, careful to stay on the throw rug I put over the hardwood at the start of every rainy season. Even though we had been neighbors for more than fifteen years, we hardly went inside each other's homes. I couldn't remember the last time he had been in mine.

  He looked at his mud-covered shoes as he said, “My daughter sent me over here. Seems Wicked is missing."

  His voice had the right combination of sincerity and loss, but he wasn't meeting my gaze.

  "Wicked stopped barking about eleven this morning,” I said.

  Ike looked up, frowning at me much the way his elderly dog had when I stood in their driveway.

  I told Ike the entire story, such as it was, leaving out, of course, the Goddess's odd attack and her murping sounds, as well as my desire to see Wicked blood seeping into the muddy tire prints.

  "A truck?” Ike repeated.

  "I thought maybe it was you,” I said. “You know, that whole incident with the cat."

  He winced. “No one lets me forget that. I didn't mean to hit the damn thing."

  "No one ever does,” I said, then realized I wasn't being neighborly. “You want a beer?"

  "I want an entire keg,” he said tiredly. Then he smiled at me. “But a bottle will do."

  I got him a Rogue Brewery Pale Ale from the fridge, then kicked out one of the dining room chairs. “Sit for a minute."

  "I'll track all over,” he said.

  "Who cares?” I said, catching myself before I added, I have a housekeeper who worries about such things. I had a lot more money than my neighbors—hell, these days, I had more money than the entire town—but I didn't try to call attention to that.

  Although it was hard not to notice in my maple and cherry kitchen, with the matching formal dining table, the brand new appliances, and every cooking gadget known to man lining the kitchen counters. Not that they saw those.

  What they usually saw was my one and only toy. My late-model Jag, which I replaced each and every year.

  He sat down and took a sip from the long-neck bottle.

  "That goddamn dog,” he said. “If my karma determined that I had to run over only one animal with my truck, why did it have to be Roxy's kitten? Why the hell couldn't it have been Wicked?"

  "If the neighborhood had known you were looking for volunteers . . . “ I said, letting my words trail off.

  He looked up at me, startled. Then he realized I was joking. He leaned against the table, resting his elbow against the tablecloth my housekeeper insisted on changing every Tuesday

  "There were times I might've looked,” he said. “The Bastard"—that was his nickname for his daughter's soon-to-be ex—"trained the little creep, or didn't train it, as the case may be. Wicked loves my daughter and that baby, and will guard them with his little doggy life, but other than that, he isn't a dog at all. He's a goddamn menace. He doesn't shut up, he pees all over everything, he tears up the furniture."

  "He's still
a puppy,” I said, not exactly sure why I was making excuses for a dog I hated.

  "A puppy?” Ike said, sitting upright. “Are you kidding? Wicked is three years old. I've been trying to train him all month. It's not working."

  Obviously, I nearly said, but didn't. No sense in causing my neighbor more pain.

  "I haven't heard Wicked since that truck,” I said. “You'd think if he got injured or snuck into the woods, we'd hear him."

  "You'd think the entire town would hear him,” Ike said. “I'm hoping the little bastard ran off."

  The little bastard, trained by the Bastard. I had never put Ike's language together before. He hated Wicked not just because he was an uncontrollable dog, but also because the dog represented an uncontrollable soon-to-be-ex son-in-law.

  "If Wicked did run off,” I said, “he did so chasing that truck. Silently."

  "That dog isn't quiet about anything,” Ike said. Then he paused for a moment before adding, “You thought I was driving that truck?"

  I nodded.

  His frown grew deeper. “Not many trucks sound like mine. Did you see it?"

  "Nope,” I said, taking another sip of my ale. “I heard it. It sounded big and heavy, like yours does when it comes up the driveway. But you usually don't peel out. In fact, the only time I ever heard you peel away down the driveway was—"

  "The cat incident,” he said tiredly. “I know."

  He started to take a sip from his beer, and stopped.

  "The Bastard,” he said.

  "Hmmm?” I asked. I wasn't sure if he was talking about the soon-to-be-ex or the little dog.

  "The Bastard,” Ike said to me, slowly, like he was having a realization. “He used to peel."

  I sipped. Thought. Remembered.

  He did peel. It was one of the noises I had gotten used to. Roxy had started dating the Bastard in high school. It became one of those neighborhood dramas, something everyone in Crest Hill subdivision talked about, since the Bastard came from a family of do-nothings on the wrong side of town.

  In a town of seven thousand, the wrong side is pretty low-key. We don't have murderers, thieves, or knife-wielding maniacs. Our do-nothings are well named. They're freeloaders who try to live on county money without doing any work. If they do get a job, from an unsuspecting out-of-towner, they lose that job within the month.