Strangers

by Mort Castle

  Beth decided she’d prepare an espescially nice ending for this thankfully normal day. While the Louden family didn’t become enthusiastic over elaborate gourmet meals, they all, Kim included, liked unusual treatments of American standards. The window open over the sink, the kitchen fresh-smelling with a gentle breeze, Beth sat at the table, planning her menu: a tossed salad, zucchini, stuffed meatloaf with twice-baked potatoes and an almond-green bean casserole, and for dessert—yes, let’s get a bit fancy and creative!—a chocolate-mocha roll cake!

  The cake would take some time, so she set to work at it. Next week she would become a college student, a woman in “today’s real world,” but for right now, checking refrigerator and cabinets for ingredients, she was happy to be “a domestic-minded housewife,” Mrs. Michael Louden, cooking a good meal for her family.

  Upstairs, Marcy and Kim were in their room. Doctor’s orders were that Kim take it easy for another day or so, and “Mrs. Louden, if she has a headache, dizziness, nausea, anything at all, call right away,” so Beth told Kim to stay indoors.

  “You know,” Kim said, on her bed, leaning back on her elbows, knees bent and bare feet flat on the spread, “that was real dumb.”

  “What do you mean?” Marcy said. Like her mother, she’d changed clothes before leaving for the hospital and now, dressed in yellow sun suit, Marcy stood by the open window, back to Kim, the breeze ruffling her blond hair.

  “You know,” Kim said, “how you waved to me so I thought it was okay and then that guy zapped me.”

  “I didn’t see the car,” Marcy said quietly. “I thought it was okay.”

  “Then you’re blind,” Kim said.

  “I’m not blind,” Marcy said. She turned her head and squinted at Kim as a slanted ray of hazy sunlight struck her eyes. “I just didn’t see it, that’s all.”

  “For sure,” Kim said with a contemptuous sniff.

  Marcy moved to sit on the side of Kim’s bed. “Kim” she said, “Maybe it was my fault you got hurt, but I didn’t mean it. And I really am sorry. Don’t be mad at me, okay?”

  Kim didn’t reply.

  Marcy leaned forward and, as though sharing a grave secret, whispered, “You know, Daddy spanked me.” As soon as she said it, Marcy blushed.

  Kim’s eyes were big with surprise. “Wow! He spanked you? You never get it, you’re such a goody-goody.”

  Kim sat up and tapped her sister’s arm. “Hey,” Kim said, “I’m not mad at you now, okay?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “I want to give you something,” Marcy said.

  “What?”

  Marcy rose and went to the aquarium that housed the guinea pigs. She took out the white one, held it with her left hand under its belly, the other hand beneath its excited, kicking rear legs.

  “I want you to have Snowball,” Marcy said, handing the guinea pig to her sister. “He’s yours now.”

  Shaking her head, the tip of her tongue filling the gap of missing teeth in the bottom row, Kim said, “I can’t! Snowball’s yours!”

  “I’m giving him to you. I want you to have him.”

  Kim held out her hands. The guinea pig squealed in fright as he and his ownership were transferred from one girl to the other. “Thanks, Marcy,” Kim said. “Sometimes you’re a pretty good sister.”

  ««—»»

  “An ex-cellent re-past, my dear,” Michael drawled, folding his napkin and putting it to the side of the plate.

  They’d had supper in the dining room, white tablecloth and good china, and even candles. Beth, bright and fresh in a green skirt and ruffled, yellow blouse, smiled at Michael and said, “Will you please stop being W. C. Fields!”

  Would would you like me to be, wifey dear? Michael asked himself.

  “No, thanks,” Michael said to the offer of more cake or another cup of coffee. He pushed back his chair, and with the dramatic wave of a carnival barker, announced, “And now, fair ladies, for your delight and pleasure, we have a surprise, for you”—he pointed at Kim as though aiming a pistol “and you”—Marcy was temporarily in his sights—“and, last but not least, you!” He took aim at Beth, letting his thumb-hammer fall.

  Beth gave him a puzzled look while Marcy said, “Oh, Daddy,” and Kim demanded, “What is it?”

  He rolled his eyes at Kim. “I said it’s a surprise. If I tell you what it is, then it won’t be a surprise anymore. Now that makes sense, right?”

  Kim nodded.

  Michael rose, gesturing like a choir director to bring the group to their feet. “Come, my three wonderful women, and follow me.” In the kitchen, he opened the door to the basement rec room. “Please go downstairs and await my summons. And if anyone peeks before I’ve got it all ready, her head will turn into a giant turnip.”

  Marcy and Kim were both giggling and Beth, Michael noted, seemed as happily confused as the girls. Yes, he thought, wasn’t he one hell of a guy to bring such excitement into their miserable, moronic lives? Bet your ass, he had a goddamned warehouse full of all kinds of surprises for his dear family!

  Ten minutes later, Michael led them out the back way. Even as he was saying, “Ta-dah!” and waving toward the open garage door, Kim was running, shouting, “A bike! A new bike!”

  “Three speeds, hand brakes, everything a girl could want,” Michael said.

  So thrilled she was actually hopping, Kim asked, “Can I ride it now, Dad? Please?”

  Sure, pedal out to 394 and try for a truck this time, Michael thought. “Well,” Michael said, “you’re supposed to take it easy, so twice around the block will do it for tonight. Is that a deal?”

  “You got it!” Kim was off like a shot, zipping down the drive.

  “Now Marcy’s surprise,” Michael said. Inside, he told Beth to wait in the kitchen; she was forbidden to go to the living room under pain of becoming turnip-headed.

  Marcy’s gift was on the dresser in the girl’s room. “A television!”

  “Every American kid needs a television,” Michael said, tapping the plastic cabinet of the twelve-inch black and white set.

  Michael readied himself and, yes, there it was, Marcy’s exclamation for all situations:

  “Oh, Daddy!” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, thanking him again and again.

  It hadn’t been easy deciding what to buy for Marcy, with her dishwater personality, but hell, he needed to have something for her. He thought she seemed delighted but then again, a mouse like Marcy might have been equally satisfied with a pound of putty!

  Beth’s surprise—her surprises, that is—were perfect, Michael had no doubt. Downstairs, asking Beth to keep her eyes shut until he told her to look, Michael guided her from the kitchen to the living room, Beth softly laughing about how silly Michael was acting.

  “Now, when I count to three,” Michael said, “open your eyes! One… two…”

  Beth giggled.

  “…three…”

  Beth opened her eyes. Her hands formed a tent in front of her mouth, muffling her exclamation: “Oh, Michael!”

  On the end tables flanking the sofa stood the antique crystal lamps Beth had wanted so long. Their brass bases gleamed and the delicate, hanging prisms both captured and reflected a spectrum of diamond-bright, fairy-like colors.

  “They’re…they’re beautiful!”

  She thanked him with an exuberant hug and a kiss, made the obligatory comment, “You spent so much money!” obviously not displeased that he had, and then Michael said, “Well, glad I made all my ladies happy.”

  Michael explained he had about a half hour’s work that had to be done, but, as he started upstairs to his office, he turned back. “Beth,” he said, “have you seen anything of Zeller today?”

  “Hmm, no,” Beth said. “You know, I’m really ashamed to say it, but with everything going on, I didn’t think…”

  “Sure,” Michael said, starting for the front door. Before he reached it, he called back to Beth. “Say, how abo
ut going over to Brad’s with me? It might do him good to see the two of us, let him know we give a rap about how he’s doing.”

  “Of course,” Beth agreed. At Zeller’s, Michael rang the bell twice, knocked, and got no response.

  “Maybe he’s out,” Beth said.

  “I don’t think so,” Michael said. “Car’s here and there aren’t many places that Brad does go.”

  Michael knocked once more and then, pausing, he tried the doorknob. It turned.

  “Michael,” Beth said, her hand on his arm.

  Michael opened the door, stuck his head inside, and called, “Brad? You here Brad?”

  “Michael,” Beth said, “maybe something is wrong.”

  Something wrong? Michael thought. Whatever could have gone wrong for good old Brad Zeller?

  “I’ll take a look out here in the kitchen,” Michael said. “Why don’t you step down the hall and see what’s what?”

  “All right,” Beth said hesitantly.

  In the kitchen, Michael drummed his fingers on the table and waited. The bathroom was down the hall. Had he not been so intently listening, he would not have heard it. Beth’s outcry was pinched and weak, only his name, sliced in two distinct syllables.

  Then she screamed, his signal to race to her, a scream that grew louder as the pitch rose like a European police klaxon, that did not end until he got to her.

  She was gasping for air to scream once more. Her face was so white that the vein at her temple looked like a tattoo. Beth stood catatonically rigid in the washroom doorway, hands like claws on her cheeks as though she were about to rip at her flesh, eyes glitter-glazed circles of horror and shock.

  Michael did all the right things, pushing past her to check Brad—A corpse is a corpse is a corpse—taking Beth’s shoulders, ordering her to calm down, telling her they would call the police—“Let me speak to whoever’s in charge of the dead drunk squad”—saying, “Come on, Beth,” and “It’s all right, Beth,” and “That’s it, hold on, don’t faint,” walking her back to their house. “Just a few steps more, that’s the way.”

  And it was all he could do to prevent himself from putting his face close to hers, so close, and saying, “Surprise!”

  — | — | —

  NINE

  TWO UNIFORMED officers from the Park Estates Police Department and the paramedics arrived without sirens, their whirling lights fragmenting the neighborhood into coldly iridescent, expressionist angles and objects: a birdbath, jumping shadows cast by the limp of a tree, an advertising circular blowing across a lawn, the eyes of a prowling cat, Beth Louden’s face as she stood, with Michael, on the walk by their front door.

  “You’re the folks who called? The Loudens, isn’t it?” asked a slender man in a light tan suit. He’d pulled up in an unmarked Ford shortly after the others. He’d gone into Zeller’s home, stayed only a minute or so, and now, offering his hand to Michael, he explained he was Detective Charles Hogan from the county sheriff’s office. It was standard operating procedure for the county to check into all “deaths by misadventure.”

  Michael asked the detective to come in; it would be better to talk inside. And it wouldn’t be necessary for his wife to go—over there—would it? She was still pretty shaken.

  “I don’t think so,” Hogan said.

  Beth thought that, despite a more than slight resemblance to Don Knotts, Detective Hogan projected quiet competence. The three sat around the kitchen table, and Beth, with a perfunctory calm that surprised her, answered his questions. Hogan scratched notes in a pocket-sized leatherette book. Yes, she was the one who found Brad. An alcoholic? She couldn’t say that, not exactly, but yes, Brad often drank heavily.

  Beth sipped hot coffee. Michael had put up a pot. Hogan’s low-key, blandly efficient manner reassured her. He might have been an insurance representative writing up a policy. This was nothing out of the ordinary to him, Beth thought, and that somehow made it less awful for her. There’d been a tragic accident, but now there were proper steps to be taken. The world was still in balance.

  And then she wondered if, right now, next door, at this exact moment, Brad Zeller was being put on a stretcher and covered over and hauled away so that the right things could be done for him—to him. There was a quick and horrible image on her mental movie screen: that dent, blood crusted, in his forehead, and Brad’s face, the grinning sneer of his upper lip sucked in and drawn over his teeth, as though—death were mocking life.

  Beth blinked rapidly, eyes wet:

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Louden,” Detective Hogan said. “I’m just asking what has to be asked.”

  “I know that,” Beth said.

  “It’s all right, Beth,” Michael said, his hand on her arm. “The detective has his job to do. We’ve got to do all we can to help the police.”

  She glanced at Michael from the corner of her eye; saw him through the diamond lens of a tear. My God, she thought, this is unreal.

  Michael sounds as though he’s reciting lines from a TV script! Didn’t he understand that Brad Zeller was really dead—deadandgone—forever…

  No. She was upset. That’s the way she would think of this chaotic desperation—fear—dread she felt, this too real sense not that she was going mad but that the world around her had done so. She had to control herself. There was—Oh, God, it was grimly funny how the corniest lines came to mind!—“Nothing to fear but fear itself”—a cliché well suited to this moment, as apt as Michael’s “We’ve got to do all we can to help the police.”

  “I see,” Detective Hogan said, and Beth realized that he must have asked another question and that she had answered it.

  Now Hogan spoke to Michael. “You said you were over at Zeller’s the other night.”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “Brad was, well, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of him, but he was drunk and depressed on account of what happened to Dusty.”

  “Dusty?” Hogan said.

  “His dog,” Michael said. “Brad notified the police. I thought you knew about it.”

  Hogan shrugged his shoulders noncommittally. “Local report and I haven’t really touched base with the locals. What’s there to know, Mr. Louden? Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Sure,” Michael said. “Okay, I mean, anything I can do to help.”

  What is it? Beth demanded of herself. Why did she feel as though she were watching a stage play, a drama in which there was an actor portraying a policeman, and another, Michael, cast in the role of…of The Good Neighbor? The Hero?

  …or The Suspect! The Man Who Knows Too Much! The…

  Beth drank more coffee and scolded herself. Reality was quite bad enough without her imagination—her paranoia adding to it!

  “You know,” Michael was saying, “it does seem suspicious that one day Brad’s dog is killed and then the next day Brad is dead himself.”

  “Suspicious?” Hogan said.

  “I mean, I’m not a policeman, so maybe I shouldn’t use a word like that, but it is strange. Don’t you think it’s strange, Detective?”

  “Sure it’s strange,” Hogan said. “A lot of things are strange but that doesn’t mean they’re suspicious.”

  “Maybe I used the wrong word.”

  “Maybe,” Hogan said.

  Word games! They were playing word games, Beth thought, with the frustrating feeling of exclusion of a child hearing other youngsters speak pig-Latin, sounding almost as though they were talking English, but not quite. No, it wasn’t that. She was…upset. She was misinterpreting, finding uncalled-for connotations for every word, every phrase, then compounding the error by seeing nuances and new shades of meaning for a raised eyebrow or the tap of a finger on the table.

  “What time did you leave Zeller’s the other night, Mr. Louden?”

  Michael waved a hand. “I’m not sure. Maybe 7:30, maybe 8. It could have been later.”

  “Hmm,” Hogan said, nodding at his notebook without looking up at Michael. “Just as a guess, Zeller probably died w
ithin a couple hours of that. We’ll know more after the autopsy. Always do an autopsy for something like this. Would you say that Zeller was into a bad drunk when you came home?”

  “Because of what happened,” Michael said, “I would have to say that now, but I didn’t realize it then. You see, when I first went over there, Zeller was pretty out of it. I even had to help him get to the john. But later he seemed to come around. I thought it was okay to go.”

  Michael’s voice trailed off and then, suddenly, he slammed a fist on the table. Coffee sloshed over the rim of the cup he’d poured himself but from which he had not drunk. “I should have done something! It’s just that I’ve seen Brad drunk before and I figured he’d be okay, sleep it off like always, but this time, he’ll be sleeping if off forever. If I’d hauled him over here, put him to bed on the sofa in the rec room…

  Michael pushed back his chair. He rose, walked away, and then, back to the table, stood with his hands on the counter, head bowed and shoulder hunched. “Goddamnit, Brad Zeller was my friend and I…

  Michael turned, pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes glistened.

  Beth saw pain on Michael’s face, in his weary, defeated stance. He was blaming himself, she thought, playing that anguishing mind game “If only I had…” She had never seen her husband more vulnerable, more in need of her comfort, and she knew just how very much—trulyandalways—she loved Michael Louden.

  She got up and walked to him. Michael put an arm around her.

  “I am sorry, folks,” Hogan said. He flapped shut the notebook and rose. “I’ve bothered you enough. Thanks for the coffee.”

  “It’s all right,” Michael said. “And I’m sorry I got carried away. It’s just that Brad was a good man and…”

  He didn’t continue. Shrugging, Hogan said, “And something bad happened to him. I know. It works that way sometimes and we can beat our heads against the wall trying to come up with answers. The only good thing about pounding your head on the wall is that it feels so good when you stop. So do me a favor, Mr. Louden.”