THE POLICY

by Bentley Little

  Beth laughed.

  It had been a while since she’d been able to laugh about that subject, and her friend had obviously noticed the change. She didn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed, but in a way she was glad that her love life had taken a turn for the better, that she had once again rejoined the living.

  That she had met Hunt.

  Hunt.

  He was different from other men she’d gone out with since Tad—and different from Tad himself. Tad had been handsome, successful, and charming, but he was also petty, controlling, and irredeemably self-obsessed. Hunt was mellower and more even-tempered. Kinder, she supposed. Nicer. Although those were not necessarily the qualities she would have said she was looking for in a man. He was also, despite his apparent lack of ambition, much smarter than Tad, and that appealed to her greatly. Most important, though, Hunt made her happy. She liked being with him, looked forward to seeing him, and it was that indefinable intangible that cemented her feelings and made her believe that they could make it over the long haul.

  If it were up to her, they would have moved in together immediately, but she understood his reluctance to proceed too quickly. He was gun-shy after his divorce. Despite her own emotional history, she felt no such hesitation. She’d always been willing to take chances, and she’d always been one to make quick decisions.

  And she’d decided that first night at Stacy and Joel’s that Hunt was a keeper.

  A trendy-looking woman who could have been a fashion model strode out of Victoria’s Secret and nearly ran into her. The woman was talking into her cell phone, and she barely acknowledged them as she breezed past and continued on her way. “No, Tristan,” she said. “After swimming lessons you have karate, and then tomorrow is your craft class…”

  “Did you see that?” Beth asked incredulously.

  “Did you hear that?” Stacy replied.

  “Yeah. I feel sorry for her son.”

  “Children today are so overscheduled. They all have gymnastics and dance class and piano lessons and karate practice and soccer practice. We’ve tried to keep that to a minimum with Lil, but even so, she’s in Brownies and signed up for band. It’s hard to avoid it. Things aren’t like they were when we were kids. Girls these days don’t have time to just hang out at the mall or sit in each others’ rooms and gossip and try on different nail polish.”

  “That’s kind of sad, isn’t it? There’s enough of that when you become an adult. Children at least should be able to have some unstructured time. Let kids be kids.”

  Stacy nodded. “And time flies by so fast. It seems like just yesterday Lilly was in diapers. Now she’s only a few years away from being a teenager.”

  “You’ve done a great job with her, though. She’s a fantastic girl.”

  “Yeah. She is.” Stacy glanced slyly over at Beth. “Have you ever thought about having children?”

  “Stace!”

  She held up her hands defensively. “In a general way, I mean. Not anything specific, not necessarily with Hunt. I was just wondering if you ever see yourself as a mother somewhere down the line.”

  “Since my clock’s ticking.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, I did. And yes, of course I’ve thought about it In a general, nonspecific way.” She paused, smiled. “And recently in a not so general way.”

  “Aha!” Stacy grinned.

  “He could be the one.”

  “Valley Girl.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “At the end of Valley Girl when Nicolas Cage is walking out of the prom with the girl, the band on stage, Josie Cotton, I think, starts singing this song: ‘He could be the one, he could be the one.’” She must have seen the blank expression on Beth’s face. “Sorry. Before your time, I guess.”

  “I’m not that much younger than you.”

  “Take your compliments where you can get them.”

  “Mommy!” Lilly called.

  As the two of them walked up, the girl was peering through the front window of a pet store at a trio of orange kittens who were rolling across a carpeted shelf, playing.

  “Can we get a cat?”

  “You have to ask your father,” Stacy said. “You know that.”

  “That means no.”

  “I told you before, if you can prove to him that you’re responsible enough to care for a pet, he’ll let you have one.”

  “But I can’t prove that I can take care of a pet unless I have a pet! It’s a catch twenty-two.”

  Stacy laughed. “Catch twenty-two? Where did you hear that?”

  “I listen,” Lilly said. “I pay attention.”

  “Little pitchers,” Beth warned, smiling.

  “What about Hunt?” Stacy asked. “Do you think he likes cats?”

  “He will,” Beth promised. “He will.”

  “Courtney!”

  Beth put her packages down on the kitchen table and looked around for the cat. Usually, he greeted her the second she walked through the door. But the rattle of keys in the lock and her own entry noises had not drawn out the animal this time, so she called out again: “Courtney!”

  There was a meow from the living room, and she followed the sound. “Courtney?” she said. He was sitting in front of the entrance to the hall, stock-still, staring fixedly toward her bedroom at the far end. Beth felt an involuntary shiver of fear, an emotion she refused to acknowledge. “What are you doing?” she asked, picking up the cat. Courtney’s muscles were stiff, tense. She held him in front of her face, looked into his green eyes, and he relaxed, meowing happily at her.

  “Let’s go get a snack.” She carried him back into the kitchen. She didn’t know why he had been so tense, didn’t know what he thought was down the hall, but it creeped her out, and she didn’t want to go down there just now.

  She wished Hunt were here.

  That was another reason she wanted him to move in with her, though it was not something she had consciously articulated even to herself. She’d been having weird feelings about the house lately, little moments here and there where she was spooked or uneasy. It was probably the result of living alone for too long, something she was doing to herself, but it was still disconcerting, and she’d feel a lot better if Hunt were with her.

  Beth grabbed the Friskies box from the cupboard and poured some into Courtney’s bowl. The cat immediately started chomping.

  “Let’s see what we bought today,” she said, wanting to hear a voice in the house, any voice, even if it was hers. She dug through the first sack. “New tennies. And new socks. Finally.” She opened the second bag. “Jeans! Now I’ll be able to button my pants again.”

  From somewhere in the back of the house—her bedroom, it sounded like—came a tapping, a low but insistent knocking, as of wood upon wood, that seemed far too loud in the silence.

  Courtney growled, his back arched, and moved away from his bowl.

  It was nothing, Beth told herself. But as she ran through a list of possibilities in her mind—water pipes, kids outside, settling house, wind, rats—none of them seemed plausible.

  What did seem plausible?

  Ghosts.

  She wasn’t going to go there, she didn’t want to think about that. But she was thinking about it. And though it was midday, though the drapes were all open, the interior of the house seemed dark, forbidding. Through the kitchen window, she could see the world outside: her car, the Valdezes’ yard next door, an airplane in the sky. Normal everyday sights that suddenly seemed a million miles away.

  Beth opened the kitchen utensils drawer, drew out a long carving knife. Gripping it tightly, she walked out of the kitchen, through the living room, and with only a slight pause, into the hallway. The tapping had stopped for a moment, like a cricket alerted to the presence of an intruder, but it resumed almost immediately, and she could tell now where the noise came from: the guest room.

  She moved forward slowly, trying not to make any noise. The guest room door was cl
osed, though she always left it open, and Beth stood in front of it, listening to the low knocking inside. She didn’t know what to expect, but the image that came to her mind was a scene from a children’s book, a scary story about a house haunted by the ghost of an old cobbler. She imagined going into the room to find a wizened figure in the far corner, a white-haired wraith with a grinning death’s-head face, sitting in an ancient chair next to a small table, obsessively working on a pair of spectral shoes.

  The tapping grew softer… slowed… stopped. Then returned full force, a loud knocking that made her think of huge green knuckles rapping on a door, demanding entrance.

  Instinct was telling her to run, get out of the house, get help, but she held her ground, forced herself to remain in place.

  Steeling herself, she opened the door and walked inside.

  There was nothing there.

  FOUR

  1

  The day was bad from the get-go.

  It was a Monday, to begin with—always the worst day of the week. And when Hunt arrived at the maintenance yard for the assignment meeting with Steve, he learned that there’d been a complaint lodged against them by an elderly woman who said that chips expelled from their woodchipper had damaged the hood of her parked Cadillac—not a good development when one member of the Board of Supervisors was already making noises about contracting out maintenance services.

  Steve, typically, was furious. “Do you know how this makes me look?” he yelled at them. “Every time you jackoffs screw up, it’s a black mark on my record. And I don’t want to take the heat for your incompetence. Ever hear the phrase ‘Shape up or ship out’?”

  “Ever think that maybe the old biddy’s lying?” Edward countered. “Maybe she wants a free paint job and wants it on the county’s dime?”

  Steve met his eyes, stared him down. “You really think that’s the case? You think that lady researched the type of equipment we use, decided that the chipper’s the most likely candidate for car damage, and now she’s claiming it caused scratches to her paint job because she wants to grift the county out of a couple hundred bucks? Huh?”

  “No,” Edward admitted.

  “No.”

  “Hey,” Jorge offered. “Accidents happen.”

  “Well, they’d better not happen on my watch, and they’d better not happen on your shift. Got me?”

  They said they did.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, when he, Edward, and Jorge reached the stand of sycamores where they were to work for the next three days, they discovered that someone—teenagers or U of A frat boys most likely—had overturned a Porta Potti and dragged it around the dirt support road before messily smashing it against one of the trees.

  But that was not the worst of it.

  No, the worst was when he arrived home that evening to find the front door wide open and his house trashed.

  He stepped carefully inside. The stereo was gone, he noticed instantly, though whoever had taken it had left the speakers. Likewise, his TV, VCR, and DVD player were missing. He didn’t know if the thieves had taken any of his books, videotapes, CDs, records, or DVDs, but they had certainly made a mess of them, knocking over bookcases, clearing shelves, throwing everything onto the floor. In the kitchen, the contents of the cupboards and refrigerator were strewn over the linoleum, the breakfast table smashed. He was dialing 911 on his cell phone even as he walked gingerly through the debris and into the hallway. He’d been using the second bedroom for storage and there wasn’t much in it: a few boxes, his luggage, wood-and-block shelving filled with extra records. That room appeared to be untouched. But the master bedroom was a shambles. The drawers of his dresser had been pulled out, their contents dumped on the floor. The mirror over the dresser had been smashed, and the mattress of his bed had been sliced open, the stuffing welling out from parallel incisions like blood from open wounds.

  “I want to report a break-in,” he told the police dispatcher who answered his call. He described the scene, said the perpetrators no longer seemed to be in the house, then gave his name and address. Someone would be right over, the dispatcher promised, don’t touch anything, there might be fingerprints or other evidence.

  Before he even finished the call, he heard the sound of a siren from somewhere to the north, and a few minutes later, two police cars pulled in to the driveway. He made his way back through the wreckage, and once outside, found himself staring with suspicion at the white-trash shack next door. He was tempted to tell the police that as far as he was concerned, those losers should be considered the prime suspects. But he knew he was being irrational, and after giving the arriving officers the information they asked for, he stepped aside and let them do their work.

  He did call Joel and Beth from the front yard, and while a machine answered at Joel’s, Beth was already home from work and immediately drove over.

  “Oh my God,” she said when she arrived and saw the extent of the damage. The forensics team was still dusting for prints and searching through the debris for evidence. “Who do you think did this?”

  “I have no idea,” he admitted. The presence of police cars had piqued the interest of his neighbors, and though none of them had been brave enough to come up to him and ask what was going on, a growing line of people stood on both sides of his property, squinting at the house and talking amongst themselves. They looked as clueless as he felt, and against his will, he had to admit that his neighbors had probably not been the ones to break into his place.

  But who, then? And why?

  Immediately after calling Beth, he had phoned his landlord to explain what had happened, and the man arrived now in a cloud of dust and a clatter of gravel. Leaping out of his pickup truck as though the seat were burning his ass, Sid Sayers ignored Hunt and Beth and the gathered crowd, striding up the porch and directly into the house, “Who’s in charge here?” he demanded. “Who’s in charge of this case?”

  He emerged several seconds later with Lieutenant Badham the one who had interviewed Hunt about the damage. The lieutenant led him firmly onto the porch so the forensics investigators could continue their examination of the rooms, but he remained to answer all of Sayers’s questions.

  Afterward, the landlord came over to where he and Beth stood in the driveway, and the three of them stared silently at the house for a moment.

  “You have any enemies?” Sayers asked suspiciously.

  Hunt shook his head. “Not to my knowledge, no.”

  “What about those piece a crap no-count neighbors? Have any run-ins with them?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know what, then.”

  The police finished soon after, allowing everyone back in. Sayers got a Polaroid camera from his pickup and took his own photos of the home’s interior. He had insurance, but other than broken windows the building didn’t appear to have sustained any structural damage. The real damage was to Hunt’s belongings. He had rental insurance, though, and the landlord suggested that he contact his insurance company and have them send out an adjuster ASAP. Hunt just hoped that he had enough to take care of all this. Only last night a representative from All Homes had called him to suggest that he increase his coverage, and he’d hung up on the man, saying that he wasn’t interested.

  He didn’t know his policy number, didn’t even know where his policy was in all this mess, but he knew the name of the insurance company, so he called Information to get the phone number, and dialed it.

  He explained what had happened, gave his name and social security number, and the phone rep looked up his policy. After verifying that he was who he said he was by providing his date of birth and mother’s maiden name, he was told that he had coverage for the loss of up to ten thousand dollars’ worth of personal property.

  Ten thousand. That might not cover all of it but it was close enough for government work. Maybe he wouldn’t need that extra insurance after all.

  The phone rep took down some additional information, then explained the claims process and s
aid that a living allowance of sixty dollars a day, up to a thousand dollars total over the life of the policy, would be provided so that Hunt could stay in a motel while restoration work was performed.

  “An adjuster will be out to look at the rental unit tomorrow morning, and once he determines the extent of the damage and files a report, we’ll arrange to have everything cleaned up. Your home should be looking as good as new by the end of the week.”

  “The adjuster’ll be coming tomorrow morning?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m not sure I can get off work tomorrow. Wednesday would be better.”

  “There’s no need for you to take off work.”

  “I have to be there.”

  “It’s not necessary. Leave a key under the that, and the adjuster will let himself in. He does this every day. We’ll call you back with the estimate or fax you a copy of the report if you wish. Just leave a number where you can be reached. A cell phone number if you have it, or a work number.”

  “But when you’re cleaning up—”

  “Don’t worry. The company we use is really good. They’ll salvage whatever’s salvageable, call you on anything questionable or personal, and replace the rest. If there are important papers, documents, or items of sentimental value that you wish to retain, I suggest you retrieve them now and take them with you. Otherwise, simply leave a note taped or tacked to the inside of the front door with a list of things you do not want replaced, and it will be taken care of.”

  Hunt borrowed a pen and scrap of paper from Beth and, writing against the living room wall, jotted down his claim number and the name of the representative with whom he’d been talking.

  “So what’s the news?” Beth asked after he’d hung up.

  He told her.

  “They’re going to do it while you’re at work?” She frowned. “You have to be there to supervise.”

  “That’s what I said. I don’t want some stranger going through all my stuff. But the insurance company said this is a routine procedure for them, they do it all the time, and they don’t need me there.”