Bad Move

by Linwood Barclay

  Earl had been looking down the opposite side of the street, a couple of houses past Trixie's. It was a guy going door to door. Tall and thin, short gray hair, about fifty I figured, armed with a clipboard. He was too casually dressed, in jeans and hiking boots and a plaid shirt, to be anyone official.

  “Beats me,” I said. He had drawn a woman to the door, who listened, hanging her head out while she held the door open a foot, while he went through some spiel.

  “I'm betting driveway resurfacing,” Earl said. “Every other day, some asshole wants to resurface my driveway.”

  The woman was shaking her head no, and the man took it well, nodding politely. He was moving on to the next house when he saw me and Earl. “Hey,” he said, waving.

  “Or ducts,” Earl said to me. “Maybe he want to clean your ducts.”

  “I don't have any ducks,” I said. “I don't even have chickens.”

  “You guys got a moment?” the man said, only a couple of yards away now. We shrugged, sure.

  “My name's Samuel Spender,” he said. “I'm with the Willow Creek Preservation Society.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I didn't give my name. Earl didn't give his either.

  “I'm trying to collect names for a petition,” Spender said. “To protect the creek.”

  “From what?” I asked.

  “From development. Willow Creek is an environmentally sensitive area and one of the last unspoiled areas in Oakwood, but there are plans to build hundreds of homes backing right onto the creek, which will threaten a variety of species, including the Mississauga salamander.”

  “Who?” It was the first word from Earl.

  “Here's a picture,” Spender said, releasing a snapshot from under the clip of his clipboard. We looked at a four-legged, pale green creature with oversized eyes resting in a person's hand.

  “Looks like a lizard,” Earl said.

  “It's a salamander,” Spender said. “Very rare. And threatened by greedy developers who value profit over the environment.” He thrust the clipboard toward us, which held a lined sheet with about twenty signatures on it. There were other pages underneath, but whether they were blank or filled with names I couldn't tell.

  I hate signing petitions, even for things I believe in. But when it's an issue where I don't feel fully informed, I have a standard dodge. I said to Spender, “Do you have any literature you could leave me, so I could read up on it?”

  “Yeah,” said Earl. “Likewise.”

  Something died in Spender's eyes. He knew he'd lost us. “Just read The Suburban. They've been following the story pretty closely. The big-city papers, like The Metropolitan, they don't give a shit because they're owned by the same corporations that put up the money for these developments.”

  This didn't seem like a good time to mention where my wife worked. Spender thanked us for our time and turned back for the sidewalk to resume door-knocking. “That house?” I said, pointing. “That's mine, so you can skip it.”

  “Salamanders,” Earl said to me quietly. “Think you can barbecue them?”

  “They'd probably slip through the grills,” I said.

  We chatted a moment longer. I told Earl, even though he hadn't asked, that Paul intended to pursue his interest in landscaping, maybe go to college someday for landscape design. It was, for me, a surprising development. Most kids his age wanted to design video games.

  “He's good,” Earl offered. “He doesn't mind getting his hands in the dirt.”

  “It's not my thing. Writers, you put a shovel in our hands, we start whining about blisters after five minutes.”

  It was looking very much as though Sarah was not going to come to our front door and retrieve her keys. I felt I'd given her long enough to redeem herself, told Earl I had to go, and headed back to our house. On my way in, I took Sarah's set of keys from the lock and slid them into the front pocket of my jeans. I could hear her in the kitchen, and called out, “Hey!”

  “Back here,” she said. It was a good-sized kitchen, with a bay window looking out onto the backyard, lots of counter space, and a dark spot in the ceiling above the double sink, where water from our improperly tiled shower stall had dripped down over several months. I tried not to look up at it too often; it made me crazy. I had to go over to the home sales office and make a fuss.

  My earlier theory that Sarah had come through the front door weighed down with groceries was right. Empty bags littered the top of the kitchen counter. Some carrots and milk still had to be put into the fridge.

  I turned to the fridge, which I seemed to recall was white, but was covered with so many magnets and pizza coupons and snapshots that it was hard to be sure. A large part of the door was taken up by a calendar that mapped out our lives a month at a time. It was on here that we recorded dental appointments, Sarah's shifts, lunches with my editor, dinners with friends, all in erasable marker. I noticed, just before I opened the door to put away the carrots and milk, that we were to attend an interview with Paul's science teacher in a little over a week. And a couple of days after that, Sarah's birthday was indicated with stars and exclamation points, drawn by her.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “I heard about the thing, the shooting, on the radio,” I said.

  Sarah shrugged. “They're gonna take one story for the front, do a color piece for the front of Metro.”

  “Uh-huh.” I had my hand in my pocket, running my fingers over the keys. “You got anything left out in the car that needs to come in?”

  “Nope, that's it, I'm done. I shopped, you can cook. I've had it.” She'd worked nearly a double shift in the newsroom.

  “What am I making?”

  “There's chicken, I got some burgers, salad, whatever. I'm beat.”

  This particular week, Sarah was on a shift where she had to be at the office by six, which meant she was up by half past four in the morning.

  “Did you bring in your briefcase?” I thought mentioning the items she typically carries into the house with her might help jog her memory about the keys.

  “I got it,” she said, sitting down on one of the kitchen chairs and taking off her shoes.

  “You wanna beer?” I asked.

  “If it comes with a foot massage,” Sarah said. I grabbed one from the fridge, twisted off the cap, and handed it to her.

  “Massage to follow,” I said. “I got something I gotta do. Back in a minute.”

  Sarah didn't bother to ask what, and took a sip of the beer instead. I slipped out the front door, used her keys to unlock her Camry, and backed out of the drive. I didn't need to go very far. Just down to the end of Chancery, then a right onto Lilac, just down from the mailbox. Far enough around the corner that the car wouldn't be visible from our place, even if you went and stood at the end of the driveway. I pulled it up close to the curb, made sure all the windows were up, locked it, and jogged back to the house, passing Spender, Defender of the Salamander, on the way. Sarah was still at the kitchen table when I came in.

  “Where'd you go?”

  “I bought some printer paper today and left it in the car,” I lied. “And then I saw Earl and got talking to him.”

  Sarah nodded. She didn't know the neighbors as well as I did, and she'd never taken to Earl.

  Her mind was still back at the office. “So this guy, the clerk, his wife's right there when he gets it.”

  “The variety store thing. Yeah, awful.”

  “Sometimes you're right.”

  “Huh?”

  “Moving out here. The last thing I wanted to do was move out of the city, but I'll admit I'm not looking over my shoulder out here like we did on Crandall. There's not addicts leaving their needles all over the slides at the playground, girls giving blowjobs in the backs of cars for fifty bucks, no guy waving his dick at you on the corner—”

  “I remember him. What was his name?”

  “Terry? Something like that? I always just thought of him as Mr. Dickout.”

  “I ran into him once at the Italian b
akery. He was buying some cannolis. Think there's a connection?”

  “God, cannolis,” Sarah said, taking another swig from the beer bottle. “I looked, on the way home, at the grocery store, for some. They don't have them out here. No cannolis. It's so hard to find anything like that. Twinkies, those I can get. You want white bread, I can get that for you.”

  “I know,” I said, quietly.

  “And there's no place to get decent Chinese,” Sarah said. “The kids are always complaining that there's no decent Chinese out here, or Indian. The other night, Paul says he'd kill for a samosa. What happened to my foot massage?”

  I was unwrapping some lean ground beef, not thinking about meal preparation so much as the plan I had put into motion. Later that night, maybe, or the next morning, when she got ready to leave for work, there'd be the payoff. At some point Sarah would happen to look out the window, or step out into the night air, and it would dawn on her that her car had gone AWOL. She'd dismiss it at first, figure I or our seventeen-year-old daughter Angie had it, and then she'd realize that I was in my study rereading what I had written that day, and that Angie was up in her room, or fighting with her brother, and she'd take a sudden, cold breath and say quietly, “Oh no.”

  And right about then she'd picture her car keys in the door, and it would all come together for her.

  “I can form burgers, or I can rub your feet,” I said. “Or I could do both, but I think I can speak for the rest of the family when I say the burgers should be done first.”

  There's a set of sliding glass doors that open out from the kitchen to our small backyard deck. I went out there and opened the lid of the barbecue, unscrewed the tap atop the propane tank nestled underneath, and turned the dial for the grill's right side. When I heard the gas seeping in, I pressed the red button on the front panel to ignite the gas.

  I clicked it once, then again, then a third time. “This thing doesn't work worth a shit,” I said to Sarah through the glass. I tried a fourth time, without success, and now I could smell the unignited gas, wafting up into my face. I turned the dial back to the “off” position and went into the kitchen for a pack of matches. I had done this before—dropped a lit match into the bottom of the barbecue, then turned on the gas. Worked every bit as well as the red ignition button, when the red ignition button was working.

  I struck a match and dropped it in, thinking that the gas that had been there a moment earlier would have dissipated by now. But when the air around the grills erupted with a loud “WHOOMPFF!” and took the hair off the back of my right hand, I understood that I'd been mistaken.

  I jumped back so abruptly it caught Sarah's attention. She threw open the door. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, shaking my hand and feeling like an idiot. “Man, that smarts.”

  The leftover propane was definitely gone now, so I tried a second time, dropping a lit match into the barbecue, then turning the dial. The flame caught with a smaller “whoompf” and I closed the lid.

  “You want something for your hand?” Sarah asked.

  “No, I think it's okay.”

  “Let me get something for it.” She headed upstairs to our bathroom, where she keeps first-aid supplies. From there she called down, “I've got some aloe here somewhere!”

  The front door opened and Paul walked in. “Hey,” I said, standing in the front hall, holding my right hand with my left.

  “Uhhn,” he said, walking past me. Then he noticed that the back of my hand was bright red. “Whadja do?”

  “Barbecue,” I said.

  “That button doesn't work,” Paul said.

  “I know.”

  “When's Mom getting home?”

  “She's home. She's upstairs.”

  “Car's not here.” He tipped his head in the direction of the driveway.

  “I know. But don't say anything.”

  “About what?”

  “That the car's not there. She doesn't know the car's not there.”

  Paul looked at me. “What happened? Did you smash it up or something? Because I was gonna ask her to drive me over to Hakim's after dinner.”

  “I didn't smash it up. I just moved it.”

  Now he looked at me harder. “You're doing something, aren't you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don't do another one of your lame-ass things, Dad. Are you trying to teach her a lesson or something? Because, like, we're all tired of that kind of thing. What'd she do? Leave the keys in the car?”

  “Not quite. But sort of. Just go into the kitchen and butter some hamburger buns.”

  “I'm not hungry.”

  “I didn't ask if you were hungry. I asked you to butter—”

  “I can't find the aloe!” Sarah shouted from the bathroom.

  “Don't worry about it,” I said, but the truth was, the back of my hand was really stinging. “Maybe we've got something else. Like, I don't know, isn't butter supposed to help?”

  “Butter? Where'd you hear that?”

  “I don't know. I just thought I had.”

  “I'm going to go out and get some aloe.” She was coming down the stairs now, reaching into the closet for her jacket, grabbing her purse on the bench by the front door.

  “Really, it'll be fine.”

  But Sarah wasn't listening. She was rooting around in her purse, looking for her keys.

  “Where the hell are my . . .” she muttered. She threw her purse back on the bench and strode into the kitchen. “I must have left them in here when I brought in the groceries. . . .”

  I hadn't planned to make my point about the keys this quickly. Things were ahead of schedule because I'd burned my hand and Sarah was frantic to ease my suffering. It was starting to look as though my timing could have been a bit better.

  “I wonder if I left them in the car,” Sarah said, more to herself than anyone else. “Except I remember unlocking the door and—”

  The bulb went off. You could see it in her eyes. She knew exactly where to find those keys. She strode confidently through the front hall to the front door, opened it, her eyes drawn to the lock.

  Things did not turn out as she'd expected.

  “Oh shit,” she said. “I was sure I'd left them there. Did you leave the door unlocked when you went out?”

  “I don't think so,” I said.

  “Then they have to be in the car.” She took one step out of the house and froze. I couldn't see her face at that point, with her back to me and all. But I had a pretty good idea how she must have looked. Dumbfounded. Dumbstruck. Panicked.

  “Zack,” she said. Not screaming. More tentative. “Zack, Angie's not home yet, is she?”

  “No,” I said. As far as she knew, I was unaware that her Camry was no longer in the driveway. I came up behind her. “Listen,” I said, shaking my hand at my side, trying to make the sting go away. “I should tell you—”

  “Shit! Shit! Shit! You were right! Shit! I did it! It's all my fault. Jesus! Oh shit!”

  She spun around and pushed by me on her way back into the house. She was headed straight for the kitchen, and I nearly had to run to catch up with her. She had the phone in her hand. “I'm going to have to call the police.”

  “Sarah.” I didn't want her to make the call. The last thing I wanted was the 911 operator getting another false alarm from this address.

  “The car's been stolen,” she confessed to me. “Shit, I can't believe this. I don't even know what I had in there. What did we have in the car? We had that stuff, from the trip, those Triptiks from the auto club, and a bag of old clothes in the trunk I was going to drop off at the Goodwill, and—”

  “Don't call,” I said.

  “—not that that's very valuable, but Jesus, we were going to give those to people who needed them, not some asshole who steals—”

  “Put the phone down,” I said. But she wasn't listening. She was about to punch in the number, so I reached down into my pocket, pulled out her set of keys, and set them on the kitchen counter where s
he could see them.

  She stared at them a moment, not comprehending. If her car had been stolen, how could I have the keys?

  “It's around the corner,” I said, softly.

  “I don't understand,” Sarah said. “You were using the car?”

  “It's around the corner,” I repeated, whispering. “I moved it. Everything's fine.”

  Sarah replaced the receiver, her face red, her breathing rapid and shallow. “Why did you move my car around the corner? And why have you got my keys?”

  “Okay, you see, what happened is . . . you know how you thought you'd left your keys in the door?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “And you know how I've mentioned that to you before?”

  Sarah nodded again, a bit more slowly this time.

  “Anyway, when I came home, a couple of minutes after you . . .”

  “I'd just come in with the groceries,” Sarah said slowly. “I stopped for them on my way home, even though I had a totally crappy day at the office, did five extra hours because Kozlowski booked off sick and we had the variety store thing, and picked up some things so we could have dinner.”

  This was not good. Sarah was developing a tone. That meant she was already ahead of me. She knew where this story was going and how it was going to end. But I decided to tell the rest of it anyway. “So when I came up the driveway, I saw that your keys were hanging from the door, you know, where anyone could find them. This is the thing. You know, it's lucky for you, really, when you think about it, lucky for you that it was me coming up the driveway then, and not some, you know, crazy axe murderer or car thief or something instead, because that's what could have happened. You know I've mentioned this before, about you leaving your keys in the lock, and all I was trying to do was make a point, you see, to help you, so that you wouldn't do this sort of thing again and expose us to any, I guess you could say, unnecessary risk.”

  Sarah was breathing much more slowly now. And just staring at me.

  “So, you see, that's why I did what I did.”

  “Which was what, exactly?”

  “I moved the car, just, you know, just a little ways down the street. Like, around the corner.”