Love, Suburban Style (7 page)

So the house has some problems. All houses do.

But it also has oodles of potential.

Far more potential than the cookie-cutter ranches in her price range fifteen miles up the commuter line. A house like this has character, and history, and…

And, well, just… lots of… er, potential.

For some reason, Meg is seriously determined to be optimistic about this gloomy old house.

“
Gloomy?
”
That’s not exactly optimistic.

No, but it’s accurate.
Look
at it.

The place looks even more forbidding now than it did when she was a kid. It’s even got that classic haunted house silhouette, thanks to the tall, mansard roof.

But it isn’t
really
haunted… is it?

Gazing upward, she can swear she sees a sudden flicker of light in the attic window.

Which, of course, is impossible, because the house has been vacant for months. The new family never even took possession.

And why not?

Because they thought it was haunted.

She and Kris sure did have a good laugh over that.

Only…

Somehow, it’s not quite as funny now.

“Let’s go, Chita Rivera,” she urges impatiently, turning on her heel.

Her command is dramatically punctuated by a loud rumble.

Meg gasps…

Then realizes that it’s just thunder.

Which at this point is actually even worse than…

Well, other things that can make you gasp when you’re hanging around a haunted house.

Meg looks up at the sky, hanging low and ominously gray above the distant hills that surround the town.

“Think it’s going to rain?” she asks Chita Rivera, who merely looks royally peeved. “Yeah, so do I. Let’s get moving.”

“Right. That’s one large pie, sausage and pepperoni, to 31 Boxwood. About how long?” Sam asks the pizza delivery guy, wondering why he’s bothering. They always say the same thing.

“Half hour.”

Yup, they say that whether it’s going to be fifteen minutes or seventy-five minutes. Oh, well. Whatever. He’s on his own for dinner tonight, so what does it matter when it gets here?

Hanging up the phone, Sam goes back to the book he was reading. A few paragraphs in, he hears a distant rumble of thunder and wonders whether it’s supposed to rain—he didn’t think so.

Then he wonders whether he remembered to close the windows on his Trailblazer when he got home a little while ago. The air-conditioning is on the fritz—in the midst of the dog days of August, of all times—and he’s been driving with them down and the moon roof open.

“What do you think, Rover?” he asks the shaggy beige mutt lying on the rug beneath the raised footrest of his leather easy chair. “Did I close them, or not?”

Rover snores peacefully, as unfazed by questions as he is by thunder.

I probably didn’t bother to roll them up,
Sam decides, his open book poised in his hand.

Right, he was most likely thinking he’d just have to go out again later to pick up Katie. She’s swimming in her friend Kelsey’s pool over in Glenhaven Chase, the new development across town, and was supposed to just stay for dinner. But she called a little while ago and asked if she can sleep over. “It’s so hot, and we’re going to go swimming again before bed to cool off.”

He reluctantly said yes, hating that he did it, in part, because he has an early soccer practice in the morning, and it’s impossible to get Katie moving at that hour. Plus, she’ll grumble the whole time about being bored and having to sit on the sidelines while Sam coaches and Ben plays.

Yes, he thinks somewhat guiltily, life will be simpler if Katie spends the night at her friend’s.

But will Kelsey’s mom know enough to get the girls out of the water at the slightest sign of a thunderstorm? Even if it doesn’t actually rain, lightning could still—

Okay, stop it,
Sam warns himself.
Just stop.

He can’t spend the rest of his life worrying that something horrific is going to happen to Katie, who, with her stick-straight brown hair and hazel eyes and boyish build, is the spitting image of Sheryl.

Or to Ben, who is at the moment down at Chelsea Piers hitting golf balls with his uncle Jack, Sam’s younger brother.

Sam gave Ben so many preemptive cautions on his way out the door earlier that Jack finally intervened.

“Stop acting like a mother hen, Sam. He’s fifteen.”

That’s pretty much what Jack said when he convinced Sam that it would be a good idea to put a box of condoms in the bathroom cabinet and let Ben know they were there… just in case.

“He doesn’t have a girlfriend, and he’s way too young for just in case,” Sam protested.

“Really? How old were you when you lost your virginity? And did you tell Mom and Dad about it?” asked Jack, who was well aware of the answer.

Sam was sixteen that summer, and madly in love with older woman Molly Harper. At seventeen, she was a lifeguard—tawny and toned—and on the rebound from her college-bound boyfriend.

Sam and Molly lasted all of one weekend. But what a glorious weekend it was. And no, his parents never knew a thing about it.

“I wasn’t fifteen, Jack,” he pointed out to his brother.

“Yeah, but this is over two decades later. Prices have to be adjusted to account for inflation. So do ages.”

“For
inflation
?” He quirked a dubious brow at his brother.

“You know what I mean,” said Jack.

“Well, Ben doesn’t even have a girlfriend, so…”

“Sam, come on. Molly wasn’t your girlfriend.”

True, that.

“I don’t want to condone my son having sex at this age.”

“You’re not condoning it. You’re just being realistic. I bet you don’t want to rock a grandchild this time next year, either.”

Jack had a point there, too. As a high school teacher, Sam has seen more than his share of unplanned teenaged pregnancies. They usually happen to the nice, naive kids. The ones whose parents are in denial.

“Look,” Jack persisted, “just get the condoms, stick them in the cabinet, mention it to Ben, then leave it alone.”

That wasn’t nearly as easy for Sam to do as it was for Jack to say.

It was also easy for Jack to say, amid Sam’s many precautions as he was headed to the city with Ben today, “Do you really think I’m going to lose him somewhere? And that even if I did, he wouldn’t find his way back home again?”

Sam just shook his head.

Bad things happen in this world.

Children are kidnaped. Struck by lightning.

Their mothers walk out the door to go grocery shopping and never come back.

Sam squeezes his eyes closed in an effort to stave off the vivid memory of the crushed blue station wagon at the intersection. But he can’t shut it out, nor a haunting echo of the wailing sirens that sounded less than five minutes after Sheryl left home that day. When he heard them, he somehow
knew.

He just knew.

And he was right.

The nightmare had begun.

Widowed, devastated, he moved back into this house with his children—and dog—in tow. His mother had offered to move in with him instead, but he couldn’t stand the thought of staying on in that house they rented in Pelham without Sheryl. Everywhere he looked, there were memories.

Here, at least, he stood a chance of eventually moving on.

So he came home to Glenhaven Park.

He commuted to his old teaching job in lower Westchester until, miraculously, a position opened up right here at his old school. Things had fallen into place within a year of Sheryl’s death—he and the kids were settled in here with his mother, surviving.

Yes, there are memories in this house, too. Plenty of them. He grew up here, raised with his brother Jack under this very roof. Ben has his boyhood room now, and Katie has Jack’s. Sam has his parents’.

Mom passed away two years ago. It was unexpected, though not the tragedy losing Sheryl had been.

In fact, at first, Sam reacted so numbly to the loss of his mother that Jack was worried about him. Gradually, the pain seeped in. But with it came an odd sense of peace. He bought out Jack’s half of their inherited property, and this felt like home once again, in a way it didn’t while he was living here with his mother.

Hearing another roll of thunder, Sam rises abruptly from his chair.

There goes the ball game,
he thinks. The Yankees should be throwing out the starting pitch right around the time the pizza arrives. He was planning to watch the game, but the cable frequently goes out in thunderstorms. Plus, the Yanks are playing at home in the Bronx only thirty-some miles south of here—the game will be affected by the rain anyway.

It’s going to be a long, dull, lonely night.

So what else is new?

Sam steps over Rover, plunks his open novel facedown on the coffee table, and bends over the back of the couch to peek out the front picture window.

The first thing he sees is the Trailblazer, parked on the driveway.

Yup, windows down.

And…

Huh. There’s a big U-Haul truck parked at the curb in front of the Duckworth house next door.

Here we go again.

This time, the house wasn’t even on the market all that long. A FOR SALE sign hadn’t yet been planted in the lawn before he heard the place had been sold again.

He has no idea who bought it this time, nor does he care.

Why should he?

It won’t be long before his new neighbors get wind of the rumors, fall victim to their imaginations, and go the way of the Delgados, and the Sterns before them, and the Blumbergs before them.

Seeing movement behind the truck, he spots a petite figure staggering backward, only half-visible beneath a towering cardboard box.

So the new people have children—and they’ve put them to work.

Well, that’s good. Most of the kids around Glenhaven Park these days are the spoiled offspring of privileged parents.

Sam is thinking that it will be nice for Katie and Ben to have kids next door after all… until it occurs to him that it won’t be nice at all when they move.

Maybe I won’t even tell the kids about the new neighbors,
he decides, wondering how long it will take before the resident ghost puts in its first appearance. For all he knows, these people will be gone before dawn.

At the window before him, the lace curtain stirs in a sudden gust through the open screen.

Then the still air is shattered by another reverberation of thunder. This time it’s closer.

Yup, a storm is closing in.

Sam grabs his keys and heads for the door just in time to hear another loud crash.

Only this time, it isn’t courtesy of Mother Nature—and this time, it’s followed by a very human curse word.

He looks to the source and sees the newcomer just inside her black wrought-iron gate. She dropped the box she was carrying.

Uh-oh. Her mom isn’t going to be very pleased about this. She’s surrounded by shards of broken pottery, which she kicks angrily, with another curse—pretty salty language for a little girl, there.

“Need help, sweetheart?” Sam calls, stepping out onto his porch.

She looks up, startled.

Then she grins, and calls back, “That would be terrific, Honeybunch.”

That’s when he realizes that she isn’t a little girl at all.

She’s a woman.

A petite, curvy, beautiful woman.

A petite, curvy, beautiful woman whose eyes have just gone from mocking his mistake—he just affectionately called a strange
woman
“sweetheart”!—to wide with sudden recognition.

“Sam Rooney?”

He frowns.

“Sam? Is that you?”

He nods vigorously. Yup. He’s positive he’s Sam… and he’s also pretty sure he’s never seen this woman before in his life.

Though she certainly seems to know him.

Brushing off her red shorts and pulling down the hem of her orange T-shirt, she takes a few steps closer, toward the line of shrubs dividing their property.

“I don’t believe it… it really
is
you. Hi!”

“Hello.” His tone is meant to be friendly, but even he can hear that it’s unnaturally formal and fraught with uncertainty. “Uh, how are you?”

“Not great at the moment…” She laughs, indicating the broken pottery. “But generally speaking, I’ve been okay. How about you? Are you visiting your parents?”

“My parents?” he echoes, then shakes his head. “No, they, ah, passed away.”

“Oh, no. I’m so sorry.” She does seem to be genuinely sympathetic. But why? “When did it happen?”

“Dad died back when I was still in college. Mom died almost two years ago.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says again. “So then the house…”

“I live here now.”

“Really?” She comes closer still.

Close enough for him to clearly see her features: big green eyes, pert nose, wide—like Julia Roberts’s—mouth, straight white teeth.

All right, he has no idea who the heck she is, even now.

So maybe she’s mistaken him for somebody else.

Then again, she does know that his parents used to live here, so…

“Are you… ah…”

“Meg,” she supplies, thinking he’s fishing for her name when what he was going to ask was
Are you sure we’ve met?

“Meg,” he echoes, nodding. “Right! Meg.”

Still no clue.

Meg who?

“Meg…” He snaps his fingers a few times, as if it’s on the tip of his tongue.

“Jones,” she says, as thunder claps in the not-so-distant distance.

“Oh! That’s it. Meg Jones. Now I remember.”

“Really?” She takes a few steps closer, wearing a strange smile, her hands on her hips. “That’s funny. Because it’s actually not Jones.”

“It isn’t?”

She laughs… but frankly, she doesn’t seem all that amused. “I was testing you. You have no idea who I am, do you?”

Uh-oh.

“No,” he confesses. “I don’t.”

“We went to high school together.”

“
Really?
”

He wonders why he never dated her. She’s beautiful. Quick-witted. Spirited.

Definitely his type.

Or maybe—

Nah. He definitely
didn’t
date her. He’d remember that.