The Woman Next Door (27 page)

THE HOUSE

June 19, 1961

A
lone! I am all alone! And nobody will help me!
The child's thoughts were not as clear as that, but, in substance, said as much. She tried to move, and couldn't. Tried to cry out, but her fear stopped her.

She waited. There was no pain. Only numbness. And confusion.

A
fter many minutes, the babysitter turned the TV down; it was ruining her concentration. She glanced at the telephone on the small white table just inside the entrance to the kitchen.

Later
, she thought.

One thing was certain: Six months of dull Friday nights shouldn't have ended like this. There was no reason for it to have come to this. Well, her own stupidity was the reason, wasn't it? Her own colossal stupidity. . . .

She stood, went to the telephone, picked up the receiver, dialed, waited.

"Hello?" she heard.

"Is Mrs. Winter there, please?" she said.

"May I ask who's calling?"

"Her babysitter. This is her babysitter."

"Just a moment."

She heard, as if from a distance, "Evelyn, it's for you. Your babysitter."

She waited again. Then: "Yes, this is Mrs. Winter."

"Mrs. Winter?"

"What is it? Is something wrong?"

"I don't know, Mrs. Winter." The babysitter paused briefly. "I mean . . . it's the baby—"

"The baby? What's happened to the baby?"

"Nothing. I mean . . . I don't know. She's so quiet. I think you'd better come home, Mrs. Winter."

"Quiet? What do you mean
quiet
?"

"Well, I mean she's breathing and everything, but . . . she's not moving. She fell. Out of her crib. She fell."

A short silence.

"Mrs. Winter?"

Then, again as if from a distance: "Oh, Jesus!" And a click, a dial tone.

The babysitter put the receiver on its rest. She went back to the child's room, turned the light on.

She saw that the child was almost exactly as she had left her—on her side at the back of the crib—except now her huge, impossibly blue eyes were open.

Would she tell? wondered the babysitter. Would the child tell her parents what had happened? Would she say something like, "I pee-peed, and I got her wet, and she said a bad thing and threw me down, real hard"? Would she say something like that? Or would it all end right here? Because the child was too damned scared and confused. Yes, she decided. It would all end right here.

She saw that the child was staring at her. Hard. Not with a bubbling smile ready on her lips, as if the babysitter were merely an object of amusement or curiosity. But hard. And cold. In emotion so intense that the muscles of the child's face had frozen, and all the energy in her small, quiet body had massed in the eyes.

I
t had been a long morning for Roger Peterson, and it promised to be an even longer afternoon. There were exactly twenty-three
Courtneys
in the Rochester section of the phone book and, he estimated, at least a dozen more for the outlying towns. But that was all the police had been able to give him—the boy's last name, Courtney, and a description: eight or nine years old, four feet six inches tall, eighty-five pounds, sandy-blond hair, large gray eyes. A good-looking boy. And Roger Peterson had some bad news: The boy was in Intensive Care at Highland Hospital. The boy had been able to tell police only his name—his whole name, though the first part had been unintelligible—before slipping into unconsciousness. Now the boy was comatose. The temperature had just risen to twenty degrees when they found him—dressed only in light blue cotton pajamas—curled up in front of the Sibley Building. No one knew precisely how long he'd been there. "A couple hours at least," was the attending physician's guess. "I'm really surprised nobody noticed him."

Roger Peterson called the tenth Courtney of the afternoon.

"Hello?"

A woman's voice—a young woman, Peterson thought. "Is this the Courtney residence?"

"Yes, it is, and we've got all the life insurance and all the magazines—"

"This is Roger Peterson, ma'am, from the Department of Social Services."

"Oh? Are you peddling food stamps over the phone now?"

"Mrs. Courtney, please, I'm calling in reference to—"

"Or are you passing out those welfare checks to just anyone? We happen to be white, Mr. Peterson."

"Do you have a son, Mrs. Courtney?"

"A son? No, I don't have a son."

"Thank you, Mrs. Courtney." He hung up. "For Christ's sake," he whispered.

Obviously the boy had been abandoned, hard to believe as that was; otherwise there would have been panicked calls to every official agency in the city by now. It had been over twelve hours since the boy was found.

Peterson checked his log sheet. Of the ten
Courtneys
called, three apparently were not home, two—a Mark Courtney and a B. Courtney—yielded busy signals, two were elderly people, one number was "no longer assigned," and two were obvious blind alleys.

He dialed the eleventh number. Surely something would happen when the afternoon newspaper appeared, he thought as he waited. The police had arranged to have the boy's picture and name at the bottom of the front page. Obviously the boy had relatives, classmates, teachers, neighbors. Yes, the chances were excellent that the whole thing would come to a head this afternoon.

M
arilyn checked the grandfather clock near the living-room archway: 1:30. The antique dealer, a Mr. Hardin, of Hardin and Hardin Antiques, was due in an hour, with his truck. She wondered if she should tidy things up for him—dust here and there, vacuum, wash down the walls where Greg had left his dirty little fingerprints.
Goddamnit
, she'd be forever liberating the house from Greg and Brett's corruptive, lingering, nasty presence. Forever! She'd need new sheets, to begin with, and new pillowcases. And she'd need new toilet fixtures, too. And new mattresses, new quilts, new flatware . . . Christ, was there anything they hadn't touched, anything at all left that she wouldn't have to change, make right, clean, cover over? Anything?

Only the room, she realized.

Her room.

She suddenly cocked her head toward the stairway. Were those really the soft cries of a child she was hearing? She listened. The sounds stopped abruptly, and she decided it had probably come from outside—a pigeon under the eaves, some kids passing by, a breeze moving around the house. It wouldn't be the first time, she reminded herself, that the house had made noises of its own.

The phone rang. She snapped her gaze toward it, quickly angered by the intrusion. She went to it. "Yes?" She hoped her tone carried her annoyance.

"Mrs. Courtney?"

"Yes."

"This is George Hardin; we spoke a short while ago."

"What is it, Mr. Hardin?"

"If it's convenient, Mrs. Courtney, I'd like to come over immediately. You see, another client called to change his appointment—"

"It's fine with me, Mr. Hardin."

"Good. I'll see you in ten or fifteen minutes?"

"Yes. I'll be waiting, Mr. Hardin. Good-bye."

She went to the kitchen, opened a closet door, got out dust rags, a mop, a broom, floor wax, lemon-oil furniture polish. Soon her arms were so burdened that she dropped the can of furniture polish. She swore, and kicked it toward the hallway.

C
hristine wished Tim had stayed home. It was difficult being alone in the house today, uncomfortable—as if something had taken Tim's place when he left and was following her from room to room. Not a malevolent something. It might even be herself that followed her, that lingered at each window she passed and in every doorway, counseling,
Slow down
—her rational self berating her for the turmoil she had allowed to grow inside her, her rational self punishing her for holding onto the dream momentarily, then letting it go. Because that was the way small children behaved. She remembered, with almost frantic fondness, the story Becky Foster had told her about the Cornhill ghosts: "Each house has one. Yours is of a young woman killed when the roof of this house collapsed." She longed for just such a ghost—for some classic, unseen, archetypal thing she could blame her fears on.

But there was no ghost. Only her fears, and her turmoil, and something inside slowly tearing her apart. It had spent the last nine months at it, and its growth had produced only unanswerable questions:

Why (the first question) had she demanded that Tim buy
this
house? Even restored it was ugly, without charm, claustrophobic.

And why (the second question) had she so willingly accepted Becky Foster's offer of friendship and then, without reason, rejected it, as if that friendship had suddenly become an unnecessary burden?

And why in God's name had she opened her arms to Marilyn Courtney, accepted her gifts and confidences as if hungry for the details of her life, for a live sketch of her psyche?

And why the dreams, the exhaustion, the glimpses into her own, blank future?

"Christ!"

She found herself in the small foyer, facing Jimmy Wheeler's portrait. And the thing following her about the house—not her rational self at all, she realized, but . . . desperation? helplessness? Jesus, how did she define it?—pulled her away from the portrait. It was only a painting now—something dead and useless.

M
arilyn gestured stiffly at the three T-shirted men standing behind Mr. Hardin: "Please tell them to wait outside, Mr. Hardin."

Hardin, a short, thin man in his late sixties, nodded, and the men stepped back from the door. "May I come in, Mrs. Courtney?"

"Of course." She held her arm out toward the inside of the house.

Hardin stepped in and glanced about. He adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses on his nose,
harumphed
: "You have a very large house, Mrs. Courtney. You said on the telephone that you wish to sell everything?"

"Almost everything, Mr. Hardin. All except for one room's worth."

He nodded at a pecan settee near the entranceway. "Now,
that's
a nice item, Mrs. Courtney."

Marilyn said nothing: Hardin's tone said he wanted to haggle about price, and she was not in the mood for haggling.

R
oger Peterson looked up at the man in the doorway. The man said, "There was no one at the desk; I guess it's past her quitting time, right?" He indicated the receptionist's desk, behind him. "So I came in. Are you Mr. Peterson?"

"I am. And you are—"

"Brett Courtney." He paused briefly. "You've got my son."

Peterson stood slowly and nodded at the chair opposite his desk. He used his most officious tone: "Please sit down, Mr. Courtney. I have some questions I'd like to ask you."

"Tell me first how Greg is. They wouldn't tell me a thing at the hospital. They sent me here."

"He's listed as satisfactory now."

Brett lowered his head. "Thank God."

"For a while it was pretty much anyone's guess. But he'll pull through. I assume, Mr. Courtney, that you saw the boy's picture in the newspaper."

"Could you tell me why neither you nor your wife came forward till now?"

"My wife and I are separated, Mr. Peterson. Not legally—not yet, anyway." He paused: Did Peterson believe him? He had rehearsed the whole thing a dozen times on the way over. "I've been living at the Alexander Street Apartments for the past week or so." And that was true enough, if Peterson wanted to check, though Brett couldn't remember going back there. After escaping the attic, he had been fog-bound for at least a day. "Greg and I, that is."

"Do you think you could tell me how your son happened to turn up on the steps of the Sibley Building?"

"Yes. I have an office there. He knew that. I can only guess he had another of his nightmares—"

"Nightmares?"

"He's plagued by them, Mr. Peterson. He's under psychiatric care, as a matter of fact." Also true. "And sometimes these nightmares frighten him so badly that he panics. That's apparently what he did last night. He panicked."

Peterson looked skeptical, Brett thought, but not disbelieving. This was, after all, the best way to go. Marilyn had obviously grown tired of Greg and thrown him out, frightened him away. Eventually—when he had Greg with him—Brett could deal with Marilyn in his own way, on his own terms. If he told the truth now, there would be so many difficult questions, and so many clumsy answers. Besides, it was possible—perhaps even likely—that, in the end, Marilyn could regain custody, could turn the tables and somehow prove that Brett was negligent, culpable. It would be, after all, one on one—his word against hers.