The Neighbors (26 page)

It was all for nothing.

Isaac returned from his first practice with a soiled uniform—knees and elbows bright green, the front of his shirt streaked
with dirt from sliding into third. Harlow took one look at him and flipped. She tore the uniform off him in a frenzy, grabbed the scissors, and began hacking away while Isaac bawled. By the time she was finished, the uniform was a collection of dishrags. Isaac spent all afternoon trying to Scotch tape his uniform back together, eventually approaching his mother with a tearful apology. He was sorry. He’d never slide during a game again, even if it meant being tagged out. Harlow wasn’t interested. She sent him to his room. Isaac wasn’t allowed to participate in sports again.

But Isaac’s love for his mother was undeniable, just like Red’s, and she knew it. Listening in while Red comforted a whimpering Isaac in his room, Red excused Harlow’s outbursts, explaining to his son that his mommy had bad memories, that they haunted her; and for that very reason, Isaac had to be as good as he could possibly be. Harlow was given a free pass, having convinced Red that his unconditional acceptance was what was keeping his wife from leaving them behind. Isaac fell in line as well, because kids were gullible. They’d do anything to win a parent’s love. Harlow knew that from experience.

Harlow’s past—the trauma and pain—was what kept Red’s mouth shut throughout their marriage. Even when she was caught sneaking out of Isaac’s bedroom in the middle of the night; even when she repeated history. Harlow knew Isaac never complained to his father about her climbing into bed with him. She had convinced him that it was the only way she knew how to show him she loved him. And so the cycle continued. Rather than being saved from her madness, Harlow slipped farther beneath its surface.

That night Andrew lay in a bed that wasn’t his. He stared up at the ceiling of the master bedroom, Harlow’s head on his chest,
hardly able to believe that he’d gone along with it—that he had let her seduce him.

It hadn’t taken much. The idea of losing someone who actually understood him, someone who represented everything he had always wanted—it was too much to risk. He had followed her into the master bedroom, seeing her as someone broken, someone as used up as he was. And yet after all had been said and done, the sickening churn of his stomach refused to let him deny it: what he’d done was wrong. The restraints; the things she had asked him to whisper into her ear. It had freaked him out.

But he’d done it anyway.

Unable to get back to sleep, he carefully slid out from beneath her, sneaked out of the room, and stepped across the hall to the room he was meant to occupy. He stopped by the window, his attention paused on Mickey’s fixer-upper—the house that still held most of his things. The trees bent and swayed in the unrelenting wind. It was strange looking toward that house instead of away from it. He’d spent so many nights looking at the Wards’ perfect home, wondering what it would be like to stay there rather than where he had been, but now that he was there, he gazed back toward where he’d come from. It was true what they said—the grass was always greener. The grass on the other side of this particular fence was dead and brown, but he wanted to be back there.

Something crossed behind one of the curtains, but he dismissed it as a trick of the light, nothing but shadows and paranoia—the storm throwing gloom like a magician throwing smoke. But the longer he stared, the more convinced he was that Mick’s house wasn’t empty, that there was someone in there.

He crawled into the guest bed, pulled the sheet up to his chin, and squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to sleep, but he couldn’t breathe. It was as though a demon had crawled out of the darkness to perch on his chest, its weight pressing heavy against his diaphragm—Fuseli’s painting come to life. He sat up,
trying to swallow, but his esophagus refused to cooperate. With his heart pounding hard in his throat, he pulled his knees up to his chest and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes.
It’s just anxiety
, he told himself. He was losing his grip, losing himself. Harlow had proved one thing, whether she had meant to or not: she was in charge. She’d pulled him into her bed, and Drew had done what she wanted.

He shook his head as he took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. Overwhelmed with the need for a drink, he shot back to his feet. He had seen a liquor cabinet downstairs.

In spite of his runaway heart, he tried to be as silent as possible. Creeping into the hall, he didn’t want to wake the owner of the house. Something about going downstairs without her knowing felt forbidden. Harlow had never demanded Drew stay upstairs, but he felt as though she expected him to stay in his room until the sun came up, waiting to hear the June Cleaver clatter of dishes in the kitchen. This, however, was no June Cleaver moment. This was
A Nightmare on Magnolia Lane
.

He wondered if Red had tailed them to the drive-in, wondered if he had followed them back to the house. Perched up in one of the trees that flanked the street, he could have easily seen everything that had transpired in the hallway just hours before. He would have seen Andrew following Harlow into Red’s old bedroom. And if she had been anything the way she had been with Red, Red would know exactly what had happened behind closed doors.

Harlow hadn’t had time to call somebody to change the locks, and that meant Red still had a key. He could have been hiding in the shadows at that very second, waiting to grab him, to wrap his hands around Drew’s throat, to swing an ax high over his head and embed it in Andrew’s skull. His heart thumped inside of his chest like a boxer punching a speed bag.

He tiptoed past Harlow’s door even though walking normally would have looked far less suspicious. He stopped at the
top of the stairs, took a deep breath, and crept down the steps. Outside, the wind roared.

Stopping in the dining room, he tugged on the liquor cabinet door. Naturally, it was locked. He closed his eyes, exhaling a steady breath of defeat. Rather than searching the place for the key, he settled on the kitchen instead.

Squinting against the brightness of the fridge, he pushed the milk aside to reach farther into its confines, fishing out a hidden carton of orange juice. He shook it, popped it open, and poured himself a glass—and was thrown into blindness as the door swung closed. Groping for the door handle, he pulled it open again, illuminating the kitchen in a cold white glow, nearly choking on his juice when his eyes found a silhouette standing at the base of the stairs, watching him from afar.

His mind reeled; he was sure it was Red, come to settle the score. Every horror flick he’d ever watched came rushing back to him, ready to flatten him with all the slasher scenes he’d seen, the thousands of gallons of fake blood, the terrified screams and the pitiful begging:
Please, don’t kill me
. If he ran, he’d hardly move at all. It would be nothing but one continuous shot—a dolly-zoom effect, woozy and claustrophobic.

“Andy?”

Drew’s heart flip-flopped. It was Harlow.

“Oh God,” he murmured, nearly squeaking out the words. “Did I wake you up?”

“I was still awake.” She took a few steps forward. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, why?” he replied, but he knew what she meant. What had happened upstairs, combined with looking as though he’d just seen a ghost, very likely made him look ready to run for his life.

“I just don’t want things to be awkward,” she told him.

“I’m OK. Just thirsty.” He lifted his half-drained glass of orange juice.

Harlow nodded and turned to go back up the stairs.

When she finally disappeared, he stood there, staring at his glass of OJ, wondering how the hell he’d gotten himself into this situation.

Even in exile, Harlow had a hold on Red. While she and Andrew romped around Creekside before rolling between the sheets, Red had spent hours on a metal-legged stool, staring at a motionless Mickey Fitch.

He imagined this was what Mickey had done before his first time—sat, stared, prayed to hear the distant buzz of an alarm clock growing louder, louder, loud enough to rouse him from this nightmare.

But Mickey wasn’t dead.

Red looked down to his hands for the thousandth time. A twenty-milliliter ampoule of propofol rested in his right palm. Though he had never administered the stuff himself, he had seen the effects firsthand. Harlow called it “milk”; it was one of her favorite drugs because it kept the object of her hobby quiet—a surprised gasp when the needle pricked the skin, but that was all. Years before, Harlow had complained about how difficult it was to obtain. But that was the magic of the Internet, and Harlow knew where to look.

Turning his attention from the emulsion in his hand to the man on the autopsy table, he watched Mickey’s chest rise and fall with shallow breaths. He had no idea how long the guy had been lying on the table, no clue when Harlow had shot him full of anesthetic. If he administered another dose too soon, the result would be grim. Death by cardiac arrest wasn’t nearly as gruesome as dismemberment, but it was forbidding enough to keep Red where he was, sitting atop that stool, wondering what the hell to do.

If Mickey had been the guy who was sleeping in his house, sleeping with his wife, he wouldn’t have given two shits about taking a bone saw to the bastard’s throat. But Mickey had just been doing his job.

Andrew was the problem.

He eventually left the safety of his chair to wander the perimeter of the room. Before now, he’d never actually set foot in this room. Harlow’s determination to purchase two homes rather than one had bewildered him until men in hard hats descended his basement stairs. She told them she was lilapsophobic, and tornado anxiety wasn’t exactly conducive to Kansas living. The house next door would be occupied by their only son, she said. The tunnel would serve as a storm shelter as well as an underground bridge linking the two properties together. If the workers had still been skeptical, their suspicions were tossed aside when she paid them in cash, tax-free, no strings attached.

That room was lined with stand-alone freezers—twenty-nine cubic feet of storage space per unit; plenty of room for an intact body in each one, big enough for a duo if they were torn apart. Three of those freezers were lined up end-to-end. Harlow liked to overplan. She had enough room for half a dozen bodies, just in case Mickey couldn’t toss them into the trunk of his TransAm and drive them out to wherever he took them fast enough.

Red stopped at the freezer closest to him and pulled its top open. Cold air rolled over the open top, spilling over the side of the chest like dry ice in a witch’s cauldron. It was bare. The second freezer matched the first: vacant, hardly used. Hesitating in front of the third icebox, he had to wonder why he was looking inside them at all. This wasn’t his pastime. He wasn’t interested in discovering the body of a kid who’d mowed his lawn and painted his window trim. But much like driving by a freeway accident, he had to look, and there it was: A red streak decorated the back interior wall, as though a limb had tumbled out of a bag and made a wide, gory sweep—a calligraphy brush with flesh
for bristles. A single bag sat inside the icy, frigid vastness—black plastic hiding its contents from the world.

Seeing it, Red suddenly understood why he’d gone from freezer to freezer—this bag was his ticket out of this mess. He’d paid the True Value a visit with full intention of laying Andrew out, gutting him like a fish not only to remove him from the equation, but to show Harlow that he could do it. But this was better.

He let the door slip from his grasp. It slammed shut loudly enough to incite a wince. Red’s eyes darted to the autopsy table. His wife’s former employee took a deep breath, fighting against the haze of anesthesia, trying to claw his way back into consciousness. Red stepped across the room, grabbing for the syringe on the counter—he had found it there when he had arrived, unable to decide whether to chalk it up to Mickey’s mess, or whether Harlow had set it out for him, anticipating this very moment. The syringe skittered across the surface in his haste, tumbling to the floor and rolling out of view.

“Goddamn it,” he hissed, crouching down, trying to locate it, but it was gone. Exhaling a frustrated sigh, he threw open the cabinet doors. But despite the freezers being mostly clean, Mickey’s shortcomings were housed within those drawers; chronic disorganization that Red was now forced to dig through at the most inopportune time.