“She was totally strange.”
“Yeah, but that’s the point. She kind of was, but no one noticed? You could do that downtown, and no one really thought about it. Out here, there’s this suburban thing, where you have to be borderline normal all the time.”
In some inexplicable way, I knew what she was talking about.
“That’s why, for example, Paul wants to get a tattoo,” Angie said. “So he can be just a little edgy out here.”
“Paul wants a tattoo?”
Angie glanced at me, realizing she’d broken a confidence. “He didn’t tell you?”
“No. Not yet.”
“You didn’t hear it from me, but he’s thinking about it. There’s a place, in the plaza, that’ll do them.”
“He can’t get a tattoo. He’s not even sixteen yet. They wouldn’t do it.”
Angie rolled her eyes. We were almost to the school. “Is there more?” I asked.
Angie was quiet.
“Haven’t you made any friends here?”
Angie shifted her chin around, a nod in disguise. “Not really. I had friends at Bannerman, like Krista, and Molly, and Denny, but I had to leave them because it wasn’t safe there, we had to move to a neighborhood where everything would be okay.” There was a mocking tone. “Well, so what if there was a flasher and a few hookers or some needles on the sidewalk? At least it was interesting.”
“You know you’re welcome to have your friends out here any time you want,” I offered. “Invite them on Friday or Saturday, do a sleepover thing in the basement.”
Angie looked at me as though I’d just stepped out of an episode of Ozzie and Harriet. “God, Dad, I’m not five. And, like, they just can’t wait to come out here.”
I stopped the car out front of the school. “I hate this place,” Angie said, slipping out the door and closing it behind her.
I SWUNG BY KENNY’S HOBBY shop to see whether a model I’d ordered, of the dropship the Marines use to fly from the mother ship to the planet’s surface in the movie Aliens, had come in. I could have phoned, but going in person to check gave me an excuse to wander the shop and see whether any other new things had arrived. Kenny catered to a variety of hobbyists-model railroaders, slot car fans, fliers of radio-control airplanes-but his selection of SF-related kits was fairly extensive for a full-range hobby store.
My model hadn’t shown up. “Maybe next week,” said Kenny, who was leaning over the counter, mini-screwdriver in hand, trying to reattach a wheel to a metal reproduction of an old Ford Thunderbird. “You ever wonder,” Kenny asked, not taking his eyes from his work, “why men have nipples?”
I thought about that for a moment. Not about the question itself, but at the sorts of things that preoccupied Kenny. “Not really.”
Kenny bit his lip and held his breath, not wanting the tiny screw to slip from its hole. “It just doesn’t make any sense at all. They don’t do anything, they serve no purpose.” Then: “How’s the house?”
“Shower’s still leaking into the ceiling in the kitchen, drywall’s falling into the kitchen. The tub taps drip, the wind whistles sometimes around the sliding glass doors. The caulking around our bedroom window is useless. I don’t even bother to take down the ladder. I’m squeezing caulking in every couple of weeks.”
“There’s another guy, lives in your neighborhood, says he’s had trouble with his windows, and wiring problems, you know? Breakers popping, that kind of thing.”
“We haven’t had that. Yet.”
I asked Kenny if he had the latest issue of Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models, which he didn’t, so I said I’d see him later and got back in the car.
Driving home, my thoughts turned to Angie. Our problems with shoddy house construction were minor compared to hers. Her world was falling apart. Paul had adapted to our move out here much better. He made friends more easily, didn’t place a lot of demands on them. As long as they were interested in playing video games and didn’t have any moral qualms about sneaking into movies that they weren’t supposed to see, that was good enough for him. He’d even struck up that semi-friendship with Earl, developed an interest in gardening and landscaping. Not that things were perfect with Paul. His marks were lousy. School bored him. There was that upcoming appointment with his science teacher. And now, there was this new development about Paul wanting to get a tattoo.
He and I would have to talk.
Maybe, I thought as I drove through the streets of Valley Forest Estates, I’d made a terrible mistake. I’d dragged us out here out of fear and delivered us into mediocrity. And then I shook my head and decided that my initial instincts had been right-the recent corner store robbery downtown reinforced my decision. Just because the suburban architecture was bland didn’t mean our lives had to be. We still had our interests and our passions no matter where we lived. We didn’t have to give those up just because we no longer lived downtown.
The evidence that we were safer here than downtown was still overwhelming, and I had that thought in mind when our house came into view and I spotted the unmarked police car parked at the curb out front.
“DID YOU SEE ANYONE ELSE near the creek before you found Mr. Spender’s body?”
His name was Flint. Detective Flint. Short, squat, in an ill-fitting suit, wearing a hat like you’d expect to see on Lee Marvin back in the 1960s. He was sitting across from me at the kitchen table, and he’d turned down my offer of coffee. His hands were busy making notes in a small reporter’s pad.
“Uh, no, I didn’t see anyone,” I said.
“Not coming out of the woods as you were going in, headed for the creek?”
“No, I didn’t see anyone at all. You think he was down there with someone?”
“Well, there was someone else down there with him at some point,” Detective Flint said, pushing his hat back further on his head. “Mr. Spender didn’t bash his own head in.”
I stared at him for a moment. “So you’re thinking now that it wasn’t an accident?”
“Mr. Walker, we’ve never thought it was an accident. Mr. Spender was a victim of homicide.”
“I’d been thinking it was an accident,” I said. Okay, maybe I’d been hoping it was an accident. I’d been telling myself it was probably an accident. That he’d tripped, bashed his head on a rock, then rolled over into the water. “You’re sure?” I said.
Detective Flint poked the inside of his cheek with his tongue. His cheek bubbled out like he was Kojak eating a Tootsie Pop. “We have some experience with this kind of thing,” he said.
“No, I wasn’t suggesting you didn’t, it’s just, this isn’t exactly downtown, you know? You don’t expect this sort of thing around here.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes we’re a bit behind, but we do our best to catch up,” Detective Flint said with sarcasm. “Mr. Spender was struck on the back of his skull with a blunt object with considerable force. There wasn’t even any water in his lungs. He was dead before he fell into the water.”
“I see.”
“So you didn’t see anyone at all.”
“No.”
“I understand from Officer Greslow that you knew the deceased.”
“Not personally. But I knew who he was. That he was a naturalist, environmentalist-type person.”
“You know anyone who might want to do Mr. Spender any harm?”
I half-laughed. “Of course not. Like I say, I hardly knew him, and…” And I thought back to that day when our paths had crossed at the Valley Forest Estates offices, and I’d had to hold Don Greenway back from lunging at him.
“What?”
“It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
“Well, I don’t want to go around accusing people of murder, I mean, that’s pretty serious.”