When my money started pouring in — and it did pour: one minute I was scrambling to make my mortgage, the next I was talking to my broker about various places to store excess cash — I could have built a true mansion on a cliff face overlooking the ocean. But every bare piece of property I looked at, every tumbledown house that could be replaced with something better, existed in that sea of empty houses.
I didn’t like that much isolation, so I stayed in Crest Hill, along with Ike and Stella next-door, the Sandersons one house up, old Mrs. Gailton across the street, and Annalita Carmica on the corner. We formed the foundation of the neighborhood, and over time we acquired even more full-timers. Dave the plumber and his wife (whose name I always forget), Joyce the Hollywood producer who retired to her dream house, and the McMillians who bought, for a song, a McMansion that lost its view to the six-plex.
We were a pretty quiet bunch who lived in a very safe place — or so I thought, in those days before Wicked moved in.
The morning Wicked disappeared seemed like any other. I had trudged through the rain from my back door to my free-standing office, a hot mug of coffee in one hand and an offering to the Goddess in the other.
The Goddess was the elderly cat who lived alone in my office. She bit the hand that fed her each and every day. I was inordinately fond of her, enough that I put up with her nasty temper and her inability to get along with anyone, including me.
She spent that morning in the library window, watching Wicked, as she often did. She hated the barking more than I did. Once, she had seen him peeing on one of her dishes that I had set down outside. She had pushed the screen out of the window, then attacked him, tearing him up so thoroughly that I had to go over to Ike and Stella’s and offer to pay for Wicked’s trip to the vet.
That’s when I learned how much Ike hated Wicked.
“Let the damn dog suffer,” he said. “He’s got to learn that the world isn’t his toilet.”
During Wicked’s stay on the hilltop, the Goddess glared out the library window — the only room in my office that had a good view of Wicked’s yard — and occasionally made little growling noises. Mostly, she seemed to believe if she stared hard enough, Wicked would feel her anger and shut up.
It spoke to my desperation that daily I wished she did have magical powers. I wanted something to shut that damn dog up.
About eleven o’clock that morning, I got my wish. Wicked let out one of his sad yips, followed by the strangest bark I’d ever heard. It was high-pitched and sharp, almost sounding startled. Then he let out a long half-bark, half-yowl that seemed more like a human scream than a noise any dog was trained to make.
That sound didn’t end. It got cut off. I leaned back in my office chair and listened, waiting for the barking to begin again.
It didn’t.
Instead, I heard the squeal of truck tires against gravel. Rocks pelted my newly built fence (good fences make good neighbors; they also keep out little peeing yappy dogs).
Then silence.
After a moment, the Goddess sprinted across my desk. She landed in my lap, meowed in my face, and pawed at my hands. I hadn’t seen her that agitated since a yellow tom sprayed one of the rose bushes outside the office’s sliding glass doors. So I followed her into the library.
She jumped onto the window ledge and pressed her face against the glass.
I peered out. From this one window, I could see over the fence and into the Maizes’ yard. No truck sat in the driveway, even though I had heard one. Isabel, the elderly dog, was sitting on the walkway to the back door, head tilted to one side.
I didn’t see Wicked.
The Goddess was murping, a sound she made when something in her universe was out of order. I frowned, my stomach knotting in a little ball.
I realized I recognized that sequence of sounds.
I hadn’t heard it in years, not since the Maizes’ daughter was little and Ike drove up the driveway too fast one afternoon, running over one of their cats.
He scooped the bleeding, broken creature into his arms, placed it on the floor of the truck, and then backed out of the driveway, peeling away as fast as his old Ford one-ton could go.
He made it to the vet’s in record time, but it was still too late. He’d crushed his daughter’s favorite cat beneath the wheels of his truck and it took months for her to forgive him.
Now, I figured the same thing had happened. Right in the middle of her messy divorce, one that threatened to spill into a long custody battle over her own daughter, her father runs over the dog she has loved since she moved away from home.
Ike had to be devastated.
I really didn’t want to be there for him — there are some things that are beyond neighborly, even in Crest Hill subdivision — but I knew I had to investigate, just in case my writerly imagination had leaped to the wrong conclusion.
I let myself out of the office. The morning rain had turned into a light drizzle, the kind that looks harmless but actually can soak you within five minutes.
Red and gold leaves littered my driveway. Sometime during the night, a raccoon had clearly pulled part of a white plastic trash bag through the slight hole in my garbage can’s lid, scattering plastic food containers and paper plates across the yard.
I ignored the mess and walked to the fence. It was a picket fence, painted brown, with the pickets rising over six feet, so that few people could see over the top of them. I pulled open the gate in the center and stepped onto the Maizes’ unpaved driveway.
The rainstorm had left the ground so wet that the retreating truck had torn deep grooves in the muck. I walked to the edge of them, expecting to see some pieces of white curly hair ground into the dirt or maybe a bit of blood on the already wet rocks. Maybe even a smashed collar or the impression of a small dog’s body in the dirt.
To my disappointment, I saw none of that. I didn’t even see Ike’s footprints in the muddy gravel, although mine were clearly visible.
I frowned and looked up. Isabel, who was used to me, stared at me, a matching frown on her large doggy face. I couldn’t tell if she was perplexed to see me standing on her driveway or if the truck’s quick retreat had surprised her.
I clasped my hands behind my back and walked farther up the driveway, so that I could peer inside the garage. No injured Wicked lying on his side on the concrete. No impish brown eyes peering at me through the small window beside the garage door.
Nothing barked, nothing yipped.
The silence was profound.
Isabel sighed, seemingly in relief, and put her head between her paws. Again, I couldn’t understand the reason for her emotion. Relief that a human was on the case? Or relief that Wicked had finally shut up?
Or both?
I felt no relief. The depth of my Wicked hatred surprised me. Part of me really wanted to see that dog dead. I had never actively wished anything dead before, not even the raccoons who constantly defeated each garbage can I bought.
I had hoped to find evidence of that dog’s demise.
Finding none disappointed me.
But at least something had forced Wicked to become quiet. As I peered into my neighbor’s garage, I realized I should accept the gift.
I hurried back to my office — after stopping briefly to clean up after the raccoons — and had the most productive day I’d had in the month and a half since Wicked had moved in.
The silence didn’t last.
As I microwaved the takeout I picked up for dinner, someone knocked on my door. Even though our neighborhood was close, very few people knocked. The UPS guy knocked every morning, and the newspaper delivery boy knocked once a month, but almost no one else came to the door.
I pressed Stop on the microwave and walked to the door. The door was solid- core, with no peephole, something I’d meant to remedy. So opening it always contained, for me, a small bit of adventure.