“Hey, Wally, look at this great kachina doll!” he’d say as he strolled in through the kitchen door. Actually, he wasn’t sure the mayor cared a bit about kachina dolls. He wasn’t sure he much cared for being called Wally, either. Didn’t matter. It got Harvey through the door, where he could keep an eye on things. That mattered.
And if museum curios couldn’t do the trick, there was always home repair. One ruse he could count on—there was always something in the Barrett home that needed to be fixed. Back in Dill City, he had learned how to take care of most home emergencies himself, including the plumbing, because there was usually no one else to do it. These were useful skills, and skills that Wally had never managed to acquire, thus leading to another easy entrance into the Barrett home.
“Harvey!” he remembered Caroline saying not too long ago, when he delivered himself to their kitchen, “what brings you over here?”
“Well, the kids were tellin’ me there was a leak in the …” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, the …”
“The shower?”
“That’s right. The shower.”
“You mean the shower drain.”
“Right, that’s what I meant. Well, I brought my tools.”
“So I see.”
“I’ll just get to work. So how’s everything going?”
Worked like a charm. Let him stay vigilant, maybe prevent a few knockdown-drag-outs, and maybe make Caroline’s life a little easier. Which was important.
The truth was, Harvey harbored a secret, one he admitted only to himself. Sure, he cared about the kids, and he worried when their parents fought like cocks in the henhouse. But that was only half the story.
Truth was, Harvey was in love with Caroline Barrett.
It was nothing tawdry or unseemly or disgusting. He didn’t lust after her from afar or take pictures of her to bed or anything. He just loved her, that was all.
Who wouldn’t? Caroline was a gorgeous woman, one of the most natural beauties God ever saw fit to put on the face of this earth. Tall, thin, well-dressed, with high cheekbones and long legs that went from here to forever. She was a knockout’s knockout. Why she’d want to get hitched up to some old jock-turned-politico he couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t resist the limelight, he supposed, such as it was. What could you say about a culture that made millionaires out of football players and paid museum curators twenty-two thousand a year?
It wasn’t so much the fighting that worried him. All couples quarrel, though most didn’t do it as often, or as mean, as those two. But he had noticed that in the last six months or so, Caroline had occasionally taken to wearing sunglasses when she went outside, and the sun just wasn’t that bright. One afternoon when he caught her out in the garden, she had a bruise on her cheek so discolored no amount of makeup could hide it. She told him some lame story about bumping into the shelves in the attic.
That worried him.
One afternoon not too long ago, he’d been at the neighborhood block party and the Barretts were there too, and there was some jerk who had just moved into the area and had drunk too much for his own good who was hanging around Caroline, smirking and winking and drooling and touching her arm and generally trying to cozy up in a none-too-subtle way. Wally saw what was going on, marched over, stepped between them (cutting the jerk off), and just stared at her. He didn’t say a word; he just stared. But man, his was a stare that could chill Death himself. It had given Harvey shivers all up and down his spine.
That worried him.
Harvey watched television for a while, but found he couldn’t concentrate on it. There was something odd about this business today, though Harvey couldn’t quite put his finger on what. He pushed off the sofa and returned to the kitchen. He stood by the window for a while, but didn’t hear a peep. That was it—that was what was odd. Earlier he’d heard such a terrific hullabaloo, and now he heard nothing. How long ago was it he heard the big noise? An hour? But now he heard nothing. Less than nothing, actually. It was absolutely silent over there. Deathly silent.
That should be good, shouldn’t it? That should mean the fight was over. So why was his skin crawling?
Harvey put the empty beer bottle in the trash and strolled out onto his front lawn. It was no different. No sign of activity at the house next door, or anywhere else, for that matter. He should’ve been relieved by that. This was supposed to be a nice, upper-class neighborhood, but lately, he’d noticed people he didn’t much like the looks of. Not that he sat around all night peering out the windows or anything, but still. Occasionally there were vagrants. The last several nights he’d seen what he called the Odd Couple: some grungy-looking man wearing fatigues and a young girl—mid to late teens, he’d guess—wearing a tank top and big hoop earrings and a blue headband. They walked up and down the street, real casually, looking the neighborhood over. Or casing it, he suspected. Let those druggies in and you might as well move out.
The eerie silence was shattered by a piercing, howling noise. What the hell? He eased across the lawn toward the Barretts’ house. Suddenly, as if in answer to his question, Harvey saw Wallace Barrett race out the front door.
“Wally!” Harvey shouted.
Barrett didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to hear, as far as Harvey could tell, even though they were less than twenty-five feet apart. Barrett was running at top speed, flexing those leg muscles that made him the best rushing quarterback OU had ever seen. His shirt seemed to be torn, and there was something bright smeared across one side of his face.
“Wally!”
No use. Barrett leaped into his Porsche parked on the curb—had that been there before?—and slid into the driver’s seat. In a few seconds the car was powered up and Barrett was halfway down the street.
Now that was very odd, Harvey thought. Odd, and worrisome.
I need to get in that house, he told himself. I need to know … what? He wasn’t sure. But the short hairs on the back of his neck told him something unusual was happening. Or had happened.
It was so quiet over there.
The window on the side of the Barrett home was still open. Maybe if he just sidled up to it casually …
No. What would he say, after all, if they saw him? He didn’t have his tools and he didn’t have a kachina doll. The place was probably a mess. The kids were probably upset. It would just be an embarrassment to everyone.
Well, he told himself, the police were supposed to handle this sort of thing, weren’t they? So let them. He could call in a domestic disturbance anonymously. The cops had to answer, even if they didn’t think there was anything to it; he’d read about that in the paper. They could check on Caroline and the kids, and no one need know he had called them in.
It was tempting just to go in now, to march in there and make sure everything was fine. That’s what he would’ve done back in Dill City.
Hmph. And these big-city types thought they were so much more sophisticated. Sometimes he thought they didn’t know anything at all, not about the things that were really important.
The doorknob was so close. He could just reach out … step inside …
But he didn’t. He turned around and walked back to his house.
If he had gone in, he would surely have been overcome by the sickly sweet smell of blood, so thick that it permeated the air in every room of the house. He would have noticed the swarming flies, drawn by the smell through the open window, circling the grisly remains. He might’ve called the police a lot sooner than he did, had he remained conscious afterward, which is doubtful.