“I got a weird vibe the one time I talked to them. The Ribieros, I mean. They were nice and all, but …”
Cole nodded. “They’re nice. I get along with them. But I don’t think you’re wrong. They definitely seem weirded out by your house, and that’s probably carried over to their attitude toward you. I mean, they’ve never said anything to me about any of this—in case you haven’t noticed, we all kind of keep to ourselves around here—but reading between the lines, I think they probably have a problem not just with your house but with anyone who lives there. They’re a little superstitious, I think. Or more than a little superstitious.”
Julian glanced down the street. “What about the people on the other side of us?” he asked. “Do you know anything about them? We’ve tried to go over there a couple of times and introduce ourselves, but no one’s ever home.”
“Oh, they’re home, all right,” Cole said. “But they’re very strange. Don’t even give them a second thought. They keep their yard up, their house looks nice, but they never come out and no one ever sees them. I’m not even sure when they mow their lawn or go to work, or anything about them, really. But at least they’re quiet and don’t bother anyone. I lived next to some hard partyers before—up at all hours of the night, stereo cranked full blast—and let me tell you, it was no picnic. Be grateful for the Boo Radleys of the world.”
Julian liked Cole. He was glad that he’d invited Cole to the party, glad Cole was coming, glad they’d had a chance to talk. This was a friendship worth nurturing. Claire always said that men were much bigger gossips than women, even if they pretended to be above such pettiness, and Julian thought that was probably true. Cole obviously kept close tabs on everything going on in the neighborhood, and Julian was only too happy to be able to find out details about the neighbors from him.
He smiled. No, men didn’t gossip. They shared intel.
Walking home, he wondered about the people who had owned the house before them. He and Claire had never met the previous owners, had only seen their signatures on some of the countless forms they’d been required to sign upon purchasing the property, and though he’d thought nothing of it at the time, that now seemed odd. He recalled the way the house had looked on their first visit, the trash and debris on the floor, the discarded furniture. Claire was right. Something was going on there.
And it had nothing to do with Miles.
He wished Claire had not mentioned Miles. The whole horrible incident had been on his mind ever since, and in the background, behind everything he did or said or thought, like a low hum, was an unyielding sadness, an emotional blackness that threatened to bloom into depression should he pause to examine it.
Last night he’d had the Dream again.
But this wasn’t Miles; this was something else, and as he walked across the grass toward the front door, he forced those thoughts down and looked up at the house itself. Even knowing what he knew, there was nothing spooky about it. The front of the structure did not resemble a face; no spectral figure flitted through the darkness behind one of the windows. The building looked like what it was: the home of a normal, middle-class family.
Thirsty, Julian walked through the living room, through the dining room, into the kitchen, where he got a Heineken out of the refrigerator. He glanced over at the basement door. Had a man really died down there? It seemed impossible to believe. While standing on a neighbor’s porch and talking about it, the idea had been incredible enough. But here, inside the house, intimately close to the location where it had occurred, the notion was truly horrifying. Though it had happened several years and two owners ago, the fact that someone had died within the walls of their home seemed like the grossest and most personal invasion of privacy.
Julian walked over, opened the basement door, switched on the light and headed down the steps. On the wall before him, he saw white scratches where Claire had scraped off the moldy face. Otherwise, the cellar appeared unexceptional, a storage room, no more, no less.
Which corner had the man died in? he wondered. The image was strange: a naked man, sitting in the corner, dead. He tried to picture it, but the jumble of boxes and bags made it nearly impossible.
He stood in place for several minutes, trying to feel something, trying to sense something, and when he didn’t, he walked back upstairs, turned the light off and closed the door.
It was Sunday, and Claire and Megan had gone to Claire’s parents’ house for lunch, so he and James were on their own. Julian checked the clock. It was nearly noon; no wonder he was getting hungry.
Where was James? he wondered. Before Julian had gone out to issue invitations, the boy had been in the living room, watching TV, although he’d said that he might go out to his “headquarters” after the show was over. Julian smiled. He and his friends had had a secret hideout when they were James’s age—a lean-to in a vacant lot, built with discarded materials from a nearby construction site—and he understood the allure. Some things never changed.
He looked out the window above the sink, intending to see whether he could spot movement in the garage’s upstairs, but James was on the ground, on his knees, bent over a hole in the backyard. Was he eating dirt? It looked like it, but that didn’t make any sense. Frowning, Julian walked outside. At the sound of the screen door’s creaking hinges, his son looked up. There was a ring of dirt around his mouth.
“What are you doing?” Julian demanded.
“Nothing,” James said, getting to his feet. But there was a guilty expression on his face, and Julian could see confusion mixed in with the guilt, confusion and fear.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, less harshly this time.
“I don’t know, Dad,” James said, and started to cry. Julian could not remember the last time his son had just burst into tears like this. Although his initial reaction to the fact that the boy was apparently eating dirt had been one of anger, the anger shifted to concern.
Julian walked over, looked into the hole, saw nothing unusual. He put his hands on James’s shoulders. “Why were you eating dirt?”
“I don’t know.” James was still crying.
“Well, don’t do it again.” He was aware that his admonition was lame and ineffectual, that he should be saying something else to his son, something more, but he was at a loss here and didn’t really know what to say or how to react. Eating dirt was something that usually came up when dealing with toddlers, not twelve-year-olds. It occurred to him that there might be a deeper problem here, but he prayed that wasn’t the case and that this would be the end of it.
James nodded, wiping the tears from his eyes. “I won’t, Dad.”
Still worried, still concerned, Julian forced himself to smile, wrapped an arm around the boy’s shoulder and steered him back toward the house. “Wash your face off, then. I’ll make us some lunch.”
They went inside. Julian prepared macaroni and cheese, the only food he really knew how to make, and the two of them ate in the living room while they watched an episode of The Twilight Zone.
When Claire and Megan returned, James was upstairs in his room, playing some game. Julian didn’t say anything about his eating dirt, but he did tell Claire that he’d made the rounds and invited their neighbors to the housewarming party, and that most of them would be coming. Except the Armados. And the people next door.
He did not tell her what Cole had said about the homeless man dying in their basement.
“That’s great,” she said happily. “I’m glad Pam talked me into this. I think it’s going to be fun.” She gave him a quick kiss on the nose.