Джеймс Паттерсон - The House Next Door

“Harry. But don’t tell him I sent you.”

“Never,” he says with great solemnity. He holds his hand up as if he is about to swear on a Bible. I say good-bye. Then he closes the door and I stand there, not moving at all. It’s after six, and getting dark, but everything seems a little brighter than when I first rang the doorbell.

Chapter 9

Friday morning I wake up at six forty-five, stumble downstairs in my bathrobe, get out the mayo, and open two cans of tuna to fix sandwiches for the kids. Ned is already up and dressed and making impatient faces at the Nespresso machine. It’s casual Friday, which means Ned has scrapped his usual Brioni suit for some J. Crew khakis and a J. Crew shirt. Tall, lanky, his thinning blond hair still swooping across his eyes, he looks the way he always does: handsome, but perpetually annoyed.

“Do you think Caroline looks like me?” I ask him.

“Don’t be silly,” he says. “She’s blond. You’re brunette.”

I can see where she gets it from.

At seven fifteen, Ben walks into the kitchen.

“Have a good day, my man,” Ned says to him. They pound knuckles as Ned leaves.

“Good morning, Sunshine,” I say, cutting the crusts off Caroline’s sandwich, putting tomato on Ben’s, and smearing Joey’s with salsa.

“What’s today?” Ben asks as he takes a cereal box out of the kitchen cabinet.

“The fourteenth.”

“Oh, no.” He looks panicky.

“I thought you loved Fridays.”

“Today’s the day we’re doing our Famous Artists presentation. I need to bring my van Gogh costume to school.”

“What? Why did you wait till now to tell me?”

“I didn’t. I brought home that paper for you to sign last week.”

I check the refrigerator door—home to all notices, clippings, and other assorted reminders from my eternal to-do list. Sure enough, the Famous Artists Fact Sheet is there, right underneath a bill from the butcher. I freak a little bit.

“I don’t even know what van Gogh looks like! Quick—let’s google him.”

Ben pulls out his cell phone. Before I can say “how-can-you-find-that-so-quickly-using-just-your-thumbs,” he has pulled up a range of van Gogh self-portraits.

“Okay,” I say, my eye on the clock. “He wore ascots a lot. Take your blazer to school. And we’ll borrow a scarf from Dad.”

I go to the hall closet. Ned’s antique 1930s white silk scarf is hanging on a padded hanger.

I slide it out from the cellophane wrapper and hand it to Ben. “Make sure you bring it back. It’s Dad’s favorite.”

“How do I tie it?”

“Like this.” I drape it around his neck and make a simple loop.

“Now, what about the blood?”

“What blood?”

He rolls his eyes. “The blood from where he cut off his ear, remember?”

I find some gauze in our family first-aid kit. Then I dribble some red food coloring on it and wrap it around Ben’s forehead.

“How do I look?” he asks.

“Like you’ve been in a train wreck,” I say.

“Cool,” he says with a smile, checking himself out on the selfie side of his cell phone. He puts the blazer, scarf, and gauze headpiece in a shopping bag.

As I finish making their sandwiches, my cell phone beeps. A text message.

I read it.

Thanks again for yesterday. If you need to reach me my number is 914-809-1414. Easy to remember.

Chapter 10

I drop the kids at school. But instead of heading home, I decide to visit my friend Darcy. First I stop at the Human Bean, our local Starbucks wannabe. I order a latte for me, a chai tea for her, a chocolate croissant, and an almond Danish.

On the way to Darcy’s, I look in Vince’s window. The house is dark. There’s no car in front.

Of course. He must be at his wife’s bedside.

Darcy is an artist—tall and red-haired, with a smattering of freckles across her face and wide green eyes. Darcy is quite beautiful. But she dresses like come-as-you-are day at Goodwill. So I am not surprised when she opens the door and I see her midsection is covered with hundreds of tiny blue dots.

“Let me guess,” I say. “You’re making wine from grapes. And you’ve been stomping them with your breasts.”

“Not even close,” she says. “I’m spatter-painting a deck chair. But I think I overdid it on the spatter. What’s in the bag? Something rich and gooey, I hope.”

We sit down at her oak kitchen table. She gets napkins, and I look around. The room is newly painted. It’s an odd shade of pink. The color of tongue.

“You like it?” she asks. I lie and say I do.

“You certainly have a knack for this sort of thing,” I say. “Maybe you can help our new neighbors get their place in shape.”

“The Kelsos?” she asks. “I would…but I still haven’t met them. Have you?”

“Just him,” I say.

“I saw him once, at a distance,” she says. “Saw the kid. Even saw the family cat, sitting on the windowsill—though it could have been a pillow. Never laid eyes on the wife, though.”

I tell her about Vince’s phone call, and about meeting him yesterday. She looks concerned.

“Hmmm. The whole thing’s a little…creepy,” she says.

“Creepy? How?”

“The place is a dump,” she says. “What kind of family would move in there? Especially with a kid. I’ve seen the inside. It’s like lead paint central.”

“Maybe they’re short on cash,” I say. She frowns.

“So what’s the father like?” she asks.

“Nice guy. Not bad to look at.”

“How not bad ?”

“Hmmm. All-American. Blue eyes. Interesting looking.”

“Interesting like who?” she asks. “Channing Tatum…or Quasimodo?”

“Just sort of…preppy,” I say.

“Preppy? In a house like that ?”

I can see where she gets it from .

“Nice voice,” I add.

“I bet,” she says.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re blushing.”

“What? I am not,” I say.

“Now don’t go getting all huffy. This is me you’re talking to. Tell the truth,” she says, leaning forward, whispering as if we weren’t alone. “Do you have feelings for this guy?”

“Darcy, I just met him yesterday! I’ve only seen him once.”

“But obviously he’s seen you,” she says, licking chocolate off her fingertips.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…it’s just very odd that he asked you to pick up the kid. Why you? And where has his wife been hiding?”

I tell her what Ben heard his teachers discussing. A sudden illness. A middle-of-the-night ambulance.

“When was this?” she wants to know. “Monday? Tuesday? My bedroom faces the front. I would have heard something.”

“I don’t know. All he said was, they took her away.”

“To United?”

United is our local hospital. It’s where you go to have a sprained wrist bandaged, or a speck taken out of your eye. But for anything more serious, you go somewhere else. United’s one claim to fame is that it’s won the Hospital Gift Shop Award three years running.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say where she was.”

“So, for all you know,” she says, tossing the Human Bean bag into her recycling bin, “she could be lying in a ditch somewhere.”

“Oh, come on…”

“No. Listen . You don’t think it’s strange—a new family in town, keeps to themselves, meets no one. Didn’t even move in with any furniture, for God’s sake.”

“Is that true?”

“No moving van. No U-Haul.”

“Well, now that you mention it…”

“One day the house is empty. Then boom, it’s got tenants. No one meets the wife. Then suddenly, she’s being spirited away in the middle of the night. I’m getting a weird vibe from the whole thing. Hey—can you hand me the Splenda?”