The Secret Lives of Married Women E-Book

Elissa Wald

• Herausgeber: Hard Case Crime
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 299

Beschreibung

"You can rid yourself of the wolf at your door, but what do you do when the wolf is in your bed...?" Two identical twin sisters—one a sexually repressed defense attorney, the other a former libertine now living a respectable life in suburbia—are about to have their darkest secrets revealed, to the men in their lives and to themselves. As one sister prepares for the toughest trial of her career and the other faces a stalker who knows details of her life that even her husband doesn't, both find themselves pushed to the edge, and confronted by discoveries about their husbands that shock and disturb them. The Secret Lives of Married Women is an intense, psychologically penetrating tale of fears and fantasies, the desires that drive us, and how far men will go for the women they love. Acclaim for the Work of Elissa Wald... "A brave, disturbing new voice in American fiction." — Pat Conroy "Passionately wrought...a writer whose prose I've long admired." — Junot Diaz "Elissa Wald, a veteran of what vanilla reviewers call 'the S/M scene,' brings new meaning to the term 'literary submission.' If you're looking for a good erotic read, cuff yourself to this book." — Time Out New York

Leseprobe

Acclaim for the Work of ELISSA WALD!

“A fine, passionately wrought novel from a writer whose prose I’ve long admired. Wald’s vision of the world has much to teach us about the brevity of desire and the longevity of pain.”

—Junot Diaz

“Psychologically complex... Wald clearly knows her varied characters, whom she portrays in a sympathetic and unsparing light.”

— Publishers Weekly

“Remarkable and fascinating... Wald writes with a simplicity and frankness that are unusual but perfectly suited to her subject.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“Elissa Wald’s style is both delicate and tough, her images haunting...I read it in one sitting, and I hope Wald receives the attention that she deserves for producing such a lovely and challenging work.”

— Pat Califia

“Elissa Wald is a brave, disturbing new voice in American fiction. She works all the margins of the wild side and brings us news from those frontiers that very few writers have dared approach.”

— Pat Conroy

I had time to take in every detail of the room—the black-and-white photo of the New York City skyline above the headboard, the heavy mauve curtains and the sheer white scrim behind them, the sparkling view through the window, the wide expanse of the bed.

I had time to take in every detail of him. He was handsome. His tie was loosened. His shoes were shined.

By the time he put his papers aside, my scant black panties were soaked through and there was an ache between my legs.

Finally he stood and slowly approached me until we were eye to eye. He had a few inches on me but not many. Looking straight into my gaze, he took off his belt and held it across my mouth.

“Kiss it,” he said.

I kissed it.

“Kiss it like you’d like to kiss me,” he said. “Kiss it like you love it.”

My mouth opened and I tongued the leather, nipped at it like a kitten.

He took it away and cracked it against the wall next to my head. I whimpered in real fear. Then he wrapped it around my neck, sliding the leather end through the buckle so that it was at once a collar and a leash.

“Down on all fours,” he said...

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The SECRET LIVES of MARRIED WOMEN

byElissa Wald

A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

(HCC-113)

First Hard Case Crime edition: October 2013

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street

London SE1 0UP

in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

Copyright © 2013 by Elissa Wald

Excerpts from Different Hours by Stephen Dunn, copyright © 2000, used by permission of the author

Cover painting copyright © 2013 by Glen Orbik

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Print edition ISBN 978-1-78116-262-0

E-book ISBN 978-1-78116-263-7

Design direction by Max Phillips

www.maxphillips.net

Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

Printed in the United States of America

Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

For Nikolai and David

Contents

Part One: The Man Under the House

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Part Two: Abel’s Cane

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Epilogue

THE SECRET LIVES OF MARRIED WOMEN

PART ONE

The Man Under the House

1

Before that summer, the summer of fear—

It makes me cringe to know that I sound like a tabloid wife. I can’t talk about what happened, even to myself, in a way that seems real. The words that come to me sound like something I’ve read in line at the supermarket.

Before the summer of the stalker, the summer I looked at my husband and saw a stranger, I was drinking in a bar with Rae and having a conversation about intimacy. It was a conversation I’d had many times before, with any number of thirty-something women who were worried about their chances of marrying in time to have children. Rae was thirty-six, the same age as me. She was our realtor, and it seemed she was also becoming a friend.

I had married just two years before, and now had a one-year-old daughter. (I was also a few weeks into my second pregnancy, but didn’t know it yet.) As a result, my part in this time-worn dialogue had shifted from sharing the despair to dispensing counsel. Usually these women had spent their time—as I had, myself, until very recently—investing in a series of untenable characters, men whose inability to commit was as clear as the color of their eyes.

“I do want a family. I do,” Rae was telling me. “And I know I’ve got to get on it soon. But I don’t know if it would be fair to date right now because the truth is I’m still getting over someone else.”

“Oh,” I said. “So—you just ended a relationship?”

“If you can call it that.”

“Let me guess: married man?”

“Worse than that. Even worse.”

Hearing this, I couldn’t help leaning in.

“Okay, how should I put this...let’s call it a ten-year tryst. With a stone-cold thug. The guy’s a gang leader and a dealer, he’s done all kinds of time. And no, we didn’t have an official relationship. We had nothing but insane, unbelievable sex. Trouble is, it was so good with him that no one else does it for me.” Rae shot me a sidelong glance. “This is probably more than you wanted to know.”

“Not to worry,” I told her. “I want to know everything.” This, at least, was the truth. And then I said my usual lines.

I know just what you’re doing, because I spent almost two decades doing pretty much the same thing. If a man was married, or engaged, or living on another continent, or certifiably insane, or gay, or a priest, or a prison inmate serving a life sentence, I was all over him. A few of these categories were invented for emphasis, but not many. On the other hand, if a man was single, appropriate, and well-intentioned, I couldn’t run away fast enough. And when my relationships never seemed to work out, I decided I wasn’t lucky in love. It took me years to understand that I was afraid of commitment myself, that the suffering was essentially self-inflicted. But even once I could see what I was doing, it took many more years to be able to change. Because that’s what I was used to; that’s where I was comfortable. It may have been bleak and lonely, but in some sense it was safe.

And Rae asked the usual question in response. “So how did you cross the road?” she wanted to know. “How did you get to the other side?” And here I had another practiced answer.

You know, I don’t think it’s quite like that...at least for me, it’s more of an ongoing process, and to be honest, I still struggle with it. But I think you have to reach the point where you want it more than you don’t want it. Where you’re ready — really ready — to let it into your life. I’ve come to believe that intimacy is available to anyone who’s truly ready to give and receive it.

That conversation took place in the early spring.

2

A couple of months later, I was standing in front of our new home: a weathered split-level with cedar siding and asphalt roof shingles, set back from a somewhat busy street. This was in Vancouver, in Washington State, just a few miles north of Portland, Oregon. We would be moving in the next day.

I was at the edge of the driveway, scanning the street, when a man hailed me from the house under construction next door. A workman, well over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with reddish-blond hair, a goatee, dusty clothes and work boots.

“Hey, are you moving in here? It’s a great house. I’m Jack,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Walt’s cousin.” Walt was our house’s former owner.

I was waiting for a house painter who was late. The night before, my husband had given him painstaking directions over the phone. Afterward he said the man sounded slow, or maybe drunk. I wasn’t confident that he would show up.

“Do you know any painters?” I asked after shaking his hand.

“I’m a painter,” he said. “What do you need painted?”

“Just one small room,” I told him. “But it has to be today. I’d like it to air out overnight so my little girl won’t be breathing in any paint fumes.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Tell you what. Why don’t I do it on my lunch break?”

“It’ll take longer than a lunch break.”

“Well, I can finish it tonight if need be.”

“Really? Don’t you want to see the room first?”

No need, he told me. He knew the room. (The little one across from the master bedroom, yes? Yes.) He knew the house, he said, like it was his own. He’d do it for a hundred bucks.

This was an appealing offer, as the first painter had wanted one fifty. Just as I began to hope our original man wouldn’t show up, his battered blue van pulled to the curb across the street.

“Just get rid of him,” Jack urged. “Tell him you changed your mind.”

“Well,” I said. “I wish I could.”

“Why can’t you? Come on. I’ll do it cheaper and better.”

“I wouldn’t feel right about it. He came all the way out here. But look,” I said. I realized that for some reason I was anxious to appease him. “There’s a lot more work we want done on this house. Our daughter’s room was just the first thing. We want to strip the wallpaper in another room and paint that one too, and rip up some carpet and put down wood floors...”

When I brought the painter into the house, Jack came along so he could see what I wanted done. I showed him the alcove on the western side of the house, which was covered with garish electric-blue wallpaper. I thought that with a few adjustments, it would be ideal as a nursery for the baby due in November.

“Ah,” he said. “The gun room.”

“What?”

“This is the gun room. It’s where Walt kept his rifles.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, we’d like to make it a nursery now.”

He had named his hundred-dollar price for the paint job on the spot, so now I tried to get an idea of how much he’d want to do other things. But here he became evasive, saying he charged by the hour and it was impossible to know how long such jobs would take.

“Like you never know what you’re going to find under that wallpaper,” he told me.

I went over to the wall and ripped off a long strip. “Well, here. Take a look,” I said. I added that I didn’t like to pay by the hour. “In general,” I said, “jobs seem to take a whole lot longer when there’s an hourly rate instead of a flat fee.”

“Oh, hey, I don’t screw around,” he protested. “I get it done.”

I didn’t point out that at this very moment he was presumably on the clock of the owner next door while chatting me up.

“At the least,” I said, “I’d need to know that a job wouldn’t exceed a certain amount.”

He looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language, and I realized we were already on somewhat adversarial terms. I began to feel sorry I’d started talking with him at all.

“Well, look, I’m sure we’ll figure something out,” I said.

Instead of responding to this, he tilted his head and squinted at me. “You know,” he said finally. “I think I’ve seen you someplace before.”

“Maybe,” I said. “We were in Portland for a year before buying this house, so if you get down there much...” But I didn’t believe he’d really seen me before; I didn’t even think that he believed it. It was just something men said to get information.

* * *

It was true that we’d spent the last year renting a house in Portland. But when we were ready to buy, we were drawn to Vancouver, just across the Columbia River and the Washington state line. Here we were amazed by what we could afford: the lush green lawn and two-car garage, the split-level layout and vast kitchen. We loved the great room’s vaulted ceiling and rough-hewn wooden beams, the floor-to-ceiling fireplace constructed of river rock. For all this, we were willing to overlook the neighborhood’s lack of charm, its absence of continuous sidewalks, and the fact that the area seemed to be all strip malls and chain stores.

It would be an adjustment, Stas and I kept saying to each other. Like the many other adjustments we’d made in such swift and recent succession. Stas had moved in with me after our second date and we’d married within the year. I was pregnant six weeks later, and we left New York City for the west coast a few months into the pregnancy. It was hard to leave Manhattan but even harder to imagine having children there: too expensive, too crowded, an endless hassle. If we stayed put, we told each other time and again, our kids would never get to play in the yard. In Manhattan, there were no yards.

Portland was full of yards, and there seemed to be two cats and a rosebush in every one of them. We rattled off the city’s virtues to our friends back east: kind and gentle, laid back and easy, progressive and affordable and child-friendly. Portland offered easy access to the ocean, the mountains, the national forests and the desert. It was full of independent bookstores and galleries and museums.

Beneath all this was something harder to articulate: a certain ramshackle charm, an enchanted quality about even the modest houses and streets. Many of the homes brought the word cottages to mind, with their shingled sides and pitched roofs and smoking chimneys. Wildflowers were a fixture in almost every yard, and porches were often elaborately furnished, with porch swings and baby swings, rugs and chairs and end tables, prayer flags or paper lanterns. Little artisanal touches were everywhere: rectangles or diamonds of colored glass set into a wooden fence, roses trained painstakingly over a trellis, a mosaic of ceramic and china shards embedded in the cement of someone’s front steps. Alleys crisscrossed the serene neighborhoods, and they could be mistaken for little country lanes with their hawthorn and honeysuckle and dirt paths worn smooth.

The only drawback was that so many others were in sudden agreement about Portland’s allure. Even as the real estate market was taking a hit across the nation, the housing prices there were skyrocketing. The other outposts of the city made Vancouver seem appealing. So here we were, first-time buyers with a home of our own. And I was having a room painted, because I could.

When I returned to the house later that afternoon to pay for the job, Jack appeared in the driveway again.

“Listen, I’ll come up with a fair price to give you guys,” he said. “I thought about what you were saying, and I get where you’re coming from.”

I told him I appreciated this. “There were just so many expenses involved in buying the house. More than we realized. So we want to rein in the spending for a while.”

“Yeah, no, I get it,” he repeated. “And like I said, I’ll work out something you can live with.”

I recounted this exchange to Stas when he came home from work. “So, you know, already it’s awkward,” I said. “I all but offered him this work, but he wouldn’t say how much he’d want for it.”

We were in the stripped living room of our Portland rental, sitting on boxes and eating takeout burritos on paper plates. Clara’s crib had been dismantled and she was asleep in the Pack ’n Play.

“Why did you even start talking to him?” my husband asked, irritated. “Why didn’t you wait to see if the painter would show up? You are too impatient.”

“He started talking to me,” I said.

“You should learn not to be so friendly.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Stas gave me a hard look and said nothing further.

I shouldn’t have married him, I thought for perhaps the hundredth time.

* * *

“Don’t feel bad,” Rae said a little later that evening, upon hearing the same story. She had come to drop off some house keys that Walt forgot to give us: one for the side door, another for the garage. “Your back was against the wall by then. You had one day to get the job done!”

I was happy to see Rae. Her loud pronouncements always gave me a lift.

“It’s not like you would’ve had time for a comparison shop if the first guy never showed,” she added.

“Well, exactly,” I said.

“Just make him name his price before he starts. You’re smart to want a flat fee. And listen, once you’re settled in, we need to grab a drink. Maybe the middle of next week?”

* * *

The following morning, an unseasonably hot morning in May, we arrived at the house with our U-Haul in tow. My twin sister Lillian and her husband Darren were already parked out front; they had flown in from New York to help us move, and from here they would drive up to Canada to see Darren’s father. “Look at that. Darren’s rental,” Stas said. “Is that a Mercedes...?”

This was something I never would have noticed. I could be close with someone for years and never notice what they drove, beyond a vague sense of its shape and possibly its color. Whereas Stas kept a vehicular inventory of his every casual acquaintance: the brand, the make, the year, how many miles it would get to the gallon.

Lillian emerged from the car: a lean and angular woman in faded blue jeans and a t-shirt, her dark hair swept back and held by a simple clip. She wore tortoiseshell glasses and no makeup: a slimmer, sensible version of me.

“It’s lovely, Leda!” she said. “Look at your new yard. What a beautiful tree, and how great that there’s a swing.”

“Thanks so much for coming.” We hugged hard and I breathed in her scent of laundered cotton and herbal shampoo. Over her shoulder I watched as Stas and Darren shook hands. “You’re renting in style. Stas is very impressed.”

“Oh, it’s ridiculous. You’d think we could do without a luxury car for a week-long road trip. But you know Darren.”

Darren and Lillian had met in law school. He was now a senior associate specializing in mergers and acquisitions at Skadden, Arps. Lillian was a defense attorney and a partner in her own firm. They had been trying to have children for a long time and for that reason, I’d put off telling Lillian I was pregnant again. But now she tentatively touched my swelling belly.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “Are you...?”

I gripped her hand in both of mine. “I am.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Oh, Lily. I just wanted to wait until after the first trimester. You know how it is.”

“How far along are you?”

“Thirteen weeks. I was going to tell you this weekend, honestly. I wanted to tell you in person.”

“That’s just so wonderful, honey. I’m so happy for you.” A little abruptly, Lillian turned to peer into the backseat of our car. She kept her face averted as she lifted Clara out and made a breathless, affectionate fuss over her. “Sweetie-pie, hi! I’m so glad to see you. I missed you so much!”

Inside the house, my sister and her husband exclaimed over the dramatic fireplace and the kitchen’s rustic charm. I went to the sink to refill my water bottle but when I turned the faucet, nothing happened.

“What the hell,” Stas said. I stepped into the laundry alcove and tried that sink too. The water was off.

It was the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Stas called the water department and got a recorded message. I called Rae and got her voicemail. Walking down our new driveway to the U-Haul, I thought about three days with no working sinks, showers, or toilets.

“Hey, what’s the trouble?”

I looked up to see Jack grinning at me from the next yard.

“You look like someone pissed in your cornflakes,” he said.

I told him about the water. He stepped away from his pail of plaster and wiped his hands on his pants. “Maybe I can give you a hand. Let me take a look.”

He followed me back to the house, where I introduced him to everyone else. Then he disappeared into the basement. When he resurfaced a few minutes later, the water was back on.

We all exclaimed with relief. My unease of the day before was replaced by gratitude. How lucky that I’d met Jack! We invited him to grab a bagel and cream cheese from the breakfast spread on the kitchen island. He dug in without hesitation. He seemed to be in no hurry to leave.

Eventually Stas and I turned to the task of hauling boxes into different rooms while Jack lingered over his third cup of coffee, talking to Darren.

“You see, Stas,” I said, as we unpacked linen and quilts and clothing in our new bedroom. “It’s a good thing I met Jack after all. Otherwise we’d have no water till Tuesday.”

“He really knows this house,” Stas conceded.

* * *

“Listen,” said Lillian when we were alone later, drinking green tea at the kitchen table. “I know you’re mostly a stay-at-home mom right now, but if you’re interested in a one-time paying job that you can do at your convenience, a client of mine just told me about a project that might intrigue you. It won’t pay much, of course.”

“What is it?”

“Well, he’s blind and affiliated with all kinds of advocacy groups. Apparently one of them received an endowment for the purpose of creating an audio library of poetry.”

She drew a slender hardcover from her purse. The title was Different Hours; the poet’s name was Stephen Dunn.

“Whether or not you’d like to record for them, I think you would love this,” she said. “It won a Pulitzer. Anyway, have a look at it and let me know whether you’d like to be a reader. You’d be recording all the poems for around seventy-five dollars.”

I took the book without opening it. “It was nice of you to think of me, Lily.”

“Do you ever think of trying out for any local theater?”

“Yeah, there are a million parts for pregnant women.”

Right away, I regretted saying this. Lillian held her teacup with both hands and stared into the pale green liquid without answering.

“I’m sorry, Lil,” I said after a moment. “It’s just—acting is not a part of my life anymore, and I’m okay with that.”

“All right.”

I felt my throat tighten.

“What’s that sound?” my sister asked suddenly.

“What sound?”

“Listen,” she said, and then I heard it: something like a trickle of rain, but coming from inside the house. As we rose to investigate, Stas and Darren wandered up from the basement where they’d been flattening empty boxes; they had heard it too. The guest room ceiling was leaking. A steady stream of water splashed from the rafters and pooled on the floor. As I ran to get a mop and bucket, it came to me for the first time that there was no landlord to handle this, no building manager to call.

“I can’t believe it. On our very first night!” I said to Stas. “How much did we pay for that inspection? No one said anything about a leak!”

“Welcome to home ownership,” my brother-in-law said.

* * *

But lying in bed a little later, I was bone-tired and deeply pleased. I loved the house. The yard had space enough for a swing set and sandbox. There was a lovely wooden side porch between the house and the garage. And come winter, a fire would blaze inside the stone hearth.

3

“How’s about you haul boxes around today, and I’ll spend time bonding with my niece,” Darren suggested to Lillian the next morning.

“Nice try.”

“C’mon, it’s only fair. You had your turn at the fun job.”

“Overruled.”

As I set a bag of trash outside the front door, I thought—as I had many times before, and never without envy—about how Lillian and Darren spoke the same language. The jargon of the law, of American culture, the countless shared nuances of native English: they bantered and bickered and jousted and joked with nothing lost in translation. Whereas Stas and I—

“Hey, how’s it going?” It was Jack, raising a hand from the next yard.

“Oh, hey,” I said. “Well, there’s always something, I guess.” I mentioned the leak.

“I can probably help you out with that too,” he said. “I’ve fixed a lot of ceiling leaks in my time. Let me drop by when the work day’s done.”

I stepped back into the house and almost collided with Stas, who was just inside the front door.

“Leda,” he said, in a tone of clear reproof.

“What?”

“I don’t want this guy coming over every day.”

“You mean Jack?”

“That’s who I mean.”

“Uh...okay,” I said, trying to strike just the right note between amenable and bewildered, even as I fought off a secret sense of culpability. “But, I mean...where is that coming from? Do you dislike him?”

“Well, let me put it this way. I don’t ever want you to be alone with him.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What are you worried about?”

“I don’t trust him.”

“Trust him how? I mean, what’s he going to do? We know who he is. We know where he works.”

Stas was silent.

“We know his cousin,” I added.

“All right,” Stas said. “You don’t want to listen to me? Don’t listen to me then.”

He left the room and I didn’t go after him.

* * *

The tension lingered all afternoon: at the hardware store where we made copies of our new keys, at IKEA where we picked up a lamp for Clara’s room, at Home Depot where Stas thought someone could trim the ill-fitting marble surface of our kitchen counter.

“Can’t be done here, son,” a man in an orange apron told him.

“Well, where should we go?” I asked. “There’s an alcove for the fridge cut into our kitchen wall, but right now the marble’s overlapping it. We have our refrigerator out in the middle of the kitchen floor.”

“Ma’am, I don’t rightly know what to tell you. You need industrial machinery for that.”

“I cannot believe it is so difficult,” Stas said.

“It’s not as simple as you seem to think,” said another employee who’d stopped to listen. “You need a diamond-coated blade to get through that kind of stone, and you need a stream of water to cool the blade on its way through. It’s a highly specialized process. Might be easier just to replace it.”

A Slavic-looking man came over. Without preamble, without a glance at the other two men, he addressed my husband directly in Russian. The two conferred a moment in their native language and then the man wrote an address on a slip of paper.

Our destination turned out to be a low-slung, windowless building in the middle of a desolate parking lot. “Look at this place,” Stas said, cutting the ignition. “It looks like a mafia warehouse.”

Inside were stacks of stone, tile, and marble and dozens of Russian workers. One of them had a dramatic scar stretching from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. It was he who took the slab from Stas, set it on a nearby table, and drew a tool from his belt. The task took him less than ten minutes.

In the three years I’d known my husband, I’d never heard him say a good word about anyone or anything Russian. But as he replaced the marble on the counter and eased the refrigerator into its intended space, I heard him muttering to himself.

Highly specialized process, my ass...I spent more time talking to those fucking Americans than it took that Russian guy to get it done.

* * *

It was only after Lillian and Darren had left the next day, and Stas was at work, that I opened the book of poems. It was as if, without knowing why, I’d been waiting to be alone with it. I put Clara in the Exersaucer and, hoping that would keep her busy for ten minutes, turned to a poem called Odysseus’s Secret.

At first he thought only of home, it began.

But after a few years, like anyone on his own,

he couldn’t separate what he’d chosen

from what had chosen him. Calypso,

the Lotus-eaters, Circe;

a man could forget where he lived.

He had a gift for getting in and out of trouble,

a prodigious, human gift. To survive Cyclops

and withstand the Sirens’ song —

just those words survive, withstand,

in his mind became a music

he moved to and lived by.

Not halfway through the poem, I became aware of the outline of a man through the window of the front door. Jack was on the porch, a tool belt slung around his hips and a slash of dirt under his left eye. “I can take a look at that leak now, if you want,” he said.

And as I rose from my chair, I felt a twinge of my previous unease. The day before, surrounded by my family and absorbed by moving in, it was easy to brush off Stas’ misgiving. Today I felt the emptiness of the house at my back and the desolation of my sister’s departure. Still, I couldn’t think of a polite way to refuse. I showed Jack into the guest room and, to keep Clara from escaping, pulled the door shut.

“It’s been a while since a girl took me into a room and closed the door,” he said.

This startled me into silence for a moment. “I don’t want the baby to get out,” I said finally, picking her up for good measure and moving toward the window. “Not with that flight of stairs so close by. So do you see the stained part of the ceiling, above the bar? That’s where the water was coming in.”

He glanced at the ceiling and then back at me while Clara tugged at my shirt.

“Why are you trying to undress your mommy?” he said to her. Then to me: “Why do they do that?”

The false innocence of this question seemed to alter the air in the room. It occurred to me that Jack was between me and the door now. Oh, I thought. Oh. So Stas was right about him. But at the moment—because I hadn’t listened to Stas; because I was, in fact, alone with Jack—it seemed essential not to show alarm, essential to be calm and casual.

“She’s probably hungry,” I said.

“Oh...so you’re still...”

“Yes.”

“It always makes me feel funny. To see a woman doing that. I mean, I know it’s natural and all, but still. There was a woman once, I was working on her house, and I walked in on her just after she finished feeding her baby. The baby was done drinking but she hadn’t put herself away yet.”

“Anyway,” I said. I set Clara back down. “There’s the spot where the leak was.”

Slowly Jack brought his gaze around to where the water had come in. “I’d have to break into that part of the ceiling to see what’s going on,” he told me. “Is that all right?”

I was glad when Clara wandered toward the door, giving me a reason to follow her. So far, I wasn’t afraid as much as jittery, skittish; Jack seemed more off-putting and overbearing than truly menacing. But I didn’t want to prolong his visit.

“Let me call Stas,” I said, reaching for my cell phone, “to make sure he won’t mind.”

Just mentioning Stas was a relief. It was a way to remind Jack that I had a husband: a man whose consent was needed before anything could proceed.

“Tell him to wait until I get home,” Stas said immediately. “Just tell him I want to be there to look at the pipes with him.”

“All right,” I said gratefully. “So when do you think that might be? Around six?”

“Stas wants to get a look too,” I reported after hanging up. “He’s hoping you can come back later.”

Jack regarded me with an expression I couldn’t read. “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll come back when he gets home.”

On the threshold of the front door, though, he turned to face me once again. “Man, where the hell have I seen you before?” he asked. “It’s driving me crazy.”

I lifted a shoulder as if to say no clue, and waited until he was out of earshot to slide the metal bolt across the door.

No sooner had he disappeared than my phone rang. It was Lillian, calling from the road. “I didn’t say anything yesterday,” she said, “because I didn’t want to get between you and Stas. But I thought he was right, actually, about the man next door. That you shouldn’t be alone with him.”

I moved to the front window, feeling the first pang of real foreboding. “Yeah, I’m starting to get it,” I said. “But what happened yesterday, to make you say that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t like the way he was looking at you.”

“Well,” I said. “Okay, then. I’m on board with you guys now. Don’t worry.”

I folded the phone and stood holding Clara in the middle of the room.

If I repeated Jack’s remarks to my husband, then Stas would turn him away when he showed up, and we would have an enemy before we’d lived here a week. Jack would be next door every day while I was home alone, and who could say what he might do? For the time being, he was essentially our neighbor.