Just Plain Weird (2 page)

         
“For weeks? That’s become something of an obsession, hasn’t it?”

         
“Just look,” I said. “See the driveway?”

         
“Uh-hunh.”

         
“See the cars?”

         
“Uh-hunh.”

         
“They haven’t moved since the day they moved in.”

         
“So?”

         
“So, they’re nice cars, right? Expensive cars, probably with big car payments every month. But I’ve yet to see anyone in the house go to work.”

         
“Maybe they’re on vacation,” he suggested.

         
“For a month?”

         
“Some people get long vacations,” he said. “Or maybe they work at home, who knows? Maybe they’re independently wealthy.”

         
“And they moved into this neighborhood?” I asked. “What?-- are they independently daffy, too?”

         
“Well, there could be a lot of legitimate reasons why they’re not going to work for that long.”

         
“Oh, and how about food?” I said. “I haven’t even seen anybody go out to buy groceries. How many reasons could there be for that?-- they’re all on a fast?”

         
“You sure they’re even home?” he asked, his interest finally piquing.

         
“They must be,” I said. “The cars are there. They didn’t just wander off someplace.”

         
“Well, maybe they do their grocery shopping at night,” he said.

         
“Uh-uh. My bedroom window is right over their driveway. If anyone started one of the cars, I’m sure it would wake me.” I was a really light sleeper.

         
Raffles looked away from the telescope. He thought for a long while. “All right,” he said finally. “It seems strange. But there’s probably a reasonable explanation for all of it. You just haven’t figured out what it is.”

         
“I just can’t see it.”

         
“Well, there are three courses of action you can take,” he said, his methodical mind slipping into gear. “You can go on like this, which is rather stupid because you’ll just end up making yourself nuts. You can just forget the whole thing, which, given the fact that there might be a potential hottie involved, you’ll probably consider impossible. Or you can do the smart, practical thing.”

         
“What’s that?”

         
“Just ring their doorbell, and give whoever answers the ole welcome to the neighborhood spiel.”

         
“Uh-uh.”

         
“You’d rather spy on them?”

         
I had to admit that there was a certain amount of pleasure to be derived from spying on the house; it probably would be even more pleasant if I ever saw anything.

         
“Come on,” Raffles said, and started to move toward the ladder. “I’ll go with-- we’ll get to the bottom of things, and say hi.” He said it in that determined way, that way that always began something that ended up being embarrassing-- embarrassing usually for me.

         
Although I fully realized what an awful idea it was, I followed him down the ladder. If I didn’t, he would have pestered me until I did follow him.

         
It was a late afternoon in early August, and the air was hot and dry. By the time we made it to the front door of the house, beads of sweat were breaking out on my forehead, partly from the heat and partly out of sheer nervousness. I was not the most sociable person, and ringing the doorbell of a complete stranger to say hello was not the kind of thing I did easily.

         
Raffles started to stab at the doorbell with his long bony finger. It was obvious to me that no one would answer, and that we ought to leave, but he was relentless. I thought the way he was ringing the bell was rather rude, and if anybody did answer the door, they would probably be mad.

         
Then there came a faint stirring sound from the other side of the door. It sounded like the timid rustling of somebody trying to figure out whether or not they should open the door. Or maybe they had a small dog they were trying to shoo away from the door so that they could open it. Finally the door, hinges squeaking slightly, swung open, and a man was looking at us in a searching way, as if he couldn’t comprehend a single reason why we ought to be at his front door. He was a most ordinary-looking man; in fact, if you were trying to design a person of commonplace looks, you couldn’t have done a better job of it than nature had already done to him. He was pretty old, maybe in his fifties, and getting somewhat overweight. His dark hair was thinning and his waist was thickening. He wore black-rimmed glasses on a face that had no features that were especially memorable-- or even vaguely interesting, for that matter. He didn’t have a large, honking nose, but neither was it small. He jaw was neither strong nor weak, but enjoyed some anonymous territory in between. His eyes were not beady, or broadly set, and appeared a dull medium brown. The strangest thing about him was that he was wearing gray suit-- hardly something you’d expect somebody to lounge around the house in-- also, eerily remindful of Ward Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver.

         
He stood there in the doorway, looking from Raffles to me and then back to Raffles again, patiently waiting for one of us to explain our appearance on his front porch. His entire manner as he stood there was of a person who never in his lifetime had ever had a visitor.

         
“Say something,” Raffles whispered out of the corner of his mouth at me. It was just like him to lead me into a situation I’d never wanted to get into to begin with, and once in that situation, expect me to take the bull by the horns.

         
“We were just--” I struggled to say something that wouldn’t sound too stupid-- “Well, we were just wanting to welcome you to the neighborhood.”

         
The man considered this explanation, for what seemed an oddly long period of time. It was a simple explanation, after all, and yet he mulled it over as if it were the unified field theory. In the end, he seemed to relax into a sociable manner.

         
“We moved in almost a month ago,” he said, letting the statement linger in the air so that I wasn’t certain whether he was expecting an explanation why it’d taken us nearly a month to welcome him to the neighborhood.

         
The encounter reached a very uncomfortable juncture, and I promised myself to ring Raffles’ neck later.

         
Finally, the man, who told us his name was Laughton, invited us in for something to drink.

         
Wonderful, I thought, sliding deeper into a situation I never wanted to get into to start with. All Raffles’ previous statements about mass murderers and stalkers began suddenly to flood my mind. Given the oddity of the man’s behavior so far, the guy could have been a mass murderer. Well, you never knew. Maybe that was his method of operation: move into a neighborhood, and then never go anywhere, so that curious people finally came over to see what was what, and then they’d fall into his sinister trap, end up decapitated, chopped into various pieces, and buried in window boxes throughout the community. It could happen.

         
He led us into the living room of the house, which was large and airy. It was pleasantly cool, which struck me as strange, because-- as far as I could tell, anyway-- the air conditioning didn’t seem to be running. The room itself was sparsely furnished, just a sofa, a coffee table, a television, an end table on which stood a plain-looking brass lamp that might have been antique or just designed to look antique. The furniture itself, however, was definitely cheezy. He motioned for us to sit on the sofa, but never offered to turn on the television, before he disappeared into another room. He returned a short time later with two glasses of lemonade.

         
As he handed us the glasses, I couldn’t help thinking, Poison. Sure, poison-- either that or something to knock us out so that he might have his vile way with us-- whatever that was. I just couldn’t stop thinking along these lines, thanks to Raffles.

         
It turned out to be, though, the best lemonade I’d ever tasted. Lemonade would never be the same for me after that day. I couldn’t pinpoint what made the taste of that lemonade so much better than other lemonades I’d had in my life-- after all, how many ways are there of making lemonade?-- but I could tell it was homemade.

         
“So you boys live-- where?” he asked.

         
I explained I lived next door, and that Raffles was over visiting me.

         
“Yeah,” Raffles chimed in, at long last. “We were noticing that you don’t seem to go out much.”

         
The man considered this. “Well, I am retired,” he said dully. “But you may be entirely right. I really don’t go out that much. I guess I’m a born homebody. I have my hobbies to keep me busy, though,” he added, a bit ominously, I thought.

         
“Retired?” Raffles said. “But you’re too young, aren’t you?”

         
The man chuckled, not above accepting a little flattery.

         
“I’ve been very fortunate,” he said.

         
“Stock market?” Raffles asked.

         
“Patents, actually. I invent things.”

         
“Anything we might have heard about?”

         
“I doubt it. My inventions are of a highly-- technical nature-- hardly something that would be widely known.”

         
While he and Raffles spoke, I stared at the floor, noting that rather than having carpeting or bare hardwoods floors, the floor was instead covered with dark brown marble tiles. I’d never seen a living room floor finished that way; it looked very expensive-- especially considering the furniture in the room was so chintzy-- and not a little slippery.

         
When I turned my attention back to the conversation, the man was explaining to Raffles an idea he’d had to better organize the internet.

         
It was just at this point that she entered the room. She was still breathless from running down the stairs, probably from her bedroom. She had to be this man’s, Laughton’s, daughter. She hurried into the room, but when she spotted strangers sitting there and speaking with her father, she froze just inside the doorway. I’d been right when I first laid eyes on her, when they moved in; she was incredibly cute, with long wavy hair that perfectly blended blonde and light brown. Her eyes looked dark green. The shorts she was wearing were pretty short, the white t-shirt was loose, and all and all she was looking a lot better than all right. Her legs were pale, badly in need of a tan, but that didn’t stop my heart from taking a leap that nearly broken a couple ribs as I watched her standing there frozen in time. When her father glanced over at her, she gave him a look that was like a series of questions-- Who are these people? Why are they here? Why are you talking to them? What are you telling them? When are they leaving?-- the cascade of emotions running through her expressions somehow making her appear adorable. I made no mistake about it, though; it was clear she viewed us as intruders.

         
“I need to speak to you,” she told her father, petulant, “in the other room.”
 
She said in the other room in a vicious hiss. I couldn’t explain why but I felt as though I was the cause of her tetchy attitude. Sure, she probably saw us as unwelcome visitors, but for some reason I took it all more personally than that.