She Loves Me Not (12 page)

“Keep the pen,” the woman says. “We have millions
of 'em. They're giveaways.”

“Oh, thanks.” Christine tucks it back into her
purse, grabs Ben's breakfast, and heads out the door, hoping she'll find her
husband in a decent mood for a change.

“. . . Y
ou had a nice white dress and
a party on your confirmation,”
Leslie sings along with the radio as
she turns off the main road toward Shorewood Lane.

“Aunt Leslie? What's a confirmation? Is it like a
wedding?” Jenna asks from the back seat.

“Sort of. More like a first communion, though.”

“I'm going to make my communion next year,” Jenna
proudly informs her. “And I'm going to get a beautiful white dress with a veil.
Mommy said so.”

“So am I.”

“Leo! You are not!”

“I am too.”

Jenna sighs with the exaggerated exasperation of a
seven-year-old sister. “Aunt Leslie, tell him he's not.”

“Leo, you'll make your first communion in a few
years.”

“And you won't have a white dress with a veil,”
Jenna adds.

“I will too.”

And here we go
again.

Spending time with her niece and nephew has been
mostly a pleasure, but their constant bickering is really starting to get on
Leslie's nerves. At McDonald's, where they stopped for breakfast after the kids
decided the chocolate toast had just been a pre-breakfast snack, they argued
over everything, from who got to sit on the same side of the booth with Aunt
Leslie to whether Chicken McNuggets can be construed as a healthy breakfast.

Before they left, Jenna started crying because the
Barbie doll she'd brought with her was missing. Leslie combed the car, the
parking lot and the restaurant before spying a tuft of blond nylon hair sticking
out of Leo's coat pocket. Naturally, he said the doll got in there by
accident.

“It did not!
” Jenna
shrieked so loudly that everyone in McDonald's turned to stare.
“You're always stealing things! I heard Mommy say
so.”

Leslie will be glad to hand them over to their
mother again. How the heck does Rose do it? She always seems so patient. Maybe
she just tunes them out.

Leslie tries to do just that now, turning up the
volume and singing along with the radio, but the song is just about over.

The DJ announces, “That was Levittown native Billy
Joel with ‘Only the Good Die Young,' and you're listening to
Sunday Morning Oldies
on WLIR. Next, here's Petula
Clark with—”

“Later, Petula,” Leslie mutters, pulling into the
driveway behind Rose's car and turning off the radio. Hmm. Peter isn't here yet.
He must have gotten hung up at the—

“Hey, what's Mommy doing?” Leo sounds
concerned.

“Uh-oh. She looks mad,” Jenna adds.

Leslie glances up to see Rose out on the front
porch in her dress coat. She doesn't appear to be coming or going, just
. . . standing.

And she doesn't look mad. She looks upset. Terribly
upset.

Leslie's stomach twitches. Has there been bad
news?

Peter.

Oh, God.

Did something happen to Peter?

She opens her car door and hurries toward her
sister-in-law as Leo hollers, “Wait, Aunt Wes-wee, get me out!”

“Rose? Is something wrong?”

Rose nods, her arms wrapped around herself as she
turns haunted, frightened eyes up to meet Leslie's expectant gaze.

“Someone's been here,” she says in a low voice. “In
the house. While I was gone.”

“Oh, Rose . . .” Leslie exhales in
relief. “That was probably just Peter. He said he was coming over and that he
had the key. He probably just ran back out to get a cup of cof—”

“No, Leslie, not Peter. Somebody else. Somebody
who's trying to scare the hell out of me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mommy!” Jenna calls from the car. “I can't unstrap
Leo. Help!”

“I'll be right there,” Rose calls as she reaches
behind her for the knob and pushes the door open a crack. She whispers to
Leslie, “Listen.”

Leslie leans in. Startled by the loud, pulsating
sound, she looks at Rose. “What the heck is
that?”

“It took me a few seconds to figure it out.
. . . It's Leo's new sound machine. It has a heartbeat setting and
somebody must have—”

She breaks off abruptly at the sound of gravel
crunching and tires splashing along the wet road.

Leslie turns to see Peter's truck pulling up at the
curb.

“Mommy!” Now both Jenna and Leo are hollering from
the back seat of her car.

“I'll get them,” she tells Rose. “You just
. . . wait here.”

“I don't want the kids to hear it,” Rose protests.
“They might be scared.”

“Of the sound machine? Do you want to run in and
turn it off so that—”

“No! Leslie, I'm afraid to go into the house.
Somebody's been in there.”

Peter's car door slams. “Hi, guys,” he calls
jovially.

“Hi, honey. Maybe . . .” Lowering her
voice, Leslie searches for something reassuring to tell Rose. “Maybe the sound
machine's on some sort of timer and it went on by itself?”

“It doesn't have a timer. And we keep it on the
mountain stream setting, and never this loud.”

“Well, maybe Leo changed the setting and the
volume,” she suggests, seeing Peter take a hardware store bag from the back of
the truck.

“Yes, but Leo has been gone. The house has been
empty since I left for church two hours ago, Leslie. I'm telling you, somebody
came in. And it's a
heartbeat,
Leslie.”

“So you think somebody is . . . I don't
know, teasing you? About the heart surgery?”

“Mommy!”

“Coming!” Rose shouts impatiently, then asks
Leslie, “What do you think?”

“I think it's your secret admirer trying to tell
you he's in love with you. I think that's what the heartbeat means. And I think
that the secret admirer is—”

“Hitch,” Rose says flatly. “I know you do. But
Leslie, Hitch wouldn't do something like this. He knows it would scare me to
think that somebody's been in the house when I'm not here. And in my car. And he
would never call me in the middle of the night, either.”

“Well, you don't know that that has anything to do
with this. It was probably just a wrong number,” Leslie points out, watching
Peter walk over to the truck where her niece and nephew are waiting restlessly.
He reaches in to release Leo's seat restraints.

“I didn't feel like it was a wrong number. I know
it sounds like I'm losing it here, but . . . Leslie, I can't help
being freaked out. Somebody was in my house.”

“What are you talking about?” Peter asks, coming up
beside the porch, the kids trailing behind him. “Somebody was in your house?
Who?”

“Shh . . .” Leslie raises a finger to her
lips and shoots a meaningful glance at the children.

“Thanks for getting them out of the car.” Rose
hurries down the steps and past him to hug Jenna and Leo, who are bickering
about who gets to feed Cupid.

“Oh . . . the dog,” Rose turns toward
Leslie and Peter. “She's in the house. She was barking when I opened the door. I
ran back out again when I heard—”

She breaks off, conscious of the children
listening.

“Heard what?” Peter asks, looking from Rose to
Leslie.

“Hey, guys, we forgot to get your overnight bags
out of my trunk,” Leslie says brightly, taking her niece and nephew by the hand
and leading them back to the car.

Behind her, she sees Peter and Rose talking quietly
for a moment. Then Peter pats her sister-in-law briefly on the arm before going
up the steps and into the house.

“Be careful, Peter,” Leslie calls after him,
frowning.

“Why does he have to be careful? Is he going to use
his hammer?” Leo wants to know.

“No, it's just . . .”
Just what, Les? That there was an intruder in the house while Mommy was
gone?
“Um, power tools,” she amends. “He's going to use his power
tools and I always tell him to be careful with them.”

“Can I go watch?”

“Not right now.”

She stares up at the house. Rose is hovering
nervously on the porch. The children race each other down to the sidewalk and
back, with Jenna contradicting Leo's repeated shouts of “I win!”

Leslie wants to believe that Rose is overreacting
to this sound machine incident, and the phone call, and the anonymous gifts. But
what if she isn't? What if somebody other than harmless Hitch is actually behind
this?

“Excuse me . . . is everything okay over
there?”

She looks up, startled, to see an unfamiliar man
poking his head through the open front door of the house next door. Leslie
recalls Rose saying that a couple moved in there a few months ago, but this is
the first time she's seen anybody over there.

Rose appears to be at a loss for words, distracted
by the children and by Peter inside the house, so Leslie crosses the patch of
grass to speak to the neighbor.

“Hi, I'm Rose's sister-in-law, Leslie,” she tells
the man, who has now stepped out onto the small porch.

“Ben Kirkmayer.” He reaches down over the railing
to shake her hand. The gesture seems oddly formal, considering that he's wearing
flannel pajamas and slippers. She senses tension in his handshake and in the
dark eyes regarding her from behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. He's probably
self-conscious about what he's wearing, and looks like he'd be far more
comfortable in a suit and tie, carrying a briefcase instead of the terry cloth
dish towel in his hand.

“Rose just got home and she thinks there might have
been an intruder in the house,” Leslie tells him. “You didn't see anything
strange over there, did you?”

“No, but then, I'm not the type to spy on my
neighbors through the windows,” he says, sounding almost defensive.

“I didn't mean—I just thought you might have
glanced out and seen somebody prowling around.”

“If I had, I would have called the police,” he
informs her. “What makes her think there was an intruder in the house. Are there
signs of a break-in?”

“No, it's not that, it's . . .” Leslie
eyes the man, uncertain how much she should reveal. He is, after all, a
stranger. Besides, you never know. What if . . . ?

Nah. She dismisses that theory as quickly as it
flits into her head. There's no way this uptight married man is concealing a
flaming infatuation for Rose. In fact, it's difficult to imagine him being
passionate about anything.

At the sound of wild barking, both Leslie and Ben
Kirkmayer turn back toward the house next door. Peter has emerged onto the
porch, the puppy wriggling in his arms.

“Ow! He bit me!” He lets go of the dog abruptly and
he drops the few feet to the ground.

“You dropped our dog!” Jenna shouts as the puppy
releases an accusatory yelp. Trailed by Leo, she scampers after her pet across
the brittle, muddy lawn.

Leslie abandons the neighbor on his porch and
hurries toward Peter, who has thrust his knuckle into his mouth, wincing with
pain.

“Are you okay, Peter?”

He removes his hand from his mouth and examines it.
“He barely broke the skin. I thought you said he was friendly, Leslie.”

“He is. I don't know why he'd—”

“Where did you find him?” Rose interrupts.

“He was shut in that small room where I'm working
on the shelves. And he crapped in the toolbox I left there yesterday.”

“But . . . he was upstairs when I left.”
Her uneasiness now verges on alarm. “You're saying the French door was closed
and he was trapped in there?”

Peter nods, his knuckle back in his mouth.

“What about the sound machine?” Leslie asks.

“It was on,” he says with a shrug. “The volume was
all the way up. I unplugged it. Maybe there's an electrical short in one of the
wires.”

Electrical short.
Wires.

The disturbing memory of Sam's freak electrocution
bursts into Leslie's thoughts.

But that wasn't a short in a wire. That was
high-voltage cables coming down in a storm.

“Was there . . . was there anything
else?” Rose asks, her eyes shadowed with trepidation.

He meets her gaze and shakes his head. “I checked
the whole house. It doesn't look like anything was ransacked, and there were no
broken windows or anything like that. I'm not sure how anybody could have broken
in. Maybe it was just a short in the wire, like I said.”

“Then . . . what about the dog?” Rose's
voice rises, shrill with barely contained hysteria.

They turn their gazes to the children romping on
the grass with the barking puppy.

“Maybe he got himself trapped in there on his
own.”

“How? By turning the doorknob with his paw?”

“Rose, try to calm down,” Leslie says, pushing
aside her own worry and resting a hand on her sister-in-law's coat sleeve.

“You never know. Puppies are capable of all kinds
of mischief, Rose,” Peter says.

You never know.

Just what Leslie thought moments earlier about
Rose's taciturn neighbor. She glances over at the porch next door, intending to
give him a wave to show him that everything is okay, whether it is or not.

But the porch is empty, the front door closed.

“I'm calling the police,” Rose says.