The Woman Next Door (13 page)

She led Greg to his bed, ordered him into it. "You get up again, young man, and we'll do more than talk."

"Yes, Mommy." Greg heard the sniveling tone in his voice. "I'm sorry."

"You should be."

She left the room.

Greg got back to sleep an hour later.

B
rett slowed the car and turned sharply right. A white saltbox house appeared. Abandoned now. He glanced ruefully at it; it was unpleasant to imagine that the owners of the house had died years ago. They had been a beautiful, generous couple, well into their seventies, obviously still very much in love:

"Come in, come in." His name was Ralph Hauser, his wife's name Eileen. They were short, rotund people —cherubic, Brett remembered thinking. Cherubs with wrinkles and stories to tell. Ralph Hauser pointed at Brett's car, at the steam wafting into the still, warm morning air. "I see you got a little problem there."

Brett nodded sullenly. "Afraid so." He introduced himself and Marilyn. They were on their honeymoon, he explained, and wasn't this a hell of a thing to happen on someone's honeymoon? Ralph Hauser laughed: "Sure it is, sure it is, but you'll be on your way soon enough. After you have some breakfast, we'll call Ernie's Garage and we'll say you're a friend of mine and Ernie will give
ya
extra-good service."

The saltbox slipped past. Brett glanced back, saw the jagged scorch marks above the second-floor windows. He grimaced.
Things change
, he thought.
Things change
.

Ernie's Garage appeared. Brett thought of stopping for some gas and wondered idly if Ernie would remember him. He looked at the gas gauge, saw that he had half a
tankful
. He looked up; Ernie's Garage was behind him, the cottage ahead. Only a couple miles.

Andrea Ferraro's call had been a complete surprise. Though he hadn't put her out of his mind since their first meeting a week before—it would have been impossible—he had relegated her to a position of pleasant unimportance. Her sudden appearance in his life had been an anomaly; he hadn't expected it to be repeated. And then her phone call:

"Mr. Courtney?"

The voice was familiar, but he couldn't place it. "Yes, who's calling?"

"Andrea Ferraro." A pause. "Do you remember me?"

He noted something taunting, something inviting, in her tone. "Yes," he answered, his voice low. "I remember you." And he could think of nothing else to say.

"I'd like to talk with you, Mr. Courtney."

"Yes."

"Today, if possible."

"I'm here till—" He reconsidered. "I can cancel some other appointments, Miss Ferraro, if it's urgent."

"
Andrea
, Mr. Courtney."

"And call me Brett."

"All right . . . Brett." Another pause. "I could meet you. I'd like that."

"Meet me? Where? I don't understand."

"You have a cottage on Canandaigua Lake." It was a statement.

"Yes, but how did you—?"

"I'd like to meet you there, Brett. In an hour, if possible. Is that possible?"

"But the cottage has been closed up for nearly five years."

"Are you saying you can't meet me there, Brett?" Again that taunting, inviting tone.

"I don't know, I . . . ." But he did know. He had known ever since their first meeting. This woman did not merely appeal to him; she possessed him. From her first word to him, her first look, she had possessed him. He was bewildered by it. His intellect told him that such things did not—could not—happen that way. Sixteen years of fidelity to Marilyn had to mean something, otherwise those years were a waste, a blank; it was nearly like throwing life away, and that was an immoral, perverse thing (if there were gods watching over him, they would punish him). And yet he knew what he would say to Andrea Ferraro, what would happen in the next few hours.

He prayed the roads would be clear, that the forty-mile trip to the cottage would take no more than an hour. "I can meet you there, Andrea."

"In an hour, then," she said, and hung up.

A
n amorphous blob of darkness had come up to the north—a storm in the making. Brett wondered if it would bypass the lake. Storms usually did, though when they hit, they hit very hard. He remembered the last time he had been at the cottage in July '74. A bad time—for him, for Marilyn, even for Greg, barely more than a toddler. The vicious summer storm had trapped them in the cottage for two days. Brett thought now that the enforced togetherness in such a confined space was what had started
their
. . . emotional separation. He laughed aloud at the phrase. Who was he kidding? He and Marilyn had become strangers to each other. Then he thought that people do not become strangers. They may become friends, but they do not become strangers. You don't stop knowing a person; you either get to know him better, or you admit that you've never really known him at all.

He stopped suddenly. He had passed the cottage. He craned his head around, put the car in reverse, and backed it up in quick, short bursts. He turned into the gravel driveway, stopped again, put the car in neutral.

Why am I here? What am I doing here?

He concentrated his gaze on the cabin's weathered front door. He thought—unreasonably, he knew—that Andrea was inside. Waiting for him. And then be thought what a fool he had been. It was all some kind of joke, a ruse to get him out of the office, Lord knew why.

"Hello, Brett."

He turned his head slowly, disbelievingly, to the left. He saw her face.

"Why don't you turn the car off, Brett?"

It was as if he were seeing it for the first time, as if he had been wandering through some elite gallery of beautiful faces, had turned a corner and come across her face, and the gallery had fallen to ashes around him. Where did the beauty of that face begin? The mouth? The eyes?

"Turn the car off, Brett." He thought her voice was suddenly louder. Such a delicious, musical voice it was, the kind that could put a wailing child to sleep with one word, but touched subtly, powerfully, with sensuality—a voice that said so much about her and yet—of course, of course—only as much as she wanted known.

"Brett, please turn the car off!" She was shouting now; he was sure of it.

He noticed then, from the roar of the engine, that he had the accelerator halfway to the floor. He took his foot from it, turned the ignition off.

Andrea Ferraro stepped back, away from the door.

"N
o, Mrs. Courtney, your husband is out of the office at the moment."

"What do you mean, 'out of the office'?"

"He left about an hour ago. I'm afraid he didn't say where he was going."

For Christ's sake, Marilyn thought, why did she always have to deal with incompetents? "You are supposed to be his secretary, Miss Diehl. You are supposed to find out where he's going when he leaves during the day."

"All I can tell you, Mrs. Courtney, is what he told me, and he told me nothing."

Marilyn hung up.

I
t was a small cottage, very much like the thousand others that dotted the lake's shoreline. Outside, it was a uniformly weathered gray: it might always have been gray, Brett thought—the people who built it thirty or forty years ago had probably used gray, weather-beaten wood. But they had built it to last, had known what the lake winds, moisture, blown sand, and insects could do. The cottage, in a foot of midwinter snow, stood straight and solid. It surprised Brett a little: He had supposed that without the periodic care of people, the cottage would have moldered away by now.

He fished a key from his pocket, held it up for Andrea to see. "I never thought I'd be using this again," he said, aware of the trembling in his voice.

"Can we have a look around first?" she asked.

"Aren't you cold? I know I am." He wondered if he sounded too eager, if he was rushing the moment.

She put her hand on his, took the key from him. Her slight smile said,
All of these moments are precious
. "I've always enjoyed cold weather, Brett; it makes me feel alive." Then, suddenly, she hesitated, as if confused.

Brett frowned. Her look made him nervous. "Is something wrong, Andrea?" He waited. She said nothing. "Andrea?"

She looked quickly to her right, then to her left. "I don't know," she said, just above a whisper.

"Andrea, are you all right? Andrea?"

A cold wind from the lake rounded the corner of the cottage and hit him, hard. He started to shiver, tried to force himself to stop, couldn't. "Damn it!" he breathed.

He reached for Andrea's hand; she seemed not to notice.

"I don't know," she said, not to him but to herself. She looked up at him, through him.

"Andrea?" he said. He forced himself to smile encouragingly. "I need you, Andrea." He wondered what had prompted the words. Her look? "I need you, Andrea."

She seemed not to hear him.

He saw the key lying on a bare spot of ground near her foot. He stooped, picked it up, stood.

"Help me," he heard. And knew Andrea hadn't said it, though the voice had been hers. He stared at her mouth expectantly, as if the movement of her lips would come now, several seconds later. He saw her lips part slightly, saw her smile.

"You look upset," she said, her concern obvious. And slipped her hand in his. "The cottage will wait, Brett. Let's go look at the lake, okay?"

"Uh . . ." Brett managed.

"I think the lake's as beautiful now as in the summer, don't you?"

Yes
, he thought. "Yes," he said.

"And it's quiet."

"Very."

She tugged gently at his hand. They made their way to the back of the cottage.

T
he wind from the lake was colder here. It hit in rapid bursts, quieted a moment, then hit again. It was a sadistic wind, Brett thought. It allowed not quite enough time for his body to renew the warmth it had just lost, then took that little bit away. It was a killer wind. A smart wind.

He put his arm around Andrea's waist, tentatively at first, until he felt her body relax against his. Then his body relaxed.

"It seems colder here," he told her, "than anyplace I've ever been. Maybe it's the abandonment, maybe that adds to it." He nodded toward the next cabin, several hundred feet to the south. It was a small, squat, neglected structure. Its tar-paper roof sagged now under the weight of old snow.

"A family of five used to come here during the summers," Brett said. "Then, one day they went out on the lake in their little boat and a storm came up." He paused, looked at the lake again, saw a car on the ice near the opposite shore, about a mile off. "They were all drowned." Another pause. "Good people, too."

"That's not a nice story," Andrea said, and he realized immediately that she wasn't chiding him; she was merely making a statement of fact. "It makes me a little sad."

He saw that her gaze was on the car that had gone out on the lake.

The wind hit hard, sustained itself. Brett felt her shiver beneath her suede coat. He pulled her closer to him. "Let's go inside."

"Yes," she said.

I
nside, Brett found that the smaller of two lake-facing windows had been broken, probably by vandals. A nest of spiders had been established in the sink; a number of dull-yellow egg sacs lay waiting for spring. "I'll get rid of them," he said.

"No," Andrea said. "They're doing no one any harm. Besides, spiders are good for a house."

Brett smiled. "My mother used to say the same thing."

"You loved her very much?"

Brett hesitated, memories flooding back; his eyes moistened. "Yes," he said finally, and sought to quickly change the subject. He gestured at the small wood stove standing on a square of red bricks. "There should be some firewood around the side of the cottage. Most of
it's
probably wet, but there might be some we can use." He noticed for the first time the faint smell of mold and disuse. It would grow stronger as the fire heated up the small room, he knew. He glanced at the bed. The blue-and-white crazy quilt—a wedding gift from Marilyn's aunt—was still on it, and two uncovered pillows. It would be a cold bed. And there would be something cloyingly familiar about it: Marilyn's smell would probably still be on it.

He grinned sheepishly. "It's not much, is it."

"Does it matter?"

No, he thought, it didn't matter. Andrea's presence seemed to dispel the mustiness and the stench of bad memories. "No," he said.

"It's a place for us to be, Brett."

"You don't mind that I was here with my wife?"

"If it's going to bother you, yes I do mind. Is it going to bother you?"

"I don't think so." Simple. True.