Because I'm Watching (7 page)

Yesterday, Jacob had been alone, in the dark, and he didn't know one thing about Virtue Falls or his neighbors. Now … he was hearing gossip?

He must have made a sound or a gesture, because Moore jumped and said, “Oh! You want to get done. What was I talking about? Oh, yeah.” He rapped his knuckles on an exposed stud. “This house was built to last or the floor wouldn't have held the weight of the SUV. All oak studs and beams. Can't get wood of that quality anymore, price is prohibitive, so I recommend a steel structure. It'll hold up in the climate and—”

“Fine.”

“Right. Fine.” Moore wrote on the form and passed the clipboard over.

Jacob signed it, and they went on to the next issue.

There were a lot of issues. Windows were single pane. Pipes were copper and fragile. Nothing was to code.

Jacob said, “Fine,” and signed off on everything. Maybe the contractor was padding the job, but Jacob had more experience than most men with government bureaucracy, so when Moore said all this bullshit had to be done to satisfy the building inspectors, Jacob believed him. And signed.

Moore was starting to look less like a mournful basset hound and more like a guy with a hefty profit in his future … when the phone rang.

Moore laughed. “Man, I cannot believe your landline survived this disaster.”

“Answer it.”

The phone rang.

“What? Why?”

The phone rang.

“I came out. I'm signing off on everything. I'm a veteran. Answer it.”

Moore went over to the old-fashioned phone and used his sleeve to brush off the dust. “Who is it?”

The phone rang.

“My mother.
Answer it.
”

“You bet.” Moore picked up the handset. “Jacob Denisov's residence. Berk Moore speaking. How may I help you?”

Even from where he stood, Jacob heard his mother squawk.

Moore held the phone away from his ear. When the shouting had quieted, he brought the phone close again. “I'm a local contractor. I'm doing some work on Jacob's house … Well, Mrs. Denisov, this is an older home and needs repair, so when Jacob had some trouble, he called me in … nothing too serious. Some electrical problems, a mushy feel to the living room floor—”

That was one way to describe the hole Maddie's tire had put in the hardwood.

“And he wants to open up the front of the house with a couple of new windows.…”

Unwillingly impressed with Moore's ability to spin spur-of-the-moment half-truths, Jacob leaned against the wall and listened.

Moore scrutinized Jacob. “He looks fine. He's skinny. Could use a haircut and a shave … Yes, it is hard to believe he used to be clean-cut.…” He glared meaningfully at Jacob. “Can you speak to him?”

Jacob sliced his finger across his own throat.

“Right now, he's under the kitchen sink dealing with some old pipes.”

Jacob picked up a wrench from Moore's toolbox and pounded on a shattered piece of plaster that disintegrated under his blows.

“You bet, Mrs. Denisov, I'll tell him!” Moore hung up.

Jacob ceased pounding. “Thanks.”

“Sooner or later you're going to have to talk to her.”

“Later.”

“I get it. I really do. I've got a mother, too, and when I came back from Afghanistan … God bless her, she meant well.” Absently, Moore rubbed the place over his belly wound. “The only cure for battle hangover is time.”

“Or death.”

Moore gave him one sharp look. “Well, sure. But when you dodge the bullet in battle, it seems surly to seek it out in civilian life. Now, we probably
do
need to look at the pipes under your kitchen sink.”

Jacob dropped the wrench into Moore's outstretched hand. “Maddie's car didn't get close to the kitchen.”

“Thank God. Can you imagine the mess a broken pipe would have created?” Moore crawled under the sink and rattled around, came out, and wiped his hands on his handkerchief. “You're due for a major break. We'd better replace what we can while we've got light in the crawl space.”

Now Moore was definitely padding the job. But Jacob was grateful to him for answering the phone, so he signed off on that, too.

Both men were squatting by the water heater closet, looking at the corroded connections, when a high, cheerful voice said, “Hello, Mr. Denisov.”

Moore flinched.

Bit by bit Jacob turned his head and looked.

The woman who had been working in her yard when the accident happened, the one with the pink bathrobe, the one with the dog poop on her shoe … was standing behind them holding a pie.

 

CHAPTER NINE

How had the woman managed to climb through the rubble and remain fresh and clean, the pie tall, pristine, and white with whipped cream?

She was beaming. “Mr. Denisov, I wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you to the neighborhood.” Her bright tone changed to dismissive. “Hello, Berk.”

“Hello, Mrs. Butenschoen,” Berk said weakly.

Jacob rose to his full height.

Moore stayed low.

Mrs. Butenschoen was five-two, 140 pounds. She wore jeans with rhinestones on the pockets, eyeglasses with rhinestones on the corners, and discreet rhinestone earrings. “I made you a howdy-new-neighbor treat.” She offered the pie.

Browned coconut crawled through the cream.

She continued, “My pies are famous in Virtue Falls. Aren't they, Berk?”

Moore was on his knees, easing away. He froze like a cornered rabbit and muttered, “Famous.”

“I tried to bring a pie over before. More than once, in fact.” She waggled her finger at Jacob. “But you didn't answer the door.”

“No.” If his door had remained on his house, he still wouldn't have answered it.

Mrs. Butenschoen took his hand and wrapped it around the ceramic lip of the pie pan.

A section of the crust crumbled.

She looked stricken. “So few people appreciate the work that goes into a real homemade crust.”

He shoved his thumb in. Crust fell like crisp snow.

With a brave lift of the chin, she ignored his antagonism. “But at last I get to meet you, so our little mishap here”—she waved a hand around at his mangled house—“does have at least one happy consequence.”

“
Our
little
mishap
?” Jacob stared intimidatingly through Berk Moore's sunglasses.

“It's a tragedy, of course, the way Maddie Hewitson causes trouble. She is certainly incorrigible, and possibly venal.”

Moore had scooted far enough out of the line of fire to stand up. “Mr. Denisov, I've got enough to start working up a bid, so I'll head back to the office, then present the bid to Mr. Wodzicki. Shouldn't be any problem—he said anything the insurance disallowed he would pay for out of his own pocket.”

“That's so wonderful and kind,” Mrs. Butenschoen chirped.

Jacob's hostility was undiminished. “That
prick.
”

“Right,” Moore said. “This afternoon, I'll get a guy over here to clean up, and I'll be back tomorrow with the electricians. If I can round up enough generators, I'll get my crew to work day after tomorrow.”

Jacob moved fast, grabbed Berk's arm. “How long will this take?”

“Couple of months. Maybe a little less, maybe a little more. Depends on what we find when we dig into the walls. If there's mold…” Moore shook his head dolefully.

“Two months.” Jacob grasped Moore's shoulders firmly enough to make the man wince.

“I'll do my level best to beat the clock,” Moore assured him.

Mrs. Butenschoen lowered her chin and glared over the top of her glasses. “I'll keep you to that promise, Berk. We have a nice, clean, normal neighborhood where children play and flowers bloom. We can't have our street disrupted.”

“I'll be sure it gets done even if I have to work night and day.” Moore shook off Jacob's grip. “Keep the sunglasses, man.”

Now Jacob knew how Maddie had felt the day before when he abandoned her. He had seen a sniper with his target in view who looked less determined than Mrs. Butenschoen did at this moment. And a faint memory niggled at him. “You look like someone I know. Someone in black-and-white.” From that old TV sitcom
The Andy Griffith Show
 … He had it! “You look like Aunt Bea.”

It took her a minute to figure out who he was talking about. Then she flushed, and he could see her struggling between outrage and nosiness.

He never had a doubt which one would win.

In a soothing, friendly tone, Mrs. Butenschoen asked, “Why don't we sit down and have a chat, get to know each other better?”

“No.”

“After all, I own one of the two largest houses in the neighborhood and I feel it's my obligation to help maintain the quality of appearance we all want for our little bit of Virtue Falls historiana. For instance, did you know—”

“Don't care.”

“That these houses date back to the days when Virtue Falls was a sawmill town? These smaller houses were built for the sawmill workers, and the larger houses, like mine, were built for the superintendents who—”

“I. Don't. Care.”

“I was simply explaining why it's important that we all pull together to maintain trim yards and well-tended homes. I have been caring for your yard. It's the least I can do for one of our honored veterans, but I thought we could pull together and—” This time she interrupted herself. “Would you look at that?”

Mrs. Butenschoen sounded so indignant, Jacob expected to see another car careening toward him. Or a weed in Mrs. Butenschoen's flower bed.

All he saw was Maddie standing up out of her rose garden, disentangling herself from the thorns, dragging her sleeping bag after her like Linus with his blanket. She looked dirty, hollow-eyed, and frightened. As she jerked the sleeping bag free of the branches, she kept her head down and her shoulders hunched. Obviously she knew she was under scrutiny.

Mrs. Butenschoen huffed. “I've tried to talk to her about the pitfalls of an unscheduled existence, but she stares as if I'm speaking a different language. It's not as if she's some kind of undocumented immigrant, you know. She is from Connecticut, a perfectly good East Coast American state.”

“Colorado,” he said.

“What?”

“She's from Colorado, a perfectly good Midwestern state.”

Mrs. Butenschoen ruffled up like a grouse, then subsided under his stare. “If she's going to live off her brother's money, why can't she do what the rest of us stay-at-home ladies do and care for her house?”

“Looks okay to me.”

In forbidding tones, she said, “There is moss on the roof, the lawn has dandelions, and let me tell you, I went inside that house once, and it was a disgrace. Why, when Mrs. Kenyon lived there, you could eat off her kitchen floor. Right now, the poor lady is probably spinning in her grave.”

“If she's in the afterlife and she's worried about the state of her earthly linoleum, she's probably also got a problem with flames shooting up her ass.”

Mrs. Butenschoen seemed not to appreciate that this was the longest speech he'd given since his return from Korea. “Mr. Denisov, I really don't enjoy you using that kind of language around me!”

“What kind of language?”

“You know. The ‘A' word.”

“Ass?” He could hardly believe this woman. “You're going to be really upset when I say
fuck,
aren't you?”

Mrs. Butenschoen actually lost color. “Mr. Denisov, I understand you are recovering from a trauma.”

Recovering? That was news to him.

“So I forgive your crudeness. But”—her head turned again—“oh, my dear heavens.”

Mrs. Butenschoen looked so horrified he wouldn't have been surprised to see her head spin in a circle.

Maddie was back outside, dressed in jeans and a wrinkled, long-sleeved T-shirt, and she was hacking at one of the bushes up against the house. With scissors.

“That is not how you trim a rhododendron. I told her … but does she listen?”

Maddie stepped back and stared at the bush, then went after the bush with renewed fury.

“I'm going to call the police.” Mrs. Butenschoen's head wobbled.

Cool. It really was going to spin in a circle. “Because the neighbor is trimming her bushes?”

“She is a known criminal. She was involved in a mass murder, then she was put in a sanitarium, then she was involved in the murder of her fiancé, then she moved here where nobody knows her, and now she's using scissors!”

Abruptly, he was done with Mrs. Butenschoen. He disliked her more than anybody else he knew. And he didn't like anybody.

He shifted the pie so that he was no longer holding it by the rim. Instead, he held it balanced on the tips of his five fingers like a TV comedian about to toss the cream pie into her perfectly made-up face.

Mrs. Butenschoen's words faded to nothingness and she lifted her hands to protect herself. She eased backward. “I'm going to … to talk some sense into Maddie Hewitson … and if that doesn't work … I will get the police involved. I'll see you later.” She fled.

Not if I see you first.

 

CHAPTER TEN

The trouble with being a cop was—Kateri couldn't simply park her car, walk into the Oceanview Café, and have a cup of coffee. First she had to cruise the street to make sure everything looked normal. And by normal, she meant—all the jaywalkers seemed properly horrified at the sight of a law enforcement officer, no one was attacking the meter maid over a ticket, and no obvious drug deals were going down in Town Square Park.

Next Kateri had to park in front of city hall in the space reserved for the sheriff. She got out and grabbed her walking stick; she had been working nonstop for far too many hours to think she could keep her balance without it. She walked half a block and crossed the street at the corner, hoping all the while she could get inside the Oceanview Café before a concerned citizen collared her to complain about the jaywalkers, the meter maid, or the drug deals.