Neighborhood Watch

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

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Original
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Copyright © 2000 by Andrew Neiderman

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ISBN: 0-7434-1736-4

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For Brian Ingber

A friend sorely missed

“Excuse me,” she said,

stepping up to her, “but

aren’t you Mrs. Feinberg?”

Elaine Feinberg turned slowly and gazed at Kristin with what Kristin thought were

vacant eyes, the eyes of someone suffering amnesia.

“Yes,” she said in a voice nearly void of expression, mechanical, uninterested.

Kristin widened her smile.

“I’m Kristin Morris. My husband and I bought your house. I know we only met for a few seconds, but—”

“What do you want?” she demanded firmly, her eyes changing quickly to those of one

terrified.

“Nothing, I just . . . wanted to say how sorry I was for what happened to your husband and . . .”

“You’re sorry? You don’t know how sorry you will be. Unless, of course, you become

one of them,” she said.

“One of them? Who’s them?”

“You’ll find out,” she replied.

NEIGHBORHOODWATCH

Books by Andrew Neiderman

Sisters

Weekend

Pin

Brainchild

Someone’s Watching

Tender, Loving Care

Imp

Night Howl

Child’s Play

Teacher’s Pet

Sight Unseen

Love Child

Reflection

Illusion

Playmates

The Maddening

Surrogate Child

Perfect Little Angels

Blood Child

Sister, Sister

After Life

Duplicates

The Solomon Organization

Angel of Mercy

The Devil’s Advocate

The Dark

In Double Jeopardy

Neighborhood Watch

Published by POCKET BOOKS

ANDREW

NEIDERMAN

NEIGHBORHOOD

WATCH

POCKET
STAR
BOOKS

New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore

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WATCH

ELAINEFEINBERGFELT HER BABYstirring inside her. She interpreted the movement

to be restlessness even though she was only in the beginning of her seventh month. Her child wasn’t impatient in the womb, she thought; rather, he or she sensed Elaine’s

disquiet. In fact, it seemed more like the wind that whistled and twisted around the house had sliced through her too, making the fetus shudder. She envisioned the infant tightening its fetal position, grimacing; and then she thought she heard its tiny, but shrill cry vibrate through her bones and into her skull.

She put the palm of her hand on her enlarged stomach and pressed it as firmly as she could without causing herself any pain. She hoped to comfort her baby.

“There, there,” she whispered. “It’s all right. It will be all right.”

Elaine put all her effort into making the words ring with sincerity and with confidence, even though she had no faith in their validity.

It wouldn’t be all right.

It couldn’t be all right.

Poor Sol was in his office, racking his brain, tapping out numbers on his calculator, trying to find a miraculous solution to their deep financial woe. Their little world had closed in around them like some giant hand clenching, squeezing, firming its hold, the fingers shutting down all linkage with the outside, blocking out not only the flow of money, but the flow of sympathy. More and more they found themselves alone, an island in the development, the stream of displeasure and intolerance rushing around them,

creating torrents, waves so high they risked their lives merely stepping out the door.

She hardly spoke to anyone in Emerald Lakes anymore. Her hello’s would echo off the faces of her neighbors, all of them one bland expression, not a smile, not a warm glint in the eyes, nothing but winter in their eyes.

I’m tired, she thought, tired of the battles.

And she knew Sol was tired, too.

She closed her eyes and tried to recall when things were different. It wasn’t that long ago when there was such optimism about everything, and her pregnancy was the giant

exclamation point emphasizing their rainbow future.

A stirring in the air around her snapped her eyes open. It was as if someone had slid open the patio door. Of course, that could never happen, not in Emerald Lakes. Why Emerald Lakes, Sol told her when they first moved here, was as safe as . . . as being back in the womb. Here you could be all snug and warm, never a worry.

She sighed deeply. The womb. Her baby had quieted down. The power of her hand, she

thought and smiled to herself. She closed her eyes again. Surely they would get through their crisis. Surely, it would all end happily and Sol would stop aging right before her eyes.

He was working too hard, she thought, deciding to sit up. She should get him to relax.

Maybe if they just sat and talked with some music playing, put on some Yanni, they

would have a relaxing, stressless night for a change. Neither she nor he would toss and turn trying to slip out of the grip of worry. Maybe if they just—

It was so loud an explosion, she expected the roof to come crashing down. Later, she would say the walls vibrated. Certainly the bed did and that vibration traveled through her body, surely terrifying the baby, too. Her heart stopped and then began to pound.

“SOL!” she cried. She dropped her feet into her slippers and stood up, shaking so hard, she had to brace herself on the bed a moment. “SOL!”

She started out of the bedroom. It looked like smoke in the air around the office doorway and there was the scent of something burning.

“SOL! WHAT WAS THAT? SOL?”

She paused a moment, listened, and then walked slowly toward the office doorway, her hand pressed over her heart. She turned into the office and saw him slumped over his desk. The blood streamed freely from his temple, down his cheek, over the side of his chin to soak the papers.

Did she scream? She really couldn’t remember. She did remember seeing the gun in his hand, but she also remembered thinking, we have no guns or didn’t have until now. Most important, and she emphasized this when the detective arrived, most important, she

would swear on a stack of Bibles that the patio door in the office was unlocked and open at least a quarter of an inch. But when the detective went to look, he said the door was closed, locked, and from the inside.

She had to have been mistaken.

But she wasn’t. She insisted.

“My husband never owned a gun. I never saw that gun in the house. I don’t care that his finger is on the trigger. My husband wouldn’t do such a thing to us.

“Not to us. Not to me and our baby, our unborn baby.”

The detective was patronizing, but he didn’t believe anything she said. To him it was black and white.

Easy.

One moment Sol was alive and the next he was dead because he wanted it that way.

Who would believe otherwise? Certainly not her neighbors.

She heard the whispering.

“A terrible blight on Emerald Lakes. A suicide!”

“There’s just so much we can do with people like this. Just so much the Neighborhood Watch can do to protect them and us.”

“Especially if they don’t cooperate.”

Philip Slater leaned back in his burgundy leather, rich mahogany desk chair. He had soft gray hair and mesmerizing black onyx eyes set in a face dark enough to be Arabic. He spread his arms over the chair’s armrests and curled his long fingers around the claw ends.

It was quiet, cemetery quiet, silent enough to hear the heartbeat in the miniature

grandfather clock resting on the white marble mantle.

“He tell anyone he wasn’t going to be here?” Philip asked.

“Not me,” Nikki Stanley replied quickly. The five-foot-five petite woman narrowed her beady brown eyes to add a schoolmarm’s expression of reprimand.

“Sid?”

“Not a word,” Sid Levine replied.

Slater gazed at the clock furiously. Suddenly they heard the doorbell. Philip turned in his chair and leaned forward, folding his hands on his desk, and fixing his eyes on the doorway to this office. They could hear Marilyn Slater greeting Vincent McShane and then McShane’s hurried steps down the marble tile corridor.

“Sorry,” he said and quickly moved to his seat in front of Slater’s desk. “We had a little family crisis. Mindy,” he added ashamedly, “was caught smoking with some of her

girlfriends in the locker room today. Just found out she was suspended for two days.

Eileen is devastated.”

“Peer pressure is far stronger than the influence we have on our children. That’s for sure,” Nikki said.

Vincent nodded and released his breath as if he had been holding it in to keep from being discovered. The passage of air over his thick lips made him sound like a horse, an

embarrassing sound. He straightened up in his chair and sucked in his beer belly. Philip Slater never missed an opportunity to criticize him for it and when Philip criticized anyone in Emerald Lakes, it was open season on him. McShane had tried to lose weight.

He knew that five feet eight, one hundred and ninety pounds was a bell ringer, but those damn Rob Roys at his business lunches, and the food he consumed at those lunches—all held at the best gourmet restaurants in Manhattan—made it very difficult to diet.

“Did I miss anything?” he asked sheepishly.

“We didn’t start. We needed a quorum,” Philip said, “and you knew Larry Sommers was out of town this week.”

“Sorry. Eileen was crying and . . .”

“What are you going to do about Mindy?” Sid Levine asked with the curious tone of

someone who expected to be in similar circumstances shortly.

“We grounded her for two months . . . no movies, no dates. Directly home after school.”

Nikki nodded.

“That’s all they understand . . . losing privileges.”

“All right, we’d better start the meeting,” Philip Slater said. He and Marilyn had lost their only child, Bradley, to a blood disease when Bradley was six. Philip wasn’t

interested in the problems related to bringing up teenagers.

“Sid?” Philip Slater said.

Sid Levine leaned over in his chair to look down at his notepad. He adjusted his thick lens glasses, and cleared his throat. With his free hand, he brushed back the sides of his pearl black hair. Other men in their early forties, especially those who were in the same stressful line of work, showed more signs of age. Sid had no receding hairline, no deep wrinkles or dark circles around his dark gray eyes, and managed to keep his five-foot-ten-inch frame rather trim, which was something Vincent McShane coveted.