The Woman Next Door Read online

  THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR

  By T.M. Wright

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2012 / T.M. Wright

  Copy-edited by: Anita Lorene Smith

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Terrance Michael (T.M.) Wright is best known as a writer of horror fiction, speculative fiction, and poetry. He has written over 25 novels, novellas, and short stories over the last 40 years. His first novel, 1978's Strange Seed, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and his 2003 novel Cold House was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. His novels have been translated into many different languages around the world. His works have been reviewed by Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, and many genre magazines.

  His first publication was the non-fiction study of unidentified flying objects, entitled The Intelligent Man's Guide to Flying Saucers (currently available from Crossroad Press) in 1968 for AS Barnes. His seventh novel, A Manhattan Ghost Story, has had fourteen foreign editions and was optioned to be filmed in the 1980s.

  He has written over forty short stories that have appeared in several magazines including Twilight Zone Magazine, PostScripts, Cemetery Dance, Flesh and Blood Magazine, UpState, and Brutarian. He has also painted book covers and done illustrations for magazines including Brutarian.

  Book List

  The Strange Seed Series

  Strange Seed

  Nursery Tale

  Children of the Island

  The People of the Dark

  Laughing Man

  A Manhattan Ghost Story series

  A Manhattan Ghost Story

  The Waiting Room

  A Spider on My Tongue

  Ryerson Biergarten series

  The Changing

  The Devouring

  Goodlow's Ghosts

  The Ascending

  Sleepeasy

  Other Novels and Novellas

  Blue Canoe

  Boundaries

  Carlisle Street

  Cold House

  I Am the Bird

  Little Boy Lost

  Sally Pinup

  The Eyes of the Carp

  The House on Orchid Street

  The Island

  The Last Vampire

  The Place

  The Playground

  The School

  The Woman Next Door

  Visiting the Edge

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Pat LoBrutto, Joanie Hitzig, and Frederick Armstrong for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this novel. Later thanks also to Bill Basile Jr.

  For Mary Jane Basile and William G. Thompson

  Prologue

  June 19, 1961

  After many minutes, the babysitter turned the TV down; it was ruining her concentration. She glanced at the telephone on the small white table just inside the entrance to the kitchen.

  Later, she thought.

  She crossed the living room, pushed the child's door open, and stood quietly, her eyes on the child. Finally, she reached around the right side of the doorway and flicked the light switch off.

  She turned, went to the couch, sat and drummed her fingers—l-2-3-4—methodically on the armrest. She became aware of the fluid ticking of the grandfather clock near the front door. She glanced at it and grimaced. "Damn it!" she whispered.

  One thing was certain: Six months of dull Friday nights shouldn't have ended like this. There was no reason for it to have come to this. Well, her own stupidity was the reason, wasn't it? Her own colossal stupidity. She grinned. Colossal. Colossal stupidity. She stopped drumming her fingers. Colossal stupidity! She'd use that phrase on some of the kids at school—Joanne Vanderburg, for one. "You're so colossally stupid!" she'd say. And then she'd walk off, leaving Joanne Vanderburg with her mouth wide open and with nothing to say. It was a nice thought.

  Her grin vanished abruptly.

  Now.

  She stood, went to the telephone, picked up the receiver, dialed.

  "Hello?" she heard.

  "Is Mrs. Winter there, please?" she said.

  "May I ask who's calling?"

  "Her babysitter. This is her babysitter."

  "Just a moment."

  She heard, as if from a distance, "Evelyn, it's for you. Your babysitter."

  She waited. Then: "Yes . . . this is Mrs. Winter."

  "Mrs. Winter?"

  "What is it? Is something wrong?"

  "I don't know, Mrs. Winter." The babysitter paused briefly. "I mean . . . it's the baby—"

  "The baby? What's happened to the baby?"

  "Nothing. I mean . . . I don't know. She's so quiet. I think you'd better come home, Mrs. Winter."

  "Quiet? What do you mean quiet?"

  "Well, I mean she's breathing and everything, but she's not moving. She fell. Out of her crib. She fell." A short silence.

  "Mrs. Winter?"

  Then, again as if from a distance: "Oh, Jesus!" And a click, a dial tone.

  The babysitter put the receiver on its rest. She went back to the child's room, turned the light on.

  She saw that the child was almost exactly as she had left her—on her side at the back of the crib—except now her huge, impossibly blue eyes were open.

  The babysitter glanced around the room, her face expressionless. Yes, everything was in order. She reached for the light switch. She hesitated. The crib! she realized. The damned crib!

  She crossed to it, put her foot on the small pedal beneath and unlatched the left-hand side. She pushed down. The side gave a few inches. She stepped away.

  Her gaze settled on the child.

  She saw that the child was staring at her. Hard. Not with a bubbling smile ready on her lips, as if the babysitter were merely an object of amusement or curiosity, but hard. And cold. In emotion so intense that the muscles of the child's face had frozen, and all the energy in her small, quiet body had massed in the eyes.

  Two weeks later

  The babysitter got comfortable on the big couch. Well, it was too bad, she thought. Really too bad. Almost enough to make you cry, if you were used to crying, if it made you feel more human, if it "salved your conscience" (a phrase she had heard the day before, in English class, and thought was a very interesting phrase). She remembered crying—at the hospital, in the waiting room, while the doctors were busy finding out what had happened to the child (not what had been done to her, but what had happened to her). She had cried right in front of Mr. and Mrs. Winter.

  ("I'm sorry, Mrs. Winter, Mr. Winter. I'm so sorry. I should have—"

  "It's okay, it's not your fault, not really.")

  It had been just the right kind of weeping—good, dry, hesitant, confused. She'd kept it up, too, right up till the moment the doctor finally came into the waiting room.

  ("This is extremely difficult for me, Mrs. Win—"

  "My God, my baby is dead, my baby is—"

  "No, Mrs. Winter, she's not dead. She has sustained some spinal injuries.")

  And that—the
babysitter readjusted herself on the couch—really was too bad, wasn't it? That was . . . tragic. Terrible. But accidents happened every day. No one was really to blame for them. They happened and that was that. It was fate.

  The babysitter called, "Sammy, I thought I told you to stay the hell in your room," and got up from the couch; she was certain that little Sammy Watson, her latest charge (God, but wouldn't it be great if she didn't need to freakin' babysit, if she could just marry some guy who had a lot of money and he could set her up in some great big house and maybe she'd have a kid of her own), had gotten up again for another goddamned "dinkawawa." The babysitter turned and faced the stairway.

  And very spontaneously peed in her pants.

  Because the child on the stairs was not little Sammy Watson. But this child could not possibly be on the stairs, because she was five miles away in a hospital bed and she was all trussed up because she had "sustained some spinal injuries" because accidents happened every day, no one was really to blame, it was fate.

  The babysitter mumbled something, her throat suddenly too dry for speech.

  The child on the stairs grinned a big, wide, malevolent grin that made the babysitter wet her pants once more.

  And then the child vanished.

  The nurse's name was Simpson, and one word—pathetic—was going through her head now. Ever since the Winter child was brought in, two weeks before, that word had been running around inside Nurse Simpson's head. It was the only word that fit. And now it fit doubly well.

  The nurse reached out and gently touched the sleeping child's lips. "I hope," she whispered—she felt a tear start —"that your dreams are good dreams, little one." She took her hand away. "And I hope you always have reason to smile."

  Part One

  BRETT

  Chapter 1

  1981

  Christine Bennet knew that the whole thing would end in an argument, their first. And it was an argument that couldn't be avoided; that was the hell of it. His role, his position, as her husband, provider, maker of decisions, and, yes, even her protector was at stake, regardless of how vehemently he'd deny it. And that all added up to a matter of pride. Better to injure him physically than to injure his pride.

  "It's amazing, isn't it?" Tim Bennet said.

  Christine nodded.

  "A chance like this," he continued, "doesn't come along very often."

  If only he wasn't so wildly enthusiastic, it would be easy to tell him, Yes, Tim, you're right. But it just doesn't appeal to me. You understand, don't you? And that would be the end of it and they could go on looking.

  "In five years," Tim said, "this will be the place to live. Hell, it already is. Do you know that fifteen, twenty years ago you couldn't even drive through this area, let alone live here?"

  "Uh-huh," Christine said.

  "It's really amazing," Tim repeated.

  Christine tried to fault him for his enthusiasm, his pride, tried to ascribe it to some lack of understanding, some break in communication that originated with him. But it was no good. He was what he was and she was what she was, and if he saw only so far, saw only what was apparent, it was because at this point in their marriage it was all he could deal with. A person learns to walk before he runs. Christine grinned at the cliché.

  "What's funny?" Tim asked.

  She looked at him. He was driving with both hands on the wheel, even though he was keeping the car just below the thirty-mile-an-hour limit. It was another sign of his protectiveness.

  "Funny?" she said.

  "You were smiling."

  She thought a moment. "I was, wasn't I?" She paused. "I don't remember why. Sorry."

  He brought the car to a slow, easy stop at a red light. "See that house there?"

  Christine looked. He had indicated a large, square, whitewashed brick building with a red stone roof and a small, nonfunctional wrought-iron porch under each of three front windows. The double front doors were of glass and oak; an oversized number 1 had been painted in yellow on the left-hand glass panel, and the number 4 on the other. The small, bright-green lawn was bordered by a tall, ornate fence, also of wrought iron. Christine thought the house forbidding and pretentious.

  "Yes," she said.

  "That was the first," Tim explained. "A man named Williamson bought it for fifteen hundred back around nineteen sixty-two."

  "Fifteen hundred? Is that all?"

  "It needed a lot of work, of course." The light changed. He pressed the accelerator gently. "I don't know exactly how much he had to invest to make it livable, but it was something like thirty thousand. And he had to do all the work himself, but that saved him a bundle. The house is worth at least a hundred thousand now."

  "Sounds pretty impressive," Christine said, just missing the tone of enthusiasm she had tried for.

  "Oh, it is, and that's why so many people latched on to the idea, and why there are so few houses left." He paused. "Light me a cigarette, would you, darling?" He pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her.

  He parked the car in front of a big, rambling brownstone house. The windows on its first floor had been boarded over with plywood; most of its second-floor windows were broken; faded obscenities were visible on the sidewalk leading to the front door and on the door itself, there were gaping jagged holes scattered around the roof. Paradoxically, the lawn had recently been mowed, and the honeysuckle hedges encircling the house neatly trimmed.

  Tim, leaning over, looking at the house through the passenger window, said, "That would cost us two thousand."

  "Two thousand," Christine said, not as a question but merely for something to say. "It's certainly big, isn't it?"

  "Yes, it is."

  "Be hell to heat."

  "Absolutely."

  "Are you thinking of buying it, Tim?"

  He straightened, put the car in gear, and pulled slowly away from the house. "Hell no," he said. "It needs too much work. I've been through it. And besides, it's too big for just the two of us."

  Christine thought she heard something vaguely accusatory in the way he said, "just the two of us," but decided to disregard it. That delicate subject had yet to be opened, and it deserved far more attention than they could give it now.

  Tim and Christine Bennet had been married for six months. The marriage was a culmination of a long and progressively more passionate relationship, the end destined to make them husband and wife.

  It was at first an uneasy relationship, one tinged by uncertainty. Because Christine, for nineteen of her twenty-one years, had been paralyzed from the waist down. All indications were that the paralysis was permanent. The wheelchair was her almost, constant companion, and, predictably, it had drawn to her a succession of altruists, and men with pity to spread around and be known by, and, pathetically, the occasional oddball. But she learned quickly enough to identify each type and to cultivate a cool but polite attitude toward them.

  When Tim came into her life toward the end of her freshman year at Brockport State College—where she majored in fine arts and where he had a part-time position as an assistant professor of photography—she found that he was persistent, despite the attitude she cultivated. It became obvious that he saw through the façade, saw through to the spark of interest he had started in her. And he was so beautifully direct:

  "You think I'm something other than what I appear to be, don't you, Christine?"

  They were having lunch together on the college grounds. He hadn't asked the question offhandedly, eyes averted, in a foolish attempt to appear unconcerned, or subtle.

  She toyed very briefly with the idea of saying I know exactly what you are and thus throwing him off guard. But his question—or at least the way he had asked it—demanded an honest answer.

  "Yes," she said, "I'm afraid I do."

  "I understand," he said. "At least I think so."

  From Christine's point of view, it was not the perfect reply. There was a question in it—a plea that she explain his uncertainty to him a
nd so put him on firmer ground. Which was why, of course, he had lowered his head and closed his eyes. Because it was her turn.

  The dull ache of disappointment flowed through her. There had been something genuine about this man, and now he had destroyed it.

  "Will you give me some time, Christine?" His bead was still lowered, eyes still closed.

  "Tune?" she said, without expression.

  He raised his head, looked at her. "I'm not going to try to talk you into something or out of something. I don't think I'd be able to; you've made that very clear. All I want is for us to take the time to get to know each other. I like you . . . very much. Well, that's obvious, isn't it? I can't say . . . ." He paused, considered. "I can't say I like the fact that you're crippled. I don't like it. I wish I had some kind of healing power. I wish I could lay my hands on your head and say 'Rise, walk,' and then throw that damned chair away. But I can't. No one can. Which leaves us . . . here. Nowhere, if that's what you want, and I don't think you do. I know I don't. So . . . ." Another pause. "So, I understand. This past month you've been watching me very closely, trying to get a line on what I'm all about, what my intentions are." Again a pause. "I have none—intentions, I mean. Not yet, anyway. Given a little time, though, which is what I'm asking for, I'm sure I'll come up with something." He grinned. "End of speech."

  Christine felt like applauding. He had redeemed himself. And the point of it was, he hadn't been trying to redeem himself. His sincerity had been obvious.

  And they both realized that it was the beginning of something.

  Two years later, they were married.

  But there was still the uneasiness, however subtle. And still, on his part, an overprotectiveness that Christine was reluctant to make an issue of—because it was almost an instinct with him, and it would take time to soften it.