Neighborhood Watch Read online

  “What?”

  “Yeah, Sunny’s been visiting them. Not a lot, but sometimes she’ll go over and talk to the wives. Says they’re nice people.” Bob hitched up his burly shoulders. “One time I asked her if she wanted me to go, but she shot that down.” He laughed and winked. “Girl talk.”

  “Yeah, girl talk. See you later, Bob.”

  “Take care now.”

  Neither Derek nor Toni had exchanged more than a few words with the women across the street. For all he knew, Carl’s wife Kendra was mute. He hadn’t pegged Sunny as being the type the women would invite into their small, elitist group. A wonderful, optimistic woman like Sunny didn’t seem to fit.

  The irony struck Derek hard. He sought shadows—the kind he wasn’t supposed to look for—under Sunny.

  * * * *

  As soon as Toni pulled into the driveway, Derek dashed outside.

  Her smile vanished when she saw his frazzled state. “What’s the matter?”

  “I have to show you something.” Derek grabbed her arm, half pulling her out of the car.

  “What?” She yanked away and stood arms akimbo. “Tell me what’s wrong!”

  “Just come with me, okay? Trust me. I have to show you something.”

  “Damn it, Derek.” Realizing he wasn’t going to give up, she acquiesced. “Fine. Let’s make it quick. I’m tired and starving.” Reluctantly, Toni followed him across the street.

  Surveying the neighbor’s homes, Derek saw Scott’s truck occupying his driveway. Carl and Kendra were nowhere to be seen.

  “Okay, look under the bush.”

  “What? A nest or something? You really need to get a life, honey.” Even though Toni tried to lighten the situation with humor, her words sounded fraught with tension.

  “Just look.”

  She dropped to her knees and peered underneath the bush. She stood, slapping the dirt from her hands. “There’s nothing under there,” she said evenly.

  Derek looked under the bush. The wooden eye had vanished. “I’m telling you, Toni, I saw the wooden eye underneath there just a couple hours ago. They stole it! They’re the ones who nailed the squirrel to the tree.”

  “Oh, God…” Toni twisted on her heels, preparing to leave.

  Carl’s van rumbled down the street, bumped over the end of the driveway and came to an abrupt halt. The van shimmied as Carl shifted his formidable weight out.

  Derek and Toni exchanged guilty glances. Thinking fast, Derek snagged a letter out of Carl’s mailbox.

  Carl stalked toward them, his shaved head burning red. “What can I do for you folks?” His words were neighborly, his tone menacing.

  Derek brandished the letter in front of him. “Ah, hi, Carl. This letter was delivered to our house today by accident. Thought I’d drop it in your mailbox.” Toni rolled her eyes, tapped her foot impatiently.

  Carl snatched the letter out of Derek’s hand. Flipping his sunglasses on top of his head, he perused the letter. “And it took both of you to bring it over?”

  “Didn’t plan on it. I just caught Toni on her way in. She decided to join me.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s really going on?”

  Toni sighed, looking mortified. “Carl, I’m sorry. Derek thought he saw something underneath your bush today.”

  “Oh, you thought you saw something?” A slow smiled edged onto Carl’s lips. “What’d you think you saw? And why were you looking underneath my bushes anyway?”

  “Hi neighhhbors.” Scott, appearing out of nowhere, leaned against his truck, grinning. “Something the matter in the neighborhood?”

  Derek ignored him and turned his attention back to Carl. “Okay. I saw the missing eye from our tree underneath your bush.”

  “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.” He bent and peeked below his bush. “Nope. Nothing there. Maybe you’re seeing things.”

  “I’m not seeing things!” Next door, Scott chortled. “You took the eye off our tree and nailed a dead squirrel to it.”

  “Derek,” Toni said, “stop it.”

  Carl approached Derek, his teeth clenched, his barrel chest inches away from Derek’s. “Are you accusing me of something here?”

  “You’re damn right I’m—”

  “Derek, enough! Drop it!” When Toni reached for Derek’s arm, he shrugged her off.

  “You know, Carl, I don’t know what you think you’re doing. If you’re getting off by playing mind games, or if you’re schoolyard bullies who never grew up, or—”

  “I’d be real careful what you say to me.” Carl’s voice dropped into a bear’s grumble. “You might not like the results.”

  “What? Now you’re threatening me?”

  “Derek, damn it! Let’s go. Now!” Toni said to Carl, “Sorry, Carl.” Then she stormed out of the yard, leaving Derek alone across enemy lines.

  Carl cocked his head at a disturbingly crooked angle. “I didn’t hear any threats. Just said you should be careful. Not everyone in the neighborhood’s as friendly as we are.”

  When Derek heard Scott cackle, he shot his gaze in his direction. Scott casually tossed something into the air then caught it. Derek squinted, his eyesight not what it once was. A baseball, maybe? The round object twirled, slapping down into Scott’s hand. He threw it up again. No, too gray to be a baseball. Oval, like an egg. The eye.

  “There. He’s got the eye!”

  The eye dropped into Scott’s palm with a splat. “What, this?” He studied it like it was a foreign relic, rolling it between his fingers before dropping it into his pocket. “Just a rock.”

  “I don’t believe this!” With no way to win the battle, Derek turned to leave.

  “Now, you’re doing the right thing,” called Carl. “Just go run and follow your little wifey indoors where you won’t fall and break a hip.”

  Shaking from head to toe, Derek tromped through Carl’s yard and across the street.

  From behind him, he heard Carl ask Scott, “Can you believe that shit?” Raucous laughter followed.

  Derek trudged up the front stoop. A snake, thin and white, stood straight up in the fir bush, staring at him. Its tongue flitted out hungrily.

  * * * *

  Toni sat at the dining room table, her head buried in the mail, anywhere to keep from looking at him. Derek knew the signs only too well.

  “Sorry.” He scraped a chair across the hardwood floor and joined her. “I’m really sorry, Ton.”

  Livid, she met him with blazing eyes. “What in the hell are you doing, Derek? What? Were you going to start a neighborhood brawl? I don’t want my husband in jail!”

  “I don’t know… Those guys just get to me. I know what I saw. And Scott was tossing the eye, flaunting it in front of me. They—”

  “There was no eye.”

  “I know what I saw, honey. The eye was there. You’ve got to believe me.”

  Toni looked down at the mail again. Her long silence said more than words. “I believe you think you saw it, Derek.”

  Her words eerily echoed what Derek had told Katherine the day before. Placating words to cover up disbelief, a verbal salve to soothe feelings of discomfort. “It was there, Toni. It really was. I know what you’re thinking. You think—”

  “You do not know what I’m thinking.”

  “Okay. You’re right. But, please, if you’ve ever had faith in me, have it now.”

  Toni’s eyes misted. “Of course I have faith in you. I’m just worried. The behavior you displayed out there…that’s not you. I didn’t recognize the man out there.”

  Derek gulped, torn between an involuntary sob and a humiliated chuckle. What came out sounded like an unholy mix of both. “Yeah, I guess I was kinda stupid.”

  “Kinda?”

  “Kinda.”

  She reached across the table for his hand. “Derek, even if you think you saw the eye, it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing. A kid could’ve tossed it there, or a dog could’ve dragged it there.” She shook her head solemnl
y. “It means nothing. You need to understand that.”

  “I do. I get it. It’s just…” His voice fell away.

  “I need you to do something for me, Derek.”

  “What’s that?” He didn’t need to ask. He knew his wife well enough to know what was coming.

  “I want you to make an appointment with Dr. Farraday. Tomorrow.” She leaned closer, her eyes locked onto his.

  It had been years since Derek had seen Dr. Farraday. The idea seemed tantamount to torture. Farraday reminded him of his darkest days, days he’d thought were buried long ago. Once he had tossed the last handful of dirt onto the grave of his depression, he had vowed to never revisit. But now, Memorial Day had come early.

  He understood Toni’s fears. She’d lived through it before. And the things he was saying, seeing, and hearing rang paranoid even to his own ears. So much so that he even began to question his sanity.

  Chapter Five

  “Hi, Dr. Farraday. Thanks for squeezing me in at the last minute.” Derek crossed an ankle over his knee and settled in. He remembered the nerve-wracking waiting game they used to play, and apparently, the rules hadn’t changed. Perhaps a misconception, but he always thought the onus to begin should be on her. He had wanted her to lead him down the path to mental health. But it never played out that way. She sat, quiet as death. Her head tilted in a sympathetic manner, to such extremes he wondered if she had a chiropractor on speed dial. All of her annoying traits were still firmly locked in place. Lips pinched together, brow wrinkled, and eyes blinking behind her trendy, narrow glasses. Judging him. Derek remembered it all too well. And he wanted to jump up, run away screaming before the pain started again.

  But she had helped him. Hadn’t she? She must be doing something right.

  Dr. Farraday finally broke the ice with her therapeutic pick. “Well, Derek, I must say I was surprised to hear from you.” She flashed her toothy, yet hollow, smile. “You were one of my star students.”

  “Um, yeah, thank you.” Derek nervously picked at the lint on his trouser leg for lack of anything better to do.

  “So. What brings you back here, Derek?” Her head leaned so far, Derek considered offering her a pillow.

  “My wife.” He blurted it out before he had a chance to run it through his inner censor.

  Dr. Farraday consulted some papers next to her chair. “Toni Willett.” She peered at him over the tops of her frames.

  “Yep. Good notes, Doc. Even eight years later.”

  She laughed. “I never throw anything away. Drives everyone nuts. I’m a crazy packrat!”

  Derek sometimes wondered if Dr. Farraday pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, the patient posing as asylum keeper. “I’ll bet. Anyway, here I am again.”

  “Derek, you say your wife’s the reason you’re here. Are you having marital problems?”

  “No. Our marriage has never been stronger.”

  “Then why would you say Toni’s the reason you’re here?”

  “Well, I guess I value my marriage that much, Doc.” Derek flapped his foot, keeping time with a tune in his head. Just get through this. Just get through this… “Um, no offense, Doc. It’s not too bad being here. I guess.”

  Her head straightened as she burst out laughing. She swiveled at the edge of her chair as if to get a closer peek into his mind. “You and I both know that’s bullshit, Derek. No one enjoys going to therapy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now, remember our first rule, Derek?”

  “Honesty.”

  She mechanically snapped her fingers. “Told you you were one of my best students. It does neither one of us any good if you come in here and don’t tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “So help me, God. Okay, Doc. You ready for the truth?”

  Shifting in her chair, she could’ve been at the theatre preparing for a good film to sweep her away.

  Derek told her the events with the neighbors that had transpired over the last several months. He even told her about Katherine and her strange story. Remarkably, he felt better having someone listen. Maybe Farraday, for all her pretentious tics, is right. Therapy without honesty is playacting.

  But, sometimes—not always—one has to act in the human theatre of the absurd.

  Dr. Farraday tented her fingertips, a stereotypical move she must’ve picked up from old melodramas. She blinked at Derek, waiting for him to say something. Or break.

  Derek cleared his throat and wanted to clear the room. “That’s the story, Doc. Toni’s worried. I guess she thinks I’m relapsing. That’s why I’m here.”

  She looked over the notes she had just jotted down. Derek would have loved to see those notes. He imagined “crazy” and “uh-oh” scribbled in the margins between doodles of flowers. Finally, she said, “Derek, the last time you came to see me, you were suffering from severe depression. And you were having paranoid delusions. Refresh my memory.” She squinted and slightly inclined her head, not a full tilt this time, but her distrusting head move.

  “Well, at my job—you know I was there for, what? Twenty-six years or whatever—I’d seen a lot of people come and go, getting fired, a lot of mind games, power trips, and back-stabbing going on. I guess it finally began to wear me down…or something.” He threw his hands up in surrender. Expressing what he felt during those years didn’t come easy. “I remember thinking my co-workers were talking about me behind my back—plotting, even—to take me down.” This time, Derek let his pause fill the room, determined to hold his ground of silence.

  “Why do you think you felt that way, Derek?”

  He nearly blurted out the first thing that crossed his mind. He wanted to tell her because it was true. It was the truth. His heinous co-workers had been out to get him. They wanted him fired, they wanted his office, for no particular reason other than they didn’t like him. He never played their games or got involved in office politics. Unpopular seemed too mild a label for his tenure in Hell.

  But this time, his inner censor kicked in. Past experience taught him how to intuit what Dr. Farraday wanted him to say. Playacting.

  He told her what she expected. “Because my depression caused me to feel paranoid. Look, Doc, you and I both know this already. What does this have to do with my visit today?”

  She lifted a corner of her mouth, half smiling, half smirking. “I think it has everything to do with why you’re here today, Derek.” She ran a long fingernail down her yellow pad. “Your neighbor Katherine—that’s some tale she told you.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And, ah, how much of it do you believe, Derek?” She was back to the condescending head tilt.

  Derek gripped the arms of the leather chair and held on tight before his rising anger blasted off. “I don’t believe any of it, Doc! Ghosts and spiritual nexuses.” He dismissed the ideas with a wave. “Come on.” But truthfully? What is the truth anyway? It’s hard to determine what he believed any more.

  “I’m glad to hear you say that, Derek.” She leaned back and crossed her legs, her knobby knee—an egg in a black stocking—a glaring distraction. “If you’d come in here going on about ghosts and things…well, we’d have reason to talk, now, wouldn’t we?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It’s sad about your neighbor’s state of mental acuity, but…” She narrowed her eyes and nodded conspiratorially. “…I think we know what’s going on with her. Now, about these neighbors of yours—”

  “What about ‘em?” Derek splayed his fingers, showing he had nothing to hide. “I told you the truth. The facts are the facts.” She gave him another suspicious look. He quickly added, “Okay, maybe I’m connecting dots where they’re not even on the same page, but…” He wouldn’t back down on the neighbor issue.

  “Do you believe your neighbors have a vendetta toward you, Derek?”

  Derek knew a loaded question when he heard one. He wouldn’t allow himself to pull the trigger. “No, of course not. I think they’re just a b
unch of jackasses, that’s all.”

  “Do you believe they’re out to cause you bodily harm?”

  “No, Doc, I don’t. They’re not out to do me bodily harm.” For some reason, Farraday always looked at reiteration as a breakthrough. Anything to help him break through this agonizing hour.

  “I see. Tell me, Derek, how do these new neighbors make you feel?”

  “How do I feel? Well, how would you feel? Pissed off!”

  “Pissed off.”

  “That’s right. They piss me off.”

  “Derek, that’s not truly a feeling. It’s more of a response. How do they make you feel? With their actions and their words. How do you feel?”

  Derek leaned back on the headrest and shut his eyes. He blew the word to the ceiling. “Old.”

  “Ah! Now I think we’re getting somewhere.” Derek opened his eyes. Dr. Farraday wiggled in her seat, as if anticipating imaginary accolades. “Derek, I don’t believe you’re suffering from paranoid delusions again. There may be a little bit of depression going on, but I’d attribute that to the onset of a mid-life crisis. Now we can talk about that more. You may need further counseling on how best to deal with that.”

  “Yeah, sure, of course.” But he wouldn’t reschedule. He couldn’t wait to leave the office and never set foot in there again. “And thanks.”

  “Oh? For what?” Again with the head tilt.

  “For calling me middle-aged.”

  They shared a laugh. “Now Derek, I’m going to prescribe a mild antidepressant, much lower than the last dosage we had you on.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let me know in a month how you’re doing and if we need to up the dosage. Or take you off it. Who knows? You may not need it.”

  “Who knows?”

  “And one last word of advice, Derek. Don’t let your neighbors bother you. They’re not out to get you.” She clawed her hands in the air and formed a comically menacing face. “They may not be ideal neighbors—and I nearly hate to tell you this—but I’m betting you don’t even register as a blip on their radar. They’re just wrapped up in their worlds of good times and partying, believing they’ll remain youthful forever. The same way you were when you were their age, Derek.”