The Neighbor Read Free Page B

which he felt comfortable was sorrow.
    Amalia was somewhat distressed. “Somebody should have cleaned up these dishes andemptied the refrigerator before things in it spoiled. Leaving it like this … it’s just wrong.”
    I shrugged. “Maybe no one cared about him.”
    My sister seemed to care about everyone, even making excuses for our parents at their worst, but now she said nothing.
    I sighed. “Tell me you don’t mean we should clean this up.”
    As she was about to answer, her attitude abruptly changed. She turned with a start and said, “Who, what?”
    Perplexed, I said, “What—who, what?”
    She frowned. “You didn’t hear that?”
    “No. What didn’t I hear?”
    “He said, ‘Melinda. Sweet Melinda.’ ”
    “Who said?”
    “It sounded like Mr. Clockenwall.”
    When I was younger and my sister was not yet perfect, she had enjoyed spooking me by reporting with great conviction things like,
Dad didn’t realize I was there, and he took off his face and under it was this lizard face!
Or on one occasion,
Oh, God, I saw Mom eating live spiders!
She was so convincing that I needed about a year to become immune to her bizarre declarations, and for another year I
pretended
to believe them because it was such fun. Then she became interested in boys and lost interest in scaring me, although I was never so scared by any of her hoaxes as by a couple of the idiot guys she dated; even in those days, however, she was too smart to go out with a psychopathic maniac more than twice.
    “Mr. Clockenwall is dead and buried,” I reminded her.
    “I know he’s dead and buried.” Holding the plate of cookies with her left hand, she rubbed the back of her neck with the right, as if smoothing away gooseflesh. “Or at least he’s dead.”
    “I’m not nine anymore, sis.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “I know Mom eats only
dead
spiders.”
    “I’m not joking with you, Malcolm.” As before, she startled and turned, as if toward a voice that I couldn’t hear.
    “What now?”
    “He said it again. ‘Sweet Melinda.’ ”
    Suddenly she set out as if in search of the speaker, turning on lights as we entered each new space, and I followed her through the rest of the ground floor, turning off the lights in our wake. When we arrived at the front of the house once more, Amalia peered up the stairs toward the gloomy realm on the higher floor.
    After she stood transfixed for a long moment, her face clenched with revulsion, and I asked what was happening now, and she said, “He’s disgusting. Obscene. Sick.”
    Suspicious but half believing, I said, “What?”
    “I won’t repeat what he said,” she declared, and she hurried out through the open front door.
    I stood at the foot of the stairs, gazing up, wondering if she might be yanking my chain or if she might be serious, when I heard heavy footsteps in the upper hallway. And then a creaking arose from the stairs, as though somebody was moving from one tread to the next. The landing at the head of the lower flight creaked, too, and made a cracking noise, as if an old board had splintered a little under a punishing weight. The shadows on the stairs were not so deep that they could have concealed anyone. Whoever descended toward me, if anyone did, was no more apparent to the eye than Claude Rains in that old movie
The Invisible Man
.
    Bad things happened to good people when invisible men or their equivalent were around. I quickly left the house, pulled the front door shut behind me, and joined Amalia as she descended the porch steps and hurried along the front walk.
    As we passed through the gate, I said, “What was that about?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it now.”
    “When do you want to talk about it?”
    “I’ll let you know,” she assured me as she turned toward home.
    I said, “I guess we’ll have to eat those cookies ourselves.”
    “Yeah. She doesn’t want them with walnuts.”
    “And he doesn’t want them with chocolate chips. And I don’t