The Uninvited (25 page)

She was watching
When Harry Met Sally
and missing New York when Lazar phoned her back.

“What are you doing stalking my friends?”

“Mimi, calm down.”

“Do not tell me to calm down. This is not about me.
You
are a pervert. Do you realize that?”

“That is not the case. And I was not, as you say, stalking your friend.”

“Lazar,” she said. Then paused to take a weary breath. On the screen Meg Ryan had her finger raised at Billy Crystal, about to give him a lecture. Then the image dissolved into a screen saver of a rain forest. Behind Lazar she heard urban sounds, an echoey loudspeaker voice—the subway, maybe?

“I want to come up there,” he said.

“You don’t even know where ‘there’ is,” she said.

“Actually, I do.”

Mimi sat up a little straighter. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“So help me, Lazar, I am this close to calling the NYPD.”

“I was not stalking your friend, all right? Why won’t you believe me?”

Mimi was breathing hard, a little frantic. “All Jamila knows is that I’m in Canada. News flash, Lazar, Canada is a BIG PLACE.”

“You’re right, of course,” he said. “But she did mention that there was this house where you are staying that your father owns. So I took the liberty of calling him.”

Mimi froze.

“Meem? Are you still there?”

“You what?”

“I talked to him, and he was kind enough to give me your address.”

Mimi thought her head was going to explode. Blood pounded against her skull like a tsunami against some fragile island wharf.

“Meem?”

“He did
not
tell you where I am,” she said in a voice only just above a whisper.

“Meem—”

“Stop calling me that!”

“Mimi,” he said, “things have changed. Big things. Sophia has gone to see her parents in Chicago.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“She and I are separating. I have told her about you.”

It was like a nightmare. Every sentence seemed more improbable than the last.

“I am coming,” he said.

“No! You are not. And if you do, you won’t find me here.”

Her face felt like it might burst spontaneously into flames. She could barely breathe, and into the blood-pounding silence came a noise. A noise that was not in the subway or some shopping concourse in Manhattan but nearby. Outside the house. It sounded like a struggle of some kind. Was that a shout? She peered through the curtains.

“We will talk, face-to-face,” he said. “It will be different.”

She heard a voice cry out.

“Lazar, I’ve got to go.”

She was on her feet now and moving toward the kitchen.

“You wait and see,” said Lazar, his voice buoyant, filled with easy good humor. “It will be good between us. As good as it was.”

Through the kitchen window, Mimi could see a shadowy flurry of activity just beyond the illumination from the kitchen light.

“Lazar—”

“I understand, Mimi,” he said, interrupting her. And he went on talking, but she wasn’t listening anymore. She only heard him dimly, a background noise to the struggle in the bushes. She pressed her face against the glass.

Then she gasped.

“What is it?” the voice on the phone demanded, but she hung up. All her attention was on the figure lying facedown in the long grass just past the shed, his old head poking out of the shadows into the light.

Stooley Peters. By the time Mimi had grabbed a flashlight and her mace, he was on his knees, groaning. He looked like some mangy animal.

“Mr. Peters?”

He groaned again. Groggily, he clamped his hand over his head. In the flashlight beam, she could see blood. His skull was bleeding!

For a moment she didn’t know what to do. She was afraid to relinquish her hold on her mace canister and certainly not on the flashlight. Nervously, she aimed it at the bushes, seeing nothing but foliage in every direction. But foliage by flashlight had never been the same since
The Blair Witch Project.
She swung around, as if maybe the old man’s assailant had sneaked up behind her. But there was nothing—only the shed with its own jumble of shadows lit by the light pouring out of the kitchen door.

Peters groaned again and mumbled something.

“Shhh!” she said, because she had heard another sound. Yes. The sound of something or someone crashing through the bush, quite far away now. She listened to the sound recede until it was gone. It could have been an animal, spooked by all the noise. She didn’t think so. Summoning up her courage, she holstered her mace and knelt on one knee beside the old man.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“Hell, no!” he said. “Give me a hand?”

He weighed a ton. And he stank. She wondered if he had pissed himself.

It took all her effort to get him to an upright position. She had to shove the flashlight in the waist of her jeans, and it shone up at them, underlighting his bony old face like some ghoul. He was as dizzy as a drunk, though she couldn’t smell alcohol on him. Only fear and hot anger and the disagreeable odor of someone who didn’t wash any too often. She scrunched her nose shut as she placed his arm over her shoulder and staggered back toward the house. But he couldn’t be too injured, she realized. It was not by chance that his limp hand brushed against her breast. At least it wasn’t chance the second time it happened.

When she had deposited him, as quickly as she could, in a chair at the kitchen table, she found a facecloth and doused it in cold water to clean the wound on the back of the old man’s head.

He was bent over the table, his head on his arms. But the moment the facecloth touched his scalp, his head flew up and Mimi jumped back, his nobbly skull just missing her jaw. The man reached up and took her hand in an iron grip and wrestled the cloth from her. She pulled away, rubbing her hands on her jeans.

“What happened?” she said.

He stared at her, his eyes unfocused. “What do you think happened?” he said. “I got my head stoved in is what happened.”

“By who?”

Peters didn’t answer her. He took the cloth, now smeared with blood, and staggered to the sink.

“Let me do that,” said Mimi. But the old man paid her no attention. He turned on the tap, and bending his long frame forward, he splashed his face with cold water, getting a great deal of it on the linoleum floor while he was at it. Mimi leaned on the other end of the counter, still trying to catch her breath. After a few moments, the old man stood up straight and turned off the tap. Mimi handed him a towel. He took it from her with shaking hands, muttering the whole time, and began to dry himself off. There was a lot of blood on the facecloth and towel, but the wound on Peters’s head did not look too deep, as far as she could tell. He walked by her and examined his head in the mirror in the bathroom—seemed to know his way there, she thought, but then the door was open so maybe she was wrong. She watched him from the doorway. His crowlike eyes were darting back and forth in the mirror as he felt the welt on his head with his gnarled fingers.

“Hit me with a two-by-four,” said the old man after a while.

“You saw him?”

“No,” he snapped. “Saw
it,
though. Just as it come at me—the two-by-four—out of the corner of my eye. The bastard.”

Now that he was on his feet again, he was feisty, ready for a fight. His face scowled at her from the mirror as if she was somehow responsible for what had happened.

“That’s the one who’s been stealing from you,” he said. “Not me!” He poked himself hard in the chest, and the cold expression on his face left no doubt he was referring to the visit he’d had from the cops.

“Would you like a drink or something?” she asked.

He turned from his ministrations and looked her up and down as if she had propositioned him. She stepped back, wishing now she had left him outside. He was tall and farm-hardened. His forearms were leathery and strong.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a dram of rye,” he said.

She shook her head. There was wine and a can or two of light beer, but she didn’t want him to get any ideas. He shambled out of the bathroom, across the kitchen to the window, where he pulled back the curtain and scanned the darkened yard.

“He’ll be long gone,” he said.

“Who?”

“That right son of a bitch who crowned me.” He shook his head and winced. Then he turned to look at her. “Maybe if I had a little lie-down,” he said. “I’m feeling a bit woozy is all.”

Mimi moved away from him until she bumped up against the counter.

“How about I call 911?” she said.

He grinned. “With this?” he said. He reached down and picked up her phone, but he didn’t hold it out to her. His eyes said,
Come and get it.

“Mr. Peters,” she said. “You’d better get home.”

“And how am I going to do that?” he said, leaning hard on the table as if any minute he was going to faint. It was a feeble performance. “Maybe you could drive me?”

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Jay’s phone is just upstairs. How about I go and phone the cops, and they can drive you home?”

He glared at her. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said. “You like siccing the cops on your neighbors.”

“That’s not how it was,” she said.

“Oh? So how was it?” he said.

“Mr. Peters—”

But he cut her off. He poked himself in the chest again. “You owe me, girl,” he said, and mingled with the hostility in his eyes was a strong dash of lechery.

Mimi saw it clearly, and any misgivings she had vanished.

“He’s been watching you,” he said, pointing his thumb back over his shoulder. “That critter, whoever he is.”

“Really?” she said.

He nodded. Made himself tall, tucked in the tails of his pewter-colored work shirt, with its worn and oil-stained cuffs.

“So let me get this straight,” she said. “This
guy
was watching me, but it was
you
who got hit over the head from behind.”

He stopped tucking in his shirt and glowered at her from under steel-gray eyebrows. “I was passing by on the road, when I seen someone.”

“Really?”

“Damn right. Some shadowy figure messing around that pipsqueak car of yours. I stopped, see. Come back to take a look.”

“Lucky me,” she said, and she made no attempt to hide her contempt.

He took a step toward her, and her hand immediately went to her hip. She slid out her trusty mace and held it where he could see it. His eyes swayed from the canister to her face. And she wondered if he could read in her eyes just how ready she was to use it.

“You sure got yourself a heap of attitude,” he said.

“I’m not in the market for a Peeping Tom, Mr. Peters.”

He glared at her but didn’t say another word. He sniffed and headed past her to the door. With every bit of courage she could muster, she stayed put. Just let him so much as touch her and she’d fill his lecherous eyes with something
really
hot!

He stopped at the doorway, turned, and pointed a finger at her.

“A word of advice,” he said. “You keep parading around with next to nothing on, you’re going to have more than you bargained for. You hear me? More action than a feral cat in heat.”

Mimi stepped ­toward him with the canister aimed and watched him flinch, throwing up his arm to guard his face. “What I wear
parading around
in my own house with the curtains drawn is
my
fucking business. Now get out of here and don’t come back. Ever.”

He left, muttering darkly. She slammed the door after him and locked it. And as soon as he was good and gone—as soon as she heard the engine of his truck roaring—she gave in to gravity. She slid down the face of the door all the way to the floor and burst into tears.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

H
ARRY NEVER DID ACTUALLY
get together with Sally. Not that night. Mimi was already in bed when she realized she had left the two of them frozen there on the screen. She crawled into the front room, to her desk, and shut down the computer. Then she crawled back.

“Why am I crawling?” she wondered out loud.

So as not to be a silhouette on the curtains, that’s why.