The Summer Man

Chapter THREE





Since he’d arranged his workweek to run Tuesday through Saturday, John Hanover slept in on Mondays. Sometimes late. It was one of the nicest things about setting one’s own hours, as far as he was concerned; besides the concession to his ability to be a total slacker, it also gave Candice a chance to catch up on office work, hassling with the insurance companies and the like.

This particular Monday was no exception; he’d stayed up until two in the morning, half-watching trashy cable shows—a semi exploitive documentary on the history of circus geeks had been the winner—while he caught up on some of his own paperwork. He’d slept until almost eleven, which was truly obscene and wonderful. A leisurely breakfast, a long shower, and it was almost one before he was dressed and presentable. Not that he had anywhere he needed to be presented; he would run by the office, pick up some groceries, maybe stop at Patisserie or the Klatch for a coffee. In all, a perfect Monday, or at least the best he could manage on his own.

He winced inwardly as he jingled his car keys in his pocket, walking toward the back door. The internal jabs had grown sporadic, but they still popped up every now and then. It was inevitable; divorce wasn’t an antidote to pain, after all. It had been official for more than six months, and while he knew it had been the right decision, in the end, that didn’t make it a happy one.

Someone knocked on the front door, the sharp tap echoing through the kitchen…John glanced at his watch, headed back to the front of the house. A package, maybe, or one of the kids selling lawn maintenance. He knew a few of his neighbors, but not well enough for there to be just-dropping-bys.

A glance through the side window revealed Annie Thomas, in uniform. John opened the door, trying on a smile. Annie was a law student most of the year but worked as a noncommissioned police officer during Port Isley’s tourist season. He only knew her slightly. She and Lauren had been friendly.

“Hello, Officer,” he said, and was relieved that her answering smile looked real enough. She also seemed—different. Formal. Perhaps it was the uniform. The last time he’d seen her had been…before New Year’s, anyway. At Le Poisson, which he still treated himself to every few weeks. She’d been wearing a dress then, something dark and flattering. She’d had a dinner date.

“John,” she said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m running a canvass. Is it all right if I ask you a few questions?”

“Sure, of course,” he said, stepping back from the door. He realized he was wearing his coat and felt a need to explain, to assure her that he wasn’t too busy. “I was going to run some errands, but they can wait. Come in.”

“You probably noticed all the commotion earlier,” she said, not moving.

“Actually, I was…” He automatically ran through a couple of reasonable excuses, before remembering that Annie almost certainly didn’t care. More leftover Lauren angst, apparently. His ex-wife had always seemed slightly disgusted with his desire to sleep past eight.

“It’s my day to sleep in,” he admitted, smiling a little.

“There was an incident in the park, early this morning,” she said, not smiling back at him. “Probably late last night. I’m wondering if you heard anything, or saw anyone around…?”

“What kind of incident?” he asked.

Annie hesitated, studying his eyes briefly as she decided whether it was appropriate to tell him.

“Homicide,” she said finally. “A jogger found a body this morning, near the park’s west entrance.”

“Oh my God,” he muttered.

“I know it’s unlikely that you heard anything,” she continued. “It looks like the, ah, victim was killed there, but the chief wants us to cover everyone living on the border, just in case.”

“Sure,” he said. He lived on the park’s eastern edge, twentyplus acres of trees between his house and the apparent site. “I don’t remember hearing anything….I was up late, too. Wind in the trees, but nothing out of the ordinary. Can I ask—who was killed?”

Again, that brief, scrutinizing gaze. Her own eyes were a mild, bright brown, quite pretty, actually; he’d never noticed before.

“I suppose you’ll hear about it soon enough,” she said. “Actually, I’m surprised you haven’t already. A teenage girl was strangled. A local.”

“That’s awful,” he said.

She nodded. “Yeah. Listen, do you know your new neighbor? The car’s there, but they’re not answering the door…”

She tilted her head toward the house next to his, a gray bungalow that had recently been rented out, perhaps a week ago. John only knew it was occupied at all from the consistently stationary Bimmer in the drive and the lights at night; he had yet to see the man, woman, or family that had moved in.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “It’s a rental, though.” He paused, frowned. “You don’t think that there’s any possibility—”

Annie answered with a shake of her head before he finished asking if there might be a killer next door. “Just covering the area. Anyway, if you remember anything, give us a call, all right?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

She stayed where she was, clearly wanting to say something else. When she spoke again, her voice was pitched lower than before.

“Listen, unofficially, can I ask you if you’ve ever had Ed Billings as a patient? I know you can’t answer if he was, but it would save us a records warrant if you could rule it out for us…”

“Technically, I can’t answer either way,” he said, noting the “was,” wondering if that meant what he thought. “You know that.”

She moved slightly closer to him, her expression very flat. “Yeah, I do. But let me be clear—it looks like one of our high school teachers killed one of his students, then went home and choked his wife to death before shooting himself. You’re the town shrink. It’s going to come up, and if you can just tell me whether it would be worth our time to get a judge’s order for your records, I’d personally appreciate it very much.”

John blinked, caught off guard as much by her manner as by the news. He didn’t know her that well, but she’d never struck him as particularly assertive. It seemed the uniform did make a difference.

“OK,” he said slowly. “I think it’s safe for me to say that it would be a waste of time to bother a judge, but I’m not the only therapist in—”

“You didn’t treat him,” she said.

He sighed. “I didn’t treat him,” he said, because it seemed that nothing short of that would do. Annie was a law student; she knew better than to even broach the subject…but then, he knew better than to answer, and here he was spelling it out.

“Thank you,” she said, and finally smiled again. She had a very nice smile, warm and slightly crooked. As with her eyes, it seemed like he was just noticing for the first time.

Not so married anymore, am I?

John quashed the thought, surprised that he’d even had it. He wasn’t looking for a romantic relationship of any kind. He nodded, summoned another smile. “Sure,” he said.

There was an awkward pause, and for the barest of seconds, he thought that he could see a different kind of scrutiny in her eyes, an appraising one that matched the sudden flush of red across her cheeks…but then it was gone, and she was only Annie Thomas again, a vague acquaintance to his ex-wife, a police officer on a rather unpleasant duty. She thanked him for his time and left.

John closed the door, stepped to the flanking window, and watched her through the blinds as she walked past the mostly empty lot across the street, back toward State. Her head was up, one hand on her belt; she looked good, lean, and efficient. She cast a lingering glance at the rental next door, slowing a moment, then walked on. Her car, a mud-splashed SUV with a police decal on the side, was parked near the corner, across from Dick Calvin’s tidy blue house.

When she got in her car, he started to turn away and caught a glimpse of movement from the house next door to his. A flicker of the deep-red curtain that had been strung behind the picture window…which he hadn’t seen open since it went up, now that he came to think of it. The slight motion could have been his imagination, or a cat or something—he’d have noticed a dog, probably—but he thought it was his new neighbor. Watching Annie walk away, as he had been.

John stayed at the window another moment. The rental and his home were separated by a wide strip of lawn and both driveways, maybe fifty feet total. He’d actually been inside the gray house once; Lauren had befriended the couple that had lived there four, five summers ago, Jim and Melody…Saunders? Sanders? There had been a few chance meetings and a single mediocre dinner party to remember them by. He vaguely recalled the layout of the house, remembered that the pork roast had been horribly overcooked. Walking back across the lawn in the summer dark, Lauren had commented that it was good to know there was no possibility that they’d contacted trichinosis, and he’d laughed hard enough to make his face ache. She could be so funny, so random…he’d loved that about her…

Oh, stop.

John turned away from the window, decided that maybe it was his imagination after all…and if it wasn’t, so what? Maybe his new neighbor had been napping, or just didn’t feel like answering the door. Hell, maybe he—or she—was a terrorist on the lam; didn’t really matter, in the grand scheme of his own life. He wasn’t sure if that made him a realist or just self-absorbed. A question for another day.

He headed for the back of the house, again jingling his keys, surprised to find his thoughts wandering back to Annie Thomas’s eyes and sideways smile. It seemed he was adjusting to life after divorce after all, like it or not.