VICTIMS FEEL HARMLESS, at first: they can’t raise objections, they’re finite objects at rest in a stable field. But in the wake of each victim come waves of hurt: the rooms in which they lived have to be cleaned up; their larger possessions have to be parceled out; the people with whom they had outstanding accounts, material or otherwise, must learn to swallow their complaints. Sooner or later, I’d have to locate any such creditors still among the living, I knew. I hoped to forestall the search as long as I could. Just thinking about it made me tense. Cold calling is a bad look in almost every profession.
But by June I’d made a friend, and he knew more than I did about the neighborhood. It was Ken from the apartments across the street. We’d exchanged several head nods while leaving our houses at around the same hour of the morning a few times, but nothing past that; I was out early one day when he called out to me, his voice gravelly, a lit cigarette in hand. “Hey, the new guy,” he said, waving with the other.
“Gage,” I said.
“All right, Gage,” he said. We shook hands. “Ken.”
“My mother’s idea,” I said preemptively; most people say something about how they haven’t ever met anybody named Gage. Ken cocked his head a little.
“Well, all right,” he said: he had a light tone to his voice, in which I thought I heard a note of correction. “Mom knows best, right?”
“Right, right,” I said.
“Mine still calls me ‘Kenny.’ Makes me feel like a little kid.”
“Whatever they call you for the first few years after you’re born probably sticks with them forever,” I said.
“Maybe that’s it,” he said. “Anyway, where were you before you got to Milpitas?”
“Oh, just up in San Francisco. You?”
Ken laughed; he looked down a little, toward the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with my question. “I’m from here,” he said when he found my face again. “Until pretty recently not a lot of people moved here.”
“Real estate agent says it’s coming up,” I said.
“Well, that’s true,” he said. “It’s growing. New people. Right here next to the freeway, though—don’t take this the wrong way, but most of the people moving here … they don’t move here.”
“Oh, I know,” I said, remembering my first visit to town. “Whitney tried to show me a place in—what was it called? The neighborhood had a name.”
“There’s a lot of that now,” said Ken. I was trying to guess his age without staring too hard: maybe thirty-seven, I figured. His clothes looked freshly laundered and his hair was neatly shaped. “Wolf Trail Crossing or whatever. I think they get to mark up the price if they give a block a name like that.”
“Well, anyway,” I said, “they were a good deal more expensive than this one.”
He looked at me a little sideways; he’d noticed I wasn’t volunteering much. “Yeah, I bet they were,” he said after a second. “Listen, I’m on my way to work, I better get going. You want to get a beer later?”
“Sure,” I said, a little surprised.
“Cool,” he said, with a friendly smile; I thought I heard a note of suspicion in it, but I’d hardly had any company at all since getting to town, and solitude can do strange things to your hearing. “I’m home after five. You’ll be around?”
“Haven’t really figured out many other places to go,” I said.
He laughed again. “I imagine you haven’t,” he said.
* * *
AT ABOUT FIVE-THIRTY that evening, my doorbell rang; it was a cheery two-note chime, and it had to be new—who puts a doorbell on the front of a porn store?—but it sounded, to my ears, like a relic of the 1970s: there was something aspirationally optimistic about it, as if it were trying to climb above its actual station.
Ken produced a six-pack of Tecate and set it down on the coffee table by the couch in the living room. I don’t think I’d seen a Tecate since college. We cracked our cans open simultaneously; the sound caromed off the walls with a weirdly metallic echo. Whoever’d done the refurb on the place hadn’t given much thought to the acoustics.
What’s your life like, where’s your family: we took care of the basics first. He’d been born at the hospital in San Jose; his parents still lived in the house he’d grown up in. He said the place had seemed palatial to him as a kid, but that he could see, now, with all the new construction, that it had been incredibly modest. I thought about how every town this near San Francisco must have experienced some measure of seismic change almost the minute the information economy cranked into high gear, and how this was still going on, my own lodgings being just a single example.
He had a sister at Mills, and both his parents were college graduates: but they cared more about their children’s happiness than about status, and he’d been good with tools since he was young, so he worked at an auto shop.
“I wouldn’t have guessed,” I said: leaving in the mornings, he looked like he was heading for a desk job.
“I only wear my uniform at the shop. Old habit. Leave my work at work, you know?” I cracked open a second beer; it was dark outside, but inside it felt hotter than it had in the daytime. “How about you?”
“I’m a writer,” I said. “Mainly books.”
“There you go,” he said, raising his can like a champagne glass. We toasted my profession. Then we sat quietly for several minutes, each of us sort of staring into space at the end of the day, beers in hand.
It’s pretty rare to meet someone who’s comfortable just sitting quietly with you before you get to know each other better. Sometimes quiet people are trying to let you know they don’t actually want to talk to you, but this wasn’t that. It was easy. I’d meant to start asking questions—you never know if you’re getting an opportunity you won’t get again, or won’t get again for a while—but I chose to wait. There was a gentle, blurry quality to the scene. I relaxed into it. You get susceptible to environments when you don’t keep much company.
“So you came here to write?” he said eventually; the stillness resolved. I wasn’t sure what to say in response: how much of the truth to tell him, I mean. He was an adult who’d lived here all his life. There was no way he didn’t remember the murders at Devil House. That he hadn’t already commented on the former life of the house in which we were sitting together drinking beers was, by itself, a clue of some kind—a sign of something delicate to be navigated, like a prison record or a death in the family.
“I came here to write,” I said. “That’s sort of what I do, I go places and write.”
“About what?”
There was a beat. “Crime. I write true crime.”
“I figured,” he said. “I don’t know if you know this, but when people saw somebody was moving in, the first thing everybody wondered was if it’d be somebody who knew.”
“That was all a long time ago,” I said.
“Here in town…” he said, looking for the right words. “Here in town it doesn’t feel like a long time to a lot of people.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I tried to let the quiet open up again. It didn’t work. Ken was looking at the beer in his hand, trying to think of how to say something.
“I don’t know if you know this, too, but everybody mainly feels like they dodged a bullet when nobody wrote a giant story about it like with the other thing that happened here.”
“Sure,” I said. I decided to go ahead and hit the ice with a hammer. “River’s Edge didn’t go over real well around here?”