He reached down to touch the knee and I kicked his hand. He startled away and I got the door almost shut before he threw his whole body against it. I said, “I’m only a foot from the telephone and I can have cops here in five minutes. They want to talk to you about a piece of meat nailed to my door. They want to know about a dead dog somebody left in my car.”
“Call ’em.” His voice was unnaturally calm, like what was going on was exactly what he wanted to have going on. “I’ll say you asked me over to talk about how sad you were about Lilly and me breaking up and how you hoped I’d come visit and in the generosity of my heart I agreed. Because you sounded a little unbalanced … a little crazy.” He took a deep breath and smelled the pie for the first time. “How sweet. Were you baking me something as a surprise, hoping I’d be here soon? That’s the picture I’ll paint for the cops. Here you are baking me something nice. A lonely, jealous woman making advances on her sister’s ex-husband and getting violent when he rejects her, so in self-defense I had to subdue you. A nut case. What a whore. I only came over because I thought you might be a danger to yourself. I’ll look so sad about it all.”
Ricky suddenly twisted around, frowning. There were footsteps on the stairs. I peered past his shoulder down to the street. Jane’s car. Jane—generous, perpetually cheerful Jane, dropping by because I’d told her I was watching Annie tonight and she’d decided to surprise me and keep me company because she believed everyone wanted company. The steps got closer and there she was on the landing directly behind Luhrmann. She’d been preoccupied with balancing the cake on its pink platter and the scene at my door took her by surprise. She moved toward us, very slowly, but she kept coming toward us.
“What are you doing here?” she said loudly, but we could both see that the cake was shaking in her hands. I could feel her fear feed something in Luhrmann, make him expand into a slightly larger, leering thing.
I said, “Jane? Thanks for coming. Is Todd right behind you?”
Ricky looked from her to me, from me to her, deciding. “Yes,” she lied. “Just behind me.”
Luhrmann looked me in the eyes. “It’s not over,” he whispered. “Women like you end up regretting how they act.” He pushed off from the door and brushed by Jane, hard, purposefully swinging a shoulder and arm so that the cake and its pretty pink platter flew down the steps behind her, an arc of shattered glass and broken lemon cake. I closed my hand firmly around Jane’s arm and yanked her into the apartment. We bolted the door and watched from a locked window as he made his way to his own car, got in, and drove off.
“Aunt Neave? Aunt Jane?” Annie, ruffled and sleepy, a good deal of her hair sticking straight up from her head. She had a stuffed bear in her arms. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” we said as one.
Annie considered this. “I smell chocolate!” she accused. “Did you make brownies?”
“Nope.”
“I smell them.”
“It’s chocolate peanut-butter pie,” I admitted.
“You made it after I went to bed!”
“It was a surprise. For breakfast.” That was true, but I’d fully expected to make my way through half the pie tonight all by myself. Annie’s face got accusatory. Stern. Certainly Jane’s presence was suspicious.
“Aunt Jane came over to eat pie with you.”
“You promise not to tell your mom if we let you stay up and eat pie?” Jane asked. Annie nodded, hard.
It is an absolute truth that having a little girl under your wing who thinks you can protect her makes you feel more powerful. That could be why we let Annie stay at the table until her face fell directly into her plate, at which point Jane plucked her up and carried her back to bed. We spent a half hour scrubbing cake off the stairs and sweeping up the shattered platter.
“What are you going to say to Lilly when she comes to pick up Annie?” Jane asked.
“The truth. That he’s a psychopath and I’m furious with her for starting up with him again.”
“Something’s wrong with him. He’s not normal. Neave, I heard what he said.”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“He said it wasn’t over. He said you’d regret something. He didn’t come to see Lilly, did he? He came to say those things to you. He didn’t even know Annie was here. I’m calling Todd and telling him to come over and wait with us until Lilly comes home.”
“No, you will not. He’s not coming back tonight. I’ll bolt the downstairs and the upstairs doors. Besides, Lilly will be here any minute.”
“Oh, Neave,” my gentle and brave little sister said, her face darkening around lowered, worried eyebrows. “It’s times like this I wish you were married.”
*
When Lilly came to pick Annie up I described our evening. She got mad—not at Luhrmann, at me. “Why did you go talk to Max? Why would you do that!” she demanded. “You just went and got Ricky crazy. I told you he and Max didn’t get along. That’s all you accomplished!”
“How can you talk to me like any of this is my fault?”
“I told you not to talk to Max!”
“It wasn’t Max who came here and threatened me. Neither one of us think Max left a piece of meat on my door. Do we? Or put your perfume on an animal and then broke its neck! You know in your bones that it was Ricky. What does he have to do? The dog in the car, Lilly!”
“I know this is hard for you to hear, Neave, but you don’t understand.”
“No. I don’t.” Lilly turned her face away from me. “Lilly? What are you thinking? Please tell me it’s done; tell me if he calls you again you’ll hang up!”
“Stop worrying,” she said, and I don’t know how I knew but it was clear and sharp and certain. She was going to see him again.
NEAVE
What Could Be Worse?
For the first time in my life I felt like I couldn’t reach my sister, couldn’t find any way to make her see me, listen to me. She said there was nothing to worry about, which was clearly a lie. I went to Jane, who had no advice or guidance to offer. It was surely a sign of how helpless and crazed I felt that I brought the whole subject up with Snyder. We had just gone over a month’s cash flow for his business, which was doing so well that he’d had to hire an assistant and get a second telephone line.
“I knew guys like Ricky in high school.” He shrugged. “That dog thing you’re talking about, I knew two guys who had dead cats left in their lockers. That happens to you, you tell nobody or the next thing you find in your locker’ll be worse.”
“What could be worse than a dead cat in your locker?”
“Just the head of the cat.”
“How do you know this?”
“I was one of the two guys.”
After a moment of silence in which it was clear that I felt a little stricken on his behalf he added, as if to comfort me, “The head was just a threat. Never actually materialized.”
But the dead cats had.