The Good Neighbor Read online

  The Good Neighbor

  Cathryn Grant

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Free Psychological Thriller

  A Note To Readers

  Also by Cathryn Grant

  Rights Info

  Prologue

  There was so much blood. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

  I thought it would flow smoothly, not emerge with thick clumps, stopping suddenly. Then, just when I thought it was finished, starting to ooze again.

  I cleaned it up as best I could.

  But when I looked at my hands, my fingers had absorbed it. Red lines snaked along my cuticles, and blood was lodged beneath my fingernails. I scrubbed my hands, watching the water and liquid soap run red and pink down the drain. Faint stains clung to the porcelain. It required rinsing with several jars of water before it gleamed white again.

  Once everything was cleaned up, my fingers began to tremble uncontrollably.

  To calm them, I opened the bottom drawer in the vanity. Behind the bottles of bubble bath and the fancy body scrubs, I felt for the empty tissue box I kept there. Inside was a chocolate brown notebook and a pen.

  I placed the notebook on my leg and, with sloppy writing, recorded my thoughts about what had happened. I wasn’t sure why I kept this tiny journal. Sometimes I wondered whether I was writing to my future self.

  No one knew about my small, almost insignificant journal. I’m a secretive person, but I’ve had to be.

  I started to think about whether it was possible to keep her from finding out what had happened. She would be livid. I’d seen her fury before.

  I had no doubt she would say it was my fault. She would accuse me of going out of my way to hurt her. She would blame me, as if I could have done anything to stop it. Nothing I could say would convince her I hadn’t been able to help it. I did try. I really did.

  The way she behaved lately, the things she said…it was almost as if she was insane. A diagnosable disease ate at her brain, the tissue-thin, connective net of sanity decaying every day. It was the lock her in a room with padded walls and bars on the windows with the bed bolted to the floor variety of insane, not just your typical oh she’s nuts kind of insanity.

  Of course, she didn’t look insane. It wasn’t something that could be seen from the outside. She didn’t have the stereotypical appearance of a madwoman with filthy hair, ragged, grimy fingernails, and a wild look in her eyes. She was perfectly pleasant and normal, on the surface.

  But she was insane. And I knew she would prove it when she saw all that blood, the rest of the blood I hadn’t been able to clean up.

  1

  Taylor

  When I saw it, I knew—the family moving in next door would change everything.

  The first object to emerge from the moving van was a globe. It was securely boxed inside a wood crate, the globe and stand visible through the slats spaced several inches apart. It was a perfect sphere covered with coffee-colored oceans, the continents and countries depicted in warm reds and golds. The globe revealed an interest in the world outside our suburban surroundings. It suggested a desire for travel and an interest in the tight connections among the human beings spread across the surface of the planet.

  It was a globe that would have looked at home in a nineteenth-century home.

  I imagined the Victorian mansion where that globe might live—a house that was nothing like the modern, glass-walled homes populating our cul-de-sac. I saw its parlor and library, a formal dining room and two floors filled with bedrooms. I pictured an attic and a basement. In the corner of a richly furnished study, the globe would sit in a place of honor, bracketed by bookcases.

  Duncan would say I was reading into it. Fantasizing. I didn’t think I was. I was certain my new neighbors were different because their possessions told me they were not slaves to technology. As each piece of their lives emerged from the moving van, several items announced they weren’t like the rest of my neighbors. There were boxes of books and board games, the thick, dark lettering on the cardboard announcing the contents so proudly I could easily read the words from where I stood in my front yard. Out came a croquet set and badminton rackets. The others on my street preferred closing themselves up in their homes, binge-watching TV, playing computer games, deluding themselves into believing they were having genuine human interaction on social media.

  I knew it wasn’t only our neighborhood where the residents carry out their social activities online. It’s everywhere. People prefer TV and computer time, they play video games, and they sit in their houses thinking they’re connecting through social media. They prefer searching out like-minded people online to the real people who populate their world.

  Duncan, my friends, the people I work with—all think I’m extreme, but I really believe smartphones and social media are tearing apart society. If eighty percent of human communication is nonverbal, as they say it is, and all we exchange are words, there’s no communication at all. There’s no connection. We might think we’re forming and maintaining relationships through photographs and videos, pithy comments and emojis, but we’re not. We hide behind them.

  People should be terrified by what’s happening to the world.

  The husband was overseeing the unloading. He was tall and slender, his movements fluid and sure. He saw me watching, standing beneath my small Japanese maple tree, trying to stay cool in the unseasonably scorching May sun. It was the hottest California spring on record. We’d already had four days with temperatures passing the hundred-degree mark. An equally hot summer was forecast.

  Although he probably couldn’t see my features from where he stood, I smiled at my new neighbor. I lifted my hand and waved.

  He looked directly at me, then spun and walked up the front path. He opened the door leading into the walled courtyard and closed it behind him. My hand was still lifted, still waving as if my body thought the effort would lure him back outside.

  Finally, I lowered my arm and took a sip from the bottle of cherry-flavored sparkling water in my other hand. The water was no longer cold. I swallowed more anyway, to keep the moisture flowing into my throat.

  The movers emerged from the van carrying a glossy white child’s bed. Next came four posts and an assortment of supporting bars to hold a canopy, followed by a white dresser with drawer pulls depicting the faces of baby animals.

  I remained under the tree fo
r another forty-five minutes until the van appeared to be nearly emptied of its contents. I was hoping to see the wife, and the little girl who slept in that charming bed. I hoped most of all that the husband would come outside again and return my wave. Then I could introduce myself.

  Just as the sun was sinking toward the foothills, a small SUV pulled into the driveway. The woman climbed out and leaned into the car. When she stood, I saw a fragile-looking frame. Her hair was light brown streaked with blond, perfectly straight and cut to her shoulders with a side part. She wore white Capri pants and a turquoise top. A large turquoise bracelet grasped her right wrist. A girl emerged from the passenger side. She was tall and slender. Blond hair hung to the center of her back in a silk curtain. She walked with grace, mirroring her father’s stride. She possessed a certain awareness of how beautiful she was. I didn’t see her face, but she appeared to be older than the child I’d envisioned sleeping in that canopied bed. If asked, I would have estimated she was thirteen or fourteen years old.

  Something didn’t fit.

  2

  Moira

  Even after two months living on our new somewhat too-cozy cul-de-sac in Silicon Valley, I hadn’t adjusted to the summer weather. Every afternoon, my body was sheathed in an ooze of perspiration. Most nights, the cooling ocean breeze moved inland and the temperature dropped into the fifties.

  In this older, established neighborhood, the houses had been considered ultramodern in the nineteen sixties, but had stood the test of time with their simple lines, tiled floors, and glass walls facing lush backyards, but central air-conditioning hadn’t been a feature. The open floor plans, designed for a good cross-flow of air, and those cooling ocean breezes were supposed to be adequate.

  The homes on our cul-de-sac had front courtyards filled with plants and water features that gave a sense of coolness, but not the real thing when the temperatures climbed to triple digits. The heat was different here—dry and choking, burning my skin and stirring up thick, heavy sweat.

  There had been no nighttime relief from the heat for five days now. I was overcome with lethargy and lack of enthusiasm. I blamed the heat, though that wasn’t all of it.

  While Alan caught up on work, Brittany and I had spent the evening marching Monopoly pieces around the board, trading cash and filling our properties with tiny green houses. It was a tedious game when only two were playing, but she’d insisted.

  After she and I ate the last two slices of the strawberry pie I’d made a few days earlier, I tucked her into bed, kissed her goodnight, and retreated to my bedroom.

  I don’t know what woke me. My phone said one eleven. Three ones. It seemed like an omen. I was alert and energized. I wondered if I’d heard a sound that dug into my subconscious and yanked my brain up to the surface.

  I got out of bed as if I’d been shoved. I stood for a moment with my eyes closed, trying to reorient myself to the layout of our house. Even after all these weeks, it felt unfamiliar. Because of the design, no light from streetlamps found its way inside. All of the front windows looked into the courtyard, blind to the street, and behind our backyard was an open preserve—a vast empty space of trees, wild grass, native plants, dips and gullies, deeper ravines, and unlighted trails.

  When I once again had the floor plan firmly rooted in my mind, I opened my eyes and stepped into the hallway. I turned on the light. My throat was parched. I coughed, unable to get relief. In the kitchen, I filled a glass with water and drank half of it.

  The house seemed foreign and empty with its uncovered sliding glass doors. The blinds we’d ordered had to be returned because they were three-quarters of an inch too narrow. New window coverings were on their way. I wasn’t used to all this glass and I felt exposed. Anyone could be out in that wild space beyond the back fence. If someone was out there, I’d never even know it. He could be watching me right that minute, binoculars focused on my thin nightgown and bare feet with the chipped pink polish on my left big toe.

  I finished the water and made my way to Brittany’s room. She’d been quiet and withdrawn for the last few weeks, listless during meals. I didn’t attribute it to the move or the heat, because everything had been fine the first week or two. She’d picked up where she’d left off with her schoolwork and was as involved as ever in the lessons I planned for her.

  Although the local chapter of homeschoolers had welcomed us, after the second get-together at a waterslide park, Brittany had complained about meeting up with them again. She couldn’t explain why she was refusing to make new friends. I asked repeatedly whether someone had bullied her, whether the others were cliquish, but she said she didn’t want to talk about it right that minute. The more I pressed, the more she retreated into her own thoughts.

  The air in her bedroom was cooler than ours, which wasn’t right. We had a sliding glass door we’d left open a crack, the door locked by a bolt on the metal frame to be sure the house was secure. The coldness in Brittany’s bedroom told me her window was wide open. That was not the way I’d left it when I tucked her in. The windows also had locks so that only a whisper of night air was able to make its way through the narrow opening. She must have unlocked it and opened it, longing for fresh air.

  Moving toward the bed, the carpet fibers stroked my feet like dried grass.

  I lowered my hand to cup the back of her head, as I always did when I checked on her. She slept on her stomach, her face turned toward her right shoulder, and I always approached the bed from the left side.

  My hand settled onto the cool pillow. It seemed strange that the air had cooled the pillow to the point that it chilled my palm. I moved my hand, feeling for strands of her long hair. Nothing but fabric brushed across my fingertips. I patted the pillow, then lower on the bed, thinking she’d slid down and pulled her head beneath the covers.

  The bed was empty. I stumbled to the door and pressed the light switch to confirm what I already felt like a knife piercing my stomach. The bed was empty and so was her room. I’d passed the hall bathroom on my way. The door had been open, the lights off.

  I half-ran across the hall to the spare bedroom we used as a classroom, to the guest room, then the main bathroom, the living room, the dining room that opened off the kitchen, and the small side room where we kept the TV and desktop computer. Every room was bathed in darkness. Empty.

  As I searched, my mind had called out her name, more terrified each time, but I hadn’t been able to speak, certain that at any minute I’d see her and realize how foolish it was to panic. I ran back to my bedroom, a sob rising in my chest.

  The lights in our room came on as I hammered my fist on the switch. “Alan. Alan! Brittany’s gone.” Now the sob released itself, a mixture of wailing and screaming, echoing inside me and filling the space around me.

  He sat up and pushed his hair back as if it must be tamed into place before he was fit to carry on a conversation. “That’s not possible.”

  “I checked every room. She’s not here.”

  “Did you look in the courtyard? The garage?”

  Together we hurried to the garage and turned on the lights. The cars sat side by side, the interiors dark. Even so, Alan opened the passenger door on each vehicle and looked inside, calmly speaking Brittany’s name.

  The courtyard was equally deserted, and so was the house. We searched every room a second time, calling her name, chastising her for playing games, angry and worried in one confused wave of fear. Finally, we stood in front of her open bedroom window. Even with the heat, she knew we wanted it locked at night. She’d opened the window, and the monster I feared lurking in the open space had seen her standing there. He’d come into the backyard and ripped her out of her room before she could cry out.

  Tears poured down my face. My chest ached as if I were flat on my back, a man pressing his boot into my bones. Alan and I yanked on whatever clothes we could find, trying and failing to swallow the panic. Alan called the police and then said he would drive around the neighborhood to see if he saw anything out
of the ordinary.

  When he backed out of the garage, I decided I couldn’t wait for the police to take their promised eight minutes. Eight minutes! I ran to the house to the left of ours and stabbed my finger at the small button, hating the locked door to the courtyard because it prevented me from seeing whether any lights came on in response to the bell.

  After several minutes, the courtyard door opened. A woman with wavy dark hair and large dark eyes stood in front of me. She wore a T-shirt that hung to the middle of her thighs.

  “Hi. I’m Moira. We just moved in a few weeks ago. Next door.” I waved my hand toward my house.

  Her lips parted, starting to form a smile that dropped just as quickly as she read my panic.

  “My daughter’s been abducted. I woke up and she was gone.” A sob gushed out of me. “Her bedroom window is wide open. We always lock it. Have you seen her? Have you seen anything? Heard her screaming? Seen…anyone?” The words managed to come out of my mouth despite my lack of breath to carry them. I gasped for air.

  The woman put her hand on my wrist. “Did you call the police?”

  “My husband did,” I said, my voice trembling. “They said they’d send an officer, but it would be a few minutes.” Another sob rose out of me. “Eight minutes.”