The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

James Mathews Many dogs have died here From Iron Horse Literary Review

On the afternoon I met my new neighbor, a woman others in the cul-de-sac would dub “Ramba,” I wasn’t looking for trouble. In fact, I wasn’t looking for anything other than to enter my first full month of retirement with a small military pension and dreams of a hop to Florida or Hawaii once a year until my expiration date arrived. My immediate goal was a peaceful night of sipping Stella Artois, catching up on baseball scores, and making a list of things I needed to do to the lawn the next day.

I had just taken a seat in my favorite club chair when the knocking started. I muted the television and glowered at the clock on the wall. I wondered whether to just wait it out. But the knocking continued and grew more insistent. I finally shot up, galloped across the room, and flung open the door in a way I hoped would signal deep emotional instability, which I imagined to be a staple of retirement.

“I’m your new neighbor,” the woman announced through a smile of perfectly aligned and pampered teeth, “and I was wondering if you knew how to change a flat tire?”

I stared with disbelief at the woman, who seemed oblivious to the fact that I was irritated. She was young, upper twenties tops. Her complexion was fever-pale, her red hair pulled back and tied off in a ponytail or braid, and her big, goofy smile was more an event than an expression. She wore faded jeans and an olive-drab T-shirt. The shirt was standard grunt issue, although I would never have associated her with the military except for the way she was standing, at parade rest, hands behind her back, rocking slightly on her heels, waiting for me to answer her idiotic question. Somewhere on the other side of the neighborhood, a lawnmower started up on the first pull.

“Call a mechanic,” I told her. And for good measure: “Which is what you should have done when you first got the flat.”

“Oh, it’s not my car,” she said. “It’s yours.”

I blinked a few times and stuttered stupidly, “Excuse me?”

“That’s right,” she said, and from behind her back she produced a Buck knife the size of a billy club. “It’s how I’ve introduced myself to all the neighbors. So that you each know I’m serious. And that I’m not going anywhere.”

Her smile was gone now, traceless on her pale skin, as if it had been wiped from her face by the glimmer of the steel knife. I retreated a step and swallowed hard, fully expecting her to move toward me. Instead she executed a textbook about-face and stalked down the walkway and across the lawn, the blade swinging side to side like a machete hacking through an imaginary jungle.

She’d gotten to my tire all right, one of the $229-a-pop Michelin 3000 Weather Breakers on the right front side of my Ford pickup. I had parked ass-end in, with the grille facing the cul-de-sac, and it appeared as if, on her way up the sidewalk to introduce herself, she’d taken the blade and carved a clean line through the top of the treading. This wasn’t going to be a patch job.

Harold Cummings, the neighbor to my right, wasn’t as lucky. She had slashed the two rear tires of his Volkswagen Gallant. The Popovs, an older husband-and-wife team, escaped altogether because their car had been in the garage. They rarely went out anyway.

For a long time I stood looking at my tire and then walked a full circle around my truck, inspecting it for additional damage. Every few steps, I would glance over at the house to my left, a simple bungalow design with a shadowy porch and grizzled yard spangled with dirt patches. The only evidence that it might be occupied was a black POW You Are Not Forgotten flag hanging dead and heavy outside the brick porch. The FOR SALE sign was still sitting out front, where it had been for the last several months. In all that time I had seen no potential buyers come or go. In fact, Harold and I had even taken turns mowing the grass, since no one else seemed at all interested in doing so. We had always prided ourselves in our quiet little cul-de-sac, a place of calm and reflection, filled with residents whose principal occupation was minding their own damn business.

In the entire four years I had lived there, I think the biggest issue had been a complaint or two about the Popovs’ pet dachshunds running loose and dumping on other people’s yards. As I looked over at the bungalow, I realized we had moved far beyond the scourge of doggie droppings.

“How goes your day, sergeant?” Harold called from behind me. He was standing at the front of my truck, arms crossed, grinning. Harold was a retired professor of psychology and dressed the part to a T. In fact, if he were masquerading as a retired professor, he couldn’t have found a better outfit — lightweight, rimless spectacles, a two-toned sweater vest, khakis, Birkenstocks, and a curved alabaster pipe. He looked like he’d just walked off a campus movie set.

The Popovs shuffled up and huddled behind him like a pair of eager students.

“Has anyone called the police?” I asked, fumbling for my cell phone.

“Hold on now,” Harold said. “We were just talking about that, and the consensus is that it will only make things worse.”

“Please,” Anna Popov said. She was clutching one of her two long-haired dachshunds across her chest.

Her husband, Vlad, had the other dachshund tucked under his arm like a newspaper. “Yes, no police,” Vlad said. “This is to be no good.”

The Popovs were Russian and had moved to the States ten years earlier. Harold was convinced that Vlad had been a member of the KGB who had gambled the wrong way when the spirit of glasnost finally petered out. Their faces were always shiny and suffering, their accents heavy. They butchered English to the point that we wondered just how much they really understood.

“Well, good luck with your consensus,” I told them as my thumb hit the 9 and then the 1.

Harold reached out and covered the phone with his hand. “Seriously, we think you should talk to her first.”

“Who?”

He gestured toward the bungalow with his pipe. “Her. Ramba.”

“And say what, for chrissake?”

“Talk,” Vlad said with a nervous grunt. “No police.”

“Yes,” Anna said. “Please to be talking only.”

Harold added, “Try to get her on our side.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” I said.

“Look,” Harold said, “I’ve seen this kind of thing many times before, mostly with new students on campus. Moving into a new environment is one of the biggest stressors in life, and this may have been her way of getting it out of her system. If we just tell her we’re nice people who don’t want any trouble, then—”

“There’s already trouble,” I said, jabbing a finger at my Michelin 3000 in desperation. “Jesus Christ, Harold, look at my tire! Look at your tires!”

He maintained a serene demeanor, even raising one eyebrow scoldingly. His expression seemed to say, In the grand scheme of all that is life, what’s a tire? “She just moved in, and she clearly has issues,” he said. “But getting the police involved at this juncture could make things worse. Today, we hold the deescalation card. Tomorrow, she could be cutting our throats.”

Vlad winced and Anna gasped and both of the dogs — their names were Foo-foo and Rocky, or Rocko and Fee-fee, I wasn’t exactly sure — began to whimper.

“Harold,” I said, pleading for reason. But he just stared back at me. I had known him since I moved in. We shared a love of landscaping and exotic beer but beyond that didn’t have much in common. I suspected he was a bleeding-heart lib, and he probably thought I was a right-wing warmonger. But since we never knew for sure how the other felt, we generally got along. I admit that for once, his psychobabble was appealing. As I said, I wasn’t interested in escalating anything with anyone, least of all a bowie-wielding lunatic.

“It’s for the good of us all,” Harold said.

I smirked. “Then maybe we should all go up there. We could deescalate together.”

Anna gasped again and muttered something in Russian.

Harold was shaking his head. “Too confrontational. Besides, she’s got a POW flag, so maybe she’s prior military. Tell her you were in the air force. Tell her about Iraq. Connect with her. Above all, don’t take an aggressive posture.”

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this,” I repeated, even as I shoved my phone into my shirt pocket and began walking up her driveway.

When I mounted the porch steps, the lawnmower buzzing in the distance hit a patch of rock and stopped dead. The wooden planks of the porch creaked with neglect and resentment beneath my feet. I could feel the eyes of my huddled neighbors watching me. And right before I knocked, I heard Anna’s weak, frightened voice utter, “Is he just to be talking, Mister Harold?”

Harold answered her in an unruffled, professorial manner. “That’s correct, my dear,” he said, teeth clenched on the stem of his pipe. “He will just to be talking.”

She opened the door on the first knock. I was prepared for anything, especially hostility, but she was wearing the same tremendous smile she wore when she introduced herself. I made sure to locate her hands. One was on the door, and the other was brushing some dust off the front of her shirt. The features of her face were stark white against the darkness of the hall behind her, her eyes open wide and gleaming, as if the strain of her pulled-back hair had stretched the skin too tight. She looked about as crazy as I’d ever seen a person look, like a mad monk preparing to burn a heretic at the stake.

The effect left me speechless. My mind fluttered between what I wanted to say and, per Harold’s suggestion, what I was supposed to say. Was it I’m here about the tires, you crazy bitch? Or Gee, I just love your POW flag, so let’s connect? But I couldn’t even open my mouth.

She stood up on her toes and looked past my shoulder at the other neighbors. “Let me guess,” she said. “You’re not happy I moved here.”

I cleared my throat and tried to soften my tone, all the while hearing Harold’s droning voice: Don’t take an aggressive posture. “That’s not exactly true,” I said, “but I—”

“And you don’t know what to do or say because you’re not used to having someone — especially a new neighbor — greet you like I did?”

“Well...”

“Well what?”

“Well, um, I really love your flag. Were you in the service? The military? I was too, so I thought we could, you know—”

Her response was immediate and electric. She clapped her hands together, and her eyes glistened. “A veteran? Why the hell didn’t you say so? Come on in.”

And here I retreated a step. I was no fool. I had lived long and bore the scars of many narrow escapes to prove it. But then Harold’s voice persisted, like some kind of suburban secretary of state. Play the deescalation card. Get her on our side.

“Okay, sure,” I said, unsurely. “Thanks.”

I stepped across the threshold and paused as my eyes fought to adjust. The fading afternoon light I brought with me did nothing to illuminate the dark interior, although my eyes fixed on a glowing lampshade within. There was some kind of cheap, ridiculous foyer chandelier slung low enough that it grazed my head. It was missing several glass hangings and rattled as if mocking me.

The woman had moved on ahead and disappeared. I managed to follow her voice as it faded deeper into the shadows. “You’ll have to excuse the mess,” she said. “As you can see, I’m having a wonderful adventure in moving. Shut the door, will you?”

By now my eyes had settled, and the foyer took shape as well as the open living/dining room beyond. The layout wasn’t that different from my own house. The couple who had lived here prior were an air force sergeant and his South Korean wife. They’d gotten orders to Minot, North Dakota, and, like everything else headed that way, disappeared in the quiet of night, never to be seen again. Despite our shared service, we had never socialized.

I took a few more cautious steps, navigating around a clutter of cardboard boxes, their lids open in mighty yawns of disgorged packing paper. Rather than an adventure in moving, it looked more like one of exile, a picture of abandonment, as if the moving truck had simply backed up to the front door and dumped its contents through the opening.

I moved past a kitchen area to my left and into the living room, where I found the woman crouched over and rummaging through some boxes. “Make yourself at home,” she said. “So you were in the army?”

“Air force.”

Something flittered across the ceiling above me, some rodent nesting in the ductwork. I couldn’t imagine what she might be looking for in those boxes or how she expected to find it. All the windows were covered by thick sheets or curtains. Although my eyes had adjusted enough to see, the only legitimate light source was from the lamp. Near the back of the house was a sliding glass door, where a brush of sunlight glinted below the hem of the curtain.

More disturbing than the lack of light was the smell. The air inside was overwhelmingly musty, scented with low-grade alcohol or perhaps some kind of cleaning product.

“Let’s see. Where is it?” she said. “Ah-ha!” With a flourish, she produced a darkened wine bottle and held it out to me, as if it were a small animal she had shot in the woods and expected me to cook. “This was a wedding gift,” she announced. “Although I couldn’t tell you what kind it is. My husband was the wine expert in the family.”

“Please, no,” I said. “Really, I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

I shifted closer to the lamp, which was positioned atop a round end table, making sure to keep my back to the front door. In the small circle of light was an eight-by-ten picture, neatly framed and standing amid a jumble of prescription pill bottles. I squinted, but couldn’t read the labels.

The photo showed a Marine pilot in flight suit, nestled in the open cockpit of what looked to be an F-18 fighter. He was wearing aviator sunglasses and smiling, one gloved hand extended in a thumbs-up salute. A vast desert landscape fell away behind him, and I knew immediately it was Iraq. It could have been anywhere. Nevada, California, or even Kuwait. But I knew by the cast of the shadows that it was the place I’d spent six miserable months at the height of the insurgency. Just looking at the photo, I could taste the desert dust in my mouth and feel it thicken on my teeth. This recognition was a frequent occurrence, most especially whenever I watched a news report about the war on television. Harold probably would have diagnosed me with PTSD if I’d mentioned it to him, which I wouldn’t.

While the woman continued to rummage, I gestured toward the picture. “That your husband?”

She glanced at the photo, then at me, blinking in an almost sleepy gesture. Her shoulders wilted, and the smile was gone again. I felt my heart clench up.

“That’s right,” she said. “He’s in Iraq.” She shimmied sideways on her knees to another box, this one tattered and torn at the corners.

Tell her about Iraq, Harold broke in. Connect with her. “I was over there too,” I said. “Back in 2006. I worked in the theater hospital. Administrative stuff mostly.”

“Really? You must have seen a lot of death.”

I detected a trap in her comment and chose my words carefully. “Actually, we had over a ninety percent save rate once the casualties reached us. It’s unusual to have that kind of—”

She cut me off with a grunt and said, “Save rate? Is that what you said? Wow, that’s funny.” Her concentration was now focused entirely on the tattered box. She had set the bottle down and started removing small items one by one, each individually wrapped in newspaper. I noted well the size and shape of each package. I didn’t want her emerging from the cardboard with a loaded AK-47.

I inched forward again, waving a hand to get her attention. “Please, please, you don’t have to go to any trouble.”

“There you guys are,” she said to something in the box. She produced a bundle cocooned in newspaper. She sat back on her haunches and unwrapped two wineglasses, delicately setting each one down on the floor beside the wine bottle.

Harold started to whisper into my ear again, but I cut him off. “Listen,” I said, reverting to my gruff sergeant’s voice. “We should really talk about the tires. You’ve got to understand.”

“So you say you were in Iraq?” she said, still not looking up.

I sighed, feeling the weariness of the entire exercise. I said, “I don’t think you understand how serious what you did was. I wanted to call the police.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I thought we could talk first.”

“So let’s talk. Over some wine.”

“I’m really not in the mood to drink wine.”

“That’s good. Because I never intended you to drink it.” She reached back behind her head with both hands and yanked at her ponytail, tightening the hair even further, as if girding herself for battle. Then she grabbed the neck of the bottle, rose up to her feet with the quick grace of a lioness, and hopped over the box toward me.

“Okay, look,” I said calmly, and then watched in utter disbelief as she reared back and swung for the fences. I could still feel my mouth forming the words I really think you need to when the bottle collided with my skull.

I staggered backward, arms flailing. The bottle, which did not break, felt like it was filled with concrete. The point of impact burned, and my vision boomeranged from focused to double to triple. Some glass or porcelain knickknack, perhaps even a precious memento of her marriage, crackled beneath my sneaker.

I shook my head fiercely and managed to restore my vision. Still, my brain refused to process what had happened. I could feel blood trickling down the side of my head, but I was very much aware and conscious. Somewhere in my brain’s circuitry, deep and falling fast away, was Harold’s voice saying, Get her on our side.

My new neighbor had by now set the unbroken concrete bottle aside and stooped to retrieve something from another box. My heart clutched again, and I thought for certain that her hand would soon be holding the Buck knife. But it was a frying pan. One of those heavy jobs, with a titanium nonstick surface.

Then she was crouching, shoulders back, hips tight, and with a yelp she charged at me, the cookware held high like a caveman’s club.

I said, “Wait — listen — you can’t—” as if my mind was stuck in reason mode, still looking for a way to talk myself out of it. She swung before I could get my hands up. I took the flat, hard metal of the pan to the left side of my face. Something gave and rattled. It wasn’t the skillet.

I was thrown back again, this time into the foyer. I heard the pan drop and hit the floor, another weapon used and discarded. The next few seconds were a blur of bulging eyes, gritted teeth, ringless knuckles. She punched, kicked, elbowed, and pushed, backing me toward the front door. Throughout the attack she huffed and yipped like a redheaded ninja.

Although her blows were not as painful as the bottle or pan, she was much too quick for me and seemed to anticipate every defense I attempted. When I parried low, she head-butted high. When I blocked high, she kneed low. She took my polo-shirt collar in both fists and pogo-sticked me down the tight foyer, up and over the boxes, my head crashing into the chandelier, which sent about a dozen glass hangings smashing down in our violent wake. She snatched the doorknob and then kicked open the door. She yanked and pulled me across the threshold by my shirt. I almost tumbled over, but she reined back and kept me upright as I floundered across the porch. Finally, using the momentum of my attempt to flee, she sent me airborne diagonally over the steps and the hedge. I landed directly on a patch of hard, grassless dirt.

But before I struck the ground, while I was hurtling through the air, a strange thing happened. Everything slowed, as if I had been plunged underwater. There was even an underwater glow to the early evening light. And I realized at that moment that I had never — in a long life of visiting shady bars the world over — been in a bar fight. I had certainly never been thrown from a bar. I had been asked to leave once while stationed in Turkey, after a friend and I got into an altercation with some Dutch airmen on joint military maneuvers. But there had been no blows, no international incident to answer for. We were insulted, but also outnumbered and still sober enough to be easily persuaded.

Now, as I whispered through the air toward the hardest part of my new neighbor’s lawn, my eyes catching the unmoving POW flag, I thought, This is what it’s like. This is what it’s like to get your ass kicked in a bar fight and then thrown ingloriously out into the street.

I had been lucky until this day. But I would soon look back — to the moment right before she knocked on my door — and realize just how lucky I had truly been.

At the emergency room, business was booming. I hoped they’d see me right away, but once I stepped through the automatic sliding glass doors that opened with a whoosh and into the grip of the room, I knew it was hopeless. The place reeked of sickness and injury, and I was right in the middle of it, just another victim. Take a number; have a seat. The oddest thing was the hush of the crowded waiting room. Nothing but muted shuffles and whispers, the faint ringing of phones, and an occasional mewl of pain.

Despite the assortment of faces everywhere, no one seemed to be looking at anyone else, as if doing so would only confirm a dark prognosis. There was one exception, a small boy in a Florida Marlins baseball cap, who sat across from me. He gawked relentlessly at my face with all the wide-eyed, slack-jawed fascination of his first peek at a centerfold. I can’t say I blamed him. I was pressing a dripping baggie of ice onto my swollen jaw. Down the front of my shirt was a smattering of fresh blood. I must have looked like a roughed-up zombie.

“What are you in for?” I mumbled to the boy, trying to be humorous but probably only managing to be terrifying.

The boy turned away and yawned.

Harold hustled over from the reception area, deftly sidestepping a gurney being wheeled recklessly past him. He was holding a clipboard and, after taking a seat beside me, began to scribble in my name and address.

“Did they say how long?” I asked him.

He answered by smacking his lips and shrugging. “There was some kind of accident involving a bus, so it could be a while. Good thing you’re not so bad off.” This more or less matched his medical assessment from the moment he had collected me off the lawn and stuffed me into Vlad’s Fiat Strada, which was the only car in the cul-de-sac not disabled and which Vlad enthusiastically suggested we take because, as he said, “I am not to be involved.”

All the way to the hospital, Harold alternated between complaints about the battered car — “I guess this passes for luxury in Russia” — and a near obsessive insistence that I was going to be okay. His efforts to calm me only added to my concern. The more he said, “Really, you’re going to be fine,” the more I became convinced that I was as good as dead.

I removed the icepack from the side of my head and gestured toward the boy, whose eyes had migrated back to me. “I have a feeling he doesn’t think I’m going to be okay.”

Harold concentrated on the form. “You’re almost certainly not as bad as you feel.”

“Really? Because I feel like shit. Like every-bone-in-my-face-is-broken shit.”

“I’m really sorry. I should have expected some resentment on her part, but violence? Very strange.”

“I take it none of your homesick students assaulted anyone after moving onto campus.”

“You’d be surprised. I’ve seen many difficult patients in my day. In fact, the difficult ones were my specialty. There are several cases I’m consulting on now that—”

“Seriously, I think my jaw might be broken.”

He laughed. “You wouldn’t be talking if it were.”

I patted my pockets and realized I had lost my phone during the attack. “Did you call the police yet?”

“Let’s wait until the doctor sees you. My guess is you’re not as bad as you feel.”

“You’ve said that twenty times already.”

“You know—”

A woman screamed. The sound burst mournfully through the whooshing emergency room entrance and was loud enough that everyone in the waiting room collectively jumped. A gurney carrying a small child was wheeled through by two attendants. Running alongside was a woman in shorts, a bikini top, and flip-flops, who appeared to be limping slightly. “Please, someone, please!” she shouted. She was waving her arms and pointing, as if trying to direct the two attendants. All of them were swallowed up by another set of double doors. The waiting room resumed its hushed suffering.

It was the same everywhere, I thought. One of the starkest memories I had of Iraq occurred while I was attached to the medical group at the theater hospital. During a lull in American and British casualties, the local clinic transferred to us a girl of about ten who had been caught in crossfire and had suffered a mortal head wound. The doctors who patched her up said she wouldn’t live through the night. But she hung on for more than a week. Each day her mother was escorted in under guard and had to be told repeatedly that outbursts of any kind were forbidden. Yet whenever she laid her eyes on her daughter, she would scream and chant and pound the mattress for the child to wake.

I remember one night, late in the evening, as I made my rounds through the area, gathering up soiled sheets and scrubs, I paused beside the little girl’s bed. Around her head lay a halo of about a dozen stuffed animals, which a few nurses had left behind. I remember being flooded with yearning. I had never been married and had only dated one woman seriously and for only about six months. I never wanted children and even got a vasectomy when I was twenty-one. This act, I was later convinced, had greatly limited my ability to attract the opposite sex. Even when I stopped telling women about the elective operation, they still weren’t interested in any long-term relationship. The one woman I wanted to be free of, the one whom I had dated seriously for six months, shrugged when I told her I was unable to procreate the species and then asked me to pass the salt.

The taste of blood in my mouth snapped me back to the present. Harold was droning on beside me, and it wasn’t until he said the word rape that I perked up. I asked him to repeat what he just said.

“I said, ‘She’ll probably cry rape if you go to the authorities.’ Something to consider. Especially if your injuries aren’t too bad. Which they don’t appear to be. To be honest, contacting the police over this matter is probably exactly what she wants.”

I leaned over and whispered, “Harold, can you hear what I’m saying right now?”

“Of course.”

“Good. I’m going to make sure she’s arrested; then I’m going to sue the fuck out of her.”

I winced, my tongue having flopped over the bloody gap in my mouth where I had lost a tooth. I groaned as I thought about that tooth. How it had traveled with me on many journeys. Over fifty years it had been in my mouth, and now it was — where? In my stomach? On the floor of her house with my phone, the porcelain, and other assorted debris?

Harold sighed. “A shame you’ll have to take such drastic actions against a fellow war veteran.”

“She’s not a vet. Her husband is. He’s deployed, and if it makes you feel any better, I have no plans on having him arrested.”

He began to scribble on the hospital form again, but stopped. “We never talked about the war.”

“Why would we?”

“You might be surprised how I feel.”

“Maybe we’d both be surprised. Or maybe neither of us would give a shit how the other one feels.”

“Perhaps.” He set the pen down and adjusted his glasses nervously.

And that’s when it struck me, with the crystal clarity of a long-hidden truth suddenly revealed. “You know her, don’t you? You sonofabitch.”

He grimaced and shook his head. “It’s more complicated than that. Please don’t be upset.”

“I’m not upset. I’m just exhausted and missing a tooth, and my face is broken in about ten places. I mean, what’s there to be upset about? Now what the hell is going on?”

Harold sighed again and told me what he knew, which was a lot more than I did. The woman was a patient of a colleague, a former student of his. She was the widow of a vet — yes, her husband had been killed while deployed — but he didn’t know the details. She had been moved off base and didn’t have anywhere to stay. It was Harold who had volunteered the empty house and helped arrange for her to move in temporarily.

“Can you imagine if your significant other was lost forever?” he asked. “Especially in such a cruel and senseless war. Can you imagine such a thing? And then having nowhere to turn?”

“No,” I said, still struggling to control my anger and pain, “but maybe we should just stop talking about this.”

“Of course. But really, I had no idea she would react this way. In fact, I thought just the opposite.”

I wasn’t seen until late in the evening, having been triaged to the lowest rung of the injury ladder. The bus accident had been serious, but no fatalities. The doctor who examined me was wearing a white coat with a splotch of blood above his nametag that resembled the state of New Jersey. He apologized profusely for the long wait until he found out that I was not in fact one of the bus crash victims. He turned indignant and dismissive, telling me that my wounds were superficial, and offered vague instructions about what to do if I developed symptoms of a concussion.

When I told him I had lost my tooth, he confirmed what I already knew by peering halfheartedly into my mouth. “You bet you did,” he said. “You’ll need to have an oral surgeon look at that. Just don’t let them talk you into a porcelain bridge for any back teeth. Go with metal, and you’ll thank me later.”

After filling a prescription for Tylenol 3, Harold and I were back in the Popovs’ Strada and headed home. “What did I tell you?” he said, as if he’d won a bet. “In and out, good as new.”

“Like it never happened,” I said, trying to lay on the sarcasm.

But he didn’t catch on. Instead he grunted and fought the gearshift, grinding it mercilessly. “Who owns a Fiat these days?” he said. “Honestly.”

“At least the tires work,” I said.

For the next few weeks I simmered, I watched, and occasionally I felt better. I also steered clear of Harold, even though he called frequently and left updates on my answering machine about our neighbor or, as he called her, “my student’s patient.” She was improving, he assured me. She had not missed a single session. What’s more, although she’d clearly become more reclusive, she hadn’t bothered anyone.

I agreed with the reclusive part. Only once since I returned from the hospital had I seen her, and that was just a glimpse of her shadow, staring out the front bay window of the bungalow, watching the comings and goings in the cul-de-sac as though it were the entire world in micro and she its sentinel. And although her features were lost behind the glass, I couldn’t imagine her face with anything other than that huge psychotic grin.

I myself made a few inquiries about her background, calling a flight surgeon friend who turned out to be quite aware of the unfortunate demise of the Marine in question. In fact, he was the last U.S. military pilot shot down over Iraq. The pilot’s call sign was “Buster,” and as the name would suggest, he was a wholesome, stand-up guy and a worthwhile Marine. He had been shot down near Balad while laying down covering fire for a squad of Army Rangers. Before anyone could get to his body, insurgents had swarmed over the wreckage and spirited away most of what remained. The Defense Department had identified him by DNA left at the crash site — mostly blood and shreds of his flight suit.

“What about his wife?” I asked my friend.

He paused thoughtfully on the phone. “Didn’t know he had one.”

“She’s my neighbor.” I almost added, She beat me up, but assumed it would invite a whole new series of questions.

“It’s sad,” he said, and his voice turned bitter. “He never had a chance to punch out. Pararescue had boots on-site within twenty miles of the crash. Those fucking hajis were just a little quicker. What the PJs could get back wasn’t much, but it was enough to tell he was KIA.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yep. That’s the guy to talk to about it.”

After the call, the picture of a somber funeral with a near-empty coffin stayed with me and cooled my resentment of the woman. I even felt a bit guilty.

That is, until a day later, when one of the Popovs’ dogs turned up missing. Anna arrived at my door in a state, shaking and runny-eyed, her hands clasped together. In broken English, she explained that she had let her dachshunds out into the front yard to do their business. Only one was there when she went to call them back inside. “They are never leaving the yard, never!” Then she shivered and sheepishly extended a torn sheet of paper in my direction. “Please to tell me,” she said. “What does these message mean?”

Scrawled on the paper, in black capital letters, were the words MANY DOGS HAVE DIED HERE.

“It came in mailbox,” Anna said.

“Anyone could have put it there,” I said, realizing I sounded just like Harold, which prompted me to add, “Even Harold. Have you seen the way he drives?”

Still, the look on my face must have given Anna the answer she was looking for. She spun around and ran back across the lot toward her house, whimpering in Russian.

I left a message on Harold’s cell phone to call me.

He showed up on my doorstep the next morning, a Saturday, with two cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I stepped out just in time to see Vlad and Anna climbing into the cab of a U-Haul truck, their surviving mutt yelping from a carrier between them. The day was overcast and windless, which spoke of a coming storm the local stations had been talking up all week. The trees in the yards and at the entrance of the cul-de-sac looked subdued in the gloom.

“What the hell’s going on?” I asked.

“Tropical storm. They say the coast is really going to catch hell.”

“I’m talking about the Popovs.”

“Oh,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve already tried talking them out of it. They apparently spent the whole night packing up. Vlad wouldn’t say anything else except that they’re going to stay with relatives in Jersey.” He sighed and sipped his coffee. “I can only guess that the recent unpleasantness must remind them of God only knows how many KGB horrors.”

We both watched as the truck drove off. I thought about the ragged note. “Which one was it?” I asked.

“Which one was what?”

“The one that disappeared. Was it Rocko or Fee-Fee?”

“I couldn’t say. Foo-Foo, I think.”

“This is crazy. Somebody’s got to call the cops.”

“And tell them what? Who’s to say the animal didn’t just run off?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe the cryptic note in the mailbox?”

He huffed and shook his head. “We are just talking about a dog, you know.”

“That’s right. Just a dog. So do you think maybe she’s got it out of her system yet, professor? Or will it take one more incident? Like maybe one of us spitted and basted over a giant grill in her basement?”

“Look, I’ve already called my former student. I’ve told him my concerns and feelings, which mirror yours.”

“You sure about that? Maybe you’d be surprised how I feel.”

He gingerly removed the lid from his coffee and poured the contents into the brush beside my porch steps. I still had not taken a drink from the cup he had handed me. “So hard to anticipate this kind of thing,” he said with resignation. “But I suppose we should have. There are people all over the country right now living the nightmare she’s living.” He looked up at me, his eyes as gray and remorseless as the thickening clouds stretched out above the trees. “The terrible reach of this sickening war on so-called terror is quite evident, don’t you think?”

“I saw a few things over there that would make your pipe explode. You don’t see me running around slashing tires and offing the neighborhood pooches.”

He turned away. “Hmmm,” was all he said.

I retreated back into the house and stared at him through the screen door. The wind had picked up a bit, and the shock of white hair on either side of his head put me in mind of a contemplative Albert Einstein, dreaming about the potential of a split atom. “When this half-assed psycho relocation program of yours gets out,” I said, “you might find yourself answering a whole lot of questions.”

“Perhaps that’s the least of our worries.”

“What do you mean?”

His features drooped, and now he reminded me of a depressed Albert Einstein after having watched the first atom bomb explode. “My former student tells me that she’s developed a bit of an unhealthy interest. In you.”

“Me?”

“Hmmm. You really upset her the other day.”

“You mean the other day when she assaulted me? That other day?”

“I told you not to take an aggressive stance.”

“That’s a load of—. What else did your friend say?”

“Not much. Except...”

“Except?”

“Except that you might want to purchase a gun. I told him you were prior military, so you probably already had one. That is correct, right? You do own a gun?”

“Sonofabitch,” I said, meaning he was a sonofabitch.

But Harold didn’t hear me. He simply sighed again and made a sweeping gesture at the darkening horizon and stirring trees. “I just hope this isn’t as bad as last year’s big one. We were without power for a week, remember? It was like being stranded on a deserted island.”

I locked every door and window of the house, even the narrow casements in the cellar that were surely impossible for any adult to crawl through. When I was finished, I retraced my steps and checked each lock again. The act of barricading myself in was therapeutic. I found a quiet relief surging over me. The feeling continued as I gathered candles, batteries, and a flashlight from the kitchen drawers and cupboards. I kept telling myself it was all for the coming storm and potential power outage and not for the purpose of defending against a home invasion by a psychotic neighbor who was now fixated on me as — what? The cause of her husband’s demise? A participant in what Harold called a cruel and senseless war? The collapse of the real estate market? Shit, who knew? But there was no denying my purpose when I retrieved a .22-caliber Marlin 39A rifle from beneath my bed, removed the bolt, cleaned the chamber, and methodically loaded it.

I had not recovered my cell phone, so I kept the landline within easy reach, positioned on the kitchen table amid a scatter of batteries and extra ammo. Harold would have a clinical name for my preparations. And I suppose he would be right. I surveyed my spartan dwelling and wondered why I was satisfied — if I was in fact satisfied. I had lived my entire life alone, in the bachelor dorms for over twenty years in the military and now in an empty house. Never married, never in love. No family, or even close friends for that matter. Even the friends I had made in the air force were mostly relationships of convenience, none of them standing out enough to mark and identify as special, as worthy of the name brotherhood. The one tangible remnant of my time in service was a shadowbox of “gimme” medals that I kept on the wall in the foyer. I contemplated it now as if it represented a stolen identity.

And then it struck me: all I had — all I ever really had — were neighbors. All of them utterly forgettable. Save one.

The realization bestowed a sudden and empowering effect on me. In a bitter huff, I stormed through the house and unlocked every door and window. Of course I kept the gun loaded.

No sooner had I unlatched the last window than it began to rain, huge drops going phut, phut, phut on the rooftop. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to the shower begin to increase, the wind whistling now, shaking the doors and window frames.

The phone rang. I barely heard it over the hiss of wind. The caller ID showed Harold’s name and cell phone number. Somewhat reluctantly I answered, but the line was dead.

From the kitchen window I could just see his house through the bent and swaying trees in my front lawn. The rain was now hammering down at a sharp angle, creating a blurred effect through the glass. I redialed his number but got a busy signal. The lines must be down, I thought.

Thunder cracked overhead, followed by a flash of lightning that revealed a hazy figure racing across the rim of the cul-de-sac. I grabbed clumsily at the barrel of the gun. Almost immediately, as if in diabolical collaboration with my unease, the power went out.

I snatched up the flashlight, threw on my slicker, and stepped out onto the porch. The screen door slapped savagely shut behind me, and the gutters gurgled and strained in the torrent. From the porch I could see the whole of Harold’s house. His front door was wide open.

“Terrific,” I muttered, and the fear in my voice startled me. Harold would probably have a name for that too. I hefted the rifle and adjusted my hold on the flashlight. The note declaring the death of dogs flashed into my thoughts.

After a slight bounce, I pushed off, clambered down the steps, and dashed down my driveway and through the rain. By the time I reached his house, I was completely soaked. I yelled Harold’s name through the open doorway, then stepped inside. Hearing nothing, I closed the door behind me with some effort. Rainwater had pooled around my sodden shoes, and I called out again. A muffled ticking of a clock and the scent of pipe smoke were the only signs of life.

Then I saw it. Lying atop a foyer table was a frayed dog collar decorated with glassy studs, some of them broken. A small metal tag identified the collar as belonging to Fee-Fee Popov.

I held my breath and listened again. Nothing but the spasm of the storm. I left the scene as I found it, although I did make sure the front door was shut tight. By now the wind and rain were beyond raging. I could barely see as I struggled back toward my house. Once inside, I sucked and gulped at the air as if I had been underwater, which I suppose I had been. Once again I listened for any sound beneath the raging din.

And I knew — I don’t know how, but the knowledge was absolute — that she was there.

I flipped on the flashlight, and it glimmered across the shadowbox and bookcases, television, couch, and my favorite club chair. I moved the circle of light onto the floor leading into the living room, looking for wet tracks. I swept the light through the kitchen door, and my eye caught something on the table there. It was my cell phone, placed neatly where it had not been just a few moments earlier.

As I approached it, the phone began to vibrate, its display glowing a white-blue color. The number was Harold’s cell. I didn’t pick up. Instead I turned back toward the entrance to the kitchen and peeked around the corner into the living room. I imagined her using Harold’s phone to call me from behind my club chair. Waiting for me to pick up, only to fall on me in a fury of assorted blunt weapons.

Ten seconds ticked by. Twenty seconds. Then the phone burped twice, signifying the arrival of a text message. Keeping one eye and the flashlight beam on the open kitchen doorway, I picked up the phone and read, I’m down in Silver Lake with my mother. Just checking to see if all is well. Hope you’ve battened down the hatches.

I licked my lips and considered typing a response. But the creak of wicker sounded behind me. I spun around. She was sitting in a small chair tucked beside the refrigerator, staring at me.

“What are you doing here?” I said in a shudder, struggling to level the rifle at her with one hand while trying to hold the cell phone and flashlight with the other. The flashlight’s beam shined unsteadily in her eyes. She never flinched. My heart beat upward into my throat, but I concentrated on forcing the fear from my voice. “I said, what are you doing in my house?”

“Do you like it?” she said, her voice soft and almost childlike. Her red hair was untethered and smeared wet and flat around her pale face. Water dripped from her nose and chin.

“What?”

“This. Living alone.”

“I’ve got a gun.”

“That’s funny.”

“Not really, no,” I said.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You mean, again, don’t you? You’re not going to hurt me again.”

“The dog was already dead when I found it. Your friend, the professor, backed over it the other day. He threw it into the trunk and drove off, but he forgot the little collar and tag.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It’s the truth.”

“So why the note? Because maybe it’s funny?”

“It was a warning. I didn’t want that poor couple to lose another dog.”

“Okay,” I said, somehow convincing myself to feel convinced. “So how did the collar end up in his house?”

“I put it there. I want him to know that I know. That I have power over his cowardice. That there are consequences for daring to forget.”

The rifle in my hand felt as heavy as a dumbbell. Yet I still didn’t move for fear she would see me shaking. I said, “I’m going to call the police, and you’re going to be arrested.”

Her response was softer still, almost maddening and out of breath. “When my husband said goodbye to me, I knew he was going to die. I don’t know how, but I knew. And yet” — her features twisted up in pain — “and yet I also expected him to come back home. Safe and the same as when he left. And then we would laugh together at my silly premonition.”

“I can’t do anything about that,” I said. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

“Do you know what they put in his coffin? Do you know what they put there instead of his body?”

“Look—”

“You saw body bags in Iraq. You saw those that were full and those that only held pieces. You must know.”

I started to respond but stopped. I stopped because suddenly I believed her. Every word. Especially about what happened to the dog. But even more important than that, I suddenly felt her grief, arrayed around her, an instinctive defense mechanism that emitted its own warning signal. The sense of it was almost pious in its depth, like a religious ceremony, all of which made her pitiful, deflated appearance seem all the more heroic.

The woman straightened her back and stood up.

“Stop,” I said.

“Stop what?”

The cell phone finally slipped from my grip and clacked onto the linoleum floor of the kitchen. I settled the stock of the rifle across my forearm and steadied the light on her face. My fear was gone. Even the strain of holding the gun level had dissipated to numbness. I said, “I really don’t think I can help you.”

“I don’t either.” She edged closer.

Smoothly, I flicked the safety off, hoping the sound would deter her. “I’ll shoot,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. She walked forward but quickly veered to my left, toward the open kitchen doorway. I stepped aside, my finger loose against the trigger. Then she was past me and in the foyer. Without pausing, she opened the front door. The force of the wind threw it back against the wall, shaking the house. She had to lean forward to push herself out of the screen and into the wind.

As I watched her stumble out and down the porch steps, I felt it. Relief, certainly, but also something else. Something meaningful and harsh, like a wave of fever. It was something — or rather a mix of something, gunked together in a stew of senses — that I had not experienced before and would probably never experience again. It was the taste of sorrow, the wreckage of war, the feeble cries of the dead and dying, the silence of children — all of it culminating in a barren loneliness that we had fought for and so dearly deserved.

I ran forward, shouldering my way through the screen and onto the porch. I stopped there and called out to her. “Don’t! Wait!” I yelled. But she might as well have been walking into a roaring waterfall. In an instant she was gone, lost in the mighty pull of the storm, her dim impression sealed over.

I wanted to pursue her, to embrace her, to comfort her and share my feeling with her. I wanted to do all of that. I really did. But I could not move.