Page 12 of Safe Enough

She was walking through the woods, fast. Vines whipped at her legs. He saw her, but she didn’t see him. She was preoccupied. Angry, or upset. She looked like a spirit of the countryside. A goddess of the forest. She was tall, she was straight, she had untamed straw-blonde hair, she wore no makeup. She had what magazines call bone structure. She had blue eyes and pale delicate hands.

Later, from the foreman, Wolfe learned that the lot he was working on had been her land. She had sold nine of thirty acres for development. Wolfe also learned that her marriage was in trouble. Local scuttlebutt said that her husband was an asshole. He was a Wall Street guy who commuted on Metro-North. Never home, and when he was he gave her a hard time. Story was he had tried to stop her selling the nine acres, but the land was hers. Story was they fought all the time, in that tight-ass half-concealed way that respectable people use. The husband had been heard to say “I’ll f-ing kill you” to her. She was a little more buttoned-up, but the story was she had said it right back.

Suburban gossip was amazingly extensive. Where Wolfe was from, you didn’t need gossip. You heard everything through the walls.

They gave Wolfe time and a half to work Saturdays and slipped him big bills to run phone lines and cable. Being a union man, he shouldn’t have done it. But there were going to be modems, and a media room, and five bedroom phone extensions sharing three lines. Plus fax. Plus a DSL option. So he took the money and did the work.

He saw the woman most days.

She didn’t see him.

He learned her routine. She had a green Volvo wagon and he would see it pass the bottom of the new driveway when she went to the store. One day he saw it go and downed tools and walked through the woods and stepped over the property line onto her land. Walked where she had walked. The trees were dense, but after about twenty yards he came out on a broad lawn that led up to her house. The first time, he stopped there, right on the edge.

The second time, he went a little farther.

By the fifth time, he had been all over her property. He had explored everything. He had taken his shoes off and padded through her kitchen. She didn’t lock her door. Nobody did, in the suburbs. It was a badge of distinction. “We never lock our doors,” they all said, with a little laugh.

More fool them.

Wolfe finished the furnace line in the new basement and started on the first floor. Every day he took his lunch to the twin rocks. One time-and-a-half Saturday he saw the woman and her husband together. They were on their lawn, fighting. Not physically. Verbally. They were striding up and down the grass in the hot sunlight and Wolfe saw them between tree branches like they were on a stage under a flashing stroboscope. Like disco. Fast sequential poses of anger and hurt. The guy was an asshole, for sure. Completely unreasonable, in Wolfe’s estimation. The more he railed, the lovelier the woman looked. Like a martyr in a church window. Wounded, vulnerable, noble.

Then the asshole hit her.

It was a kind of girly roundhouse slap. Try that where Wolfe was from and your opponent would laugh for a minute before beating you to a pulp. But it worked well enough on the woman. The asshole was tall and fleshy and he got enough of his dumb bulk behind the blow to lift her off her feet and dump her on her back on the grass. She sat up, stunned. Disbelieving. There was a livid red mark on her cheek. She started to cry. Not tears of pain. Not even tears of rage. Just tears of sheer heartbroken sadness that whatever great things her life had promised, it had all come down to being dumped on her ass on her own back lawn, with four fingers and a thumb printed backward on her face.

Soon after that it was the Fourth of July weekend and Wolfe stayed at home for four days.

When the Dodge Caravan brought him back again he saw a bunch of local cop cars coming down the road. From the woman’s house, probably. No flashing lights. He glanced at them twice and started work. Second floor, three lighting circuits. Switched outlets and ceiling fixtures. Wall sconces in the bathrooms. But the whine of his auger must have told the woman he was there because she came over to see him. First time she had actually laid eyes on him. As far as he knew. Certainly it was the first time they had talked.

She crunched her way over the driveway grit and leaned in past the plywood sheet that was standing in for the front door and called, “Hello?”

Wolfe heard her over the noise of the drill and clattered down the stairs. She had stepped inside the hallway. The light was behind her. It made a halo of her hair. She was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt. She was a vision of loveliness.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said.

Her voice was like an angel’s caress.

Wolfe said, “No bother.”

“My husband has disappeared,” she said.

“Disappeared?” Wolfe said.

“He wasn’t home over the weekend and he isn’t at work today.”

Wolfe said nothing.

The woman said, “The police will come to see you. I’m here to apologize for that in advance. That’s all, really.”

But Wolfe could tell it wasn’t.

“Why would the police come to see me?” he asked.

“I think they’ll have to. I think that’s how they do things. They’ll probably want to know if you saw anything. Or heard any … disturbances.”

The way she said disturbances was really a question, real-time, from her to him, not just a future prediction of what the cops might ask. Like, Did you hear the disturbances? Did you? Or not?

Wolfe said, “My name is Wolfe. I’m pleased to meet you.”

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