Page 19 of Middle of the Night

But he’s done nothing wrong, Joyce thinks.If he even exists at all. It’s more likely Sally Seitz made it up just so she’d sound important.

“I think we need more information before we start getting too worried,” Joyce says. “Besides, it’s not like the boys will be camping in the woods. They’ll be in our backyard the whole time. It’s perfectly safe.”

“Do you really think so?” Mary Ellen says.

Joyce flashes the same kind of tight smile Alice gave her. “There’s nothing to worry about. Everything will be just fine.”

Twenty-four hours later, Joyce will regret every word. But right now, in this moment, she fully believes what she says—at least about Ethan and Billy camping in the yard. Everything else remains maddeningly worrisome. Especially when she reaches the front door of her house and notices that one neighbor remains outside. Someone who hadn’t been there earlier.

Fritz Van de Veer.

Dressed in a black suit, he stands next to his open garage, simply staring at her from across the cul-de-sac. Joyce does the neighborly thing and waves—just in case someone is watching from one of the other houses.

Fritz doesn’t wave back.

Instead, he lifts a finger to his lips, his message from the other side of Hemlock Circle silent but frighteningly clear.

Don’t tell a soul about last night.

FIVE

My steps are slow as I climb onto the Wallaces’ front porch, so preoccupied am I by what kind of friendship Fritz Van de Veer had with my father. If they had one at all beyond simply being neighborly. The fact that he singled out my mother but not my father suggests they weren’t on the best terms, which I find impossible.

Everyone likes my father. He’s as decent as he is nice. The kind of father I wanted to make proud, which is partly why I got into teaching, although a prep school English teacher is a far cry from being a professor at Princeton.

Maybe that doesn’t impress Fritz. Or maybe it makes him insecure. Or, more likely, it’s nothing at all, and Fritz only mentioned my mother because she used to sometimes chat with Alice and the other wives at various spots on the cul-de-sac. Concluding that must be the reason, I ring the bell at the Wallace house.

The door is answered by a boy of about ten with unruly brown hair and dark-framed glasses sliding down his nose. He peers up at me through the smudged lenses, looking both curious and slightly annoyed to be pulled away from whatever ten-year-olds do nowadays.

“How may I help you?” he says in a manner so precociously seriousit would be amusing to everyone else but me. Instead, my general mood is unease. The fact that I’m uncomfortable around kids shocks everyone who knows I’m a teacher. “Of teenagers,” I always remind them. “Not children.”

I hold out the baseball and say, “Um, hi. Does this belong to you? I found it in my yard and thought it might be yours.”

“It’s not,” the boy says without looking at the ball. His gaze stays firmly on me, curious.

“Henry? Who are you talking to?”

The woman’s voice rising from inside the house makes me stand a little straighter. Although it’s different from the last time I heard it, there’s a warmth there that’s instantly familiar.

Ashley.

“A stranger,” the boy, apparently Henry, calls back.

“Tell him to please go away.”

Henry looks up at me, unsmiling. “I’m supposed to tell you to please go away.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Suddenly Ashley is there, coming up swiftly behind Henry, too preoccupied with putting in an earring to notice me at first. When she does, there’s a moment in which she recognizes the boy she once knew in the man I’ve since become and tries to mentally process if we’re one and the same. When she concludes it’s a match, a wide smile spreads across her face.

“Ethan? Is it really you?”

An awkward few seconds follow in which Ashley opens her arms for a hug as I attempt a handshake, forcing both of us to change tactics. The result is a partial embrace that leaves Henry looking confused.

“So you’renota stranger?” he says.

“This is Ethan Marsh, honey. I used to be his babysitter. A long, long time ago.”

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