The Neighbor Read Online Free PDF

putting that volume aside or of retrieving from the desk another scrapbook, this one of more recent vintage. In it were articles clipped from the student newspaper at the middle school that Amalia had attended, the school where Rupert Clockenwall had taught English. They were poems and little stories that she had written for that publication. He had somehow obtained her seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade class photos. I noticed the silver cross on a chain around her neck, which she had taken to wearing in those days but no longer wore. There were as well photos taken with a telephoto lens: a younger Amalia sitting on the front porch, standing in the backyard, going to and from the garage that was her safe harbor and mine. Clockenwall seemed to have stopped adding to the scrapbook when my sister was fifteen, and as I came to the blank pages that he had never used, I heard myself say, without intention or control, “A tasty little piece of tail, but too close to home. Too risky. Didn’t dare. Didn’t dare. Wish I had.”
    With no recollection of getting up from the desk, leaving the bedroom, and descending the front stairs, I found myself in the kitchen. I was holding a filleting knife.

8
    I tried to throw down the knife, but instead gripped it more tightly than ever. If I was in terror of leaving that house and going home with some unthinkable purpose, I don’t recall. I remained in a dreamlike state as I crossed the kitchen to an inner door, opened it, switched on the cellar lights, and went down the steep stairs to that lower realm.
    In that windowless place, entirely below ground, with its block walls and earthen floor, I found a small wooden table and two chairs, as well as a bookcase containing volumes suitable for a girl twelve-going-on-thirteen, stories of horses and romance and adventure. On the floor lay a stained and moldering mattress, and in the concrete-block wall above it was fixed a ringbolt from which trailed a chain and manacle.
    In the corner near the furnace, I stood swaying, gazing down at the hard-packed earth, from which had over time fluoresced both bright white and yellowish crystals finer than salt in patterns that were vaguely reminiscent of voodoo veves. Now Clockenwall shared with me his images—memories—of burying the murdered girl in a deep bed of powdered lime to facilitate decomposition and to control the odor. In my mind’s eye, I saw him tamping a layer of soil atop the lime, weeping as he worked, weeping not for the girl but for the loss of his toy. Melinda had been in her grave for so many years that no foul odor lingered.
    I looked up from the floor and stared at the knife, wondering for what purpose he had made me take it from a kitchen drawer.
    Upstairs, Amalia called my name.

9
    Wide-eyed, wondering, Amalia came down the cellar stairs, her footfalls echoing hollowly off the plank treads. The novel that she had been reading failed to engage her, and she couldn’t be distracted from thinking about the voice that had spoken to her in this house earlier. As twilight approached, she had looked out of her window and had seen the Clockenwall house filled with light once more.
    “I went to the garage,” she said, “you weren’t there, but an album was playing, and I just
knew
where I’d find you. It’s my fault you came here. I mean, what’re you going to do when I tell you to stay away from this place, you being twelve and a boy and careening toward puberty? You’re brave—okay?—but we should get out of here.”
    She had glanced at the mattress as she came off the stairs, but the horror of it registered with her only on second glance, when she seemed to see the ringbolt, the chain, and the manacle for the first time.
    Yet surely she couldn’t fully understand what had happened here. Maybe she’d never heard of Melinda Harmony, who had been kidnapped a year before Amalia was born. Remembering Mr. Clockenwall’s creepy interest in her, however, my very bright sister seemed