Outrunning Shadows

Chapter 1: The New Neighbor

                   Outrunning Shadows





                             A novel by: Allen Buice





Chapter 1: The New Neighbor





         Engrid turned off the Highway 219 onto the Broad Street extension. Broad Street took her into the downtown area of Deerfield, South Carolina. She drove along in silence and mulled what Dora has said. Rose had lived in between Dora and Engrid for over 50 years and then had died suddenly about three months previously. Both grieved her passing, but knew that life did have to go on, and so they did. She drove into the main part of town. The unusual thing about Deerfield was that Main Street was actually a little side street. The main street through town was called Broad Street. She passed the plate glass windows set in the brown and red bricked walls of the storefronts, most of them dating from the 1890’s and early 1900’s. Along Broad Street was the bank and the farm and garden store on the corner. There was an office supply store, a barber shop, a Chinese buffet restaurant, and a locally owned pharmacy. One of the streets that crossed Broad, besides Main, was Cloverdale Avenue. There was a nice investment firm on the corner of Broad and Cloverdale. To look down the street, the signs hanging out front, you could see the names of all the stores on Broad from any vantage point you chose making shopping a breeze. Deerfield was a quaint little town where Engrid lived ever since she and her husband George got married in 1949. Prior to that, she’d lived out west in the great state of Oregon. She didn’t make much of her Oregonian roots because in this town, anyone who wasn’t born here was considered an outsider. Even after 60 years, there were still a few people who considered her an outsider. Since she liked to think of herself as a local Deerfield girl, most of the stories she recounted were occurrences since she moved here. If she did tell a story that predated her move, she simply neglected to specify the location and she just let the listener’s assumptions fill in the blanks.


         “Thanks for going with me; I enjoyed getting out for a few minutes.” Engrid said, climbing out of Dora’s Explorer and onto the curb. “I’ve wanted to get to that place for lunch for months.”


         “I’m glad you thought of it.” Dora seemed distant.


         “Are you okay?” Engrid asked, noticing that Dora wasn’t really engaged in what she’d said. All through lunch, Dora had the far away expression like she wasn’t really interested in what was going on around her. Engrid knew Dora was often quiet and pensive, but today’s lunch was almost awkward with Dora remaining silent for long periods of time. Engrid could talk to anyone or anything for that matter, but Dora was much more cautious with her words. Sometimes she spoke with such deliberation that it took her a while to get her point across because she wanted to make sure that it came out just so. Engrid would just start talking and see where she ended up. It was one of the many things that Dora marveled about was that Engrid always had something to say. In the six decades they’d been friends, she’d never seen Engrid speechless.


         Dora went up onto the porch and into her house while Engrid went home. Dora left again to go somewhere else; but, Engrid stayed home and started vacuuming the rug in the living room. She was a little worried and a little excited at having new neighbors. Rose had lived there for so long, that it was going to take a lot of getting used to, but she liked the idea of new people to get to know. A few other houses had come on the market in the last couple of years and Engrid hadn’t been all that impressed with the people who moved in. It wasn’t that they were mean or distasteful; she just didn’t get along with them very well. As she was vacuuming, she caught some movement out of the corner of her eye. It was just habit to look up and see who was coming or going. Most of the time, it didn’t really matter who it was, often she didn’t know who it was, but if she saw movement through the window, her head would immediately snap up to see who had come or gone. Now that more and more people had moved to town and people traded vehicles so often, it was getting harder and harder for her to keep track of who was coming or going. Mr. Miller’s gold Buick drove up into Rose’s driveway.


         She saw a very nice looking young man walking with Mr. Miller, the local real estate agent. Where was the nice young man’s wife? She mused to herself. Surely a man like that can’t be single- it just wouldn’t be right. A slight smile curled the edge of her lips. She heard the sound of her own grandmother in her ear when that thought flashed through her mind. She was the nosy old woman she’d sworn in her youth never to become. She remembered the summer of 1940. Her great aunt Sylvia asked every week at church if Engrid was “courting” anyone. She remembered how irritated she was with the questions about her private life. She swore on the 4th of July of 1940, her 20th year of life, never ever to become a nosy old woman. Yet, she realized that somehow, through the inexorable march of time, she had accomplished just that. She was now one of ‘them.’


         Nonetheless, she watched the young stranger with interest. She wouldn’t mind him moving in next door. She decided that she wanted a neighbor who looked like that living next door. It could only help the sagging property values and bring down the average age of the residents of Maple Avenue. His black hair was tussled but not messy. His figure was slim, but not skinny and his skin a light shade of olive. He definitely had some Mediterranean somewhere in his lineage. She could get him to help out around the house. She was sure that he could fix or do anything she needed done. He wasn’t like that good-for-nothing couple from Manhattan- of that she was certain. She crouched beside the window and pulled the white lace drapes back with her hand and peered outside. Mr. Miller was showing the man the front of the house with wide sweeping motions with his hands. Engrid couldn’t help but smile. She really had little respect for Mr. Miller. She wasn’t sure why, but he just rubbed her the wrong way. She often associated the word ‘scuzzy’ with him. She left the window quickly and hurried for the door. Mr. Miller couldn’t sell a shopping cart to a bag lady, so if she wanted a new neighbor, she was going to have to take matters into her own hands.


         She went down the steps and walked across her green, manicured lawn toward the stranger. The stranger noticed her approaching. He smiled. He had gorgeous teeth. So straight and white- “His dentist must love him,” Engrid mumbled under her breath. She had more bridge work than the River Kwai, so she appreciated nice teeth.


         “Hi! I’m Engrid Matthews. I live next door.” She cheerily extended her hand. She was determined to make a good impression. She wondered what Dora would think. She really admired Dora’s perceptiveness and Engrid wished she was so intuitive. Dora could meet someone for 10 seconds and know if something was going on that should not have been. Occasionally she would be wrong, but not often.


         “Ah, it’s nice to see you Mrs. Matthews. How are you?” Mr. Miller extended his hand feigning being glad to see her. There was no love lost between the two of them. Engrid regarded him to be a blowhard and a dumb oaf. He regarded her to be an obnoxious old biddy. She didn’t even acknowledge him, but zeroed in on her new target.


         “I see you are looking at living here?” She said intentionally ignoring Mr. Miller and focusing her attention solely on the young stranger.


         “Yes. I fell in love with this house the minute I saw the picture on the internet. It looks so warm and homey. I hope the inside is nice.”


         “Oh it is,” Engrid assured him, “My friend Rose lived here for many, many years. In fact, she lived in this house since 1951. So I guess that’d be about almost 60 years- then she died a couple of months ago.”


         “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.” He furrowed his brow and looked at her. He knew what death means and didn’t envy her that in the least.


         “It’s okay,” Engrid assured him, “But maybe that means that I’ll get to live next door to you.” She smiled. While he could never replace Rose, he could definitely work in her absence.


         He smiled, “The pleasure would be mine.”


         She grinned. “Let me show you around.” She grabbed the stranger’s arm and ushered him toward Rose’s front door. “I don’t think I know your name…”


         “Andrew. Andrew Garrison.”


         “Where are you from?”


         “I've lived all over the place, but I moved to South Carolina to go to college. Then I got a job working at the investment company over on Cloverdale Avenue.”


         “Interesting.” Her eyes sparkling, so sure that this was her new neighbor, “So, how old are you?”


         “25.”


         He could read her expression. She didn’t want to ask, but was dying to know how he could afford this place. Not that the house was particularly expensive as houses go; it’s just that not many people so young were in a position to buy real estate.


         “My parents gave me a lot of money recently. That’s how I can afford to live in a grand house like this. They sent me to spend a lot of time with my Uncle Ray who was in the army. So I’ve moved all over the world. They sent me with him because they wanted me to explore the world before settling down. Now the time has come for me to settle down.”


         “Must be nice.” Engrid said trying to her elation at his interest in have a domestic life, “All that money and traveling.”


         “It was. I missed my parents, but they meant well.”


         “Well your parents and your Uncle Ray certainly did an excellent job raising you.” She patted him on his arm. They left Mr. Miller standing outside on the porch. He was happy not having to deal with Engrid on this trip. He was beyond ecstatic that Engrid actually liked this guy. Miller was determined to sell this house to Andrew regardless of the cost so that Engrid would leave him alone. Invariably, when he would get back to his office, there would be a message on his phone from Engrid telling him why she disliked the people to whom he had just shown the house. She would rattle off this list of grievances as to why they should not be allowed to move in next door to her. The potential buyers had a list of grievances of their own regarding Engrid and so refused to buy the house because they didn’t want to live next door to her. Mr. Miller hoped that today would be different. Today would be the day that he would be done with Engrid Mae Matthews for a long, long time to come. Maybe he’d be selling her house next- literally over her dead, decaying body. It disturbed him slightly how the idea of her dead decaying body was exciting. He smiled wanly as the unlikely compatriots disappeared into the house.


         Engrid’s current home and Andrew’s potential home were laid out very similarly. Each had a porch that ran the length of the front with stone steps leading up from a concrete walkway which then lead to the sidewalk. The porches had a slight Victorian feel with painted latticework at the tops of the support columns of the porch. Their front doors opened up only a central hallway that ran the length of the house all the way to the back door. The rooms of the main floor were all off the central hallway. The first door on the left was the living room and complete with a large fireplace and mantle.


         To say Engrid was enamored by her potential neighbor would be an understatement. Engrid was transfixed. They just didn’t make boys like him anymore. He was polite, he was funny, he was smart and he was decently good looking. They started out in the kitchen; she informed him that this is where she and Evan discovered Rose’s dead body on the floor.


         She stood by the sink and turned to face Andrew. “This is the place we found her. She was sprawled out right here.” She tapped her foot on the linoleum. His eyes followed her leg down to the floor.


         “What happened to her?” Andrew asked. He was curious. He knew that most likely everyone in town was tired of hearing Engrid’s recycled stories, but he was fascinated. Having moved as much as he had, he never knew any grandparents so he was totally excited about Engrid.


         “They said she had a heart attack. But I don’t know. Sometime I wonder if doctors know what they’re talking about.”


         “Hmm.” Andrew said thoughtfully scanning the room trying desperately to keep the grin of excitement off his face. It was a nice kitchen. Rather small, but the house wasn’t huge; but, comfortable enough. It was two stories, hardwood floors through most of it- the walls were various shades of off-white. The wall paper in the kitchen had little burgundy flowers with roosters and covered wagons on it and looked like it dated to about 1984, the year before Andrew started kindergarten. The kitchen window afforded a panoramic view of the side of Engrid’s house. There were about 30 feet of grass that separated the two houses. The hedges along the side of Engrid’s house were, like the rest of the yard, immaculately manicured. She obviously spent a lot of time doing yard work. She wasn’t dressed for that today in a white blouse with blue flowers, mint green slacks and matching flats. Engrid made a big arc as they walked from the counter to the door. It was a half-century-old habit to walk around the table; she did it without there being a table in the room. She noticed Andrew looking at her with a curious expression. She looked around to try to see what he found amusing. It took her a second to realize that it was she that he was amused by. She smiled sheepishly.


         “I guess that’s where the kitchen table used to be?”


         “Yes, it was.” She recovered quickly and brushed past him into the hallway.


         “This is the living room.” She said as they walked into it. It was on the front corner of the house overlooking the street and Dora Murchison’s house. She was Rose’s neighbor on the other side. It was a nice big room with a fireplace at the end with a large mantelpiece over it. There were also alcove bookshelves recessed into the walls on either side of it. Engrid walked around the perimeter like she was giving a guided tour of a medieval castle sweeping her arms around and speaking unnaturally loudly. “I remember Rose threw a Christmas party here, the Christmas after she moved in. What she didn’t know is that one of the neighborhood boys put a whole bottle of sour apple schnapps in the punchbowl. It was some apple concoction she made, so no one noticed until it was too late,” Engrid had a smile remembering how it used to be.


         “When was that?”


         “Well, she moved here in 1951. So it would have been that Christmas. The kid who did that just turned 70 last month. Then there was the time her husband Richard nearly burned my house down with a Roman candle.”


         “What happened?” Andrew laughed. He found her obviously recycled stories wonderful, refreshing and funny. He already sensed that great and amazing things waited for him in this place. He just knew it as clearly as he knew anything.


         “Well, I had just had my first daughter, Natalie, so George and I had 2 kids and Rose and Richard had four. So, Richard decided that it would be fun for the kids to see some fireworks. Fireworks were expensive and even back in those days fireworks were illegal within the city limits. Dora, who had a passel of kids herself, said it was a terrible idea. Rose and myself said the same thing. So, naturally, he did it anyway.


         “Naturally.”


         “Well, it being the fourth of July and all I had the windows in my house open. It was back in the days before air conditioning. Well, this Roman candle fell over and shot a fireball right into my house. It set a couch on fire and smoked up the whole place. My house stunk for months after that.”


         Andrew chuckled. He actually thought it was hysterical, but was not one to let anyone else see his emotions. Engrid could tell he was enjoying this and so the more he grinned and laughed, the more animated she became. She had a fresh audience for all her old stories.


         After they had gone throughout the house, they went back out onto the porch. Engrid was smiling at Mr. Miller from beside Andrew as he walked across the boards of the porch.


         “Mr. Miller, you must sell this man this house.” She pointed her finger at him as if he were a servant of hers.


         “We’ll see.” Mr. Miller replied, “It depends on whether or not Mr. Garrison will agree to the terms of sale.”


         “Make the terms of sale favorable then.” Engrid insisted as if it was the most obvious solution in history.


         “Mr. Garrison, we need to get back to the office,” Mr. Miller said, ushering Andrew back toward his car, “We have some other things we need to discuss.” He wanted to get Andrew away as quickly as possible before he became irritated with Engrid and decided not to move in after all.


         Andrew got in the car and shut the door. When Mr. Miller started the car, Andrew rolled down the window and motioned for her to approach. Engrid came over.


         “I liked meeting you, Mrs. Matthews.” He extended his hand and shook hers. She was grinning from ear to ear.


         “Just call me Engrid…all my friends do.”


                                                              #


         Later that afternoon, Engrid sat down at her dining room table to eat a sandwich for dinner. When her husband was alive, she cooked a full meal every day. With just her there most days, she just didn’t see the point in cooking anymore. She frequently had people over so she could have the company. Evan and his mother were frequent house guests for dinner. She also often hosted lunch at her house after church on Sundays. With any luck, Andrew would be added to that list. Evan should be back from Atlanta soon, he was supposed to come back today. She assumed he would go home and would most likely stop by in the morning for a few minutes before going on to the dry cleaning store just after lunch, around one. His mother worked mornings and he worked afternoons and early evenings. Grayson’s Cleaners opened at 7:00 in the morning and closed at 7:00 in the evening. They had a couple of other people who worked there who were responsible people and perfectly capable of running the place, so Evan and Myrtle’s hours were very flexible.


         Myrtle and her son Evan had always lived in the house they now occupied, about six houses down from Engrid. They had inherited it from Evan’s dad who died in a car accident when Evan was four years old. Ever since then it had been just him, his mom and the family dry cleaning business. Evan flew the coop for several years and attended New York University and got a degree in English- his bachelor’s thesis had been on early American Literature. It didn’t help much with running a dry cleaning store in a small town in South Carolina, but they’d still been pretty successful with it the slightly less than two years, since Evan’s return. They had not opened a second location because Myrtle feared losing contact with her customers, who were often also her friends and were her sources for either news and information or just ordinary gossip. But Evan had managed to do some nice renovations and the building itself was second to none for cleanliness and efficiency even though there wasn’t much competition.


         Engrid continued thinking quietly to herself. She didn’t like television very much, so she contented herself to staring at the pages of a romance novel and hoping that Andrew would buy Rose’s old house. He would be so much fun to have as a neighbor. As was often her custom, she walked around her big old house wishing it was full of people again. All six of her children had all grown up and moved away. She had children, in-laws, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Tyler, Texas; Decatur, Georgia; two of their children lived in Florida- one in Jacksonville and one in Pompano Beach; and two in South Carolina- one in Greenville and one in Charleston. She had four boys and two girls. She got to see her children in Georgia and South Carolina fairly regularly but the ones in Florida and Texas was much less often. She missed them a lot. She loved the sounds of children echoing throughout the house. In many ways, she was haunted by the ghosts of what had been. She often grieved for the life she once had. She was sure nostalgia had greatly distorted reality, but she missed being a wife and mom. She didn’t mind being granny, but it was pretty rare that she actually got to play that role. She smiled. She remembered how Evan was terrified of her when he was a little boy. Then one day when he was about 11 or 12, the neighborhood boys hit a baseball through her window and Evan was dared to come get it. It was the beginning of a beautiful but unorthodox friendship. He was 12, she was over 70. In some ways, he was a surrogate grandson and she was his grandmother. Evan only had one living grandparent and she lived in a nursing home in Atlanta. Senility had set in on her so she mostly just sat in that room in Atlanta and waited for deliverance into eternity. Engrid was scared of ending up like Evan’s actual grandmother. So far her mind held out and she’d been largely spared some of the inevitable ravages of time. She just had some wrinkles, white hair and myopia to prove the passage of the years.


         Soon, it was dark outside. Engrid stood in the darkened living room, the yellow glow of the street lights filtering through the lacey curtains. She realized that part of her problem was that she was bored. Part of Andrew’s appeal was that he was different. Except for Evan and Myrtle, her other neighbors were crusty old farts too. Andrew was youthful and vibrant. He seemed fun and exciting. Her idea of living dangerously was embroidering without a hoop. She felt someone like Andrew would pep up this sad old world just a bit. She had been a part of southern society for a long time and knew that the winds of change were blowing. A breath of fresh air was desperately needed on the scene. The trouble with fresh air is that the scents change. The familiar fragrances of ages past would be replaced by new, strange scents. These new scents were exciting but scary. Who knows what else they might bring. These new scents would be uncharted and dangerous.


         Engrid decided that was an awfully strange thought for so late on a Saturday night. She went upstairs and sat on the edge of her bed preparing to take a shower and she kept thinking. She walked over to the window and looked out. She could see the darkened hulk that Rose used to live in. The two of them would stand in the window and look at each other while they talked on the phone. Now her house seemed so bare, so dark and forlorn sitting there empty. Rose’s children had removed all her things from the house so that when she and Andrew went through the house earlier that day, it had seemed so barren. It needed life. It needed someone with their whole life ahead of them. Rose’s house needed someone with the potential to have lots of children for Engrid to baby-sit during the day and a pleasant wife to chat with. Like Rose and Richard had been an eternity ago. She went back over and sat down in the chair by her vanity to take off her mint green flats. She looked at her reflection in the mirror. When she had moved into this house she was 27, she bought this vanity out of a Sears and Roebuck catalog for Christmas that year. The reflection had certainly changed since 1949. Engrid wasn’t really depressed or anything, she was just mildly discontented and was ready for something interesting to happen. She began running her brush through her snow white hair and furrowing her brow. After putting on her shower cap and getting all washed up, she put on her night gown and her bath robe over that. Even though she lived alone and had the curtains closed, she still refused to emerge from the bathroom without being fully covered. It was one of her quirks. She went back and sat at the vanity and started putting things away, checking her curlers to make sure they were ready for morning, and generally straightening up a bit. She couldn’t sleep if her space was messy. She drummed her fingers on the table top and tried to figure out what was with her weird mood tonight.


         She stood up and walked around her room. She went back over to the window and looked out at Rose’s old house. Soon, she hoped, it would be Andrew’s house. And not too terribly long, it would be the home of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Garrison. She wondered if Andrew had a middle name. She pictured what their wedding invitation would look like with her name gracefully printed on the inner and outer envelopes. “Mrs. Engrid Mae Matthews” it would read. She was already working on the text for the invitations. If only she knew the bride and groom’s parents’ names- or the bride’s name for that matter.


         ‘What on earth am I doing? The boy doesn’t even have a lady friend yet.’ She chided herself aloud. She couldn’t think of any girls in town good enough to date him, but she would have to work on that some more. Then a more cheerful thought- he worked in a small town and so even if he chose to live elsewhere, he wouldn’t be too far away. She looked out at the sky and wondered where Andrew was. Was he camped out in a motel out by the interstate? Was he asleep on a friend’s couch? He deserved better than that. That’s it! She got it.


         “I’ll find him and invite him to stay with me until he finds a suitable home. He said he was working at the investment firm over on Cloverdale Avenue. Oh crud, tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ve got to find him. Maybe it can wait until Monday.”


         Then her mind was off to the races and sleep was nowhere on the horizon. She stayed up the better part of the night figuring out how she could go about finding Andrew first thing Monday morning. She could get Evan to ask around at the dry cleaner’s tomorrow. Surely investment people need dry cleaning. Andrew was bound to come in there at some point to have his suit coats cleaned. Maybe he already had and Myrtle knew where he was staying. She knew pretty much everything else that went on in town. A new face of that caliber was rare enough to warrant investigation on Myrtle’s part. She was bound to know something. If that failed, she could go to the city clerk’s office. Sandra knows everything there is to know about the city and its residents. She’d know or would know whom else to ask. She could always go to the police station and report Andrew missing. They would find him quickly since Andrew didn’t know he was missing and was supposed to be in hiding. This was all going to be a perfect plan.