“I love that word, chatter,” Kate said. “Makes it sound like they bugged Perez Hilton’s tea set or something.”
“Shh.” Matt raised the volume.
The anchorman of the local news, who wore a cheap pin-striped suit and looked as if he was about sixteen, went on, “… heightened concerns about a possible terrorist strike in downtown Boston just two days from now.” The chyron next to him was a crude rendering of a crosshair and the words “Boston Terror Target?”
Now the picture cut to a reporter standing in the dark outside one of the big new skyscrapers in the financial district, the wind whipping his hair. “Ken, a spokesman for the Boston police told me just a few minutes ago that the mayor has ordered heightened security for all Boston landmarks, including the State House, Government Center, and all major office buildings.”
“Isn’t it a little loud?” Kate said.
But Matt continued to stare at the screen.
“-speculates that the terrorists might be locally based. The police spokesman told me that their pattern seems to be to establish residence in or near a major city and assimilate themselves into the fabric of a neighborhood while they make their long-range plans, just as law enforcement authorities believe happened in the bombing in Chicago last year, also on April nineteenth, which, though never solved, is believed to be-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kate said.
“Shh!”
“-FBI undercover operatives throughout the Boston area in an attempt to infiltrate this suspected terrorist ring,” the reporter said.
“I love that,” Kate said. “It’s always a ‘ring.’ Why not a terrorist bracelet? Or a necklace.”
“This isn’t funny,” Matt said.
Matt couldn’t sleep.
After tossing and turning for half an hour, he slipped quietly out of bed and padded down the hall to the tiny guest room that served as their home office. It was furnished with little more than a couple of filing cabinets, for household bills and owner’s manuals and the like, and an old Dell PC atop an Ikea desk.
He opened a browser on the computer and entered “James Nourwood” in Google. It came back:
Did you mean: James Norwood
No, dammit, he thought. I meant what I typed.
All Google pulled up was a scattering of useless citations that happened to contain “James” and “wood” and words that ended in “-nour.” Useless. He tried typing just “Nourwood.”
Nothing. Some import-export firm based in Syria called Nour Wood, a high-pressure-laminate company founded by a man named Nour. But if Google was right, and it usually was, there was nobody named Nourwood in the entire world.
Which meant that either their new neighbor was really flying under the radar, or that wasn’t his real name.
So Matt tried a powerful search engine called ZabaSearch, which could give you the home addresses of just about everybody, even celebrities. He entered “Nourwood” and then selected “ Massachusetts ” in the pull-down menu of states.
The answer came back instantly in big, red, mocking letters:
No Results Match NOURWOOD
Check Your Spelling and Try Your Search Again
Well, he thought, they’ve just moved here. Probably too recent to show up yet. Anyway, they were renters, not owners, so maybe that explained why they didn’t show up on the database yet in Massachusetts. He went back to the ZabaSearch home page and this time left the default “All 50 States” selected.
Same thing.
No Results Match NOURWOOD
What did that mean, they didn’t show up anywhere in the country? That was impossible.
No, he told himself. Maybe not. If Nourwood, as he’d suspected, wasn’t a real name.
This strange couple was living right next door under an assumed name. Matt’s Spidey Sense was starting to tingle.
He remembered how once, as a kid, he’d entered the tool-shed in back of the house in Bellingham and suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, thick as cleats. He had no idea why. A few seconds later, he realized that the coil of rope in the corner of the dimly lit shed was actually a snake. He stood frozen in place, fascinated and terrified by its shiny skin, its bold orange and white and black stripes. True, it was only a king snake, but what if it had been one of the venomous pit vipers sometimes found in western Washington State, like a prairie rattlesnake? Since that day he’d learned to trust his instincts. The unconscious often senses danger long before the conscious mind.
“What are you doing?”
He started at Kate’s voice. The wall-to-wall carpet had muffled her approach.
“Why are you awake, babe?” he said.
“Matt, it’s like two in the morning,” Kate said, her voice sleep-husky. “What the hell are you doing?”
He quickly closed the browser, but she’d already seen it.
“You’re Googling the neighbors now?”
“They don’t even exist, Kate. I told you, there’s something wrong with them.”
“Believe me, they exist,” Kate said. “They’re very real. She even teaches Pilates.”
“You sure you have the right spelling?”
“It’s on their mailbox,” she said. “Look for yourself.”
“Oh, right, that’s real hard proof,” he said, a little too heavy on the sarcasm. “Did they give you a phone number? A cell phone, maybe?”
“Jesus Christ. Look, you have any questions for them, why don’t you ask them yourself, tomorrow night? Or I guess it’s tonight by now.”
“Tonight?”
“The Kramers’ cocktail party. I told you about it like five times. They’re having the neighbors over to show off their new renovation.”
Matt groaned.
“We’ve turned down their last two invitations. We have to go.” She rubbed her eyes. “You know, you’re really being ridiculous.”
“Better safe than sorry. When I think about my brother, Donny-I mean he was a great soldier. A true patriot. And look what happened to him.”
“Don’t think about your brother,” she said softly.
“I can’t stop thinking about him. You know that.”
“Come back to bed,” Kate said.
For the rest of the night, Matt found himself listening to Kate’s soft breathing and watching the numbers change on the digital clock. At 4:58 a.m. he finally gave up trying to sleep. Slipping quietly out of bed, he threw on yesterday’s clothes and went downstairs to pee, so he wouldn’t wake Kate. As he stood at the toilet, he found himself looking idly out the window, over the café curtains, at the side of the Gormans’ house, not twenty feet away. The windows were dark: the Nourwoods were asleep. He saw their car parked in the driveway, which gave him an idea.
Grabbing a pen from the kitchen counter and the only scrap of paper he could find quickly-a supermarket register receipt- he opened the back door and stepped out into the darkness, catching the screen door before it could slam, pushing it gently closed until the pneumatic hiss stopped and the latch clicked.
The night-really, the morning-was moonless and starless, with just the faintest pale glow on the horizon. He could barely see five feet in front of him. He crossed the narrow grassy rectangle that separated the two houses, and stood at the verge of Nourwood’s driveway, the little car a hulking silhouette. But gradually his eyes adjusted to the dark, and there was a little ambient light from a distant streetlamp. Nourwood’s car, a Toyota Yaris, was one of those ridiculous foreign-made econobox hybrids. It looked as if you could lift it up with one hand. The license plate was completely in shadow, so he came closer for a better look.
Suddenly his eyes were dazzled by the harsh light from a set of halogen floods mounted above the garage. For a sickening moment he thought that maybe Nourwood had seen someone prowling around and flicked a switch. But no: Matt had apparently tripped a motion sensor.