What if they kept their bedroom curtains open and one of them wasn’t a sound sleeper? He’d have to move quickly now, just to be safe.
Now, at least, he could make out the license plate clearly. He wrote the numbers on the register receipt, then turned to go back, when he collided with someone.
Startled, Matt gave an involuntary shout, a sort of uhhhl sound at exactly the same time as someone said, “Jesus!”
James Nourwood.
He was a good six inches taller than Matt, with a broad, athletic build, and wore a striped bathrobe, unruly tufts of black chest hair sprouting over the top. “Can I help you?” Nourwood said with an imperious scowl.
“Oh-I’m sorry,” Matt said. “I’m Matt Parker. Your, uh, next-door neighbor.” His mind was spinning like a hamster on a wheel, trying to devise a plausible explanation for why he’d been hunched over his neighbor’s car at five in the morning. What could he possibly say? I was curious about your hybrid? Given the Cadillac Escalade in Matt’s garage, whose mileage was measured in gallons per mile, not exactly.
“Ah,” Nourwood said. “Nice to meet you.” He sounded almost arch. He had a neatly trimmed goatee and a dark complexion that made him look as if he had a deep suntan. Nourwood extended a hand and they shook. His hand was large and dry, his clasp limp. “You scared the living daylights out of me. I came out to see if the paper was here yet… I thought someone was trying to steal my car.” He had the faintest accent, though hardly anyone else would have picked up on the telltale traces. Something slightly off about the cadence, the intonation, the vowel formation. Like someone born and raised in this country of parents who weren’t native speakers. Who perhaps spoke Arabic since infancy and was probably bilingual.
“Yeah, sorry about that, I-my wife lost an earring, and she’s all upset about it, and I figured it might have dropped when she came over to visit you guys yesterday.”
“Oh?” Nourwood said. “Did she visit us yesterday? I’m sorry I missed her.”
“Yep,” Matt said. Did Kate say she’d gone over to their house yesterday, or was he remembering that wrong? “Pretty sure it was yesterday. Anyway, it’s not like it’s fancy or anything, but it sort of has sentimental value.”
“I see.”
“Yeah, it was the first gift I ever gave her when we started going out, and I’m not much of a gift-giver, so I guess that makes it a collector’s item.”
Nourwood chuckled politely. “Well, I’ll let you know if I see anything.” He cocked a brow. “Though it might be a bit easier to look after the sun comes up.”
“I know, I know,” Matt said hastily, “but I wanted to surprise her when she woke up.”
“I see,” Nourwood said dubiously. “Of course.”
“I notice you have Mass plates-you from in-state?”
“Those plates are brand-new.”
“Uh-huh.” Matt noticed he didn’t say whether he was or wasn’t from Massachusetts. Just that the license plates were new He was being evasive. “So you’re not from around here, I take it.”
Nourwood shook his head slowly.
“Yeah? Where’re you from?”
“Good Lord, where aren’t I from? I’ve lived just about everywhere, it seems.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Well, I hate to be rude, but I have some work to do, and it’s my turn to make breakfast. Will we see you tonight at the Kramers’ party?”
“I thought I heard voices outside,” Kate said, scraping the last spoonful of yogurt and Bran Buds from her bowl. She looked tired and grumpy.
Matt shrugged, shook his head. He was embarrassed about what had happened and didn’t feel like getting into it. “Oh yeah?”
“Maybe I dreamed it. Mind if I finish this off?” She pointed her spoon at the round tub of overpriced yogurt she’d bought at Trader Joe’s.
“Go ahead,” he said, sliding the yogurt toward her. He hated the stuff. It tasted like old gym socks. “More coffee?”
“I’m good. You were up early.”
“Couldn’t sleep.” He picked up the quart of whole milk and was about to pour some into his coffee when he noticed the date stamped on the top of the carton. “Past the sell-by date,” he said. “Any more in the fridge?”
“That’s the last,” she said. “But it’s fine.”
“It’s expired.”
“It’s perfectly good.”
“Perfectly good,” he repeated. “Ever notice how you always say something’s ‘perfectly good’ when something’s actually not-quite-right about it?” He sniffed the carton but couldn’t detect any sour smell. That didn’t mean it hadn’t begun to turn, of course. You couldn’t always tell from the smell alone. He poured the milk slowly, suspiciously, into his coffee, alert for the tiniest curds, but he didn’t see any. Maybe it was okay after all. “Just like the Nourwoods. You said they were ‘perfectly nice.’ Which means you know something’s off about them.”
“I think you drink too much coffee,” she said. “Maybe that’s what’s keeping you up nights.”
The Boston Globe was spread between them on the small round table, a moisture ring from the yogurt container wrinkling the banner headline:
FBI: Probe Possible Local Terror Plot
Security heightened in high-rises, government buildings
He stabbed the paper with a stubby index finger. “See, that’s what’s keeping me up nights,” he said. “The Nourwoods are keeping me up nights.”
“Matt, it’s too early.”
“Fine,” he said. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He took a sip of coffee. “Why’d they move into the neighborhood, anyway?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Was it for a job or something? Did they say?”
Kate rolled her eyes in that way that always annoyed him. “He got a job at ADS.”
“In Hopkinton?” ADS was the big tech company that used to be known by its full name, Andromeda Data Systems. They made-well, he wasn’t sure what they did, exactly. Data storage, maybe. Something like that.
“That what he told you?”
She nodded.
“There you go. If he really got a job at ADS, why didn’t they move somewhere closer to Hopkinton? That’s the flaw in his cover.”
She looked at him disdainfully for a long moment and then said, “Can you please just drop this already? You’re just going to make yourself crazy”
Now he saw that he was upsetting her, and he felt bad. Softly, he said, “You ever hear back from the doctor?”
She shook her head.
“What’s the holdup?”
She shook her head again, compressed her lips. “I wish I knew.”
“I don’t want you to worry. He’ll call.”
“I’m not worried. You’re the one who’s worried.”
“That’s my job,” Matt said. “I worry for both of us.”
The engineering firm where Matt worked was right in downtown Boston, in the tallest building in the city: a sleek sixty-story tower with a skin of blue reflective glass. It was a fine, proud landmark, a mirror in the sky. Matt, a structural engineer by training and an architecture nut by avocation, knew quite a bit about its construction. He’d heard stories about how, shortly after it was built, it would shed entire windowpanes on windy days like some reptile shedding its scales. You’d be walking down the street, admiring the latest addition to the Boston skyline, and suddenly you’d be crushed beneath five hundred pounds of glass, a hail of jagged shards maiming other passersby. You’d never know what hit you. Funny how things like that could happen, things you’d never in a million years expect. A flying window, of all things! No one was ever safe.
A Swiss engineer even concluded, years after it was built, that in certain wind conditions the tower might actually bend in the middle-might topple right over on its narrow base. How strange, he’d often thought, to be working in such a grandiose landmark, this massive spire so high above the city, and yet be so completely vulnerable, in a glass coffin.