"Looks like we have ourselves a problem," all hands agreed next day, after details of the past night's alarm had circulated through the community. Like Margie, silver-curled Becky Gibson could say only that the figure at her back-door window had been a beardless adult white male, either dark-haired or wearing a black bill cap backwards; whether it was the same intruder or another, two Peeping Tom incidents in successive weeks in the same small neighborhood obviously spelled trouble. As had been the case with us, neither the Gibsons nor in this instance the sheriff's deputies had found any trace of the prowler, who'd presumably vanished as soon as he knew himself to have been seen. Mary Grauer, wakened like me by the reflected flashes, was almost certain she'd seen from their living room window somebody skulking in our joint front-walk shrubbery: probably the Gibsons' peeper beating a retreat from Oyster Cove. I was tempted to explain and laugh it of, but held my tongue lest anyone get the wrong idea. Even to Margie I said only that I'd stepped outside to have a look, not that I'd walked to the curb in my PJs and ducked for cover when Security came by.
The third incident, just two nights later, was less unequivocal than it's forerunners: Reba Smythe, looking from a window just after dark as we all seemed to be doing now with some frequency, thought she might have glimpsed a furtive figure in the Baileys' front yard, and phoned to alert them. Her husband hurried over, nine-millimeter pistol in hand, just in time to quite frighten Sam Bailey, who deplored handgun ownership anyhow, as he stepped out to see whether anyone was there. The two men then did a perimeter check together, and found nothing. Reba acknowledged that she might have been mistaken: She'd recently suffered what ophthalmologists term a vitreous separation in her left eye, in consequence of which her vision was pestered by black "floaters" that she sometimes mistook for flying insects or other UFOs, as she liked to call them. But she was equally insistent that she might not have been mistaken; she just couldn't say for sure, although whatever she'd seen was certainly larger than her usual dark specks.
At a sort-of-emergency meeting of the Neighborhood Association the following afternoon (at our place, with jug wines and simple hors d'oeuvres), we decided to reactivate the Oyster Cove secondary entrance and exit gates as a warning and possible deterrent, even though our P.T., as we'd begun to call him for short, was pretty clearly a pedestrian. And we would press HBECA, the overall community association, for additional nighttime security patrols, even if that entailed an increase in everyone's annual assessment; for it needed no Matt Grauer to point out that three such incidents constituted an alarming pattern, and while they'd been confined thus far to Oyster Cove, it was to be expected that the peeper might try other Heron Bay venues, particularly now that ours was on a geared-up lookout for him.
As we most certainly were: unpleasantly on edge, but reassuringly drawn together by a common nuisance that, while not yet quite an overt threat, was definitely scary.
"Not a threat?" Mary Grauer protested when I described our problem in those terms. "You don't think we feel threatened when some creep might be peeking at us in the shower?"
Posing like a Jazz Age flapper with her glass of chablis in one hand and a brie-smeared cracker in the other, "Speak for yourself, dear," Ethel Bailey teased. "Some of us might find it a turn- on."
Less publicly, Matt Grauer and Jim Smythe shared with me the disturbing possibility — just theoretical, mind, not a genuine suspicion yet — that our P.T. might actually be one of us: if not an Oyster Cover, maybe some unfortunately perverted resident of an adjacent neighborhood. Or somebody's kinky visiting son, perhaps, or adolescent grandson, out on the prowl unbeknownst to his hosts?
No way to check on that last, really: Nearly all of us being empty-nesters and most of us retirees, there was a constant stream of visiting progeny and out-of-town friends in Heron Bay. But the One of Us hypothesis was reinforced, amusingly though ambiguously, a week or so later, when by early-June full moonlight both Bob and Frieda Olsen (in 1014, on the Grauers' other side from us) spotted a stocky, hatless somebody in dark shorts and shirt crossing stealthily, as it seemed to them, from their backyard into "M&M's." The alarm was quickly passed by telephone from the Olsens to the Grauers to us. We all clicked our backyard lights on, and while Margie rang up the Smythes, we three husbands stepped out back to investigate — and interrupted Jim Smythe, pistol in one hand again and flashlight in the other, completing what he unabashedly declared to us (even as Reba was confirming it by phone to Margie) was the first of the one-man armed patrols of Oyster Cove that he intended to make nightly until either HBECA increased the frequency of it's security rounds or he caught and apprehended our P.T. in the act — or, better yet, gunned the sick bastard down as he fled. Not a ready acknowledger of his mistakes, Jim was dissuaded from this self-appointed mission only by our unanimous protest that it was at best more likely to trigger false alarms than to prevent real ones, and at worst might lead to his shooting some innocent neighbor out stargazing or merely enjoying the spring air. "Yeah, well, all right then," he grudgingly conceded (while Reba, who'd joined us along with our wives, did her signature eye-roll). "But they'd better stay in their own backyard, 'cause anybody I catch mooning around in mine, I intend to plug."
"Gun nuts, I swear," Sam Bailey sighed to me next day, when we shook our heads together over the fellow's presumption and shortsightedness. "Doesn't he realize that if one of us happened to be a guy like him, he'd have gotten himself shot last night?"
"Maybe he's been the P.T. all along," I ventured — not seriously, really, and none of us cared to tease Jim with that proposition.
Less alarming, if we count the foregoing as Peeper Incident #4, was the one that followed it the very next evening, as reported by it's perpetrator and sole witness, Sam himself, when I happened to walk out to fetch our morning newspaper of the front walk at the same time as he, the pair of us still in robe and slippers before breakfast and Sam wearing the French beret that he'd affected ever since teaching a Fulbright year in Nanterre three decades past. "So at nine last night Ethel turns on one of those TV sitcoms that I can't stand, okay?" he tells me. "So I step into the library," as the Baileys like to call their book-lined living room, "to read for an hour till bedtime, and I catch sight of some movement just outside the picture window," which, flanked by smaller double-hung windows, overlooks the front yard, the street, and the commons beyond in all Oyster Cove Court villas. "So I cross the room to check it out — in my robe and PJs, same as now? — and the guy comes at me from out there on the porch as I come at him from inside, and I'm thinking, Isn't he a brazen bastard, and traipsing around there in his nightclothes too! Until I realize it's my own reflection I'm looking at. So I stand there contemplating myself in the picture window and feeling foolish while my pulse calms down, and then I experiment a bit with different lights on and of — table lamps, reading lamps, the track lights over the bookshelves — to see how a person inside might be fooled by his own reflection in different amounts of light from different angles. Because it's occurring to me that our Peeping Tom might be not only one of us, but each one of us who's seen him. In short" — he touched his beret—"Monsieur Voyeur, c'est moi."
Nonsense, all hands agreed when Sam's report and theory made the rounds: What had so alarmed Margie at our bathroom window and Becky Gibson at her back door had been a youngish, medium-built man, not the reflection of a gracefully aging though less-thin-than-she-used-to-be woman. And it was Jim Smythe on his reckless neighborhood patrol that the Olsens had spotted behind 1014, not Bob and Frieda's joint reflection.