Baltimore Noir

“Yes. I’m from California, originally. I like to be outside.”

“There are a lot of others in the neighborhood who garden, too. Once you meet them, you’ll feel at home.” Hortense smiled, as if Jeannie had been doing the right thing all along. “I’ll stop by one day next week. Now’s a good time of year to cut back your hydrangea. I want to show you a personal trick that I bet they don’t know about in California.”

Jeannie didn’t know why the visit of an eighty-year-old neighbor should throw her into such a tizzy, but it did. She declined Hodder when he called, inviting her for lunch again, and she practically bit Charlie’s head off when he wanted her to organize a dinner party for his friends the night after. Everything, Jeannie felt, had to be just so for Hortense. Their furniture-a motley mix of Pottery Barn, Maurice Villency, and Gaines McHale-was minimal, but at least it could be free of the litter of toys and newspapers and food. The parquet floors were to be swept, the marble ones mopped. Charlie was useless at cleaning-what millionaire would be otherwise?-so Jeannie finally broke down and begged Fernanda to come by in her off hours to give the place a quick dusting, which quickly turned into an all-out cleaning, a two-night marathon of vacuuming that drowned out the sound of bowling that Jeannie seemed to be hearing more often over the past few days.

The prospect of serving a cocktail was also an unending worry. Jeannie usually had a few bottles of wine stashed somewhere, but she sensed an eighty-year-old woman would probably take a mixed drink, or some kind of spirit straight up. She wished the walls would talk, in this case, tell her something like, Sherry, neat! Or, Old-fashioned! Jeannie could mix a margarita, but that was about all.

Charlie thought she should hire a bartender to come with his own stash, and thus be perfectly assured of making the drinks right, but Jeannie figured this would be pretentious. In the end, Jeannie ran into the liquor section at Eddie’s, where a nice young man helped her spend $200 in fifteen minutes, and had someone drive it back to the house and actually unpack it in the butler’s pantry. Too bad everything in Baltimore wasn’t that easy. She had to drive to Hecht’s in Towson to buy Waterford glasses of every shape and size, and was just unpacking them when the doorbell chimed.

Hortense was an hour early. Jeannie hadn’t time to change from her shopping clothes to her gardening ones, let alone get all the sticky labels off the bottom of the glasses. The doorbell awoke Ivanhoe from his nap so he was screaming from above, and Jeannie now felt the picture was complete; she was a totally decadent, uncaring trophy wife who knew nothing about caring for children or gardens.

“Oh dear,” said Hortense, immediately ascending the stairs. “May I?”

Ivanhoe was terrified when he saw Hortense peeping round the edge of the door, and had to be mollified with a sippy cup of warm soy milk. Then the three of them went outside and Hortense started snipping away, much lower than Jeannie would ever have cut.

“Are you sure I’ll get them all back next year?” she asked, looking at the stumps where outstretched boughs holding faded blue blooms had been.

“It’s good wood. It will survive. Just like this house.” She paused. “Just like you, my dear.”

“You can tell I’m out of my element, can’t you?” Jeannie said, starting to collect the flowers and branches in a trash bag. She knew that a more organized woman would save the hydrangeas to dry them and then spray-paint gold for the holidays. The holidays. She found herself flinching at the thought of putting on the kind of Christmas Charlie would expect in the house.

“I don’t think that’s the case.” Hortense looked levelly at Jeannie. “If there’s a problem, you’ll be the only one in this house to solve it. That’s all I meant.”

The problem. Over drinks-it turned out that Hortense drank whiskey, straight up-Jeannie tried to fish around and find out exactly which of her many discomforts was the problem Hortense had gleaned. But for a straight talker, she was surprisingly evasive-as curvy, in fact, as Edgevale Road.

That night, Jeannie awoke at 2 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. The whiskey she’d had with Hortense and Charlie, who came home early, true to his word, had thrown her sleep-wake cycle out of whack. She’d be a mess when Ivanhoe woke up at 6-although he seemed to be awake now.

As the whimpering continued, Jeannie slipped out of bed and padded down the hallway to his room. Ivanhoe was sitting bolt upright in bed, and when he saw her, his whimpers turned to an outright scream. Jeannie pressed him against her breast, and gradually the cries lessened.

“Did Ivan have a bad dream? Everything’s okay now-”

“Bad boy,” said Ivanhoe. “Bad, bad boy in room!”

“Nobody’s here, Ivan. You just had a bad dream.”

“No, Mama, he real.” Ivan pointed toward the closet. “He shine like, like moon.” Ivan pushed the curtain over his window aside, pointing with emphasis at the full moon outside. “He have bib on. He roll a big ball.”

Jeannie felt herself shudder. She reached back and switched on the light. No bowling balls anywhere, and all the windows were latched shut.

“Come on, Ivan, let’s get you some milk.” She stood up, still holding him close, and started down the stairs and the hallway, snapping lights on as she went. The alarm panel downstairs still said ARMED the doors were all locked. Nobody had penetrated the embassy. She settled Ivan in his booster seat while she microwaved his cup of milk. But when the hum of the microwave finished sixty seconds later, she heard it. Rolling, then a crash. Rolling, rolling, another hit.

“What that, Mommy?” Ivan demanded. “What that sound?”

So her son had heard the rolling sound, too. It was time to get Charlie involved.

Charlie took a logical approach to the whole thing. After Jeannie had woken him, he pulled on a bathrobe and plodded downstairs, cordless telephone in hand. When they’d entered the kitchen, it was silent at first, so Jeannie was frustrated; but then the long rolling sound began again.

“Do you hear it?”

Charlie listened a minute, then said, “It sounds like something’s rolling around on the lower level.”

“Yes, yes! Exactly. And Hortense Underwood said it used to be a bowling alley.”

“Now a nanny suite.” Charlie looked thoughtful. “I can’t remember what the house inspector said about the foundation being level.”

“What does that matter?” The house inspector had been one Reeves had recommended; he’d said the house was perfect, of course.

“I do have my tennis things stored down there. Last time I was getting ready, I took Ivanhoe downstairs with me and gave him a ball to play with. It’s probably just rolling around.”

“The basement is carpeted. And the sound is too loud to be a tennis ball.”

“What else could it be?”

“Let’s go downstairs and look,” Jeannie said.

Charlie paused. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll call the police.”

That wasn’t what Jeannie had expected. She thought Charlie would have gone down with the unregistered Beretta he’d received from a client in L.A., years ago, who couldn’t come up with a cash payment; the gun that he kept fully loaded, but locked up in a safe in the bedroom. Jeannie thought Charlie would bear arms because so many of the superheroes in his games did; but then again, why should she expect heroics from her husband, eighteen years her senior and already with a slight predisposition for heart trouble?

Since the call for help had come from Goodwood Gardens, three squad cars arrived within two minutes. Six cops trooped downstairs. By then, of course, the sound had stopped. And they found nothing.

“You have reached Hodder Reeves’s answering service. Leave a message, and I will personally return your call as soon as possible. Have a super day.”

Jeannie had been calling Reeves every day for a week, but she kept getting the same recorded message; and he hadn’t called her back, not once, which seemed peculiar given all the special attention he’d lavished on her so recently. Maybe he was closing a deal with other clients. Or maybe he was worried that Jeannie had figured out he’d sold her a haunted house.

Now Jeannie understood why seven people had owned the house in ten years. Nobody could stand to keep living with the sound of German-American bowlers, night after night. Ivanhoe had dreamt about the boy in the bib again. He wanted to sleep in their room, which Charlie sternly forbade. Adding to the stress in the house, Charlie’s sexual appetite had increased-something Jeannie felt sure was connected to his witnessing Hodder touch her at the gala.