I have no idea how long the townhouse next door had been empty before someone noticed that the two women living there were gone. I did see the story in the local paper of the two women who drowned on Lake Stanley when their rowboat capsized and thought of it as both sad and a little weird, as no one was supposed to be out in a rowboat on Lake Stanley after dark. Also it happened in early March rather than the summer, and they were reported to be dressed in street clothes. That too was weird—the wrong season to be rowing on the lake and the wrong clothes to be wearing to do it. I didn't connect that report with my neighbors until the workmen showed up next door, though.
I'm not an unfriendly man, although I was going through a bad patch myself at the time. This small townhouse in a reclaimed, once slum area, of the old town hadn't belonged to me when I moved in. It belonged to a professor, Tim. I had been hired as his graduate assistant and had started working in his office at the local university. He was steeped in his research, which spilled over into his private time and which, therefore, spilled over into mine as well. It expanded out from working at the university office to working at his home, my duties gradually broadening to include the domestic and personal. One thing led to another, and, for convenience at first, I was spending nights at his house. And then, again for his convenience, I suppose, I was sleeping in his bed.
When he died suddenly of a flu advancing into pneumonia, I found that he'd left the townhouse to me, as well as everything else he owned. And at his unexpected absence from the university, associate and assistant professors were moved up the chain, and I was brought in at the bottom of the chain as an adjunct professor.
It all happened so naturally and quietly that it seemed to have happened without my full participation. I'd been quite fond of Tim, and I'll admit that his taciturnity rubbed off on me. I too became a bit morose and withdrew into a routine that didn't involve much beyond classes at the university and continued research at home—and doing whatever Tim asked me to do.
The women next door were set in a routine too—for how long before I moved in with Tim, I have no idea. Only one of them ever seemed to leave the townhouse. She was the older of the two and must have been a professional, as she'd leave at 8:15 every morning, almost on the dot, in a tailored, but somewhat severe business suit, and with a briefcase in her hand. There was a bus stop up in the next block, on a busier street than we lived in, that regularly serviced the downtown area. I guess I always assumed she took the bus, but in the news report, they said there was a sedan belonging to one of the women found at the lake right where they would have taken the row boat, so maybe she drove and had the car garaged someplace nearby. She always reappeared by 6:00 p.m., often with a grocery bag as well as the briefcase, and she'd march right up to her door and then look furtively up and down the street before entering the townhouse. I found that odd enough that I marked it in my mind. I wouldn't see her again then until the next morning—assuming I was looking out on the street the next morning.
My routines and isolation were such, though, that I found I did look for her to follow her routines as well. Observing her almost-on-the-dot departures and arrivals became as much a routine with me as winding Tim's old grandfather clock. That being the case, I did mark when her routine stopped, but I just subtracted those observations from my own daily routine after a few days of change.
Our townhouses were small and bunched together close to the street, with no alley behind, so there really wasn't much of a place to put a car. The woman's townhouse didn't even have a parking pad. There was one for two cars, taking up nearly the whole front yard, for Tim's townhouse, but he never used it for his car. Tim had his car, a fancy Lexus coup he didn't want to leave out in the open, garaged over on the main street. It wasn't a longer walk from the house to where he garaged the car than our subsequent walk from the parking garage to our academic building at the university was. These walks were just about the only regular exercise we got—well, other than what happened in bed, our most active part of the day. Still, we both kept in shape.
We'd used the Lexus almost exclusively to get to and from the university, and I inherited it too. Tim didn't have any family—other than me, and I wasn't really family in any legal sense. I did wait around from some long, lost relative to show up and make a claim, which I would not have contested, but none did. This all happened before same sex marriage had passed in our state, so my claim seemed tenuous.
The older woman, Inger, although I didn't know her name until after she'd died, was maybe in her early fifties and was a big-boned Germanic blonde. She wasn't exactly unfriendly, although no one on this block of townhouses got into anyone else's business much, but she wasn't inviting either. She often seemed to have a weary and pursed-lipped look about her when she came home, and, as I noted before, she had a habit of furtively looking about her before opening her door and entering her house. I found that fascinating and all a bit Alfred Hitchcock in the atmosphere it created.
The other woman was somewhat younger in appearance and was of some Southeast Asian extraction. She was a scared little bunny, sometimes coming a step out of the house either in front or back, but never more than a foot away from an open door in front, through which she'd scamper back into the house at the slightest sound or movement on the block. She did hang their laundry out to dry on a line in their postage-stamp-sized back garden, which I found a bit "last century," but it accorded me an opportunity to observe what she looked like. She was very attractive, but always looked a bit sad—and she too had a tendency to look around with apprehension before settling down to her laundry chore. All mysterious enough to provide me a mental break from my research to pursue flights of fancy about their life.
I didn't learn her name until after they were gone either, and then, first, from the newspaper article without realizing that it was my neighbor. Her name was Lek, and she was from Thailand.
I often wondered how the two women could be so reclusive and what they did in the townhouse, just the two of them. But then I'd think about Tim and me living in here next door to them and how so steeped in his research Tim could be that we could go for days on end not leaving the house when university classes weren't in session. And I thought about some of what we were doing in here alone, and I decided not to think that much about the women next door.
I didn't think about the women next door so much—the interest in observing them having waned quickly once they'd broken their routine and never appeared—that it was maybe a month after I'd read the article in the newspaper without connecting their absence to the article, when I heard a racket start up on the other side of the wall and my own doorbell was ringing.
I opened the door to find a muscular and florid man maybe in his early forties, robust looking in white coveralls with no shirt under them that left his arms bare, showing bulging guns and several tattoos peeking out of the edges of the coveralls. There were construction boots on his feet and his head was topped off with a white painter's cap.
