“You have a daughter, right? Erin?”
“What’s this about?”
“Well, we were wonderin’ if maybe she might be free this Sunday to babysit for us. We’ve been invited to play golf and have dinner with Mrs. Fisher’s son and his wife. You know Julia Fisher? She lives across from us. My husband was her husband’s doctor before the poor man died? That’s how we know her son…. Anyway, they’ve asked us to play golf and have dinner with them on Sunday, and our regular sitter isn’t available, and Nick suggested we ask Erin if she could look after our boys that afternoon and evenin’. Would that be all right, do you think? Could she sit for us?”
“Well, I’d have to ask her.”
“Of course. If she could maybe give us a call later and let us know?”
Maggie writes down the Wilson’s phone number. “I’ll give her the message.”
The line goes dead.
“Yes, thank you so much,” Maggie says, imitating Dr. Dani Wilson’s surprisingly tentative Southern drawl. “Pleasuretalkin’to you.” She hangs up the phone, thinking that this was the longest conversation she’s had with the woman since they moved in. Seems strange that, after having had little contact with any of her neighbors for months, Maggie would have interactions with two of them in the same day.
“You’re being paranoid,”she hears Craig say.
“Fuck you,” Maggie says as, somewhere outside, she hears the familiarvroom-vroomof a motorcycle. The sound vibrates through her body like a drill. Maggie crawls under the covers of her unmade bed and stays there until nightfall.