Page 18 of The Neighbor

I log in to my laptop with my hands still shaking like goddamned leaves in a hurricane, so I lift them off the keys to steady myself. Closing my eyes, I take a deep breath in and tell myself he can’t know a thing.

But what if in your fixation with Caroline you missed him when you should have found out every last detail of his life like you did with everyone else in this neighborhood?

When I open my eyes, I’m happy to see my hands aren’t shaking as badly as they were a minute ago. I’m fine. I simply need to stop letting my imagination get the best of me.

Calmer now, I can’t help but chastise myself for not researching Aaron fully before this. He always seemed so lost and insignificant before tonight, though, so I didn’t have a reason to.

Well, now you do, so get going. You can’t afford to not know everything there is to know about this guy if he’s going to be popping up out of nowhere and claiming God knows everything.

My fingers type as if they have a mind of their own. Aaron Perry. 8 Park Circle, Raven Terrace, Pennsylvania. I start with a basic Google search since that can actually provide a lot of information. The average person doesn’t realize that, but simply searching a person’s name can bring forth a treasure trove of details about them.

My eyes scan the page until I reach his name. I click on the link and see it’s the wrong Aaron Perry, so I click back and continue my search. After visiting two more pages about other men with the same name, I finally come upon one about him.

I read through the information and then grab my pen and paper I keep beside my laptop to take notes. Yes, it would be easier to do that on the computer I’m using to search for information, but I like doing it this way.

Call me old fashioned in this part of my stalking.

Aaron. 32 years old. Married once. Wife Sheila Perry deceased. Two children (boy and girl) ages 8 and 5.

He’s older than I thought he was. Not that he looks younger necessarily, but for some reason I thought he was in his twenties.

Curious about what he used to do for a living before grieving became his chief occupation, I read further into the article about him from some online magazine and find out he was an accountant. I didn’t guess that right either. Actually, I don’t think I ever gave any thought to what his job was before this moment, but if I had, I wouldn’t have guessed he worked as an accountant at some big firm in Philly.

In the middle of the article sits a picture of him accepting some commendation from a portly old man who clearly needs to get a different suit. I hope he did soon after this picture was taken because I suspect anyone standing nearby was in acute danger of losing an eye if one of those suit coat buttons lost its battle with his waist.

I stop for a few moments to study Aaron’s face. He was a good-looking guy before everything in his life went to hell. Chiseled jaw, sharp eyes, a great smile. He looked like he worked out too. His hair was shorter then. I guess when you have a wife and kids and the world by the tail you’re motivated to keep things tight.

Standing next to him on the other side from the fat bossman is a beautiful brunette I think may have been his wife. Damn. She was gorgeous. Big brown eyes my mother used to call doe eyes. She had an innocence to her I always find appealing in a woman.

So Aaron really did have everything going for him. And then he lost it all. Now he wanders around the cul-de-sac in his bare feet spouting nonsense about God.

Just goes to show you anyone can be king of the world one day and a beggarman the next.

Stop letting yourself get lost in this guy’s past. So what if he had the picture-perfect life back then? He might very well at this exact moment be telling someone what he knows about you, so you damn well better get your head together and find out about him.

I shake my head to get rid of any romantic thoughts about Aaron and his dead wife and then keep scrolling down the page. There’s more information about the firm he used to work for, Kaplan and James, so I jot that in my notebook too.

There’s no way this guy knows a single thing about me. I feel pretty confident about that. Still, I need to learn all there is to know about him so I can be sure. It’s a good idea to have a thorough understanding of the people you live around anyway. Just makes good sense.

I go back to my search and find a page about his wife. Curious, I read through, not really paying very close attention to much of anything since she’s dead, but then I come across a little nugget of information that piques my interest.

She was a staff writer for some online magazine. That means she knew how to research. That detail changes everything. He may have been an accountant when he had a better life, but he lived with someone who knew how to find out things about people, places, and events. Who’s to say Aaron didn’t learn a few tips about that from her?

My hands begin to shake again as my mind races to construct an entire scenario around what he said to me outside on the porch. What was it again? Can you hide the horrible things you’ve done from God? Yeah, it was something like that. Was he talking about me or about himself? Nothing I’ve found says he’s ever done anything horrible. He was an accountant, for God’s sake. How much horrible could he do in that job? Forget to file someone’s quarterly taxes on time? Mess up a company’s balance sheet?

Or maybe he’s guilty of some kind of embezzlement.

No, he wasn’t talking about himself. He was talking about me. That’s why he chose to come to my house instead of going to anyone else’s tonight.

He knows. I don’t know how, but he knows what I’ve done.

8

Customers filedpast me in clusters as that week’s sale threatened to surpass the previous month’s big spring-cleaning sale. Those always do well at Big Joe’s Liquidation Depot, but I was surprised to see so many people here for what seemed like a ridiculous idea for a promotion when management first announced it.

The April Fool’s Day sale.

I thought most customers would have assumed they were going to be tricked in some way so they wouldn’t come out for the sale. Obviously, the giant crowds every day that week showed I was wrong.