Read The Neighbor for Free Online

before, it came three times, but now it sounded less like a sword drawn from a scabbard than like some great metal door scraping open across a threshold. The roaring, whistling wind seemed to blow away through that unseen door, and the cellar fell quiet, still, all dust drifting toward the floor.
    Because Amalia always was as resilient as she was strong, as strong as she was smart, she knelt beside me, and wasting no time exclaiming about what we had just witnessed, she said, “Your leg, the wound, let me see.”
    Blood had streamed between my fingers, darkened the leg of my slacks, spattered the floor, but when I took my hand away from the wound, my trousers were not ripped. In wonder, I raised my hand and saw that the blood dripping from it a moment earlier was nowhere to be seen. The pants were no longer stained, the floor without a single crimson spatter. The blade of the knife gleamed, as clean as if it had just been washed.
    I got to my feet, physically as whole as I had been before I entered that house. Amalia rose, too, and met my eyes, and neither of us could speak. She put her arms around me, and I hugged her, and after a while we went up the stairs to the kitchen.
    Together, we went through the quiet house, turning out the lights that I had left on. Before we departed, I showed her the scrapbook about Melinda Lee Harmony, the diary, and the scrapbook to the pages of which her own middle-school class photos had been fixed with Scotch tape.
    Still, neither of us spoke. We had no need to put our recent experience into words, for we understood the meaning of it in our hearts.
    We closed the door, descended the porch steps. Night took the last purple from the sky as we crossed Clockenwall’s backyard.
    At the rear gate, Amalia said, “So the Glenn Miller stuff didn’t soothe your nerves.”
    I said, “I should have played a Guy Lombardo album.”

10
    We didn’t want to go back into that house ever again. We didn’t want to talk about what had happened there or be questioned about it.
    Using a typewriter in a research room at the public library, my sister wrote a letter to the police, reporting in some detail what they would find in the Clockenwall residence. She made sure that she wiped all fingerprints from the paper and envelope before mailing it at a post office twelve blocks from our house.
    Maybe they thought the letter was a hoax. But they had to check it out. The story was a sensation for a week, which was a long time in a year when the news was full of big stories about war in Vietnam and race riots in America’s cities.
    Having found the scrapbook devoted to Amalia, the police came by to speak to her, and she told them how Mr. Clockenwall had spooked her on those two occasions when she was thirteen. But she said not a word regarding our adventure. Perhaps because she never lied and had about her a palpable air of truthfulness, they never thought to ask if she had recently been inside the house of murder or if she might be the one who had written the letter. I do not believe the cops were careless or incompetent in their investigation; what I think is, because of Amalia’s great good heart and the purity of her gentle soul, some Power that watches over us ensured that she would be spared the ordeal of being the object of a media frenzy.
    She and I never again spoke of those events. There was nothing that needed to be said, for we understood and accepted. Occasionally, however, my sister came to me and hugged me tightly for the longest time, and although she seemed to have no reason for doing so, we both knew the reason.
    As I said, that was the summer when I met Jonah Kirk, who became my best friend for life, who loved Amalia as if she were his sister, too, and who has written so well of her in his book,
The City
. During the months thereafter, far more happened to us than we, at our most imaginative, could have foreseen, all of it different in character from what I’ve just told you here, with more