Raymond froze. This was antique leaded glass, impossible to replace, and the fiend didn’t seem likely to give up until it broke. Who was this? What did they want?

At her fourth thwack! Raymond thought he heard a crack in the glass or in its frame. That was it. A man had the right to protect his property. He gulped down the rest of the Muscadet and stormed to the door.

“You’re asking for it, sweetie!”

She must have had quick feet because when he opened the door, there was nobody on the porch. A cold draft rushed past him and into the house. There was nothing out there but the night. The chirping crickets gave nothing away.

He walked to the window and surveyed the damage from the outside.

There were two smudges in the center of the pane, shaped exactly like greasy nipples.

– 3 –

– 3 –

THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW

Summer was murder on the lawns of Alta Vista. The San Gabriel Mountains held the July air down in a valley chokehold and the parched grass went from green to white to gray to brown in a single breath.

The people of Santa Claus Lane took the heat personally. They either kept longer hours at air-conditioned offices or hid in their homes until night made it safe to breathe again. As the sun went down, the rattle and hiss of lawn sprinklers covered up the whines of rash-covered infants and the whimpers of sunbaked pets. There were no evening soirees organized around cold drinks to commiserate—everybody withdrew. But had someone created opportunities to mingle and snipe, all the neighbors would have agreed that the only home on Santa Claus Lane that seemed exempt from the inferno was the Big Brown House.

Raymond van der Holt’s house loomed larger, was set back deeper and painted darker than the others. Like many fancy homes in folksy neighborhoods, it tried to camouflage itself with common shrubs and trees. The effect of all that greenery was that Raymond’s house resembled some opulent forest hideaway in the Pacific Northwest, cool and aloof even when pounded by the hottest heat. Not true, of course, and Raymond had the electricity bills to prove it. When the heat subsided one evening, he emerged from his air-conditioned refuge and activated the sprinklers. The boom box–playing maniac had been uncharacteristically silent. He could only hope she was dead from sunstroke.

He slipped on rubber clogs and unleashed a hose on the thirsty patches the sprinklers missed. The sound of flowing water relaxed him. The sky was darkening, and there was a loamy fragrance from where the moisture loosened the soil. Earthworms were probably farting without a care. If it weren’t for the mosquitoes, Raymond would be sipping Bandol in the shade of his oak, making believe he was in an abnormally prosaic aerie in the south of France.