See You / See Me

By W.A. Winter

Whittier Avenue, on the tranquil South Side of Minneapolis, seems to be a happy place in the spring of 1948. Below its sunny surface, however, the neighborhood seethes with dark secrets. Young family man Buddy Bailey is tormented by forbidden visions of a teenaged neighbor even as he plunges into a perilous affair with needy newcomer Cora Delafield. Meanwhile, Cora's husband, Henry, a frustrated shoe salesman with a sketchy past, schemes to seduce Buddy's unhappy wife, Evelyn. When Evelyn's brother, a shameless voyeur who has seen too much for his own good, is brutally murdered, both Buddy and Henry fall under suspicion, revealing new secrets and dangerous behavior that lurch inexorably toward disaster.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W.A. Winter
• Release date: Oct 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370408573

W.A. Winter

W.A. Winter is the pen name of a Minneapolis journalist and author.

Book preview

SEE YOU / SEE ME

Death is in the eye of the beholder.

A Novel

W. A. Winter

Copyright © 2017 W.A. Winter

All rights reserved.

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CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

ONE

They thought you were the cat’s meow, the Delafields, Buddy said.

Bending low over the sink, a tall, trim young man in blue-and-white striped pajamas, Buddy Bailey rinsed his toothbrush in cold water, jiggled the brush across his perfect white teeth one more time, then rinsed it again. They were very impressed, and you didn’t have to sing a note. He tapped the brush against the cold-water spigot and stuck it in its slot in the porcelain holder attached to the wall above the sink.

At least Henry was, he added in a lower, more cautious voice, probably unheard in the adjacent bedroom. Impressed.

Glancing at himself in the mirror above the sink, Buddy sighed. He would love another cigarette, but now he had brushed his teeth and Evelyn would say something if he came to bed smelling of tobacco. He was exhausted—he had worked in the yard all day, and the evening at the Delafields had gone on longer than he expected—but he was restless, jumpy, too jittery to fall quickly to sleep, something he was having difficulty doing most nights of late. A cigarette would help him relax. He buttoned his pajama top and walked into the darkened bedroom.

Evelyn was already in bed. Her long, undulating form was stretched out on the far side of the bed, her head turned toward the closed and curtained window. Tomorrow was Sunday, and her hair was wound tight in curlers.

What were you saying? she muttered—then immediately, in a sharper voice: But not so loud. You’ll wake Susan.

Buddy stood and looked at her in the yellow glow from the hallway light. I said you made a good impression on the Delafields. They think you’re Minneapolis’ answer to Rise Stevens, he said, picking one of the several opera-star names he’d heard Evelyn and Henry bandy about that night.

Evelyn made a small, indignant noise. Well, maybe Henry, she said. But that wife of his wouldn’t know Rise Stevens from Tokyo Rose.

Cora Delafield had been a baton-twirler back in Channelview, Texas, she—Cora—had announced over the under-done roast beef and watery creamed corn she served them for dinner. She said it matter-of-factly, though maybe with a little pride, when each of the four of them was explaining his or her connection to what Henry, with a perfectly straight face, called the wonderful world of glorious music. Cora also revealed that she had been a car-hop—once on roller skates—though car-hopping, she acknowledged, really didn’t have anything to do with music unless you counted the radios blaring in the customers’ cars. Bobby Joe Whaley and the Pecos River Boys—I can hear them in my head to this day, she added wistfully.

Evelyn, thankfully, had held both her tongue and her laughter until the Baileys got back to their house. Then, when Anna Lisa, their babysitter, had been paid and sent home (she lived next door), Evelyn tossed her head and laughed out loud. She even mimicked, with some skill and a great deal of exaggeration, Cora’s twang. "In Channelview, baton-twirlin’ is hah ahrt. Not as hah as car-hoppin’, but hah ahrt all the same. Yah-hoo!" Buddy laughed, but less enthusiastically than Evelyn. Buddy felt a little sorry for Cora, who seemed sweet and sincere. She might have been a trifle unsophisticated, but she struck Buddy as a very nice person—attractive in her way, too. He didn’t like the idea, in any case, of talking about people behind their backs, especially when they had just served him supper. Cora Delafield was no more a cook than she was a musician, but she’d probably done her best. Buddy didn’t think it was right to fault her for what she wasn’t.

Well, said Evelyn, are you coming to bed or not?

Buddy ran his hand though his thick, chestnut-colored hair. He picked his bathrobe up off his side of the bed and put it on over his pajamas, loosely knotting the belt in front. His half-erect penis was immediately responsive to the soft brush of the heavy fabric.

I’m going to have a smoke first, he said.

Evelyn, facing the window, said nothing until he pulled the bedroom door softly shut behind him.

Don’t forget to brush your teeth, he heard her say from the dark side of the bedroom door.

• • •

Buddy sat in one of the wicker chairs on the front porch and looked out at the 4000 block of Whittier Avenue. Even with the robe he was a little chilly on the porch and was glad the glass storms were still on the windows. He held a saucer in his hand and carefully tipped the ash from his Old Gold into the saucer. Shivering slightly, he hunched his narrow shoulders, stretched his long, skinny legs, and rested his bare heels on the thin rug that covered the wooden floor. He’d left his slippers in the bedroom.

The avenue, at nearly half-past midnight, was deserted and silent. Occasionally a dog barked somewhere a block or two away, and once or twice a car crossed Whittier at the corner. But, although it was Saturday night, the neighborhood was tucked in and soundly sleeping—most of it, at any rate. Buddy Bailey, lord of the manor—a modest but well-kept story-and-a-half bungalow at 4032 Whittier—was wide awake and excited.

He’d been excited for most of the day, having witnessed fifteen-year-old Anna Lisa Andersen, the babysitter who lived next door, pull her nightgown over her head and expose her naked breasts. Anna Lisa was oblivious to the pre-dawn darkness that framed the glass in her brightly lit, unshaded bedroom window and to her grownup neighbor and occasional employer standing in the darkened kitchen twenty feet away.

Buddy, having climbed out of bed at five-thirty, had shuffled into the kitchen for a glass of milk. Standing in front of the open ice-box, he’d been startled by the light flashing on in the Andersens’ window next door, startled even more when the golden-haired adolescent appeared in the window and just like that, as Buddy turned his head toward the sudden illumination, lifted her arms above her head and with them her flannel nightie. Buddy reflexively shut the ice-box door, killing the tiny light inside, and stared, utterly still and hardly breathing.

He was stunned by the vision, which lasted just long enough—three, four, five seconds?—for Anna Lisa to realize the shade was up and to pull it down, though she did so as calmly, it seemed to Buddy, as she had pulled off her nightgown, surely unaware that she had been observed. For the rest of the day it was a vivid memory.

It was the first Saturday in April. Buddy spent the entire day in the yard, raking the winter’s detritus from the lawn and the flower beds, hauling baskets of the stuff out to the driveway off the alley, and burning what was combustible. As he worked, Anna Lisa’s image danced behind his eyes. Like a smitten schoolboy, he hoped to catch a glimpse of her in the flesh, though of course the flesh would be fully clothed. He was pricked by darts of contradictory emotions: lust to be sure, but also shame, fear, wonder, and amazement—even a tender, protective kind of love. He felt that he had shared a spectacular sort of intimacy with the girl, never mind an intimacy of which she was wholly innocent.

Buddy had not seen Anna Lisa again that day. He found out, during a somewhat unnerving chat over the backyard fence with her father, that the girl had risen early (he knew that!) and gone off with her mother to visit Gloria’s ailing mother in New Ulm, an hour’s drive southwest of the Twin Cities. The news had both disappointed and relieved him, and with mixed emotions he kept an eye peeled for the Andersens’ green Pontiac out front or in the driveway. That evening he’d let Evelyn open the door for Anna Lisa, who was babysitting for Susan, when it was time for the Baileys to walk up the block to the Delafields’ for dinner. He scarcely dared make eye contact, felt a slight flush when he said hello in the living room, and covered the catch in his voice with a bogus cough. The girl was wearing a pretty blue sweater over a white blouse and pleated skirt, her long hair in a ponytail. He was reasonably sure that she paid him no more attention than usual, which he found oddly disappointing. When they had returned home from dinner, he was pleased to let Evelyn pay her and watch her skip across the narrow yard to the Andersens’ front door.

Staring out at the quiet street, Buddy, though shivering, lit another Old Gold. He was cold and he wasn’t cold at the same time. He wondered if he was going to sit there all night.

Cora Delafield had unexpectedly taken his mind off Anna Lisa. Cora: whom he had never, before that evening, seen up close, had never, before that evening, actually spoken to, had only nodded to and doffed his hat and bid Good morning!—Cora wrapped in a flowered housecoat, standing at the Delafields’ front door when he and Henry headed off to the streetcar stop at the south end of the Delafields’ block on weekday mornings. Now, at one-thirty on a Sunday morning, it was Cora who again diverted his fevered attention from the underage girl.

Shivering, smoking one cigarette after another, Buddy felt the small, insistent worm of desire stirring inside him. All those morning greetings exchanged between front door and public sidewalk had not prepared him for Cora up close, no more than the innumerable sightings of Anna Lisa playing with her tabby cat in the yard, coming and going with her parents, or standing in the Baileys’ living room before or after a babysitting assignment had prepared him for Anna Lisa in the nude.

Sitting there on the porch, he would be hard-pressed to explain Cora’s sudden physical attraction (unlike Anna Lisa’s immediate and obvious appeal). Cora was pretty in a conventional sense, but hardly striking. Her hair was a dishwater blonde, piled rather haphazardly on top of her head. She had ample breasts, a round, not overly large derriere, and nicely turned ankles, but it was her extraordinarily large, round, blue-gray eyes and a certain undefinable—undefinable at least to him—sensuousness that he now realized had seized his imagination.

Restless, and maybe already responding to her appeal, Buddy had wandered into the Delafields’ kitchen while Henry and Evelyn were poring over Henry’s extensive collection of opera recordings in the living room. Cora was standing at the sink, her back to the door. When she turned her head and smiled, Buddy was immediately reminded of the famous Betty Grable pin-up that he and a million other G.I.’s had tacked to the wall above their bunks during the war. Cora didn’t look much like Betty Grable, but there was something insouciant about her pose, something about the way she smiled at him over her shoulder, and that ineffable sensual quality that in that moment made Buddy go weak in the knees.

Now, in his current febrile state, Buddy imagined himself bringing in the coffee cups and dessert plates from the living room (Cora’s coffee and gingerbread cake were no better than the roast beef and creamed corn), setting the china down on the counter, then, aroused by that saucy pose, impulsively unbuckling his belt, yanking up Cora’s dress, and taking her right there against the sink. The picture brought Buddy, sitting on his porch a city block and several hours away, a robust erection. The image vanished only when he let the tip of his momentarily forgotten cigarette burn his fingers.

He was aware once more of both the chill and his exhaustion, and now his fingers were singed. He would wait for his erection to subside, then go back inside and hold his hand under cold water, then brush his teeth for the second time that night and crawl into bed beside his sleeping wife.

Only then did he remember something Evelyn had mentioned on their short walk home that evening. Evelyn’s comment had seemed unimportant at the time, Buddy’s mind focused on other matters, and he’d let it pass. Remembered now, the words seemed heavy and ominous as pitched bricks.

• • •

At three-forty-five that morning Buddy lay in bed, staring at the bedroom ceiling, shivering beneath a lightweight blanket, within arm’s length but not touching his softly snoring wife. He had immediately fallen asleep upon finally coming to bed, then abruptly wakened, as had become his habit, for no apparent reason.

Oh and by the way, is what Evelyn had said on the way home from the Delafields’. Everett will be arriving on the bus tomorrow afternoon. He isn’t sure, poor kid, how long he’ll be staying.

TWO

Buddy was standing on the front steps of the house, arms akimbo, when Evelyn pulled up at the curb in their year-old Chevrolet coupe. As usual, Evelyn, who habitually drove too fast and had virtually no spatial sense, scraped the tires against the curb, adding more unsightly scuffs to the white sidewalls. Evelyn’s brother Everett grimaced in mock horror, then grinned at Buddy from the passenger side of the Chevy’s front seat.

Buddy sighed and reached for the pack of Old Golds in the pocket of his white shirt. He watched Everett get out of the car, shoot his cuffs, then snap to exaggerated attention on the curb and smartly salute.

Top o’ the day to you, Captain! the new arrival shouted.

Buddy, on the stoop, lit his cigarette.

Without a word he walked down to the car, shook his brother-in-law’s unavoidable right hand, ignored the theatrical salute, and dragged a battered suitcase out of the Chevy’s backseat.

Following Evelyn up to the house, Everett jabbed an elbow in Buddy’s ribs and said out of the corner of his mouth, What say, Captain? Gettin’ any strange stuff?

Watching Evelyn, in her prim white dress, ascend the front steps, Buddy said nothing.

• • •

The unrelieved sexual excitement of the previous day, the lack of sleep, and now Everett Scherzer’s arrival had combined to make Buddy feel miserable that Sunday afternoon.

He’d skipped breakfast, taking only a couple of cups of black coffee, sat sulkily through Sunday service without joining either the rote recital of the familiar Lutheran liturgy or the plodding hymns he had grown up with and usually enjoyed singing in his earnest but unremarkable tenor voice—Evelyn, an accomplished contralto, was the singer in the family— then barked at Susan when she asked one too many questions during their reading of the Sunday funnies. While Evelyn took the car downtown to fetch Everett at the bus depot, he stared out the porch windows at the tentative April sunshine, Terry and the Pirates folded open but unread on his lap.

He’d kept his eyes open, of course, for any appearance of Anna Lisa next door, at the same time mentally berating himself for having sexual thoughts about the fetching teen. It was a sick mind, he told himself, that was aroused by the sight of an adolescent girl. It was a sick mind, for that matter, that allowed its owner to spy, however inadvertently, on the daughter of a neighbor and friend. He was less hard on himself for his erotic thoughts about Cora Delafield. True, he and Henry had become close in a funny sort of way—closer than he and George Andersen had become in fact, even though the Baileys and the Andersens had been next-door neighbors for nearly three years—and he felt a genuine fondness for Cora, albeit in part a knee-jerk reaction to Evelyn’s cruel comments about the poor lady’s accent and culinary skill. Still, Cora was a mature woman, presumably experienced, and definitely appealing, maybe even willfully provocative, in a fully grownup sense.

Buddy, in any event, was happily—well, at least contentedly—married and the father of a beautiful and sensitive child. He and Evelyn had been a couple since their respective senior and sophomore years at St. Ansgar College, a small, Norwegian Lutheran liberal arts institution in Northfield, Minnesota, and married now for almost seven years. Evelyn insisted they wait to have sex until their wedding night, and they did, and for the first couple of years of their marriage he had gingerly plumbed the depths of her long-legged, undeniably lovely body—pale and spectral in the inevitably darkened bedroom—two or three times a week. Once Susan was born and sleeping down the hall, the frequency fell off to once a week, and whatever hopes Buddy might have harbored for more adventurous lovemaking disappeared.

The righteous self-rebuke that Sunday left him feeling scoured out. The arrival of his brother-in-law replaced the empty feeling with a roiling, sour-tasting anger.

Buddy was by nature pleasant and easy-going. He was reliably compliant, forbearing, and eager if not desperate at times to get along with the people in his life. Everett Scherzer was the only person Buddy could ever recall truly hating. The only other person who aroused anything halfway close to the antipathy he felt toward Evelyn’s younger brother (there were three Scherzer siblings, Evelyn, in the middle, the solitary girl) was Lewis Lodwick, his self-important, authoritarian boss at the insurance company, and, truth be told, Buddy didn’t hate Lodwick as much as he feared him.

Buddy despised Everett with an all-embracing fury that both frightened and shamed him. He couldn’t help it. Everett, with his uncanny ability to crawl under his skin, simply brought out the worst in him. What once, early in his relationship with Evelyn and during occasional visits to the Scherzer farm outside of Grand Forks, North Dakota, had merely been annoyance had hardened over the years into rock-hard hatred. Buddy loathed Everett’s sloth and aimlessness, his obsequious kid-brother relationship with Evelyn (rewarded by her big-sister protectiveness), his sly and sometimes foul-mouthed irreverence, and, worst of all, the questionable wartime experience he wore on his sleeve.

I’m surprised he doesn’t pin that precious Purple Heart on his polo shirt, Buddy groused on one occasion. To which Evelyn, predictably and pointedly, replied, "If I had earned a Purple Heart, I’m sure I would be just as proud of it as he is."

Everett’s self-serving heroism was exacerbated by his insistence on calling Buddy Captain, which he did, Buddy believed, to snidely underline the fact that Buddy had risen only to the rank of private first class while Everett had been discharged at war’s end a buck sergeant. Even more than the difference in rank, Buddy was certain, Everett loved to emphasize with the mock Limey soldier-boy routine the fact that Buddy had spent the war behind a Public Information Office desk in England while Everett had fought—or at least been a member of the Allied fighting force—on the beaches of Sicily and southern France.

I would think, Evelyn told Buddy more than once, you would find a way to be proud of having a war hero in the family, instead of always running him down.

Buddy had given up replying that Everett’s valor was suspicious. The only visible trace of his brother-in-law’s combat trauma was a faint, two-inch-long scar on his right calf where, Everett had informed his family, he had been struck by Nazi shrapnel. Everett coyly refused to say more about his experience; Buddy suspected he’d acquired the scar while getting hung up on a barbed-wire fence on the farm back home. Eventually, seeking what he believed