Chapter 1

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR

I

     Amanda shut the door and turned to survey the damage. God, she was exhausted already and the real work had just begun. Now she had to unpack all of this. Bedroom first. Then, if she really couldn’t take it anymore, she’d just go to bed. Screw the rest of it. Tomorrow is another day. She’d been at it since seven this morning. It was...what? She glanced at her watch. Eight thirty!
     Murphy’s Law had been in force ever since the alarm went off. Or didn’t. The power had shut off sometime during the night and then come back on. It had killed the memory in her clock. She’d been awakened by the movers banging on her door. Up, out of bed, no time to do anything but throw on clothes and then have the men load the truck. The truck then proceeded to break down. Another truck had been hours in coming and then everything had to be taken off the first truck and loaded onto the second. What a nightmare.
     But now it was over. And here she was. In her own home. Hers. How cool. She looked around her. Up the stairs. She’d wanted an upstairs. Something about having a second floor made her feel secure. Like when she was a child. She smiled. She was far from a child now. She was a middle aged woman. Still attractive, but fading fast. A woman of great, but unfocused ambition. And now the bloom was off the rose. But luck had intervened.
      She’d been left money, by not one but two relatives. An unexpected reprieve in a life of endless adventure with little to show for it. She knew how lucky she was. So she’d bought this place. Not the house of her dreams, but a condo in Glendale which was a pretty nice place to live in her estimation. It was new, it had all the modern conveniences, and it was the first time she’d been an owner and not a renter. This place was hers. And hopefully it would appreciate in the next ten to fifteen years and she could move up the coast in a comfortable retirement. That was the plan. In the meantime she’d work.
      She was a hypnotist. Her tenth career. But who was counting? And she did all right. Most of her clients wanted to quit smoking and she’d been able to help quite a number of people to kick the habit. It was how she’d quit and what gave her the idea to study hypnotherapy in the first place. And now here she was, Amanda Harris, in her own place, with her own business and no boss other than herself.
      The phone rang. Amanda picked it up, knowing it was her daughter, Jennifer. “Hey!”
      “Mom?”
      “That’s me.”
      “So how was it? I wish I could’ve been there to help but I couldn’t turn down a job.” Jennifer was an actress of the struggling variety.
      “Don’t apologize. You’d just have been in the way anyway.”
      “Gee, thanks, Mom.”
      “You know what I mean. Really, there were two guys. They moved everything. I just stayed out of the way and made certain that everything was gone in the end. There was nothing you could do. And I’ve got to unpack myself. Put things where I want them. Fold things the way I like, you know?”
      “Yeah.”
      “So,” Amanda said, “how did it go today?”
      “Pretty good. I did everything on the first take. I wasn’t nervous at all. I think I’ll like what I did when I see it.” Jennifer had worked on ‘Hearts and Flowers’, one of the top soaps in the country. Hers had been a small part but you had to start somewhere. And it was a fun job.
      “So you’re back tomorrow?” Amanda asked.
      “Yes. And then again next Monday.”
      “Well, I’m happy for you, Sweetie. This is so exciting! Did you call your grandmothers with the dates you’ll be on?”
      “Of course.” Jennifer answered. “So how is it? Your new place? Is it cool?”
      Amanda laughed. “Yeah, it’s cool. I like it. But I gotta get something to eat or I’ll pass out.”
      “Okay. You want me to come over?”
      “No. Thank God I brought over a lot of small stuff all week so the kitchen is pretty well set up. I’m going to fix something to eat, set up my bedroom and take it from there.”
      “All right. I’ll call you tomorrow to see how things are going. Maybe I’ll take you out to dinner to celebrate your new home.”
      “Deal.” Amanda answered.
      She hung up and looked around her. The cats! Amanda suddenly remembered that the cats were locked in the bedroom. She’d let the two of them out of the cat carrier as soon as the bedroom had been off the truck and closed the door to prevent them from running away in the confusion. She’d left food and water and the litter box, not that they would avail themselves of any of it. They were too upset by the move.
      Amanda went upstairs to the bedroom, opened the door and turned on the overhead lights. Two wall sconces shed light on a profusion of boxes. The movers had set up the bed for her, thank God, because doing it herself would have been a bit much, heaving mattress and boxspring around.
      “Kitties! Baby kitties!” she crooned.
      Nothing.
      “Beverly! Ralph!” Amanda sing-songed the names. Neither cat showed her face.
      “Ralph! There you are!” Amanda picked up the calico, a female, but she just looked like a Ralph. The cat meowed reproachfully.
      “Oh, don’t get your panties in a bunch!” Amanda admonished the cat. “We’re home!”
      She hugged the wriggling Ralph and put her down. Beverly, a sleek white cat, came timidly from beneath the bed.
      Amanda scooped her up into her arms. “Hi baby,” she crooned to the purring feline who was so obviously happy to be the center of Amanda’s attention. She stroked the cat for a moment, then put her down and picked up the litter box, moving it out into the hall.
      “Okay kitties, this is the toilet and it is not in my room,” she announced as she pointed to the covered litter box in the hall. She picked up the food and water dishes and called to the cats to follow as she descended the stairs on her way to the kitchen. It would be awhile before they’d follow, she knew. If they would at all. Beverly and Ralph didn’t travel well and the move had freaked them out considerably. Amanda remembered her former cat of eighteen years who had been across the country with her and through all sorts of trials and tribulations. These cats didn’t have the same stuff as Camille. But they had their own stuff. And that was why she was a cat person. She just liked cats and their stuff.
      Downstairs, in the kitchen, Amanda rinsed out the catfood dish, put fresh dry food in it, filled the other dish with fresh water and put both bowls on the floor out of the way of foot traffic. She opened one of the cabinets and found a can of soup then retrieved a pot from the cabinets under the counter. As she prepared her simple meal of soup and dark bread she mused to herself about how she would do the kitchen. A little wallpaper on the one wall that wasn’t tiled. Maybe some accent paint on the trim around the dropped ceiling. Color combinations drifted through her head as she found the corkscrew and opened her celebratory bottle of Merlot.
      She poured herself a glass and held it up to the light. She smiled as she lost herself in the deep rich color of the wine, then raised the glass a bit higher in a silent toast to her surroundings. After pouring the soup into a bowl and clearing a space on the table in the dining area, she sat down to her first meal in her new home.
      With the first spoonful she discovered she was ravenous, then thought it no wonder since she’d last eaten over ten hours ago. And then it had been a hurried thing - some horrid fast food picked up on the fly while she’d had a chance when the moving men were packing her things into the truck. She fairly inhaled the soup and gobbled down the bread, then sat and sipped her glass of wine thinking that perhaps that wasn’t the most productive thing to do under the circumstances. Already she was feeling a lassitude creep through her. Oh, what the hell, she thought to herself. I’ll just make up the bed, take a nice hot bath and worry about the rest of this tomorrow. She finished the wine, all the while planning the placement of furniture, then rinsed the dishes, put them in the dishwasher - her dishwasher, she thought with a certain proprietary pride - turned off the downstairs lights and went upstairs to the bedroom.

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