Death of a Bad Neighbour--Revenge is Criminal by Jack Calverley

Author:Jack Calverley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: An anthology of all-new crime and mystery stories about the comeuppance of a bad neighbor, where revenge is less than strictly legal. Short fiction, with moments of humour.
Publisher: The Logic of Dreams
Published: 2022-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

King of the Castle

Hilary Davidson

THE SNOW CAME down hard that early December afternoon. At first it looked enchanted, with snowflakes swirling gracefully through the air before landing on the ledge of my home-office window. As they accumulated and covered the trees in my backyard all I could think about was how postcard-perfect my view was. I was busy editing a technical manual for a client who always called me with last-minute jobs. They paid handsomely but inevitably caused headaches. In spite of the looming deadline, every few minutes I lifted my eyes from the laptop and surveyed the glorious scene. It wasn’t until my wife, Kait, came home from work that I woke up to reality.

“Fletcher, honey, there’s almost a foot of snow out there,” she said. “And you haven’t started shoveling yet.”

It was our first snowfall in our first house. Kait and I had married three years earlier, in a summer ceremony at a manor house up in the Muskoka Lakes. While we’d continued to live in my tiny studio apartment in downtown Toronto, we’d sworn to each other we’d save every penny to buy our dream home. And we had, moving into a semi-detached three-bedroom house on the far eastern edge of Danforth Village, a short walk from restaurants, shops, and the subway. We’d been there for two months, painting and re-grouting and enjoying our new space.

One of our friends had given us a sturdy red snow shovel as a housewarming gift. Welcome to the wonderful world of homeownership, he’d told me. You’re your own superintendent now.

His words were ringing in my ears as I trudged to the garage out back—we didn’t own a car, so that was our storage space—and located the shovel. Kait was right; the snow was piled at least a foot deep.

At the front of the house, I took a deep breath and told myself I needed the workout. I’d canceled my gym membership—part of our belt-tightening scheme to afford a house—and had only started setting up a workout space in the basement. At least shoveling snow promised to be a full-body workout. I pumped myself up so much that I cleared not only our side of the house but the next door neighbour’s as well. He was an elderly man named Max Bode, and we had yet to meet him, though we’d caught glimpses of his short, bony frame. We considered ourselves lucky because we had yet to detect any noise from him through the wall that our houses shared.

After I finished and returned the shovel to the garage, I noticed the light was on inside Max Bode’s kitchen. Like ours, it was at the back of the house. I figured it was as good a time as any to introduce myself, so I headed up his steps. Our neighbour was sitting at a Formica table, his back turned to me as he hunched over a newspaper. Long strips of white hair were carefully combed over an otherwise bald pate.

I tapped on the glass of the storm door.

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