When my neighbor marched across the lawn that Wednesday afternoon, I thought she was coming to complain about my trash cans again, or maybe the leaves I hadn’t raked yet. Instead, she planted herself at the edge of my driveway, folded her arms, and said something that made my stomach squeeze tight. “Your house gets so loud during the day, Marcus,” she said.
“Someone is shouting in there.”
I stood there with two grocery bags cutting into my fingers, still wearing my work slacks and the same blue button-down I’d thrown on at six in the morning. The November air in our little suburb outside Milwaukee had that thin, cold bite that slides right through a shirt. My breath puffed in the air between us.
I stared at her, waiting for the punch line. “That’s impossible,” I said. “I live alone.
And I’m at work all day.”
My neighbor, Ruth Halvorsen, had lived next door since my parents first moved to this house in the late eighties. She’d watched me learn to ride a bike on the sidewalk between our mailboxes. She’d watched me back Dad’s old Chevy out of this same cracked driveway the day I left for college.
She wasn’t the type to make up stories just to pass the time. “Well, someone’s in there,” she said, her gray eyebrows knitting together. “I heard yelling again around noon.
A man’s voice. Not the TV. Real shouting.
I went over and knocked. No answer. But I heard… movement.” Her voice softened just a little at that last word.
I shifted my grip on the bags, trying to make light of it. “Probably the TV,” I said. “I leave it on sometimes.
Makes it sound like somebody’s home. You know, for burglars.”
“Marcus…” She shook her head. “I know what a television sounds like.
This wasn’t that. This sounded like a man who was angry. In your bedroom.
I could hear it through the fence.”
The wind pushed a few dry maple leaves across the street. A car rolled past, slow, the way people drive through a quiet cul-de-sac where they don’t live. I forced a laugh that sounded hollow in my own ears.
“I’ll check it out,” I said. “But I promise there shouldn’t be anyone inside. You’d be hearing ghosts before you’d be hearing roommates.”
She didn’t smile.
Ruth just looked at me for a long moment, like she was trying to decide whether to say something else. Then she let out a breath and patted my arm. “Just… be careful,” she said, and turned back toward her front porch, where the small American flag she kept by the steps fluttered in the cold breeze.
I walked up to my own front door, trying to shake off the unease. The house looked exactly the way it always did at this time of year: a little tired, a little too quiet, a plastic rake leaning against the garage, the porch light I kept meaning to replace hanging crooked over the door. The faded house numbers my father had screwed in himself were still there above the mailbox.
Nothing about it said “loud.” Nothing said “angry man.”
Still, by the time I unlocked the door and pushed it open, my heart was beating a little faster than usual. The first thing that hit me was the smell. Not something bad, exactly—just different.
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