Tom listened to the van as it thrummed and faded down the road.
He went back into the house, alone. The silence seemed faintly alive.
“Hello, ghosts,” Tom said. “Bet you didn’t do the dishes after all.” But the thing was, they had.
Two
It wasn’t long before a single question came to occupy his mind almost exclusively: What was madness, and how do you know when it happens to you?
The cliche was that the question contained its own answer. If you’re sane enough to wonder, you must be all right. Tom had trouble with the logic of this. Surely even the most confirmed psychotic must sometimes gaze into the mirror and wonder whether things hadn’t gone just a little bit wrong?
The question wasn’t academic. As far as he could figure, there were only two options. Either he had lost his grip on his sanity—and he wasn’t willing to admit that yet—or something was going on in this house.
Something scary. Something strange.
He shelved the question for three days and was careful to clean up meticulously: no dirty dishes in the sink, no crumbs on the counter, garbage stowed in the back yard bin. The Tidiness Elves had no scope for their work and Tom was able to pretend that he had actually done the dishes himself the night he went to Tony’s: it must have been his memory playing a trick on him.
These were his first days at Arbutus Ford and there was plenty to occupy his mind. He spent most of his daylight hours studying a training manual or bird-dogging the senior salesmen. He learned how to greet buyers; he learned what an offer sheet looked like; he learned how to “T.O.”—how to turn over a buyer to the sales manager, who could eke out a few more dollars on an offer; who would then T.O. the customer to the finance people. (“Which is where the real money’s made,” the sales manager, Billy Klein, cheerfully confided.)