More on Fenwick

“Slow down a bit, will ya?” Fen gasped as he pedaled. “I'm kinda out of shape.”

Linkoln laughed, slowing her pace by stopping her pedaling altogether. She loved to ride her bike. She especially loved to ride her bike with Fen Summers. He could never keep up, no matter how hard he tried. His professed, “out of shape” was hogwash. The boy could not keep his eyes steady on the road. A strange house, a wilting tree, an oddly parked car—Fen could not pass by without slowing to inspect them. He had to catalog and review these little bits of observation constantly, recalling obscure facts at the drop of a hat. He knew the mood of the doctor who lived four houses down by the way he trimmed his grass. He knew what car Mrs. Talmedge, the eccentric lady who owned five vehicles on Riverside drive, drove on which day of the week to which appointment.

Linkoln loved to shout out random questions to test Fen's knowledge. She was an exceptionally adventurous person, someone willing to leap from her bike to tackle him before he steered into a highway guardrail and fell to the traffic below. Fen was easily distracted. Lying on the grass after one such tackle, Linkoln realized that she just liked touching him at all, which scared her a bit and she jumped back up to her feet immediately. This friendship stretched into early childhood and neither opted for much physical contact with people outside of family.

“What is that?” Fen wondered a loud. Linkoln followed his gaze with her eyes. She wanted to be ready if he started swerving. A gigantic SUV-type vehicle filled her vision. Black, sleek and powerful, the overbearing beast sat feigning innocence at the curb. It was just the sort of creature that would house several black-suited creeps intent on watching someone through the tinted windows.

It was also almost directly across the street from Fen's house.

“Is it one of the neighbor's?” Linkoln asked. No matter how sinister something appeared, Linkoln remained skeptical. She believed deeply in a normal existence, where strange things like spies just did not appear across the street in ritzy rides. That sort of thing was for the movies.

Fen was the opposite in every way. He was suspicious of everything, making all the twists and turns of life out to be plots in his books. Nothing was simple or benign to him. Through and through Fen was a writer, in every dreamy, ultra-focused and weirdo way.

The two of them slowed to a crawl, fixated on the new parked car.

“Don't turn off into my driveway,” Fen murmured. Linkoln kindly humored him.

“Isn't it just as obvious to stare at them?” she murmured back, hiding a smile.

“Right,” he acquiesced, snapping his head back to the front and then narrowly missing his own parked Cavalier. Linkoln stifled a laugh. Suddenly the beast of an SUV roared to life and lumbered off down the street in the opposite direction. Both teens halted.

“That was creepy,” Fen stated, swinging a leg over the side of his bike.

“Very,” Linkoln added.

Linkoln stayed for dinner, along with two other friends of Fen and his sister Aonora. The duo often included guests for dinner at their home. Aonora loved cooking for people. Some siblings are total opposites in every sense of the word, but Aonora and Fen both loved people and doing things for people. If anyone needed help moving, painting, gardening, cleaning or peacemaking they need only choose which cell phone to call.

The house was modestly small. With just two occupants, the living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, office, bathroom and laundry room were more than enough space. It was a single-story house with a garage that housed Aonora's car and Fen's seldom-used Harley Davidson. The furniture was in good shape, though not new by most standards. Pictures hung from all the walls, memorandums of all the friendships they made in their lives. All the clutter in the house consisted of CDs and paper. Letters, post-cards, pictures, ticket-stubs, newspaper clippings—these filled memory books and shelves alike. The laundry room walls crowded four shelves filled completely with pieces of the past contained in that substance so often identified as paper.

A few books sat in Fen's office, but he had a habit of giving books away. Some movies and board games stacked by the couch in the living room. Aonora liked her TV show seasons in a tower by the older TV screen. She was a collector of Numb3rs, Chuck, Monk and Psych.

She did not own any expensive jewelry, clothes or collectibles. The cabinets held no silver, no high-priced glassware. No single object in the house was worth more than a hundred and fifty bucks, except possibly the refrigerator and Fen's laptop computer. It is important to remember this, because no thief would be willing to waste time stealing the contents of this particular home.