{"id":372,"date":"2021-05-03T19:35:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-03T23:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tcschueler.com\/?p=372"},"modified":"2021-05-05T17:15:29","modified_gmt":"2021-05-05T21:15:29","slug":"chapter-one-of-22-dutch-road-8-of-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tcschueler.com\/chapter-one-of-22-dutch-road-8-of-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter One of 22 Dutch Road (8 of 10)"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Stan Rutmeyer let Mr. Peebles out for his afternoon potty. The dog bolted, hustling down the deck steps to inventory the backyard pee spots. Some dogs are one-spot dogs, but Peebles, an industrious dachshund, liked to spread it around, hitting previous marks before trying anywhere new. Stan stood between open back doors, watching the dog\u2019s tail waggle as he went willy-nilly, peeing intermittently, working his way towards the neighbor\u2019s hawthorn hedge and the wall behind it. Stan looked over this wall which separated his yard from his neighbor\u2019s, noticing a small white sedan parked on the Buchanan driveway, a car that hadn\u2019t been there that morning. Well, doesn\u2019t look like that lawyer\u2019s car<\/em>, he thought, and it\u2019s certainly not Richard Buchanan\u2019s<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It was a hot afternoon, not the time of day to be standing in the sun. Stan realized he was half in and half out, cooling off the neighborhood just as Billy had done earlier. He stepped inside, closing the French doors behind him, confident Peebles would scratch the glass when ready to come in.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Stan had been examining ledgers in his den, but didn\u2019t return there right away, instead stopping in the kitchen for a ginger ale. Stan, who was battling Type 2 diabetes, allowed himself one soda a day and was looking forward to this afternoon\u2019s allotment. He took a Canada Dry from the fridge and stood by the sink, looking through the window at Buchanan\u2019s manor. Stan Rutmeyer\u2019s house was smaller than Dick Buchanan\u2019s\u2014all the other homes in Whispering Pines were\u2014but stood higher in relief, allowing a good view into Dick\u2019s yard over what Stan referred to as the Berlin Wall.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

He told himself he was looking to see if Bates (or whoever owned the white car) was going to cut Buchanan\u2019s lawn. It had been a stellar summer for growing grass in South Carolina, with plenty of heat and near-daily thunderstorms to keep the turf verdant. Stan himself had struggled keeping his own back forty in check, which meant Buchanan\u2019s yard was a prairie. To Stanley Rutmeyer, tending one\u2019s yard was a civic duty on par with voting, so with no yard man calling, his neighbor\u2019s lawn galled. Of course, Stan wasn\u2019t just curious about the lawn. Buchanan\u2019s statues, whose heads had appeared above the Berlin Wall earlier that spring, also piqued his curiosity, but for the moment, his dead neighbor\u2019s Serengeti took top billing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

At first, it had been no big deal. Two weeks after an ambulance arrived at 22 Dutch Road and one week after Ruthie, Stan\u2019s wife, learned that Buchanan had died, Stan cut Richard\u2019s lawn. He did it out of a neighborly respect for the dead and because Ruthie had asked him to\u2014whoever was in charge over there now had more important things to worry about, she\u2019d said. Besides, cutting the lawn would be the male equivalent of bringing a casserole, so Stan, who lived for riding his John Deere, took the hint.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It turned out his neighbor\u2019s lawn, larger than his own by two acres, was a challenging cut. The two dozen statues required careful maneuvering, and large, unexpected ruts (some with kicked-up furrows necessitating lifting the mower\u2019s blades) made for slow work. The gouges were odd: the last lawn service must have mown after a particularly bad rain as the ruts ran counter to natural drainage. Stan could knock his own yard out in less than sixty minutes, but that first Buchanan goodwill mowing took two and a half. The beer bottles and assorted trash hadn\u2019t helped; Dick had been dead perhaps a week before hooligans began arriving, requiring Stan to hop off the mower a dozen times to pick it all up.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Hooligans in an Aster & Son Paving truck, perhaps?<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

He remembered he\u2019d finished the last of the weed-whacking, wondering whether Shane Junior, the son of Aster & Son, and his band of delinquents were to blame for the trash, when an old dented Cadillac sedan drove under the Buchanan arch. That piece of crap has seen better days, <\/em>he\u2019d thought then. The fidgety driver, who wore a rumpled suit, parked three feet from Stan\u2019s shoes, emerging without acknowledging him. Ruthie later told him the guy was Deacon Bates, Buchanan\u2019s lawyer. Stanley put his weed-whacker down, wiping his hands thoroughly with a handkerchief before stepping up to the man, extending a dried hand.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\u201cHi-ya.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

Next section<\/a><\/p>\r\n

\r\n

Excerpt of the first chapter of horror-fantasy novel 22 Dutch Road<\/em><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stan Rutmeyer let Mr. Peebles out for his afternoon potty. The dog bolted, hustling down the deck steps to inventory the backyard pee spots. Some dogs are one-spot dogs, but Peebles, an industrious dachshund, liked to spread it around, hitting previous marks before trying anywhere new. Stan stood between open back doors, watching the dog\u2019s tail waggle as he went … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5837,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[15,16],"class_list":["post-372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-22-dutch-road","tag-free-first-chapters-of-books","tag-horror-fantasy","no-post-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nChapter One of 22 Dutch Road (8 of 10) - T.C. 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