The Development

Peeping Tom

DON'T ASK ME (as my wife half teasingly did earlier this morning) who I think is reading or hearing this. My projected history of our Oyster Cove community, and specifically the season of it's Peeping Tom, is barely past the note-gathering stage, and there's nobody here in my study at 1010 Oyster Cove Court except me and my PC, who spend an hour or three together after breakfast and morning stretchies before Margie and I move on to the routine chores and diversions of a comfortably retired American couple in the dawn of the new millennium and the evening of their lives. Maybe our CIA/FBI types have found ways to eavesdrop on any citizen's scribbling? Or maybe some super-shrewd hacker has turned himself into a Listening Tom, the electronic equivalent of Oyster Cove's peeper, even when I'm talking to myself?

Don't ask me (but in that case you wouldn't need to, right?); I just work here. For all I know, "You" — like the subject of this history, in some folks' opinion — may not actually, physically exist. Unlike him, however (and we all assume our P.T., whether real or imagined, to have been a Him, not a Her), you're an invited guest, who- and whatever You are, not an eavesdropper. Welcome aboard, mate, and listen up!

As I was saying, I just work here, more or less between nine and noon most mornings, while Margaret the Indispensable does her ex-businesswoman business in her own workspace upstairs: reviews and adjusts our stock-and-bond accounts and other assets; pays the family bills and balances our checkbook; works the phone to line up service people; schedules our errands and appointments; plans our meals, vacation trips, grandkid visits… and Next Big Moves.

Which last-mentioned item prompts this whatever-it-is-I'm-doing. Margie and I have pretty much decided (and she'll soon e-mail the news to our middle-aged offspring, who'll be Sad But Relieved to hear it) that what with my ominously increasing memory problems and her near-laming arthritis, the time has come for us to list this pleasant "villa" of ours with a realtor and get ready to get ready to shift across and down the river from good old Heron Bay Estates (of which more presently) to TCI's assisted-living establishment, Bayview Manor.

Even Margie — a professional real-estate agent herself back in our city-house/country-house days, when she worked the suburban D.C. residential market while I taught history to fifth-and sixth-formers at Calvert Heights Country Day School — even Margie rolls her Chesapeake-green, macularly degenerating eyes at all that developers' lingo. Heron Bay Estates, now approaching the quarter-century mark, was the first large gated-community project of Tidewater Communities, Inc.: a couple thousand acres of former corn and soybean fields, creeper-clogged pine woods, and tidewater wetlands on Maryland's river-veined Eastern Shore. By no means "estates" in any conventional sense of that term, our well-planned and "ecologically sensitive" residential development is subdivided into neighborhoods — some additionally gated, most not — with names like Shad Run and Egret's Crest (low-rise condominiums), Blue Crab Bight (waterfront "coach homes," the developer's euphemism for over-and-under duplexes, with small-boat dockage on the adjacent tidal creek), Rockfish Reach (more of a stretch than a reach, as the only water in sight of that pleasant clutch of mid- to upper-midrange detached houses is a winding tidal creeklet and a water-hazard pond, ringed with cattails, between the tenth and eleventh holes of HBE's golf course, whose Ecological Sensitivity consists of using recycled "gray water" on it's greens and fairways instead of pumping down the water table even further), Spartina Pointe (a couple dozen upscale McMansions, not unhandsome, whose obvious newness so belies the fake-vintage spelling of their reeded land-spit that we mockingly sound it's terminal e: "Spartina Pointey," or "Ye Oldey Spartina Pointey") — and our own Oyster Cove, whose twenty-odd "villas" (on a circular "court" around a landscaped central green with a fountain that spritzes recycled water three seasons of the year) have nothing of the Mediterranean or Floridian that that term implies: In the glossary of HBE and of TCI generally, "villas" are side-by-side two-story duplexes (as distinct from those afore-mentioned "coach homes" on the one hand and detached houses on the other) of first-floor brick and second-floor vinyl clapboard siding, attractively though non-functionally window-shuttered, two-car-garaged, and modestly porched fore and aft, their exterior maintenance and small-lot landscaping managed mainly by our Neighborhood Association rather than by the individual owners. Halfway houses, one might say, between the condos and the detached-house communities.

Indeed, that term applies in several respects. Although a few of us are younger and quite a few of us older but still able, your typical Oyster Cove couple are about halfway between their busy professional peak and their approaching retirement. Most would describe themselves as upper-middle-incomers — an O.C. villa is decidedly not low-budget housing — but a few find their mortgage and insurance payments, property taxes, and the Association's stiff maintenance assessments just barely manageable, while a few others have merely camped here until their Spartina Pointe(y) (Mc)Mansions were landscaped, interior-decorated, and ready for them and their Lexuses, Mercedeses, and golf carts (3.5-car garages are standard in SpPte). An Oyster Cove villa is typically the first second home of a couple like Margie and me fifteen or so years back: empty nesters experimenting with either retirement or a transportable home office while getting the feel of the Heron Bay scene, trying out the golf course and Club, and scouting alternative neighborhoods. The average residency is about ten years, although some folks bounce elsewhere after one or two — up to Spartina Pointe or Rockfish Reach, down to an Egret's Crest condo, more or less sidewise to a Blue Crab Bight coach home, or out to some other development in some other location, if not to Bayview Manor or the grave — and a dwindling handful of us old-timers have been here almost since the place was built.

To wind up this little sociogram: The majority of Heron Bay Estaters are White Anglo-Saxon Protestants of one or another denomination, but there are maybe three or four Jewish families, a few more Roman Catholics, and probably a fair number of seculars. (Who knows? Who cares? Firm believers in the separation of church and estate, we don't pry into such matters.) Politically, we're split about evenly between the two major parties. No Asians or African Americans among us yet — not because they're officially excluded (as they would have been fifty years ago, and popular though the adjective "exclusive" remains with outfits like TCI); perhaps because any in those categories with both the means and the inclination to buy into a gated community prefer not to be ethnic-diversity pioneers on the mostly rural and not-all-that-cosmopolitan Eastern Shore.

"Gated": That too is a bit of a stretch in Oyster Cove, and (in Margie's and my opinion, anyhow) an expensive bit of ornamentation for Heron Bay. In a low-crime area whose weekly newspaper's police blotter runs more to underage tobacco and liquor purchases and loud-noise complaints in the nearby county seat than to break-ins and crimes of violence, there's little need for round-the-clock gatekeepers, HBE Resident windshield stickers, phone-ahead clearance for visitors, and routine neighborhood drive-throughs by the white-painted Security car — though it's admittedly a (minor) pleasure not to bother latching doors and windows every time we bicycle over to the Club for tennis or drive into town for medical/dental appointments, a bit of shop ping, or dinner. As for the secondary gates at Spartina Pointe, Blue Crab Bight, and Oyster Cove — unmanned (even though some have gatehouses), their swing-gates operated by push-button code and usually closed only at night — pure snobbery, many of us think, or mild paranoia, and a low-grade nuisance, especially on rainycold nights when you don't want to roll down your car window and reach out to the lighted control box, or oblige arriving guests (whom you've had to supply in advance with the four-digit entry code) to do likewise. And both gates — Reader/ Listener take note — screen motor vehicles only: Bicycles and pedestrians come and go freely on the sidewalks, whether the gates are open or shut. Our own Oyster Cove gates, by near-unanimous vote of the Neighborhood Association, have remained open and inoperative for the past dozen years. We use the attractively landscaped little brick gatehouse for storing lawn fertilizer, grass seed, and pavement de-icer for the winter months: a less expensive alternative to removing the whole structure, which anyhow some residents like for it's ornamental (or prestige-suggesting) value. Since, as aforementioned, the average O.C. residency is a decade or less, it's only we old-timers who remember actually having used those secondary gates.

But then, it's only we who remember, for better or worse and as best some of us can, when the neighborhood was in it's prime: "built out," as they say, after it's raw early years of construction and new planting, it's trees and shrubbery and flower beds mature, the villas comfortably settled into their sites but not yet showing signs of "deferred maintenance" despite the Association's best efforts to keep things shipshape. Same goes for HBE generally, it's several neighborhoods at first scalped building lots with model homes at comparatively bargain prices, then handsomely full-bloomed and more expensive, then declining a bit here and there (while still final-building on a few acres of former "preserve") as Tidewater Communities, Inc., moved on to newer projects all around the estuary. And likewise, to be sure, for the great Bay itself: inarguably downhill since residential development and agribusiness boomed in the past half-century, with their runoff of nutrients and pollutants and the consequent ecological damage. Ditto our Republic, some would say, and for that matter the world: downhill, at least on balance, despite there having been no world wars lately.

Nor are we-all what we used to be, either.

But this is not about that, exactly. M. and I have quite enjoyed our tenure here at 1010 Oyster Cove Court, our next-to-last home address. Of the half-dozen we've shared in our nearly fifty years of marriage, none has been more agreeable than our "villa" of the past fifteen and sole residence of the past ten, since we gave up straddling the Bay. We've liked our serial neighbors, too: next door in 1008, for example, at the time I'll tell of, Jim and Reba Smythe, right-wingers both, but generous, hospitable, and civic-spirited; he a semiretired, still smoothly handsome investment broker, ardent wildfowl hunter, and all-round gun lover; she an elegant pillar of the Episcopal church and the county hospital board. On our other side back then, in 1012, lively Matt and Mary ("M&M") Grauer, he a portly and ruddy-faced ex — Methodist minister turned all-purpose private-practice "counselor"; she a chubbily cheerful flower-gardener and baker of irresistible cheesecakes; both of them avid golfers, tireless volunteers, and supporters of worthy, mildly liberal causes. And across the Court in 1011, then as now, our resident philosopher Sam Bailey, recently widowered, alas: a lean and bald and bearded, acerbic but dourly amusing retired professor of something or other at an Eastern Shore branch of the state university, as left of center as the Smythes were right, whose business card reads Dr. Samuel Bailey, Ph.D., Educational Consultant—whatever that is. Different as we twenty-odd Oyster Cove householders were and are — and never particularly close friends, mind, just amiable neighbors — we've always quite gotten along, pitched in together on community projects (most of us, anyhow: What community doesn't include a couple of standoffish free riders?), and taken active part in OCNA, our neighborhood association. Indeed, for the past twelve years I've served as that outfit's president; it's a post I'll vacate with some regret when the For Sale sign goes up out front. And despite my having been, please remember, a mere history teacher, not a historian, I find myself inclined to set down for whomever, before my memory goes kaput altogether, some account of our little community, in particular of what Margie and I consider to have been it's most interesting hour: the summer of the Peeping Tom.

And when was that? Suffice it to say, not many years since. Odd as this may sound from an ex — history teach, the exact dates aren't important. Truth is, I'd rather not be specific, lest some busybody go through the records and think: "Mm-hm: Just after the [So-and-Sos] bought [Twelve-Sixteen, say], which they sold a year later and skipped out to Florida. I thought there was something fishy about that pair, him especially. Didn't even play golf!" When in fact the poor guy had advanced emphysema and shifted south to escape our chilly-damp tidewater winters. So let's just say that the time I'll tell of, if I manage to, was well after "Vietnam," but before "Iraq"; more specifically, after desktop and even laptop computers had become commonplace, but before handheld ones came on line; after cordless phones, but before everybody had cellulars; after VCRs, but before DVDs.

Okay? The name's Tim Manning, by the way — and if You've got the kind of eye and ear for such things that Matt Grauer used to have, You'll have noted that in all four of the families thus far introduced, the men are called by one-syllable first names and their wives by two-, with the accent on the first (Sam Bailey's late mate, a rail-thin black-haired beauty until cancer chemotherapy wrecked her, was named Ethel). So? So nothing, I suppose, except maybe bear in mind Dr. Sam's wise caution that a Pattern — of last names, happenings, whatever — doth not in itself a Meaning make, much as we may be programmed by evolution to see patterns in things, and significance in patterns.

Okay?

Okay. "It all began," as stories so often start (and if I were a storyteller instead of a history-teller, I'd have started this tale right here, like that, instead of where and how I did), late one mid-May evening in 19-whatever: already warm enough here in Chesapeake country to leave windows open until bedtime, but no AC or even ceiling fans needed yet. After cleaning up the dinner dishes, Margie and I had enjoyed a postprandial stroll around Oyster Cove Court, as was and remains our habit, followed by an hour's reading in 1010's living room; then we'd changed into nightclothes and settled down in the villa's family room as usual to spend our waking day's last hour with the telly before our half-past-ten bedtime. At a commercial break in whatever program we were watching, I stepped into the kitchen to pour my regular pale-ale nightcap while Margie went into the adjacent lavatory to pee — and a few moments later I heard her shriek my name. I set down bottle and glass and hurried herward; all but collided with her as she fled the pissoir, tugging up the underpants that she wears under her shortie nightgown on warm end-of-evenings.

"Somebody's out there!" In all our years of marriage I'd seldom seen my self-possessed helpmeet so alarmed. "Looking at me!"

I flicked off the light and hurried past her to the open lavatory window, near the toilet. Nothing in sight through it's screen except the Leyland cypresses, dimly visible in the streetlight-glow from O.C. Court, between us and the Smythes, which give both houses privacy enough to make closing our first-floor window blinds unnecessary. "Call Security," I said (Heron Bay's main gatehouse); "I'll go have a look outside." Hurried back into the kitchen, grabbed the big flashlight from atop the fridge, and headed for the back door.

"Do you think it's safe to go out there?" Margie worried after me. "In your PJs?"

"Not safe for that snooping bastard," I told her, "if I get my hands on him." Though what exactly I would have done in that unlikely event, I'm not sure: haven't been in a physical scuffle since third grade; never served in the military or had any other form of hand-to-hand-combat training; hope I'm not a coward, but know I'm not the macho sort either. Was maybe a bit surprised myself, not unpleasantly, at my impulsive readiness to go unarmed out into the night for a possible-though-unlikely confrontation with a prowler. Went anyhow, adrenaline-pumped, through laundry room and garage to night-lighted rear driveway and around to side yard — shining the flashlight prudently ahead to warn of my approach.

No sign of anyone. The night was sweet; the air moist, mild, breezeless, and bug-free. The grassy aisle between those cypresses and our foundation planting of dwarf junipers wasn't the sort to show footprints; nor was the shredded-hardwood mulch around those junipers obviously disturbed under the lavatory window, as far as I could tell. Standing among them, I verified that a six-footer like myself could just see over the shoulder-high sill into the lavatory and (with a bit of neck-craning) over to the toilet area. I shrugged a "Who knows?" or "Nobody in sight" sign to Margie, standing inside there with cordless phone in hand, then stepped back onto the grass and checked with the flashlight to see whether my footprints were visible. Couldn't say for certain, but guessed not.

"Well, I damned sure didn't imagine it," Margie said a bit defensively when — having inspected the length of our side of the duplex and as much of the front and rear yards as I could without attracting the neighbors' attention — I was safely back indoors.

"Nobody said you did, hon." I gave her a hug, and to lighten things up added, "Great night for prowling, by the way: no moon or mosquitoes. You called Security?"

"They're sending the patrol car around for an extra check and keeping an eye out for pedestrians leaving the grounds this late in the evening. But they're not armed, and they don't go into people's yards except in emergencies. They offered to call 911 or the sheriff's office for us, but I said we'd call them ourselves if you saw anything suspicious out there. What do we think?"

We considered. What she'd seen was certainly suspicious — alarming, even — but was it worth involving the county sheriff and the state police? On the one hand, the prowler might for all we knew have been armed and dangerous, scouting the premises with an eye to Breaking and Entering, as it's called in the crime reports, and been spooked when Margie caught sight of him. On the other hand, he might have been some Oyster Cover out looking for a strayed house pet and mortified to find himself glimpsing Margaret Manning in mid-urination…

In either case, "A white guy," she affirmed, her pulse and respiration returning to normal as we brushed our teeth and made ready for bed. "No eyeglasses or mustache or beard as far as I could tell, though I couldn't see his face clearly out there through the screen. High forehead but not bald, unless he maybe had some kind of cap on. It was just a glimpse, you know? Kind of a pale moon-face that popped up and looked in and then ducked and disappeared when he saw I'd seen him and heard me holler for you."

So what did we think? In the end — maybe partly because by then it was past eleven and neither I nor the main-gate security guys (who phoned us after their pass through the neighborhood) had seen anything amiss — we decided not to notify the sheriff's office, much less call the 911 emergency number, until or unless something further turned up. I would take another look around in the morning, and we would definitely alert our neighbors, ask them to pass the word along and keep an eye out.

"Sonofabitch peeps in on my wife," Jim Smythe growled, "I'll blow his damn head off." He had a way, did swarthy Jim, of making those less belligerent than himself seem reprehensible, wimpy: a habit at which Reba, to her credit, rolled her fine brown eyes. Ethel Bailey, on the other hand, was impressed that I'd gone out there alone and unarmed in the dark. She would never have let Sam do that, Margie said she'd said — characteristically admiring husbands other than her own while implying that their wives were less appreciative of them than was she. Sam himself good-naturedly questioned my "risk-benefit analysis" while freely admitting that he'd be too chicken to do what I'd done even if he judged it the best course of action, which he didn't. Matt Grauer, too, as fond of proverbs as of patterns, reminded me that discretion is the better part of valor, but jokingly declared himself envious of the Peeping Tom. "Margie on the can!" he teased the two of us. "What an eyeful!" To which his plump Mary added, "If it'd been me, he'd've gotten a different kind of eyeful: I'd've wet my pants." "Not likely," Margie reminded her, "when you've already dropped them to do your business. Anyhow, guys, they don't say 'scared shitless' for nothing: I here report that it applies to Number One as well as Number Two." Whereupon Sam and Matt, our neighborhood eggheads (though only Sam was bald), bemusedly wondered whether the colloquialisms "It scared me shitless" and "It scared the shit out of me" are two ways of describing the same reaction or (understanding the former to mean "It scared me out of shitting" and the latter to mean "It scared me into shitting my pants") descriptions of two opposite, though equally visceral and involuntary, manifestations of fear.

Thus did we banter the disconcerting event toward assimilation, agreeing that the prowler/peeper was in all likelihood a one-time interloper from "outside": some bored, beered-up young redneck, we imagined, of the sort who nightly cruised the shopping-plaza parking lots in their megabass-whumping, NASCAR-stickered jalopies and smashed their empty Coors bottles on the asphalt. Until, less than two weeks later, Becky Gibson (with her husband, Henry, the new owners of 220 Bivalve Bend, one of several saltily named side streets of Oyster Cove Court) glimpsed a pale face pressed to the glass of their back-porch door as she passed by it en route through their darkened house to turn of a kitchen light inadvertently left on when the couple retired for the night. Like my Margie, she called for her husband; unlike me (but this was, after all, the second such incident), he unhesitatingly dialed 911. Although the responding officer considerately didn't sound his siren at one in the morning, a number of us noticed the patrol car's flashers even through our closed eyelids and bedroom-window curtains. As OCNA's president, I felt it my responsibility to slip as quietly as I could out of bed and into my pajama bottoms (which Margie and I have always slept without, originally for romantic reasons, latterly out of long habit and urinary convenience in our three-pees-a-night old age) and to step outside and see what was what.

Another fine May night, still and moonless. I could see the distant flashers pulsing from somewhere around the corner on Bivalve Bend, but couldn't tell whether they were from one of the county's multipurpose emergency vehicles or a sheriff's patrol car. Not a fire truck, I guessed, or there'd have been sirens. Lest I be mistaken for a prowler myself, I ventured no farther along the curb than the edge of our property, tempting as it was to continue past the next two duplexes to the corner. Other folks were quite possibly looking out their front windows, and anyhow one had to draw some line between being a concerned neighbor and a prying one. As I turned back, I saw the Heron Bay security patrol car — an "environmentally sensitive" hybrid bearing the Blue Heron logo of HBE — turn into Oyster Cove Court through our ever-open gate and head for Bivalve Bend. Rather than hailing or waving it down in my pajamas to ask what was happening, I stepped behind a nearby large boxwood (standard walkway-flanking shrub around our circle) and crouched a bit for better cover until the vehicle hummed past.

"Looks like we have ourselves a problem," all hands agreed next day, after details of the past night's alarm had circulated through the community. Like Margie, silver-curled Becky Gibson could say only that the figure at her back-door window had been a beardless adult white male, either dark-haired or wearing a black bill cap backwards; whether it was the same intruder or another, two Peeping Tom incidents in successive weeks in the same small neighborhood obviously spelled trouble. As had been the case with us, neither the Gibsons nor in this instance the sheriff's deputies had found any trace of the prowler, who'd presumably vanished as soon as he knew himself to have been seen. Mary Grauer, wakened like me by the reflected flashes, was almost certain she'd seen from their living room window somebody skulking in our joint front-walk shrubbery: probably the Gibsons' peeper beating a retreat from Oyster Cove. I was tempted to explain and laugh it of, but held my tongue lest anyone get the wrong idea. Even to Margie I said only that I'd stepped outside to have a look, not that I'd walked to the curb in my PJs and ducked for cover when Security came by.

The third incident, just two nights later, was less unequivocal than it's forerunners: Reba Smythe, looking from a window just after dark as we all seemed to be doing now with some frequency, thought she might have glimpsed a furtive figure in the Baileys' front yard, and phoned to alert them. Her husband hurried over, nine-millimeter pistol in hand, just in time to quite frighten Sam Bailey, who deplored handgun ownership anyhow, as he stepped out to see whether anyone was there. The two men then did a perimeter check together, and found nothing. Reba acknowledged that she might have been mistaken: She'd recently suffered what ophthalmologists term a vitreous separation in her left eye, in consequence of which her vision was pestered by black "floaters" that she sometimes mistook for flying insects or other UFOs, as she liked to call them. But she was equally insistent that she might not have been mistaken; she just couldn't say for sure, although whatever she'd seen was certainly larger than her usual dark specks.

At a sort-of-emergency meeting of the Neighborhood Association the following afternoon (at our place, with jug wines and simple hors d'oeuvres), we decided to reactivate the Oyster Cove secondary entrance and exit gates as a warning and possible deterrent, even though our P.T., as we'd begun to call him for short, was pretty clearly a pedestrian. And we would press HBECA, the overall community association, for additional nighttime security patrols, even if that entailed an increase in everyone's annual assessment; for it needed no Matt Grauer to point out that three such incidents constituted an alarming pattern, and while they'd been confined thus far to Oyster Cove, it was to be expected that the peeper might try other Heron Bay venues, particularly now that ours was on a geared-up lookout for him.

As we most certainly were: unpleasantly on edge, but reassuringly drawn together by a common nuisance that, while not yet quite an overt threat, was definitely scary.

"Not a threat?" Mary Grauer protested when I described our problem in those terms. "You don't think we feel threatened when some creep might be peeking at us in the shower?"

Posing like a Jazz Age flapper with her glass of chablis in one hand and a brie-smeared cracker in the other, "Speak for yourself, dear," Ethel Bailey teased. "Some of us might find it a turn- on."

Less publicly, Matt Grauer and Jim Smythe shared with me the disturbing possibility — just theoretical, mind, not a genuine suspicion yet — that our P.T. might actually be one of us: if not an Oyster Cover, maybe some unfortunately perverted resident of an adjacent neighborhood. Or somebody's kinky visiting son, perhaps, or adolescent grandson, out on the prowl unbeknownst to his hosts?

No way to check on that last, really: Nearly all of us being empty-nesters and most of us retirees, there was a constant stream of visiting progeny and out-of-town friends in Heron Bay. But the One of Us hypothesis was reinforced, amusingly though ambiguously, a week or so later, when by early-June full moonlight both Bob and Frieda Olsen (in 1014, on the Grauers' other side from us) spotted a stocky, hatless somebody in dark shorts and shirt crossing stealthily, as it seemed to them, from their backyard into "M&M's." The alarm was quickly passed by telephone from the Olsens to the Grauers to us. We all clicked our backyard lights on, and while Margie rang up the Smythes, we three husbands stepped out back to investigate — and interrupted Jim Smythe, pistol in one hand again and flashlight in the other, completing what he unabashedly declared to us (even as Reba was confirming it by phone to Margie) was the first of the one-man armed patrols of Oyster Cove that he intended to make nightly until either HBECA increased the frequency of it's security rounds or he caught and apprehended our P.T. in the act — or, better yet, gunned the sick bastard down as he fled. Not a ready acknowledger of his mistakes, Jim was dissuaded from this self-appointed mission only by our unanimous protest that it was at best more likely to trigger false alarms than to prevent real ones, and at worst might lead to his shooting some innocent neighbor out stargazing or merely enjoying the spring air. "Yeah, well, all right then," he grudgingly conceded (while Reba, who'd joined us along with our wives, did her signature eye-roll). "But they'd better stay in their own backyard, 'cause anybody I catch mooning around in mine, I intend to plug."

"Gun nuts, I swear," Sam Bailey sighed to me next day, when we shook our heads together over the fellow's presumption and shortsightedness. "Doesn't he realize that if one of us happened to be a guy like him, he'd have gotten himself shot last night?"

"Maybe he's been the P.T. all along," I ventured — not seriously, really, and none of us cared to tease Jim with that proposition.

Less alarming, if we count the foregoing as Peeper Incident #4, was the one that followed it the very next evening, as reported by it's perpetrator and sole witness, Sam himself, when I happened to walk out to fetch our morning newspaper of the front walk at the same time as he, the pair of us still in robe and slippers before breakfast and Sam wearing the French beret that he'd affected ever since teaching a Fulbright year in Nanterre three decades past. "So at nine last night Ethel turns on one of those TV sitcoms that I can't stand, okay?" he tells me. "So I step into the library," as the Baileys like to call their book-lined living room, "to read for an hour till bedtime, and I catch sight of some movement just outside the picture window," which, flanked by smaller double-hung windows, overlooks the front yard, the street, and the commons beyond in all Oyster Cove Court villas. "So I cross the room to check it out — in my robe and PJs, same as now? — and the guy comes at me from out there on the porch as I come at him from inside, and I'm thinking, Isn't he a brazen bastard, and traipsing around there in his nightclothes too! Until I realize it's my own reflection I'm looking at. So I stand there contemplating myself in the picture window and feeling foolish while my pulse calms down, and then I experiment a bit with different lights on and of — table lamps, reading lamps, the track lights over the bookshelves — to see how a person inside might be fooled by his own reflection in different amounts of light from different angles. Because it's occurring to me that our Peeping Tom might be not only one of us, but each one of us who's seen him. In short" — he touched his beret—"Monsieur Voyeur, c'est moi."

Nonsense, all hands agreed when Sam's report and theory made the rounds: What had so alarmed Margie at our bathroom window and Becky Gibson at her back door had been a youngish, medium-built man, not the reflection of a gracefully aging though less-thin-than-she-used-to-be woman. And it was Jim Smythe on his reckless neighborhood patrol that the Olsens had spotted behind 1014, not Bob and Frieda's joint reflection.

"On the other hand," Ethel Bailey pretended to consider seriously, squinting over-shoulder at her husband, "that beret of Sam's could be mistaken in the dark for a backwards bill cap, n'est-ce pas? Do you suppose our Oyster Cove pervert might turn out to be the guy I've been sharing a bed with for forty-three years?" Come to think of it, though, she added, the ladies' P.T. had been sans eyeglasses, and Doc Sam couldn't find his own weenie without his bifocals. No fun being a voyeur if you can't see what you're peeping at!

"Seriously though, people," Sam bade us consider while all this was being reviewed, with edgy jocularity, at our next OCNA meeting. "Granted that what the Olsens saw was our pistol-packing Jim-boy, and that whatever Margie and Becky saw, it wasn't literally their own reflection. Same with these new reports from Blue Crab Bight and Rockfish Reach…" in both of which neighborhoods by then, one resident had reported a peeper/prowler sighting to the HBE Community Association.

"They're just jealous of us Oyster Cove women getting all the attention," Reba Smythe joked, to her husband's nonamusement.

"Better pickings over there, d'you suppose?" Matt Grauer pretended to wonder — and added, despite Mary's punching his shoulder, "Guess I'll have to give it a try some night."

"What I worry," Jim Smythe here growled, "is we might have a copycat thing going: other guys taking their cue from our guy."

Ethel Bailey tried to make light of this disturbing suggestion: "Another Heron Bay amenity, maybe? One peeper for each neighborhood, on a rotating basis, so we don't have to undress for the same creep week after week?" But a palpable frisson of alarm, among the women especially, went through the room.

With a gratified smile, "You're all making my point for me," Doc Sam declared.

"Your pointey," I couldn't resist correcting, and felt Margie's elbow in my ribs. "P-O-I-N-T-E, as they spell it up the road."

But there was a nervousness in our joking. He was not maintaining, Sam went on in his mildly lectorial fashion, that every one of these half-dozen or so sightings had literally been the sighter's own reflection, although his own experience demonstrated that at least one of them had been and raised the possibility that some others might have been too, it being a well-established principle of perceptual psychology that people tend to see what they expect to see. No: All he meant was that to some extent, at least, the P.T. might be — might embody, represent, whatever — a projection of our own fears, needs, desires. "Like God," he concluded, turning up his palms and looking ceilingward, "in the opinion of some of us, anyhow."

"Objection," objected Matt Grauer, and Sam said, "Sorry there, Reverend."

"Are you suggesting," Becky Gibson protested, "that we want to be peeped at on the potty? Speak for yourself, neighbor!"

More edgy chuckles. Sam grinned and shrugged; his wife declared, "I don't know about you-all, but I've taken to checking my hair and makeup before I undress, just in case."

But scoff though we might at Sam's "projection" theory, at least some of us (myself included) had to acknowledge that for Jim Smythe, say, the P.T. could be said to have addressed a macho inclination to which Jim welcomely responded — as perhaps, changes changed, had been the case with Ethel Bailey's touch of exhibitionism. And we were, as a neighborhood, agreeably more bonded by our common concern than we had been before (or would be after), the way a community might become during an extended power outage, say, or by sharing cleanup chores after a damaging storm. Thanks to our Peeping Tom, we were coming to know one another better, our sundry strengths and shortcomings, and to appreciate the former while accepting the latter. Matt Grauer might tend to pontificate and Sam Bailey to lecture, but their minds were sharp, their opinions not to be taken lightly. Jim Smythe was a bit of a bully, and narrow-minded, but a man to be counted on when push came to shove. Ethel Bailey was a flirt and a tease, but she had put her finger on an undeniably heightened self-consciousness in all of us — perhaps especially, though not merely, in the Oyster Cove wives — as we went about our after-dark domestic routines. And when some days later, for example, it was reported that a fellow from over in Egret's Crest, upon spotting or believing he'd spotted a face at the bathroom window of his first-floor condo as he zipped his fly after urination, had unzipped it again, fished out his penis, marched to the by-then-dark window saying "Eat me, cocksucker!" and afterward boasted openly of having done so, his account told us little about the interloper (assuming that there had in fact been one) and rather much about the interlopee, if that's the right word.

For all our shared concern and heightened community spirit, however, by July of that summer we Heron Bay Estaters could be said to be divided into a sizable majority of "Peeping Tommers" on the one hand (those who believed that one or more prowlers, probably from Outside but not impossibly one of our own residents, was sneak-peeking into our domiciles) and a minority of Doubting Thomases, convinced that at least a significant percentage of the reported incidents were false alarms; that, as Sam Bailey memorably put it, we had come collectively to resemble an oversensitive smoke alarm, triggered as readily by a kitchen stove burner or a dinner-table candle as by a bona fide blaze. My wife was among the true believers — not surprisingly, inasmuch as her initial "sighting experience" (Sam's term, assigning our P.T. to the same ontological category as UFOs) had started the whole sequence. I myself was sympathetic both to her conviction and to Sam's "projection" theory in it's modified and expanded version set forth above — in support of which I here recount for the very first time, to whoever You are, the next Oyster Cove Peeper Incident, known heretofore not even to Margie, only to Yours Truly.

Hesitation. Deep breath. Resolve to Tell All, trusting You to accept that Tim Manning is not, was never, the P.T. per se. But…:

On a muggy tidewater night toward that month's end, while Margie watched the ten o'clock TV news headlines from Baltimore, I stepped out front to admire a planetarium sky with a thin slice of new moon setting over by the gatehouse, off to westward, from where also flickered occasional sheet lightning from an isolated thunderstorm across the Chesapeake. Although our windows were closed and our AC on against the subtropical temperatures, the night air had begun to cool a bit and dew to form on everything, sparkly in the streetlamp light. In short, an inviting night, it's southwest breeze pleasant on my bare arms and legs (not this time in my usual after-nine pajamas, I happened to be still wearing the shorts and T-shirt that I'd donned for dinner after my end-of-afternoon shower). No problem with mosquitoes: The Association sprays all of Heron Bay Estates regularly, to the tut-tuts of the ecologically sensitive but the relief of us who enjoy gardening, backyard barbecues, and the out-of-doors generally. Time was, as I may have mentioned, when the two of us and others would take an after-dark stroll around Oyster Cove Court, to stretch our legs a bit before turning in for the night. Since the advent of the Peeping Tom, however, that pleasant practice had all but ceased, despite Jim Smythe's reasonable urging of it as a deterrent; one didn't want to be mistaken for the P.T., and most would prefer not to encounter him in mid-peep, lest he turn out to be not only real but armed and dangerous.

So I had the Court to myself, as it were — or believed I did, until I thought I saw some movement in the corridor between Sam and Ethel's 1011 and the villa to it's right. A little flash of light it was, actually, I realized when I turned my head that way, which to my peripheral vision had looked like someone maybe duck ing for cover over there, but which I saw now to be either the shadow of movement from inside one of the Baileys' lighted windows or else light from that window on some breeze-stirred foliage outside. More and more of us, as the P.T. incidents persisted, had taken to keeping all blinds and draperies closed after sunset; it was unusual to see light streaming from an uncurtained window of what was evidently an occupied room — the Baileys' main bathroom, in fact, by my reckoning, our Oyster Cove floor plans being pretty much identical. It occurred to me then to check our own bathroom window, to make certain that with it's venetian blinds fully lowered and closed nothing could be seen — through some remaining slit at the sill, for example, or at the edges of the slats. Creepy as it felt to be spying on oneself, so to speak, I was able to verify that nothing could be seen in there except that the light was on; no doubt Margie making ready for bed.

What must it be like, I couldn't help wondering, to be that sicko bastard snooping on unsuspecting people as they washed their crotches and wiped their asses? I found myself — I'm tempted to say watched myself — returning to the street and strolling as if casually across the Court toward that light from 1011, assuring myself that in good-neighborly fashion I was making certain that nothing was amiss over there, but at the same time realizing, with a thrill of dismay, that what I might really be about to do was…

Wearing only her underpants, slim Ethel Bailey stood at her bathroom window, facing it's curtained and unlighted counterpart across the shrubberied aisle in 1013 (it's floor plan the mirror image of 1011's). Eyes closed, thin lips mischievously smiling, head turned aside like an ancient-Egyptian profile and chin out-thrust in amused, faux-modest challenge, she cupped her small breasts in her hands as if in presentation and swiveled her upper torso slightly from side to side, the better to display them. As I watched from behind a small cypress, she then slid one hand down across her flat belly and into the front of her jay-blue undies, moved it around inside there, and twitched her pelvis as if to the beat of some silent music. Turned herself hind-to; flexed and unflexed her skinny buttocks practically on the windowsill as she worked her panties down! Hot-faced with appall at both of us, I beat as hasty a retreat as prudence allowed. Was relieved indeed to see no one else out enjoying the night air. Hoped to Christ Jim Smythe wasn't checking for prowlers from his front window.

Already in bed, sitting propped against it's king-size headboard and working her Sunday Times crossword puzzle while she waited for me to join her, "Where've you been?" Margie asked, in a tone of mock-petulant amusement, when I came in. "Out peeping on the neighbors?"

"Nobody out there worth peeping at," I declared as lightly as I could manage, and moved past her to the bathroom to hide my flushed face. "All the hot stuff's right here in Ten-Ten."

"Yes, well," she called back — playfully, to my immeasurable relief. "It is a bit sticky in here. Maybe turn the ceiling fan on when you come back in?"

I did, having undressed, washed up, brushed teeth, peed (uncomfortably conscious of the window virtually at my elbow), and donned a short-sleeved pajama top — and found that Margie had already shed hers and set aside her puzzle, expectantly. At that period of our lives, we Mannings still made love at least a couple of times a week (the so-clinical phrase "had sex" was not in as general use back then as nowadays, and never between ourselves), most often in the mornings, but also and usually more ardently at bedtime or even on a foul-weather weekend afternoon. That night, as the low-speed overhead fan moved light air over our skin and I was simultaneously stirred and shamed by the un-expungeable image of Sam Bailey's naked wife, we came together more passionately than we had done for some while. Entwined with her then in spent contentment, guilty-conscienced but enormously grateful for our happy and after-all-faithful marriage, I wondered briefly — and unjealously — whom my wife might have been fantasizing as her lover while we two went at it.

But "Wow," she murmured in drowsy languor. "That night sky of yours must've been some turn-on. You'll have to try it more often." "You're my turn-on," I assured her — dutifully, guiltily, but nonetheless sincerely as we disconnected our satisfied bodies and turned to sleep.

And there You pretty much have it, make of it what You will. Relieved both as self-appointed chronicler and as a prevailingly moral man to put that discreditable aberration behind me, I wish I could follow it now with a proper dramatic climax and denouement to this account of the Oyster Cove Peeping Tom: Some rascally local teenager, say, or migrant worker, is caught red-handed (red-eyed?) in the disgusting act and turned over to the Authorities, unless gunned down in flagrante delicto by Jim Smythe or some other Oyster Cover, several of whom had seen fit to arm themselves as the sightings multiplied. Or better yet, for dramatic effect if not for neighborhood comity, the P.T. turns out indeed to have been one of us, who then swears he was only keeping an eye out for prowlers, but fails to convince a fair number of us despite his mortified wife's indignant and increasingly desperate defense of him. More or less ostracized, the couple list their villa for sale, move somewhere down south or out west, and divorce soon after.

Et cetera. But what You're winding up here, if You happen to exist, is a history, not a Story, and it's "ending" is no duly gratifying Resolution nor even a capital-E Ending, really, just a sort of petering out, like most folks' lives. No further Oyster Cove P.T. sightings reported after July, and only one more from elsewhere in Heron Bay Estates — from an arriviste couple just settling into their brand-new Spartina Pointey mansion and, who knows, maybe wanting in on the action? The late-summer Atlantic hurricane season preempted our attention as usual; perhaps one of it's serial dock-swamping, tree-limb-cracking near misses blew or washed the creep away? Life in the community reverted to normal: New neighbors moved in, replacing others moving up, down, sideways, or out. Kitchens and bathrooms were remodeled, whole villas renovated, older cars traded in for new. Grand children were born (never on grandparental location, and often thousands of American miles away); their parents — our grownup children — divorced or didn't, remarried or didn't, succeeded or failed in their careers or just muddled through. Old Oyster Covers got older, faltered, died — Ethel Bailey among them, rendered leaner yet in her terminal season by metastasized cervical cancer and it's vain attendant therapies; Jim Smythe too, felled by a stroke when Democrats won the White House in '92. We re-deactivated our secondary security gates, and some of us resumed our evening paseos around the Court. Already by Halloween of the year I tell of, the P.T. had become little more than a slightly nervous neighborhood joke: "Peekaboo! I see you!" By Thanksgiving, the OCNA membership bowed heads in near unison (the outspokenly atheist Sam Bailey scowling straight ahead as always) while ex-Reverend Matt Grauer gave our collective thanks that that minor menace, or peace-disturbing figment, had evidently passed.

"I can't help wondering," Mary Grauer declared just a month or so ago, when something or other reminded her and Margie of the Good Old Days, "whether that's because there's nothing in Oyster Cove these days for a self-respecting pervert to get off on. Who wants an eyeful of us?"

Her husband loyally raised his hand, but then with a wink acknowledged that the likeliest candidates for voyeuring the current femmes of Oyster Cove Court were the geezers of TCI's Bayview Manor, were it not too long a round-trip haul for their motorized wheelchairs. Margie and I exchanged a glance: We had just about decided to make our "B.M. Move," as we'd come to call it between ourselves, but hadn't announced our decision yet.

"You know what?" my wife said then to the four of us (Sam Bailey having joined our Friday evening Old Farts Happy Hour in 1010's family room, with cheesecake provided by Mary Grauer). "Sometimes I almost miss having that sicko around. What does that say about Margaret Manning?"

"That she enjoyed being sixty," Sam volunteered, "more than she enjoys being seventy-plus? Or that for a while there we were more of a neighborhood than before or since? Life in Oyster Cove got to be almost interesting, Ethel liked to say."

"I do sort of miss those days," Margie said again to me at that evening's end, as we clicked off the TV and room lights and made our way bedward. "Remember how we'd go at it some nights after you came in from checking outside?"

Replied I (if I remember correctly), "I do indeed," and gave her backside a friendly pat.

Indeed I do.