While almost everyone in our neighborhood has a pretty healthy attitude about sex, and an openness about it, some people just keep to themselves and don’t feel the need to join in our sexual games. Our next door neighbors Fred and Lannie are one such couple. Fred travels all over the country for his marketing business, while she is a retired professor from the University, who occasionally fills in as a substitute teacher at the local high school. They’re both rather quiet, but very nice people.

She stopped over at my house one day last summer, asking if I noticed anything strange in the neighborhood. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, because she was a little hesitant to get to the point. At first I thought maybe she was going to say something about our open lifestyle, with several different vehicles parked in our driveway overnight from some of our entertaining. Apparently it was something a little creepier than than that.

She said, “This may sound strange, but have you been missing any laundry from your clothesline out back?”

I didn’t think so, but now that she mentioned it, I was missing a couple pairs of underwear, one was the skimpy pair with pink hearts that DJ gave me last Valentine’s Day. I thought maybe that I just misplaced them. When I mentioned the missing underwear, Lannie’s jaw dropped and she gasped, as she thought someone was stealing her underwear too, over the last few weeks, right off the line while hanging out to dry in her backyard.

“You don’t think we have some kind of pervert around here, do you?” she asked, making it seem as if it were on the same scale as a serial killer. I just smiled and told her to relax, it was probably just some horny teenager trying to get his rocks off. The lovely lady calmed down and laughed it off too, realizing that she may have overreacted.

Our joking around suddenly shifted to amateur detectives, as Lannie asked what I knew about the McAlister boys that lived up the street. I reinforced her suspicions by telling her that I wouldn’t put it past them. I added my possible culprits to the mix too.

“How about that guy from New Zealand that moved in across the alley last year, what do you know about him? He seems to be walking out back at last twice a day. It can’t all be for the exercise.”

Again she gasped and grabbed me by the arm, telling me that he stopped to talk to her one day last week while she was hanging her laundry.

“You don’t think it was him do you? He seemed so nice.”

I was kind of sorry I brought it up, Greg did seem like a pretty nice guy. But everybody has some sort of secret, I’m living proof of that.

“Why don’t we set a trap?” I offered. “I’ll hang some of my things on the line and we’ll see what happens.”