Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

  Obviously the jury thought I was, but I doubted my capacity for the depth of feeling such an act would require. Even as I wrote letters protesting my innocence, I envied those who’d owned up to their terrible crimes and carried Bibles around the way they once wielded firearms. They knew the blackened edges of their heart, the bilious taste of their own rage fomenting. Watching those women sob and tear at their own clothes taught me something. I admired them. Crazy as they seemed, I did.

  What conscious, bold stance had I ever taken except, possibly, asking Paul for a divorce? I am grateful to have shown that much foresight. Though standing dutifully by his imprisoned wife had become Paul’s identity—he talked about me at work, he financed my appeals, he even set up a Web site (freebetsy.com) to outline the circumstantial evidence used against me—the loyalty he showed after my arrest seems only like a sad comment on the absence of such feeling before it. Listening to Roland, who talks on even in the face of his wife’s disapproval, I’m struck by his dedication to a cause after all these years working in isolation. He’s committed his life to it in a way that I wish I could emulate. Then I hear the tail end of his point: “Basically the whole thing is a souped-up version of an electrolytic cell.”

  I look up, excited. “I made one of those once. I got second place in a science fair.” My contraption separated water into hydrogen and oxygen using a lantern battery, two pencil leads, and some wire. I was one of only two girls who’d entered (the other built a solar oven using a foil-covered pizza box), and my winning second place shocked everyone, including the science teacher, who lowered his glasses in my direction when my name was announced, as if he’d never seen me before.

  “Then, you do know.” Roland looks over at Marianne. “There you have it. She knows what I’m talking about.”

  And then I realize he’s not telling the truth.

  The notes I saw on his desk about the excess heat observed, a thousand times higher than previous experiments, and the tentative conclusion: The temperatures generated weren’t chemical in origin. He wasn’t designing a prototype for conversion efficiency. Those notes were about heat produced over time. They weren’t about energy conversion at all, they were about energy creation. Which isn’t especially strange, except that he’s just spent the last twenty minutes lying about it all.

  CHAPTER 12

  Here’s a question no one has ever been able to answer: If I am not guilty, where did the blood on my nightgown come from? It was a rough oval across the chest area on the front of the gown. Looking at it, one might think I’d been shot. As Jeremy has pointed out, there are no spatter marks or individual blood drops, only one smear that extends like an afterthought toward the back, as if the stain itself were reaching an arm around to embrace me. The afternoon I brought the gown to the police, they were too embarrassed to ask the most obvious question, which now seems quaint and unimaginable to me. It wasn’t until that evening, alone with a female detective, that I was asked directly if the blood might be my own. She used the word menses, which I’d never heard anyone say aloud before. “You mean, did I start my period that night?”

  “Yes.”

  It shouldn’t have been a difficult question. Either I did or I didn’t. I hadn’t been strip-searched by anyone yet; only I knew if I was wearing a tampon. “No,” I said, hesitating slightly. “I don’t think it’s possible.” I told myself I didn’t want to get into the grisly particulars of my erratic cycle—that, in the course of my many miscarriages, it was possible for me to have spontaneous bleeds that stopped as suddenly as they started. Once, a doctor dismissed one night of staining as “breakthrough bleeding” only to discover on a sonogram a week later that I’d lost the baby. Though I hadn’t bled after the one night, the body can fool itself. I’ve learned that much.

  In the terrible dark hours after I found the nightgown, I wrestled with myself, trying to decide what the blood stain meant. I assumed I hadn’t killed Linda Sue. I knew that I’d walked outside and stayed asleep before, but how could I have slept through a rage that turned murderous? I spent that morning at the library and discovered that in the last five years there had been quite a few instances of murderers alleging a sleepwalking defense. In each case the person had killed a spouse or a parent—someone close enough that they didn’t need to dress or wear shoes to their crime—and in all the cases domestic abuse was involved. So it was possible. Not likely, but possible.

  When I looked up from my research, my heart tripping at what I’d read and what it might mean, I gasped to see Geoffrey standing in the corner, looking shaken. Linda Sue had been dead for three days. The police were no longer pursuing him as a suspect—the phone records checked out, and Corinne was right. They’d been on the line from 10:15 to 11:36. When he caught my eye, his face softened. We need to talk, he mouthed.

  Outside, I understood that he was not here to offer comfort. “They found half a sandwich in Linda Sue’s kitchen, lying on the counter. It doesn’t match the contents in her stomach and there’re no fingerprints on the knife, meaning it was made by someone wearing gloves or else someone who cleaned their fingerprints afterward. They think it has to be the perpetrator.”

  I watched his face as he spoke. There could be no mistaking what he meant. I’d told him everything from my past—the sleepwalking, the eating episodes. Who would commit such a crime and eat afterward except someone moving outside of all reason? Who else could have done it except someone with my history? Geoffrey never told me directly to turn myself in, but he nodded gratefully when I told him I would.

  He was the last friend I talked to before my arrest. I called Paul later, after the questioning had gone on for so long that I knew I wouldn’t be home for dinner. In the police report, I am described as having a low affect and an unusually unemotional response to the events I was describing. Later a psychologist said that I refused to assume full emotional responsibility for my crime by qualifying it in all my answers: “Supposedly I was there”; “I guess I must have been angry”; “I don’t remember how I felt.”

  Now I can explain all of those answers. I didn’t know what had happened. When I signed the confession I felt that I was probably guilty, but even back then I also had this thought: During my questioning, no one mentioned the sandwich. Even in the swirl of confusion that descended over me that day, I wondered: If that hadn’t been part of questioning a suspect, how did Geoffrey know?

  Had he made it up, afraid the cloud of guilt he’d lived under for past crimes would darken and implicate him for this one? It was a relief when my lawyer went through the first files of discovery and confirmed that, yes, a sandwich had been found on the counter, because it meant Geoffrey hadn’t lied. He’d probably learned these details and worried right away about how they might lead back to me. I still remember his face, blotched with emotion, the tears he didn’t quite shed, the relief when I told him about the nightgown and said, “I have to take it to the police. I have to see what they say.” We were frightened and polite enough to speak obliquely. He squeezed my hand and said, “I’m worried. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” I tried my best to reassure him. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m stronger than you think.” I told many people that until I realized how it implicated me—I’m stronger than you think—and then I stopped reassuring people and began accepting the medication that weakened my resolve and muddied my thinking. Looking strong no longer seemed like a smart or noble option.

  The more clearly I see how the events played out just before and after Linda Sue’s murder, I find myself asking what I should have twelve years ago: How did Geoffrey know those details from the crime scene? I had assumed the police told him during his questioning, but now that I understand better how police work, I know that information wouldn’t have been given away. Unless he told them right away that he knew of a suspect, a female parasomniac, and controlled the conversation so well that, against usual protocol, they told him things. As unseemly as that thought is, it’s preferable to the alternative: He knew becaus
e he was there, laying the sandwich out himself.

  I haven’t let myself consider the possibility that Geoffrey could have done both: loved Linda Sue and killed her. Out of jealousy or desperation, or the fear of losing her. He could have gone over that night, necklace in hand, to cement their future, and maybe she confronted him somehow, about his writing, about the plagiarism lawsuit. I have tried for so long not to think about the necklace that Geoffrey showed me once before giving it to her. Though I still don’t want to think about it, I know what it means: It’s possible. He would have had eight hours to make a plan and destroy any clothes of his own with blood on them. He could have worn gloves and laid out the food evidence intentionally. He knew the ways I was most vulnerable. To make me look guilty, he needed to plant evidence that only I’d recognize. He had a copy of our house key; he could have gotten in that night and found one of my nightgowns.

  I know something else that others don’t know. Once when we were talking about our spouses and laughing at their quirks, I told him how Paul slept in his socks. He said that when Corinne was in Princeton, she called him every night and asked him to talk to her until she fell asleep.

  “That’s sweet,” I said, because I wasn’t jealous. I wasn’t.

  “That’s expensive,” he said.

  What it really means is that he could have created his own alibi. He’d done it before—run away from crimes with the help of women who covered his tracks.

  That evening I call Jeremy and tell him what I’ve never allowed myself to say: “Geoffrey’s alibi had a hole in it. Yes, he was on the phone with his wife, but she fell asleep every night on the phone.” Even now, it’s hard for me to form these words. “It was a regular thing. He could have gone over to Linda Sue’s without hanging up.”

  All during my trial, this possibility hovered in the back of my mind. I could have brought it up and never did. Back then I felt too powerless. I didn’t think it would work and I didn’t want the bad feeling it might provoke. I still remember Geoffrey on the witness stand, wearing a seersucker jacket and with a new haircut so short his scalp showed through. We were reeling in the midst of a late-July heat wave but he managed to look dapper in the oppressive temperatures. Everyone in the room listened closer to his words than they did to the forensic experts who’d analyzed my nightgown.

  What kind of “friendship” did we have? His lawyer made air quotes with his fingers in case anyone missed his implication: This wasn’t a friendship, it was an aberration of some kind, a one-sided obsession.

  “I hadn’t experienced anything like it for years,” Geoffrey told the DA. “Since college, really. We exchanged books and talked about them. Such a simple thing, really, but it meant a lot to me.”

  His lawyer looked surprised. “What do you mean exactly?”

  “Friendships between men and women are common enough when you’re young, but when you get older, it’s so much more unusual, isn’t it?”

  Listening to him, my heart filled. Yes, I thought, he, too, had felt the rarity of it.

  The prosecutor quickly got him back on track. Had he slept with Linda Sue? Had he loved her? Had his intention been to leave his wife in order to marry Linda Sue? Yes, yes, and yes. I didn’t dwell on these answers and focused instead on what he had said earlier, what I’d never heard Geoffrey articulate. Our friendship was different, something unexpected and valuable. If he flirted with others, it was different with me, unmuddied by the messiness sex brings along. I should have guessed the prosecution would twist the idea until it seemed dubious, then sad, and finally pathological. Why would a married woman seek out “friendship” with a man? What void was this childless woman trying to fill? When I took the stand—a last-ditch effort, dressed in a pastel sweater, the picture of innocence, of a thousand librarians going back through time—Franklin tried to undercut the prosecution by asking me their questions. What void were you trying to fill? I answered as honestly as I could: “After my fifth miscarriage, we were told that my body couldn’t sustain another pregnancy. It was devastating for both of us. Then I thought of the idea that maybe friendships—deep, meaningful friendships—could feel like family.”

  “Didn’t your marriage feel like family?”

  “Paul and I shared the same loss.” I was careful with my word choices. I wanted to be honest and clear. “We reminded each other of what was missing.”

  Our defense plan involved paying experts to explain disassociation, how it is possible for the mind, under duress, to fragment and act of its own volition. There are textbook cases of split personalities and repressed memories. At the center of most, an abused child is warehousing terrible episodes in a sealed-off room of his or her mind. Was that possible in my case? Could coming home nightly to the sad specter of a father, his eyes glued to a TV, sitting in a chair he hadn’t moved from since the morning, be categorized as trauma? Though I tried not to dwell too often on those memories, I hadn’t repressed them, nor had I repressed the even sadder sights of childhood. My mother, waging her own battle with chronic arthritis, struggling to stand up from the couch, blinking back pain to fetch my father’s pills. Terrible, yes. Repressed? Unfortunately, no.

  I went along with the defense because what else was possible? I had no memories of that night. And I’d had blackouts before.

  To establish this defense with any validity, my old college secrets had to be aired, along with the roommates who bore witness to them. They must have been stunned by the call, equal parts thrilled and horrified to discover they had a role to play in their old friend’s murder trial. Did they remember the strange disappearance of food? Yes, Polly said, how could I forget? Once, a pound of raw bacon disappeared. (I have no memory of that, but I was hardly going to say, It was raw hot dogs, I’m almost sure.) In the end, we got two roommates to humiliate me with their college memories of a sleepwalker in their midst, committing acts of aberrant nighttime eating.

  Paul was a crucial link in this line of self-defense and, as helpful as he wanted to be, a weak one. We’d been married eight years and shared a bed all that time. No, he admitted in cross-examination on the stand, he had no memory of me sleepwalking, nor did he recall any food disappearances. When he said this he looked up at me sadly, as if in apology. Later, the prosecution made his testimony their final point: “Fifteen years ago, at night, she binged on strange foods most of us wouldn’t eat. If that’s evidence of a mental disorder, three-quarters of the college girls I know would qualify.”

  That was how the trial went, the reason I didn’t step forward to offer my own evidence of a hole in Geoffrey’s alibi. I felt sure I was going to be found guilty anyway.

  What would have been the point?

  Now I wait for Jeremy to applaud my good work. We’ll get a DNA sample, check it against the hair. How long will it take? Two days?

  “It’s not Geoffrey,” Jeremy says, stopping me before I can say any more. “We’ve already had his blood drawn. I just got the results back today. The skin doesn’t match. Neither does the hair.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry, Bets. But it was someone else.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “I told you about this,” Marianne says, pulling out boxes marked

  I “Samples” from the closet. “It’s not a party exactly. I like to think of it as a public seminar on personal security.”

  Ah, yes. Marianne’s new side career, what has evidently become of her failed Neighborhood Watch efforts. Now, instead of inviting police officers into her home, she hosts parties where women can order rape whistles, pepper sprays, and what she describes as her most exciting new product, pastel-colored Taser guns that come with their own animal-print carrying pouches.

  “Oh, my,” I say, as she unfolds a life-sized, human-shaped target with a bull’s-eye on its chest, which she tapes to her living room wall.

  “I know you probably think I’m crime obsessed, but I’m not really. It’s about moving past that, about being prepared so you don’t have to worry.”<
br />
  She seems so agitated that I want to say something supportive, let her know that I don’t judge her. “This seems nice, Marianne. Like a new Neighborhood Watch.”

  “Oh, no. It’s not like that. It was never really about crime prevention.” She looks up at me as if she’d inadvertently revealed more than she meant to.

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No. I mean, sure, that was part of it.”

  I wonder why I’ve never asked her this before: Why did she start Neighborhood Watch? We all wondered about it at the time when we’d never had a crime in our neighborhood.

  “But obviously it didn’t work very well. After our third meeting, Linda Sue was killed.” I can see her hesitation, trying to decide what she should say. “It was Helen’s idea originally.” She gestures as if to say, You remember Helen, her crazy ideas. “We were worried about you. All the miscarriages you’d had. And then you’d get pregnant again so quickly. It broke our hearts, Bets. That’s all.”

  I stare at her. “You started Neighborhood Watch because of my miscarriages?”

  “No, no. Or not exactly. You just—you had these episodes, where you didn’t seem like yourself. You’d stand in the garden sometimes and you wouldn’t answer when someone spoke to you. I’m sure it was the hormones. My God, what your body must have been going through.”

  I feel my breath go shallow.

  “So much of the time you seemed fine. And then, on a bad day, you were so immobilized.” She goes on, speaking quickly. She tells me they were worried about Paul, how “stretched” he seemed at times, taking care of me and working. “We wanted to help. Helen thought of Neighborhood Watch as a way to let Paul know we were here to help.”