Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

  Linda Sue’s old house was 32 Juniper Lane, right next door to 34, which was Marianne and Roland’s house. I don’t remember anything about a toxic spill, but I do remember that it was around this time that Marianne began warning us about a new study on the pressure-treated wood we’d all used to build our decks. Apparently they’d just discovered dangerous levels of lead leeching into the soil. She circulated flyers telling everyone not to plant vegetable gardens within fifty feet of our decks. I took her flyer and worried that maybe this was an explanation for my miscarriages, but we hadn’t built a deck. Everyone else seemed to ignore her warning completely. They couldn’t get a lawn of grass to grow. Why would they undertake a vegetable garden out back? “Be safe!” I remember her calling from her yard. “I just want everyone to be safe!”

  Now I wonder what was in the beakers of water Finn saw. Finn says he asked once, and Roland told him they were ocean water, hardly a toxic substance.

  Finn also thinks he might have found something on Trish. “I was doing all these different searches, variations on her name. Patricia. Pat. Tish. On one of them, I accidentally left off the R in her last name—I typed in Patricia Ashke—and look at this: Here’s a woman listed, the right age, living in Connecticut about an hour north of here.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Any chance our Trish could be a writer these days?”

  I clap my hands. “Yes! That’s what she always wanted to be!”

  “It’s a Library of Congress listing. She uses a pseudonym as her writing name. If this is her, she writes a fantasy series for middle readers, ages eight to eleven. There have been three books so far, all written under the name Cat Ashker.” He has notes scribbled on a piece of paper.

  I look over at where he’s written it down. “Cat?” I say, my heart quickening.

  “That’s what she goes by.”

  There it is in block letters: CAT ASHKER.

  It takes only a minute to see that it’s an anagram: three letters from Patricia and the letters in her last name rearranged. In front of my eyes, the letters jumble again and rearrange themselves, as if they’ve become a message meant for me: Cat, ask her.

  “Where in Connecticut does she live?”

  “Bridgetown, which is up north about an hour away. I Googled a white pages search and her address isn’t listed, but look at this. Here’s a press release for a reading she’s doing tomorrow afternoon at a bookstore in Middletown.” I lean over his shoulder and read the notice. My mind races ahead. I can’t drive myself, and I can’t ask Marianne.

  Finn scratches his head and smiles. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to go.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The library has all three books by Cat Ashker. I check them out using Finn’s card and wait until I get outside to Geoffrey’s and my old bench to start reading the first one. It’s about five children, ages five to fourteen, who live in a development marked off by cornfields on one side and woods on the other that are full of tiny fairies who have grown tired—bone-tired, they say, though they have no bones—of eating the dried corn. One day they see the children alone in the woods on an evening picnic, eating from a bowl of ambrosia salad. They move closer to admire the bits of fruit covered in sticky white. They want that salad more than they’ve ever wanted anything before, but surrounding it are the five children, three boys and two girls.

  I stop reading for a moment and wonder, Can this be a coincidence? Then I keep going and feel my breath catch:

  The tallest was Shannon, fourteen and pretty, but not in that way that boys at school noticed. They saw it, though, the fairies did: The way her eyes sparkled. Her teeth were so straight and white ever since her braces had come off. Her middle brother, Peter, a year younger, was handsome but irresponsible, just the kind of boy, frankly, that fairies don’t like. They preferred Ben, the oldest, bespectacled and kind, bad at all ball sports. Henry and Charlotte—the little ones, the babies, were favorites because everyone loved babies, even though these babies were five and six.

  For a moment I can’t breathe. Even Wanda never knew about the children I’ve imagined, that they have lives of their own, names and personalities. In all this time, I’ve told only one person. And she’s dead.

  “Betsy? Is that you?”

  I look up, so startled to hear my name, I gasp. “Paul!” I close the book and slide it to one side. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, I stop by occasionally these days.” He’s smiling cheerfully, holding a plastic file case in one hand. “I like to check up on them. You’d be surprised. They’ve let a few things slide. No one can get the whole New York Times on one roller like you could.”

  I move over so he can sit down. “There’s a trick to that actually.”

  “You’d better tell them what it is. Poor Viola gets yelled at for throwing away the sports section.” I laugh and he touches the back of my hand. “So I’ve been thinking about our conversation.” He says he’s got a new theory. It has to do with the sandwich found on Linda Sue’s counter. “We’ve always assumed the perpetrator made that sandwich, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But why couldn’t it have been someone else? Why hasn’t anyone thought about the possibility that two people came into her house that night? One who went looking for valuables upstairs, and one who stayed downstairs because he was hungry?”

  I should be grateful that he’s still working on my case, trying to help, but I can’t help thinking about an observation Franklin once made: Paul doesn’t have the greatest instincts. He doesn’t mind barking up a lot of the wrong trees. If it was a team of burglars, why would they have chosen Linda Sue’s empty house? Why would they have taken nothing afterward, including a twenty-dollar bill sitting on the table?

  Paul’s right about one thing—the sandwich has always been hard to explain. Franklin tried to use it as part of my sleepwalking scenario. In his version, I crossed the street and walked into Linda Sue’s kitchen believing I was still in my own house. He displayed the identical blueprints of our houses as evidence—stove, refrigerator, countertop, all identical. Thinking I was in my own kitchen, he argued, I made a sandwich in my sleep state and was interrupted by a sound that frightened me. Not Paul’s voice, but a stranger’s. In this scenario, her death was entirely unintentional. I grabbed the closest weapon at hand, the new lock, walked upstairs, and there, in the dark, was violently disoriented by a stranger’s appearance in what I believed was my own house. “What we have is a case of self-defense,” Franklin argued. “Fear of crime had become a neighborhood obsession, and tragically, Linda Sue, who spoke out against the dangers of community-sanctioned paranoia, was herself the victim of it.”

  It was the strongest argument we had, even though it had holes. It didn’t explain the cleanup afterward, or the choice I must have made not to seek help.

  Paul offers another theory. “At first I thought maybe it was inexperienced teenagers who didn’t know enough to look inside a window before breaking into a house, but you’re right, that might be a stretch. So then I started thinking about Gary, the burglar who came to that last Neighborhood Watch meeting.”

  Gary was a suspect early on. Linda Sue was murdered three nights after our meeting at Marianne’s house, the one where she announced to everyone that she never locked her doors. A promising lead, dismissed when staff at his residential house provided an alibi for him that night.

  “What the police never followed up on was the other men living at that halfway house. Gary could have gone home after that meeting and told the story of Linda Sue. How she lived alone and didn’t lock her doors. How she stood up at the meeting and announced that fact. Everyone living there had at least one felony conviction. Most of them were already repeat offenders.”

  I know these statistics all too well. Having been incarcerated, I’m at a precipitously high risk for becoming one myself. “How far away was Gary’s house?”

  “Nine miles. None of the residents had cars, but they could have
hitched a ride down the highway or walked. Whoever it was planned for one crime but not the other. They wore gloves and knew how to get inside, but they didn’t bring a weapon. Meaning they had experience, but weren’t hard-core, which lines up with the Cleary House residents at the time.” Paul opens his case and pulls out a file. “Here’s the list I got of the residents. I’ve flagged two who shared a room with Gary. It was supposed to be a single, but they were overbooked and it’s possible that made Gary angry. He knew the best way to free up his living space was if those guys went back to prison.”

  Sometimes I wonder, does Paul work this hard to prove my innocence, or is it more complicated? Is he trying to prove Geoffrey couldn’t have done it either?

  By the time Geoffrey moved here, I’d already begun to suspect a reason for the distance I felt in our marriage. I never put words to it and couldn’t say exactly when it started. Was it the first week after we moved onto the block, when Marianne gave us a tour of her house and I watched Paul pinch the fold of one curtain, feel its weight, rub the texture with his thumb? Or did the possibility strike me later, when I saw the way he sometimes watched Geoffrey from across the room? When did looking gay turn into a question of being it? I don’t think that came until later, when I got to prison and could look back with some clarity on the marriage I’d left behind.

  The first time we had sex, I remember Paul saying afterward, “We did it!” so triumphantly, I wondered if I’d just taken his virginity. No, he told me, it had just been awhile and he was nervous about all the parts working. I can say that it’s possible to have an active sex life and still wonder about your husband’s attention to small matters of personal vanity, about how sensitive he sometimes seemed to what other men said.

  Now we sit side by side not talking for a long time. He seems to sense my reluctance to keep pursuing threads of my case with him. “But if Gary wanted them to be caught, why weren’t they? Why wouldn’t he have just turned them in afterward?”

  “Maybe he felt bad. Maybe the murder freaked him out.”

  “Have you found the old roommates?”

  He nods his head. “One of them is back in prison at Bellington State. I’ve written him a letter but I haven’t heard back.”

  Of course he hasn’t. He never will.

  I tell him I’ve been doing my own research, talking to more neighbors. I tell him what I’ve heard about Geoffrey calling people before my trial.

  “He was trying to help,” Paul says. “He told them he didn’t think you were guilty.”

  I’m sure he did, but I wonder what else he communicated. Geoffrey knew he was vulnerable and many people were still suspicious of him. Did he talk to neighbors, ostensibly on my behalf, and say softly under his breath, Her childhood was hard. Her father had mental illness. Was he planting the story in their minds, watering the seeds of doubt? It wasn’t really her fault. She is the victim of hormones and memory loss. Paul could have supplied him with my diagnosis, could have acted as an accessory without even seeing how Geoffrey had manipulated him.

  “He told them I was mentally ill, Paul. That I should be going to an institution, not a prison.”

  “We were trying everything, Bets. We got a little desperate by the end. We thought it might work if we reminded people about your episodes.”

  “Insanity defenses almost never work.”

  “I told him that. I’d spent all the money we had, I’d paid for half a dozen different outside experts to weigh in on the evidence. We were told this was the smartest way to go. In the end, Geoffrey talked me into it. He said we had to commit to one line of defense and throw all our resources into it. That’s why he went to all the neighbors. We thought they’d step forward voluntarily, and then nobody did. It was such a—” He struggles to find the right word. “Well, a disappointment.”

  In a trial, I’ve learned, what isn’t said can be as significant as what is. Silence can be deafening, and in my case it was. The jury assumed I was a neighborhood version of a malcontent school shooter—quiet and unnoticed until the night my hidden rage propelled me across the street. With no testimony stating otherwise, what else could they think? We’d been neighbors for six years, participants in one another’s lives, but when mine hung in the balance, no one spoke up in my defense. Franklin told me he wasn’t surprised. Suburban criminals, especially women, often get abandoned. He told me not to blame anyone individually—the group fear response won out.

  But was this why Marianne remembers my bad episodes so well? Because Geoffrey gave her details? Is this why everyone I talk to sounds so nervous to hear from me? It’s certainly possible. It’s hard to blame Paul, whose face wears the terrible weight of these misguided efforts. “It wasn’t your fault, Paul. When I look back, I see how Geoffrey manipulated all of us.”

  “I know he did,” Paul says softly. “Still, I can’t help it—sometimes I miss him, don’t you?”

  I think about the way Geoffrey listened to my stories, how powerful that was. I know this much: We were both in love with him. Paul for a lifetime, me for a year. Strangely, it wasn’t a source of tension between us. It gave us something private that we shared, though we never discussed it. Even as I remember this, I think: Maybe Paul, in his own way, has been a truer friend than I realized. We shared certain truths we couldn’t speak of aloud. We respected the privacy we each seemed to need.

  “All this time I’ve wondered if Geoffrey killed her. If maybe I turned myself in and confessed in some unconscious, complicated act of friendship.”

  “No, Bets, I wouldn’t have let you do that—”

  “It turns out he didn’t do it, though. He took a DNA test; it wasn’t him.”

  Paul must know this already because he nods. “I knew he couldn’t have. He loved Linda Sue. In a way I’d never seen in him before.”

  “So where does that leave us? Who was it, then?”

  Instead of answering, he hands me another file, a report from a blood spatter expert, saying it was possible that Linda Sue coughed the blood up the wall, that the spray hadn’t necessarily been caused by repeated blows to her head. It takes me a minute to realize what it says, and the difference this could have made if it had been included in the trial. It would have at least introduced the idea that her death was not a bludgeoning but a possible accident. “If the blood spatter could have come from her coughing, did anyone say she might have just fallen down the stairs?”

  “Unlikely, given the fingernail scrapings and the hair in her blood.”

  “But it’s possible, right? Maybe someone was there, maybe they struggled before she fell, but this person isn’t responsible.”

  “I tried. After I read that blood spatter report, I sent it to three experts. Two out of three ruled out accidental death. They pointed to the bruising on the neck as evidence of intent. Whoever it was tried to strangle her and couldn’t manage it. Eventually the fight came to the top of the stairs, where she was struck in the head and forced down.”

  “What did the third expert say?”

  “The third said it was remote, but accidental death was a possibility.”

  For a long time, neither one of us speaks. “It could have been an accident, Paul. That’s what I’ve always thought. But who was there with her?”

  It wasn’t Corinne, she was in Princeton. It wasn’t Gary the burglar, who had an alibi. Who was Linda Sue happy enough to see that she invited him or her in, put on a kettle for tea, then went upstairs and ended up getting killed? One of the other women on the block? I go through all the names—Helen, Barbara, Kim, Marianne. “She didn’t like any of them. If they showed up at her door she would have done what she always did with me, stepped out on the porch and smoked a cigarette so the conversation could end when the smoke did. So who did she invite in?”

  I haven’t mentioned this new idea I’ve only just hatched: that Trish could have been there, somewhere inside the house. Paul’s already dismissed Trish as a possibility and I don’t want to lose my focus.

  To my surpri
se, Paul hardly seems interested in going over the list of suspects. Instead, he seems determined to dwell on the mistakes and what went wrong twelve years ago with my defense. “I wish I’d done a lot of things differently. Starting with Franklin. Boy, if I could go back in time, I never would have chosen Franklin.”

  “I was there, too, remember? Making the same mistakes.”

  “I should have seen things clearer. You were sitting in jail, how could you judge? I was weighing everything, getting advice, and still I managed to screw it up.”

  He turns and looks at me, his brown eyes soft. He’s a sweet man, and well meaning. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s kept blaming himself for what happened. I wish we had a different history. I wish I could ask him if he’s fallen in love or if his current life is less lonely than the one we had together, but I can’t. There are some questions I simply can’t ask out loud.

  CHAPTER 19

  Instead of going back to Marianne’s house, I stop by Finn’s and ask if I can borrow his computer again. Typing in Trish’s pen name leads me to a Web site designed for young readers to talk to other fans of her books. Currently posted are two weeks of messages, about twenty in all.

  Are you a huge Peter fan? I am! Which book is your favorite? I say number three is best!

  I went to prison just as the Harry Potter craze was beginning and I missed what I imagine has been an exciting phenomenon. Trish’s books seem to have attracted an equally loyal, albeit smaller, fan base. One girl writes to complain that there hasn’t been a new book in a year and a half, which means she’s had to reread her three books over and over.

  Please, Cat, if you’re reading this, finish the new one soon! An eager sixth grader in Portsmouth, NH

  I can’t get over the casual way everyone talks about the characters:

  Henry and Charlotte are my favorites. I know they’re usually the cause of all the trouble, but that’s why I like them. Has anyone else noticed they make everything happen?