The Good Neighbor

by Cathryn Grant

  She’d made the necklace after she and Moira had gone to a fabric store, and Brittany had fallen in love with all the unique, colorful buttons available for homemade garments. She wasn’t interested much in sewing, but she wanted some of those buttons, as many as her mother would allow her to buy. Moira had spent hours in Brittany’s room since she’d disappeared, but hadn’t noticed the necklace was missing. If she had, she hadn’t mentioned it to me. What else was gone that had escaped our attention?

  Moira started to cry.

  I coughed hard, a single cough turning into a series, that then became a racking, uncontrolled sound.

  “So this belongs to your daughter?” Officer Mae asked.

  I nodded.

  “Did you realize it was missing?”

  “No,” Moira said.

  “The jacket?”

  “Not the jacket or the necklace. I haven’t been able to think clearly, and I didn’t think of it when you asked.”

  “Thank you,” Officer Carter said. Officer Mae inserted the plastic-wrapped jacket back into the sack and dropped the necklace in with it.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  Moira cried harder, her shoulders convulsing with sobs.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In the outdoor eating area of a burger place—the Burger House on Fremont Avenue.”

  “When?”

  “If you mean when was it left there, we’re not sure. One of the clerks found it while he was wiping tables. It was kept in lost and found for a while. Finally someone went through the pockets and found the necklace. They recognized the name and called us.”

  “So it could have been there for days?”

  “Possibly. They recall it was only a day or two.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Nothing, really. It means we’ll interview everyone who works there.”

  “It means she wasn’t dead two days ago,” I said.

  Officer Carter looked at me, about to say something, but after a moment, she turned her head.

  “That’s great news,” I said. “Knowing she’s alive.”

  The room was quiet as we all silently added two days ago.

  “Yes, it’s good to remain positive,” Officer Mae said.

  Officer Carter inched forward to the edge of the chair, which was not a good sign. I could sense her eagerness to make her point and then get out of there before she had to deal with any more of our emotions.

  “I want to make this very clear,” she said.

  I knew we wouldn’t like whatever was coming.

  “We’ve made the determination that Brittany is a runaway. We don’t believe she was abducted.”

  “No,” Moira said.

  Officer Carter nodded. “Let me finish.”

  “No.” Moira stood. “You can’t make a determination. She did not run away. She was snatched right out of her bed!”

  “Looking at the jacket, the lack of evidence, we believe she left on her own.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Please let me finish, Ms. Cushing. This is actually good news.”

  Moira raised her voice. “How can it be good news? My baby is missing and you’re not even going to try to find the monster who took her!”

  “We aren’t stopping the search for her, we’re just treating things differently. We’ll still utilize the Facebook page, try to extend its reach, especially among teenagers. We’ll follow up on reported sightings. She’s out there, and someone knows where she is. And it’s also good news because—”

  “It is not good news! Stop saying that.” Moira was crying. Again.

  “It is good news because it’s more likely she’s still alive. It’s good news because we don’t have to waste resources interviewing sex offenders.”

  “Then what, exactly, will you be doing when you’re not wasting resources?” Moira spit the words out, spittle erupting from her lips, speckling her chin.

  “We’ll be looking at places where runaways are known to hang out. We’ll keep a closer eye and talk to kids around the junior high and high schools where she might have made friends, where others might have information about her.”

  “She did not run away, and she doesn’t know any kids at local schools. She’s a happy child because our home is loving and nurturing,” Moira said.

  Officer Carter gave us a tiny smile. It was difficult to decide whether the smile was condescending or patient and pitying. I thought it was more of the latter. But pity and condescension are closely related. I was certain she thought we were deluded about how good our parenting was, about how tightly knit our small family was.

  After a moment, she continued as if Moira hadn’t spoken. “With that theory, I have some additional questions.”

  “So you admit it’s a theory. Because you don’t have any suspects. And it’s the wrong theory, so you’re going to waste more time chasing in the wrong direction.”

  Officer Carter cleared her throat. “That was a poor choice of words. Taking this approach…I need to know more about Brittany’s friends.”

  “We gave you that information at the beginning,” Moira said. “All of her friends are from our homeschooling group.”

  “She never associated with any other kids? Any of your neighbors?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” Moira narrowed her eyes, freezing her gaze on Officer Carter.

  “People we’ve spoken to suggested she didn’t have a lot of freedom. She was isolated from kids her age. That she was chafing a bit.”

  “She wasn’t chafing. One and a half million children are homeschooled in this country. It’s perfectly normal.” She pushed her hands through her hair, yanking it away from her face, exposing the bones of her forehead and temples. “What people are saying these things?”

  “I can’t get into specifics.” Officer Carter looked at her notebook. “From what we’ve learned, her homeschool classmates didn’t know her well.”

  Moira folded her arms. “As we already told you, we just moved here. Brittany only met with the larger group a few times. Why aren’t you looking for the man who took her?”

  “Moira.” I waited until she looked at me. “We need to follow their lead, do everything we can.”

  “But this is the wrong thing!”

  “We don’t—”

  “Brittany did not run away. She was happy with us. I won’t answer any questions about running away.” She got up and walked out of the room, headed toward the bedrooms. I knew I’d find her later, lying on Brittany’s bed, the plush comforter pulled around her, no matter how high the temperature was set to climb that afternoon.

  “Just to circle back,” Officer Carter said, “there were no recent fights between you or your wife and your daughter?”

  “No.”

  “What was the nature of your disagreements with her?”

  “We didn’t argue.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “She’s a happy child. Moira wasn’t exaggerating about that.”

  “She’s a teenager. Invariably there are disagreements, even if you don’t categorize them as fights. There are arguments about bedtime rules, music, online activity—”

  “None of those were issues.”

  “It won’t help us find your daughter if you’re not forthright with us.”

  “I’m telling the truth. We didn’t argue, and Brittany didn’t push boundaries.”

  “That’s very unusual.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  She stared at me. I returned her gaze, holding steady, knowing I would outlast her. I have strong nerves. It takes a lot to break me. She could keep pushing all day, theorizing about arguments and preteen angst and unhappiness. Moira had worked hard to eradicate that kind of nonsense, and if I occasionally squirmed at her methods, I admired how well she’d done. I agreed wholeheartedly with my wife. Brittany was a well-adjusted, extraordinarily happy girl. It wasn’t possi
ble that she would climb out her bedroom window and disappear into the night. She would not leave the security of the home we’d made for her, the stability of two parents who doted on her without indulging her.

  “We’re doing everything we can to find Brittany,” Officer Carter said.

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  “Knowing about the mindset of the missing person is a critical piece in locating her. Unless you want to rely upon chance. You’ve seen how well that works out so far.”

  “We’re not relying on chance. We’re relying on the police investigation. We’re relying on you, and on people good enough to keep their eyes open and to look for anything unusual or upsetting.”

  She closed the cover on her small notebook. “I really hope, for your sakes, that you’re telling me everything you know.”

  After she was gone, I went into the hallway. Moira was indeed curled up in Brittany’s bed. I entered the room and sat on the corner of the bed. I wanted to place my hand on her leg, but I wasn’t sure how she’d react. “They’re gone.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “We’ll find her.”

  Moira let out a ragged sob. “I think that kid across the street convinced them she ran away.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Who else would tell them Brittany was chafing except a kid who is obviously looking for trouble? I saw him watching her.”

  “Did you?”

  “He’s always out there. Getting high.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Who else?”

  “It could be anyone.”

  “He doesn’t even know us. He has no right. Unless he saw something, unless he’s trying to save his own skin.”

  “I don’t think that’s likely.”

  “Who knows what’s likely?” Her voice was shrill. “He said stuff about our family, about Brittany, and he’s never even met us! They aren’t looking for the monster who took her because of him.”

  “Let’s not rush to conclusions. We don’t really know.”

  “I know.” Moira turned on her side and yanked the blankets over her head.

  I felt a strange desire to creep under the covers with her, but that wouldn’t help anything. No matter how difficult, how close to breaking I was, I needed to remain strong, for all of us.

  23

  Moira

  My body had grown steadily weaker, and my will was even weaker still. Alan said I looked like a skeleton and I didn’t disagree. He was constantly pushing food on me—slices of turkey, candy bars, chips, fruit—but I was sick with terror, despair. Sick, period. I’d asked Alan to buy me a pack of cigarettes. Smoke and the accompanying ritual would calm me. It would keep my hands busy, steadying my focus, but he said it wouldn’t help anything.

  I could have gone to the store myself. I wasn’t incapacitated, yet the thought of walking around out there, knowing people were looking at me—that they might recognize me from Facebook, the articles online, in the newspaper, and on the local television station—kept me huddled behind what I’d thought were protective walls. I couldn’t predict how I might react if I saw a girl Brittany’s age, or a younger child, flooding my mind with memories of all those precious years that had slipped away.

  Since the night Brittany disappeared, Taylor had brought over one supply of groceries, and the rest of the time Alan had done the shopping. The neighbors brought dishes of food that sat almost intact under their foil wrappings in the fridge. I’d become a recluse, if I hadn’t been one already.

  While all I wanted to do was sleep, I couldn’t close my eyes. When they did close, I saw blood and death. I knew I shouldn’t allow my mind to wallow in those gruesome, conjured images, but they wouldn’t leave me alone. The longer Brittany was gone, the more vivid they became.

  It was difficult to even answer the door, especially since it technically required going out of the house, walking the short distance from the entryway to the courtyard door. I no longer took pleasure in the lush greenery and the soft sound of water from the fountain set among the plants in our courtyard. I took no pleasure in the house at all, or in life. I was a carcass wandering from room to room, sitting or lying down for a while, nibbling at food like a mouse and sipping water when my body grew too frail to move. Inside, I was dead. I wondered at what moment in time I’d ceased living.

  After talking to Officer Carter, my mood changed. Anger at their irrational belief that Brittany had run away stirred life inside me. I needed to see people. I needed to find out what the others living around us knew about that boy, a man, really, living across the cul-de-sac from us.

  Finally something good in my life. When I opened the courtyard door, all the neighbor women were sitting on the benches in the center park area. Taylor, Sofia, Kelly, and Freya. All but that boy’s mother. Her absence said something.

  I took a deep breath and stepped out into the hot sun that beat against the front of the house. No wonder they were all sitting out there. I expected the spot drew them when the stifling heat took over the insides of their homes, as it usually did in the late afternoon, although I’d never noticed them out there before.

  As I approached, Taylor stood and walked toward me. “I’m so glad you came out.”

  I looked at her, trying to sort out her words. They sounded out of place.

  “I texted everyone, but I didn’t want to bother you. Come have some sparkling water. I brought a cooler. Do you like lime? Plain? Raspberry?”

  “Plain is fine.”

  “I don’t suppose Officer Carter has any updates?” Taylor said.

  I shrugged. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them what the police had decided. I could hardly think about it.

  “It’s so awful,” Taylor said. “I don’t understand why they haven’t found anything.”

  We moved closer to the other women. I opened the bottle of water Taylor handed to me and took a long swallow.

  They waited, as if they expected something from me.

  “You know, at first, I was sure someone had been watching Brittany from the open space preserve,” I said. “It’s terrifying, all that emptiness out there, the darkness at night, the ravines. It seemed obvious.”

  They nodded. Except for Taylor, they all looked slightly frightened. I suppose I’d altered the conversation. I wondered what they’d said about me when I wasn’t there, the truth of what they really believed about our chances of bringing Brittany home safely. I shook my head to get rid of the thought. “Then, for a while I wondered if someone had seen us somewhere else, stalked her without us realizing it.”

  “What did the police say about that?” Freya asked. She lifted her glasses off her face and scooped silky brown hair off the sides of her face.

  “Since I couldn’t describe a specific person I’d seen, or point to a type of vehicle I’d noticed repeatedly, they couldn’t do much.”

  “I guess they need at least one or two concrete details to go on,” Kelly said.

  Freya lowered her glasses with an authoritative gesture. “It’s maddening that no one saw anything.”

  I took a deep breath. I sipped some of the sparkling water. “Now I wonder about someone closer.”

  “They talked to all the registered sex offenders in the area,” Sofia said.

  “Yes. But what if he isn’t a sex offender?”

  “Then what?” Taylor said.

  “Not everyone is registered. Not until they’re caught.”

  They nodded as if they’d just considered this for the first time.

  “Good point,” Freya said.

  “What if it was someone…nearby…who saw her? A pervert no one knows about. A guy who gets off on…whatever, and decided he wanted to…Someone who never did that before, who got in over his head.”

  “How would they find him?”

  I shrugged.

  “They need something specific to start with,” Taylor said. “Someone who saw something.”

  I stared at her, longing to see her eyes through her
dark glasses, wondering how she’d react. “What about that guy across the street?”

  “What guy?” Taylor asked.

  “Right there. At sixteen forty.”

  “Luke?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. He’s a good kid,” Taylor said.

  “He smokes pot,” Freya said.

  “So? Lots of kids do. Lots of adults smoke pot.” Taylor giggled, stopping herself abruptly.

  “I don’t really like him,” Freya said. “He hangs out in that gazebo and stares at people. Watching them.”

  “He’s just getting high. Really, he’s a good kid. I’ve known him for years. We all have,” Taylor said.

  “I saw him looking at Brittany,” I said.

  Taylor frowned. “Luke? I can’t imagine him—”

  “Maybe because you’ve known him for years. It blinds you. He said stuff about us to the police. He doesn’t even know us and he made comments about homeschooling, about Brittany. About Alan and me.”

  Taylor screwed the cap onto her bottle. She twisted it off again. “He’s a good kid.”

  “You didn’t see how he was looking at her.”

  “Maybe you were reading into it.”

  I shook my head. The more I thought about it, the more right it sounded. There was no way Brittany had just evaporated and no one had seen anything at all. It wasn’t possible for a person to disappear like that. Right out of her bed! People all across the country claimed to have seen her, wrongly, it turned out, yet in her own neighborhood, no one saw a thing. Even though Brittany’s bedroom window faced the open space preserve, it would be awfully bold for someone to enter our yard and then her bedroom window. It was much more likely it had been someone who knew the area, who knew how the yards were laid out, how the courtyards all wrapped around one side of the house and opened into the back. Someone who knew that the houses backing up to the open space had gates out into that wilderness area.

  “I didn’t read into it,” I said. “He just sits there watching everyone. You’ve never noticed?”