The Neighbor

  He could feel Sandy’s leg against his leg, her fingers intertwined with his fingers. His wife, sitting beside him. He wanted to keep her here.

  He said, “You once told me, what’s done can’t be undone. What’s known can’t be unknown. You were right. We’re marked, you and I. Even in the middle of a crowded room, we will always feel alone. Because we know things other people don’t know, because once we did things, or had to do things, that other people have never had to do.

  “The police sent me home, but not even for my parents could I magically become a real boy. It distressed them. So on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, when I came into the stock Rita had left for me, I took off. Being Joshua Ferris didn’t feel right. So I took another name. Then another, and another. I became something of an expert on inventing new identities. It soothed me.”

  Sandra rubbed the back of his hand. “Joshua—”

  “Jason, please. If I had wanted to be Joshua, I would’ve stayed in Georgia. I moved here, we both moved here, for a reason.”

  “But that’s what I don’t understand,” she blurted out. “By your own words, you and I have so much in common. So why didn’t you tell me these things before? Especially once you knew about my mother. Surely you could’ve shared then.”

  He hesitated. “Because I don’t just retrieve pornographic photos off the web. I, uh … Well, let’s just say I tried therapy, but it didn’t work for me. Then, one night, I got onto my parents’ computer and I started visiting the chat rooms. I … made the rounds, found the kind of guys who liked to prey on a kid like me. And I developed a system: I entice them to hand over their credit card numbers and other personal information in return for my old pornographic photos. Then I nail them to the wall. I liquidate their accounts, max out their credit cards, open home equity lines of credit in their names, transferring all of their assets to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. I wrap them up and drain them. Like a spider. I have become, I suppose, just as good a predator as the one who once trapped me.

  “It’s all highly illegal,” he finished. “And it’s the only thing that keeps me sane.”

  “That’s what you’re doing at night? Why you spend all your time on the Internet?”

  Jason shrugged. “I don’t sleep well. Probably never will. Might as well do something useful with the time.”

  “What about your family?”

  “My family wanted Joshua, and Joshua doesn’t exist anymore. On the other hand, Jason Jones has a beautiful wife and a gorgeous little girl. He couldn’t ask for a better family.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why did you marry me? If you just wanted a child, surely there are easier ways than saddling yourself with a wife—”

  He placed two fingers over her lips, silencing her. “It’s you, Sandy,” he whispered softly. “It’s always been about you. Since the first moment I saw you, you were the woman I wanted. I’m a terrible husband. I can’t … do … everything a husband should do. I can’t say everything a husband should say. I’m sorry for that. If I could turn back time, so maybe I wasn’t out on my bike that day, heading down the road, when this guy turned right in front of me and my bike went down and I fell to the ground and then there he was, looming above me …”

  He shook his head. “I know I’m not perfect. But when I’m with you, when I’m with Ree, I want to try. Maybe I can never be Joshua Ferris again. But I’ve worked real hard at being Jason Jones.”

  She was crying now. He could feel her tears on his fingers. He lifted his other hand to her face, using his thumbs to brush the moisture from her cheeks. He was gentle, unbearably conscious of the cut on her lip, the bruise on her temple, the rest of the story he had yet to hear but would no doubt break his heart.

  His wife had been beaten, and he hadn’t been there for her. His wife had been hurt and he had not protected her.

  “I love you,” she whispered against his fingertips. “I fell in love with you the day Ree was born, and I’ve been waiting for you to love me ever since.”

  He studied her in bewilderment. “Then why did you leave me? Was it because of Aidan Brewster?”

  Her turn to look confused. “Aidan Brewster? Who’s that?”

  D.D. was just hitting Southie when Dispatch returned. Reports of gunfire, nearest units please respond. Dispatch rattled off the address, and D.D. immediately connected the dots.

  She was on her radio in an instant. “Does that address belong to a Mrs. Margaret Houlihan? Please confirm.”

  A moment’s delay then the muffled reply.

  “Dammit!” D.D. hit the wheel. “That’s Brewster’s address. Who the hell is on the scene?”

  “Officers Davis and Jezakawicz are at the residence. There has been no response to their repeated knocks on the door.”

  “Break it down. I’ll be right there.”

  Then D.D. pulled a hard left and was racing for Aidan Brewster’s apartment. An explosion. A missing teenager. Shots fired. What the hell was going on tonight?

  “Ever since September,” Sandra was saying, “I’ve been worried that you were some kind of predator, doing terrible things online. So I started learning more about computers, and in the course of doing that, I met Wayne Reynolds.”

  “You fell in love with the state computer guy,” Jason stated. He withdrew his hands, fisted them on his lap. Maybe that wasn’t fair of him, but he could only give as much as he could give.

  “I became infatuated.”

  “You slept with him.”

  She immediately shook her head, then hesitated. “But sometimes, on the spa nights …”

  “I know about the spa nights,” Jason said curtly.

  “Then why did you let me go?”

  He inhaled, exhaled. “I didn’t think it was fair to punish you for my failings.”

  “You can’t have sex.”

  “We did have sex.”

  “Did you like it?” she asked curiously.

  He managed a crooked grin. “I’d be willing to try it again.”

  That made her smile, eased some of the tension. But then her expression grew somber again, and he leaned closer, so he could study her eyes in the dark.

  “After our family vacation,” she said, “when I realized that the photo I saw wasn’t something you’d done, but something that had been done to you, I tried to break it off with Wayne. Except he didn’t take it so well. He thought you were coercing me, that I didn’t know what I was doing. He threatened to turn you in to the police if I didn’t keep seeing him.”

  “He wanted you for himself.”

  “I found out I was pregnant,” Sandra whispered. “I took the test last Friday. And I realized then that I really did need to end things with Wayne. I’d been stupid, reckless. But … I wanted you, Jason. I swear, I just wanted to be with you and Ree and whatever little life we’ve made together. So I e-mailed Wayne again, told him that I’d made a mistake, and that I was sorry, but I’d decided to save my marriage.

  “He called me immediately. Agitated, angry. He kept trying to tell me that I wasn’t thinking straight. He seemed to think that you had some kind of hold over me, maybe you were beating me into submission, I don’t know. But the more I tried to tell him everything was okay, the more he became convinced he had to save me.

  “I broke off all contact. Stopped answering his calls, his text messages, his e-mails. I purged accounts. I did everything I could think of. I just wanted him to go away. And then, Wednesday night …”

  She looked away. Jason caught her chin in his hand and brought her gaze back to him. “Just tell me, Sandy. Let’s just get it all out, then we can determine where to go from here.”

  “Wayne appeared. Right here. In our bedroom. Apparently, he’d made an impression of my house key the last time I’d met with him. His face was red, angry. He was holding a baseball bat.”

  She broke off. Her gaze was out of focus, seeing something only she could see. Jason didn’t interrupt. Just waited.

  “I
tried to stop him,” she whispered. “Tried to calm him down, tell him everything would be okay. I’d resume talking to him, go to the basketball games, whatever. Just, he needed to leave. He needed to go home.

  “He hit me. With his hand. He struck me, here. Here.” Her fingers idly brushed the bruises on her face. “I fell on the bed and he came after me. I stopped fighting. There didn’t seem to be any point, and I thought, maybe if I just submitted, he wouldn’t be so angry. He’d finish and go away, before something worse happened. I was terrified about the baby, and Ree, of course. And you, too. What if you came home and found us, and he grabbed the bat….

  “So many terrible things were going around in my head. Then … Ree appeared. She’d heard the noise and come to our bedroom. She was standing in the doorway, half-asleep. She said, ‘Mommy.’

  “The second he heard her voice, he stilled. I thought that was it. He’d kill her, kill me. It was over. So I pushed him off. Told him not to move. Then I pulled my nightgown down, walked over to our daughter, and escorted her back to her room. I told her that Mommy and Daddy had been wrestling. Everything was okay. I’d see her in the morning.

  “She didn’t want to let go of my hand at first. I got anxious. I thought if I didn’t get out of the room fast enough, maybe he’d come in. Bring the Louisville Slugger. So I swore to her that I had to go away for a moment, but that I’d be back. Everything was okay. I wouldn’t be gone long.”

  “She let you go.”

  Sandra nodded. “And when I returned to the room, Wayne was gone. I think Ree scared him. Maybe she shamed him back to his senses; I’m not sure. I went downstairs, redid the locks, not that they would do much good against a man with a key. Then I started to clean up. The bloody comforter, the broken lamp. Except …”

  He rubbed the back of her hand. “Except …”

  She looked at him, “Except I started to realize that nothing I did would be enough. Wayne works for the state police. He has a key to our house. Maybe he didn’t kill me that night, but what about the next, or the next? It’s not like a guy shows up with a baseball bat when all he wants to do is talk. He might press charges against you for the computer image, putting my husband in jail. Or heaven help us, he might go after Ree. She thinks he’s a friend. She’d get in a car with him. I started to realize … I started to realize that I’d made a huge mess of things.”

  “So you ran away.”

  She smiled thinly, catching the edge in his voice even as he tried to flatten it out. “I thought the only way to be safe from a man like Wayne was to have public knowledge of our relationship. If it was known that he was involved with me, then he couldn’t hurt me or my family, right? He’d be an automatic person of interest.”

  Jason couldn’t follow her train of thought. “I guess.”

  “So, I decided to disappear. Because if I disappeared, then the police would investigate, right? They’d learn about Wayne, then when I reappeared, I’d be safe. He wouldn’t dare do anything; it would cost him his career. So I retrieved your lockbox from that attic—”

  “I never told you about the lockbox.”

  “Ree did. She saw you after Christmas, when you were putting away the ornaments. She spent most of January chattering away that you had a treasure chest in the attic and now constantly demands to go ‘treasure hunting.’ I thought she meant that you had a box of mementos or something, but then, in the past few months, given everything that’s been going on, I’ve been reconsidering you. How easily you changed your name from Johnson to Jones. Our considerable cash reserves, which you never talk about, but I know are there from reading the bank statements. I decided to do a little digging around in the attic. It took me a couple of tries, but I finally discovered the metal box. The cash was very useful, the fake IDs … troubling.”

  “Escape plans are important to me,” he said.

  “There’s only ID for you. Not for a family.”

  “I can change that.”

  She smiled, more warmly now, and he found himself taking her hand again, tucking her fingers inside his.

  “I threw on your old clothes, all in black,” she said. “I stuck the cash and IDs in my pocket—cash for me to use, IDs for me to hold so you didn’t disappear while I was gone. I used one of our spare keys to lock the door behind me, then I hid behind the bushes until you returned.”

  “You hid in the bushes?”

  “I couldn’t leave Ree alone,” she said earnestly. “In case Wayne returned. I couldn’t just leave her. It was hard—” Her voice broke. “It was very hard to walk away. You have no idea. Leaving the two of you … I kept telling myself it would only be for a few days. I’d lay low, stay at some cheap hotel, paying cash. Then, when the police started questioning Wayne, I’d reappear, say I’d gotten overwhelmed, some sort of Mom excuse, and after a few embarrassing days, the dust would settle and we’d continue on with our lives.

  “I never expected my father would show up. Or they’d put Ethan through the wringer. Or … I don’t know. Everything grew bigger than I expected. The media attention, the police scrutiny. It’s all gotten out of hand.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “I had to cut through four back yards just to sneak into my own home tonight. It’s crazy out there.”

  “So how are you going to do this?”

  She shrugged. “Throw open the front door and declare, I’m back….’ Let the photographers click away.”

  “The reporters will eat you alive.”

  “I have to pay for my mistakes sooner or later.”

  He didn’t like it. And pieces of the story nagged at him. Sandy’s lover hadn’t taken no for an answer, so she’d thought to expose the relationship by disappearing? Why not just go public with the affair? Tell him, notify the state police. Her vanishing act seemed extreme to him. Then again, she’d just been assaulted, had been terrified for Ree. Her level of physical duress, mental exhaustion …

  He wished again he had been home Wednesday night. He wished he had kept his family safe.

  “Fine,” he said. “We’ll do this together. Walk out together, hand in hand. I’m already the menacing husband. You can be the ditzy wife. Tomorrow they’ll crucify us; by end of week, we’ll have our own reality TV show and be sharing a couch with Oprah.”

  “Can we do it in the morning?” Sandy asked. “I want to wake up with Ree. I want her to know I’m all right. Everything’s good again.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  They stood together. They had just taken the first step, when they heard a sudden dull roar from outside. Curious, Jason crossed to the bedroom window, cracking the blind and peering out.

  One by one, all the news vans with their enormous klieg lights, camera crews, and news reporters were suddenly packing up and pulling away. He watched the first one do a U-turn, then another, then another.

  “What the hell?” he murmured. Sandra had come up behind him.

  “Something bigger must’ve happened.”

  “Bigger than your return from the dead?”

  “They don’t know about that yet.”

  “True,” he said. But the sudden darkness outside discomfited him after two nights of blazing lights. Then, suddenly, he was aware of something else. A high-pitched scrape, like tree branches against a bare window, except their property didn’t have any trees that close to the house. From the back yard, he realized, and it was already moving away from the window, toward the hall.

  “Stay here,” he ordered.

  But he was too late. They both heard it at the same time: the tinkling of shattering glass, someone breaking through a back window.

  | CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX |

  “Shot twice,” D.D. was reporting to Miller, who’d just arrived at the Brewster scene after being called out of bed. D.D. had been at the house for nearly twenty minutes already, so she was bringing him up to speed. “First time in the stomach, second time in the back, between the shoulder blades, apparently as he tried to crawl away.”

&n
bsp; “Messy,” Miller observed.

  “Certainly not professional. This was personal business, through and through.”

  Miller straightened, wiping at the Vicks he’d smeared on his mustache. Gut shots weren’t just messy, they were smelly. Feces and blood and bile, all churned up and soaked into the carpet.

  “But Wayne Reynolds was taken out with a car bomb,” Miller countered. “That’s a professional-grade hit.”

  D.D. shrugged. “Guy can’t be in two places at once. So he rigs a bomb for bachelor number one, and pays a visit to bachelor number two. Either way, in one night, his competition is eliminated.”

  “You think Jason Jones did it.”

  “Who else had links to both men?”

  “So Jones kills his wife first, in a fit of jealousy, then sets out to get revenge against the men he believes were her lovers.”

  “Hey, crazier things have happened.”

  Miller arched his brows, just to show his doubt. “Ethan Hastings?”

  “Bolted. Maybe he heard what happened to his uncle and is scared it might be him next. Hell, maybe it could be him next.”

  Miller sighed. “Crap, I hate this case. Okay, so where’s Jason Jones?”

  “Sitting in his house, contained by two of Boston’s finest and most of the major news outlets.”

  “Not the news outlets,” Miller corrected. “This made the airwaves. By the time I pulled up, they were already lining the street. Might want to fix your hair before you exit, because we’re tomorrow’s news lead.”

  “Ah shit. Can’t anything stay quiet anymore?” D.D. selfconsciously touched her hair. It’d been nearly twenty hours since she’d last showered or tended to personal hygiene. Not the look any woman wanted to present to the world. She shook her head. “One last thing,” she informed Miller. “Out here.”

  He obediently followed her to the glass sliders leading outside. The back yard was dark compared to the lights blazing around front. But Southie had small yards, mostly fenced in, which kept the media at bay.