Neighborhood Watch

  After she’s introduced, she steps up to the podium. “Hi, everyone, thanks for coming—” She stops talking when she sees me. “Oh, my gosh! Mrs. Treading! I can’t believe you’re here!” I know she’s had twelve years to practice not letting on what she knows about Linda Sue’s death, and I expected her to put on a show of politeness, but I didn’t expect this: unmitigated delight.

  She turns to the audience. “This is my old librarian, everyone. It’s so funny to see her because I always think of her when I do a reading. She was the only librarian I ever knew who read chapter books to preschoolers. I still remember one about a witch who rode on a vacuum cleaner with a cat who could fit in one of her pockets.”

  I can hardly get over her saying all this, though I remember the book—The Wednesday Witch by Ruth Chew. A favorite from my childhood that had fallen out of print.

  “Mrs. Treading was the first adult I knew who took children seriously as readers.”

  I was?

  “She read books that she loved and passed along that passion. I’ve always wanted to thank her publicly for opening the world of books to me. I came from a house that favored science over fiction and I don’t know if I would have been a writer if it hadn’t been for her.”

  The crowd—now around thirty—applauds politely, and after an awkward moment where it’s unclear if I’m meant to say something or not, she continues with her reading. It’s from her newest book, in which cousins from England are introduced, a girl named Grace and a boy named Thaddeus. She reads their dialogue with an English accent, then laughs self-consciously, tucking hair behind her ear.

  Afterward, Finn and I get in line to get books signed. I’m grateful to him for buying two copies of each book. “My treat,” he whispers, handing them to me, and I wonder if he knows how much this means to me. I want to take them home and read them, sleep with them at night, wake up with them lying next to me in bed. I want my own copies but of course I have no money.

  “Thank you for what you said, Trish,” I say when we get to the table where she’s signing books. “I was very touched by that.”

  “It was all true.”

  After we’ve talked for a few minutes, managing to avoid all the loaded topics like my incarceration and the characters she’s named after my imaginary children, I invite her to join us for a cup of coffee, which she seems happy to do. At a table in the café section of the store, she starts to look more nervous than she did in front of an audience. After we order drinks, Finn asks why she chose to write for this age group.

  “I’m not sure. Someone once said you write for the age you remember being the happiest. Ten was probably my peak. Things went a little downhill for me after that. I’m not sure, maybe you heard.” She peeks up at me. “I did some stupid things.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I got in trouble. I went home with guys I shouldn’t have. They’d ask if I wanted to hear the new Pink Floyd album and the next thing I knew I’d be in some fat boy’s bedroom taking my shirt off.”

  It’s hard to know what to say. Finally Finn leans over and pats her hand. “I did that, too. Only I was the fat boy and we listened to the Electric Light Orchestra.”

  She laughs hard enough that some whipped cream on her hot chocolate blows off onto the table. “I’ve never heard of them,” she says. “It’s just a funny name.”

  We drift back to the safer topic of her writing. She tells us she’s planned seven books for her series, each one with a different suburban foe—a real estate developer leveling the forest, a school superintendent cutting art programs—each enemy vanquished by a combination of the children’s nimble wit and fairy magic. “The last book will be the darkest of all. About toxic pollution spreading first through the gardens, then killing pets, and finally people, too.”

  I think about the mysterious spill next to her house. Is this whole series based on our life back then and the dangers we didn’t even recognize?

  “I’ve only read part of the first book so far but I loved it,” I say. “You’re a wonderful writer, Trish.”

  “Thanks. I think about you a lot when I’m working. In some ways, you’re responsible for them being written at all.”

  I can’t get over the credit she’s giving me. “How?”

  “My parents would have insisted I be more practical. You were the first person I told the truth to, that I wanted to be a writer. Do you remember what you said?”

  I don’t.

  “You said, ‘I think you should be.’”

  I hardly know what to say. It’s more than I ever imagined, that I played a role in her life, affected her without even realizing it. As sweet as she’s being, I still have to ask: “Trish—about the names of the children in your book.” Suddenly, my voice is shaking. “How did you pick those?”

  “I did it for you.” She takes my hand and squeezes it. “I wanted them to have a life—something you could read about.”

  “Were you there? In Linda Sue’s house when I told her?”

  “Yes.”

  I can’t believe she’s admitting this so easily, as if it means nothing. “Were you there when she died?”

  “No.”

  In the timeline we constructed of that day, I left Linda Sue’s house at 4:00 P.M.; she died almost seven hours later, at 10:50 P.M.

  “I left around six o’clock that day,” Trish says. “My parents came over and said if I didn’t come home with them they’d call the police.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I’d been there for a while.”

  I remember what Jeremy said: that police found evidence of another person living there—toothbrush, shoes. It’s possible the police called her combat boots men’s shoes. Then I remember the list we all puzzled over trying to understand: Dr.’s appt., Library books, Betsy T. Is it possible this is the explanation? That Linda Sue didn’t write it, Trish did?

  But it seems so improbable that Trish ran away from home and then went only a hundred yards next door.

  “I’d been there almost two weeks without my parents figuring it out. It was amazing, in a way. I watched them through the upstairs window making calls and freaking out.”

  Had she done it as a cry for attention from her parents? “Why did you run away?”

  “I had to leave. They were going to make me do something I didn’t want to do.” Trish seems to consider saying more and then stops there.

  “How did they figure out where you were?”

  “I was never sure. I always wondered if maybe you saw me and told them.”

  “No. I had no idea.” Even as I say this, though, it’s strange. I’m remembering some fragment. Weeping in the dark because Trish chose Linda Sue’s house to go to and not my own. When would that have happened? When did I know enough of the story to feel saddened by it? “Even if I had seen you, I wouldn’t have told your parents.”

  “Now I wish I had let them call the police. If I did, Linda Sue would still be alive.” Her eyes are rimmed not with girlish tears but with adult ones.

  It’s a relief to realize Trish didn’t kill Linda Sue. She couldn’t have. She is still the book-loving, well-intentioned girl I remember, but a larger question remains: Does she know who did? Is she estranged from her family because one of them went back to exact revenge for the two weeks Linda Sue had hidden her next door without saying a word? I think about the clues that have never added up—the tea kettle and two mugs set out on the counter, such a welcoming gesture for a woman who never invited anyone inside. The killer didn’t force his or her way into her house looking for a confrontation. It was someone Linda Sue was happy to see, someone she offered a choice of teas to. That wouldn’t have been Marianne.

  And then my breath catches. I think about the time I showed up in Roland’s apartment, and the steaming mug of peach tea he’d made for me. The easy way he had of talking to women in the middle of the night. “I need to ask a favor of you, Trish.”

  “What?”

  “You n
eed to come back with us and talk to your parents again.”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Treading, but I can’t do that.”

  “I know it’s been a long time since you’ve seen them, but if I’ve ever been an inspiration to you, or a help, I’m asking you to do this for me.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m terrible around my parents. It’s like I become this different person. These books I write are—” She stops herself.

  “Are what?”

  “They’re about kids who haven’t been parented, really. They have to go out and find fairies to help them because that was how my childhood felt. My parents were never there.”

  “That’s not true, Trish.” I think of Marianne bringing her to the library, carrying in her bags of books.

  “You don’t know what it was like.”

  She’s right. I can’t imagine what it was like to grow up in her house.

  “Look,” Finn says, leaning in. “Here’s one thing I’ve learned about parents. It takes more energy to stay angry at them than it does to forgive them. That’s my experience anyway.”

  Trish stares into her milky cup and says, “My parents aren’t bad people, but they’ve done some bad things.”

  I lean closer to her. This is what I need to know. “What did they do?”

  “They never saw me. They never had a clue what was going on. They worried about John all the time. How depressed he was, and anxious. I was always supposed to be fine, but I wasn’t.”

  Finn smiles. “My parents thought my biggest problem was sensitive skin. That’s why I cried in public and blushed. Because rashes make you attracted to men.”

  She laughs and looks over at him. “And you still see them now?”

  He holds up an index finger. “Once a year, whether it kills me or not. Sometimes it almost does kill me. But here’s the thing I’ve learned about parents: They never change. You can get down on your hands and knees and beg them to and they’ll say, ‘Yes, yes, we want to change.’ And they still won’t.”

  Finn may have a point, but he’s missing a larger one. I say to Trish, “You say being with your parents isn’t good for you, but sometimes we don’t have choices in these things. We have a responsibility to tell the truth.”

  “I’ve been trying to do that.”

  I look in her eyes and try to decide what she means by this. “You have, haven’t you? In your books. You’re trying to tell us something, aren’t you?”

  She nods. “Yes.”

  “There’s something about your parents we need to know, isn’t there?”

  She nods again.

  “Please, Trish. Come with us. I promise you won’t have to be alone with them if you don’t want to.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks carefully.

  “I’ll stay with you.” I lean toward her so that she understands the urgency. “This will never end without your help. The police won’t do anything. They don’t have enough evidence.” I don’t know if she understands what I’m saying. “I need this, Trish.”

  She closes her eyes and finally nods. “All right.”

  In the car, she sits in the backseat, quiet for most of the hour-long drive. I watch her face grow more anxious the closer we get and wonder if I’m doing the right thing, forcing a confrontation like this. For twelve years, my case has gotten nowhere because this family has managed to hide whatever the truth was about their participation that night. Not only was Trish there earlier in the day, but Roland and Marianne were as well. Having spent two weeks in the private hell of their daughter’s disappearance, they had finally found the engineer behind it, their next-door neighbor, a woman Marianne had always resented.

  “Thank you again for doing this, Trish,” I say when we finally pull into her driveway. “I know it isn’t easy.”

  “I don’t want you to go in with me,” she says.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I need to do this by myself.”

  For a second, I wonder if this might be a mistake. Will she go inside and warn them that they need to escape? “How about if we call you in an hour?” Finn says as she gets out of the car.

  She nods and walks toward the house. “What’s the worst that can happen?” Finn says, watching her go.

  CHAPTER 21

  I’m beginning to remember more from the week before Linda Sue died. How the whole block was unsettled, in flight, though nothing showed yet. Things had changed for me, too. By day, I’d grown quieter. At our monthly library staff meeting, I made no mention of the reference books I found misshelved, or the “bookmarks” I’d been collecting under the desk for my lobby display. What did it matter with a friend too busy to take any notice? I knew I was being childish in the way I moved past Geoffrey without a word if he was standing in his yard. Childish in a way that I’d never been as a child. Eventually Geoffrey did notice. How could he not as I grew bolder with my silence and once looked him in the eye and turned up my own walkway without a word? There, I thought, closing the door behind me. That’s what you get. It was glorious and satisfying and a perfect communication of words I couldn’t speak. You can’t have it all, Geoffrey. My friendship and her, too.

  For two weeks I moved under that cloud. But such anger is draining after a while. I tried a new tactic and made a show out of laughing with neighbors on the street, in case Geoffrey was watching. See, I tried to show him, I have other friends, too.

  Roland was part of that. Their house sat directly opposite Geoffrey’s. The night I left Roland’s basement, I felt someone watching me and hoped it was Geoffrey. The revelation that it was Marianne has unsettled me more than I want to admit. As if I were putting on a show for the wrong audience entirely. Though it didn’t feel like a show. That night with Roland broke the back of my anger. I saw how easily a body could respond, how it opened up and reacted without any forethought. I want to kiss you, he’d said. But I don’t know if I should.

  It was a relief to realize how senselessly bodies acted, but it didn’t stay that way. In that mind-set, one obsession replaced another. For one day and then two, I thought nearly nonstop about Roland. At work, stamping a sheaf of overdue notices, I’d remember the moment of leaning across for a kiss, the messy urgency, the way our bodies pushed against each other, and a minute later I’d realize my hands had gone damp. It was wonderful and terrible to be kissed by Roland. To carry that memory around in my head, already crowded with so much I was trying not to think about.

  A break from all this electrified stasis came when I least expected it. One morning, as Heather, another assistant librarian, was checking in returns, shaking each one for loose contents, as I’d asked her to do for my collection, an envelope dropped out addressed to me.

  “Look,” she said. “Here’s something for your bookmark collection.” She raised her eyebrows as if she already knew what it said.

  I carried it to the back office and opened it privately:Can I talk to you, please? I’ll be out back in the garden at lunchtime.

  Love,

  G

  So simple and direct. A peace offering. A plea. I was filled with a sense of largesse. We were each having our flings, and still we needed the touchstone of our friendship to sift through and understand what we were doing. All morning I waited for lunch hour to come.

  When it did, I walked outside to find Geoffrey looking withered and exhausted on the bench, brown bag on his knee, a backpack beside him, in which he carried the notebook that he wrote his novel long-hand in. He looked as if hadn’t slept in days, maybe weeks. My heart softened at the sight. He was suffering, too. Maybe more than I was.

  We got through our apologies without specifying exactly what they were for. “I’m sorry we’ve gotten so distant,” he said vaguely. “I didn’t know if you were angry with me or just preoccupied for some reason.”

  “No,” I said gently. Why spread it out now like dirty linens between us? I thought. “I’m not angry
anymore.”

  He looked at me and waited for something more.

  “I’ve been worried,” I said. “You don’t look too well.”

  “Right.” He looked down.

  I couldn’t get over how the balance between us had shifted. As if I’d become the only person who could steer him out of a dark hallway. “What is it, Geoffrey? Tell me what’s going on.”

  I’ll tell him, too, I decided. I think I might be falling in love. This is what friends do—they try out grand ideas and see how they sound.

  “I’m being sued,” he said. “For plagiary, if you can believe it.”

  I couldn’t, actually. Then he told me the details. It was an old student, and involved two of the shortest stories in his book, written last, after he’d sold the manuscript. They were the weakest stories in the book, more like voice exercises than stories with any weight. He said the suit was valid, yes, but the plagiary unintentional on his part. He’d read the student’s stories five years earlier and must have remembered them subconsciously. When he sat down to write two new ones, he was amazed at how quickly these came. Now the student had sent proof to his publishers, copies of his old stories with Geoffrey’s comments written on them.

  My face burned with shame for him. I thought of what my colleagues inside the library would say, how the world of minions waited for such stars to fall from the sky. “What does this mean?” I whispered.

  “Not that much actually,” he said, shrugging and pulling his backpack into his lap. “I still feel pretty good about the novel. I just finished another chapter this morning.”

  He was being sued for plagiary and wrote another chapter this morning?

  “But what about these stories?”

  “I’ll have to pay the guy something. But it’ll die down after that, I expect.” Was he serious? Could a writer be so cavalier about something so fundamental? “If the book hadn’t been a best seller, the guy wouldn’t have cared. He’s in law school now. He hardly reads fiction. He only picked up mine when he saw the sticker on it.”