Neighborhood Watch

  The sleep scientists who testified at their trials said these cases were the result of random misfiring of a poorly wired brain, not the expression of deep-seated desires or psychopathic aggression. The sleepwalker who attacks has never consciously entertained the idea of hurting that person. The event is entirely out of his control. Even as I looked further into their studies, though, I started to question them, the way some behaviors seemed to divide curiously along gender lines. One doctor declared, “Somnambulists do not act out latent desires, their actions are random.” Yet he also cited the study where sleepwalking men are most inclined to battle unseen intruders and women are most likely to roam farther and longer, in search of lost infants.

  How could this be considered random? Surely there was meaning behind these late-night wanderings, our minds in search of solace withheld from us by day.

  My case is listed among the others and our testimony rings similar notes. We all have a long history of waking up in rooms and houses altered by our night movements through them. We all know the heavy dread of remembering nothing. In every case, there was a genetic component to the disorder—all (except me) were acquitted in part because family members had a documented history of night wandering. Though my father’s hospital would not release his records, I know it was a problem there, that he arrived and finally began sleeping again only to wake up more than once and discover himself in another patient’s bed. I know this news did not wholly shock my mother. Instead she was quietly grateful that no charges were pressed and, after two incidences, had a lock placed on his hospital room door.

  I resisted bringing this into my trial until I was told I had no choice, that sparing my father could be tantamount to going to jail. How many people have made such choices and gone to jail anyway? When I finally relented, the revelation was broadcast on our local news, as so much of my trial was, and eventually, like a virus, it made its way across the country. My father, a widower by then, wrote Paul a letter succinctly apologizing for “harm done in the past, genetic and otherwise.” I understood this to mean I shouldn’t expect to ever hear from him again. And I haven’t.

  Though it’s Wednesday morning and I know Jeremy goes to church with his family, I call him and tell him what’s happening, that Trish is missing and they suspect there might have been foul play involved.

  “Jesus, Betsy.”

  “I know.”

  “Are the police there yet?”

  Roland is in the kitchen, though he doesn’t look at me or acknowledge my presence. Jeremy arrives fifteen minutes later, while the police are in the living room talking to Marianne. I tell him what has unsettled me as much as Trish’s disappearance. “I’m starting to remember more about that night. About Linda Sue’s death.”

  Jeremy exhales and looks in the direction of the police. “All right, stop right there. First, we concentrate on Trish.” We go upstairs to Trish’s room, where I tell him everything I’ve learned about her over the last few days: her books, the baby, the tension with her parents. I don’t mention anything about the cat or remind him of the letter I showed him long ago. Given the choice of her pen name it will raise too many questions, get everyone wondering how much she knows.

  “Did it make you angry when she told you about wanting to give the baby to Linda Sue? That she didn’t pick you?”

  Yes, of course. But it was my own fault, wasn’t it? She’d wanted to give it to me and I hadn’t given her the chance. “No,” I say. “No. I wasn’t angry with Trish. I wanted to help her.” He seems to be missing the main point I’m trying to make without saying it out loud: Trish might have killed Linda Sue and I don’t want these police officers to know this.

  “Look—I’m going to be honest with you, Bets. If her body turns up, or if she’s disappeared for good, you’re going to be their first suspect, okay? You’ve got to be careful every step of the way here, about everything you say.”

  I understand this and I don’t. I am trying to protect someone I also might have hurt. Jeremy walks me back downstairs to the living room, where two officers wait, one seated on the sofa, the other pacing behind it. I recognize the technique—one in motion, inviting agitation and unease, the other inviting stillness and confession. The older one, sitting, tells me right away, “We’ve found some more evidence in the bushes outside the bathroom window—a T-shirt saturated in fresh blood.”

  “Okay,” I say, aware of him watching my response, weighing it carefully.

  “We need you to tell us everything you remember from yesterday.”

  I’m a different person than I was twelve years ago, the first time I was questioned like this. I know that we’re not on the same side, that everything they ask is for a reason and everything I say will be interpreted as negatively as possible. The balance is skewed against me. I know that a bloody shirt thrown out the window suggests a hasty and desperate stab at cleaning up, not unlike the job done at Linda Sue’s. In a minute, the younger cop is going to start with his questions, pressing these points and pushing me to admit that, yes, there are some similarities here. He’ll probably be ugly in his insinuations. Yes, I might have been exonerated, might have gone to prison innocent, but I no longer am. The police assume I’ve been brutalized by the twelve years I spent warehoused in the prison system and am now capable of worse offenses than I ever was back then.

  As I retell the story of the afternoon, the older one nods in agreement and shakes his head in wonder at everything I say. He’s all affirmation and sympathy, while the younger one, with darker hair and skin, listens skeptically in the corner, arms folded over his chest. “Did you ever suspect anything? See any signs of Trish’s pregnancy?”

  I think about the conversation we had at the bus stop when she talked about wanting a book from the library with a cigarette folded into her curled palm. She must have been pregnant then. It was maybe a month before Linda Sue’s death. “No.”

  “Did you notice her gaining weight?”

  “No.”

  “But yesterday, when she told you this, you believed her.”

  He’s trying to have me admit that I knew all along about her plan for the baby. That my resentment, gone underground, has seethed all these years. “I know young girls can sometimes hide pregnancies. It’s happened before.”

  “But you must have felt pretty angry, right? After you’d tried for many years and hadn’t had a baby? And she had one so easily?”

  “No.”

  “And she wasn’t even going to keep it. She was going to give it away to your neighbor, no less. It must have been infuriating.”

  I need to be clear. “I don’t have the same intensity of feelings that I used to about pregnancy. I can hardly spend the rest of my life resenting every woman who’s carried a baby to term.”

  “Still. This one might be different.” He looks down at his notes. “Didn’t you tell Roland, her father, that you always felt a special connection to her? Something you couldn’t explain exactly?”

  Roland told them this? “I did. She was a precocious reader as a little girl. I was a librarian. That’s not so strange.”

  “Why did you get a neighbor to drive you an hour away to a reading yesterday afternoon? Do you do that with all your old library patrons?”

  “She’s an author now. I was staying with her parents.”

  “Did her parents go?”

  “No.”

  “Did they ask you to bring her here?”

  “No.”

  “You took it upon yourself to invite her into a house you’ve been staying at for only three days?”

  “She’s their daughter. She’s been estranged for a while and I thought I would help them reconnect. Trish wanted to come.”

  “Did you have any other motivation in bringing her back here?”

  I need to say this carefully. “I wondered if the family had information about Linda Sue’s death that they might be keeping from me. I thought it might be an explanation for their estrangement from Trish. If I brought her back here, I was h
oping I’d find out what it was.”

  “Did you know Trish was a suspect in the murder of Linda Sue Nelson?”

  This is a surprise. “No—she’s never been a suspect for the murder.”

  “Her fingerprints match the fourth set found in the victim’s house. She was in the house that day. She admitted this to you, right?”

  How do they know so much? “Yes, she told me she was at Linda Sue’s house that day. But she left four hours before she was killed. When it happened, Trish was back in her own home, locked in her room.”

  “Did you go to the reading yesterday hoping she would confess?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think she killed Linda Sue?”

  The biggest mistake I could make now would be telling an outright lie. “I’ve thought about it, but in the end, I don’t think she did it.”

  “Her mother has called her an intense and troubled girl.” I see where this is going. “And difficult at times.”

  I know what they want to hear. They want me to admit, It’s possible, yes, Trish could have killed her. My heart begins to race. I know how easy it is for the appearance of guilt to become guilt itself. How it feels like quicksand.

  I look through the doorway to where Marianne stands with Roland. They’re all talking about me, about the strange things I’ve done and said. This is no longer about protecting Trish. If she is guilty of the old crime, I must be guilty, too, of some new crime we don’t even know the specifics of yet. I’ve made this mistake before—sat with police officers convinced of my guilt until I saw the picture they’d painted for themselves. Yes, I think. You’re right. She was a difficult girl. Infuriating. Yes, I could have hurt her. It’s possible.

  I can feel eyes on me. Everyone in the room is pretending not to look at me.

  I have felt so out of place and disoriented this whole time. I don’t belong in this world that has moved on without me. I know the statistics. The odds of reoffending are highest in the first week after a prison release because voices whisper everywhere you go: Prison is where you belong, where it is safest.

  Calm down, I tell myself. Breathe in. Breathe out.

  Then I imagine Wanda, a paintbrush of nail polish in one hand, waving hello, happy to see me. The relief it will be.

  “I know what I did,” I say. “I remember now.”

  I can’t speak yet.

  There’s a flurry of activity, a need for protocol. Jeremy is called in. I hear someone, somewhere, reading me my rights. They need a tape recorder, they say, and leave me alone in the room with Jeremy, who looks saddened by this turn of events. I’m not his poster girl for innocence anymore.

  This story is more complicated, as am I, apparently. He looks at me for a long time without speaking, as if he wants me to tell him without words whether I am guilty of something here. And of course I can’t, because nothing is simple, and nothing happened the way it looked.

  CHAPTER 30

  It has come back to me slowly, what happened that night.

  I see the oval pool of Linda Sue’s blood and Geoffrey’s necklace lying in it. The necklace is so vivid in my mind that I know it can’t be my imagination. I remember the way it seemed to float on top of the blood, until I tried to pull it out and discovered the clasp caught on Linda Sue’s nightgown. Getting it off her involved lifting her up, smearing blood all over myself. I’d wanted only to get rid of the jewelry that implicated Geoffrey, and in trying to do that I’d made such a mess. I had no choice. I had to clean up what I’d done.

  Here is the truth I need to tell Jeremy: I’m the one who cleaned up the crime scene, which means I altered the evidence and rendered much of it inadmissible. I don’t remember everything about the hour I spent alone with a corpse, a bucket of soapy water, and a sponge, but I remember my first thought when I walked into her house and found her lying there. Geoffrey must have done this. I assumed there had been a terrible accident, that they’d had a fight about his plagiarism and it turned physical.

  In theory, Geoffrey might have loved Linda Sue’s raw honesty at our Neighborhood Watch meetings, but he didn’t love it as much as he loved the illusions about his life, that he was a great artist and a man of letters. I knew his marriage to Corinne was based on those illusions, along with the dark places she’d reached in and pulled him out of. Now she was withdrawing into her own world, home less and less, available for picking up fewer pieces of the life he continued to shatter.

  I thought about the man I’d grown to love in spite of his flaws. The friend who had read my old favorite books, listened to my stories, and prodded me with questions. I’d married a man who asked none and I’d never felt this before. Whatever pain Geoffrey had caused me in the past two weeks, he’d also awoken a great cistern of feeling that sometimes left me breathless. Corinne can’t save him this time, I thought, but I can, and I got to work cleaning.

  I found the lock beside Linda Sue’s body and cleaned it for a while. I returned to the kitchen a few times and found sponges and gloves, though I don’t remember seeing the sandwich or the mayonnaise. They might have been there, but I didn’t see them. I was working with only the one light in the foyer on. I also missed the catalog I brought over myself that afternoon, the books I’d touched, the glass I must have drunk from. I was aware enough of the need to protect myself that I wore rubber gloves while I cleaned and then missed all those items and I’m not sure why.

  Jeremy sits beside me for my official statement, helping me say as little as possible to incriminate myself. They can’t arrest me yet without a body or more evidence that a crime has been committed. Two days ago, my picture was on the front page of every newspaper in the area with a headline about the twelve years I’d spent behind bars for a crime I didn’t commit. The police need to be careful. They can’t make another mistake.

  CHAPTER 31

  For a day, then two, nothing happens.

  Trish doesn’t return to her apartment in Bridgetown. A canvassing produces no sightings or information. Because of the blood, police have identified this as potential foul play and brought dogs in to search the woods and the cornfields behind the house. A story appears on the front page of the local paper under the headline YOUNG AUTHOR MISSING, with her photograph, which appears on none of her books. If Trish wanted anonymity in her writing, she’s lost it forever by disappearing.

  I’m trying to be helpful in any way I can. I’ve confessed to cleaning up the crime scene at Linda Sue’s house twelve years ago, but have continued to say I don’t know where Trish is or what happened to her that night. I can feel the tension my presence creates and am grateful when Bill and Finn invite me to stay in their guest bedroom for the time being. I pack what few belongings I have, and before I leave, I find Marianne sitting alone in the kitchen, with a pamphlet titled FIND THEM: What to Do When a Loved One Goes Missing open on the table in front of her.

  I sit down at the table across from her, thankful for the tentative truce that has grown between us. Two days is a long time to hover by phones and wait while people in uniforms tell us what to do. Every few hours, we’ve learned a little bit more. For instance, Trish has done this before, gone missing for days when she had appointments and meetings scheduled. When her agent first heard about her disappearance, he actually said, “Oh, no, not this again,” then quickly backpedaled, calling her the most talented young writer he represented. “She’s astonishing,” he said. But yes, he admitted, she can be unreliable. He told about her reading at the Book Expo last year where three hundred people waited, and she never showed up. After that, she didn’t call or send an apology, didn’t contact anyone for almost two weeks. “I worried that time,” he said. “But eventually she turned up.”

  The finger of suspicion pointed against me is softening. Marianne is no longer sure if this is my fault. I suspect she’s no longer sure what to think. When I sit down, she shakes her head, as tears I’ve seen only once before rise to her eyes. “I don’t understand. For five years, I was fine not knowing where she was. N
ow I can’t bear to have this go on another day.”

  The doorbell has been ringing with neighbors stopping by, checking in, dropping off food. All of this reminds me of the feeling after Linda Sue’s death. As if we’ve all been poised, waiting for this to happen, expecting it somehow.

  For the moment, though, we are alone and I take advantage of the silence around us to ask Marianne about her work. Her eyes widen and then she must assume Roland has told me everything. She looks toward the basement door and shakes her head. “We had to keep it a secret. We didn’t have a choice. My first husband, David, died doing this work and I needed to keep us all safe.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Pancreatic cancer. But there were other people on his research and development team getting the same cancer and no one wanted to investigate the connection or figure out what was really going on.”

  “Was it from the chemicals they were working with?”

  “He didn’t work with the chemicals. I did. None of the men who got the cancer worked in the labs. They were analyzing our results and drawing up designs. How do three men under the age of fifty get cancer from pencils and computers? No one would ever answer that question for me.”

  I can’t get over how easily she’s shed a twenty-year charade of pretending to do nothing. It’s as if, with Trish gone, there’s no point in any of the old secrecy anymore. She tells me I’d be stunned by what an amoral bunch scientists can be, especially if they think their precious research funding might be endangered. “David used to complain about it. I thought he was being ridiculous, and then he died under circumstances that no one would look into. There were people obsessed with stopping cold fusion research. He thought it was someone putting carcinogens in our water supply, which I thought was crazy until all these guys got cancer and died within six months of each other.”

  “Who wanted to stop work on cold fusion?”

  “Hot fusion got all the government contracts and money in those days—billions and billions. They had to hold on to it.” It all started when they were at Texas A&M after Fleischmann and Pons made their announcement. Their lab went to work the next day trying to replicate the experiment. After four months with no results, the tide began turning. Georgia State was the first to say it wasn’t replicable; MIT came out a few weeks later, calling cold fusion a hoax. Soon after that, the money disappeared. Basically, the government funded it long enough to look like they’d tried but not long enough to threaten the twenty-five years they’d invested in hot fusion. Without government subsidy, the university cut them off, even though most of the scientists they were working for agreed they hadn’t had enough time. She and David were postdocs at that point, low enough on the totem pole that they were able to move around under the radar. They stole equipment from the lab to continue the work in the basement of their tiny rented house. Their feeling, the whole time, was that the higher-ups knew and approved of what they were doing. They believed cold fusion had potential, though it might take ten years or more to get reliable results.