Light from a Distant Star (24 page)

“Freaky?” her mother gasped. “What do you mean? Something happened, didn’t it?” She put her hands on Nellie’s shoulders. “He did something to you, didn’t he? And you’re afraid to tell me.”

“No!”

“Listen, hon. You can tell me anything, you know you can. Please, just get it out.”

Nellie stared back. There was a lot to get out. But it wasn’t about Max.

“Tell me!” she insisted. “Whatever happened, whatever he did, you’ve got to talk about it. You have to.”

“He didn’t do anything. Honest!” Her voice broke. It scared her to see her mother so frantic, so intense. “He was just nice, that’s all. He always was.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice faint with dread and accusation. “How? How was he nice?”

A familiar car was coming up the street. It slowed at the corner.

“Hi, Sandy. Hi, Nellie,” Barb Horton, their neighbor, called through the open window. The Hortons had been among the few to come by after the murder, wanting to help, whatever they could do. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” her mother called back. “Oh, God, God, God,” she groaned through a frozen smile, waving to the passing car.

“And not just nice, he was brave,” Nellie continued. “Like how he saved Henry that time with the dog. He got bit, too, you know. His
hand and his arm, and he never said anything. He was just, like, that’s what had to be done, you know what I mean?”

Her mother didn’t answer.
Because she’s made up her mind, just like everyone else
, Nellie thought as they walked the rest of the way in silence.

T
HEY WERE STILL
at the dinner table. Along with Henry’s annoying interjections of facts, Benjamin had been telling them about Venus, Mars, and Saturn, the triangle of planets in tonight’s sky. Ruth kept checking her watch and her mother was staring down at her plate. She’d barely eaten. Nellie’s struggle to look interested was waning when her father suddenly got up and said they should drive to the pond. Much better viewing there without any streetlights. Ruth’s mouth gaped open, but before she could protest, her mother said that only Nellie would be going, which confused Nellie and sent Henry into a bitter tirade. After all, he was the one who wanted to be an astrophysicist, not
her
, he yelled, running upstairs and slamming his door.

Her father’d hardly said two words on their way here. Probably feeling guilty about leaving Henry behind, she thought. Maybe they should go back and get him, she suggested as he pulled into the empty lot.

“He’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, after he gets done trashing his room,” she laughed, but he didn’t say anything.

As they came along the fringe of the woods, the leafy darkness seemed to swell with chirping crickets, which made her even more aware of his silence. The crunch of their footsteps over the gravelly sand echoed across the still black water. Hoisting themselves up onto the large flat rock that marked the far end of the town beach, they sat facing the last, faint rim of western twilight. Pointing, her father named each glow in the triangle, the brightest being Venus, the closest to Earth and also the closest to the sun. The evening star, he added.

“Must be a million other stars,” Nellie said, squinting up at their brilliance in the inky blue sky.

“Actually, only five thousand can be seen with the naked eye,” her father said. “Twelve thousand with binoculars.”

Fireflies flickered around them. She’d forgotten how soothing his voice could be, his nearness. Her eyes kept closing. There’s the observable universe, he was saying, and the unobservable universe.

“And right now, the two of us, we’re at the center of our observable universe,” he said.

“What’s that mean?” she yawned, letting his explanation of cosmic horizons and worldlines and events drift into the night. What mattered was how much he knew and cared about things that no one else did. Someday people would appreciate just how brilliant he was. Ruth, for instance.

“… particles and galaxies that last over long periods of time, but an event, now an event is just that, brief, a flash!” He snapped his fingers. “Like those fireflies. And that’s what so much of this is, Nellie. Something that surely happened, but now it’s over. It’s gone. Do you know what I’m saying?” He picked up a stone and scaled it plinking three times across the water.

“I guess so.” She scaled a stone. Hers plinked once.

“Mom’s afraid you’re holding things in, that maybe you’re not telling us everything. She said when she tried to talk about it, you got upset.”

“She’s
the one that got all upset.”

“She’s worried about you. And so am I.” He put his arm around her.

“I’m okay. It’s just hard sometimes, that’s all.”

“It must be, being there, seeing what you saw, then everything afterward. But I just want you to know, Nell, that there’s nothing, nothing on the face of this earth that you’d ever have to hide from me.”

“I know!” she said with a rush, dreading the thing she couldn’t even think about: Mr. Cooper. That’s what she needed to tell.

“Nellie, did … did Max Devaney ever touch you in a way he shouldn’t have?”

“No! That’s disgusting! That’s so disgusting! Why’re you asking me that?” She struggled to pull free, but he wouldn’t let go.

“Listen to me! Listen to me!” he pleaded. “I had to ask you. I had to.” And then he told why. Max Devaney was a convicted sex offender. It was with stars glimmering above the pond water as it gently lapped the gritty shore that she first heard the words statutory rape
and consensual sex. When Max was nineteen, he’d been sent to prison for having relations with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, which, disgustingly, made her think of her eighteen-year-old mother having sex with seventeen-year-old Danny Brigham.

“That’s sick. That’s so sick,” she said with a shudder. Her father thought she meant Max, but it was everything, everyone around her, this whole life that felt soiled. She kept rubbing her nose. Rot, the stink coming from inside her head, her brain, even though she knew it was the pond.

He was still talking. “I remember the day you were born, I vowed that I’d never, ever let anything bad happen to you. I meant that. But that was an impossible vow to keep, because bad things happen. They do, and they did, and they always will. So all I can do is tell my little girl how much I love her. Try and keep her safe that way.”

His shirt button was rubbing her cheek raw, but she didn’t care.

E
VEN THE PROSPECT OF SELLING THE STORE COULDN’T LIFT
her mother’s spirits. No one knew how depressed she was. Death’s taint was everywhere. She blamed herself for renting to Dolly. She blamed her father for taking in Max. The one person she really wanted to blame for her life of disappointment was Benjamin, but she couldn’t. For one thing, she loved him, and for another, Mr. Cooper had, after all, agreed to buy the hardware store. Their financial situation was bound to improve. But until then, without rent from the apartment, every day was a struggle. Detective Des La Forges had finally said she could run a For Rent ad in the paper. Of course, once prospective tenants learned there might be a jury visit to the premises, they wouldn’t be interested. Not that there’d been a single serious inquiry, anyway.

Sandy Peck felt marked, as shamed by the murder in her own home as she’d felt growing up in the middle of the junkyard. Even her fledgling jewelry business had been ruined. Days before the murder, she’d been planning her first party but then had to cancel it. She grew very quiet. At home she went about her usual routine but without her old spark. Nellie and Henry tried to stay out of her way. Ruth, however, had turned into the most loving, considerate daughter a mother could have.

Though he looked terrible, Lazlo Larouche brought the first glimmer of brightness into Nellie’s mother’s life. There were pouchy circles under his eyes and he hadn’t shaved. Their old tenant sat at the table while her mother chopped green peppers and onions for her meat loaf. Nellie listened from the hallway.

His life was in turmoil. He couldn’t think straight lately, couldn’t
concentrate, and hadn’t picked up a paintbrush all summer. He suspected that James was seeing someone. James had been denying it, but for the last two nights he hadn’t come home. And to make matters worse, the Mountain House had just been sold and the new manager didn’t like him, so who knew where that would end up. Lazlo told her mother he hated bothering her at a time like this, but he’d been feeling so alone. He’d just needed someone to talk to. And now that he had, he felt like such a vulture, swooping in after the—“carnage,” he said—something like that, because her mother gasped and then he was apologizing all over again while she kept assuring him that it was all right. It was her—she’d just been having a hard time dealing with it all.

“Of course, you are. I mean, who wouldn’t?” Lazlo agreed in his sweet voice.

“It just makes me sick inside. I keep seeing it, picturing it. How it must have happened. Him killing her, and then he comes back and he gets Nellie? My God! I mean, she was right down there with him.” Her voice cracked. “And what’ll that do to her?”

“She’ll be fine. Kids’re resilient.”

“But she’s really bothered. I can tell.”

“Then maybe she should talk to someone, a therapist or something.”

“That’s what Ben said. But we don’t even have insurance right now.”

“It’s just going to take time, that’s all,” Lazlo said. “For everyone.”

“And it’s all my fault. Everything’s so ugly now. Everything! Everything I touch.” And she began to cry. Finally, for the first time, that Nellie knew of, anyway.

“Oh, Sandy. Oh, poor Sandy. Things’ll get better. They always do.”

Nellie peeked around the corner to see her nodding and rubbing her eyes with a dish towel and blaming the raw onions while Lazlo hugged her and patted her back, and she felt the same resentment as when her mother went off with her girlfriends.

“Well, just remember,” her mother said, sniffling, “the apartment’s yours if you ever need it.”

As Lazlo was leaving, he asked to see the tree house. Nellie and Henry followed him outside, reluctantly. They hadn’t ventured into the side yard since the murder and certainly not into the tree house.
This had become Dolly’s side of the house now, the darker side. They stood below looking up, realizing, they would later admit to each other, how uneasy they felt. Its helter-skelter construction could come crashing down on them at any second.

“Oh, my Lord!” Lazlo said. “This is so amazing. It’s like I’ve seen this before, in a dream or something.”

Henry’s eyes shifted to hers. They’d forgotten Lazlo’s easy fervor, how annoying it was.

“I can just picture it,” he continued, swirling his hand above his head, “caught in a storm, blowing, twirling, spinning round and round and round before it finally comes to rest, there, there, right there. A perfect landing.” He stood for a moment, hand over his mouth, gazing up. He took a few steps back, squinting with one eye. “Beautiful,” he sighed.

H
ER MOTHER COULDN’T
get over it, not a word from the Humboldts. She asked Nellie’s father if he thought they should call them or go see them or something. How horrified they must be, living next door to—

“To a house where someone died?” he said it for her.

She nodded.

“Well, guess what, Sandy, these are old houses. Every house on this street’s had someone die in it, at one time or another.”

“But they weren’t murdered.”

“But we don’t know that, do we? I mean, who knows, in the old days, dyspepsia, a little arsenic slipped into the tea for good measure. Reset the gas light in the bedroom. Oops, poor papa. Didn’t quite make it through the night. Believe me, these things happened.”

Ooh. A huge blunder. Nellie squirmed.

Silence around the table.

“Something’s wrong with you, Ben. Seriously wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” he said with a clownish grimace.

“It’s almost like you live on a different planet from the rest of us.” Her stare was awful, as if suddenly seeing him for the first time.

“Well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” he said slowly.

“For you maybe.”

Eyes lowered to their plates, they ate fastidiously. Except for Ruth, whose gaze flickered with hope.

N
ELLIE’D JUST PICKED
up Charlie’s prescriptions at the drugstore. The day was sunny but chilly with a wind that rattled the heavy junkyard gate, which made it hard to lift the hasp. After finally prying it open, she was disappointed not to be met by Boone. Charlie wasn’t around, either. He had called her mother the other night, complaining that the police kept stopping by and asking him the same questions, over and over, even though his answers were the same every single time. He’d warned them to leave him alone or he’d sue the entire department for harassment and loss of income for driving his customers away.

After Nellie looked in the barn, she went over to the house and knocked on the door. From inside came the low, deep rumble of Boone’s bark. She kept knocking. Nothing. Turning the knob with a sweaty hand, she fully expected to find another body inside. Charlie’s. Boone whimpered happily as she slowly opened the door.