Neighborhood Watch (19 page)

“I don’t know what they were. Something with beakers of water and measuring temperatures.”

Was he back at work on solar heating? I never saw any beakers in his work space.

“I don’t think that’s going on anymore, though he’s still working on something. I see him up at night. Speaking of which, I did a little of my own work last night.”

I follow him into his office, where he pulls up old police blotter columns that list car accidents significant enough to have been noted in the police report. “There were two highway accident reports the night of Linda Sue’s death, both about twenty miles away. I checked through the column for the whole week before Linda Sue’s death. Nothing on Juniper Lane, until I found this about two weeks before the murder: ‘Hazardous Waste Spill Reported at 32 Juniper Lane.’ According to the item, which is only three lines long, the spill occurred between two properties—32 and 34 Juniper Lane—and was contained. An inspection team came in ‘to assess the area, and made recommendations, which were followed up on by the homeowners.’”

“Do you know what constitutes a hazardous waste spill in a residential area?”

Bill comes in from the kitchen, holding a bowl of cereal he eats standing up. “Antifreeze, maybe, or refrigerator coolant. At my school, some kid once stabbed a barrel of Freezone outside the hockey rink and the stuff was so toxic a team from the EPA came out to remove two feet of dirt from an area the size of a soccer field. It freaked us all out because we were standing right there when the guy did it. Everyone said we were contaminated now and we’d never have babies. Of course that might have also been because we were all gay.”

Linda Sue’s old house was 32 Juniper Lane, right next door to 34, which was Marianne and Roland’s house. I don’t remember anything about a toxic spill, but I do remember that it was around this time that Marianne began warning us about a new study on the pressure-treated wood we’d all used to build our decks. Apparently they’d just discovered dangerous levels of lead leeching into the soil. She circulated flyers telling everyone not to plant vegetable gardens within fifty feet of our decks. I took her flyer and worried that maybe this was an explanation for my miscarriages, but we hadn’t built a deck. Everyone else seemed to ignore her warning completely. They couldn’t get a lawn of grass to grow. Why would they undertake a vegetable garden out back? “Be safe!” I remember her calling from her yard. “I just want everyone to be safe!”

Now I wonder what was in the beakers of water Finn saw. Finn says he asked once, and Roland told him they were ocean water, hardly a toxic substance.

Finn also thinks he might have found something on Trish. “I was doing all these different searches, variations on her name. Patricia. Pat. Tish. On one of them, I accidentally left off the
R
in her last name—I typed in
Patricia Ashke
—and look at this: Here’s a woman listed, the right age, living in Connecticut about an hour north of here.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Any chance our Trish could be a writer these days?”

I clap my hands. “Yes! That’s what she always wanted to be!”

“It’s a Library of Congress listing. She uses a pseudonym as her writing name. If this is her, she writes a fantasy series for middle readers, ages eight to eleven. There have been three books so far, all written under the name Cat Ashker.” He has notes scribbled on a piece of paper.

I look over at where he’s written it down.
“Cat?”
I say, my heart quickening.

“That’s what she goes by.”

There it is in block letters: CAT ASHKER.

It takes only a minute to see that it’s an anagram: three letters from
Patricia
and the letters in her last name rearranged. In front of my eyes, the letters jumble again and rearrange themselves, as if they’ve become a message meant for me:
Cat, ask her.

“Where in Connecticut does she live?”

“Bridgetown, which is up north about an hour away. I Googled a white pages search and her address isn’t listed, but look at this. Here’s a press release for a reading she’s doing tomorrow afternoon at a bookstore in Middletown.” I lean over his shoulder and read the notice. My mind races ahead. I can’t drive myself, and I can’t ask Marianne.

Finn scratches his head and smiles. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to go.”

T
he library has all three books by Cat Ashker. I check them out using Finn’s card and wait until I get outside to Geoffrey’s and my old bench to start reading the first one. It’s about five children, ages five to fourteen, who live in a development marked off by cornfields on one side and woods on the other that are full of tiny fairies who have grown tired—bone-tired, they say, though they have no bones—of eating the dried corn. One day they see the children alone in the woods on an evening picnic, eating from a bowl of ambrosia salad. They move closer to admire the bits of fruit covered in sticky white. They want that salad more than they’ve ever wanted anything before, but surrounding it are the five children, three boys and two girls.

I stop reading for a moment and wonder,
Can this be a coincidence?
Then I keep going and feel my breath catch:

For a moment I can’t breathe. Even Wanda never knew about the children I’ve imagined, that they have lives of their own, names and personalities. In all this time, I’ve told only one person. And she’s dead.

“Betsy? Is that you?”

I look up, so startled to hear my name, I gasp. “Paul!” I close the book and slide it to one side. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I stop by occasionally these days.” He’s smiling cheerfully, holding a plastic file case in one hand. “I like to check up on them. You’d be surprised. They’ve let a few things slide. No one can get the whole
New York Times
on one roller like you could.”

I move over so he can sit down. “There’s a trick to that actually.”

“You’d better tell them what it is. Poor Viola gets yelled at for throwing away the sports section.” I laugh and he touches the back of my hand. “So I’ve been thinking about our conversation.” He says he’s got a new theory. It has to do with the sandwich found on Linda Sue’s counter. “We’ve always assumed the perpetrator made that sandwich, right?”

“Right.”

“But why couldn’t it have been someone
else
? Why hasn’t anyone thought about the possibility that
two
people came into her house that night? One who went looking for valuables upstairs, and one who stayed downstairs because he was hungry?”

I should be grateful that he’s still working on my case, trying to help, but I can’t help thinking about an observation Franklin once made:
Paul doesn’t have the greatest instincts. He doesn’t mind barking up a lot of the wrong trees.
If it was a team of burglars, why would they have chosen Linda Sue’s empty house? Why would they have taken nothing afterward, including a twenty-dollar bill sitting on the table?

Paul’s right about one thing—the sandwich has always been hard to explain. Franklin tried to use it as part of my sleepwalking scenario. In his version, I crossed the street and walked into Linda Sue’s kitchen believing I was still in my own house. He displayed the identical blueprints of our houses as evidence—stove, refrigerator, countertop, all identical. Thinking I was in my own kitchen, he argued, I made a sandwich in my sleep state and was interrupted by a sound that frightened me. Not Paul’s voice, but a stranger’s. In this scenario, her death was entirely unintentional. I grabbed the closest weapon at hand, the new lock, walked upstairs, and there, in the dark, was violently disoriented by a stranger’s appearance in what I believed was my own house. “What we have is a case of self-defense,” Franklin argued. “Fear of crime had become a neighborhood obsession, and tragically, Linda Sue, who spoke out against the dangers of community-sanctioned paranoia, was herself the victim of it.”

It was the strongest argument we had, even though it had holes. It didn’t explain the cleanup afterward, or the choice I must have made not to seek help.

Paul offers another theory. “At first I thought maybe it was inexperienced teenagers who didn’t know enough to look inside a window before breaking into a house, but you’re right, that might be a stretch. So then I started thinking about Gary, the burglar who came to that last Neighborhood Watch meeting.”

Gary was a suspect early on. Linda Sue was murdered three nights after our meeting at Marianne’s house, the one where she announced to everyone that she never locked her doors. A promising lead, dismissed when staff at his residential house provided an alibi for him that night.

“What the police never followed up on was the
other
men living at that halfway house. Gary could have gone home after that meeting and told the story of Linda Sue. How she lived alone and didn’t lock her doors. How she stood up at the meeting and announced that fact. Everyone living there had at least one felony conviction. Most of them were already repeat offenders.”

I know these statistics all too well. Having been incarcerated, I’m at a precipitously high risk for becoming one myself. “How far away was Gary’s house?”

“Nine miles. None of the residents had cars, but they could have hitched a ride down the highway or walked. Whoever it was planned for one crime but not the other. They wore gloves and knew how to get inside, but they didn’t bring a weapon. Meaning they had experience, but weren’t hard-core, which lines up with the Cleary House residents at the time.” Paul opens his case and pulls out a file. “Here’s the list I got of the residents. I’ve flagged two who shared a room with Gary. It was supposed to be a single, but they were overbooked and it’s possible that made Gary angry. He knew the best way to free up his living space was if those guys went back to prison.”

Sometimes I wonder, does Paul work this hard to prove my innocence, or is it more complicated? Is he trying to prove Geoffrey couldn’t have done it either?

By the time Geoffrey moved here, I’d already begun to suspect a reason for the distance I felt in our marriage. I never put words to it and couldn’t say exactly when it started. Was it the first week after we moved onto the block, when Marianne gave us a tour of her house and I watched Paul pinch the fold of one curtain, feel its weight, rub the texture with his thumb? Or did the possibility strike me later, when I saw the way he sometimes watched Geoffrey from across the room? When did looking gay turn into a question of
being
it? I don’t think that came until later, when I got to prison and could look back with some clarity on the marriage I’d left behind.

The first time we had sex, I remember Paul saying afterward, “We did it!” so triumphantly, I wondered if I’d just taken his virginity. No, he told me, it had just been awhile and he was nervous about all the parts working. I can say that it’s possible to have an active sex life and still wonder about your husband’s attention to small matters of personal vanity, about how sensitive he sometimes seemed to what other men said.

Now we sit side by side not talking for a long time. He seems to sense my reluctance to keep pursuing threads of my case with him. “But if Gary wanted them to be caught, why weren’t they? Why wouldn’t he have just turned them in afterward?”

“Maybe he felt bad. Maybe the murder freaked him out.”

“Have you found the old roommates?”

He nods his head. “One of them is back in prison at Bellington State. I’ve written him a letter but I haven’t heard back.”

Of course he hasn’t. He never will.

I tell him I’ve been doing my own research, talking to more neighbors. I tell him what I’ve heard about Geoffrey calling people before my trial.

“He was trying to help,” Paul says. “He told them he didn’t think you were guilty.”

I’m sure he did, but I wonder what else he communicated. Geoffrey knew he was vulnerable and many people were still suspicious of him. Did he talk to neighbors, ostensibly on my behalf, and say softly under his breath,
Her childhood was hard. Her father had mental illness
. Was he planting the story in their minds, watering the seeds of doubt?
It wasn’t really her fault. She is the victim of hormones and memory loss
. Paul could have supplied him with my diagnosis, could have acted as an accessory without even seeing how Geoffrey had manipulated him.

“He told them I was mentally ill, Paul. That I should be going to an institution, not a prison.”

“We were trying everything, Bets. We got a little desperate by the end. We thought it might work if we reminded people about your episodes.”

“Insanity defenses almost never work.”

“I told him that. I’d spent all the money we had, I’d paid for half a dozen different outside experts to weigh in on the evidence. We were told this was the smartest way to go. In the end, Geoffrey talked me into it. He said we had to commit to one line of defense and throw all our resources into it. That’s why he went to all the neighbors. We thought they’d step forward voluntarily, and then nobody did. It was such a—” He struggles to find the right word. “Well, a disappointment.”

In a trial, I’ve learned, what isn’t said can be as significant as what is. Silence can be deafening, and in my case it was. The jury assumed I was a neighborhood version of a malcontent school shooter—quiet and unnoticed until the night my hidden rage propelled me across the street. With no testimony stating otherwise, what else could they think? We’d been neighbors for six years, participants in one another’s lives, but when mine hung in the balance, no one spoke up in my defense. Franklin told me he wasn’t surprised. Suburban criminals, especially women, often get abandoned. He told me not to blame anyone individually—the group fear response won out.