by Lisa Gardner
Phil nodded. He appeared troubled. Locking away my forty-four-year-old psychotic sister didn’t bother him. Contemplating who she’d once been, the young girl with a troubled past. That was harder. As it should be.
“What about her lawyer?” D.D. asked. “He must’ve put up a fight, a fourteen-year-old client.”
“The best no money could buy,” I assured her.
D.D. rolled her eyes.
“Now, Charlie Sgarzi claims he found love letters from Shana to his cousin, but I don’t believe that, either. Shana abhors submissive types. No way she’d be attracted to a smaller, younger, weaker boy.”
“He has letters?”
“Found them after his uncle’s suicide.”
“Think he made them up? Maybe to sell a novel?”
I shrugged. “Or there really are notes, but he misunderstood them. The letters are really a form of coded communication or not intended for Donnie at all. He was the delivery boy, or . . .” I paused thoughtfully. “Donnie was smart, a bookworm, right? Maybe he was helping Shana write them. Shana wasn’t exactly a model student. To this day, her handwriting, spelling . . . Let’s just say, a handwritten note from her doesn’t do her natural intelligence justice.”
D.D. was still frowning.
“You think she planned this?” she spoke up suddenly. “I mean, all of this.” She made a churning motion with her hand. “You heard Christi. Shana’s basically rotting away in the MCI with no hope of ever seeing daylight. She’s clever, she’s bored, she’s got plenty of time on her hands. Why not concoct an elaborate series of murders, then position herself to emerge as the hero. It’s been more than a decade since she got to save the day by stabbing Frankie what’s-his-name a hundred times. Now she can take on the Rose Killer. Like you said, fresh meat.”
I shook my head. “I think you were right this morning: There is a connection between the Rose Killer and my sister. But it’s not Harry Day; it’s Donnie Johnson. It’s what really happened thirty years ago. It’s whatever secret the Rose Killer doesn’t want Charlie Sgarzi to dig up.”
“So we return to Charlie Sgarzi,” D.D. stated, looking at Phil.
“No,” I corrected her, earning a hard glance. “He hasn’t learned the secret yet; that’s the whole point. We need to find the person who has. And I might be able to help with that. Shana’s foster mother from back in the day. They lived by the Johnsons. Chances are, she remembers a thing or two about the kid. And I happen to have her name and phone number.”
• • •
BRENDA DAVIES STILL REMEMBERED ME. We’d met only once, nearly six years ago, when I’d first started taking over my sister’s mental health care and had interviewed Brenda as part of basic fact-finding into my patient’s history. At that time, our conversation had been focused solely on Shana. She didn’t appear surprised by my call, or that I had fresh questions regarding the murder of Donnie Johnson. According to Brenda, her busy social calendar was currently clear if we wanted to come right over.
We headed into South Boston, Phil doing the driving. Along the way, I had him stop at one of the local Italian delis for fresh pastries. It seemed the hospitable thing to do, given we were intruding on a now elderly woman’s life to talk about a time she most likely had spent the past thirty years trying to forget.
Now Brenda opened the door of her run-down triple-decker, blinking her eyes against natural daylight, though in fact the sun was setting, the day drawing to a close.
“Dr. Adeline Glen,” she said immediately.
Mrs. Davies seemed to have shrunk since the last time we’d met. Her rounded frame was hunched, her gray hair sticking out, giving her a bristly look in her floral green housecoat. I introduced her to the detectives. She nodded respectfully but was already wringing her hands.
I handed over the box of pastries. Her faded blue eyes sparked in appreciation; then she led us down the dark hall of her bottom-level unit to the family room that occupied the rear of the narrow triple-decker. She gestured to a faded brown love seat, then busied herself fussing over stacks of papers that crowded the top of the coffee table. She moved the pile to the floor, where it joined many similar piles. Both Phil and D.D. were looking around cautiously.
I remembered Brenda Davies’s home as being cluttered six years ago. Now she was venturing into hoarding territory. The loss of her foster children? The void created when her husband died, and she now faced the waning days of her life all alone?
I looked around the overflowing kitchen, the cramped family room, and I already felt sorry for the questions we would be asking this nice woman. She’d been one of the good foster homes. Proud of it, too. That was why they’d sent my sister to her and her husband. Except instead of helping my sister find her happily-ever-after, they’d simply become more debris left behind in Shana’s wake, the murder of Donnie Johnson destroying their standing in the neighborhood, not to mention their faith in their work.
It occurred to me that maybe Charlie Sgarzi was onto something. The full story of that one murder had yet to be explored. All the lives it had impacted. Brenda Davies’s. The Johnsons’. Their extended family, the Sgarzis’. My sister’s. And now my own.
One terrible act. So many ripples in the aftermath.
“Coffee, tea?” Mrs. Davies asked. She’d been busy in the kitchen, moving around stacks of dirty dishes, empty jugs of water, until she seemed to have found one clean plate. She loaded the collection of cream puffs, cannoli and macaroons onto it, then carefully carried the platter toward the coffee table, feet shuffling.
Phil graciously took the plate from her. He and D.D. declined coffee. Then, given her crestfallen expression, recanted and agreed coffee would be lovely.
Mrs. Davies’s face once more brightened, and she returned to the kitchen to resume bustling about a space that probably hadn’t seen a mop or sponge in years.
Phil and D.D. sat stiffly on the love seat, D.D. with her left arm tucked protectively against her ribs. I took the ratty recliner at the head of the coffee table. An orange tabby appeared from nowhere and jumped onto my lap. Then two or three more cats started to show their faces. But of course.
D.D. ended up with a black-and-white-spotted cat with bright green eyes, who shoved his nose aggressively against her injured shoulder. She hissed at him, and he leapt down, stalking away with his tail twitching.
“Now, Tom,” Mrs. Davies called from the kitchen. “Stop bothering our guests. No sense of manners, that one. I took him off of the streets as a baby, and he has yet to be grateful! Now, here we are.”
Mrs. Davies reappeared, one coffee mug of instant coffee at a time. Phil leapt to his feet, most likely to dodge further advances from Tom, and assisted. When we were all situated again, Mrs. Davies sat across from me.
She didn’t have a cup of coffee, nor did she touch the pastries. She simply sat, her hands clasped on her lap, with an air of anticipation. Two of the cats joined her, one on each side, like flanking guards. And I saw it then. The sorrow in her eyes, deep and penetrating, that no amount of cats or clutter would ever ease. She suffered, and she accepted her own suffering. She gazed at us now, knowing these questions would hurt, and resigning herself to her fate.
“Thank you for seeing us on such short notice,” I said.
“You said it’s about your sister?”
“Some new questions have come up, regarding the death of Donnie Johnson—”
“You mean his murder?”
“Yes. These detectives, they’d like to ask you about that time. About Shana, Donnie, your neighbors. All of it.”
Mrs. Davies cocked her head to the side. She frowned, seeming unsure, then relented with a short nod. “Well, it’s been a while now, you know. Lucky for you, though, seems with age, my memory prefers the past to the present. Ask me about last week, I don’t know that I could help you. But thirty years ago . . .” She sighed. “Thirty years ago, I sti
ll remember things I’d rather forget.”
“Tell us about Shana Day,” D.D. spoke up.
Mrs. Davies shot me a look, as if she wasn’t sure how to proceed in my presence.
“It’s okay,” I assured her. “I have no illusions regarding my sister. You don’t need to worry about speaking ill of her in front of me.”
“She’s soulless,” Mrs. Davies stated immediately. No emotion, just matter-of-fact. “Oh, the number of kids Jeremiah and I had taken in by then. Troubled kids, sad kids, angry kids. Boys and girls, all ages. We thought we’d seen it all, could handle anything. We were arrogant. Pride is a sin, and the devil sent Shana to be our undoing.”
“Did you have other kids at the time?” Phil asked.
“Three others. An older boy, Samuel, who was seventeen and had stayed with us for three years. Jeremiah had taken him under his wing, had taught him carpentry. It’s an issue with the system, you know. The kids turn eighteen, and that’s that. The state turns them loose, ready or not. The older boy, Sam, he was nervous about what was to come. But Jeremiah thought he could get him a job with a friend. And we’d told him he could stay with us; he was like our son. Didn’t matter what the state had to say. We weren’t turning our backs on him.”
“Do you still hear from him?” D.D. asked.
“Yes. He lives in Allston now. Comes by when he can. Course, everyone’s so busy these days. And carpentry’s not the job it used to be. He travels a lot, to find work. I don’t see him, maybe, as often as I used to.”
I noticed that on her lap, Mrs. Davies was clutching her hands so tightly, the knuckles had gone white. One of the cats, a gray one, nudged her. She obediently stroked its back. On my own lap, the orange tabby was purring away, a strangely soothing backdrop for such a troubling conversation.
“And the other kids?” Phil continued.
Mrs. Davies rattled them off. A little girl, eight, most beautiful mocha skin, who’d been there for only two months, then had bounced back to her crack-addicted mother. Plus a five-year-old boy, Trevor, whose parents had died in a car crash. The state had been working on locating other members of his family who might be willing to take him in. In the meantime, he was set up with the Davieses.
“And then Shana, of course. The state had warned us she was a problem child. She’d already been in six or seven homes in the past two years, which is never a good sign. Problems getting along with other kids, problems with authority. A cutter.” Mrs. Davies paused. “You know what that is, right?”
“She used razors to cut her arms and legs,” D.D. supplied.
“Well, yes. That was the most about it I knew, too. But Shana, um, cut a little higher on the legs than strictly necessary. More, like”—Mrs. Davies’s voice dropped to a whisper—“up there,” she said meaningfully. “I thought she was having her girl time and offered her appropriate products. But no, she was bleeding from her own hand. First time I brought it up, she just stared at me. Not, thank you for offering assistance, no appreciation for someone else trying to look out for her, just . . . nothing. I asked why she hurt herself like that. She shrugged, said why not.
“And that was Shana. There was nothing you could say or do. . . . I’d catch her stealing red-handed, her fingers in my purse. She wouldn’t deny it, just shrug and say, I need the money. Sam, the seventeen-year-old. I caught Shana in his bedroom, twice. They were . . . you know. That’s not allowed, I told them. Sam, now, he got all embarrassed, couldn’t even look me in the eye. But Shana could’ve cared less. She liked sex, she wanted sex and who was I to tell her otherwise? No shame, no remorse, just me, me, me, me, me.
“Within two weeks we were ready to throw our hands up. You couldn’t punish her, you couldn’t reward her. Jeremiah had a schedule for the whole household. Nothing too hard to follow, but enough to provide the kids with a sense of order and consistency. Not Shana. She got up when she wanted, left when she felt like it, came home when she pleased. We tried to ground her. She laughed in our faces and walked out the door. We called the cops on her for theft, she spent the night in jail, then sauntered home no worse for the wear. Nothing we said or did had any impact on her.
“We thought if we just gave it a little more time. We were a good home. Clean house, good meals, attentive parents. And Trevor liked her, as strange as it sounds. I always watched them when they were together—don’t look at me like that! But she was actually good with him. She’d read him stories or draw pictures with him. He was hurting, this sad little boy who’d lost his whole family in a single afternoon. When Shana was with him, that awful smirk would leave her face, and for a bit, she’d seem nearly human. The girl she could be, we kept thinking, if we just tried harder.”
“When did she first meet Donnie Johnson?” Phil asked.
Mrs. Davies shook her head. “I didn’t know that she had. Donnie lived in the neighborhood, of course, but so did twenty or so other kids. They all ran around. We never thought much of it, back then. The kids went out to play. When it was time for dinner, you called out the front door, and they came home again.”
“Were there some kids in particular she seemed to hang out with more than others?” Phil tried.
“Donnie’s older cousin, Charlie. Charlie Sgarzi. He and some of the bigger kids had a bit of a, I don’t know, gang would be too strong of a word. But they were always hanging out. Black leather jackets, cigarettes, pretending they were tough.”
“Charlie was friends with Shana?” My turn to speak up, as this was news.
“Friends?” Mrs. Davies repeated with a frown. “Oh, I don’t know that Shana had friends. But for a bit, we saw her hanging with that crowd. I was concerned about it. They were a bunch of aspiring hoodlums, and she had enough problems. I tried to talk to her about it, but she just laughed. Wannabes is what she called them. Then later, I heard from one of the other moms it wasn’t those kids she was interested in, but one of them had a twenty-four-year-old brother who dealt dope. That’s who she was really spending time with. A fourteen-year-old girl, getting involved with a twenty-four-year-old . . .”
Mrs. Davies shook her head. All these years later, she still sounded dismayed.
“How long did Shana live with you?” Phil asked.
Her expression changed, abruptly sobering up. The lines appeared deeper in her face. “Three months,” she whispered. “Three months. That’s all it took. And then we were done.”
“What happened that day, Mrs. Davies?” D.D. spoke up gently.
“I don’t know. God’s honest truth. Shana got up around eleven, left the house. We fed the other kids a snack around four, when they got home from school, but still no sign of Shana. Then, sometime around five. Yes, five; I was about to put dinner in the oven. I heard screaming. Mrs. Johnson, her house is just a few doors down. She was screaming and screaming. My baby, she kept crying. My baby . . .
“Jeremiah ran out the door. By the time he got there, someone had already called an ambulance. But according to Jeremiah, nothing for the EMTs to do. Just looking at the young boy’s mangled body . . . Mrs. Johnson never got over it. That family, that poor, poor family . . .”
Mrs. Davies’s voice trailed off. Then she offered quietly, “An hour later, Shana walked in through the back door. She was covered in blood, holding a knife. I gasped. I asked her if she was all right. She just walked over and handed me the blade. Then she turned and went upstairs. When Jeremiah went up, he found her sitting on the edge of the bed, still covered in blood, just sitting there.
“He knew. He told me, looking at her, the expressionless look on her face. He asked her if this had something to do with the Johnson boy. She didn’t answer; she reached into her pocket, drew out what looked to be a wad of tissue and handed it to him. Donnie Johnson’s ear. She handed my husband the boy’s ear. Jeremiah called the cops. What else could we do?
“George Johnson, Donnie’s father, arrived first. He’d heard the news
over some other cop’s radio and ran straight down the street. I didn’t think we should let him in. I worried what he might do to the girl. But he held it together when Jeremiah led him upstairs. He asked Shana point-blank if she’d killed his son. But she still wouldn’t talk. Just kept staring at us with flat eyes. Finally, the other officers arrived all huffing and puffing. One officer took the ear, bagged it as evidence. Then they read Shana her rights and took her away.
“She never returned to our home. But it didn’t matter. The damage was already done. Neighbors didn’t want to talk to us after that. We’d taken in a monster, then unleashed it on our friends. Jeremiah never got over it; he seemed to break, losing all interest in the kids, our home, our life. Samuel moved out six months later; I think it was too hard for him to be in a house that had become so . . . shadowed. Pretty little AnaRose was returned to her birth mom, while the state moved Trevor to another home. Didn’t tell us why, but we knew. That hit the hardest, you know. Shana, we never stood a chance. But those two little ones we could’ve saved. I never had the heart to find out what happened to them. AnaRose, a beautiful little girl returned to the care of a crack addict. God only knows what happened to her next time her mom became desperate for a fix. And Trevor most likely ended up in one of those . . . other homes. You know, where the people take in kids just for the monthly stipend, then pile them in, four to a room, where the biggest three abuse the littlest fourth, and no one cares. I probably should’ve asked more questions, but I don’t think I could’ve handled the answers. Maybe, after all that happened, I broke a little, too.”
Mrs. Davies resumed stroking the cat on her right, settling herself.
“Can you tell us what happened to the Johnsons?” Phil asked.
Mrs. Davies shrugged. Her eyes were red rimmed. “Martha, Donnie’s mom, took up drinking. That’s what I heard. She wouldn’t see me after that, talk to me. I started staying in more, as it seemed to upset the neighbors when I showed my face. But that household . . . Donnie was their pride and joy. Bright young boy, especially gifted in science. His father used to brag that he might be a cop, but Donnie would one day be the director of a crime lab. I heard George shot himself. Parents weren’t meant to outlive their children, plain and simple.”