A Crime in the Neighborhood

by Suzanne Berne

  By the next morning, we didn’t know anything more than we had the night before, except by then my mother had told us the lost child was Boyd Ellison. Nothing on the evening news, or in the morning paper. After that spate of phone calls the evening before, our neighbors left us to our own speculations, even after word began to seep back with the men who had gone out searching.

  It was a Friday. When I woke up and looked out my window, Mr. Sperling was standing on his front steps in plaid shorts and boat shoes instead of his usual dark suit, and instead of getting into his car to drive to work, he was drinking a glass of iced tea. “Frank,” I could hear Mrs. Lauder calling next door. “Frank, Frank.”

  Mr. Green left for work at a quarter to eight, as he did every morning. He walked down his front steps carrying his empty-looking brown leatherette briefcase with the noisy silver clasps, opened his car door, and ducked his head to climb into the driver’s seat.

  As he backed his car out of the driveway, I remembered what he’d told my mother the week before, about being from the country, and how our yard reminded him of where he was from. I tried to picture Mr. Green’s pink face superimposed above denim overalls and a checked shirt, standing on our lawn with a hoe. But it was impossible to divorce him from his white shirt and tie, or to persuade him out of his shiny loafers and into a pair of yellow farmer’s boots. It seemed clear that he belonged somewhere else, but where that was I couldn’t imagine.

  “Left house usual time,” I wrote in my notebook.

  My mother, Julie, and I heard the news together just after breakfast when Mrs. Morris hurried across the street with her terriers and rang our doorbell.

  “Have you heard?” Mrs. Morris quavered under the brim of her denim cap as my mother opened the screen door. “Has anyone told you what happened?”

  When none of us answered, she clutched the dogs’ leashes, pulling the terriers close to the white balls on her ankle socks.

  “They found him.” Her head shook as it always did, a gentle wobble that reminded me of a china doll with its neck on a spring. “They found the boy.”

  “Oh thank God,” said my mother.

  “No,” said Mrs. Morris, shaking. “No, no.”

  I watched Mrs. Morris shake her head, thinking of the time two years ago when Steven had complained that Boyd Ellison stole money from a Cub Scout paper drive. “Stinker,” he had said, standing in the kitchen with his face flushed and his feet apart. I remembered exactly how he said it, standing by the refrigerator, eager and aggrieved, his brown hair sticking up from his forehead. Can you prove it? my mother had asked him. Steven looked surprised; his mouth hung open. But I know he did it, he said. I know. How? said my mother. Steven couldn’t answer. His face folded inward, his lip jutting out. You never believe me. You never believe anything I tell you. I do not believe unsubstantiated allegations, said my mother, turning on the faucet. This is America.

  I tried to stop myself from repeating stinker, stinker, shivering while Mrs. Morris’s head wobbled, while her dogs lunged away from her ankles, their toenails skittering on our cement front steps, while a crow flapped into the crab apple tree, while my mother stood at the door, shaking her head in time to Mrs. Morris’s shaking.

  I tried to picture Boyd Ellison’s face; I tried to remember how he had looked the day in the playground he asked to wear my glasses. Let me, he said. I just want to see what it’s like.

  Under her hat brim, Mrs. Morris’s lips wrinkled and separated, revealing her neat brownish teeth. “Frank Lauder said they found him behind the mall. In those woods. Said he was unconscious. Frank thought unconscious. He didn’t know for sure. Then they said he was dead. But it was him, it was the boy, and he’d—”

  Here Mrs. Morris stopped, peering around the side of my mother to where I crouched on the love seat, my good leg drawn up to my chest.

  “Go inside, Marsha,” my mother said, glancing around. “Julie, take her inside.”

  “Mom,” said Julie.

  “Now. Please.”

  Julie dragged me out of my chair and stuck my crutches under my armpits, holding the door for me as I hobbled into the living room. We sat on the living-room sofa and stared at the fireplace, trying to listen to their low, rustling voices from the open window above our heads. In the distance I heard a siren.

  “Boyd Ellison,” said Julie, picking at her eyebrow. She shuddered. That morning she was wearing tight orange bell-bottoms and a flowered halter top, with her long straight brown hair pulled tightly back by a leather clasp, which made her face look round and very bare.

  Upstairs we heard Steven turn on the shower. I wondered what he would think when he discovered that a boy he’d accused of stealing from the paper drive had been killed, the boy who may or may not have also stolen David Bridgeman’s bicycle. But then, he wasn’t the only kid in the neighborhood who stole things. Who would have thought Boyd Ellison would be the one among us to have something so dramatic happen to him.

  That’s how it seemed then, that the killing itself was fated—not the person—and any of us could have been chosen. That it was Boyd Ellison suddenly invested him with new and awful importance. Almost immediately the square-headed blond boy I’d avoided on the playground acquired a kind of glamour. In spite of myself, I began to wish I had spoken to him more often, that he’d visited our house more than once. I wished I had loaned him my glasses when he’d asked for them.

  Outside Mrs. Morris said something, and then she said something else that sounded like someone coughing out a fishbone.

  Finally we heard my mother ask: “Who is they?”

  “The police,” said Mrs. Morris. A delivery truck rattled by, running over whatever she said next.

  “Question us?” said my mother.

  Next door, the Lauders’ car started up. “Luann,” shouted Mrs. Lauder; a car door slammed. Mrs. Morris’s voice began to spiral: “He didn’t mind his mother. He took that shortcut. He went through those woods. He didn’t mind. No, he didn’t. He went through those woods.”

  “Jesus,” whispered Julie beside me.

  As my mother murmured, trying to quiet her, Mrs. Morris’s quavering voice rose higher, losing its quaver. “Those woods some of you people were so keen on not having cut down. That was a mistake, now wasn’t it? They’ll cut the whole place down now, I expect. Cut it all, I expect, the whole place.”

  “Old bitch,” Julie muttered.

  I rolled over on the sofa cushion and got on my good knee to look out the window. On the other side of our yard, the Lauders’ car was backing slowly down their driveway, their three white faces bunched inside; Luann’s palms flattened against her closed car window as she peered out like a diver trapped in an aquarium. The Sperlings had appeared on their front steps. Mrs. Sperling gripped her baby bandolier-style across her chest, swaying back and forth, while Mr. Sperling walked slowly down the steps and onto his lawn.

  Mrs. Morris stopped shouting. By leaning on the back of the sofa and pressing the side of my face against the farthest edge of the windowpane, I could see her bare elbow jutting from a white sleeve printed with daisies, and her bottom straining against her ironed khaki skirt. The wisteria and the side of the porch cut off the rest of her. My mother said something in a clear, automatic tone, as if she were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. It was true; she had been the one who sent around the petition to protect the woods. She had even made a sign out of cardboard and poster paint that said “Save Our Trees/No Parking Garage,” and stuck it on the lawn near the spot where the For Sale sign now stood. In those days she’d had quite a passion for saving things.

  One of Mrs. Morris’s white ankle socks in a white tennis shoe appeared. Then a calf. Then Mrs. Morris stood in the yard complete, gray hair curling under her denim cap, head gently wagging. “I know you’re alone over here, Lois,” she was saying, her voice back to its familiar quaver. “Don’t be afraid to call us now if you feel frightened, dear. Any of us.”

  Invisibly, my mother said “Thank you. Edna.�
��

  Mrs. Morris gathered up the dog leashes and drove herself and the terriers back across the street to her own yard and house, where the smoky apparition of Mr. Morris in a golf cap waited inside the screen door.

  I slid back down into the sofa cushions, letting my hair catch on the cretonne so that it would stand up from my head. After a few moments, my mother came into the living room.

  “I don’t want you outside today.” She emphasized each word so that it hung balloonlike for an instant in the air between us. “You heard me,” she said to Julie. Then she sighed and put her hand over her eyes. But in a moment she had taken her hand away again and gone into the kitchen to begin her telephone calls.

  Seven

  It seems increasingly common for people to live in places where there has been a murder. For instance, these days I live in a fairly expensive neighborhood not far from Chevy Chase, a neighborhood of center-hall colonials and flowering dogwood trees where most people do not mow their own lawns. Last Thanksgiving, five blocks away from my house, a woman stabbed her brother in the neck with a steak knife while her housemate roasted a turkey downstairs and outside the window neighbors’ children in bright Gap outfits chased each other through the chilly November sunlight. No one knows why she killed him.

  Here in Washington, the murder rate has risen so high that newspapers record violent deaths in six-inch columns rather than as front-page tragedies. Which probably makes sense. My least-favorite college English professor once declared: “Oedipus is a tragic figure. Richard Nixon is a tragic figure. The guy down the street who gets shot is not.” When the class murmured at this, he crossed his arms and said: “Tragedy has to be interesting. The whole world cares about Richard Nixon. Who cares about the guy down the street?”

  “His wife,” someone volunteered.

  The professor smiled and took off his little oval spectacles to polish them by the blackboard. “Who cares,” he said, blinking slyly, “about his wife?”

  But you have to understand that twenty-five years ago a murder in a suburban neighborhood like Spring Hill was still an astonishing occurrence, so astonishing that for a long time the people who lived there felt somehow responsible, as if they should have foreseen something so unforeseen. Like my mother, they felt guilty for having ever felt secure.

  Almost immediately after Boyd Ellison was killed our neighbors began to see strange shapes in the rhododendrons, hear human screams in every cat fight, lose their appetites. People from several blocks away sent flowers to his family, and a total stranger from Bethesda offered to paint their garage. Collections were taken up; proposals were made inside the Clara Barton Elementary School auditorium for a memorial tree. And a month later, when the Ellisons decided to sell their house for less than they’d paid for it—even with a newly renovated kitchen, an updated heating system, and central air-conditioning—a long time passed before anyone was willing to buy it.

  Within the first few hours after Mrs. Morris’s visit, Mrs. Lauder stopped by our house, knocking at the porch door. She sat on the edge of the living-room sofa. Apparently she only wanted to hear my mother say how awful it was, what a terrible tragedy, and to repeat the same words herself. “You’ve heard who it was?” she asked my mother. They exchanged stories of when and how they had heard the news, touching their throats. My mother offered her iced tea, which Mrs. Lauder declined.

  “Now don’t be a stranger,” she added, on the way out the door.

  Otherwise people seemed to avoid us, at least that’s the feeling I had as I sat on the porch watching neighbor after neighbor congregate in one another’s front yards. All morning a weird holiday current lit the air, with so many neighbors out on the street, the fathers all home on a weekday, and everyone talking about the same thing. Even the twins dropped their British accents and wandered around the house looking somberly approachable.

  The early stories traded around that day were contradictory and convoluted. Stories swirled and eddied until each family seemed to have its own version of the events. And every version began with “I heard—”

  Among the details I overheard from my post on the porch, all of which I printed in my notebook with Julie’s Bic pen, are the following: Boyd Ellison was alive and had told the police everything. A man on a motorcycle had attacked him. A man with a beard attacked him. It was a bearded man with a foreign accent, maybe Dutch or Turkish. It was a hippie on drugs. Boyd was in a coma. Boyd had called out his mother’s name. He didn’t know who his parents were. He was dead. He was alive. He was alive but just barely. He was dead.

  Later that morning, eavesdropping from my bedroom window on Mrs. Bridgeman’s conversation with Mrs. Lauder on her front steps, I several times heard a word I didn’t understand. Molested.

  The neighborhood fathers spent the day talking together in close knots in front of their garages, eyes traveling from house to house. Mothers appeared regularly in their doorways, usually restraining a child from running outside, one hand spread against the child’s chest. Or they made forays to one another’s houses to deliver bulletins, twitching at their culotte skirts as they ran across the street, the wooden heels of their Dr. Scholl’s sandals clunking against the heated asphalt.

  Whenever my mother took a break from her Peterman-Wolff calls, the twins hurried to the phone to have hushed conversations with their friends, the ones who hadn’t gone to camp for the summer. Everyone had known Boyd Ellison, although none apparently knew him well. No one had liked him very much. Besides his reputation for petty thievery, he bullied younger children then became obsequious at the arrival of their older siblings. He was chubby and bad at baseball. He laughed when other children fell off the swings or skinned their knees. But suddenly he was the closest thing to a celebrity any of us had ever known.

  “Remember that time I gave him a ride on my bike?” said Steven. He leaned against the kitchen counter with his elbows, his brown hair tugged back into its usual ponytail. From behind, he and Julie looked nearly identical. “I gave him a ride to the mall.”

  “I sat next to him once on the bus.” Broodingly, Julie plucked strings from the fringe at the bottom of her pants’ legs.

  “Who would kill a kid like that?” said Steven, sounding almost jealous.

  In fact, in the days that followed he did become jealous, we all did, while at the same time we were appalled in a keyed-up, restless sort of way. We tried to feel afraid because we recognized that fear was the expected response and not to have it signified something uneasy about ourselves; but fear wasn’t really a part of those first days. We were exhilarated. Nothing so enormous and glittering as a murder had ever happened to us before. Its darkness was the darkness of our favorite stories, the ones we whispered at slumber parties and in the school bathrooms. We were jealous of Boyd Ellison not because he had been killed—of course not that, we had never felt so alive ourselves—but because he had encountered something legendary, and was fast becoming so himself.

  “If I’d been Boyd and that guy came up to me,” Steven began saying at lunch or dinner. And he would outline various responses, from clever methods of distraction to exactly placed uppercuts.

  “I would have kicked him in the balls,” said Julie one night.

  “Kneed him in the groin,” corrected my mother, spooning brussels sprouts onto each of our plates.

  Steven said: “If I’d been Boyd, I’d have taken that rock …” And he picked up his spoon and beat at a brussels sprout until it jumped off his plate.

  “Oh sure,” said Julie. “Like the guy would have handed it to you.”

  “No, no like this. First I would punch his nose.” Steven bunched his fist. “And get him to drop the rock. Then I would whip around behind him and kick in his knees.”

  My mother looked up sharply. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “You have no idea what you would do.” When Steven opened his mouth, she put her hand down on the table. “I don’t want to hear it. Nobody is a hero ahead of time.”

  What I remember most a
bout the theories that circulated through the neighborhood that first day was not their wildness or their exaggerations. What I remember most is that no one really seemed surprised by any of them. All that long, muggy afternoon, I sat on the porch picking at the rim of my plaster cast, listening to the opinions of our neighbors.

  “I’ll wager it’s a black,” cherubic old Mr. Morris told Mrs. Lauder, as he stood stiffly in her driveway gripping a pair of hedge clippers. Mr. Morris had been in the British army and had never quite lost the habit of standing at attention, even though he was past eighty and had arthritis.

  “Well, it could be anybody,” Mrs. Lauder began, then stopped and put a puffy hand to her forehead.

  “I’ll wager it’s one of those Panther people,” said Mr. Morris, not listening. “When they find him I’ll wager his record is two miles long.”

  While my mother was taking a phone break with me on the porch, little Mrs. Sperling came over in a flowered house-dress, carrying enormous Baby Cameron, who had the hiccups. Mrs. Sperling had lived on our street only since November and in the beginning she was so lonely at home by herself with her gigantic child that she had braved my mother’s reserve, trotting over uninvited every afternoon to ask questions about baby fevers and diaper rash and germs, which my mother answered as best she could, and the two of them had become almost friends. Lately Mrs. Sperling seemed to be getting her advice from Mrs. Lauder.

  “Hi there, Marsha,” she said cheerfully. Then she recollected herself and turned to my mother to confide in a whispery voice: “Oh Lois. That boy died in his mother’s arms. I think that’s what I heard.”

  She shivered and Baby Cameron hiccuped milky drool over her bare arm. “Oh honey. Look at you. What a mess.” She handed the baby to my mother and pulled a diaper out of her dress pocket to swab at herself. When she had slung the diaper over her shoulder and held her arms out for the baby again, she added, “His mother works, you know. I know this is wrong, but I can’t help it—I can’t help thinking this is what happens when women don’t stay home. All that women’s lib stuff—doesn’t it make you kind of, I don’t know, sick sometimes? Leaving kids home alone, going off to find yourself.” An uncertain expression of disgust wavered across her round face. She brushed a strand of hair away from her forehead. “I mean, there’s a limit, isn’t there?”