Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

  “What do you mean?”

  “There were some things we weren’t supposed to tell anyone. About the accident earlier and what was going on with Trish. Sometimes I think it all started with that accident—”

  “What accident?”

  “No one knew if it was related or not. They just kept saying they needed to keep it confidential—wait, Kevin’s just got home. I need to go. I’m sorry. I’ll call you later.”

  After she hangs up I call Paul back to see if he remembers anything about an accident.

  “Like a car accident? No.”

  What puzzles me most is the fact that no one was supposed to talk about it. I ask him if he remembers what Trish was doing around the time that Linda Sue was killed.

  He is quiet for a minute. “She had some hard times, I remember that. I don’t know too much more.”

  “What kind of hard times?”

  “Didn’t she leave home for a little while and they didn’t know where she’d gone?”

  How did Paul know this when I never did? It’s unsettling, to say the least—as if people were intentionally keeping things from me.

  “She came back later, for a little while anyway. Then she left again.”

  “Did you know that she was hospitalized?”

  He hesitates. “Yes. I heard something like that.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone looked into this more—or figured out if there’s a connection between her disappearance and Linda Sue’s death?”

  “I did, actually. I told Franklin all this and he couldn’t find any evidence that Trish and Linda Sue knew each other. The more I looked into it, the more it seemed like he was right. She was a pretty troubled girl, but all of her problems were focused on kids at school. I couldn’t find anything that connected her to Linda Sue.”

  Except that she lived next door, I think. And this: Geoffrey’s inscription in her copy of Middlemarch. Evidence that at some point he befriended her the same way he befriended me, with books and talk.

  Paul keeps going. “Turns out she ran away from home two weeks before Linda Sue died. That’s where Marianne and Roland were the day Linda Sue’s body was found—picking her up and sorting things out. She wasn’t even around for the murder.”

  So if Trish had been gone for two weeks, the last night I saw Trish, or any of us did, must have been at the last Neighborhood Watch meeting. I ask Paul if he remembers seeing her there, if she looked different or distraught.

  “You forget,” he says. “I never went to those meetings. That was when I decided that Marianne reminded me too much of my mother.”

  I laugh because I do remember even though I never understood the comparison. By the time I met her, Paul’s mother had become a free spirit who lived in an artist community in Arizona. When Paul was a child, the youngest of five children, she was entirely different, weary and distracted from coping all the time. “Five was too many kids,” she once told me. “Four more than I should have had.” Honesty was something she’d discovered in middle age, along with Eastern religions and poetry writing. She was blunt about everything, even, on the eve of our wedding, her feeling that we shouldn’t get married. “It’s just a sense I have,” she whispered privately to me. “It’s probably nothing.”

  The first time she visited, she stood on the front lawn and said it was hard to imagine why Paul had wanted to live here, on a block so much like the one he grew up on. “Maybe he’s forgotten how unhappy he used to be.”

  We learned to brace ourselves for her tactless observations.

  “Is no one here interested in doing their own thing?” she’d ask, looking around the neighborhood. “Could someone paint their house chartreuse if they wanted to or is that against the rules?”

  “It’s not against any written rules, Mother,” Paul would say. “It’s just understood.”

  Her visits drained us and I could see in Paul’s face how hurt he was by her. “It’s not your fault she wasn’t happy back then,” I once said to him. “Think about it, Paul—your mother disapproves of you living the same life she brought you up in.”

  “It’s not that. Sometimes living here makes me feel like a child again. I can’t explain it.”

  It was an odd thing to say, when buying this house meant we looked and acted older than anyone else our age, but I knew what he meant. Sometimes I’d look at Paul and see the child he must have been, the youngest and the shiest, the one his mother waited on to leave, which she let herself do when he was fifteen. He never talked about that time in his life. I heard about it only from her when she insisted, “He was fine. I knew he would be. That’s why I left.”

  Paul never chimed in on those conversations, never said, in so many words, Yes, I was, because he wasn’t. That was my discovery after I married him. Paul still needed everything his mother took with her when she left him in a big rambling house, alone with his father—reassurance, protection, a feeling of self-worth. My fondest memories of our marriage were the moments when I most felt her absence—making him a sandwich and cutting it along the diagonal, or standing in the bathroom fitting a Band-Aid around the finger he’d just cut. All those times where I thought: Here is the mothering he never got.

  “You could have gone to those meetings, Paul,” I say now. “You chose not to.”

  “That’s right. No, you’re right.”

  “You didn’t because you said the whole idea of Neighborhood Watch was creepy and strange.” What’s strange, actually, is how easy it feels to go over all this with him.

  “Wasn’t it, though?”

  “Yes,” I say, letting myself laugh. “It was a little strange.”

  CHAPTER 15

  We had three Neighborhood Watch meetings altogether. At the second, Marianne introduced a retired police officer named Norman with the wizened, folded face of an apple-core doll and a special fondness for doing home security on the cheap. Every idea he showed us had a price tag under ten dollars. Who needed an alarm system when you could glue a telephone pad to your wall and paint a red dot on it for seven dollars? Why buy a dog when a bowl of dog food and a BEWARE OF DOG sign will achieve the same effect? We were charmed by his parsimony; beside him, Marianne beamed.

  If Linda Sue was there that night, she didn’t speak up or ask any questions the way she had at the first meeting. She saved that for the last meeting, after everyone was seated and Marianne announced brightly, “Tonight we have a very special guest.”

  We all looked around the small living room. We knew everyone there. “Give me a sec,” Marianne said, and returned a moment later, followed by a middle-aged man wearing a denim jacket, brown corduroys, and a baseball cap pulled low. “This is Gary,” she said, walking him up to the front of the room. “And he’s a former burglar.”

  We looked around. Beside me, Linda Sue whispered, “What is she thinking?”

  “Gary is enrolled in a rehab program that provides supervised housing in exchange for participation in community outreach groups. Gary has graciously agreed to share his life story with us and answer any questions we might have.”

  Linda Sue put her hand up.

  “Later, Linda Sue. After he’s spoken.” Silently I prayed Linda Sue wouldn’t use this as an opportunity to pick another fight. In the month since we followed Linda Sue and Geoffrey home after Helen’s party, I’d been watching from my window for any sign of a repeat visitation. The night after we saw them standing together in her living room I slept maybe an hour or two at best. I woke early enough to make coffee and sit all morning watching Linda Sue’s yard, waiting to see Geoffrey walk across it. He never did. When I finally had to leave so I wouldn’t be late for work, I found him outside on his driveway, lying on the rolling board he used to work under his car. I was fully prepared to walk past him when he called out, “Bets!” and slid over to the grass strip that separated our driveways. “Quite a party last night, wasn’t it?” he said, smiling. I could hear the teenage joke he wasn’t saying: NOT.

  “Helen’s work might take a little getting
used to,” I said diplomatically.

  He asked when I wanted to get together to talk more about Anna Karenina. I tried to remember which one of us had suggested this book and why. Why had he put me in this position of knowing so much about him and yet nothing that mattered? He acted so cordial and so normal, asking me what page I’d gotten to, when I was off work, if I’d be ready this afternoon to talk about our book, that I began to wonder—honestly—if I’d imagined the scene at Linda Sue’s house the night before.

  “I’m a little busy this week,” I said, shaking my keys as if to prove I had a real job here, with responsibilities.

  “Okay,” he said, pushing himself back. “Maybe this weekend?”

  “I don’t know, Geoffrey,” I said. “Maybe you should spend time with Corinne. You said you hadn’t seen much of each other recently.”

  “Hmm.” He nodded. “She’s away this weekend, actually. At a conference.” We usually knew ahead of time about the weekends Corinne wasn’t around. We always had him over for dinner at least one of the nights, sometimes both.

  “I didn’t know that.” I let the silence open up, with no mention of dinner.

  “Well, then.” He pushed himself as far away as he could. “Let me know when you want to talk about the book.”

  I didn’t say any of the things that crossed my mind. I never want to talk about this book with you. You shouldn’t be sleeping with Linda Sue. She’s vulnerable and strange and not worthy of you. Or what I was finally beginning to feel: You manipulate all of us, Geoffrey. You listen to our sad stories and then you tell your own and you get all of us to excuse you for your bad behavior.

  When he didn’t show up at the library that day or the next, or anytime at all the following week, I knew something was different. It became a mystery and I watched Linda Sue’s house more. Anytime I wasn’t at work or obligated to attend to Paul in some way, I stood at the kitchen window with the clearest view of her yard. I never saw Geoffrey go in or come out. What did it mean? A few days later, I called to tell him that some things had come up at work and I wouldn’t have time to read our book. “It’s a little too much right now,” I said, hoping he’d get the gist of my meaning—the book was about an adulterous affair that didn’t end well. I know what’s going on, I wanted to yell over the phone. You weren’t exactly subtle. But the problem was that I didn’t know. I didn’t understand—what did he and Linda Sue have in common?

  “Okay,” he said, as if the enormity of what I was saying—I don’t want to read with you anymore—meant little to him. For the next week at work, I watched the library door and waited for him to come. Some days I felt the buzz of expectation, an electric tingle in my neck, and I’d think, Yes, he’s coming today. I couldn’t explain it except to say that I felt like a child, left behind by the first real friend I’d ever made. I lurched between moods, one minute sad, the next irritated by the endless demands of patrons, always looking for something slightly different than what we had on the shelf. Large print, paperback, a different translation. Once I actually snapped, “What difference does it make?” to an elderly woman looking for an edition of Emily Dickinson that she remembered as having a yellow cover. After that I went into the bathroom and sat inside a toilet stall for the better part of an hour. Calm down, I told myself. Just calm down.

  I thought about calling Geoffrey and saying, I never wanted to sleep with you, you know, which sounded adolescent even though it was true. I didn’t. Why would I want stolen kisses and hand-holding when we had topics to discuss and ground to cover?

  I was beginning to understand that the end of a friendship could break your heart as cleanly as the end of a romance. Maybe I did behave like a teenager. Paul implied it more than once and we started bickering more. “I don’t understand you,” he said one night over a dinner I’d thrown together, a box of macaroni and cheese with sausage cut up into it. We both lifted the tasteless food into our mouths. I narrowed my eyes at him as if to say, Oh, don’t you?

  Though presumably Gary’s life of crime was behind him, he began his speech in an unsettling present tense. “Okay, so. Let’s say I’m out, looking for a house. I want one that looks vulnerable, right? Windows half-open, no screens or bars. I also look for blinds closed all the way. That means when I get in I can do anything, look for the jewelry, find the silver. What have you.”

  Marianne’s smile looked like it was caught on her teeth. “You used to do this.”

  “Right,” he said, nodding.

  Gary was a dreadful speaker. He blinked nervously and picked at his teeth. Later, he talked about looking for jewelry in a bathroom and touched his zipper. To conclude, he hiked up his pants and said, “I forget what else. “When Marianne asked for questions, we sat in silence. He might have been reformed, but he was a sad sight and no one wanted to drag this out. Except for Linda Sue. “Do you mind telling us what jail is like?”

  He seemed game enough to answer the question, but Marianne stopped him. “That’s not what we’re here for, Linda Sue. This is about preventing crime.”

  “It seems like it’s been more about glamorizing it. Isn’t that what he’s been doing all night?” She turned around and looked at all of us. No one said anything. “I feel like leaving here and becoming a burglar. We’ve just learned about twenty great tips for doing it. I think it’s worth his telling us a few reasons why we shouldn’t.”

  Marianne fumed until Gary said he’d like to take the question. “Look, the thing about jail is—” He looked at each one of us, sitting with our notebooks open in our laps, pocketbooks tucked under our feet. “Don’t go there, okay? Seriously. Jail is like your worst nightmare times ten. It’s scum of the earth in your face all day and all night, sleeping on top of you, pissing on the floor. The reason I’m here tonight is I’d rather do anything—I’d rather do this—than go back to jail.”

  We shifted awkwardly in our seats at the unkind implication he’d made about our gathering. Only Linda Sue laughed at the answer, so hard I feared she might lapse into a choking fit. “Thank you,” she finally said, catching her breath.

  Because it was our final meeting, Marianne had planned a party with a rum punch, crystal cups, and a handwritten folded sign that warned: ALCOHOLIC! She laid out her spread and disappeared into the kitchen. After a few minutes, I went to check on her and found her standing alone with tears in her eyes. There was no point in pretending I hadn’t walked in. “Are you okay, Marianne?”

  “I’d just like to know why she moved here.”

  For weeks I’d been asking myself the same question. “I wish I knew,” I said.

  “Helen keeps saying she’s harmless, but I don’t think she is.”

  I hadn’t dared articulate such a thought, but the minute Marianne said it, I knew what she meant. “It’s like she watches us,” I whispered. “And judges everything we do.”

  She looked up and caught my eye. “Exactly.”

  This wasn’t fair. Even as I said it, I knew I was wrong. I’d stood with Linda Sue at three parties now, had walked home with her twice, and I knew the simple truth: She didn’t think about us nearly as much as we thought about her. The real problem with Linda Sue’s cavalier jokes and laughing with a felon about our gathering was the kernel of truth that lay behind it. We were a joke. We favored practical hairstyles and dressed in bright pinks and greens that made us look like an army of cautious women trying to look cheerful. We kept conversations light and on predictable topics. If one expected anything more interesting—like the conversations I’d had with Geoffrey all spring—one would only be disappointed coming to this group.

  Marianne wiped her nose with a paper towel. “Part of me thinks she needs our help, and part of me wishes she’d just leave.”

  I thought about my own contradictory impulses—offering to help with her curtains one minute, peeping in on her private life the next. In the other room, I could hear Linda Sue’s voice above the others. “Look, I never even lock my door. If anyone wants to rob me, they can.”

>   Standing in the dark kitchen, I surprised myself: “She’ll leave soon, Marianne,” I said. “She’ll be gone. I know she will.”

  CHAPTER 16

  After I hang up with Paul, Finn appears with a pitcher of something he calls “sun tea,” which he tells me is made by putting a pitcher of water in the sun all day with tea bags floating in it. “It’s one of those things gay men who work at home do with their extra time.”

  I laugh as he pours me a glass. He’s been so helpful and reassuring, I hardly know how to properly thank him.

  “Oh, please.” He sticks a sprig of mint into my glass. “You’ll need this,” he says, pointing to the mint. “Otherwise it just tastes like brown water. That’s the problem with sun tea. It doesn’t really work.”

  I ask if he knows any way to look up old police reports about an accident that would have happened more than twelve years ago.

  “Hmm. That might be tricky, but we can try.” He takes me into his office, where two computers sit on desks facing opposite walls. As he works on finding police files online, I ask about the other names on the list and point to the two that I wrote down at the bottom: Trish Rashke and Alocin Bell, the name I saw on the envelope at Marianne’s house. “Nothing so far, but I’m going to work on Trish Rashke next. I remember her and I’ve got some ideas about how to find her.”

  “You knew Trish?”

  “She lived here with her parents when we first moved in. We hired her to walk our dog for a while. She was always very sweet with him. She bought him toys and came over to visit with him. Then the dog died suddenly and we hardly saw her after that.”

  “How did he die?”

  “A kidney infection. It happened so fast the vet thought maybe he ate some pesticide. We never knew exactly what happened.”

  That evening Marianne starts her Personal Safety Seminar by asking everyone to say their name and what they currently use for personal protection. A woman in the front goes first. “Sharon. Mace spray.” Her sister, beside her, is next. “June. Brass knuckles.” No one makes the joke I would have expected. Condoms sometimes, diaphragm occasionally.