Dead Before Dark

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  If only someone else had gotten a good look at it. Sometimes she wonders if anyone even believes what she saw in it.

  Anyone other than Neal, that is. Or Cam.

  Lucinda gave her as many names and details as she could recall. Cam said she was going to look into it.

  Lucinda plans to get involved too, just as soon as she’s able.

  But right now, she has other things on her plate.

  And right now, she’s not supposed to be thinking about Ava Neary.

  She closes her eyes, tries to concentrate.

  Isaiah Drew.

  The first time Jaime met him, he was strolling by her building.

  He kindly held the door open for her when she came home with a rare armload of groceries. He even carried the bags up the stairs, where they chatted pleasantly while she unlocked her door. He kind of reminded her of her grandfather—back when Grandpa Dobiak was a little younger, and not so sick.

  A few days after that, he was canvassing the neighborhood with a petition and asked her to sign it. Something about air pollution.

  Of course Jaime signed. Who wouldn’t? Who isn’t against air pollution?

  Okay, maybe she did think it might be a little hypocritical, since she happens to be a smoker, but seriously, what do her measly cigarettes and some occasional weed matter in the grand scheme of things?

  “Thanks so much,” said her harmless new neighbor, looking at her signature. “What’s your name? Jemima?”

  She laughed. Bad handwriting. “It’s Jaime. What’s yours?”

  “Joe,” he said, and from that blustery early March day on, they were on a first name basis whenever they passed in the street.

  “Hey, Jaime.”

  “What’s up, Joe?”

  Just her harmless new grandfatherly neighbor.

  “Please,” Jaime begs him, panting in terror, cowering on the floor beside her bed, watching the knife in his black gloved hand. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “I wouldn’t waste my breath if I were you,” he advises calmly. “You have so few left.”

  Isaiah Drew.

  Lucinda pictures his face. Sees his brown eyes, furtive—and the pupils are dilated. Sees his hand, practiced, steady, cutting white powder on a mirror with a razor blade.

  She opens her eyes and shakes her head. “I’m definitely getting something about drugs, Neal. This room should be searched.”

  “It’s already been searched.”

  “For residue?”

  “For anything at all.”

  “So search again. Bring in drug-sniffing dogs.”

  “Cin, I don’t think—”

  “Are you saying I don’t know what I’m talking about?” she snaps—and immediately regrets it. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m having an off night.”

  “Really?” he asks dryly. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Sorry,” she says again. “I’m just giving you what I’m getting. I know it doesn’t mesh with who you think this kid was, but it’s what I feel in this room. Okay?”

  Neal looks at her for a long time, as if he wants to ask her something. Something that has nothing to do with Isaiah Drew.

  But he merely shrugs and says, “Okay. We’ll bring in dogs.”

  He allows the tip of the knife to jab—but just barely—the skin on her neck.

  “No,” Jaime sobs. “Please, no.”

  “Oh, for the love of Pete. You’re not crying, are you? Didn’t your mother ever tell you that only babies cry?”

  “Please…Please don’t hurt me.”

  “All right. Not yet.” He moves the knife back and glances at the window above her head—or the digital clock on the nightstand—or both. “We still have some time.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she sobs hysterically. “Why?”

  Joe tilts his gray head. “Why. Good question. And you know what, Jaime? I’m going to answer it for you. It’s only fair, and like I said, we still have time.”

  “Cam Neary? Ava Neary’s little sister? Girl, is this really you?”

  “It’s really me,” she says into the telephone, wishing she found the voice on the other end of the line the least bit familiar. She’d been so young, though, the last time she’d heard it. Too young to remember the voice, but not the name.

  “How are you, Bernice?”

  “I’m doin’ all right, doin’ all right.”

  Bernice Watts, Ava’s best friend all the way through high school, had grown up across the street from them in Camden, a fellow latchkey kid in a neighborhood filled with single parent families.

  Bernice’s widowed mother was a good cook, a real churchgoing, family-focused maternal kind of woman, unlike Brenda Neary. Mrs. Watts was always good to Ava, a fixture in the Watts household from the time she was old enough to cross the street alone—by their parents’ lax judgement, anyway. Cam remembers often toddling along with her, and eating homemade cookies at the Watts’s kitchen table with a horde of other kids—most of them Bernice’s siblings.

  Ava and Bernice spent a lot of their time together studying, both determined to go to college. It paid off in scholarships, and when Ava went off to NYU, Bernice enrolled at Rutgers.

  It was through their alumni association that Cam managed to find her—married, with children and grandchildren, living in Trenton.

  “Why you callin’ me after all these years, girl?”

  “It’s about my sister.”

  “Lord rest her soul. You know, not a day goes by that I don’t miss Ava Neary.”

  “Same here, Bernice. She’s the reason why I’m calling.”

  There’s a pause. “I thought so. I saw you on the news, back last summer.”

  “You did?”

  “For a split second, when you first came on that screen, I would have sworn I was looking at Ava.”

  “She was only twenty the last time you saw her, Bernice. I’m almost twice her age.”

  “But you look exactly like her. It was like looking at a ghost. I thought about calling that hotline number they set up, you know…but then I lost my nerve.”

  “Why were you going to call?” Trying to maintain her composure, Cam jerks open a kitchen drawer to look for a pad and pen. “Is there something I should know about my sister?”

  “Maybe.”

  Cam bites her bottom lip to keep from asking why on earth Bernice hadn’t called her. She doesn’t want to scare her off now.

  “Back when it happened, and they said it was a suicide, I just figured that was the truth,” Bernice tells her. “It was hard to believe Ava would do that to herself, but a lot of things are hard to believe in this world, you hear what I’m sayin’?”

  Cam murmurs that she does.

  “Ava and I used to write letters when we were both away at school. That was what people did back then. None of this e-mail-text-message-IM stuff like my grandbabies are doing. I remember your sister telling me in some of those letters not long before she died that she got herself involved in something she shouldn’t have. At the time, I didn’t think it was a big deal, but when I saw you on TV with those detectives, saying she might have been murdered—well, I thought maybe I was wrong.”

  But you didn’t tell me! Why not?

  It’s too late for admonishment. All Cam can do is listen, and hope that she’s on the verge of a breakthrough at last.

  “What was she involved in, Bernice? Drinking? Drugs?”

  “No, nothing like that. It was a man.”

  “You mean Ava had a boyfriend?”

  “For a while. Not a boy. A man, like I said. One of her professors.”

  Cam raises her eyebrows. None of the others who had known her sister in college had mentioned anything of the sort.

  But then, Bernice was like a sister to Ava. More like a sister, really, than Cam was, being so much younger.

  That would probably have changed as they grew older. They’d probably barely notice the age difference these days, if only Ava were still alive.

  If only.

/>   “What was this professor’s name?”

  “Lordy, hon, I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast today.”

  “So she was involved with him when she died?”

  “I don’t think so. I think she wrote me that it was over. Or maybe she just told me that—we used to speak on the phone once in a while, too. That was about as high tech as things got, back then.” She chuckles.

  “Do you still have the letters, Bernice?”

  “You know, I’ve been wondering about that. I never was one to throw stuff away—a pack rat, your sister called me. She always liked things nice and tidy, Ava.”

  “She did? Really? My daughter’s like that.”

  “Oh, yes, Ava was Miss Perfect. Organized, neat as a pin.”

  Funny—that’s something Cam never knew about her sister. Back then, she was too young to pay attention to that sort of thing.

  The unexpected new insight into her sister’s personality makes her acutely aware of just what her family has lost—rather, what was cruelly stolen from them.

  “Do you think you could look for the letters, Bernice?”

  “I already did. I looked around the house a while back, after I saw you on TV, but I couldn’t find them. I suppose if I kept them, though, they wouldn’t be here. I probably would have left them behind at my mother’s house.”

  “Do you think they’re still there?”

  Bernice chortles. “You haven’t been back to the old neighborhood in a while, have you? Cam, the house isn’t even there. It burned down years ago. Pretty much the whole darn block burned down.”

  Her heart sinks.

  “’Course, that was after my mother moved out.”

  “Where does she live now?”

  “With the good Lord in heaven. We lost her about two years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cam murmurs.

  “It was her time,” Bernice says simply. “But it wasn’t Ava’s.”

  “No.”

  “Before my mother died, she was living with my brother DeK’wan down in D.C. That’s where all the stuff from our house in Camden went. I’ll call down there and see what I can find out.”

  The bare-branched trees of Locust Walk are still strung with white starburst bulbs at this time of year. They, along with the full moon, glowing lamppost globes, and light splashing from windows of the Collegiate Gothic buildings along the way, are meant to dispel the shadows of this cold March evening.

  But Lucinda, walking along the brick pedestrian campus thoroughfare with Neal after leaving the dorm, can’t seem to shake the aura of gloom.

  Oddly, she isn’t entirely sure it has anything to do with the missing student. The sense of foreboding feels almost personal, as though something terrible is about to happen to her—or someone close to her.

  Not to Isaiah Drew who, as far as she can tell, has already met his fate.

  “Do you think he’s still alive?” Neal asks her now, as if he’s read her thoughts.

  “No. I don’t.”

  From the moment she walked into Isaiah’s dorm room, she’s had the sense that he won’t be coming back.

  “Any idea where he might be?”

  His remains, Neal means. All that’s left of a boy who held such promise, a boy whose family believed he was going to make the world a better place.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Any chance you could be wrong about his being dead? And about the drugs, too?”

  “I don’t think so. Sorry.”

  They walk in silence for a minute or two.

  “Why don’t you come home with me for dinner, Cin?”

  “Oh—that’s sweet of you, Neal, but I can’t just show up at the last minute.”

  “Sure you can. Garland Fisher does it all the time.”

  Garland Fisher—his neighbor. The one who was there the night the scrapbook vanished from his table and the numerical clue appeared.

  “Will he be there tonight?” she asks, wondering if seeing the man again will trigger her sixth sense about whether he could possibly have had something to do with it.

  “No, he’s been away. Why? Still suspicious?”

  She shrugs. “You’re not. And you know him a lot better than I do.”

  “I checked out his background, Cin. I told you that. He is who he says he is.”

  Is anyone?

  “You’re going to come for dinner tonight.” Neal pulls out his phone. “Erma’s been asking about you. I’m going to call and tell her you’re coming home with me. Okay?”

  Lucinda knows a losing battle when she’s in one. “Okay. Thanks.”

  Neal dials home, talks to Erma.

  Something cold and wet plops onto Lucinda’s forehead. She looks up to see that the moon has slipped behind a cloud and a few snowflakes are beginning to come down.

  “Oh, no,” she mutters, looking down at her thin leather flats. “I’m so sick of winter.”

  “Winter’s over as of today.” Neal pockets his cell phone again.

  “Yeah, well, looks like someone forgot to tell Mother Nature.”

  It really has been a crummy March, weather-wise.

  A crummy March for Lucinda’s health, too—she came down with the flu on the heels of Carla’s death, and since then, it seems, her resistance is down. She’s been battling one bug after another.

  All the travel hasn’t helped. She’s been driving between Philly and the Poconos, helping local police there track down a pair of hikers who disappeared into the mountains.

  Really, it’s been a crummy March all around—except for the fact that Randy is back in her life.

  Not romantically.

  Nothing has happened between them, and neither of them has mentioned that anything once did—or might again.

  Maybe it won’t.

  Or maybe they’re both waiting for enough time to pass, waiting for the raw pain of Carla’s death to heal, waiting for the tide to turn naturally and carry them from friendship and support to something more.

  Waiting.

  Sometimes, Lucinda wonders if she and Randy will ever get the timing right.

  The first time around, it was too late.

  This time, it’s too soon.

  Still, they’ve seen each other quite a few times over the past month—whenever neither of them is working or traveling or sick. Mostly, he drives into Philadelphia to get away from the island and all the fallout from Carla’s as-yet unsolved murder.

  It’s not a cold case by any means—the township police are reportedly following a few leads, hoping forensics will yield something, but the results aren’t in.

  Lucinda herself had to provide a DNA sample, having been present at the scene and inadvertently having handled evidence. Routine police procedure.

  Meanwhile, there have been no new clues, and no official suspects, as far as she knows. The Philly detectives were unable to pick up a single print from her apartment that didn’t belong to her. Even Jimmy, her only visitor, had apparently left no prints behind.

  Which would of course be strange at any other time of year. But it was cold the night he came to pick her up for the airport, and again when he dropped her off. Lucinda is certain that he never took off his coat, and, as she told Neal, he probably didn’t take off his gloves, either.

  “You didn’t notice?”

  “Why would I? That was before I had any reason to be suspicious of him, Neal.”

  She still isn’t. Not really.

  Lucinda’s instincts—which God only knows might very well be off the mark—are telling her that Jimmy is nothing more than a very nice, very busy lawyer.

  Jaime watches him reach over to the table beside her bed, past the blue tissue box and her clock radio, toward the ashtray she meant to empty this morning before she left for work.

  Holding the knife in his clenched right hand and plucking a lipstick-stained cigarette butt from the ashtray with his left, he dangles it over her. “It’s all because of this, Jaime.”

  “Because I smoke?”
Incredulous, she remembers the pollution petition he asked her to sign. What is he, some save-the-earth freak? Is he trying to scare her into quitting?

  Please let that be it.

  Please, God, let that be it.

  “Because you smoke?” He starts to laugh. “Oh, no, my dear. I don’t give a damn if you smoke. Smoking does kill you, though. I bet your parents told you that, didn’t they? Don’t start smoking, because it can kill you. See, now?” He waves the knife over her. “They were right.”

  He laughs harder, maniacally.

  If only someone would hear and come save her. But the walls in this old Division Street building are well-insulated. Nearly soundproof, the landlord said.

  No one can hear a thing.

  “You know what, Jaime?” he interrupts his laughter to ask. “You should have smoked more. Three, four packs a day instead of one and a half.”

  How does he know exactly how much she smokes?

  “You’re going to die young anyway. Hey, how about one last cigarette? Even the guys on death row got to have a last cigarette.”

  More laughter.

  He yanks open a drawer on the nightstand, pulls out a pack of menthols and a lighter. Somewhere in the back of her frantic, fear-clogged mind, she realizes he knows exactly where she keeps them.

  He’s been here before.

  She was right to be paranoid. She kept telling her friends she could swear someone had been in her apartment, rifling through her things. They rolled their eyes and told her she watched too much “C.S.I.”

  A montage of grisly scenes from the show flashes through her mind as the man she knew as Joe the harmless new neighbor stands over her with a pack of cigarettes and a knife.

  She’s going to die, like all those characters on the show—the ones who turn up with fixed, gaping, vacant eyes in litter-strewn, desolate vacant lots.

  He sighs, the way one does after a good laugh.

  “You might as well have a smoke,” he advises her, waving the cigarettes. “You still have another”—again, his gaze flicks to the bedside clock—“seven minutes to live. That’s enough time for a cigarette, right?”

  His laugh is shrill, like a woman’s.

  An insane woman’s.