The Girl Next Door

by Brad Parks

  “Hit and run. Hell of a way to go, huh?” he said. “I just hope they catch the bastard that did it and tie him to the center lane of the Turnpike so we can run him over.”

  * * *

  By the time Jim and I parted, it was after three and the funeral director was gently shepherding the crowd out onto the street. He was subtle about it—a funeral home can’t exactly announce last call—but people were getting the hint.

  I climbed into my Malibu, feeling my reporter’s notebook pressing against my thigh. I don’t know what it is, because ballpoint-pen ink barely weighs anything, but a full notebook just feels heavier than an empty one. And I knew I had filled this one with enough good stuff to easily get me to sixteen inches.

  My favorite anecdote was shared by one of Nancy’s fellow paper deliverers. As any longtime resident of New Jersey knows, one of the Eagle-Examiner’s nicknames is “the bird.” For one of her shop meetings, Nancy made T-shirts with a picture of a guy tossing a rolled-up Eagle-Examiner onto someone’s front porch, Frisbee-style. Underneath, it read, IFIW–LOCAL 117: PROUD TO FLIP YOU THE BIRD!

  I wasn’t sure whether I could get that line past some of our prissier editors. But as I returned to the newsroom and started writing, I figured I owed it to Nancy to try.

  The words were just starting to flow onto my computer screen when my cell phone rang. The caller had a 510 area code, which was neither a New Jersey number nor one I recognized.

  “Carter Ross.”

  “Mr. Ross?” said a monotone female voice on the other end, and I knew who it was before she could say her name. “This is Jeanne Nygard, Nancy Marino’s sister. We met earlier today.”

  “Hi, Jeanne. Thanks for calling.”

  The line hissed with the sound of no one talking, though I could faintly hear her breathing. I shifted my weight, and my chair creaked in response. I cleared my throat and soon found myself talking, because I felt like someone ought to be.

  “I’m sorry if I triggered a little bit of a spat at the viewing,” I said. “I didn’t mean to stir up ill will.”

  “My sister and I don’t always get along,” Jeanne said, and I fought the urge to reply, No, really?

  “She’s not a happy person,” Jeanne continued. “She seeks fulfillment in worldly things, in money and power. They will never lead her to enlightenment.”

  Okay there, Siddhartha, I nearly replied. But again I resisted. And since I didn’t want to enter into a conversation about Anne’s self-actualization or lack thereof, I asked, “So what can I do for you, Jeanne?”

  “My sister would be angry if she knew I was talking to you,” Jeanne said, which didn’t exactly answer my question. “She said I should keep my mouth shut. But I gave up trying to please my sister a long time ago. Do you have siblings, Mr. Ross?”

  “An older brother and a younger sister.”

  “So you know what it’s like.”

  “Family can be a joy and a pain,” I confirmed.

  The line hissed silence.

  “I’m sorry, is there something I can help you with?” I said, trying to prod the conversation toward … wherever it needed to go. “The story about your sister is going in tomorrow’s paper, so I’m on a bit of a deadline.”

  “I wanted to call you because your card says you’re an ‘investigative reporter.’ Is that true?”

  I put my hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t say something like, No, Jeanne, I’m actually a taxidermist with an active fantasy life.

  I gave myself half a beat, then removed my hand and said, “Yes, it’s true.”

  More faint breathing was followed by “Don’t you think it’s odd, her being killed in a hit and run?”

  “I’m not sure I would choose the word ‘odd.’ I would just say it was a terrible tragedy.”

  “The police said it was probably a drunk driver. What do you think about that?”

  “That people shouldn’t drink and drive?” I said, trying not to sound like a smartass.

  “I’m told bars around here close at two. Would anyone still be drunk at six in the morning?”

  I sighed. Where was she going with this? “People get drunk places other than bars, so there’s—”

  “And there were no skid marks,” Jeanne interrupted, her voice managing to rise above the flatness of Parkinson’s disease to gain some inflection. “The police said they didn’t find any skid marks on the street. Don’t you think the driver would have slammed the brakes after hitting something as large as a person?”

  “Depends. The guy might have been so bombed he didn’t even realize he hit someone. It happens.”

  Jeanne took a moment to consider this. She was nothing if not deliberate.

  “Your card says you’re an investigative reporter,” she repeated. “Are you going to investigate the accident any further?”

  “I’m not planning on it, no.”

  I tilted forward in my chair and rested my elbow on my desk. The bottom right corner of my computer read 5:17. Obits, which are not considered breaking news, have to be filed by six, no exception. I wanted to be considerate to Nancy’s grieving sister, but I had to find a way to gracefully exit this conversation.

  “I need to know if I can trust you, Mr. Ross,” Jeanne said.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I have something I think you should investigate,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  Another pause. Then:

  “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “You mean Nancy’s death?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t an accident. I believe Nancy had reason to fear for her life. I believe someone killed her.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “She’s my sister. Sometimes sisters just know things about each other.”

  “Yes, but do you have any proof?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. Then, after a pause, she added: “And yes.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I was the last person to talk to my sister before she died. She called me at ten on Thursday night—that’s one in the morning, her time. Mr. Ross, my sister went to bed at seven-thirty and woke up at three-thirty. She never had trouble sleeping like that.”

  “So what was bothering her?”

  “She was having … problems at work.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  The line went quiet again, causing me to press my ear to the phone. From somewhere in the background, I heard a door open. Jeanne drew in her breath sharply.

  “Jeannie, whatchya doin’?” I could hear a male voice inquire.

  And at that, Jeanne promptly hung up.

  There had been a dent in his SUV, a roughly human-sized crease just to the right of the midpoint of the hood. That Friday morning, he spent an hour at one of those do-it-yourself car wash places making sure there were no traces of blood, skin, or muscle hanging stubbornly into one of the crevices.

  Then he took the car to a local body shop, to a place that would do the work quickly and without comment. He explained he hit a deer while driving through South Mountain Reservation. The only question he received in reply was whether he had gotten some fresh venison steaks out of the deal. No, he said, the deer got away.

  Then he started worrying about his own getaway. He knew all it would take was one citizen with quick eyes looking out the window at the wrong moment. For as fast as he was going, for as dark as it was, for as suddenly as it all happened, he still couldn’t rule out the possibility he had been spotted.

  So that afternoon, he set up down the street from his house, where he could see the traffic coming in and out. And he waited. He waited for an unmarked car with a grim-faced detective to roll past on the way to his house. He waited for someone from work to phone and say the cops were there and asking questions. He waited for his lawyer to call and say there was a warrant for his arrest.

  But none of it happened.

  He relaxed a little when the story appeared on the Eagle-Examiner’s Web site later in the day
on Friday. The Bloomfield police were already begging the public for information, which was a good sign. It meant they had canvassed the neighborhood, come up empty, and were now tossing up one last Hail Mary before they completely forgot about this case and moved on to one they could actually solve.

  He relaxed more when the same small, empty story appeared in the paper Saturday morning. He had worried the death of an employee might cause the paper to react more strongly, to run larger stories that would keep the news in the public’s eye—and therefore in the cops’ eyes. But the paper had treated it with yawning indifference. Ultimately, she was just another papergirl, nothing special after all.

  Two days later, he went to the wake. He went to keep up appearances, because people would expect to see him there. But he also wanted to monitor the conversations. If people were still buzzing about the accident, talking about it like it was a suspicious event, then he’d know he had to keep his guard up.

  He was momentarily concerned when he became aware there was a reporter at the wake, interviewing seemingly everyone. But no. The reporter didn’t suspect anything. And neither did any of the other attendees. They were trading in all the same empty aphorisms people always did when they were around death. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that this might have been anything other than a tragic, stupid accident, no different than if she died in a plane crash or a head-on collision or any of the other capricious ways a life can suddenly end. Soon her body would be in the ground and her death would be forgotten by all but a small handful of friends and family.

  By Monday afternoon, he finally allowed himself to relax completely. By early Monday evening, he was celebrating with a stiff drink. He had gotten away with it.

  CHAPTER 2

  In the forty minutes I had to write the remaining three hundred words of my feature obit on Nancy, I mostly ignored the thought that I ought to be writing a story about a homicide instead.

  I told myself that, in all likelihood, wacky old Jeanne was just letting her imagination get the best of her. Sure, Nancy was having “problems at work.” News flash: we all have problems at work. The only people who don’t are the unemployed.

  If Nancy was still among the aspirating, Jeanne wouldn’t have given that late-night phone call another thought. Death has this tendency to take ordinary words and mundane conversations and magnify them ten-thousandfold, because it makes them the last words and the last conversation. Really, how many times have you heard someone say, with utmost gravity, “That was the last thing she ever said to me.”

  So Jeanne was just taking those final utterances—which Nancy never intended to be profound—and blowing them out of proportion, letting them lead her mind to some frightening place. Grief does strange things to people’s heads. And hippies are notorious for being predisposed toward conspiracy theories.

  Then again, so are newspaper reporters. So, yes, I was a little curious what made Jeanne think Nancy’s death was something other than what it seemed.

  I studied that 510 number in my phone for a few seconds, debating whether I should call it. In my younger days, I was the kind of hard-charging reporter who probably would have. But now, in the dotage of my early thirties, I had finally gained the wisdom necessary to let it rest for a while. Wooing sources is not unlike Friday night at the bar. Sometimes you have to play a little hard to get.

  So I mentally shelved Jeanne Nygard and concentrated on writing Nancy the send-off she deserved. Naturally, it ended up being a bit long, but I had a reputation for overwriting to uphold. With exactly three minutes to spare, I hit the button that sent it over to the copy desk, where my elegant prose would have to withstand the ritualistic assault known as “editing.”

  Then I stood and quickly surveyed the newsroom. Unlike most workplaces in America, newspapers have eschewed cubicles, partitions, walls, or any other attempts to divide space into discrete units. The Eagle-Examiner newsroom—sometimes called “the nest,” because of the whole, you know, eagle thing—is just a great plane of desks. It’s set up that way so we can yell at each other, unhindered by any barriers that might break up the sound.

  Only a handful of editors get actual offices, and even those are walled-in glass for maximum transparency. I selected the fourth office from the left and ambled over to find the assistant managing editor for local news sitting in her chair, tucked in a convoluted ball, engrossed in her computer screen.

  “Hey, I’m filed,” I said.

  “I’m overjoyed,” Tina replied. And although she didn’t appear to remove her attention from the screen long enough to look at me, she added, “It’s a good thing you’re wearing that suit.”

  “And why is that?”

  She finally lifted her eyes.

  “I got free tickets to the symphony tonight and you’re my date.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. You may now express your pleasure.”

  “I’m … so pleased?” I said, raising my pitch at the end so she wouldn’t miss the question mark.

  “Next time, you will express more pleasure than that,” she said, then unwrapped herself with a series of quick, sumptuous little stretches.

  When Tina isn’t doing yoga, she’s jogging. She couples those twin obsessions with an aversion to carbohydrates. It’s not a lifestyle I would recommend for everyone, but she seems to enjoy the discipline. It certainly had rather admirable effects on her physique, which she showed off with a wardrobe that tended toward the form-fitting, sleeveless, and short-hemmed side of the fashion spectrum. It led to complications in my life that didn’t exist when my editor was a pear-shaped, middle-aged Italian guy.

  “Who says I don’t already have plans tonight?” I asked.

  “What, like a hot date? Come on, I already heard you struck out with Sweet Thang.”

  “Sweet Thang” was the nickname bestowed on a former intern at the paper. She and I had engaged in a brief flirtation that never went anywhere, and it was now an entirely moot point—she had departed newspapering in favor of a job at a nonprofit in New York City, which was probably a better fit for her philanthropically oriented soul.

  I held my chin high and said, “I’ll have you know I happen to be highly sought after by a great variety of women.”

  “Who … the cougars from Montclair?”

  “Well, them, yes,” I said. “But I also happen to have caught the eye of a rather fetching younger woman.”

  Tina reached around to the back of her head and released a hair clasp, allowing a cascade of thick, brown curls to fall on her shoulders.

  “One, you’re lying,” she said. “Two, do we really have to play this game?”

  “What game?”

  “The one where you pretend you actually have a love life.”

  She had me there. My last serious relationship was now several years in my rearview mirror, and it had ended rather poorly. The lady and I had been living together at my house in Nutley—the house also ended poorly, but that’s another story—and we were entering that period in our late twenties when we spent a lot of time going to friends’ weddings. I thought we were heading in the same direction, even thought I was happy about it. Then she explained to me I wasn’t, then explicated all the reasons. The short version: she didn’t like anything about me, after all. I’m not even sure I had digested the long version by the time she was off shacking up with someone new.

  And now? I seemed to have become a rather committed bachelor. I had sporadic and nonrecurring dalliances with the opposite sex, though nothing that stuck. My life pretty much consisted of deadline (the job) and Deadline (the cat).

  “Well, okay, fair point,” I said. “I’m just not a big symphony guy.”

  “Come on, I’ll wear a dress and pretend not to notice when you stare at my legs all night.”

  “Tempting offer.”

  “Perhaps you missed the point earlier,” she said. “It’s not an offer. It’s an order.”

  * * *

  As promised, Tina changed into a regulation-issue
Little Black Dress, one that stopped several inches above the knee. She coupled it with a dash of perfume, a thin gold choker, and four-inch heels. And it was a good thing we were leaving the building because she was starting to set off all the smoke detectors.

  We took her car—a Volvo being a better fit for the symphony than a used Malibu—and scooted across town to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, a handsome brick edifice that really shines when lit up at night. Built in the late nineties, NJPAC was trumpeted as the catalyst that would bring nightlife roaring back to downtown Newark in a way not seen since the city’s long-ago heyday.

  And while those expectations had perhaps been unrealistic—they were building a concert hall, not a miracle machine—there was no disputing that the surrounding area, while still a bit grungy, was far better off for its presence. In a lot of ways, it was typical of the urban renewal process. People somehow thought it should happen instantly, simply because you poured money into a shiny new building. But the fact was, it had taken America many long decades of concerted effort to systematically destroy its cities. It would take at least that long to build them back up.

  And sure enough, Newark was getting better. A new arena, the Prudential Center, had eventually joined NJPAC downtown. A cultural community was slowly taking hold. New restaurants were cropping up. So now at least when suburbanites announced they were going to Newark for the evening, their peers looked at them only slightly crookedly.

  Tina and I arrived at seven-thirty for an eight o’clock show. The Eagle-Examiner was one of the event’s sponsors, which meant we were invited to a special, preshow cocktail party. Once inside the building, we found the gathering simply by following the sound of overly boisterous chatter.

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been sober long enough today,” I announced as we entered.

  “Yeah, why don’t you do something about that for both of us,” said Tina, who didn’t seem to notice or care that she was being ogled by every man in the room with usable eyeballs.