A Crime in the Neighborhood (11 page)

We were still standing by the sink when the phone rang. It was Mrs. Lauder from next door. I watched my mother cradle the receiver between her ear and shoulder as she dried a salad plate. Her eyebrows lifted and fell. “Oh no,” she said.

She moved toward the dining room, dragging the phone cord. “Who is it? Do they know who it is?” She paused. “Yes, I'll do that. All right, Marie. Thanks for calling.”

Hardly had she hung up and placed the salad plate back in the cabinet before the phone rang again. She just had time to tell me, “A child's gotten lost,” before she had to say hello into the receiver. This time it was Mrs. Sperling, who was crying because she was scared to be alone with just Baby Cameron.

“Don't worry,” said my mother, now drying a bowl. “You're perfectly safe. I'm sure they'll find him. I'm sure it will all turn out just fine.” Her brisk tone informed me that this was for my benefit as much as Mrs. Sperling's. “Really, I think
you're getting much too worked up, Dolly. There's no reason to be afraid. They've probably found him already.”

After another minute or two, she hung up, and by the dissatisfied way she stared at her dish towel, I could tell she realized that she should have invited Mrs. Sperling to come over and sit with us. A moment later she dialed the Sperlings' number, which was taped to the refrigerator on a piece of paper with the numbers of the fire department, the poison control center, and several of the other neighbors. Aunt Ada's phone number, once written at the top above Aunt Fran's and Aunt Claire's, had been neatly scissored off. The Sperlings' line was busy. A few minutes later Mrs. Morris called.

While my mother talked to Mrs. Morris, I clumped out to the porch on one crutch and sat down, my notebook ready in my lap along with my binoculars and a new Bic pen I'd stolen from Julie's room. Lately I had taken to writing in black ink, which I thought looked more serious. The Sperlings' tortoiseshell cat skulked across their lawn. A moment later, Mr. Morris's stooped silhouette passed his drawn living-room blind, like something from a Hitchcock movie. I propped my cast on the wicker table littered with Peterman-Wolff magazines and by habit looked over at Mr. Green's house. The sprinkler on his lawn arced back and forth. Otherwise the only movement I saw came from the beech leaves shifting above his roof.

While we all slept that night, the hunt widened, spreading past the mall, I learned later, all the way down to the abandoned amusement park by the river, where search teams played their flashlights into the cracked, empty wading pools and under the old roller coaster, which creaked and moaned and looked, from down below, like the collapsing skeleton of a dinosaur. So many places to hide a child, or his body: deep within the crusted gears of the old merry-go-round, behind the splintered arcade with its fourteen plaster clown faces, in one of the termite-eaten turrets of Jack's Happy Castle. Even the air tasted secretive, mixed with the taint of river water and an ancient undercurrent of popcorn. They shouted his name, again and again. Somebody got hold of a klieg light and managed to wire it, and suddenly the park lit up, ghastly, smaller. It would be appropriate, even reassuring, to find a nightmare in that place of nightmares, Playland gone to seed. But he wasn't there.

All evening my mother sat inside on the living-room sofa, riffling the pages of a magazine. For the last several weeks, the Peterman-Wolff Company had been sending us every issue of every magazine my mother was supposed to be selling, on the off chance that she might be required to say something specific in her sales pitch. That night, while the twins defiantly watched a Japanese horror movie, she sat in a corner of the living room skimming through the magazines she had just received, looking annoyed and exhausted. “Blah blah blah,” she would say periodically, tossing the magazine onto the floor.
“That's all it is. Blah blah blah.” After a few minutes of gazing into the cup of her hands, she would retrieve the magazine and go back to reading.

I refused to come in from the porch even after she had announced twice that it was past my bedtime. The phone rang for Julie. It rang for Steven, then for Julie again. I kept rehearsing one sentence:
A child has gotten lost
.

A child has gotten lost. The grammatical construction of this statement baffled me. Who had lost the child? Had he lost himself? Could you lose a child the same way you could lose the car keys? Even then I was something of a determinist, as most children are; I believed that things were lost for a reason. Perhaps God collected lost things for his own benefit, keeping them until you died, when whatever you had lost would be returned to you. I imagined heaven lined with shelves, a celestial pawnshop. All it took was a moment's carelessness, I told myself, and you could lose anything. I didn't understand the implications of this observation, but I remember the thrill that ran up my spine, composed mostly of gratification at being, for the moment, predictably where my mother would look for me.

Years later, during one of our infrequent visits, I told my father about that night and how the twins and I had watched from the porch as all the other fathers gathered on the street, talking with their arms folded. “We were frightened. We needed you,” I said, although I was no longer sure that this was true. “And you weren't there.”

“Yes, I know.” He took off his glasses to clean them with a cocktail napkin. He looked sad and thoughtful. But when he put his glasses back on, he said, “But you got through it all right, now didn't you?”

Light shone from nearly every window of every house, from attic to basement. When a dog barked from behind our house, the whole neighborhood seemed to jump. My mother, however, refused to lock the front door. “I don't believe in the bogeyman,” she said. And I have always wondered whether she was being simply stubborn and foolhardy that night, or whether something darker was passing through her mind.

The light in Mr. Green's kitchen snapped off at nine-thirty, followed by the light in his bedroom at his usual ten o'clock. His house was the first on the street to go dark.

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.”