Next Time You See Me (2 page)

“Why?”

“Hugh and Aileen”—Mac’s parents—“were found in their home.”

“Found?”

“Murdered,” she whispered, as if the word could infiltrate Ben’s innocence, all the way downstairs, in his sleep. “A home invasion. Botched, they said.”

It sounded unreal, wouldn’t penetrate. “
They’re both dead?
”

Staring at me, she nodded. Her eyes were bloodshot; she had been crying a long time.

“I don’t believe it.” I walked in a daze to the couch and sat down.

“I know.” She sat beside me. “I know.”

“Hugh and Aileen? Both of them?”

“They think it happened late in the afternoon. What I don’t understand is why they were home in the afternoon. Don’t they work in the store all day?”

“It’s closed on Mondays.”

“Closed on Mondays,” Mom repeated. “Why?”

“It was their day off—a holdover from the old European ways. It’s always been like that at the store.”

“The thieves must have thought they’d be out.”

“Probably. I don’t believe it. Hugh and Aileen?”

“Poor Mac,” Mom said—and suddenly I realized that I would have to tell him.

Chapter 2

E
ven this late on a Monday night the bars along Smith Street were buzzing. There seemed to be at least one on every block, spilling intoxicated hipsters clustered on the sidewalks in clouds of cigarette smoke. It had been a hot day and the air now was pleasantly cool. I walked slowly in the direction of Boat, the bar where Mac had said he and Billy were going to meet, in no rush to get there. In no rush to turn Mac’s world inside-out. I had called the Bronxville Police Department to confirm my mother’s report about Hugh and Aileen, and the cop’s words were still ringing in my head.

It was a bloodbath, from what I heard
.

And the cruel silence that followed.

They didn’t teach sensitivity training in cop school, that was for sure.

After walking five or six blocks, I wondered if I had gone too far.

“Excuse me?”

A girl in a spaghetti-strap minidress, her right arm covered wrist-to-shoulder in a flower show of a tattoo, pulled her attention from her chattering group and looked at me.

“Do you know where Boat is?”

“Three blocks up. It’s got no sign so look for the red phone booth.”

I thanked her. She eyed me a moment—trying to classify me, too young to be her mother, too old to be trolling the bars—before turning back to her friends.

I backtracked three blocks and passed a group of smokers to make my way inside. The walls were red, and a bittersweet song sent a fragment of lyrics straight to my heart:
. . .
in the shadow of the gallows of your family tree
. . .

Why? Why wouldn’t that shadow stop growing?

I breathed. Moved forward.

I had to tell Mac.

Didn’t want to.

Couldn’t bear to.

But had to.

It was dark and moderately crowded, a glittering collection of bottles tiered in front of a mirror behind the bar. My gaze tripped along the barstool faces, looking for Mac. I continued into the back room, where I was not surprised to find him and Billy hunkered at a table in a far corner: a white guy and a black guy, alone in a crowd, absorbed in conversation like they were in a business meeting. Even though Mac was as retired as I was from the police force, cops never could give up the brotherhood when they found themselves with someone still on the job.

Mac smiled when he saw me. Billy stood and came right at me for a hug. He was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a brown plaid shirt with abalone snaps. I had never seen him dressed for a night out on the town with the boys—or in this case, the boy—but wasn’t that surprised by his Wild West motif. I knew he liked country music and had once noticed a ten-gallon hat in the back of his car.

“Hey, Karin!” This close, I could smell his pungent beer breath. “Good to see you! What’re you drinking?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

The way he looked at me, the way he paused, showed me he read trouble. He glanced at his watch. “Yeah, well, it’s getting late. Congratulations again, man!” He held out a hand and Mac grasped it. “I’m proud of you.”

“Billy,” I said. “You don’t have to go.” Maybe it would help if he stayed. Unless Mac wouldn’t want another man to see him cry.

“Thanks, but I’m on the early shift again tomorrow. You be good now.” He kissed my cheek and walked through the dim red room, past the bar and out the door.

I took Billy’s seat and faced Mac. He leaned forward and touched the back of my hand. “What’s wrong?”

“Let’s go.”

He stared at me, saw that I meant it, and we got up to leave. Everything my eyes fell upon—the round shining edge of the mahogany bar, the reflection of a kissing couple in the mirror, a Band-Aid on a woman’s manicured thumb—hit me like a snapshot, images I would always remember. Outside, a young man wearing blue eyeliner and a nostril ring, talking to a chubby woman in a tight lace dress. The quietness of Smith Street between each bar, at midnight, as the rest of the neighborhood slept. The bitter lozenge of regret caught in my throat for what I was about to do to Mac.

“You okay?” He put his arm around my back and pulled us together. “How was class?”

“Fine.”

“Have you been home?”

I nodded. “Mom’s there with Ben. Everything’s fine.”

“Good.”

And then I realized that I had lied. “I mean, everything’s fine with Mom and Ben.”

He stopped walking. We had turned onto our block and, standing in the hushed darkness, I took him in my arms and whispered the news about his parents into his ear. I felt him melt away. He didn’t fall but it was as if he was falling. Every muscle in his body seemed to lose its shape and intention; and though he wasn’t leaning on me, I felt as if any movement would cause his collapse. We might have stood like that, our arms around each other in stunned silence, for five minutes, or ten, or fifteen. I knew that, for Mac, time had stopped. I knew it because I remembered how it had felt when I’d learned that Jackson and Cece were dead, murdered: The shock jolted you into a nether zone between the living and the dead, a place of pure hurt, in a nanosecond. You wanted to get out of it but couldn’t see how you ever would.

Mac pulled away and touched his front pants pocket, the way he always did, to feel for his wallet and listen for the jangle of his keys. He wasn’t crying but his eyes were red and his face had transformed, pinched in like a prune by the unbearable pain. When he started to walk in the opposite direction from our house, I followed.

Three blocks later, we were unlocking the gate to the lot where Mac parked his car. I waited while he got the green MINI Cooper he’d had since before we were married—the little car that was unexpectedly comfortable for two tall people like us. The motor rumbled in the sleepy quiet as he drove out of the lot and onto the sidewalk. I shut and locked the gate, then went around to the driver’s side.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Right.”

I got behind the wheel and he sat in the passenger seat as we made our way along the lonely early morning roads to Westchester. We hardly spoke until we arrived at his parents’ house in Bronxville—not the rich part of town where the power brokers lived a very commutable distance from Manhattan, but the more modest part of town that edged the highway, the decent but unfancy neighborhood where working people like Mac’s family lived.

His parents were both Irish; they had married in Dublin at the age of eighteen and immigrated to America together the following year. Theirs was the typical story of the successful immigrant: years of hard work seeding a family business, in their case a local hardware store that thrived. They became not only citizens but enthusiastic patriots, painting the window frames of their two-story white stucco house blue and the front door red. Aileen had planted pale blue hydrangea bushes on either side of the front door, and seamed the bottom of the white picket fence with alternating clusters of red and white impatiens. Now yellow police tape was strung across the top of the fence and the lawn hummed with crime scene investigators who looked like they were finishing up. Two ambulances waited with their red-and-white lights rotating and back doors gaping. As soon as we pulled up, Mac’s eyes nervously skimmed the scene before settling on his childhood window; his room had been above the garage. A uniformed cop noticed us and immediately headed our way, his irritated expression implying that we were rubbernecking.

“Move along, please.”

“I’ll explain,” I told Mac.

“No. Drive around the block.”

The cop shrank in the rearview mirror, standing by the fence, watching us drive away. I saw him shake his head and turn back toward the house. I drove slowly in a large circle that bordered the highway and a main road before returning to the house. Not knowing what else to do, I was going to keep driving when Mac told me to stop.

“I have to go in.” He looked at me, his blue eyes beseeching mine.

I shut the ignition and took his hand. In my peripheral vision I saw the cop approaching again, determined to shoo us away.

“Let me deal with him.”

Mac stayed in the car while I got out and faced the officer: He was shorter than I was, his blond hair crew-cut close to his scalp. His name tag read
Renfrew
.

“Ma’am, you can’t—”

“My husband’s parents live here.”

The cop stared at me, and I wondered if he was struggling to believe me or correct me:
lived
here. They lived here, past tense; they were dead.

“We’re both former detectives—New Jersey.” I put out my hand and waited another awkward pulse for him to reach out and shake it. “Karin Schaeffer. My husband is Mac MacLeary.”

Officer Renfrew’s eyes roamed my face for what felt like a moment too long. My fame was sticky, infamous, uncomfortable; it dogged me like a recurring illness I wished would finally capitulate. Every now and then, someone would seem to recognize me without knowing why. At the time of my family’s murder, and later, during the prolonged and complicated hunt for JPP, my story bubbled into the news with disconcerting frequency. I was
one of those faces
that looked familiar.
One of those names
you might have seen or read about somewhere. I never helped people clarify their confusion when they met me; if they wanted to know, they’d have to ask me outright, but no one ever did.

Renfrew peered into the car at Mac, who took the cue to open the door and step out.

“Who’s in charge?” I asked Renfrew.

“Detective Arnie Pawtusky, over there.” Renfrew pointed to a tall baldheaded man in brown slacks and an orange-and-green striped polo shirt, with a cigarette parked between his scalp and one ear.

We crossed the lawn and introduced ourselves. Pawtusky eyed us cautiously at first, caution that moved swiftly through reservation into what felt like a kind of sad respect.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, looking right into Mac’s eyes in a way that made me instantly like the man. And then he turned to me, looked into
my
eyes, and said, “And I’m sorry for your loss, as well.”

That floored me. I wasn’t sure what he meant. My first loss? Or this one?

“Thank you,” I said.

“Am I clear to go inside?” Mac asked.

“Sure you want to?”

“If I don’t, I’ll never—” He couldn’t finish but I knew what he would have said:
. . .
never stop rearranging the furniture in my head
. The
furniture
being the facts. He had investigated too many crime scenes to be comfortable not knowing the details of his parents’ last moments.

Pawtusky glanced at the house. “Give me a minute.” He went inside and as we stood there waiting I remembered our last visit here: the Fourth of July, the MacLearys’ annual late afternoon barbecue to which they invited every neighbor, friend, and acquaintance. The fourth was also my niece Susanna’s birthday—this year she’d turned seven—and normally Mac and I spent the day traveling a loop from Brooklyn to New Jersey to Westchester, unwilling to miss either event. But since my brother Jon and his family had moved to Los Angeles, this year we’d had to settle for singing “Happy Birthday” to Susanna over the phone, and had come early to help Hugh and Aileen prepare. They had welcomed me into their family without missing a beat, never belaboring the fact that they’d adored Mac’s first wife, Val.

“Almost ready.” Pawtusky strode toward us across the lawn.

A pair of emergency workers came out of the house carrying a stretcher upon which a zipped body bag lay with lumpen stillness. It could have been either Aileen or Hugh; they had been more or less the same size. A second stretcher and a second body bag followed. We stood there with Pawtusky and watched as Mac’s parents were loaded into the ambulances and driven away. For the second time that day, I wept uncontrollably. Mac’s eyes grew redder, but still he didn’t cry.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Pawtusky said.

After a moment, we followed the detective into the house. Pawtusky stood back and didn’t speak while we took it all in.

A glistening pool of blood at the foot of the stairs, emanating rays across the front hall tiles like a giant starburst.

A pink terry-cloth slipper—Aileen’s—half soaked with blood; the other slipper across the room by an umbrella stand.

A dozen family photographs on the wall, three frames on the right severely disarranged.

I held Mac’s hand and led him away, arbitrarily turning left into the living room. And immediately regretted it.

Another pool of blood by the smashed-in sliding glass doors that led from the living room to the back porch.

Hugh’s favorite armchair was in its recline position, footrest levered up, next to the side table upon which a glass was overturned but not broken. The smell of spilled whiskey.

And the butcher smell of fresh blood: metallic, sharp.

Across the room, red splatter on the white living room wall. Drips of it now dried mid-path on its way down the glass of a framed Norman Rockwell poster: a man and a boy at the counter of a soda fountain on a sepia afternoon.

Blood on the blue twill couch beneath the poster.