The Girl Next Door (25 page)

“How soon can you get here?”

There was only one right thing to do. “I’ll be there in the morning,” said Nina. She
was so tired that all she wanted to do was lie down and close her eyes. But the room
was not going to paint itself. She had to get it done tonight.

Nina put on her painting clothes, laid out the painting supplies, and set to work.
The work went quickly once she got started. Luckily she and Duncan had already done
most of it. She just had to finish the trim. And she had long ago washed the curtains,
which had required several washings, but were now ready to be rehung. When the painting
was finished, Nina looked around and felt a glimmer of satisfaction at the result.
She had picked a light yellow, which she hoped was close to the original color. She
uncovered the furniture and pushed the pieces back into place, being careful not to
scuff the new paint. The pictures she would rehang in their original places in the
morning, when she hung the curtains. She’d started to close up her paint can when
she noticed the closet. Should she paint it? It would be such an effort to clear it
out.

She looked at the closet critically. It really needed a coat of paint, and there was
no way she was ever going to do this job once Aunt Mary was back in the house. All
right, she thought with a sigh. It’ll keep my mind off everything else. She reached
into the closet and began to pull out the clothes, laying them
across the bed still on their hangers. She put the shoes in a plastic bag and moved
them out. She had emptied the closet of all the shoes, clothes, and accessories, and
was about to begin to sweep it out, when she noticed a couple of cardboard boxes in
the corner. She was tempted just to leave them there, but her sense of order was offended
at the idea of painting around them.

Just pull them out, she thought. It’s not that much. She had to get down on her knees
to reach the boxes. She was grateful that her aunt was not a hoarder like lots of
old ladies. I’d never get finished, she thought. Aunt Mary probably doesn’t even remember
these boxes are here. Nina dragged the dusty cartons onto the floor beside the closet.
I should probably leave them out for her to go through and throw them away if she
wants. But even as she thought this, she lifted the top off the first box and saw
that it was filled with newspapers. The headline on the top paper struck her like
a blow. “Doc’s wife stabbed to death.”

Nina sank down onto the rug and stared at the photos of her parents and the picture
of their old house, which were splashed across the yellowed front page. With trembling
hands she reached in for the next paper, neatly packed in the box. In this edition,
Marsha’s murder shared top billing with the discovery of a baby’s body in the park.
Again she saw the photo of their old house and, below the fold, a photo of the baby’s
shallow grave. She lifted off the next couple of papers. Each day, her mother’s murder
was the lead story. The next time the murder got the entire banner was a headline
reading, “Doc arrested in wife’s murder.”

Oh my God, Nina thought. Aunt Mary saved every one of these. She took the lid off
the other carton and saw that this box, too, was filled with papers. She couldn’t
remember ever having seen the newspapers or watched the news at the time of her mother’s
murder. But her aunt had saved every single paper dealing with her niece’s death.
Part of Nina wanted to throw
them away, but the desire to read about these events that had changed her own life
so completely was far too compelling. She reached for the first paper and began to
skim the various reports.

In one edition, a crudely drawn crime scene sketch showed, with arrows and broken
lines, how Marsha had crawled from the kitchen to the living room, leaving a trail
of blood. Nina had always known that Marsha was killed in the kitchen with one of
their knives from the block on the counter. But why did she crawl into another room,
mortally wounded like that? Nina wondered. It must have been some instinctual urge
to escape, or perhaps aberrant thinking brought on by the attack.

The mental image of her mother doing that, knowing she was about to die, made Nina
start to shake. She pulled the afghan off Aunt Mary’s bed and wrapped herself in it,
waiting for the chills to subside before she went any farther. The wind outside the
house had begun to howl and rattle the shutters. You shouldn’t do this to yourself,
she thought. But she felt like a smoker telling herself she should not light up, knowing
that she would. Finally, she picked up the papers again.

The papers published during the trial had minute accounts of the crime, but she was
unprepared for a picture published in a Sunday newsmagazine article about the case.
It was a photo of her mother, dead on the living room floor. Nina closed her eyes
against the gruesome image and steeled herself before she opened them again. She forced
herself to look. There was her mother’s body, splayed out on the rug, the newspaper
bunched beneath her outflung arm. Nina was grateful that she could not see her mother’s
eyes in the photographs. Marsha’s face was in shadow.

Oh, Mommy, she thought. How could anyone hurt you? Her mother looked so gentle and
vulnerable, the roll around her midriff exposed where her turtleneck shirt had ridden
up.
Her mother had always been embarrassed by that stubborn excess weight. She was always
trying to diet or walk it off. On her feet, her white ankle socks were splattered
with blood. Marsha often padded around the house in her socks. Nina could see that
the socks, in addition to being bloody, were slightly grimy on the bottom. Who could
be so cruel? Nina thought.

Nina could not stand any more. Enough of this, she thought. Enough. I can’t look at
this anymore, she thought. Forget painting the closet. No one will ever even notice.
I’ll put all this stuff away tomorrow. I have to get out of this room and away from
all this.

She shrugged off the afghan and felt chilly again. Shivering, she dragged herself
up to her old pink bedroom, and fell down on the bed in her clothes. She knew she
should get up and take a shower, but she was too exhausted. I’ll do it in a minute,
she thought. Almost before she could finish the thought she was asleep.

Nina’s dreams were a jumble of images. She dreamed, finally, of her mother. Marsha,
alive and cheerful, was standing in the kitchen of their old house. At first Nina
felt elation at the sight of her. She started toward her mother, wanting to embrace
her. All at once she realized that Marsha was chopping something on the counter with
a large carving knife. Nina was frozen, horrified by the sight. She knew she had to
warn her mother about the knife, but the words stuck in her throat.

“Go upstairs and paint your room,” her mother said. Nina was afraid to leave her mother
there in the kitchen, but she could not speak. “Go on now,” her mother said. “There’s
not much more to do. Finish it up.”

The next thing Nina knew she was in the pink bedroom at Aunt Mary’s house. She knew
in the dream that this was somehow wrong, but she didn’t know why. She went to the
closet, but it was empty—no clothes on the hangers. All she saw was a
box in the back of the closet. The sight of the box filled her with dread. Suddenly,
her brother Jimmy appeared in the doorway to the room.

“Don’t open that,” Jimmy said. But when she looked up to answer him, he had disappeared.
She turned back to the box and pulled it toward her. She lifted the lid, her hands
trembling. When she moved it away and looked inside, she saw a baby, its eyes open,
its skin cold and bluish.

Nina sat up in bed, her heart pounding. In the room she thought she could hear the
echo of her own scream. “Oh my God,” she whispered. She covered her face with her
hands. Calm down, she thought. It was just a dream. As her racing heartbeat subsided
to a normal rhythm, she reminded herself that it was obvious where the dream had come
from. The newspaper stories had brought it all back to her. The baby they found in
the park on the day her mother was murdered. It was all mixed up in her dream. I brought
it on myself, she thought, by reading those newspapers. She shook her head and sighed.

Looking down, she saw that she was still in her painting clothes. Painting clothes,
she thought. Just what her mother always wore. Nina knew she should change—put on
a nightshirt or something—but she did not want to get out of the bed. She lay back
down and pulled the pink blanket at the foot of the bed around her. But she didn’t
sleep. She thought of Jimmy, drinking beer, and wondered if he had got home safely.
She thought of Andre, and how she had been cold and driven him away. She tried not
to think of the dream. She lay there in the darkness, her eyes wide open, and listened
to the wind whipping the trees and howling against the window.

A
NDRE
walked down a long corridor to the desk where, after a variety of security precautions,
he and all prison employees were required to show their identity badges and sign in
each morning. The guard at the desk, Joe Estevez, was sitting, reading a magazine.
He looked up as Andre signed in. “Hey, Doc.”

“Joe,” said Andre. “I was wondering. Is Stan Mazurek coming in today?” The guard,
injured in a prison melee, had started coming back to work part-time. He was assigned
to a desk job in the warden’s office until he was able to fully resume his duties.

“Yeah, he’s here,” said Joe. “You want to talk to him?”

“Yeah, send him down to the infirmary, will you?”

“Sure thing, Doc.”

Andre waved, walked past the desk, and entered the bureaucratic maze of offices on
the first floor that led, at last, to the infirmary. Andre’s new assistant, Dwight
Bird, was already setting
up the examining room. Bird, a young man with dreadlocks and wire-rimmed glasses,
looked up at him. A highly intelligent college student, Bird was not an inmate, but
had pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of hacking into his university reg-istar’s
computer and changing grades for a fee. He’d been given a fine and a sentence of community
service, and the judge had recommended that he do his community service at the prison,
saying he wanted this bright young man to see where he would end up if he continued
to follow his hacker proclivities. Dwight had shown an aptitude for his work in the
infirmary and was invaluable to Andre with his skill on the computer.

“Dwight,” Andre said, as he put on his own lab coat. “How you doin’ today?”

“Doin’ my time,” Dwight said amiably as he unpacked test kits from a box.

Andre leaned over and put his hands on his desk. “A ques-tion.” Dwight shrugged. “Shoot.”

“Would it be possible to find out if a certain passenger is leaving any of the area
airports on flights to California today or tomorrow?”

Dwight raised his eyebrows. “Sure it’s possible.”

“But is it legal?” said Andre. He knew that Dwight would know better than he.

Dwight grimaced and waggled his hand. “You know. That airline thing.”

Andre nodded. “I was thinking that. Never mind.”

“I could do it for you,” Dwight said eagerly.

Andre shook his head. “Forget it. It was just a thought.”

Dwight shrugged. “Whatever you say, Doc.” He resumed unpacking the test kits.

Andre frowned and tapped his pencil on the tabletop. He wasn’t the least bit surprised
to hear that checking on an airline’s
passenger list was illegal. He was just grabbing at straws because, for Nina’s sake,
he had to find Calvin Mears. He had lain awake the night before thinking about their
discussion. Nina had been angry, but Andre knew it stemmed as much from the brutal
truth about her brother as it did from anything he had done. Well, he thought, it
might have had something to with his trip to Santa Fe. Of course, that would presume
that she was beginning to care about him the way he had come to care about her. At
any rate, it was a badly timed trip, even though he hadn’t planned it that way. And
she must have been feeling betrayed everywhere she turned, he thought. Even though
she was angry, she was also right—she didn’t need more advice. She needed help. Once
he’d made up his mind that he was going to help her, no matter what he had to do,
he was able to get to sleep.

There was a knock at the door and Andre looked around. A uniformed guard with a pugnacious
face was standing in the doorway. “Hey, Doc. Estevez said you were looking for me.”

Andre smiled. “Hey, Stan. How’s the reentry going?”

Stan Mazurek automatically reached for the spot in his chest where he had been stabbed
and patted it. “I can’t wait to get back on the bloc. I hate the desk job.”

“Well, for a while it makes sense,” said Andre.

“Yeah. And my wife’s in no hurry for me to be in with the prisoners again.”

“I can imagine,” said Andre.

“So what’d you want, Doc?”

Andre walked up to the man and spoke quietly to him. “Stan, something’s come up. I
was … uh … visiting with Doc Avery’s daughter last night.”

Stan Mazurek shook his head. “That poor kid. Just gets her old man out of the joint
and what happens? Did they catch the son of a bitch who killed him yet?”

“Not yet,” said Andre. “The local police seem to be dragging their feet on this.”

Stan nodded. “ ’Cause he’s an ex-con.”

“I think you’re probably right,” said Andre. “But it might be helpful if you could
find out for me where I could locate this guy.” Andre reached into his pocket and
pulled out a clipping of Penelope Mears’s obituary. He underlined the name of Calvin’s
aunt. “The guy I’m looking for, Calvin Mears, may be staying with these people. I
tried calling Directory Assistance, but they have an unlisted number.”

Stan looked at the name, perplexed. “How would I know where to find them?” he asked.

“The guy’s a cop in Seaside Park. I thought maybe through the police fraternal organization
or something …”

“Oh sure, that’s easy,” said Stan. “My buddy’s recording secretary of the FOP in the
county.”