The Girl Next Door (3 page)

“Mom, oh my God!” Nina started to rush toward her mother.

Slowly, Duncan rose to his feet, waving his hands at her. “Nina,” he said. “Don’t.
Don’t come any closer.”

“Mom,” she cried in a hoarse voice. “Mom. What’s wrong with her?”

“Honey, your mom is … gone,” he said. “I came in and found her like this.”

“You mean …?”

“She’s dead. Yes.” He approached Nina gingerly, as if she were a rearing horse.

“No, she’s not dead!” Nina cried. “Don’t say that.” She lunged toward her mother,
but he intercepted her and held her back.

“No. There’s nothing you can do. Someone’s stabbed her.”

“No. That’s crazy. Let me go!” Nina cried frantically. “Mommy!”

“Honey, stop. She’s dead. Believe me. I’m a doctor. I know when someone’s dead. Come
on. Get away from her. I don’t want you to see her like this.”

“Mommy,” she whimpered.

“Don’t go near her,” Duncan murmured, holding her. “Come on. We have to go in the
kitchen. We have to call the police. Come with me.” He steered her away from her mother’s
body, although Nina could not tear her gaze from the horrible, incredible sight. Supporting
one another, they stumbled into the kitchen, which was lit only by the light over
the stove. Nina slid on something wet and slippery. She looked down just as
Duncan flipped on the switch for the overhead light. Nina saw that her own sneakered
foot was resting in a scarlet puddle. She looked up. Blood splattered the cheerful,
fruit-garlanded wallpaper and smeared the checkered tile floor.

“Oh my God,” said Duncan.

Nina began to scream.

N
INA
seated herself on a cold metal folding chair in the back of the parole board hearing
room. She was one of the first to arrive. The train from New York City to Trenton
had left her with an hour to spare. She smoothed down the skirt of the claret-colored
knit dress she was wearing. It was a rich shade that matched her garnet earrings and
went well with her long black hair and her white skin. When she chose her clothes
that morning, she had been conscious of wanting to look vibrant in contrast to the
drab group that made up the parole board. She wanted her father’s gaze to pick her
out as soon as he walked into the room, so he could see the encouragement in her eyes.

The door behind her opened and Nina shifted around in her seat, wondering if it was
Patrick arriving. She saw that it was an elderly couple shuffling in, the woman leaning
on a cane. Nina turned back around and faced the long table at the front of the room.
Maybe Patrick wouldn’t show up this year. She hoped he
wouldn’t. But she feared that he would. It wasn’t as if either one of them could
ever forget about it.

Her thoughts drifted back to that horrible night fifteen years earlier and the jumble
of nightmarish images she could never shake. She remembered hurling herself into Patrick’s
arms when he arrived home that night, shaken and bewildered, accompanied by the cops
who had gone out to search for him. She could still see her eighteen-year-old brother,
sobbing against their father’s shoulder like a small boy, insisting that it couldn’t
be true. And then the three of them looking on in equal measures of horror and outrage
as the detectives produced Marsha’s rifled purse and empty wallet, which they had
found on the bedroom floor. After that, the questioning, the endless questioning.
Detective Hagen, gray-haired and sharp-eyed, suggesting, over and over, that Duncan
had been slow to call for help. Too slow. The expression in Patrick’s eyes beginning
to change. Anger beginning to dawn there.

The door behind the conference table opened and the twelve members of the board straggled
in, shuffling papers and conferring with one another. They were, as always, a stolid-looking
bunch, more men than women, more white than black, all solemn, their suits a somber
array of blue, black, and gray. Some of their faces were familiar to her. A couple
of them were new. Year after year, these proceedings had a sameness to them. Normally,
it seemed, they ended in disappointment. A few times, waiting out in the echoing corridor,
Nina had seen genuine joy as a prisoner was given a second chance unexpectedly early.
She told herself that she was not being unrealistic in hoping that this time she would
be the one rejoicing. This year she had reason to hope.

Someone whispered her name, and Nina looked up to see Patrick entering the room, followed
by his wife. She smiled, but her heart sank. She’d been hoping he might give their
father a
break, considering all that had happened recently, but no such luck. He was here,
as usual. Without looking around, Patrick seated himself in the middle of the bank
of seats on the other side of the aisle from her. He glanced over at her and nodded.
Gemma poked her head out from behind Patrick and mouthed, “Hi, Nina.” Nina smiled
weakly back at Gemma.

So Patrick was here as usual and Jimmy, as usual, was not. To be fair, Jimmy had made
great progress in his life from that night when their mother was killed. That night
when he returned home high on drugs, trailing an equally doped-up Calvin Mears. Her
father had ordered Calvin out of the house, and held Jimmy’s forehead when he vomited
at the sight of their mother’s blood in the living room and all over the kitchen.
Nina had often thought, although her father had never admitted as much to her, that
the reason he refused to go to the police station that night, the reason that he insisted
on having a lawyer before the police asked any more questions, was because he feared
Jimmy would be busted for drugs. But Patrick scoffed at that notion. Their father’s
actions that night gave rise to Patrick’s first suspicion, later confirmed in his
mind by a jury’s verdict, that Duncan was the one who had murdered their mother.

Nina straightened up as the head of the parole board, Arnold Whelan, instructed the
bailiff to bring in prisoner #7796043. The bailiff went out the side door and came
back into the room after a moment accompanied by a thin, gray-haired, gray-complected
man in an orange jumpsuit who had his hands handcuffed in front of him. Nina felt
the familiar stab of pain at the sight of her father, restrained that way, as if he
were likely to be violent.

Duncan Avery did not look around, but sat down in the chair facing the board.

“Will the clerk please read the prisoner’s file?” asked Arnold Whelan.

The clerk cleared his throat. “Duncan Patrick Avery, on August eighteenth, 1988, in
the township of Hoffman, County of Bergen, New Jersey, convicted of the crime of murder
in the second degree.” The clerk then read a history of Duncan’s applications and
denials for parole. When he was asked if everything in this file was accurate, Duncan
said gruffly that it was.

Mr. Whelan then announced that the board would hear testimony from two new witnesses
on behalf of the applicant. He called for Stan Mazurek, and a burly young man in a
wheelchair wearing a midnight blue law enforcement uniform was pushed up to the front
of the room by a young woman with lustreless brown hair. The woman was wearing a V-necked
tunic over stretch pants, and on the front of the tunic was a large round laminated
pin that had a photo of two smiling little girls in red dresses seated, one behind
the other, against a Christmas tree backdrop. The woman put the brake on the chair
and gave Mazurek a quick kiss before she sat down in the front row, far from where
Duncan Avery was seated.

“Now, Mr. Mazurek, you are, as I understand it,” said Whelan, looking at the papers
in front of him, “a guard at the Bergen County State Prison, where Mr. Avery currently
resides.”

Dr. Avery, Nina silently corrected him.

The guard nodded in agreement.

“And you are here today to support the applicant’s petition for parole?”

Mazurek shifted uneasily in the wheelchair and put a protective hand over the area
under his ribcage. “I got stabbed and the doc, there, saved my life.”

“You’re referring to the prisoner,” Whelan said, glancing over his half-glasses at
the stenographer who was working at the end of the table.

“That’s right. Doc Avery is in my bloc. He’s not like the others.
He’s a good prisoner. He keeps to himself, keeps quiet, doesn’t make no trouble for
nobody.”

“Now, as I understand it,” said Whelan, “there was an insurrection on that bloc.”

“That’s right,” said Mazurek. “Just last week. I came over here today from the hospital.
The docs told me I have to take it easy, but … I wanted to come.”

“All right. Please tell us what happened.”

“Yessir. Well, a couple of whackos got a hold of shivs, and when they gave a signal,
all hell broke loose. They took me prisoner.”

“You were a hostage,” said Whelan.

Mazurek nodded and hung his head. “Yessir, they had me. And they were getting a big
kick out of telling me what to do. I took all of it I could stand, and then I wouldn’t
go along with them, so one of them cut me. Sunshine. He tried to kill me. I knew the
moment he did it. Wasn’t something … minor, you know.”

“And the applicant …?”

“Doc Avery. Yeah, well, he’s always quiet, ’cause he knows what these guys are. But
he pipes up, right in Sunshine’s face, and says, ‘Hey, you know Mazurek is gonna bleed
to death. You gotta let me stop the bleeding.’

“Those bastards were all shouting, ‘Yeah, let him bleed,’ but Doc Avery was talking
to them real quiet but firm, sayin’ if he didn’t stop the bleeding, I was gonna end
up dead, and they’d all be on death row. So some of them seemed to get that, and they
let him get through so he could work on me. He used his own shirt as a bandage. Dr.
Quinteros there told me I would have died if he didn’t do that, the doc.”

Whelan held up a hand to stop his testimony. “We’ll let Dr. Quinteros testify about
the nature of your injury.”

Mazurek shrugged. “Okay. I just want to say to you people
that my wife and daughters and I are grateful to the doc. I owe him my life.” Mazurek
had been speaking earnestly to the parole board. Now he turned and looked directly
at Duncan Avery. Nina felt tears spring to her eyes at the intense sincerity in the
man’s tough-looking face. “I mean it, Doc,” he said gently. “I’ll never forget what
you did for me.”

Duncan nodded slightly.

Whelan turned to the rest of the board and asked them if they had any questions about
the incident. A couple of board members asked a few questions about the hostage situation
while Nina studied her father. He was paying careful attention to everything they
said. You were a hero! Nina wanted to shout. They’ve kept you caged up all these years,
but they have not turned you into an animal.

“Thank you, Officer Mazurek,” said Whelan. “We want to thank you for coming forward
with your information. We’ll hear from Dr. Quinteros now.”

A dark-haired young man in the second row stood up and walked toward the center aisle.
Meanwhile, Mazurek nodded, and his wife got up and went behind the wheelchair to push
him out of the room. Dr. Quinteros gave them both a friendly nod as he assumed the
witness seat. Mrs. Mazurek wheeled her husband’s chair down the center aisle.

As Mazurek and his wife passed the table behind where Duncan sat, the two men nodded
gravely at one another, although there was no physical contact between them. But the
woman reached out impulsively and put a hand on Duncan’s shoulder.

“Mrs. Mazurek,” Whelan said in a warning voice, as the guards in the room surged forward,
and then resumed their positions as she quickly drew back her hand.

Whelan waited until Mazurek had been wheeled out the back door of the hearing room
before continuing. “Now,” he
said, shuffling through the papers in front of him, “Dr. Quinteros.”

The young doctor sat with his forearms resting on the arms of the witness chair. He
was wearing a dark shirt and a tie, but no jacket. The gaze in his narrow black eyes
was at once aloof and alert. His face resembled that of an Aztec chief, all angles
and planes. His coal black hair had obviously been combed back, but it parted off
center and fell in a curve beside his high, sharp cheekbones.

“You are Dr. Andre Quinteros,” said Whelan. “You work at the Bergen County State Prison
infirmary. Is that correct?”

Quinteros nodded. “Correct.”

“Can you tell us about the injury sustained by Mr. Mazurek in the prison uprising?”

Quinteros leaned forward and recounted, in technical terms, the severity of the guard’s
injury. “Without immediate attention, a tear in the artery like this is life-threatening,”
he said in conclusion.

“So,” said Whelan, “is it your opinion that Mr. Avery here did indeed save the life
of Officer Mazurek?”

Quinteros looked gravely at Duncan. “Absolutely,” he said.

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“Mr. Whelan, I’d just like to add, if I might …?”

“Yes?”

“Well, Duncan … Dr. Avery … often helps me in the infirmary. I think highly of him
and I value his opinion. I … would miss his help, but I hope you will see fit to grant
him his parole.”

“Thank you, Doctor, for coming in today. We won’t keep you from your work any longer.”

The young doctor stood up and smiled at Duncan, and Duncan nodded. Nina watched in
mute gratitude as the good-looking doctor started to walk down the center aisle. As
he
reached the row where she was sitting, he suddenly glanced over at her. Nina was
used to catching the eye of good-looking men, but all the same, she flushed as their
eyes met. Suddenly, he gave her a brief nod of support as if he had recognized her
and knew why she was there. At first she was too surprised to react. Then, recovering
herself, she turned in her seat and tried to smile at him, but Quinteros had already
exited the hearing room.

Whelan shuffled his papers again. “We have several testimonials as to the role that
Mr. Avery played during this prison uprising. We also have the customary reports of
his good behavior and a dearth of citations for any kind of infraction of the rules.”