Neighborhood Watch (25 page)

The night of the murder I lay in bed for hours thinking about the fool I’d made of myself at Linda Sue’s earlier that day. How I stood in her bathroom, folded over myself to catch my breath. She thought I was sick and asked if she should call a doctor. “No,” I said, pushing her hand away.

“Don’t call anyone. Don’t do anything.” It’s a terrible feeling, not knowing if your legs will work long enough to carry you out of a place you must leave. They did, eventually. I got out of there and went to bed, where my mind traveled for hours on its own roller coaster.

Finally, I decided:
I will do it tonight.

I waited until ten-thirty to leave, a half hour after Paul had fallen asleep, as he always did, reading a magazine. There was one light on in Roland’s basement but no sign of movement, none of the rolling shadows that I sometimes watched for.

I remember the yellow glow of Roland’s window. I remember crossing the street and feeling the world drop away, the silence developing a sound of its own, a mute roar that filled my head. After that, I remember nothing. And then, in flashes, way too much.

Do I still hear voices in my head? Yes, sometimes.

Are they real or imagined? That’s the problem, isn’t it? In solitary confinement in prison, where silence is pervasive, is it sane or insane to hear voices in your head? To hold whole conversations with people who, you understand, aren’t really there? If therapy were provided in the parting package of nothing that I got from the state, I’d ask these questions and listen carefully to the answers. What constitutes insanity and what is a sane response to insane conditions? If I have memory gaps—hours and even days that are foggy and clouded with ominous feeling—does that mean I know more than I’m able to say? If I remember pieces, the smell and feel of blood on my hands, am I responsible for committing terrible acts? I remember this much: When the police cars pulled up to Linda Sue’s house, I knew what they would find inside. The body at the bottom of the stairs. The oval-shaped pool of blood splashed up on the wall and already dried by the time I got there.

I
don’t tell Finn what Trish said about the cat. I fear it would get him thinking about his dog, who got sick and died after being in Trish’s care. It has me wondering if Marianne’s paranoia began not because she was afraid of losing her daughter but because she was afraid of what she’d glimpsed her daughter becoming: dangerous, aggressive, a pet murderer, even. And if Trish had done this, was it possible she’d done something worse? The evidence presented at my trial was clear. Linda Sue’s injuries could have been inflicted by someone smaller and weaker, by which they meant a woman. But could it also have meant a child, a fifteen-year-old girl, pregnant and terrified? Had playing the pawn in the complicated adult dramas around her simply pushed her too far?

Instead of telling Finn this, I ask him if he would do a search on some of the terms I found in Roland’s drawings. I keep thinking about one detail from Trish’s account of when her parents came over to Linda Sue’s.
They weren’t worried about me, they were worried that I was telling their secrets.
“It must have been about his work,” I tell Finn. “That’s the thing they were always secretive about.”

“Why would Linda Sue have cared?”

“Exactly. I don’t know.”

Before I left her house, Trish revealed one more tidbit about her family that I’d never heard before: that Roland wasn’t her real father. Her real father, who died when she was five, was more like John, her mom always said—meaning too cerebral, too intense, apparently. He was the real scientist of the family and it was his work that Roland was trying to complete. “Her dad’s name was David Bell,” I tell Finn. “Maybe we should start there.”

It’s hopeless, of course. Far too common a name, and he died too long ago, to have any relevant information come up. We try
David Bell, chemist; David Bell, physicist.
Nothing. We get many listings and no hits until, in a very random stab on Bill’s computer, I try
David Bell Free Energy,
and then I don’t just get a listing. A Web site pops up:
The Free Energy Society of America, David Bell, Founder.

“Look at this,” I say.

Finn is across the room on his own computer, doing his own search. He rolls his chair over beside me.

“Oh, my.” He reads through the goals listed on the Web site, which seem broad and insanely optimistic. All cars hydrogen-powered by 2012; decentralized power grids by 2015; combinations of wind, solar, biomass, and nuclear-fueled communities by 2030. His mission statement ends with this:
We envision a world with no utility companies, imagine a globe with no wars to be fought over fossil fuels.
Imagine indeed.

“Can anyone make a Web site these days?”

“Pretty much.”

“So a lot of crazy people do, I imagine.”

“Sure.” He scrolls through a little farther and reads some more.

“The thing is—this is kind of interesting. He’s got all this Nikola Tesla stuff in here, and he wasn’t so crazy. He was an electrophysicist working around the same time as Edison, and everyone says he was this great unrecognized genius. He invented a whole bunch of things—wireless radio, alternating electrical currents, radiant energy—and then did a terrible job holding on to his patents.”

Bill is in the other room making us tea, though he must be listening in on the conversation because he calls out from the kitchen, “Wasn’t that the pigeon guy?”

Finn turns to me. “All right, he
was
crazy at the end. After he died, they found his notebooks and hoped they’d be filled with more amazing inventions, and instead he’d spent his last years writing about this one pigeon. I guess it flew into his hotel room pretty regularly and at some point he married it.”

“Married the pigeon?”

“Right.”

“And David Bell’s Web site is dedicated to his ideas?”

“That’s the thing. Yes, he went crazy by the end, but his ideas about energy weren’t crazy. Now everyone looks back on him as a real visionary. He saw the problems with coal pollution and carbon emissions a hundred years ago. He anticipated all the issues with utility companies having exclusive monopolies on electricity. He said there would be global conflicts over fossil fuels if we didn’t diversify energy sources early on. No one else had that kind of foresight.”

“Or a wife quite like his,” Bill jokes, handing me a mug.

Something occurs to me. “A few days ago, there was mail across the street for someone named Alocin Bell. I thought it had something to do with John because it was from a company based out of Alabama, where he lives. I wonder if there’s a connection.”

“Someone must be maintaining this Web site. In fact, if the guy died years ago, someone must have set up this Web site in his name. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with this. This looks like it’s three or four years old at the most.”

“Maybe he’s not dead?”

“Maybe not. Especially if he’s still getting mail across the street. How do you spell the name?”

I write it down so I can see how it looks: ALOCIN BELL. Then I study it some more. Alocin seems like an odd derivative for either John or David. It might be Italian, or Spanish, possibly. But it also might be a code of some kind. When I turn the paper upside down so Finn can read it, I realize it is. It’s another anagram.

“Look—” I say. “It’s
Nicola
backward.”

We search for
Alocin Bell
and get no hits on Google, and nothing on any of the other search engines, either. We get loads of other
Bell
s, and assume that we must be misspelling the first name. “Does this mean this person doesn’t exist?”

“No. It means he or she hasn’t been named in any public documents available on the Internet. It’s more common with young people who haven’t bought houses or been around long enough to get their name listed. I’m not sure what it tells us except that this is probably a pseudonym and whoever’s using it hasn’t made their work public.”

S
ometimes my children come to me at night, speaking so authoritatively on teenage matters that I don’t see how it’s possible I made them up. “No one wears those jeans anymore, Mom. Look around,” Shannon will say. In prison Ben used to talk about my life as if he was there, alongside me, watching it all. “Let it go, Mom. Taneesha’s jealous. She’s not really your friend.”

Last night they were with me and saying the same thing.
Remember what he did. Remember pouring him the tea and how he’d look up at you, weeping. The cough syrup was never his idea, was it? You thought of it yourself.

My memory points me in different directions at once. Nothing is clear, no thought more than a fragment. I know I went to Roland’s the night after my panic attack in Linda Sue’s bathroom. I’ve never lost my memory of this because I knew what I was doing. I had to see him again.

I’d gone over it in my mind again and again. Had our kiss opened a door or had we tried something once and shut it again? The more I thought about it, the less I slept and the less sure I was. Why had he told me about his loneliness, the duty he felt to his children? The whole business left me foggy and distracted, not thinking properly about anything else. Instead of doing my work, I imagined different futures. Moving out of our houses, starting new lives where no one knew the people we once pretended to be.

I went to Roland’s door because I couldn’t stay away.

When I arrived, the door was open slightly, lights on and music playing. There was even half a glass of wine on the counter, every indication that he was enjoying the same sort of evening I’d interrupted five nights earlier. Except for one thing: He wasn’t there. I called softly from the doorway and then again, louder. I pushed the door open and walked inside.

I stayed for a half hour at least, hoping he’d miraculously appear with food from upstairs, or a bottle of wine. I arranged myself in various casual positions so he wouldn’t be alarmed when he walked in. Then I heard Marianne’s voice in the kitchen speaking in a whispered hush to someone else, and after that, two sets of footsteps on the wooden stairs. I couldn’t stay. I had my answer as clearly as I was likely to get it: He did visit his wife at night. Their marriage may have been moribund, but it wasn’t dead yet. I left his apartment when I saw the time—almost eleven-thirty—and knew he wouldn’t be coming back that night.

Now I understand that they must have been upstairs, dealing with the news of Trish’s pregnancy and her determination not to abort the baby.

I keep trying to remember what happened next.

As I walked out of his basement apartment, my breath went short at the thought of returning home to the bed I’d slipped out of hours earlier. I couldn’t go back, couldn’t lie down again beside a man I hardly knew anymore.

In that state of mind, why did I go over to Linda Sue’s house? I don’t remember except that a light was on downstairs and it seemed to offer a momentary alternative. Did I think I would find Geoffrey there? Did I consider peeking in the way I had that other time, walking home with Paul? I suppose I thought,
I’ll just check and see if he’s there.
Of course I hoped he wasn’t. I wanted some glimpse of her, awake and as alone as I was.

I went because I couldn’t think what else to do. My body was alternately sweaty and dry, my thoughts fragmented, my words slipping away. At work that day, I’d alphabetized forty request slips, and then, without thinking, dropped the batch in the wastepaper basket.

I’d had no choice, really. I had to push my life off the edge in one direction or another. I went to Linda Sue’s house because I couldn’t make my body go back home.

I wanted to find her alone.

Instead, I found her dead.

T
he next morning I can tell right away that something is wrong.

Marianne and Roland are talking downstairs. The twin bed across the room where Trish slept last night is empty.

Last night when I came in, I stood over Trish for a while and asked myself again: Could she be a murderer? Could Trish have gotten out that night, climbed through the window, and crept back to Linda Sue’s house without her parents knowing? I don’t have a lot of evidence, just an unstable girl who has admitted to killing a cat, and a letter, written three years ago, imploring me to
think about the cat
. Any lawyer would tell me this doesn’t add up to much.

Downstairs, Marianne asks if I know where Trish is.

“I don’t know. It’s eight-thirty in the morning. Where could she have gone?”

“That’s just the point.” Marianne shakes her head. “You never should have brought her here. The timing was—just terrible.”

What timing? What is she talking about? “She’s your daughter, Marianne. You haven’t spoken in five years. I assumed you’d want to see her.”

“You involved yourself in something you shouldn’t have. She’s gone now. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Does this mean Trish has run away? That my suspicions are right? I go back across the street and find Finn looking as if he hasn’t slept at all. He tells me he hasn’t seen Trish, which worries me more. Has she taken a bus home? It’s possible, I suppose. More than possible, I fear, if she’d started to wonder about my suspicions. She may have written me that letter three years ago, may have wanted to confess and free herself from this prison of guilt, but when it comes down to it, no one is going to sit around and wait to be taken to a real prison.

I don’t blame her, really. In all the complicated, stormy mess of this, I don’t.

She was fifteen, mentally ill, and pregnant. Could voices have taken hold of her that night? Told her to go back and harm Linda Sue?

Last night, after I returned here and let myself in with the key Marianne had given me, I found Trish asleep and no one else home. I stayed up and read the rest of Trish’s book. I didn’t want it to end; I loved all of it, especially the details I’d never thought of: Shannon wishing for breasts, trying on lipstick; Peter wearing wide-wale corduroys his mother has bought, all wrong, so dumb-looking, it makes him wonder if his mother shops with her eyes closed. How can I not love the gift that Trish has given me?