The Bitter Season (30 page)

They didn’t find the gun.

Nikki was disappointed but undaunted. What she had found was potentially more important: the photos of Angie Jeager/Evi Burke. She knew Donald Nilsen had owned a .243 hunting rifle. She had a photograph of him wielding the weapon as he shouted at his neighbors and threatened to shoot their dog.

He’d had the means to shoot Ted Duffy. He’d had the opportunity to shoot Ted Duffy—if they discounted the statement of his long-missing wife. He wasn’t lacking motive. The two had had run-ins. The discovery of the pictures hidden under Jeremy Nilsen’s mattress, however, may have added a new dimension to the picture.

In her confrontation with Nilsen on his front lawn, she had thrown out the idea that Angie Jeager had somehow ruined or tainted his son. She’d done it just to get a rise out of him, but the more she thought about it, the more the idea appealed to her as an extra layer of motive.

Murder was a solution arrived at by different means, depending on the motive. In the heat of passion or rage, there was no forethought. It was an act triggered from a part of the brain where emotion and instinct lived. In other cases, the motivation for murder was built one step, one transgression, one insult at a time, layer by layer, until the mind could make an argument for a violent solution to an untenable situation.

Donald Nilsen didn’t get along with his neighbors. By his reasoning, they encroached on his privacy and trampled on his personal world order. He was the kind of man who would keep score, remembering every little affront. He had deemed the Duffys’ foster daughters a threat to his sense of decency. Ted Duffy had gone head to head with him on the subject of the girls. If Nilsen had found out Angie Jeager was tempting his son, or even that his son had a crush on her, that could have been the last straw. It only had to make sense to Donald Nilsen.

In need of movement and coffee, Nikki left her office and crept up the stairs to check on the boys. They had all been asleep in the living room when she got home—Kyle, R.J., and her cousin Matt—sprawled on the sofa and the floor like gunshot victims. One by one, she woke them and sent them off to their respective beds.

Kyle, her artist, had painted the door of his room red, black, and white, with a life-size samurai warrior—a fierce mask, a raised sword—warning the faint-of-heart not to cross this threshold. She cracked the door open and peeked in at him, sleeping soundly. He was her quiet one. He had broken up with his first girlfriend before Nikki even knew he had one.

She imagined Jeremy Nilsen the same way: quietly living his own life beneath his father’s radar. Donald Nilsen would not have been an understanding parent. Knowing that, and knowing how he felt about his son now, would Donald Nilsen have killed someone because of his son?

Seley had been calling homeless shelters, looking for Jeremy Nilsen, hoping against hope that they would find him and that he would be able to fill in the blanks of the story. So far, he seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth after leaving the VA hospital.

Nikki couldn’t imagine not knowing where her boys were, let alone not caring. She would have dug up every corner of the earth to find them, would have sacrificed everything she had to save them.

She closed Kyle’s door softly and went back downstairs to the
kitchen for a fresh cup of coffee—decaf, to begin to wind down. She was tired. Her head was swimming with everything that had gone on that day. Too tired to think straight, she admitted as she went to her office.

She sat back against the desk to look at her whiteboard and the notes she had made. She had put a call in to Jennifer Duffy, requesting a call back. No call had been forthcoming. She wasn’t surprised. There was a reason Jennifer didn’t want to go back to those memories, a reason she had struggled over the years with depression and whatever her other demons were.

Nikki thought back to the moment the dark cloud passed over Jennifer Duffy’s memories as she spoke about sneaking into Angie’s room to snuggle and read at night.

What did she know about Angie and Jeremy Nilsen? Angie had been like a big sister to a lonely little girl. Jennifer would have hung on her every word, would have wanted to imitate her, would have wanted to know about everything that went on in Angie’s life—including whether Jeremy Nilsen was her boyfriend.

Why wouldn’t she just say so?

And what did the answer have to do with Ted Duffy’s death?

Nikki’s follow-up call to Evi Burke had also gone unanswered. Evi Burke, who had been through two or three kinds of hell growing up but had managed to come out the other side and build a nice life, a meaningful life. It was no wonder she would rather pass on the opportunity to go back and dig up unhappy times.

“Sorry, Evi,” Nikki murmured as she stared at the time line of Ted Duffy’s death. “I’m taking you back there whether you like it or not. I think you might be my lynchpin in this.”

The dream took her
back to a place she didn’t want to go, to a time she didn’t want to remember. Even in the memory, she felt so empty and so alone, the emotions creating a physical pain inside her.

She was alone in the world. She had no one. Her mother was gone. Gone for good, not gone to a rehab or gone to a hospital or gone on a bender. She was dead. She was gone and never coming back. As damaged as she had always been, as inadequate as her capabilities as a parent had been, she had been Evi’s only relative, the only person to which she truly belonged—and vice versa.

It had come as a surprise, how hard it was to lose her. Evi had seen her sporadically as a teenager in and out of foster care. In many ways they had been little more than acquaintances and occasional roommates. Evi had done as much caretaking of her mother over the years as her mother had of her—probably more. Yet the loss felt as if a giant hole had been torn open inside her, and there was nothing to fill it. That emptiness had terrified her.

She had a roof over her head at the Duffys’. She had people around her, and she had school. But Barbie Duffy was not a mother to her, and Evi had no real friends. She was shy by nature, and ashamed of being in foster care. People looked at her differently, treated her differently, like there must be something wrong with her, something contagious that made her unlovable, or something
intrinsically broken and dirty that attracted the darkness in the souls of men.

None of them reached out to touch her heart. All of them reached out to touch her body—young or old; in anger, as if it was her fault they wanted her; or in the guise of something kinder, as if it was their duty. She took what was offered because anything was better than the emptiness inside her.

She hadn’t meant for bad things to happen. She had only wanted to be loved. She had only wanted to break the sense of feeling separate from everyone around her. She longed to feel she was a part of something, connected to someone. How could that be so wrong?

In the dream, everything was dark, all moonlit shapes and forms. Comfort came in secret. She grabbed it with both hands and held on. Hands and mouths and tangled legs, beating hearts and hot breath. But even in the attempt to connect to someone, she felt detached from her body, as if the essence of her being was just a tiny ball of energy trapped inside an empty shell. Frightened and confused, she held on tighter. She wanted something more, needed something she couldn’t name because she had never known it.

She had never meant to hurt anyone, but in the end she had destroyed everyone she cared about most. As if her heart were Pandora’s box: She had opened it and chaos had tumbled out like an avalanche, crushing everything in its path.

She had spent years in purgatory trying to pay for the damages. She was still paying on nights like this one, when she dreamed of sex and violence, and what her past could do to her present.

She woke up gasping for air, drenched in sweat, shaking, crying, dizzy, nauseated. She stumbled out of bed, tripping on the covers, and hurried into the bathroom to be sick. When her stomach was empty, she brushed her teeth and turned the shower on. Stripping her nightgown off and dropping it on the floor, she stepped under the water, gasping because it was still cold. She didn’t care. She
needed to wash the sensation of the dream away, the sensation of being dirty and defiled and disgusted with herself. She lathered herself with soap and scrubbed her skin with a loofah until it hurt.

Afterward, she felt weak and shaky. She wrapped herself in a towel and sat on the edge of the tub, trying to pull herself together. She wished Eric were there, and at the same time was glad that he wasn’t. She didn’t like to burden him with the aftereffects of her past. He knew a lot about her life, and the things she had been through, but there were memories she had chosen not to share with him. Things that haunted her. Things she regretted even all these years later that, as much as he loved her, she feared he wouldn’t be able to understand or forgive. The prospect of losing him for the mistakes she made all those years ago was more than she could stand.

And yet, she knew there was no escape. Her past was part of who she was and who she had become. The past was like a stone thrown in a lake, the ripples going on and on and on. It was the ominous Other Shoe, and she felt the weight of it hovering over her, ready to crush her and all she held dear. And all she wanted to do was ignore it and hope that it would go away.

Detective Liska had called again and left a message saying she had a couple of additional questions. Evi hadn’t called her back.

She thought of Jennifer Duffy, who had been like a little sister to her for that brief time. She had wondered for a long time after leaving the Duffys what would become of Jennifer. How much did she know? How much had she understood? Detective Liska had said Jennifer struggled for years after, another casualty of the past. Evi’s heart ached for her.

My fault, she thought. She had only wanted what every child did, to be loved, and in the end she caused nothing but death. The death of a man, the death of innocence, the death of what might have grown into real love.

Needing to move, she got up, discarded her towel, and put on a fresh pair of pajamas. She left her room and went in to check on
Mia. She always felt calmer looking at her daughter, her assurance that life went on and renewed itself with innocence. Evi felt a desperate need to keep her child that way: innocent and pure. Her mother hadn’t been strong enough to do that for her.

Mia slept the sleep of a much-loved child, sound and happy, snuggled with a favorite stuffed toy.

I can do this for you, Evi thought. She couldn’t go back and change the past, but she could ensure her daughter’s present and work for her future, and hope that that would make up for the choices she’d made so many years ago.

She went to the dormered window at the end of the room to look out at the night. The rain had subsided to a pea soup mix of mist and fog hanging low to the ground. The waxing moon played hide-and-seek behind black clouds scudding across the night sky.

She saw their faces in the moon, the face and expression changing every time a cloud slipped by—Ted Duffy, broken and defeated; Barbie Duffy, cold and bitter; Jeremy, tormented and brooding; Donald Nilsen, angry and full of hate . . .

The motion sensor security light above the back door clicked on, and Evi flinched, her heart jumping in her chest. She told herself it was probably a stray cat cutting through the yard. Once, over the summer, they had a family of raccoons visit. She scanned the yard from side to side. One of the swings on the swing set was moving. The wind?

Only one seat was moving. The other was still.

A big oak tree took up one corner of the yard. Most of its leaves were gone, but the thick trunk still offered a hiding place. Near the tree was Mia’s playhouse, which Eric had built for her birthday this year. They kept it locked. No one could get inside . . . but they could hide behind it.

Funny how something so sweet and pretty in the daylight could become so dark and sinister at night. Was that the shadow of a figure in the window? She held her breath and waited for it to move.

Her mind went back to the conversation she had had with the detectives, to the questions they had asked about why someone would be stalking her. She had assumed it might have to do with Hope Anders, but as Detective Liska had pointed out, Evi was no one of any real consequence in that case. She was a liaison. She gave the girls her counsel once a week. She had nothing to do with any of the investigations. She wasn’t the figurehead of Chrysalis. She was a social worker. Why would anyone stalk a social worker?

Why would anyone stalk her at all?

Had someone seen her picture in the newspaper article and become fixated on her for reasons only a sick mind could know?

The sensations from her nightmares came back to her—the panic, the darkness, the feeling that she couldn’t breathe or move. The shadows from her past stalked her every night. Had one of them come calling in person?

Liska had asked her if she’d kept in touch with Jeremy. She had not. She had been removed from the Duffy house and taken to a group home that seemed to have existed in another world. She never tried to contact him, did her best to put him out of her mind. Eventually, she succeeded. Years later. Just as she put his father out of her mind, and Ted Duffy, and the rest of them.

The ringing of the telephone tore through the silence, and Evi jumped and ran to answer it. A phone call in the middle of the night was never a good thing to a firefighter’s wife. Her heart was hammering as she picked up the handset from the nightstand in her room.

“Hello?”

Her mind was already racing. Eric was hurt. She would throw on clothes and scoop up Mia. Would she remember how to get to whatever hospital he had been taken to?

“Hello?” she said again, realizing no one had spoken on the other end of the line.

“Hello? Who is this?” she asked, trying not to sound as frightened as she was.

“It all worked out for you.”

The voice was soft, barely more than a whisper. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.

“Who is this?” she asked again, her voice trembling.

There was no answer. The caller was gone.

Evi tried to put the phone down, her hand shaking so badly she couldn’t get it back in the stand, and it tumbled to the floor.

“Uh-oh, Mommy!”

Mia had come into the room, teddy bear tucked under her arm, her sandy curls tousled.

“It’s okay, Mommy,” she said as she rounded the end of the bed. “It didn’t break. You don’t have to cry.”

Evi scooped her child up into her arms and held her tight, choking back the sobs of sheer panic that clogged her throat. Holding on to her future as she tried to forget her past.

It all worked out for you
 . . .