The Unforgiven (36 page)

Bending over the lifeless body, Maggie removed the gun from the twisted fingers and placed one cool hand over another in a gesture of repose.
Maybe now,
she thought,
you’ll know some peace.

The slamming of a car door jolted her out of her reverie. She heard the sound of feet running up the driveway and pounding on the porch. Maggie groaned with relief. Someone had come. They could help her. She turned to look. The door banged open and Jack Schmale burst into the house, his gun drawn, with Grace right behind him.

He scanned the room and saw Maggie standing over Evy’s body holding a gun. Blood was spattered over the two of them. In the next instant Grace saw it too. “Oh, my God,” she shrieked.

“Drop it,” Jack cried, training his pistol on Maggie.

Maggie looked at him in confusion.

“I knew it,” Grace wailed. “We’re too late. You killed her.”

Maggie looked down at the gun in her hand, then at the body in the stairwell. Understanding dawned on
her. She looked up helplessly at the policeman and at Grace and shook her head.

“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. It was an accident. She was trying to kill me. She brought this gun here. This is hers. She was going to kill me.”

“Sure, that’s right,” Jack placated her. “Why don’t you hand that over and we can talk about it?”

“We know all about you,” Grace screamed defiantly. “We know you were in prison. I told Jack this was going to happen. You won’t get away with this.”

“I didn’t mean… I had to,” Maggie protested.

“You’ll hang for this,” Grace threatened her. “We’re eyewitnesses. This time you’ll pay for it.”

“Shut up, Grace,” Jack growled.

But his warning was too late. For as Maggie listened to Grace’s words, she suddenly understood the position she was in. No one would ever believe her. She had done time for a murder and now, here she stood, holding a gun over the body of a local girl, known and liked by everyone. A girl she had threatened, in fact, at a public fair. There was no way out of it. She was doomed. She stared back at Grace.

“You see,” Grace cried triumphantly. “She knows I’m right. She knows she’ll go to death row for this. You can’t kill an innocent girl and get away with it. Not this time, you don’t. You can kill me too, but you’ll never get away with it.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Jack said soothingly to Maggie. “You’ll get a fair trial. If you hand over that gun, I’ll try to help you.”

“Help her!” Grace cried. “She’s a killer, Jack.”

Maggie looked down again at Evy. A wave of despair engulfed her.
You win. You have your revenge, after all. I’m not going back to prison. I couldn’t survive that again. I’d rather die.

Slowly Maggie raised the gun.

“No,” Grace screamed.

Maggie lifted the gun and put it against her own temple. She looked impassively at the two in the doorway.

“Don’t do that,” Jack cried out. “Give me that gun. You don’t want to do that. Give yourself a chance.”

Maggie almost laughed. A chance. She shook her head and renewed her grip on the butt.

“Let her,” Grace cried. “She doesn’t deserve to live. Not after what she’s done. Go ahead.”

Maggie cocked the hammer and squeezed her eyes shut.
Make it fast,
she thought.

“Maggie—
no!
”

Her eyes shot open at the sound of the heart-wrenching cry. She looked up and saw Jess, bearded and bedraggled, pushing his way past the police chief and the woman in the doorway.

“God help us,” Grace screamed.

Jack just gaped.

Maggie blinked at the specter in front of her. Jess’s dark eyes locked with hers. “Maggie, I know what happened. She tried to kill me too. Don’t listen to them.”

Maggie still clutched the gun to her head. “Where? What?”

“She had me in her cellar. Emmett’s body was down there. She killed him. Maggie, she was completely crazy. I know all about it.”

“You’re alive,” Maggie breathed. A sad smile formed in her eyes. “Oh, thank God.” She lowered the gun slightly.

“We’re both alive. It’s all over. We’re going to be fine.”

Maggie’s smile faded and she shook her head. “They’re going to put me in jail. I can’t go back. I can’t do that. I was in prison before. I never told you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said weakly.

“You don’t understand. I’ve been in prison. I lied to you. They’re going to say I did it,” she cried.

“No,” he pleaded. “They won’t. I’ll tell them about Evy. I’ll make sure that nothing happens to you. Won’t you trust me?”

Maggie looked up at his weary, anguished face. Tears sprang to her eyes.
He’s alive. You’re not alone anymore. It is possible to trust someone. It’s time. It’s finally time.

Slowly, she turned and placed the weapon in her hand on the staircase. She smiled unsteadily at Jess, who smiled back at her. Then he ran a hand over his pale, sweaty forehead.

“You’re sick,” she said. “Sit down.” She rushed to support him as he sank into a nearby chair. He put his arm around her neck. She buried her face in his shoulder. Through his shirt she could feel his ribs and his sagging flesh.

“Whew,” Jack exhaled loudly. He walked over to the stairs and picked up the gun. Grace followed timidly behind him. In the kitchen, the phone began to ring. “I’ll get that,” Jack said, although no one was listening to him.

Grace approached Evy’s body and looked down on it as if it were some strange icon in a museum. Then, hesitantly, she bent down and pushed a few strands of hair back off the chilly forehead. She stood up and shook her head. A small sob escaped from her.

“Everything’s under control, Owen,” Jack’s voice boomed out from the kitchen. “Yeah. It’s a terrible thing. We’ll tell you all about it when you get back. We do have one pleasant surprise for you, though.” Jack looked out to where Jess slumped in a chair, his arms locked around Maggie, who knelt beside him. “It’s about Jess.”

“I must smell like hell,” Jess whispered wryly, stroking the side of her face.

“Like heaven,” Maggie said, and held him fast.

Pocket Books proudly presents

THE
GIRL NEXT
DOOR

Patricia MacDonald

Now available in paperback
from Pocket Books

Turn the page for a preview of
The Girl Next Door…

PROLOGUE

N
INA
Avery tried to concentrate on her highlighted script. Even though she loved to act, and was thrilled with the part she had landed in the school play, she could not focus on learning her lines. She was distracted by the April breeze that drifted through her bedroom window, and by the fact that it was Friday and school was over for the week. But most of all, she was distracted by thoughts of Brandon Ross, the boy who lived next door.

His family had moved in last November, and she had met him at Christmastime. Her mother, Marsha, had invited the new neighbors to a holiday party. Brandon’s father, Frank, was balding and stocky. His mother, Sheila, was blond, stylish, and thin. The party ended, not surprisingly, in an argument between Nina’s parents. Her mother accused her husband, Duncan, of flirting with Sheila. Duncan insisted that Marsha had ruined the party all by herself by drinking too much eggnog and getting sloppy.

But the party wasn’t ruined for Nina. She had fallen head over heels for Brandon.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t seen much of him in the months that followed. They took the same bus to
school, but in the winter everyone ran to the bus stop at the last minute to avoid the cold. Now that spring was here, Nina had been leaving the house early just so she might be able to spend a few more minutes with Brandon before the bus arrived. He was taller than Nina, and a year older. At fifteen, he had broad shoulders and soft brown hair that fell over his forehead. His eyes, when she dared to meet them, were brown with flecks of gold in them.

“No, you listen to me, Marsha. I have patients waiting for me. I left my practice to go over to that school and be humiliated…” her father shouted.

Nina sighed and returned to reality. She knew very well that it wasn’t only spring fever and Brandon Ross that were distracting her. It was impossible to memorize lines over the sound of the shouting from downstairs. Her parents had just returned from the high school, where they had been summoned to discuss her brother Jimmy and the problems he was having. It didn’t sound like it went too well. Their angry voices spiked up the stairwell and mushroomed in the hall.

“Your patients can spare you for an hour,” her mother retorted in a sarcastic tone. “You don’t hear me complaining because I couldn’t work this afternoon.”

“Excuse me, I’m a doctor. I’m not just dabbling in a paint box,” Duncan replied.

“You see, Duncan?” she cried. “This is your attitude. Nothing is important but you. My painting is a waste of time. The children are a waste of time. This
is why Jimmy has problems. Because you have no time for him,” Marsha shouted. “Because you’re too busy with your…
other interests.”

Jimmy was now sixteen, and had started hanging around with a garage band called Black Death. In a lot of ways, Nina thought Jimmy was sweeter than her older brother, Patrick, but lately he got into fights, cut school a lot, and came home glassy-eyed from the Black Death rehearsals. The band’s lead singer, Calvin Mears, was a known drug user whose single mother did not seem to care what he did. A lot of girls thought Calvin was hot. He was lean and mean, with shoulder-length blond hair and haunted-looking gray eyes. Nina thought he was a little bit scary. She had heard the rumor that he had gotten a ninth-grader pregnant. Her brother Jimmy was the opposite of Calvin. Girls thought he was cute, too, but in a different way from Calvin. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with curly black hair and a face that was scarred up from a million childhood scrapes. He acted as the band’s general grunt and Calvin’s personal bodyguard. No amount of punishment had succeeded in keeping him away from his new friend.

Nina couldn’t understand why her mother blamed her father for Jimmy’s behavior. Her father was a hero in her eyes. Just last year it had been in all the papers when his astute diagnosis and quick treatment had saved the life of their mailman’s young son, who had a rare, often fatal blood disease. Nina liked everyone to know that Dr. Avery was her dad.

But Nina’s mother was always mad at him. Her father would try to avoid the arguments, but her mother would persist. And then he would snap back with something mean—that she was a nag, or she drank too much, or she had let herself go. Which wasn’t fair either, Nina thought. It was true that she didn’t look much like the raven-haired beauty in her wedding picture. Her hair was graying now, and she was pudgy. But it didn’t help anything when her dad, who was still fit and handsome, brought up her mother’s shortcomings. Nina sighed. She loved them both so much. Why couldn’t they just get along? But arguing had become a way of life for them. It was sickening. It gave her a stomachache.

Nina heard the front door slam. She went to her open window and looked out. Marsha Avery, wearing sneakers and her old green sweatshirt, her face like a thundercloud, was crossing the front lawn, toting her paint box and her large zippered portfolio. Nina knew where she was headed. At one end of their street was the Madison Creek Nature Preserve. A state-owned woodland, it was her mother’s favorite place to paint. The woods ran along the banks of a burbling stream, and its winding trails were overgrown and shady. Nina started to call out to her mother, but then she hesitated. Nina and her brothers all pretended not to hear the arguments between their parents. She didn’t want her mother to know that she had been listening.

Nina rested her elbows on the windowsill, her chin in her hands, and breathed in the balmy April air. The New York suburb of Hoffman, New Jersey, never
looked more beautiful than it did in the spring, and Madison Street was especially pretty. There were large, comfortable old houses and lots of trees fuzzy with new leaves and buds. If you turned right out of the Averys’ driveway, it was a short walk to the quaint downtown shopping area of Hoffman. If you turned left, you were headed for the preserve. It wasn’t the ritziest part of town. That was the horsey area of estates called Old Hoffman. But Nina loved her street with its towering elms, lush gardens, and gas streetlamps.

Today, though, instead of cheering her up, the loveliness of her neighborhood made Nina feel more melancholy than ever. Melancholy and lonely. Her thoughts drifted back to Brandon Ross. “He’ll never like me,” she said aloud. She turned her head and looked into the mirror over her bureau. She had long, wavy black hair and creamy skin with no zits, knock on wood. She had often been told that she was beautiful when she smiled. But why smile? If Brandon thought about her at all, it was probably to think how boring she was.

Nina heard a car engine stopping and she looked out the window again. A shiny Jeep with the sunroof open was pulling into the wide driveway beside her father’s car. The Jeep belonged to Lindsay Farrell, a beautiful girl with straight platinum-blond hair. Her dad was some kind of mogul in New York and they lived in Old Hoffman. Nina thought she had never seen teeth as dazzling as Lindsay’s or eyes as blue. Lindsay got out of the car, as did her passenger,
Nina’s older brother, Patrick. Patrick was a dreamboat with brown curly hair and an athlete’s body. He looked like a younger version of his handsome father, and together he and Lindsay looked like some
Vogue
advertisement for the good life.

Patrick came up close to Lindsay and tilted her face up to his with one finger under her chin. Just then the front door slammed again, and Nina saw her dad come out into the driveway, glowering and rattling his keys.

Patrick and Lindsay jumped apart. “Hey, Dad,” said Patrick warily.

Nina’s father mumbled a greeting and headed for his car.

“Dad, did the mail come?” Patrick asked.

“I don’t know. Check the box. I’m heading back to the office.” He climbed into his car and began to back out of the driveway.