The Neighbor

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Jason woke up to a slow building hum, then a slash of bright lights across his eyes. He peered groggily at his watch, saw that it was five A.M., then peered at his backlit blinds with fresh confusion. Sun didn’t rise at five A.M. in March.

Then he got it. Klieg lights. From across the street. The news vans had returned and were powering up for their morning visuals, everyone filming a fresh report from the crime scene, aka his front yard.

He let his head fall back against the pillow, wondering if there was any breaking news he should know about from the past three hours when he’d actually slept. He should turn on the TV. Watch an update of his life. He’d always had an overdeveloped sense of irony. He waited for it to kick in, appreciate this moment. But mostly, he felt tired, stretched in too many directions as he sought to protect his daughter, find his wife, and keep out of prison.

Jason extended his arms and legs, taking inventory after last night’s pounding. He discovered that all four limbs appeared to be working, though some hurt more than others. He tucked his hands behind his head, peered up at the ceiling with his one working eye, and attempted to plan for the day ahead.

Max would return. Sandra’s father hadn’t come all the way to Massachusetts just to sit quietly in his hotel room. He would continue to demand access to Ree, threatening… legal action, exposure of Jason’s past? Jason wasn’t sure how much Max even knew of Jason’s previous life. It wasn’t like he and the old man had ever sat down. Jason had met Sandra in a bar, and she’d kept to that routine as much as possible. Only good girls take boys home to meet their fathers, she’d told him that first night, clearly wanting to establish that she wasn’t a good girl. Jason would take her back to his little rental, where he would cook her dinner and they would watch movies together, or maybe play board games. They did everything but what she clearly expected them to do, and that kept her returning, night after night after night.

Until Jason began to notice her growing stomach. Until he started asking more questions. Until the night she broke down in tears and it became clear to him the solution to both of their problems. Sandy wanted away from her father for whatever reason. He just wanted away. So they’d taken off together. Fresh city, new last name, clean start. Right up until Wednesday night, Jason would’ve said neither one of them had ever harbored regrets.

Now Max was back in the picture. A man with money, brains, and local legal connections. Max could hurt Jason. Yet Jason still couldn’t grant the man access to Ree. He’d promised Sandy that her father would never touch Ree. He wasn’t going back on that now, not when his daughter needed him more than ever.

So Max would stir the pot, while the police continued to dog his heels. They were tearing apart his computer. Probably digging into his financial records. Interviewing his editor, perhaps even touring the Boston Daily offices. Would they spot the computer he’d left there, put two and two together?

How long could this game of high stakes poker go on?

Jason had taken basic steps when he’d become a family man. His “other” activities existed under a different identity, with a separate bank account, credit card, and P.O. box. Payment confirmations and the single credit card statement went to a suburban post office out in Lexington. He visited once a month, retrieving the paperwork, sorting through it, then shredding the evidence.

All good plans, however, had at least one central flaw. In this case, the family computer contained enough damning evidence to send him to prison for twenty to life. Sure, he employed a decent scrubber software, but any web visit generated far more temp files than one scrubber could cover. Three, four days tops, he decided. Then the forensic specialists would realize that something was wrong with the computer they had seized, and the police would return in earnest.

Assuming they hadn’t already discovered Sandy’s body and were even now standing on his front porch, waiting to arrest him.

Jason got out of bed, too keyed up to return to sleep. His ribs protested when he moved. He couldn’t see out of his left eye. His injuries didn’t matter to him, however. Nothing mattered, except one thing.

He needed to make sure Ree was still sleeping safely in her room, a tiny, curl-topped form with a bright orange cat at her feet.

He padded quietly down the hall, senses alert. The house smelled the same, felt the same. He cracked open the door to Ree’s room, and discovered his daughter lying straight as an arrow in her bed, hands clutching the top of her comforter, big brown eyes staring up at him. She was awake, and, he realized belatedly, she had been crying. Damp lines of moisture smeared her cheeks.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said quietly, coming into the room. “You all right?”

Mr. Smith looked up at him, yawned, stretched out one long orange paw. Ree just stared at him.

He took a seat on the edge of the bed, where he could brush tangles of brown hair off her damp forehead.

“I want Mommy,” she said in a small voice.

“I know.”

“She’s supposed to come home to me.”

“I know.”

“Why doesn’t she come home, Daddy? Why doesn’t she?”

He didn’t have an answer. So he crawled in bed beside his daughter and pulled her into his arms. He smoothed her hair while she cried against his shoulder. He memorized the smell of her Johnson & Johnson skin, the feel of her head pressed against his shoulder, the sound of her tired little sobs.

Ree cried until she could cry no more. Then she spread her hand on top of his, aligning each of her short stubby fingers against his own larger, longer digits.

“We will get through this,” Jason whispered to his daughter.

Slowly, she nodded against his shoulder.

“Would you like some breakfast?”

Another short nod.

“I love you, Ree.”

Breakfast turned out to be more complicated than he’d planned. Eggs were gone. Same with the loaf of bread, the majority of fresh fruit. Milk was low, but he thought he could eke out two bowls of cereal. The Cheerios box was suspiciously light, so he went with Rice Crispies. Ree liked the talking cereal and he always made a big show of deciphering what the crackling crisps said:

“What, you want me to buy my daughter a pony? Oh no, you want me to buy myself a Corvette. Ooooh, that makes much more sense.”

Jason got Ree to smile, then got her to giggle, and felt both of them relax.

He finished his bowl of cereal. Ree ate half of hers, then began creating floating patterns in the milk with the remaining rice puffs. It kept her amused and gave him time to think.

His body hurt. When he sat, when he walked, when he stood up. He wondered how the other guys looked. Then again, they’d jumped him from behind-he’d never seen them coming-so chances were, they looked pretty good.

He was getting sloppy in his old age, he decided. First getting taken out by a thirteen-year-old kid, then this. Hell, with these kinds of fighting skills, he wasn’t gonna last a week in prison. A cheerful thought for the day.

“Daddy, what happened to your face?” Ree asked, as he pushed away from the countertop, standing up to clear dishes.

“I fell down.”

“Ow, Daddy.”

“No kidding.” He set the dishes in the sink, then opened the refrigerator to eye their lunch options. No milk, leaving them with a six-pack of Sandy’s prized Dr Pepper, four light yogurts, and some wilted lettuce. Second cheerful thought of the day Just because you were public enemy number one didn’t mean you got out of grocery shopping. If they planned on eating again today, they were going to have to hit the store.

He wondered if he should wear a bandana over his face. Or wear a T-shirt with the word “Innocent” scrawled on the front, and the word “Guilty” scrawled on the back. That could be fun.

“Hey, Ree,” he asked casually, closing the refrigerator and eyeing his daughter. “What do you say to some quality time at the grocery store?”

Ree brightened immediately. She loved grocery shopping. It was an official Daddy-daughter chore, done at least one afternoon a week while they waited for Sandy to come home. He would strive to stick with the official wife-prepared grocery list. Ree would work to convince him to stray for such urgent purchases as Barbie Island Princess Pop-Tarts, or maple frosted doughnuts.

He generally shaved for the outing, while Ree preferred donning a full ball gown and a rhinestone tiara. There was no point in touring twenty aisles of food if you couldn’t make a production out of it.

This morning, she bolted upstairs to brush her teeth, then returned to the kitchen wearing a blue-flowered dress with rainbow fairy wings and pink sequined shoes. She handed him some pink gauzy hair thing, and requested a ponytail. He did his best.

Jason wrote the grocery list, then made an attempt at general hygiene. Shaving his beard revealed an ugly bruise. Combing back his hair emphasized the shiner on his eye. No doubt about it, he looked like hell. Or more precisely, like an ax murderer. Third cheerful thought for the day.

He gave up on grooming and returned downstairs, where Ree was waiting eagerly by the front door, yellow daffodil purse in hand.

“You remember the reporters?” he asked her. “The people with cameras and microphones gathered across the street?”

Ree nodded solemnly.

“Well, they’re still there, honey. And when we open that door, they’re probably going to start shouting a ton of questions and taking pictures. They’re just trying to do their job, okay? They’re gonna be all crazy-like. And you and I are going to calmly walk to our car, and drive to the grocery store. Okay?”

“It’s okay, Daddy. I saw them when I went upstairs. That’s why I put on my fairy wings. So if they yell too much, I can fly right over them.”

“You are a very smart girl,” he told her, and then, because there was no time like the present, he opened the front door.

The screaming started with the first glimpse of his shoe.

“Jason, Jason, any news of Sandy?”

“Will you be talking to the police today?”

“When can we expect a formal briefing?”

He ushered Ree out, keeping her close to his side as he closed the door behind them, locking it. His hands were shaking. He tried to keep his movements slow and measured. No rush, no guilty sprints. Grieving husband, taking his little girl to purchase badly needed milk and bread.

“Will you be assisting with the search efforts, Jason? How many volunteers have turned out to find Sandy?”

“Love your wings, honey! Are you an angel?”

That comment caught his attention, made him look up sharply. He was resigned to them shouting at him, but he didn’t want the pack of vultures going after Ree.

“Daddy?” his daughter whispered beside him, and he looked down to see the anxiety scribbled across her face.

“We’re going to the car, we’re driving to the grocery store,” he repeated levelly “We’re okay, Ree. They’re the ones behaving badly, not us.”

She took his hand, keeping her body pressed tightly against his legs as they walked down the front steps, made their way across the lawn, headed toward the car parked on the driveway. He counted six vans today, up from four yesterday. From this distance, he couldn’t make out the station call letters. He’d have to check it out later, see if they’d broken onto the national stage.

“What happened to your face, Jason?”

“Did the police give you a black eye?”

“Have you been in a fight?”

He kept himself and Ree moving, slow and steady, across the yard, homing in on the Volvo. Then he had the keys out, the doors clicking open.

Police brutality, he thought idly, as more questions followed about his face and his ribs protested as he swung open the heavy car door.

Then Ree was inside, the back passenger door closed. And he was inside, the driver’s door closed. He started the engine, and immediately the reporters’ shrill questions disappeared.

“Good job,” he told Ree.

“I don’t like reporters,” she informed him.

“I know. Next time, I’m getting my own pair of fairy wings.”

He cracked at the grocery store. Couldn’t seem to find the parental fortitude to deny his traumatized daughter Oreos, Pop-Tarts, bags of bakery-fresh chocolate chip cookies. Ree figured out his weakness early on, and by the end of the trip they had a grocery cart half-filled with junk food. He thought he’d managed milk, bread, pasta, and fruit, but to tell the truth, his heart wasn’t in it.

He was killing time with his daughter, desperate to give them a slice of normalcy in a world that had tilted crazily. Sandy was gone. Max was back. The police would continue asking questions, he’d been an idiot to have ever used the family computer…

Jason didn’t want this life. He wanted to turn the clock back sixty hours, maybe seventy hours, and say whatever it was he should’ve said, do whatever it was he should’ve done, so this never would have happened. Hell, he’d even take back the February vacation.

The woman manning the cash register smiled down at Ree’s glamorous getup. Then her gaze went to him and she did a double-take. He shrugged self-consciously, following the cashier’s line of sight to the newsstand, where he saw his own black-and-white picture staring out from the front page of the Boston Daily. “Mild-mannered reporter may have hidden dark side,” the banner headline declared.

They had used the photo from his official press pass, a closely cropped image that was barely one step above a mug shot. He looked flat, even vaguely menacing, staring out above the fold.

“Daddy, that’s you!” Ree declared loudly. She pranced over to the newspaper, staring at it more closely. Other shoppers had noticed now, were watching this cute little girl gaze upon a disturbing photo of a grown man. “Why are you in the paper?”

“That’s the paper I work for,” he said lightly, wishing they didn’t have so many groceries, wishing they could just bolt out of the store.

“What does it say?”

“It says I’m mild-mannered.”

The cashier lady went bug-eyed. He shot her a look, no longer caring if he appeared menacing or not. For God’s sake, this was his daughter.

“We should take it home,” Ree declared. “Mommy will want to see it.” She fished the newspaper out of the rack, tossed it onto the conveyor belt. He noted the byline read “Greg Barr,” his boss and the head news editor. He had no doubt now which quotes had been included in the story, basically anything Jason had said by phone yesterday.

He reached into his back pocket, working on his wallet before he grew so angry he could no longer function. Buy the food, get in the car. Buy the food, get in the car.

Drive to your house, where you can be harassed all over again.

He got out his credit card, handed it to the cashier. Her fingers were trembling so hard it took her three tries to take the plastic. Was she that afraid of him? Certain she was completing a transaction with a psycho killer who’d most likely strangled his wife, then dismembered her body and tossed it into the harbor?

He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, but the sound would come out all wrong. Too chilling, too disaffected. His life had gone cockeyed, and he didn’t know how to get it back.

“Can I have Pop-Tarts in the car?” Ree was saying. “Can I, can I, can I?”

The woman finally had the card back to him, as well as his receipt. “Yes, yes, yes,” he murmured, signing the slip, pocketing his credit card, desperate to make his getaway.

“I love you, Daddy!” Ree sang out in triumph.

He hoped the whole damn store heard that.