The Neighbor

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

“I don’t understand,” he faltered.

“I know.”

“Are you alive? Is this for real? Where have you been?”

She took the flashlight from him. Belatedly Jason realized that he’d been brandishing it before him, threatening his wife, who, apparently, had just returned from the dead.

She wore all black. Black trousers, black shirt. It wasn’t an outfit he recognized, cheap, ill-fitting. He saw now that there was also a dark baseball cap on the bed. The perfect outfit for stealth. Was she stealing in, or stealing away? Why couldn’t he understand what was going on?

“I saw the news,” she said quietly.

Jason stared at her.

“My father made the five o’clock broadcast, claiming he deserves custody of Ree. I realized then that I had to come back.”

“He claims you’re a liar,” Jason murmured. “Your mother was a fine, upstanding woman, and your father’s only sin was loving his wife more than his daughter.”

“He said what?” Sandy asked sharply.

“You’re troubled, have a history of drinking, promiscuity, perhaps multiple abortions.”

She colored, didn’t say a word.

“But your parents were solid. You were just jealous of your mother, then furious about her untimely death. So you ran away from your father, and then… you ran away from me. You left us.” He was surprised, now that he was saying the words out loud, how much they hurt him. “You left me, and you left Ree.”

“I didn’t want to go,” Sandy said immediately. “You have to believe me. Something bad happened. And maybe he didn’t kill me Wednesday night, but it was only a matter of time. If I stayed, if he could find me. I… I didn’t know what to do. It seemed better if I disappeared for a bit. If I was gone, he couldn’t want me anymore. It would make things all right.”

“Who? How? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Shhh.” She took his hands, and the first touch jolted him. He didn’t know if the feel of her fingers against his skin was the best or the worst thing that had ever happened to him. He had wanted her. Prayed for her to come home. Despaired over her return. And now, heaven help him, he wanted to wrap his fingers around the white column of her throat and hurt her as badly as her leaving had hurt him…

She must have seen some of it in his eyes, because her grip on his hands tightened, becoming painful. She urged him closer to the bed, and after a moment, he followed her. They sat on the edge of the mattress, a couple returning to their marriage bed, and still none of it made sense to him.

“Jason, I screwed up.”

“Are you pregnant?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it mine?”

“Yes.”

“From… from family vacation?”

“Yes.”

The breath finally left him. His shoulders sagged. He felt bewildered, but less pained. He shrugged off her hands because he had to touch her. This is what he had dreamed of doing, what he had wanted to do, since he’d first heard the news.

He splayed his fingers across the slender expanse of her stomach, seeking some sign of growth. That a little miracle existed here. A real life. One they had made together and-at least on his part-with love.

“You’re still flat,” he murmured.

“Honey, it’s only been four weeks.”

His gaze finally came up. He stared at her, taking in her shadowed blue eyes, gaunt cheekbones. He could see the remains of a bruise above her right temple. A swollen cut on her upper lip. His hands moved on their own, across her stomach to her waist, her shoulders, her arms, her legs. He had to feel each piece of her, to assure himself she was all here, whole, intact, okay. That she was safe.

“I had to learn that you were pregnant from the police. From some sergeant who’s one step away from hanging me.”

“I’m sorry.”

He turned the screws a little tighter. “If they’d arrested me, Ree would’ve become a ward of the state. They would’ve placed her in foster care.”

“I never would’ve let that happen. Jason, please believe me. I knew when I disappeared it might be risky. But I also knew you’d take good care of Ree. You’re the strongest person I know. I never would’ve done this otherwise.”

“Let me be accused of killing my pregnant wife?”

She smiled wanly. “Something like that.”

“Do you hate me?” he whispered.

“No.”

“Is our little family that intolerable?”

“No.”

“Do you love the other man more?”

She hesitated, and he felt that, too, another bruise to nurse in the days and nights to come.

“I thought I did,” she said at last. “But then, I thought my husband was Jason Jones. So I guess we’re both very good at wanting what we can’t have.”

He winced, then forced himself to nod. This is what it came down to in the end. He had started their marriage with a lie, so if she chose to end it with a lie, well, who was he to judge?

He removed his hands from her body. Sat upright, squared his shoulders, steeled himself for what had to come next. “You came back for Ree,” he stated. “So your father can’t have her.”

But Sandra shook her head. She lifted her hand, brushing the moisture from his cheek.

“No, Jason. You still don’t understand. I came back for both of you. I love you, Joshua Ferris.”

D.D. made it out of Roxbury in record time. She had sirens blasting, lights twirling, the whole nine yards. She was simultaneously working her radio, demanding that officers be immediately deployed to the Hastings residence. She wanted Ethan Hastings safely in police custody and she wanted it right now.

In addition, she wanted BPD detectives dispatched to the state police crime lab crime scene, even if that pissed the state off. Wayne Reynolds might be their man, but he was BPD’s witness and whatever he’d known about Sandra Jones had no doubt gotten him killed.

Furthermore, she wanted officers dispatched to the Boston Daily offices. Not a single computer was to be touched until they had further word from Ethan Hastings.

Finally, she had explicit instructions for the two officers watching the Jones residence. If Jason Jones so much as cracked open his front door, he was to be arrested. Pick him up for loitering, late parking tickets, she didn’t care. But he was not to leave the confines of his house unless he was wearing a pair of BPD bracelets.

They had just lost a man, and she was furious.

So it definitely didn’t help when Dispatch returned to tell her that two officers had arrived at the Hastings residence. Unfortunately, the thirteen-year-old boy was not in his room and his parents had no idea where he might have gone.

Three minutes past eleven, Ethan Hastings had vanished.

“How did you finally figure it out?” Jason was asking his wife.

“Your birthday. I was installing the iPod software on the computer and I found a photograph in the recycle bin.”

“Which one?”

“You were naked, badly beaten. There was a tarantula crawling across your chest.”

Jason nodded. His gaze was on the floor. “That’s the hardest part,” he said, softly. “On the one hand, it’s been over twenty years. I got away. The past is the past. On the other hand, the man took so many photos… and movies. He sold them. That’s how he earned money. Selling child porn to other pedophiles, who of course are still reselling the pictures, over and over again. There are so many images out there, hundreds of countries, ten of thousands of servers. I don’t know how to get them back. I can never get them all back.”

“You were abducted,” she said quietly.

“Nineteen eighty-five. Not a good year to be me.”

“When did you get away?”

“Three or four years later. I made friends with an elderly neighbor woman, Rita. She let me stay at her place.”

“And the man just let you go?”

“Oh no. He came looking for me. Tied Rita up, handed me the gun, and ordered me to kill her. That was my punishment for disobeying him.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.” He finally looked at her. “I shot him. Then, when he went down, I kept plugging him with bullets, just for good measure.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “It’s been a long time. I killed the man. The police returned me to my family. The case records were sealed, and I was told to get on with my life.”

“Was your family mean to you? Did they resent what had happened, what you’d been forced to do?”

“No. But they were normal. And I… wasn’t.” He regarded her thoughtfully. Inside, the bedroom was dark and gloomy. Outside, the media mob blasted the front of their home with a thousand watts of klieg lights. To him, it seemed somehow fitting. They were like two kids, hunkered under the blankets, exchanging scary ghost stories long after the adults had gone to bed. They should have done this the first night, he realized now. Other couples went on honeymoons. They should have done exactly this.

He could feel Sandy’s leg against his leg, her fingers intertwined with his fingers. His wife, sitting beside him. He wanted to keep her here.

He said, “You once told me, what’s done can’t be undone. What’s known can’t be unknown. You were right. We’re marked, you and I. Even in the middle of a crowded room, we will always feel alone. Because we know things other people don’t know, because once we did things, or had to do things, that other people have never had to do.

“The police sent me home, but not even for my parents could I magically become a real boy. It distressed them. So on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, when I came into the stock Rita had left for me, I took off. Being Joshua Ferris didn’t feel right. So I took another name. Then another, and another. I became something of an expert on inventing new identities. It soothed me.”

Sandra rubbed the back of his hand. “Joshua-”

“Jason, please. If I had wanted to be Joshua, I would’ve stayed in Georgia. I moved here, we both moved here, for a reason.”

“But that’s what I don’t understand,” she blurted out. “By your own words, you and I have so much in common. So why didn’t you tell me these things before? Especially once you knew about my mother. Surely you could’ve shared then.”

He hesitated. “Because I don’t just retrieve pornographic photos off the web. I, uh… Well, let’s just say I tried therapy, but it didn’t work for me. Then, one night, I got onto my parents’ computer and I started visiting the chat rooms. I… made the rounds, found the kind of guys who liked to prey on a kid like me. And I developed a system: I entice them to hand over their credit card numbers and other personal information in return for my old pornographic photos. Then I nail them to the wall. I liquidate their accounts, max out their credit cards, open home equity lines of credit in their names, transferring all of their assets to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. I wrap them up and drain them. Like a spider. I have become, I suppose, just as good a predator as the one who once trapped me.

“It’s all highly illegal,” he finished. “And it’s the only thing that keeps me sane.”

“That’s what you’re doing at night? Why you spend all your time on the Internet?”

Jason shrugged. “I don’t sleep well. Probably never will. Might as well do something useful with the time.”

“What about your family?”

“My family wanted Joshua, and Joshua doesn’t exist anymore. On the other hand, Jason Jones has a beautiful wife and a gorgeous little girl. He couldn’t ask for a better family.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why did you marry me? If you just wanted a child, surely there are easier ways than saddling yourself with a wife-”

He placed two fingers over her lips, silencing her. “It’s you, Sandy,” he whispered softly. “It’s always been about you. Since the first moment I saw you, you were the woman I wanted. I’m a terrible husband. I can’t… do… everything a husband should do. I can’t say everything a husband should say. I’m sorry for that. If I could turn back time, so maybe I wasn’t out on my bike that day, heading down the road, when this guy turned right in front of me and my bike went down and I fell to the ground and then there he was, looming above me…”

He shook his head. “I know I’m not perfect. But when I’m with you, when I’m with Ree, I want to try. Maybe I can never be Joshua Ferris again. But I’ve worked real hard at being Jason Jones.”

She was crying now. He could feel her tears on his fingers. He lifted his other hand to her face, using his thumbs to brush the moisture from her cheeks. He was gentle, unbearably conscious of the cut on her lip, the bruise on her temple, the rest of the story he had yet to hear but would no doubt break his heart.

His wife had been beaten, and he hadn’t been there for her. His wife had been hurt and he had not protected her.

“I love you,” she whispered against his fingertips. “I fell in love with you the day Ree was born, and I’ve been waiting for you to love me ever since.”

He studied her in bewilderment. “Then why did you leave me? Was it because of Aidan Brewster?”

Her turn to look confused. “Aidan Brewster? Who’s that?”

D.D. was just hitting Southie when Dispatch returned. Reports of gunfire, nearest units please respond. Dispatch rattled off the address, and D.D. immediately connected the dots.

She was on her radio in an instant. “Does that address belong to a Mrs. Margaret Houlihan? Please confirm.”

A moment’s delay then the muffled reply.

“Dammit!” D.D. hit the wheel. “That’s Brewster’s address. Who the hell is on the scene?”

“Officers Davis and Jezakawicz are at the residence. There has been no response to their repeated knocks on the door.”

“Break it down. I’ll be right there.”

Then D.D. pulled a hard left and was racing for Aidan Brewster’s apartment. An explosion. A missing teenager. Shots fired. What the hell was going on tonight?

“Ever since September,” Sandra was saying, “I’ve been worried that you were some kind of predator, doing terrible things online. So I started learning more about computers, and in the course of doing that, I met Wayne Reynolds.”

“You fell in love with the state computer guy,” Jason stated. He withdrew his hands, fisted them on his lap. Maybe that wasn’t fair of him, but he could only give as much as he could give.

“I became infatuated.”

“You slept with him.”

She immediately shook her head, then hesitated. “But sometimes, on the spa nights…”

“I know about the spa nights,” Jason said curtly.

“Then why did you let me go?”

He inhaled, exhaled. “I didn’t think it was fair to punish you for my failings.”

“You can’t have sex.”

“We did have sex.”

“Did you like it?” she asked curiously.

He managed a crooked grin. “I’d be willing to try it again.”

That made her smile, eased some of the tension. But then her expression grew somber again, and he leaned closer, so he could study her eyes in the dark.

“After our family vacation,” she said, “when I realized that the photo I saw wasn’t something you’d done, but something that had been done to you, I tried to break it off with Wayne. Except he didn’t take it so well. He thought you were coercing me, that I didn’t know what I was doing. He threatened to turn you in to the police if I didn’t keep seeing him.”

“He wanted you for himself.”

“I found out I was pregnant,” Sandra whispered. “I took the test last Friday. And I realized then that I really did need to end things with Wayne. I’d been stupid, reckless. But… I wanted you, Jason. I swear, I just wanted to be with you and Ree and whatever little life we’ve made together. So I e-mailed Wayne again, told him that I’d made a mistake, and that I was sorry, but I’d decided to save my marriage.

“He called me immediately. Agitated, angry. He kept trying to tell me that I wasn’t thinking straight. He seemed to think that you had some kind of hold over me, maybe you were beating me into submission, I don’t know. But the more I tried to tell him everything was okay, the more he became convinced he had to save me.

“I broke off all contact. Stopped answering his calls, his text messages, his e-mails. I purged accounts. I did everything I could think of. I just wanted him to go away. And then, Wednesday night…”

She looked away. Jason caught her chin in his hand and brought her gaze back to him. “Just tell me, Sandy. Let’s just get it all out, then we can determine where to go from here.”

“Wayne appeared. Right here. In our bedroom. Apparently, he’d made an impression of my house key the last time I’d met with him. His face was red, angry. He was holding a baseball bat.”

She broke off. Her gaze was out of focus, seeing something only she could see. Jason didn’t interrupt. Just waited.

“I tried to stop him,” she whispered. “Tried to calm him down, tell him everything would be okay. I’d resume talking to him, go to the basketball games, whatever. Just, he needed to leave. He needed to go home.

“He hit me. With his hand. He struck me, here. Here.” Her fingers idly brushed the bruises on her face. “I fell on the bed and he came after me. I stopped fighting. There didn’t seem to be any point, and I thought, maybe if I just submitted, he wouldn’t be so angry. He’d finish and go away, before something worse happened. I was terrified about the baby, and Ree, of course. And you, too. What if you came home and found us, and he grabbed the bat…

“So many terrible things were going around in my head. Then… Ree appeared. She’d heard the noise and come to our bedroom. She was standing in the doorway, half-asleep. She said, ‘Mommy.’

“The second he heard her voice, he stilled. I thought that was it. He’d kill her, kill me. It was over. So I pushed him off. Told him not to move. Then I pulled my nightgown down, walked over to our daughter, and escorted her back to her room. I told her that Mommy and Daddy had been wrestling. Everything was okay. I’d see her in the morning.

“She didn’t want to let go of my hand at first. I got anxious. I thought if I didn’t get out of the room fast enough, maybe he’d come in. Bring the Louisville Slugger. So I swore to her that I had to go away for a moment, but that I’d be back. Everything was okay. I wouldn’t be gone long.”

“She let you go.”

Sandra nodded. “And when I returned to the room, Wayne was gone. I think Ree scared him. Maybe she shamed him back to his senses; I’m not sure. I went downstairs, redid the locks, not that they would do much good against a man with a key. Then I started to clean up. The bloody comforter, the broken lamp. Except…”

He rubbed the back of her hand. “Except…”

She looked at him, “Except I started to realize that nothing I did would be enough. Wayne works for the state police. He has a key to our house. Maybe he didn’t kill me that night, but what about the next, or the next? It’s not like a guy shows up with a baseball bat when all he wants to do is talk. He might press charges against you for the computer image, putting my husband in jail. Or heaven help us, he might go after Ree. She thinks he’s a friend. She’d get in a car with him. I started to realize… I started to realize that I’d made a huge mess of things.”

“So you ran away.”

She smiled thinly, catching the edge in his voice even as he tried to flatten it out. “I thought the only way to be safe from a man like Wayne was to have public knowledge of our relationship. If it was known that he was involved with me, then he couldn’t hurt me or my family, right? He’d be an automatic person of interest.”

Jason couldn’t follow her train of thought. “I guess.”

“So, I decided to disappear. Because if I disappeared, then the police would investigate, right? They’d learn about Wayne, then when I reappeared, I’d be safe. He wouldn’t dare do anything; it would cost him his career. So I retrieved your lockbox from that attic-”

“I never told you about the lockbox.”

“Ree did. She saw you after Christmas, when you were putting away the ornaments. She spent most of January chattering away that you had a treasure chest in the attic and now constantly demands to go ‘treasure hunting.’ I thought she meant that you had a box of mementos or something, but then, in the past few months, given everything that’s been going on, I’ve been reconsidering you. How easily you changed your name from Johnson to Jones. Our considerable cash reserves, which you never talk about, but I know are there from reading the bank statements. I decided to do a little digging around in the attic. It took me a couple of tries, but I finally discovered the metal box. The cash was very useful, the fake IDs… troubling.”

“Escape plans are important to me,” he said.

“There’s only ID for you. Not for a family.”

“I can change that.”

She smiled, more warmly now, and he found himself taking her hand again, tucking her fingers inside his.

“I threw on your old clothes, all in black,” she said. “I stuck the cash and IDs in my pocket-cash for me to use, IDs for me to hold so you didn’t disappear while I was gone. I used one of our spare keys to lock the door behind me, then I hid behind the bushes until you returned.”

“You hid in the bushes?”

“I couldn’t leave Ree alone,” she said earnestly. “In case Wayne returned. I couldn’t just leave her. It was hard-” Her voice broke. “It was very hard to walk away. You have no idea. Leaving the two of you… I kept telling myself it would only be for a few days. I’d lay low, stay at some cheap hotel, paying cash. Then, when the police started questioning Wayne, I’d reappear, say I’d gotten overwhelmed, some sort of Mom excuse, and after a few embarrassing days, the dust would settle and we’d continue on with our lives.

“I never expected my father would show up. Or they’d put Ethan through the wringer. Or… I don’t know. Everything grew bigger than I expected. The media attention, the police scrutiny. It’s all gotten out of hand.”

“You have no idea.”

“I had to cut through four back yards just to sneak into my own home tonight. It’s crazy out there.”

“So how are you going to do this?”

She shrugged. “Throw open the front door and declare, I’m back…’ Let the photographers click away.”

“The reporters will eat you alive.”

“I have to pay for my mistakes sooner or later.”

He didn’t like it. And pieces of the story nagged at him. Sandy’s lover hadn’t taken no for an answer, so she’d thought to expose the relationship by disappearing? Why not just go public with the affair? Tell him, notify the state police. Her vanishing act seemed extreme to him. Then again, she’d just been assaulted, had been terrified for Ree. Her level of physical duress, mental exhaustion…

He wished again he had been home Wednesday night. He wished he had kept his family safe.

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll do this together. Walk out together, hand in hand. I’m already the menacing husband. You can be the ditzy wife. Tomorrow they’ll crucify us; by end of week, we’ll have our own reality TV show and be sharing a couch with Oprah.”

“Can we do it in the morning?” Sandy asked. “I want to wake up with Ree. I want her to know I’m all right. Everything’s good again.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

They stood together. They had just taken the first step, when they heard a sudden dull roar from outside. Curious, Jason crossed to the bedroom window, cracking the blind and peering out.

One by one, all the news vans with their enormous klieg lights, camera crews, and news reporters were suddenly packing up and pulling away. He watched the first one do a U-turn, then another, then another.

“What the hell?” he murmured. Sandra had come up behind him.

“Something bigger must’ve happened.”

“Bigger than your return from the dead?”

“They don’t know about that yet.”

“True,” he said. But the sudden darkness outside discomfited him after two nights of blazing lights. Then, suddenly, he was aware of something else. A high-pitched scrape, like tree branches against a bare window, except their property didn’t have any trees that close to the house. From the back yard, he realized, and it was already moving away from the window, toward the hall.

“Stay here,” he ordered.

But he was too late. They both heard it at the same time: the tinkling of shattering glass, someone breaking through a back window.