Roots of Murder (13 page)

“Do we really have to stay with Grandmom?” Josh asked from the back seat.

“Stay with Mrs. Thomas?” Nell echoed.

“You said we might be staying with friends. And she's the only one we've stayed with,” he said. A broken air conditioner had driven them into the cool comfort of her
in-laws
' house for almost a week last summer and they'd also stayed there when they repainted the bedrooms, opting for a few nights away from the paint fumes.

Nell started to say they weren't going to do that, but she realized it might be an option. She tried to think of a friend she could call up and say, we're camping out at your house until it's safe.

There was Jane, of course, but she was in Chicago. Only a few locally came to mind, but they were Thom's friends more than hers. How would they take it if the widow McGraw, one month after her husband's death, suddenly appeared at their doorstep claiming people were after her and her children? They would take her in; Southern politeness demanded that, but they might also shake their heads behind her back and quietly make phone calls about getting her help.

Nell turned into their driveway, going more slowly than usual, letting the headlights sweep across the lawn and into the backyard. None of the shadows seemed out of place.

“Not tonight, anyway,” she said as she turned off the car. Maybe I'm rationalizing, she thought, but I can't see us any safer at Mrs. Thomas's house. If they know where we live, they easily know where she lives.

“My bike!” Josh suddenly cried as he started to get out.

“It's locked to the stop sign at the corner,” Lizzie informed him.

“But I don't want to leave it overnight,” he argued.

“We'll get it in the morning,” Nell told them. She wanted them in the house, not standing here surrounded by shadows.

“But it's just out on the street. Only the frame is locked up. I might not have much of a bike left in the morning,” Josh said.

Nell started to point out that Pelican Bay was not a hotbed of crime and Josh's bike was likely to be unmolested, but she realized that argument would ring hollow to a boy who had just been assaulted; “they may have tried to kill you but your bike will be fine” wasn't persuasive.

She settled for the more realistic argument. “Look, those two idiots may still be running around. I think we're less likely to run into them in the morning. If something has to get damaged tonight, at least let it be the bike and not any of us. We'll go first thing in the morning,” she assured him.

“Do we have to go to school tomorrow?” Lizzie asked as she switched on the light in the kitchen.

Nell again felt odd relief; the kitchen seemed so normal, even down to the breakfast dishes still in the sink. How could the day have changed so starkly in such little time? Even the familiar irritation surfaced, Lizzie with her seemingly unerring adolescent eye for seeking advantage in a way guaranteed to annoy her mother.

“Is there a reason you think you shouldn't go to school tomorrow?” Nell asked, hoping her voice was merely cool and not irritated.

“Well, Josh got attacked going home and so we might be safer here.”

“The two of you home alone?” Nell queried. Not waiting for an answer, plus suspecting that any answer might be the one that would tip her into truly annoyed, she continued. “You'll be much safer at school than here alone. The danger wasn't school, but going there. I'll drive you and pick you up.”

“What if Josh isn't feeling up to school? Wouldn't he be better off with me here?” Lizzie countered.

“He can come with me to work and hang out on the couch in the break room,” Nell answered. “We're not debating this,” she added tersely.

“Sure, but if we get killed tomorrow, it's your fault,” Lizzie retorted.

Nell felt herself starting to lose her temper. Why did Lizzie always have to push things too far, spar with her mother when she knew it would do no good?

“I'm okay,” Josh put in. “I'll be fine for school tomorrow. Got a test in math that I don't want to miss.”

“Oh, right, Brother Perfect,” Lizzie said, then mimicked his voice. “Don't want to miss that math test.”

“I'd just have to make it up. I'd rather get it over with,” Josh said.

Nell grabbed the tail of her temper. Her son's interjection gave her enough time to remember that Lizzie didn't
always
do anything, including annoy her. She'd been remarkably mature taking care of Josh. Lizzie was in the sway of surging hormones, searching for adulthood.

“We're probably all tired and hungry,” she said in her best
calm-and
-controlled mother voice. “Why don't you two decide on a pizza and order it?”

That diverted their attention and they took the team approach to request the
mega-meat
pie, the one Nell usually called “heart attack by
twenty-one
.” But tonight she made no comments about healthy eating, even going so far as to eat two whole slices herself.

Josh watched a little TV, then went to bed. He mumbled about not having slept much last night, but Nell could see that the day had taken its toll. She wandered around the house, making sure all the windows and doors were locked, then sat down and tried to read, but nothing held her interest. She realized she was listening to each car as it passed. Waiting for one to slow or stop.

How can I do this night after night, she thought as she peered through the drapes as headlights slowly made their way down the street, finally pulling into a driveway halfway down the block. Mrs. Mertz coming home from her church social. Then Nell felt a stab of anger: am I giving them more power than they could ever take? The Jones brothers were probably plopped in front of a TV wrestling match and on their second
six-pack
already.

This is a quiet residential neighborhood and everyone knows everyone. A strange truck will be noticed, Nell reassured herself.

When Lizzie lifted her head from the computer screen, Nell pointedly looked at her watch. Her daughter got the hint.

“Just need to send some email and then I'm going to bed,” Lizzie
said.

A few minutes later, Nell heard her in the bathroom. She softly cracked the door to Josh's room, wondering if he, too, was sharing her fears and wakefulness. But he was asleep, his arm flung out as if reaching for the night and the stars in the sky, his hair tousled in a way that made him look even younger and more vulnerable.

Nell softly closed his door. As she made her way back down the hall, Lizzie came out of the bathroom, her face scrubbed, smelling of toothpaste and soap.

“Good night, Mom,” she said.

“Good night, Lizzie. Sleep well.” Nell reached out to brush a strand of hair off her forehead. She wanted to touch her daughter, make some apology, some connection, even though she knew Lizzie could be standoffish, as if needing her mother's arms might keep her in childhood and slow her journey to being grown up.

Unexpectedly, Lizzie responded by hugging her. Maybe she knows I need it, Nell thought as she returned her daughter's embrace.

“You sleep well, too. And thanks, Mom.”

“Thanks?”

“For being a good mom. Taking care of Josh and me.” Then Lizzie pulled away and went into her bedroom.

A good mom? For a cynical moment, Nell decided that good mom meant letting them buy pizza packed with calories. She didn't much feel like a good mother, by any scale, except perhaps compared to a crack addict. Maybe I'm a good mother because I'm the only one she's got; if I don't love her, no other mother will. The thought was less cynical but still put a sting in her daughter's compliment. Nell had covered some court cases, watched children begging to have their
drug-addicted
parents back. The bond was so elemental and important; to be clung to and fought against, as Lizzie was doing.

Nell suddenly felt an overwhelming ache of loneliness. She made her way to the kitchen, hoping that its cheerful normalness would assuage her gloom. But without the voices of her children, the bright kitchen seemed barren, even mocking, the cheerful colors a place Nell could no longer enter.

She turned to confront a face in the window and startled for a moment before realizing it was her own, a wan pale moon reflected against the black glass. Her hair turned from a chestnut crown into a gray smudge in the dark reflection. How did I get so old? Nell wondered. Then she spun away from the dark mirror, pulling a strand of her hair out and holding it in her hand to assure herself that it was still a vibrant brunette, not the faded gray of the murky glass.

She listened to the night, for her children. Then she found the bottle of Scotch and poured a generous shot. The harsh taste did what she wanted it to do, pulled her into the immediacy of the burn in her throat, the taste on her tongue, then the blurring of edges. Even the mirrored image didn't seem so sharp anymore.

As she poured another glass, she wondered if this was wrong, if she should stay awake and vigilant for her children. It didn't save Thom, Nell thought. She'd been
stone-cold
sober that night, the perfect wife and mother for years, and nothing had saved him. She took a long swallow of the amber liquid.

Before she took another sip, she put the Scotch bottle back exactly as she found it, then returned to the kitchen, carefully avoiding the window into the darkness even as she stood in front of it, pouring the remaining Scotch into a plastic tumbler, the kind she used for water on the nightstand. She rinsed her glass, drying it instead of leaving it on the dish drain.

After putting the glass away, Nell turned out the light in the kitchen. The outside came in; all the shadows left by the streetlight were visible without the glare of inside light. She stared, but the night gave back nothing.

Nell went to her bedroom, detouring upstairs to pause and listen at both Josh's and Lizzie's doors, but she heard only a soft snore from her son, and the rustle of Lizzie turning in her sleep.

When she came to her door, she again paused. There's a ghost in there, Nell thought. I keep him at bay with the details of a day, work, the children, exhaustion at night. But her anxiety from the day's events kept her awake, and the alcohol had loosened the tight reins of control that kept her from seeing all the places Thom had been.

He lived in every inch of this house, but most especially in their bedroom. That was where she alone had seen his playful side, his passionate side, his worried and vulnerable side.

Nell turned away and went to the bathroom. She finished the Scotch in one long gulp. I'll be in bed by the time it hits me, she thought, rinsing out her mouth so the taste of mundane toothpaste wouldn't be jarring. Her routine was perfunctory; she was careful only in rinsing the glass before refilling it with water, as if that had been its purpose all along.

Again, at the bedroom door, Nell paused and considered sleeping downstairs on the couch or in the guest room. It won't banish my ghosts, she thought, slowly turning the doorknob. Maybe someday the ghosts of memory would be friendly, comforting, but now the loss was too raw, and the memories seared.

The bed was as she had left it that morning, a hasty
pulling-up
of the covers, halfway in between being made and left as she had rolled out of it, as if she were rebelling against something but couldn't quite bring herself to mutiny fully.

Several of her brothers had come for the funeral, and they now had sons old enough to wear the garments of a man. They had taken most of Thom's clothes. Nell kept some, the ones she occasionally wore, including a tweed jacket he had once wrapped around her shoulders on a cold night. She couldn't let go of that memory of enfolding warmth.

But still he was here; the sheets on the bed were ones that they had slept on, made love on. There was no washing that could take away those memories. Nell recalled the last time they had done so. It was a weeknight; they had sent the paper to press that day, always the busiest day of the week.

He had stripped off his clothes, and was lying under the sheet, catching up on last week's
New Yorker
. Nell had been lying beside him, wearing the old
T-shirt
she usually wore to bed. She remembered debating whether to roll away from him and shut her eyes and let sleep take her, or to ask him what he was reading, to talk for a few minutes before drifting off. She had rolled to him, draping her arm across his stomach, her head on his chest. They lay like that for several minutes; the only sound their breathing and the turning of pages. She remembered feeling the heat from his body, her mind wandering to the ease of their touch, him naked, her in only a
T-shirt
, and they could simply be together. But thinking about the absence of passion brought memories of being without the absence. Nell listened to his steady breathing, the beating of his heart; he was, as he said, “built on the slim, academic line,” but she knew the power in his arms from the times he had held her fiercely. She put her hand under the sheet, trailing her fingers down his stomach, not stopping until she reached her destination.

He turned another page, but she knew him well enough to recognize the slight change in breathing. Nell often made the first move. This was one of the secrets they hid behind closed doors. She had once referred to herself as the aggressor; Thom had stuck out his chest, curled him arm muscleman fashion, and said, “No, I'm the aggressor, you're the instigator.” That had become a shorthand. He would sometimes ask, “Is Ms. I in the house?” Or she would say, “I really need to meet with Mr. A soon.”

But that last time, the time they didn't know would be their last, they had said little. Nell had begun a gentle massage and was rewarded with another change in the rhythm of Thom's breathing.

A stray practical thought filtered in. Tonight was a weeknight, with children to be readied for school. That gave Nell justification to skip a slow buildup. She slid down the bed and replaced her hand with her mouth. Thom gasped and the magazine fell to the floor.