Guilty, page 8
“It must have been awful, seeing it happen.”
“It was,” I admit. “It was like watching a movie, only I knew it was real. And when I heard the second shots and saw the guy and my dad both go down…”
I’m not sure how it happens. One minute I’m telling her what happened. Then I flash back to the night my mom died, and I feel something burning me. Lila jumps up. That’s when it registers that I must have zoned out, because I’ve spilled my tea. It’s slopped all over my thighs and the ugly olive chair. She’s out of the room and back again in a flash with a towel, which she thrusts at me, and grabs the nearly empty mug from my hand.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
I’m on my feet, doing my best to sop up the tea and ignore the burning sensation on my thighs. I press the towel down onto the chair too.
“Never mind that,” she says. “It’s going back to the Salvation Army.”
Back to the Salvation Army?
“You went white there for a minute. Did you get burned?”
Yeah, I got burned. “I’m okay,” I say. I’m also embarrassed. “Sorry about that.”
“I’m the one who should be sorry. If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s okay. I should mind my own business.”
“What? No. No, it’s not your fault.” That’s the last thing I want her to think. I glance around for somewhere else to sit.
“You want some more tea?” she asks.
“No, really,” I say quickly. I don’t want to chance another accident.
She laughs at how fast I answer. Then I laugh. It feels good. And I’m struck by how different she looks when she seems happy, how much prettier, and she’s already a knockout.
She gestures to the couch. I sit on one end. She sits on the other. We’re both turned inward to face each other. She brings her legs up under her, and before I know it, I’m telling her about that night, about the man who came to the door earlier, about him going away again, everything my dad said about the man phoning him. I tell her about hearing my dad’s voice and then Tracie’s. I try not to paint Tracie as the annoying, money-obsessed ex-cocktail waitress she was. But she picks up on it anyway.
“Sounds like you didn’t like her,” she says.
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you didn’t, did you?” she says.
I want to tell her she’s wrong, but I can see in her eyes that she already knows the truth.
“No,” I admit finally. “For a while there, I thought she and my dad were going to split up. They argued a lot. Then it blew over. But the ironic thing is, if they had split up, Tracie wouldn’t have been at the house that night. She’d still be alive.”
She’s quiet for a long time before she finally says, “What about your mother?”
“What about her?”
“It must have been hard, losing her.”
“Yeah.” And then I’m talking again, saying things I’ve never said to anyone else. I tell her how much my dad loved my mom and how hard it was for him after she died. I tell her he loved her more than anything else in the world, and so did I. I tell her that I wasn’t home that night, that I was at the club with my dad. I also tell her that I was the one who found her. And then I say something that I have never, ever in the whole ten years since my mother’s death said out loud, not even to the shrink my dad sent me to.
I say, “If I’d stayed home that night, it never would have happened.”
She frowned. “How do you figure that?”
“I would have heard the guy break in.”
“You said it happened really late. You were seven years old. You would have been asleep. And, anyway, you said it wasn’t that kind of break-in. Nobody kicked in a door or smashed a window. You said he knew the security code. There wasn’t anything to hear.”
“I would have heard my mom scream.”
She peers at me with smoky-gray eyes. “How do you know she screamed? She was in her room, right? You said she was wearing a nightgown. She was probably asleep when the guy let himself into the house.”
“She would have screamed when she saw the gun,” I say. I know it. I’ve had ten long years to think about it. I never stopped thinking about it, and since Tracie died, it’s been on my mind practically night and day.
“And then what?” she says. “You would have run into her room to see what was the matter? And if you’d seen the guy—” A funny look comes into her eyes—maybe pain, like she really cares about what she’s saying. “He shot your mom. Do you think he would have let you live if you’d been able to identify him? He would have shot you too, Finn. How would that have helped?”
I stare at her. I want to tell her she’s wrong. I would have heard my mother scream. I would have run to help her. I would have attacked the man. I would have wrestled the gun from him. I would have saved her. She’d be alive right now.
“You were a little kid,” she says again. “He was a grown man.”
“But I—” But I what? I would have turned into Superman? I would have tackled the guy to the ground? I’ve seen him close up. I saw him the other night. He wasn’t just a grown man. He was a big man—taller than me and bulky. There was no way I would have been able to bring him down. I’d have a hard enough time now. But when I was seven? I can’t shake the memory of my mother, and of all that blood. I also think about all the years since then—the emptiness, the grief, the missing, the longing. “Then I would have been shot,” I say finally. “But I would have done something. I would have at least tried. She deserved to have somebody there. She deserved to have someone try, after everything she’d been through.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
I’ve thought about my mother a million times over the years, but none of it has been as vivid as it is now that I’m talking about her, now that I’m trying to explain her and her death and my feelings—everything—to someone, to a stranger, out loud. It’s as if I’ve thrown open a window and I have no control over what I see out there right in front of my eyes. And for some reason that I can’t explain, I want to tell her. I want to tell Lila.
“She wasn’t happy,” I say. “She was tired a lot.”
“Was she sick?”
“I don’t think so.” I realize that I don’t actually know. “She told my dad she needed some time alone.”
“You mean, like a trial separation or something?”
“What?” Where did she get that idea? “No! No, she was just tired, that’s all.”
Lila stares at me. She’s thinking something, but I can tell she’s not going to come out and say it.
“She loved my dad,” I tell her, just to make it perfectly clear. “She married him even though her mother was against it. She was a snob. My grandmother, I mean. She thought my dad wasn’t good enough for her daughter. But my mother didn’t listen. She married him. She helped him with his club. It was his big dream, and she backed him every step of the way.”
“Okay,” she says. But her eyes say something different. She’s agreeing with me so that I’ll stay calm. She doesn’t want an angry stranger in her crappy little house.
“Damn straight, okay!” I say. “You don’t know anything about my parents. She loved my dad. Why would she want a separation?” Except that now that Lila said it, I hear voices, hushed but angry. I see my mother glance through a doorway and see me and then reach out and close the door before continuing to talk to my father, still in a hushed voice. I hear them at night, long after I’ve gone to bed, probably when my father gets in from the club. “She loved him.”
“Okay,” she says again in that same tone of voice. She’s not agreeing with me. She’s placating me, using the word to try to calm me down. Okay, sure, anything you say.
I’m on my feet, and, boy, am I angry.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I shout at her.
Her feet slide out from under her. She leans forward a little and looks up at me.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” she says. “I was just trying—”
“I don’t care what you were trying to do.” Why did I even come here? What was I thinking? I don’t know this girl. I don’t know anything about her. For all I know, she’s some kind of ghoul who gets off on funerals and the grief of others. “I have to go.”
I’m out of the living room and then out the front door before she can get off the couch to stop me—assuming she even wanted to stop me. Maybe she’s glad that I’m leaving. After all, she never wanted to see me in the first place.
Eighteen
LILA
I never wanted him there, but he tracked me down anyway. At first I was scared. At first I thought he knew who I was. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t ask me for my full name. He doesn’t ask for my father’s name. Or maybe he thinks he knows. He said his friend looked up our phone number; that’s how he found the address. But the phone isn’t in my name or my dad’s name. It’s in the name of the last person who lived here and who forgot to tell the phone company he was moving. My father had it on his to-do list: inform the phone company. But he never got around to it. In fact, he’d been thinking it over. Why not just pay the bill when it came and keep the phone. That way, we’d avoid any special connection fee, which, my father said, usually involved a credit check, which he probably wouldn’t pass.
Finn doesn’t know who I am, but I know who he is. That means I have a chance to find out what happened.
Except I don’t keep my mouth shut, which would have been the smart thing. Instead, I decide to ask questions and give unasked-for opinions. In other words, I blow it. He freaks out when I ask if his mother wanted to separate from his father. Well, that’s what it sounded like to me. What else does a woman mean when she tells her husband she needs time alone? But then, who asked me? I shouldn’t have said anything.
I sip my tea. I’m angry at myself for having the chance to learn something and finding out exactly nothing—well, except that maybe the first Mrs. Newsome was giving some thought to the future of her marriage, no matter what Finn thinks. He was seven years old at the time. What seven-year-old wants to think his parents are going to break up?
What else do I know now that I didn’t know before? Nothing useful. His grandmother was against the marriage. I wonder what she had against Finn’s father. I want to know because I want to have something against him too. He killed my father. I want to hate him for that instead of hating my father for going over there with a gun and trying to kill him…assuming that was his intention. I keep thinking about Detective Sanders’s question: Did he say anything to you about money, Lila? According to Finn, he said something to Mr. Newsome about it. It’s why he went there in the first place.
I set my mug down on the floor and push myself up off the couch. I go into the dingy little room that I’ve been trying to think of as my bedroom, even though it isn’t as nice as my room at Aunt Jenny’s and contains hardly any of my stuff. Most of that is still back home.
Back home. Where I mostly grew up. Where I belong now.
I look around the room. I should just finish packing and get out of here. I have enough money for a bus ticket. I don’t need to stay here any longer.
I open the top drawer of a cheap chest of drawers. I feel under my socks and underwear and pull out a file folder. I take it back into the living room with me, sit down and open it. The folder contains everything I know about my father’s case, which isn’t much. As soon as he was arrested, I was taken by child welfare. They contacted my aunt, and the next thing I knew, I was far away. Aunt Jenny tried to shield me from what was happening, which turned out to be easy. People in Boston weren’t interested in something that had happened far away to someone who wasn’t a native Bostonian and who hadn’t lived in Boston for more than a few months. So the folder was pretty thin—a few clippings and a few things I found on the Internet a little later.
It consisted of the following:
An obituary for the first Mrs. Newsome—Angela Fairlane Newsome. There was a picture. I hadn’t looked at it in years, but when I pull out the clipping with the little black-and-white photo, I am stunned to see how much Finn resembles his mother. According to the article, Angela Fairlane was daughter to Albert Finn Fairlane, an eccentric Ivy Leaguer who quit a lucrative law practice to turn inventor and who made a fortune when he patented some gizmos that most people have never heard of but that are used in manufacturing processes all over the world. Angela came from money. She was also an Ivy Leaguer. But, the obituary said, she became a devoted mother to her only son Finn. In other words, she didn’t put that Ivy League education to work. At least, not on a job or career of her own. The obituary also noted that she was both a helpmate and business partner to her “beloved husband Robert.”
I see a couple of articles about the burglary and shooting, short items that I had found in Aunt Jenny’s house one day after school. They didn’t say much, only that Angela Newsome, a thirty-year-old homemaker, was dead after being shot during a break-and-enter at her home on a quiet tree-lined street in an affluent neighborhood. The police suspected that she had surprised a burglar. A follow-up article noted that an arrest had been made and mentioned that Mrs. Newsome’s body had been discovered by her seven-year-old son. A final article quoted Mr. Newsome as saying that he was “devastated” by his wife’s murder and that he wished that he and his son had stayed home that night instead of going to his place of business, a popular dance club. If they had been home, he said, the burglary and murder never would have happened. He also noted the bitter irony that he had just installed a security system that, somehow, the killer had managed to disable.
Finally, a three-inch-long article about my father’s court date, plea and conviction that noted Mr. Newsome’s outrage that he had been offered ten to life instead of straight life and his fervent hope that no parole board in the country would ever consider my father for release.
I read each article over twice, and for the first time I consider, really consider, what it must have been like for a seven-year-old boy to find his mother dead in her own bedroom. I consider also what memories must have been prompted by seeing a second murder—the murder of his stepmother—at the hands of the same person who murdered his mother.
I feel sorry for Finn. I really do.
But instead of packing up the rest of my things, instead of calling the landlord and arranging to see him so that I can plead for the refund of the last month’s rent, instead of calling the Salvation Army to see if they will pick up the things I have for them or at least help me get them to their store, instead of any of that, I grab my bag and head out the door.
I have to ask five different people before I find someone who can direct me to the nearest library. When I get there, I find I need a library card if I want to sign up to use a computer. I have a local address, so I go ahead and pay a dollar and get a card. I sign up and am told that I will have to wait an hour before a computer is free. No problem. I wait. When my name is finally called, I log on to the Internet and type in my father’s name. I find several longer articles about him from the newspaper. I print them out. Then I type in Robert Newsome’s name. A lot more information pops up. I scan it and print out the articles that seem the most interesting. Angela Fairlane’s name brings up a couple more articles. Her father’s name gets me dozens of pages. I scan again and print out the three that have the most information. The only thing that Tracie Newsome’s name hits is an engagement notice.
I go to the library desk to retrieve my printing, at ten cents a page. Then I sit down and start to read. I read everything twice. But it doesn’t help. Nothing helps. No matter how hard I try, I can’t change the facts. I can’t make my father anything but a murderer, no matter what he told me and no matter what Dodo remembers or thinks he does.
Nineteen
FINN
I’m almost home by the time I calm down, and then I feel like a fool. A complete idiot. I went over there to see her and talk to her. I told myself that it was the right thing to do; after all, she lost her father. But did I ask her about that? Did I ask her about what happened? Did I say or do anything to make her feel better?
No.
Instead, I talked about myself one hundred percent of the time. And then I yelled at her. Nice going. Go to someone else’s place, accept her hospitality, spill tea all over her furniture, and then ream her out for something that has nothing to do with her.
I don’t just feel like an idiot. I am an idiot.
I let myself into the house. It’s quiet, but I know my dad has to be home because his car is sitting out in front of the garage.
I hear something upstairs.
I go to see what it is. The clothes bags are where I left them, but all of them have been opened and everything inside them is jumbled up and looks like it’s been taken out and then stuffed back in instead of folded neatly the way I’d done.
The door to my dad’s room is open too. I peek inside, but I don’t see my dad.
I hear something again. Muttering. I take a step across the threshold and find my dad on his hands and knees in Tracie’s walk-in closet.
“Dad?”
He straightens up so fast that he whacks his head against the underside of a shelf. He curses as he spins around.
“Finn. You gave me a scare.”
He brushes off the knees of his pants. They’re his good clothes, the ones he wears to business meetings and to the club. He usually changes out of them as soon as he gets home from work. He’s usually pretty fastidious about keeping his clothes in good shape.
“What are you doing, Dad?”
“Just checking,” he says.
“I cleaned out all of Tracie’s things for you.”
“So I see.” His eyes are darting all over the now-empty dressing room.
“Is something wrong, Dad?”
His eyes jump back to me.
“Wrong?” he says. “What do you mean?”
“I bagged all of Tracie’s things. I folded them up all neatly and everything. But it looks like someone went through them. Were you looking for something?”
