Lacy Eye (12 page)

When Gail Nazarian was preparing for the first trial, I told her about Rud playing croquet with the kids at the wedding, thinking that it might be helpful to her case—the fact that I'd witnessed Rud swinging the mallet with such force. Instead, she cursed. “That's not something we can use, but it
will
explain away his fingerprints on the murder weapon. I'm going to have to tell his lawyer.” Though I realized I couldn't have been expected to know this, I felt like an idiot for mentioning it.

To my surprise, because Dawn had stuck so close to him during the rehearsal dinner, she wasn't with her boyfriend while he hung out with the children at the reception. Seeming to enjoy the fact that Iris's popular friends now accepted her as one of their own, she was dancing the Electric Slide with them. I nudged Joe to get his attention, and nodded over to where our perpetually awkward daughter was actually
shimmying
to the beat.

By the time most everyone had left and we went to bed, it was after two in the morning, and all I wanted to do was sleep. But I could tell from the familiar wrinkle between his eyebrows that Joe was pondering something. “What?” I said, and he shook his head, the way he did when he wasn't yet ready to commit to an opinion.

“I'm just thinking about the dog,” he told me, and I felt a start of guilt, because I'd forgotten about Abby. Rud had promised us, after the poison scare, that he'd check on her periodically in the basement, where Abby lay recovering all day and avoiding the hectic happiness within and outside our house. Once Rud had told us she'd be all right, I'd focused on other things.

“We'll deal with Emmett tomorrow,” I said sleepily, turning on my side.

“I don't think Emmett did it.” When Joe said this, I turned back, realizing that his tone contained something important. “I think it was Rud.”

“What are you talking about? Rud's the one who saved her.” But as I registered Joe's words, my stomach contracted with the fear that comes with suddenly understanding something you'd rather not.

“I know. But that's my point. What better way to ingratiate yourself with your girlfriend's family than to save their dog from dying?”

The idea was absurd, I remember thinking. And yet. “I can't believe he would do a thing like that,” I said. “We don't have any reason to believe that's what he's like. Do we?” Without wanting to, I remembered the question Iris had asked, when we told her how Dawn described her new boyfriend.
What does he want?
If I had been honest, I'd have to admit it had remained at the back of my consciousness ever since.

Joe said quietly, “I'm a fraud examiner, remember? I can spot it a mile away.”

What he said worried me, because back then it
had
seemed that poisoning a dog was out of Emmett Furth's league. He may have burned down our tree house, but he'd never caused any physical harm that we knew of, even to an animal.

The idea that the real culprit could have been Dawn's boyfriend, with whom she seemed to be in love, was too disturbing for me to entertain for very long. “Why would he need to do that?” I asked Joe. “Why wouldn't he think we'd like him enough as he is?” Next to me in the bed, he shrugged, but I could tell he was ruminating. “That would be really…” I wanted to dispel the idea from the air around us, but couldn't bring myself to fill in the blank with
sick
or
cruel
or
crazy
, so I let the line trail off in the air between us.

“Do you think she told him she has money, or something?” Joe whispered after a moment. What he wondered, as we all did, was what a man like Rud Petty would see in a girl like Dawn.

“Even if she
had
told him that,” I whispered back, “why would he…” Once again, I couldn't finish my sentence. I wasn't sure what the words should be.

We could still hear the sounds of the caterers outside, dismantling the party and cleaning everything up so that in the morning our house and garden would be restored. Joe clicked off the light, and I felt relieved that he wasn't going to say anything more about the possibility that Dawn's boyfriend had poisoned our dog. By the time I fell asleep, I had come up with a good explanation. But when I woke in the morning, I couldn't remember for the life of me what it might be.

F
ive days after Rud Petty won his new trial, Dawn arrived around dinnertime. I'd taken the day off from work because she'd told me she'd be home in time for lunch, but as it turned out I needn't have done this, because when she drove up in a car crammed with boxes, giving a little beep to announce herself, it was after six o'clock and already dark.

When I heard the horn, I felt my throat constrict a little, realizing that along with my joy and anticipation at having Dawn home, I was nervous because so much had happened since we'd lived in the house together. Then I reminded myself that this was
Dawn
. There was nothing to be nervous about. I threw on my jacket and went straight out to greet her in the driveway.

I expected her to be driving the old Nova. It was the car she and Rud Petty had come in to visit us for Thanksgiving three years earlier, and it was the car Warren Goldman testified he'd seen in our driveway the night of the attack, which made sense to me because Dawn had told us she often lent it to Rud, and I assumed he'd borrowed it to drive back up that night and take out his rage on Joe and me.

But instead she was sitting in what appeared to be a Corvette, black with a moon roof. The “gotcha” light Joe had installed when we moved in, which used to turn on when it detected motion near the house, had long since blown (I hadn't replaced it, because what was the point?) and I've never paid much attention to cars, but I know a Corvette when I see one. My first thought was that it didn't look like a car any woman would choose. Joe would have been appalled to have something so expensive sitting in his driveway; it didn't look like the kind of car owned by someone who had maxed out her credit cards. Which reminded me, before I pushed it out of my mind, that I had no idea how Dawn had been supporting herself since she'd moved away.

I resolved not to ask her about the car, at least not immediately. When she stepped out, I hugged her hard. “You made it!”

“Hi, Mommy,” she said, smiling somewhat warily as she pulled back to look at me. It was the closest we had been to each other, physically, since she'd come to visit me in the hospital a year and a half earlier, when I'd had an operation to relieve the pressure on my brain. It took me a moment to realize that something was different from then, and a moment more to understand what it was. In her appearance, that is.

Her left eye, which had been corrected during the surgery we finally let her have when she was fourteen, had begun to stray outward again. Realizing this, I felt myself start, at the same time knowing I shouldn't show it. There was plenty of time to ask her about it—how long it had been happening, whether she'd had it checked out. Though I'm pretty sure I managed not to reveal my surprise and the dismay I knew she must also have felt at this development (which she'd been warned about but was sure would not happen to her), I felt the shock register down to my fingertips.

And to her credit, she didn't exhibit any visible reaction when she studied my face, either, despite the fact that I'd had another cosmetic surgery since she'd seen me last. Then again, maybe Bob Toussaint was right and my face was, in fact, “adjusting” in an effort to return to its original state. He was my friend as well as my boss, and as a family practitioner he had no expertise in such things, and it had occurred to me more than once that he was only trying to make me feel better by suggesting that someday I might look like myself again. But I didn't care; his speculation gave me hope.

I had never thought about it this way before, but now I saw that the trauma of that night had made Dawn and me mirror images of each other—her lazy left eye across from my injured right.

In the chill of the autumn evening, she wore a thin tee with her breasts straining beneath the slogan
THIS IS NOT THE LIFE I ORDERED,
and a too-short denim miniskirt with her bare legs jutting down into a pair of plastic sandals. The clothing was entirely wrong for an October night in the Northeast, but that didn't bother me as much as the fact that she seemed to have returned to the exposed, trying-for-sexy style she developed during her time with Rud, instead of sticking with the plain and almost prim outfits she'd worn—because his lawyer told her to—every day to Rud's trial.

A car beeped its horn as it passed us, and I saw Pam Furth craning to identify my companion before she turned into her own driveway. Even through the dark, I thought I could read her astonishment at the realization that Dawn had dared to come back home.

I rushed Dawn inside, despite the fact that it was too late—Pam had seen her. I knew Dawn hadn't noticed. I sat down at the kitchen table and indicated she should do the same, but she said she needed to stand for a while, she'd been sitting so long in the car. She began nattering—the word Joe had always used for what Dawn did when she was nervous. She talked about the different kinds of hand dryers in the bathrooms of all the rest stops she'd encountered on her long drive. She began describing a segment of a radio program she'd heard about the opening of a bird sanctuary in the next county over. “Maybe we can go sometime,” she said. “I like birds, I decided. You do, too, right, Mommy? Maybe you can teach me how to bird-watch, sometime.”

Though I tried to resist it, I couldn't ignore the fact that she was starting to sound like Ding-Dong Dawn. I was about to interrupt her when she said, “This is harder than I thought it would be.” Her voice wobbled, and for a moment I thought she might be sick. “It's been a long time, you know?”

Only then did I realize that she had not, in fact, been inside this house since the day of the attack. That Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, someone stole the only halfway-expensive and portable things we had in the house: the Celestron telescope Joe had inherited from his grandfather; the Pentax binoculars Joe had given me when I said I might want to take up bird-watching; an engraved crystal obelisk Joe had been awarded at his firm's accounting dinner earlier that year; and most distressing to me of all, my mother's diamond ring, which she gave to me when she was dying.

I first met Kenneth Thornburgh that day, when he responded to our call to the police station regarding the theft. Twenty hours later, after he had questioned Dawn's boyfriend in connection with the burglary and she and Rud left in a huff, the officer returned to find Joe dead on the staircase and me nearly dead in our bed.

While I was in the rehab hospital and Gail Nazarian tried to convince a grand jury to bring her to trial, Dawn stayed with Peter and Wendy Cifforelli in Clifton Park. The first option had been Iris and Archie, but they refused. There was no question of her living alone in the house on Wildwood Lane during this time, because although the trauma-cleanup people had completed their work, the renovations Iris ordered had only just begun. Not to mention that Dawn said she had no desire to go anywhere near where her parents had been attacked.

I was relieved that she continued to stay on as Peter and Wendy's guest even after the renovations were done and I returned home that March, after the grand jury declined to indict her. Dawn was steadfast in her defense of Rud's innocence, and I was sure he was guilty; with that between us, we could not live together.

The fact that Peter allowed her to stay with his family during the trial made me think he believed she couldn't have been involved in the crime against Joe and me, which did soften my feelings toward him a little. Wendy drove Dawn to court every day, and kept her company on the other side of the aisle from where I sat next to Iris. In the courtroom, Dawn and I mostly avoided each other. As long as she continued to defend her boyfriend, I could not speak to her. Occasionally our glances met by accident, and she was always the first to look away.

The day after Rud was convicted, Dawn took off to drive west, having packed only the belongings she'd had with her at the Cifforellis'. I'd expected she would want to come home and pick up some more clothes and any other items she might want to take with her, not to mention say good-bye to Abby, but she passed on my offer. We parted outside the courthouse, exchanging a hug that would have felt awkward even if the photographers hadn't been surrounding us as they always seemed to be. She'd get in touch when she landed somewhere, she said. She was determined to start over where no one knew her.

It was a month before she told me she'd settled in Santa Fe, and a few months after that before we resumed our weekly phone call routine. I worried about her constantly during that time, even though I drew some measure of comfort from the Tough Birds telling me that if something bad had happened to her, I would have heard. Several times I offered to pay her way home if she wanted to come and visit, but she always put it off, and I told myself she just needed to be on her own for a while, come to terms with what had happened to our family, and establish herself as an adult.

I got used to the distance between us, but it never became easy. I just assumed that one day we'd be as close again as we'd once been, and that day seemed to come when she called after Rud Petty won his appeal.

But it hadn't occurred to me, when she asked if she could return, that this would be her first trip in almost three years to the house she'd grown up in. The last time she'd come home, she and her boyfriend entered as invited guests and sped away in the dust of disgrace.

I could hear Abby scratching at the door between the basement and the kitchen, where I'd put her at Dawn's request. Sensing the desperation in the sounds, I asked Dawn if it was okay to let her in.

The dog's name caused Dawn's eyes to dim. I reminded her that Abby wasn't used to being shut up, restricted from the rest of the house, and that I didn't want to leave her down there, where she had suffered so horribly once, for too long. Dawn hesitated, then nodded, and watched as I headed down to the basement to open the door allowing access to the kitchen.

“Abby! Hey, girl, it's me!” Dawn said, too brightly, when she saw her old pet. Abby wasn't young anymore, and the pain in her injured hip made it difficult for her to climb steps. At night, I had to lift her onto the bed with me.

Dawn crouched on one knee and held her arms out. “Come here, girl,” she said in an unsure voice, but Abby—who in the old days used to knock Dawn over with excitement—took a step back toward me and gave a whimper. The sound, and the sight of the dog retreating, pulled my stomach taut.

“It's been three years, remember?” I told her. “She's gotten used to being an only child.” I tried to smile, but I could tell from how tight my face felt that it wasn't working.

Abby slunk out of the room and groaned herself down onto the rug in the front hallway. Dawn and I looked at each other, neither of us seeming to know what should come next. I had never felt so awkward and foreign in my own home, not even on the day I returned, after months in the rehab hospital, to unfamiliar, refurbished rooms.

Thinking all this made my legs tremble, and I sank into my chair at the kitchen table. Dawn took her place across from me. At this table she and I had struggled together over her math homework, on those nights when Joe was working late and Iris was out with her friends; both of them would have been able to help more than I could, but Dawn and I usually managed to come up with answers to the problems on her worksheet, and it made us feel good, like a team—even though we usually found out the next day, when she took the homework into class, that our answers were wrong.

This same table was where we'd built a gingerbread house from a kit one Christmas, then left it too close to the edge of the table and came down the next morning to find that Abby had knocked it to the floor. On one of the stools at the counter was where Dawn liked to sit and tell me about her day while I put supper together. During her last year of high school, with Iris away at college and Joe spending long hours working on the Sedgwick case, it was often just the two of us for dinner. It was usually something easy and quick on the nights I worked, but on weekends, I liked to look up my grandmother's old recipes and make meatballs and gravy or beef stroganoff with dumplings or potatoes and fish. Neither Joe nor Iris had an appetite for Swedish food; they were sometimes successful, and sometimes not, at hiding their distaste when they found out I was cooking one of these meals for dinner. But Dawn always seemed to like them.

“I'm starving,” she told me. “I haven't eaten since this morning.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I was saving my appetite. I thought you might have made some cinnamon rolls or something.”

Cinnamon rolls were her favorite. On Sunday mornings when the girls were little, I made them for breakfast. When Dawn got to high school and began drinking coffee, she and I would have the leftover ones after she came home and before dinner, the way my mother and I—before my father was arrested, and before she got sick—had often enjoyed a snack together (usually tea and her famous oatmeal crinkles) when I got home from school.

“Oh. Sorry. Actually, I don't have much food in the house right now.” What I didn't add was that I'd planned to go to the grocery store after she arrived, because she'd told me to expect her around lunchtime, but that in the end I waited for her all afternoon because she hadn't called to tell me she'd be late. “Do you want to go to Pepito's?”

Dawn gave a start, and I could have kicked myself. Aside from the specific painful association she would have to that particular restaurant—the default location of her sad twelfth-birthday party—she was probably also realizing (maybe for the first time since she'd suggested coming back to Everton) that even though it had been three years, she'd still be recognizable to anyone in this town who was aware of what had happened in our house the night of the attack, which was pretty much everyone. Not a day went by that I didn't catch someone giving me a long look across a store or a parking lot—
Is that who I think it is?
—and although I had grown used to it by now, Dawn had been able to remain anonymous out there in the desert.