Secrets in the Shadows (5 page)

The Harrisons' son Craig was a junior in my school and one of the most popular boys. In fact, he was currently president of our class, the captain of the baseball team, and one of the starting five on the basketball team. He was one of those people who seemed to have been blessed with everything. He was bright, good- looking and from a wealthy family. I couldn't help but wonder what it was that determined he would be born into the world he was in and I would be born into mine. Were we sinners before we were born? Or was that biblical phrase I heard true: the sins of the fathers would be visited on the heads of the sons, but in my case, the sins of the mother would be visited on the head of her daughter?
I sauntered up the sidewalk and paused in front of the Harrisons' house. I don't think I ever walked or rode past it without looking at it and thinking about it. The flag flapped and snapped in the breeze. I saw the lawn sprinklers go on and begin saturating some of the new seeds and the blades that were already starting the spring grasses. Mrs. Harrison had a row of multicolored flowers in front of the porch. It all looked picture perfect, belonging on some house and garden magazine. There was nothing to suggest its sordid past.
I started to turn away when I heard someone ask, "Is that you?"
I turned more to my left and saw Craig Harrison step out from behind a hedge. He had a pair of hedge cutters in his hands. He wore a very tight Tshirt, which emphasized his sculptured muscularity, a baseball cap on backwards and jeans. Some strands of his light-brown hair stuck out of the sides of his cap, and his bangs seemed to float over his forehead, not touching his skin. His eyes were light green, but in sunlight they became a richer emerald. At six feet two, with his broad shoulders and narrow waist, he looked like a prime candidate for Mr. Teen America. I always thought there was something impish about his tight smile. Although I tried to ignore most of the boys at school, especially the ones who leered and whispered when I passed by, I couldn't help but cast a glance at Craig.
"No," I said. "It's someone else."
I started to walk away.
"Hey, wait a minute," he cried and came hurrying around the hedges to the sidewalk. "What's the rush?"
"I have a dental appointment," I said.
"Huh?" He stared at me a moment, and then he laughed. "Okay. Sorry. I just didn't recognize you. Nice outfit," he said, letting his eyes move slowly up from my feet to my head, as if he had to capture me in some memory bank forever and ever. "I knew there was a pretty girl in those potato sacks you wear."
"They're not potato sacks."
"Whatever." He drew closer. "Never saw you wearing lipstick and stuff. What's up? You have a birthday or something?"
"No. Why would that matter anyway?" I asked, smirking at him
He shrugged. "I heard some mothers don't let their daughters wear makeup until they're a certain age."
I didn't want to point out that I didn't live with my mother, but I could see the thought registering in his mind.
"Or grandmothers," he quickly added.
"No. I just decided myself," I said.
"Good decision. So what are you up to?"
"Nothing. I just took a walk."
He nodded, glanced at his house and then at me. "I've seen you looking at the house before, you know." -
"Great. Have a nice day," I said and continued down the sidewalk. He quickly caught up.
"Take it easy," he said. "I wasn't complaining about it."
"I don't care if you were."
"Jeez."
"What?" I said, spinning on him.
"I heard you could be pretty nasty for no reason." "I'm not pretty nasty."
He laughed. "If you're not nasty now, I'd hate to see you when you are."
I stared at him a moment. "Okay," I said. "I'll admit it. So I have looked at your house before."
"It's only natural you'd be curious about the place. I was when we first bought it. You ever been inside?"
"No."
"Would you like to go inside?"
"What do you think?" I fired back at him. I imagined he was teasing me and having some fun that he would brag about later, but I didn't really care.
"I think yes. I have to warn you, though. It's nothing like it was when we first bought it. My mother redid it from top to bottom. She even changed the kitchen, ripped out counters, expanded it, put in new cabinets. We didn't move in for nearly eight months after we bought it."
I didn't know what to say. I did think anyone would have changed it. That was no surprise.
"There was nothing left in it that belonged to your mother and grandmother," he continued. "Don't think I didn't look in closets and cabinets."
"What did you expect to find?" I was going to add
"dead bodies"
but didn't.
"I don't know. Hey," he said, "we have something in common."
"And what would that be?"
"We both live in houses where a murder took place."
I didn't respond. He was right, if the legendary story about the Dorals was right.
"So?" I finally replied.
"So nothing. C'mon. I'll show you the place."
"Maybe your parents wouldn't like it," I said, hesitating. Now that he was really inviting me, I felt nervous and even a bit afraid.
"They're not here. They're in New York seeing a show. I've been left to do chores. C'mon. Don't worry about it."
He started away, expecting me to follow. After another moment, I did. He waited at the entrance to the walk, and then we started for the front door together.
"You sure?" I asked when he opened the door.
"What's the big deal? You're not going to do something evil to me, are you?" he joked.
"I haven't decided yet," I told him, and he laughed.
"You know, I've always wanted to talk to you, but to be honest, I thought you'd insult me or embarrass me," he said.
I smirked skeptically and pulled my head back.
"No, I'm serious," he continued. "I mean it. I came close to starting a conversation with you a few times in the hallway when I thought you looked my way, but I wasn't sure if you were looking at me with interest or disdain."
The way he was still standing in the doorway made me think that my answer would determine whether or not he would let me in.
"I don't know you well enough to dislike you," I said. The answer pleased him He smiled and stepped back. "Come in."
I walked in slowly, pausing in the entryway. The floor had a very pretty cocoa tile, and there were mahogany coat hooks and a hat rack on both sides. There was a rich-looking wood floor down the hallway, and the stairway was carpeted with a thick dark brown to match the balustrade. Everything looked brand new, spotless and immaculate. Right above the entryway hung a chandelier with teardrop crystals.
"The kitchen and dining room are to the left," Craig said. "This is the living room," he said and continued walking down the hallway. I gazed in at the furniture, paintings, beautiful marble fireplace and mantel.
"What kind of furniture is this?" I asked. I hadn't been in many houses other than my own, but I had never seen such elegant sofas, chairs, tables and lamps.
"It's all imported from France," he said. "That took almost a year, too, but it was what my mother wanted. Their bedroom is the same furniture style. Mine's a lot different, but the guest rooms are the same decor, as are the dining room and my father's office, which is really our den. As you can see, there's no television set in the living room. I've got my own set, and so do my parents, but our biggest screen is in the den. That's 'where Dad and I watch all the sports. It's also the only room in the house where my mother permits smoking. I don't smoke, do you?"
"No."
"I mean cigarettes," he said, smiling wryly.
"I don't smoke anything," I emphasized. I knew what he meant. He shrugged.
"Ever try it?" he asked.
"I don't care to."
"You don't know what you're missing if you don't try it."
"I don't care."
He laughed and then turned serious.
"You know my bedroom was supposedly your mother's, don't you?"
"No, how would I know that?"
"I thought you might. You want to see it?"
A part of me wanted to simply turn and run out of the house, but a stronger part of me was drawn to those stairs. I glanced at them.
"C'mon," he said, not waiting for my answer.
Under the rug were the steps upon which my mother had walked many times. It was down these steps that she'd fled. I could almost feel myself falling back through time, watching her rush out of the house and into the darkness that would surround me as well.
He paused on the stairway and leaned toward me.
"I know all about the murder," he said. "I know exactly where they found Harry Pearson's body and exactly how it looked when they found it."
He continued up.
My feet felt frozen to the step. 1 thought there was something terribly morbid about the casual way he talked about it all, but something fascinating as well.
"Hey," he said, stopping again to turn hack to me. "I just realized something. You know what's amazing, incredible about your coming here, in fact?"
I shook my head. Suddenly, because I was here and literally a few feet from my mother's room, I felt too weak to even speak.
"Today. The date. Don't you get it?"
"No."
"It's the date of the murder!"

I suddenly completely understood the concept of selective amnesia.
Of course, I knew the date of Harry Pearson's death, but neither my grandmother nor my
grandfather, no one in the family, as a matter of fact, ever mentioned it or acknowledged it in any way. Maybe they had selective amnesia as well, or maybe they just thought it was wise never to mention it, even to themselves. I had heard that when I was very young, not more than three perhaps, one of the local newspapers did a column on the murder and that had revived interest, but nothing had been written about it ever since.
"I thought that was why you had come around today," Craig said.
I shook my head. He looked skeptical.
"Are you telling me you didn't know what had happened today?"
"I forgot," I said.
"Wow. Interesting. Well, it is the date anyway. C'mon up. We'll be like historical detectives or something."
I continued up the stairs slowly, stairs my mother had climbed many times, my legs feeling heavier. It was as if l were dragging my grandmother behind me because she had seized me at the waist and was trying to prevent me from going any farther. I knew she would be upset to know I was in this house.
"Everything's changed up here as well." Craig explained when I reached the landing. "My mother put in all new lighting, including those chandeliers," he said, pointing to the two in the upstairs hallway. "She redid the flooring, covered the walls with this wallpaper, had doors replaced and redid the fixtures in the bathrooms as well. My room was changed from top to bottom, including the fixtures and the closet. She ripped out part of a wall to expand it. Then, she had the wall on the opposite side torn out and had a bathroom put in for me. That was a very big job. My father complained that it was costing as much to redo the house as it was to have bought it.
"But, being we could get all the materials wholesale and great deals on the labor, he didn't stand a chance." He leaned toward me to whisper, as if there were others in the house. "The truth was my mother wouldn't have moved in here if he didn't go along with all her changes. A dead body in your house is a dead body. For most people it would give them the creeps, but this was too good a house to pass up, especially for the price."
"I understand," I said. "Your parents were smart to buy it, I'm sure."
He nodded.
"My dad's a good businessman. It's supposed to run in the family, so there's high hopes for me."
He went to his right and opened his bedroom door.
Then he spread out his arms and cried, "Ta-da. Here it is. The scene of the crime."
He stepped back. I hesitated. How many times had I imagined myself here, dreamed of looking into the room and envisioning Harry Pearson's body on this floor, my mother standing over him? It was the meat to fatten the bones of my worst nightmare.
"Harry Pearson's body was sprawled on the floor just inside the door. He was lying facedown, both arms out above his head." Craig looked down as if the body was really there. It gave me a surge of ice along my spine, and I actually shuddered. He turned to me. "You know how she did it, right?"
I nodded even though I really didn't know any of the gruesome details. I felt as if I had a heavy stone on my tongue.
"She stabbed him in the throat," he told me.
I didn't need to hear it. I didn't want to hear those details, and yet I did. I was caught in the web of that horrible contradiction. I was like a moth drawn to a flame. Get too close and you set yourself on fire. Craig smiled.
"I know the whole story, of course. I couldn't help but be curious about something like that, happening in the house we had bought and were going to live in and especially the bedroom I would sleep in," he added, as if he had to provide me with an excuse.
I nodded, but I couldn't get my gaze off the floor where Harry Pearson's body supposedly had been found.
"He wasn't half in and half out. He was fully in the room."
I looked up at him.
"So?"
"There were no pictures of your mother in the papers," he continued, ignoring my question. "She was still considered a juvenile, but I found her picture in one of the old yearbooks in the school library. You ever go in there to look at those?"
"No"
Since my father had graduated from a high school in Yonkers, New York, looking at his yearbook wouldn't have provided my mother's picture, and Aunt Zipporah had never shown me my mother's picture in a yearbook.
"There's just pictures of her with her class, and her face is so small you need a magnifying glass. She was very pretty," he told me. "Now that I see you out of a shell, you're very pretty yourself, and you do bear a strong resemblance."
"I wasn't in any shell."
"You weren't?" He smiled.
"I wasn't."
"All right. You weren't. Anyway," he said, turning back to his room, "I think my bed is where her bed had been, between those two windows. My mother had the panes replaced with more efficient ones, but that's where the windows were then and that's where they are now."
I walked in slowly and looked around. It was difficult now to envision this room ever being my mother's or any girl's room, for that matter. The furniture was heavy-looking dark oak. He had a set of dumbbells on a stand in the corner. Over the headboard of the bed was a school banner celebrating the basketball championship last year. On the top of his bookcase, he had trophies as well.
I thought the most interesting thing was an oil painting of a baseball player swinging his bat. The artist captured his movement and the tension in his forearms, neck and shoulders. There was just enough of his profile to show his intensity.
"That's very nice," I said, nodding at it. "It has great detail."
"Yeah. I saw it in a gallery in New York and my father bought it for me. It's called
Hitter's Dream.
I heard you paint, too."
"Heard?"
"Dicky Steigman is in your art class. Mr. Longo's pretty impressed with what you do. I agree with him. I saw one of your paintings."
"When?"
Nothing I had ever done was put on display.
"Oh, one day when no one was in the room. I went in on my own and found it on Longo's desk. It was the one you did of a hawk or some large bird sailing over a pond."
"That's sneaky," I said.
He shrugged.
"Would you have shown it to me if I had asked?"
"Probably not," I confessed. The last thing I needed was for the other students to start poking fun at my art.
"Case closed."
I turned away and looked out the window. It looked down on the front of the house, but from this vantage point, I could see the street and some of the village as well. Had my mother felt as trapped up here as she had back in our attic? It was a good-size room, but nowhere near the size of the attic.
"What exactly do you know about the Pearson case?" he asked.
"Not that much. My grandparents don't like to talk about it," I said.
He was just staring at me now, wearing the expression of someone who wasn't sure he should say anything else.
"What?" I urged.
"As I said, because I'm living in the house and sleeping in her room, I couldn't help but have some curiosity about it. However, my parents don't even know how much I've learned. It's better that way. They accused me of having a macabre curiosity, and my mother hates to hear about it."
"What did you learn?"
"I know what she claimed was happening to her and how in the end no one believed her because she made so much stuff up. Some of it was quite off the wall. Actually, I suppose most of it was."
"I think I better go," I said. Talking about my mother as if she was someone else was starting to bother me, and I was afraid of what else he might say. "I didn't tell my grandparents I was going for a walk."
"Take it easy," he said. "I'll drive you home. You might be interested in what I think about it all."
"I'm not," I said, starting out.
"Why not?"
"I'm tired of people making fun of me, for one thing," I said, pausing. "Slipping notes in my locker, whispering behind my back. Spying on my art," I added.
"Wait a minute," he said as I walked out. He followed me to the stairway. "I'm not making fun of you and I don't whisper behind your back. I'm not going to say I haven't heard other girls making fun of you, but they're idiots."
"Exactly what do you want?" I asked, turning at the top of the stairs.
"I just wanted to share my ideas with you, that's all."
"What ideas?"
"About your mother, the case. I told you why it intrigued me, and it has nothing to do with making fun of you. Not everything has to be about you. That's what my mother's always telling me about myself," he added, smiling.
"Okay, what?" I said, folding my arms under my breasts and shifting my weight to my right leg. Aunt Zipporah told me my mother used to do the same thing when she was a little annoyed.
"Come on back to my room for a few minutes. I have something to show you," he said and turned and walked back as if there was no doubt I would, too.
He's pretty damn sure of himself;
I thought, but instead of concluding he was simply another arrogant boy, I envied him for his self-confidence and followed. He was sitting at his desk.
"Come on in," he said. "I won't bite."
"Aren't you worried that I might?"
He laughed. "I might enjoy it."
"Very funny. What do you want to show me?" I asked, stepping over to him. He reached down and opened the drawer on his right to pluck out a folder. Then he put it on his desk and opened it. The top page was a copy of a news story about the Pearson murder. I thought the headline was gruesomely tongue-incheek: "Prescription for Death, Druggist Murdered in Sand- burg."
"You ever see this stuff?"
I shook my head.
"I duplicated as much as I could at the public library. Here," he said, standing. "Sit down and read it. There's more in the folder. You'll even find the police report."
I looked at him, surprised.
"How did you get that?"
"Someone at the police department has a brother working for us at the lumberyard and did me a favor. Do you know, were you aware of the fact that your grandfather worked for my grandfather at the lumberyard?"
I shook my head.
"Yes, it's true. He died young. You knew that, right?"
I was ashamed to admit how little I knew about my mother's family, so I didn't respond.
"Go ahead. Read some of it. You want something to drink? A soda, juice?"
"Just some cold water;" I said, staring down at the papers on the desk. It was truly like a magnet drawing my eyes. I slowly lowered myself to the chair.
"I'll be right back. Take your time."
I could see how excited he was that I was going to read all this. I heard him charge down the stairs to get my water and get back. I smiled to myself, and then I began to read what was in the folder. It was truly like opening a forbidden door.
The first story told about the discovery of Harry's body and then the search for my mother. There were follow-up stories about the continual search, each story repeating the gruesome details. From the dates on the paper, it looked like not a day had gone by without something being written about the case. The reporter who was writing the stories made reference to the Doral case, as if somehow they could be related. It was the only other famous murder in the village, and here I was living in the Doral House, ironically touched by both crimes.
My aunt Zipporah was never mentioned by name, but references were made to a "close friend" who claimed this and claimed that. It was obvious to me who that was. There were many quotes attributed to Darlene Pearson, who was in and out of a state of shock, according to the reporter. In every instance, she had no explanation. According to her, it had all come as a big surprise. For a while at the very beginning, she even doubted my mother had done it and was worried that maybe she had been kidnaped by whoever had. That idea quickly disappeared when someone leaked the information that my mother had fled to New York City.
And then finally there was the story of the police picking her up. Someone in the police department, quoted as an anonymous source, revealed that she had been hiding in the attic of the Doral House, and once again, the possible murder of Brandon Doral was discussed as if there was some direct tie-in to the Pearson case.
Craig had everything, including the follow-up stories about the court procedures and my mother eventually being remanded to a mental institution.
"What do you think?" he asked, handing me a glass of water.
I took it and sipped some. "What do you mean?" "Anything you didn't know?"
How would I explain that most of it I didn't know? "No."
"Did you read the police report?"
"Not yet."
Actually, I was shying away from it. I imagined the gory details. He picked it up and looked at it.
"Harry Pearson wasn't a small man, you know. He was six feet two inches and weighed close to two hundred and ten pounds. Your mother was about your height, five feet four inches. I'm six feet one."
"So?"
"So stand up," he said.
"Why?"
"Just do it."
I did. He reached out for my shoulders and turned me to face him directly.
"Okay. Here," he said, putting a pen in my right hand. "Pretend that's a knife. Swing it at my neck. Stab me in the neck."
"What?"
"Do it. Don't worry. Do it hard, fast. Do it!" he nearly screamed.
Here I was, standing in what had been my mother's room, reenacting the crime she had committed, acting out a nightmare. Was he getting some sick pleasure out of this? Would he brag to his friends and make me even more of a target in school?
"I'm trying to show you something. Please, just do it."
I started to shake my head and then, I can't explain why, I did it. I raised my hand and swung it at him, and he easily blocked it. He held my wrist and smiled.
"That doesn't prove anything," I said. "He could have been looking away, never expecting it." "Looking away?"
"Yes. Let go."
He did, and I put the pen down.
"Why did you swing at me with your right hand?" he asked.
"What do you mean? You put the pen in it and you told me to do it."
"Are you right-handed?"
"No"
"Do you know where the wound was?"
"I told you. I didn't get to the police report." "It was on Harry Pearson's left side."
"So?"
"So, she had to have the knife in her right hand. That's why I told you to do it."
"Terrific," I said. All I wanted to do now was run out of his room and the house. I started to walk out.
"Wait. Like you, your mother was left-handed, and I wasn't there telling her to put the knife in her right hand. C'mon. Read this," he urged, shoving the police report at me.
I stared at him a moment and then slowly backed up and lowered myself to the chair. He handed me the police report, and I read it quickly. Then I looked up at him.