I had been all too familiar with that Boone girl. I’d watched her YouTube video so many times, it was already playing out in my mind. Ava’s mischievous smile showcasing her missing front tooth, the flesh soft and swollen as fruit pulp where a new tooth was breaking the skin, her smooth baby face hinting at angular beauty, and her voice, unsettling in both its husky tone and nuanced maturity.
“Which neighbor?” I said, getting to my feet. The afternoon sun was too harsh. I was squinting, wishing I’d brought my sunglasses. The air was burnt and ashy, like someone’s dinner gone awry. “What did they do?”
“The guy to your right.” The old man had cold eyes; two black marbles squeezed tight. “He was flirting with her right before she went missing.”
I cringed. Flirting with a five-year-old? How was this man comfortable saying something so obscene without at least dimming his voice?
I knew the neighbor he was talking about. I’d helped Leland move a dresser up his stairs five or six weeks ago. My creep radar had been gonging, but I’d convinced myself I was being a snob.
“I wanted to tell you the day you moved in, but didn’t… well, I…” he bit the inside of his cheek, “I didn’t want to ruin your day. I’m Lou, by the way.” He nodded, but kept his hands on his hips. His dog’s barking, hoarse and snarly, persisted.
Oh. That’s why he’d started the conversation bluntly. Since the day I’d moved in, Lou had probably been biting the inside of his cheek, sweating into his sweatband, wanting to tell me about Leland Ernest, but didn’t want to ruin our move. Lou had shaken the can so many times, he couldn’t pull the tab slowly to let it fizz; it was bound to explode.
My irritation eased. As rude and peculiar as Lou seemed, I appreciated his directness. No one else had bothered to warn me about Leland.
He said, “I got a wife and daughter. My daughter, Rachel, she’s seventeen.” He sighed, and I couldn’t tell if he sighed because he was almost in the clear, his daughter had almost aged out of kidnapping, or if he felt more weighed down that she’d entered prime rape age.
“Nobody told me,” I said. I sounded weak and grouchy, which matched how I felt. I considered all the people who could have told me: my realtor, the guy who sold me the house, my neighbor Brooke, whom I’d actually met before I bought. She could have warned me. The word community formed in my mind, hard and jagged as shattered glass. Well, maybe they didn’t know. I picked up Wyatt’s bike and walked it to the sidewalk. “How do you know?” I said.
“Secretary at my work, her brother is a cop. Your neighbor Leland was hired to paint the Boone house, but he was, well, too friendly with the girl.” When I said nothing, Lou said, “I’m a screw mechanic.”
His husky’s bark was still loud, but too repetitive; it had lost its angry edge.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait. He was just being friendly? That’s it?” Raising a boy brought out the defender in me. Wyatt was friendly. I didn’t like the idea that he might be suspected of wrongdoing for being simultaneously friendly and male.
Lou worked his jaw, then inhaled so big his chest puffed. His nipples hardened under his thin T-shirt. “He followed my girl while she walked home from the bus stop. Drove his car behind her, asked her if she wanted to go bowling at the mall.” The way he said it, “mall” sounded vulgar. “This was when she was thirteen.”
My stomach twisted. “What did you do?”
“I don’t have money to hire a lawyer, and I know how these things eat up tons of money and never go nowhere.” I believed him. The divorce was still a bitter pill in the back of my throat, tasting of dollar bills marinated in filthy fingers.
It looked like money was tight for Lou. His roof was rotting, his driveway was ridden with potholes, and he had no landscaping, not a single bush. “What we did was, we got a dog, and my wife drove Rachel home instead of her walking.” He bit the inside of his cheek, considered something, then said, “I rang Leland’s doorbell and told him, if he talked to my daughter again, I’d slit his throat.”
I pictured flesh opening, blood oozing from its center. Goosebumps lit the back of my arms. Chilling. It was chilling that he said that. I wanted to get away from this shark-eyed man, yet it was like I was looking into a mirror. His protectiveness was fierce, borderline repulsive.
“Well, so, that’s what we did,” he said quietly, almost to himself. He brushed his sandal against something in the grass, schoolboy shy, regretting the throat-slitting admission.
“Do my other neighbors know?”
“I told the ones who have kids.”
Assholes.
I started home, trying to keep my greasy fingers splayed and away from Wyatt’s handlebars. The teeth edging Wyatt’s bike pedal tripped my shin, and the biting pain brought my attention forward. The pedal left me with four horizontal indentations, the skin peeled back, a dot of blood welling in each hole.
“Looks like you got yourself a piss-poor bike chain,” Lou said.
“Yes, that I have.” I tried to laugh, but my laugh dribbled. “I’m Grace, by the way,” I said, walking quickly away, panic suddenly on me, harassing me like yappy pooches nipping at my heels, pawing at my shins.
That panic, it’s still there. It hasn’t eased, hasn’t quieted, since I talked to Lou.
Now my fingers glide over the small scabs on my shin and I wonder about Lou. I imagine an old shark, skin cadaverous, wearing a turquoise headband. I picture his jaw working, the mystery bandage on his hand.
I have never seen Lou’s wife or daughter, never. Maybe Lou was diverting attention away from himself for a reason. And maybe the thing between Leland and Lou’s thirteen-year-old was a misunderstanding. Thirteen is an age where fantasy and confused reality collide, like the extraordinary border where saltwater and freshwater meet, yet stay separate.
Maybe, but I doubt it.
I spend another hour on my laptop before I open Ava’s YouTube video, what I consider to be the finale of my websurfing. Ava is the last thing I will see before I close my eyes. Ava is one last potato chip in my ritual of greasy worry-gorging until my stomach feels queasy and bloated.
Every time I pull up her video, I expect it to have been removed, taken down from YouTube for violating some law related to an ongoing crime investigation. A few days ago, I recorded the video on my phone in case this very thing happens.
But no, her video is still here. The family posted this one minute and nineteen second video of their daughter weeks before she went missing, and now the video has over four million views. If her parents posted with aspirations for Ava’s fame, I bet they regret it.
5
A GAME OF HEDGE-CLIPPER TAG
Wyatt, Chloe, and I are outside on the back deck by 9:00am. They are eating from their bowls; I am drinking tea. Morning sun is low and glorious, and a comfortable September breeze twirls the wind spinner we hung in a small crabapple tree. On mornings like these when the kids are outside, sitting still, listening to birds and observing neurotic squirrels jump from tree to tree, I try to toss my mental garbage out to the curb. All my worries, all my bad decisions.
Moments like these—when I get to watch Chloe’s gossamer eyelashes lower and lift as she gazes up into the tree, when I get to witness Wyatt smile at his little sister as if no one is watching him enjoy her—are bliss.