Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

The hours after dinner, on a cool springtime evening like this, were the most peaceful moments of the year in Locust Grove. The suburb was a comforting thirty-two miles from New York City, on the North Shore of Long Island. Some truly wealthy folk lived here — new money as well as some Rockefeller and Morgan hand-me-downs. Then there were the aspiring rich and a few popular artists, some ad agency CEOs. Mostly, though, the village was made up of people like the Ashberrys. Living comfortably in their six-hundred-thousand-dollar houses, commuting on the LIRR or driving to their management jobs at publishing or computer companies on Long Island.

This April evening found the dogwoods in bloom and the fragrance of mulch and the first-cut grass of the year filling the misty air. And it found the brooding form of young Harle Ebbers crouching in the bushes across the street from Ron Ashberry’s house, staring into the bedroom window of sixteen-year-old Gwen.

Oh, dear Lord, Ron thought hopelessly. Not again. It’s not starting again...

Doris handed the cordless phone to her husband and he asked for Sheriff Hanlon. As he waited to be connected, he inhaled the stale, metallic scent of the porch screen he rested his head against. He looked across his yard, forty yards, to the bush that had become a fixture in his daydreams and the focus of his nightmares.

It was a juniper, about six feet long and three high, gracing a small municipal park. It was beside this languorous bush that twenty-year-old Harle Ebbers had spent much of the last eight months, in his peculiar crouch, stalking Gwen.

“How d’he get out?” Doris wondered.

“I don’t see what good it’ll do,” Gwen said from the kitchen, panic in her voice, “to call the police. He’ll be gone before they get here. He always is.”

“Go downstairs!” Ron called. “Don’t let him see you.”

The thin blonde girl, her face as beautiful as Lladro porcelain, backed away. “I’m scared.”

Doris, a tall, muscular woman exuding the confidence of the competitive athlete she’d been in her twenties, put her arm around her daughter. “Don’t worry, honey. Your father and I are here. He’s not going to hurt you. You hear me?”

The girl nodded uncertainly and vanished down the stairs.

Ron Ashberry kept his gaze coldly fixed on the figure next to the bush.

It was a cruel irony that this tragedy had happened to Gwen.

Conservative by nature, Ron had always been horrified by the neglect he saw on the part of families in the city to which he commuted every day. Absent fathers, crack-addict mothers, guns and gangs, little girls turning to prostitution. He vowed that nothing bad would ever happen to his daughter. His plan was simple: he’d protect Gwen, raise her the right way, teach her good moral values, family values — which, thank God, people had started talking about again. He’d keep her close to home, insist that she get good grades, learn sports, music and social skills.

Then, when she turned eighteen, he’d give her freedom. She’d be old enough then to make the correct decisions — about boys, about careers, about money. She’d go to an Ivy League college and then return to the North Shore for marriage or a career. This was serious work, hard work, this child rearing. But Ron was seeing the results of his efforts. Gwen had scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on the PSATs. She never talked back to adults; her coaches reported she was one of the best athletes they’d ever worked with; she never snuck cigarettes or liquor, never whined when Ron told her no driver’s license until she was eighteen. She understood how much he loved her and why he wouldn’t let her go into Manhattan with her girlfriends or spend the weekend on Fire Island unchaperoned.

And so he felt it was utterly unfair that Harle Ebbers picked his daughter to stalk.

It had begun last fall. One evening Gwen had been particularly quiet throughout the evening meal. When Ron had asked her to go pick a book out of his library so he could read it aloud, Gwen just stood at the kitchen window, staring outside.

“Gwen, are you listening to me? I asked you to get me a book.”

She’d turned and to his shock he saw she was crying.

“Honey, I’m sorry,” Ron’d said automatically and stepped forward to put his arm around her. He knew the problem. Several days ago she’d asked if she could take a trip to Washington, D.C., with two teachers and six of the girls and boys from her social studies class. Ron had considered letting her go. But then he’d checked out the group and found that two of the girls had discipline problems — they’d been found drinking in a park near the school last summer. He’d told Gwen she couldn’t go and she’d seemed disappointed. He’d assumed this was what troubled her today. “I wish I could let you go, Gwen—” he’d said.

“Oh, no. Daddy, it’s not that stupid trip. I don’t care about that. It’s something else...”

She’d fallen into his arms, sobbing. He was filled with overwhelming parental love. And an unbearable agony for her pain. “What is it, honey? Tell me. You can tell me anything.”

She’d glanced out the window.

Following her gaze, he’d seen, in the park across the street, a figure crouching in the bushes.

“Oh, Daddy, he’s following me.”

Horrified, Ron had led her to the living room, calling out, “Doris, we’re having a family conference! Come in here! Now!” He’d gestured his wife into the room then sat next to Gwen. “What is it, baby? Tell us.”

Ron preferred that Doris pick up Gwen at school. But occasionally, if his wife was busy, he let Gwen walk home. There were no bad neighborhoods in Locust Grove, certainly not along the trim, manicured route to the high school — the greatest threats were usually aesthetic: a cheap bungalow or a flock of plastic flamingos, herds of plaster Bambis.

Or so Ron had believed.

That autumn night Gwen had sat with her hands in her lap, staring at the floor, and explained in a meek voice, “I was walking home today, okay? And there was this guy.”

Ron’s heart had gone cold, hands shaking, anger growing within him.

“Tell us,” Doris had said. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Not like that. He just like started to talk to me. He’s going, ‘You’re so pretty. I’ll bet you’re smart. Where do you live?’ ”

“Did he know you?”

“I don’t think so. He acted all funny. Like he was sort of retarded, you know. Kind of saying things that didn’t make sense. I told him you didn’t want me to talk to strangers and I ran home.”

“Oh, you poor thing.” Her mother embraced her.

“I didn’t think he followed me. But...” She bit her lip. “But that’s him.”

Ron had jogged toward the bush where he’d seen the young man. He was in a curious pose. It reminded Ron of one of those green plastic soldiers he’d buy when he was a kid. The kneeling soldier, aiming his rifle.

The boy saw Ron coming and fled.

The sheriff’s office knew all about the boy. Harle’s parents had moved to Locust Grove a few months before, virtually driven out of Ridgeford, Connecticut, because their son had targeted a young blonde, about Gwen’s age, and had begun following her. The boy was of average intelligence but had suffered psychotic episodes when younger. The police hadn’t been able to stop him because he’d only hurt one person in all his months of stalking — the girl’s brother had attacked him. Harle had nearly beaten the boy to death but all charges were dropped on the grounds of self-defense.

The Ebbers family had at last fled the state, hoping to start over fresh.

But the only change was that Harle had found himself a new victim: Gwen.

The boy had fallen into his obsessive vigil: staring into Gwen’s classrooms at school and kneeling beside the juniper bush, keeping his eyes glued to the girl’s bedroom.