Brad Parks - The Girl Next Door

My favorite anecdote was shared by one of Nancy’s fellow paper deliverers. As any longtime resident of New Jersey knows, one of the Eagle-Examiner’ s nicknames is “the bird.” For one of her shop meetings, Nancy made T-shirts with a picture of a guy tossing a rolled-up Eagle-Examiner onto someone’s front porch, Frisbee-style. Underneath, it read, IFIW-LOCAL 117: PROUD TO FLIP YOU THE BIRD!

I wasn’t sure whether I could get that line past some of our prissier editors. But as I returned to the newsroom and started writing, I figured I owed it to Nancy to try.

The words were just starting to flow onto my computer screen when my cell phone rang. The caller had a 510 area code, which was neither a New Jersey number nor one I recognized.

“Carter Ross.”

“Mr. Ross?” said a monotone female voice on the other end, and I knew who it was before she could say her name. “This is Jeanne Nygard, Nancy Marino’s sister. We met earlier today.”

“Hi, Jeanne. Thanks for calling.”

The line hissed with the sound of no one talking, though I could faintly hear her breathing. I shifted my weight, and my chair creaked in response. I cleared my throat and soon found myself talking, because I felt like someone ought to be.

“I’m sorry if I triggered a little bit of a spat at the viewing,” I said. “I didn’t mean to stir up ill will.”

“My sister and I don’t always get along,” Jeanne said, and I fought the urge to reply, No, really?

“She’s not a happy person,” Jeanne continued. “She seeks fulfillment in worldly things, in money and power. They will never lead her to enlightenment.”

Okay there, Siddhartha, I nearly replied. But again I resisted. And since I didn’t want to enter into a conversation about Anne’s self-actualization or lack thereof, I asked, “So what can I do for you, Jeanne?”

“My sister would be angry if she knew I was talking to you,” Jeanne said, which didn’t exactly answer my question. “She said I should keep my mouth shut. But I gave up trying to please my sister a long time ago. Do you have siblings, Mr. Ross?”

“An older brother and a younger sister.”

“So you know what it’s like.”

“Family can be a joy and a pain,” I confirmed.

The line hissed silence.

“I’m sorry, is there something I can help you with?” I said, trying to prod the conversation toward … wherever it needed to go. “The story about your sister is going in tomorrow’s paper, so I’m on a bit of a deadline.”

“I wanted to call you because your card says you’re an ‘investigative reporter.’ Is that true?”

I put my hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t say something like, No, Jeanne, I’m actually a taxidermist with an active fantasy life.

I gave myself half a beat, then removed my hand and said, “Yes, it’s true.”

More faint breathing was followed by “Don’t you think it’s odd, her being killed in a hit and run?”

“I’m not sure I would choose the word ‘odd.’ I would just say it was a terrible tragedy.”

“The police said it was probably a drunk driver. What do you think about that?”

“That people shouldn’t drink and drive?” I said, trying not to sound like a smartass.

“I’m told bars around here close at two. Would anyone still be drunk at six in the morning?”

I sighed. Where was she going with this? “People get drunk places other than bars, so there’s-”

“And there were no skid marks,” Jeanne interrupted, her voice managing to rise above the flatness of Parkinson’s disease to gain some inflection. “The police said they didn’t find any skid marks on the street. Don’t you think the driver would have slammed the brakes after hitting something as large as a person?”

“Depends. The guy might have been so bombed he didn’t even realize he hit someone. It happens.”

Jeanne took a moment to consider this. She was nothing if not deliberate.

“Your card says you’re an investigative reporter,” she repeated. “Are you going to investigate the accident any further?”

“I’m not planning on it, no.”

I tilted forward in my chair and rested my elbow on my desk. The bottom right corner of my computer read 5:17. Obits, which are not considered breaking news, have to be filed by six, no exception. I wanted to be considerate to Nancy’s grieving sister, but I had to find a way to gracefully exit this conversation.

“I need to know if I can trust you, Mr. Ross,” Jeanne said.

“And why is that?”

“Because I have something I think you should investigate,” she said.

“Okay.”

Another pause. Then:

“It wasn’t an accident.”

“You mean Nancy’s death?”

“Yes. It wasn’t an accident. I believe Nancy had reason to fear for her life. I believe someone killed her.”

“What makes you think that?”

“She’s my sister. Sometimes sisters just know things about each other.”

“Yes, but do you have any proof?” I asked.

“No,” she said. Then, after a pause, she added: “And yes.”

“I’m listening.”

“I was the last person to talk to my sister before she died. She called me at ten on Thursday night-that’s one in the morning, her time. Mr. Ross, my sister went to bed at seven-thirty and woke up at three-thirty. She never had trouble sleeping like that.”

“So what was bothering her?”

“She was having … problems at work.”

“What kind of problems?”

The line went quiet again, causing me to press my ear to the phone. From somewhere in the background, I heard a door open. Jeanne drew in her breath sharply.

“Jeannie, whatchya doin’?” I could hear a male voice inquire.

And at that, Jeanne promptly hung up.

There had been a dent in his SUV, a roughly human-sized crease just to the right of the midpoint of the hood. That Friday morning, he spent an hour at one of those do-it-yourself car wash places making sure there were no traces of blood, skin, or muscle hanging stubbornly into one of the crevices.

Then he took the car to a local body shop, to a place that would do the work quickly and without comment. He explained he hit a deer while driving through South Mountain Reservation. The only question he received in reply was whether he had gotten some fresh venison steaks out of the deal. No, he said, the deer got away.

Then he started worrying about his own getaway. He knew all it would take was one citizen with quick eyes looking out the window at the wrong moment. For as fast as he was going, for as dark as it was, for as suddenly as it all happened, he still couldn’t rule out the possibility he had been spotted.

So that afternoon, he set up down the street from his house, where he could see the traffic coming in and out. And he waited. He waited for an unmarked car with a grim-faced detective to roll past on the way to his house. He waited for someone from work to phone and say the cops were there and asking questions. He waited for his lawyer to call and say there was a warrant for his arrest.

But none of it happened.

He relaxed a little when the story appeared on the Eagle-Examiner’ s Web site later in the day on Friday. The Bloomfield police were already begging the public for information, which was a good sign. It meant they had canvassed the neighborhood, come up empty, and were now tossing up one last Hail Mary before they completely forgot about this case and moved on to one they could actually solve.

He relaxed more when the same small, empty story appeared in the paper Saturday morning. He had worried the death of an employee might cause the paper to react more strongly, to run larger stories that would keep the news in the public’s eye-and therefore in the cops’ eyes. But the paper had treated it with yawning indifference. Ultimately, she was just another papergirl, nothing special after all.