Lisa Gardner - The Neighbor

“Is there anything else that helps you sleep? Music, a sound machine, a humidifier, anything else?”

Ree shook her head. “Nope.”

“What is the name of my cat, Ree?”

Ree grinned at her. “I don’t know.”

“Very good. If I told you those chairs were blue, would I be telling the truth or would I be telling a lie?”

“Nooo! The chairs are red!”

“That’s right. And we only tell the truth in the magic room, don’t we?”

Ree nodded, but D.D. could read the tension in the child’s body again. Marianne was circling around. Circling, circling, circling.

“Did you stay in bed, Ree? Or did you maybe get up to check on your mommy or go potty or do anything else?”

The girl shook her head, but she did not look at Marianne anymore.

“What does your mom do after you go to bed, Ree?” Marianne asked softly.

“She has to do her schoolwork. Grade papers.” The girl’s gaze slid up. “At least, I think so.”

“Do you ever hear noises downstairs, maybe the TV, or the radio, or the sound of your mother’s footsteps, or something else?”

“I heard the tea kettle,” Ree whispered.

“You heard the tea kettle?”

“It whistled. On the stove. Mommy likes tea. Sometimes we have tea parties and she makes me real apple tea. I like apple tea.” The girl was still talking, but her voice had changed. She sounded subdued, a shadow of her former self.

D.D. eyed Jason Jones, still standing against the far wall. He had not moved, but there was a starkness to his expression now. Oh yeah, they were homing in.

“Ree, after the tea kettle, what did you hear?”

“Footsteps.”

“Footsteps?”

“Yeah. But they didn’t sound right. They were loud. Angry. Angry feet on the stairs. Uh-oh,” the girl singsonged. “Uh-oh, Daddy’s mad.”

Behind D.D., Jason flinched for the second time. She saw him close his eyes, swallow, but he still didn’t say a word.

In the interrogation room, Marianne was equally quiet. She let the silence draw out until abruptly, Ree began speaking again, her body rocking back and forth, her hands rubbing, rubbing her stuffed toy’s ears:

“Something crashed. Broke. I heard it, but I didn’t get out of bed. I didn’t want to get out of bed. Mr. Smith did. He jumped off the bed. He stood by the door but I didn’t want to get out of bed. I held Lil’ Bunny. I told her to be very quiet. We must be quiet.”

The girl paused for an instant, then spoke suddenly in a soft, higher-pitched voice: “Please don’t do this.” She sounded mournful. “Please don’t do this. I won’t tell. You can believe me. I’ll never tell. I love you. I still love you…”

Ree’s gaze went up. D.D. swore to God the child looked right through the one-way mirror to her father’s face. “Mommy said, ‘I still love you.’ Mommy said, ‘Don’t do this.’ Then everything went crash, and I didn’t listen anymore. I covered Lil Bunny’s ears, and I swear I didn’t listen anymore, and I never, ever, ever got out of bed. Please, you can believe me. I didn’t get out of bed.”

“Am I done?” the child asked ten seconds later, when Marianne still hadn’t said anything. “Where’s my daddy? I don’t want to be in the magic room anymore. I want to go home.”

“You’re all done,” Marianne said kindly, touching the child softly on the arm. “You’ve been a very brave little girl, Ree. Thank you for talking to me.”

Ree merely nodded. She appeared glassy-eyed, her fifty minutes of talking having left her spent. When she tried to rise to her feet, she staggered a step. Marianne steadied her.

In the observation room, Jason Jones had already pushed away from the wall. Miller made it to the door just ahead of him, opening up the room to the brilliant fluorescent wash of hallway light.

“Miss Marianne?” Ree’s voice came from the interrogation room.

“Yes, honey.”

“You said I could ask you a question…”

“That’s right. I did. Would you like to ask me a question? Ask me anything.” Marianne had risen, too. Now D.D. saw the interviewer pause, squat down in front of the child, so she would be at eye level. The interviewer had already unclipped her tiny mic, the receiver dangling down low, in her hands.

“When you were four years old, did your mommy go away?”

Marianne brushed back a lock of curly brown hair from the girl’s cheek, her voice sounding tinny, far away. “No, honey, when I was four years old, my mommy didn’t go away.”

Ree nodded. “You were lucky when you were four years old.”

Ree left the interrogation room. She spotted her father waiting for her just outside the door, and hurled herself into his arms.

D.D. watched them embrace for a long time, a four-year-old’s rail-thin arms wrapped tautly around her father’s solid presence. She heard Jason murmur something low and soothing to his child. She saw him lightly stroke Ree’s trembling back.

She thought she understood just how much Clarissa Jones loved both of her parents. And she wondered, as she often wondered in her line of work, why for more parents, their child’s unconditional love couldn’t be enough.

They debriefed ten minutes later, after Marianne had escorted Jason and Ree out of the building. Miller had his opinion. Marianne and D.D. had theirs.

“Someone entered the home Wednesday night,” Miller started out. “Obviously had a confrontation with Sandra, and little Ree believes that someone is her father. ’Course, that could be an assumption on her part. She heard footsteps, assumed they had to be from her dad, returning home from work.”

D.D. was already shaking her head. “She didn’t tell us everything.”

“No,” Marianne agreed.

Miller glared at the two of them.

“Ree totally got out of bed Wednesday night,” D.D. supplied. “As is exhibited by the fact she went out of her way to tell us she didn’t.”

“She got out of bed,” Marianne seconded, “and saw something she’s not ready to talk about yet.”

“Her father,” Miller stated, sounding dubious. “But at the end, the way she hugged him…”

“He’s still her father,” Marianne supplied softly. “And she’s vulnerable and terribly frightened by everything going on in her world.”

“Why’d he let her come in, then?” Miller challenged. “If she came into the bedroom Wednesday night and saw her father fighting with her mom, he wouldn’t want her to testify.”

“Maybe he didn’t see her appear in the doorway,” D.D. suggested with a shrug.

“Or he trusted her not to tell,” Marianne added. “From a very early age, children get a feel for family secrets. They watch their parents lie to neighbors, officials, other loved ones-I fell down the stairs, of course everything is fine-and they internalize those lies until it becomes as second nature to them as breathing. It’s very difficult to get children to disclose against their own parents. It’s like asking them to dive into a very deep pool and never take a breath.”

D.D. sighed, eyed her notes. “Not enough for a warrant,” she concluded, already moving on to next steps.

“No,” Miller agreed. “We need a smoking gun. Or, at the very least, Sandra Jones’s dead body.”

“Well, start pushing,” Marianne informed them both. “Because I can tell you now, that child knows more. But she’s also working very hard at not knowing what she knows. Another few days, a week, you’ll never get the story out of her, particularly if she continues to spend all her time with dear old dad.”

Marianne started picking up the toys in the interrogation room. Miller and D.D. turned away, just as the buzzer sounded at the pager clipped to D.D.’s waist. She eyed the display screen, frowning. Some detective from the state police trying to summon her. Figures. Throw a little party with the media, and all of a sudden everyone wants in on the action. She did the sensible thing and ignored it, as she and Miller headed back up to homicide.