Lisa Gardner: The Neighbor

“He called me immediately. Agitated, angry. He kept trying to tell me that I wasn’t thinking straight. He seemed to think that you had some kind of hold over me, maybe you were beating me into submission, I don’t know. But the more I tried to tell him everything was okay, the more he became convinced he had to save me.

“I broke off all contact. Stopped answering his calls, his text messages, his e-mails. I purged accounts. I did everything I could think of. I just wanted him to go away. And then, Wednesday night…”

She looked away. Jason caught her chin in his hand and brought her gaze back to him. “Just tell me, Sandy. Let’s just get it all out, then we can determine where to go from here.”

“Wayne appeared. Right here. In our bedroom. Apparently, he’d made an impression of my house key the last time I’d met with him. His face was red, angry. He was holding a baseball bat.”

She broke off. Her gaze was out of focus, seeing something only she could see. Jason didn’t interrupt. Just waited.

“I tried to stop him,” she whispered. “Tried to calm him down, tell him everything would be okay. I’d resume talking to him, go to the basketball games, whatever. Just, he needed to leave. He needed to go home.

“He hit me. With his hand. He struck me, here. Here.” Her fingers idly brushed the bruises on her face. “I fell on the bed and he came after me. I stopped fighting. There didn’t seem to be any point, and I thought, maybe if I just submitted, he wouldn’t be so angry. He’d finish and go away, before something worse happened. I was terrified about the baby, and Ree, of course. And you, too. What if you came home and found us, and he grabbed the bat…

“So many terrible things were going around in my head. Then… Ree appeared. She’d heard the noise and come to our bedroom. She was standing in the doorway, half-asleep. She said, ‘Mommy.’

“The second he heard her voice, he stilled. I thought that was it. He’d kill her, kill me. It was over. So I pushed him off. Told him not to move. Then I pulled my nightgown down, walked over to our daughter, and escorted her back to her room. I told her that Mommy and Daddy had been wrestling. Everything was okay. I’d see her in the morning.

“She didn’t want to let go of my hand at first. I got anxious. I thought if I didn’t get out of the room fast enough, maybe he’d come in. Bring the Louisville Slugger. So I swore to her that I had to go away for a moment, but that I’d be back. Everything was okay. I wouldn’t be gone long.”

“She let you go.”

Sandra nodded. “And when I returned to the room, Wayne was gone. I think Ree scared him. Maybe she shamed him back to his senses; I’m not sure. I went downstairs, redid the locks, not that they would do much good against a man with a key. Then I started to clean up. The bloody comforter, the broken lamp. Except…”

He rubbed the back of her hand. “Except…”

She looked at him, “Except I started to realize that nothing I did would be enough. Wayne works for the state police. He has a key to our house. Maybe he didn’t kill me that night, but what about the next, or the next? It’s not like a guy shows up with a baseball bat when all he wants to do is talk. He might press charges against you for the computer image, putting my husband in jail. Or heaven help us, he might go after Ree. She thinks he’s a friend. She’d get in a car with him. I started to realize… I started to realize that I’d made a huge mess of things.”

“So you ran away.”

She smiled thinly, catching the edge in his voice even as he tried to flatten it out. “I thought the only way to be safe from a man like Wayne was to have public knowledge of our relationship. If it was known that he was involved with me, then he couldn’t hurt me or my family, right? He’d be an automatic person of interest.”

Jason couldn’t follow her train of thought. “I guess.”

“So, I decided to disappear. Because if I disappeared, then the police would investigate, right? They’d learn about Wayne, then when I reappeared, I’d be safe. He wouldn’t dare do anything; it would cost him his career. So I retrieved your lockbox from that attic-”

“I never told you about the lockbox.”

“Ree did. She saw you after Christmas, when you were putting away the ornaments. She spent most of January chattering away that you had a treasure chest in the attic and now constantly demands to go ‘treasure hunting.’ I thought she meant that you had a box of mementos or something, but then, in the past few months, given everything that’s been going on, I’ve been reconsidering you. How easily you changed your name from Johnson to Jones. Our considerable cash reserves, which you never talk about, but I know are there from reading the bank statements. I decided to do a little digging around in the attic. It took me a couple of tries, but I finally discovered the metal box. The cash was very useful, the fake IDs… troubling.”

“Escape plans are important to me,” he said.

“There’s only ID for you. Not for a family.”

“I can change that.”

She smiled, more warmly now, and he found himself taking her hand again, tucking her fingers inside his.

“I threw on your old clothes, all in black,” she said. “I stuck the cash and IDs in my pocket-cash for me to use, IDs for me to hold so you didn’t disappear while I was gone. I used one of our spare keys to lock the door behind me, then I hid behind the bushes until you returned.”

“You hid in the bushes?”

“I couldn’t leave Ree alone,” she said earnestly. “In case Wayne returned. I couldn’t just leave her. It was hard-” Her voice broke. “It was very hard to walk away. You have no idea. Leaving the two of you… I kept telling myself it would only be for a few days. I’d lay low, stay at some cheap hotel, paying cash. Then, when the police started questioning Wayne, I’d reappear, say I’d gotten overwhelmed, some sort of Mom excuse, and after a few embarrassing days, the dust would settle and we’d continue on with our lives.

“I never expected my father would show up. Or they’d put Ethan through the wringer. Or… I don’t know. Everything grew bigger than I expected. The media attention, the police scrutiny. It’s all gotten out of hand.”

“You have no idea.”

“I had to cut through four back yards just to sneak into my own home tonight. It’s crazy out there.”

“So how are you going to do this?”

She shrugged. “Throw open the front door and declare, I’m back…’ Let the photographers click away.”

“The reporters will eat you alive.”

“I have to pay for my mistakes sooner or later.”

He didn’t like it. And pieces of the story nagged at him. Sandy’s lover hadn’t taken no for an answer, so she’d thought to expose the relationship by disappearing? Why not just go public with the affair? Tell him, notify the state police. Her vanishing act seemed extreme to him. Then again, she’d just been assaulted, had been terrified for Ree. Her level of physical duress, mental exhaustion…

He wished again he had been home Wednesday night. He wished he had kept his family safe.

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll do this together. Walk out together, hand in hand. I’m already the menacing husband. You can be the ditzy wife. Tomorrow they’ll crucify us; by end of week, we’ll have our own reality TV show and be sharing a couch with Oprah.”

“Can we do it in the morning?” Sandy asked. “I want to wake up with Ree. I want her to know I’m all right. Everything’s good again.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

They stood together. They had just taken the first step, when they heard a sudden dull roar from outside. Curious, Jason crossed to the bedroom window, cracking the blind and peering out.