Nancy Bartholomew - Sophie's Last Stand

Most of my neighbors had missed the prior morning’s excitement, returning home from work to hear about the discovery of a dead body in my backyard on the local news. Now they clustered in a group, talking and watching my car turn into a blackened shell.

“You okay, Sophie?” one of them called.

I nodded, but there was no safe way to approach them. The burning car blocked my path and the overgrown front yard made walking that way impossible. I stood on the porch instead, watching and shivering. It was a warm night, made warmer by the fire, but I felt cold and very alone. I could dismiss the dead woman in my backyard as a happenstance occurrence, but my car, now that was a different matter.

I looked back at the neighbors. Did someone not want me here? I knew this was a paranoid way to view the situation, but the car had to have been destroyed intentionally. Was it kids? Vandals? Who else would want to torch my car? I thought about Nick and dismissed him. He hated me enough to do this, but he was in prison. The worst he’d been able to do so far was send threatening letters. He wasn’t due out for months. As mad as he was about me turning him in, he wouldn’t know where I was now, and if he did, I doubted he’d spring for a torch job. In the first place, New Bern wasn’t Philly. He’d have to import talent and pay for their trip down here. Nick was way too cheap for that.

I looked up and down the street, saw the fire trucks rolling toward my house, and wondered who else could’ve bombed my car. Someone connected with the body in the backyard? Someone who thought maybe I knew something or needed a warning?

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told myself. “This is not Hollywood. You’re imagining things. Maybe it was just a freak accident. Things like that happen, don’t they? Gas vapors could ignite on a hot summer night, couldn’t they? It could happen, right?”

The firemen were pulling out hoses, rushing around to keep the fire from spreading, but my car was gone. A policeman edged around the smoldering hunk of metal and made his way up the driveway. He was using his flashlight, looking at the ground, searching for clues, I supposed. When he reached me, he glanced up and said, “Ms. Mazaratti? You all right?”

“Relatively speaking,” I answered.

“Wasn’t there a call here earlier today?”

“Yeah, there was a dead body in my backyard.”

It was another young cop. He kept staring down at his clipboard, like it was going to tell him what to do, and then looking back up at me. “Okay,” he said at last, “tell me what happened.”

“At 4:23 a.m., my car blew up. I was asleep, and when it exploded I woke up. End of story. You think it was an accident?”

“Well, ma’am, I don’t know. The arson investigator’s looking it over. He’s with the fire department, so he’ll tell us when he’s through. You didn’t see or hear anything of a suspicious nature before the car blew?”

I shook my head. “Like I said, I was sleeping.”

A familiar form was making its way up my driveway. Gray Evans, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, had arrived, a worried look on his face.

“You all right?” he asked me. I nodded and he turned to the young officer. “What you got?” The boy handed him the clipboard, Gray scanned it and then nodded. “All right. Go rope it off. We’ll get forensics over here.”

When we were alone, Gray looked back at me, his lips twitching with a suppressed smile. It took only a moment to figure out why he’d see this as funny. Long enough for me to realize that I was wearing bright green-and-pink pajamas covered in dazzling red cherries and fuzzy pink bunny slippers that Joe’s daughter, Emily, had given me.

“I was sleeping,” I said.

“And the slippers?”

“My niece gave them to me. She would be hurt if she found out I didn’t wear them.”

He looked over his shoulder as if searching for her in the crowd.

“Well, they’re comfortable. You wanna try them?”

He shook his head and smiled. “Your niece might not like that,” he said. “Besides, I’ll bet they’re way too small for me.”

I looked at his feet, remembered the things people said about the correlation between foot size and, well, you know, and started turning red. Gray noticed immediately and smiled even more.

“Y-you probably have your own,” I stammered.

“Bunny slippers? No.” He had no intention of making it easier on me. The young cop helped me out by calling Gray away.

I looked down at my feet and wiggled my toes. The pink bunnies tossed their ears and danced. They were cute. I looked back at Gray and saw that he was now talking on his cell phone, his back to me. My car was a sodden mass of ashes and debris. Men poked at the wreckage, examining it, taking samples of charred material and bagging them in small paper bags. The neighbors were disbanding, returning to their homes in ones and twos. Soon the sun would begin brightening the horizon.

I watched for another minute and then decided to make coffee. I figured that was useful. We could all use coffee. It gave me something to do. It made me feel like I had control over something, if only my coffeepot.

When Gray returned, he found me sitting on the front porch steps holding a thick mug in my hands. I’d pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, replaced the bunny slippers with sneakers and tried to tame my hair.

“Coffee?”

“Yeah, that would be nice,” he said, but he seemed distracted and distant. The smile was gone.

I led him through the house and into the kitchen, poured his coffee and motioned him to the table, where the milk and sugar sat waiting. He pulled out one of the heavy wooden chairs and gestured me into another.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“Okay.” The air in the kitchen felt heavy. I knew he had something unpleasant to say.

“So, somebody blew up my car and it wasn’t a freak accident.” I thought if I said it first it might make it easier for him, but that didn’t seem to help.

“Sophie,” he said, “earlier today, as part of our investigation, we ran routine checks on all the cars parked in the area. We do this in case one of the cars belongs to the victim. You know, if it gets left behind then we know maybe it was hers, or if it clearly doesn’t belong to someone in the neighborhood we can begin to narrow the field a little.”

I nodded, feeling impatient.

“We identified a white, 1996 Mercedes convertible, registered to Nicolas Komassi, 532 Hartford Street, Philadelphia.” Gray looked at me, his eyes smoky and somber. “Your ex-husband, right?”

I felt my hands begin to tremble, and the sudden urge to cry tightened my throat. I nodded, took a deep breath and said, “Nick’s in prison. He won’t be out for another eight months. And that address you have, it’s not his anymore—it was mine.”

Gray just stared at me. “Sophie, Nick got out of prison a week ago. I talked to his parole officer. He got an early release for good behavior. They tried to notify you, but you didn’t leave them a forwarding address.”

I slapped my hand down on the table. Coffee sloshed out of my cup and stained the napkin beneath it. “I didn’t want him to find me! I thought it would be better if no one knew how to reach me. I didn’t even leave a forwarding address with the post office. I just went in the house with Joey, packed my things and drove away.”

Gray covered my hand with one of his. “Okay, Soph. It’s okay. But somehow I’m thinking he found you.”

“No! He couldn’t. He wouldn’t do that!”

“It’s his car.”

That much was irrefutable. Nick’s car didn’t drive itself down to New Bern. Nick was in town, in my new town, in my safe haven, and now bad things were starting to happen, just like he’d promised.