The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum
Jennings sighed. “Is that true, boys?” he asked. “Things’ll go better from here on in if you don’t lie.”
“I guess,” said Donny.
Willie looked at his brother. “You fuck,” he muttered.
Jennings lifted Ruth’s hand and looked at the ring.
“Okay,” he said and then all at once his voice was gentle. “You go give it to her.” He worked it off her finger.
“Tell her not to lose it,” he said.
“I will.”
I went upstairs.
All at once I felt very tired.
Susan lay on the couch.
I walked over to her and before she could ask what was going on I held it up for her. I saw her look at the ring and see what it was and then suddenly the look in her eyes brought me down to my knees beside her and she reached for me with her thin pale arms and I hugged her and we cried and cried.
EPILOGUE
Chapter Forty-Seven
We were juveniles—not criminals but delinquents.
So that under the law we were innocent by definition , not to be held accountable for our acts exactly, as though everybody under eighteen were legally insane and unable to tell right from wrong. Our names were never released to the press. We had no criminal record and no publicity.
It struck me as pretty strange but then as we were excluded from the rights of adults I suppose it was the natural thing to exclude us from the responsibilities of adults as well.
Natural unless you were Meg or Susan.
Donny, Willie, Woofer, Eddie, Denise and I went to juvenile court and Susan and I testified. There was no prosecutor and no defense attorney, just the Honorable Judge Andrew Silver and a handful of psychologists and social workers earnestly discussing what to do with everybody. Even from the beginning what to do was obvious. Donny, Willie, Woofer, Eddie and Denise were placed in juvenile detention centers—reform school to us. Eddie and Denise for just two years since they hadn’t any hand in the actual killing. Donny, Willie and Woofer until they turned eighteen, the stiffest sentence you could get in those days. At eighteen they were to be released and their records destroyed.
The child’s acts could not be held against the man.
They found a foster home for Susan in another town, up in the lakes district, far away.
Because of what she’d said about me at the hearing and the fact that under juvenile law there was, strictly speaking, no such thing as an accomplice, I was remanded to the custody of my parents and assigned a psychiatric social worker, a bland school-teacherly woman named Sally Beth Cantor who saw me once a week and then once a month for exactly a year and who always seemed concerned with my “progress” in “dealing with” what I’d seen and done—and not done—yet always seemed half asleep as well, as though she’d been through this a billion times before and wished against all reason and evidence that my parents would be far more unforgiving with me or that I’d go at them with an ax or something, just to give her some issue or occurrence to sink her teeth into. Then the year was up and she just stopped coming. It was a full three months before I missed her.
I never saw any of them again. At least not in person.
I corresponded with Susan for a while. Her bones healed. She liked her foster parents. She had managed to make a few friends. Then she stopped writing. I didn’t ask why. I didn’t blame her.
My parents divorced. My father moved out of town. I saw him infrequently. I think he was embarrassed by me in the end. I didn’t blame him, either.
I graduated school in the low middle third of my class, which was no surprise to anybody.
I went to college for six years, interrupted by two years in Canada to avoid the draft, and came out with a masters in business. This time I graduated third in my class. Which was a big surprise to everybody.
I got a job on Wall Street, married a woman I’d met in Victoria, divorced, married again, and divorced again a year later.
My father died of cancer in 1982. My mother had a heart attack in ’85 and died on the kitchen floor by her sink, clutching at a head of broccoli. Even at the end, alone and with no one to cook for, she’d kept the habit of eating well. You never knew when the Depression would be back again.
I came home with Elizabeth, my fiancée, to sell my mother’s house and settle her estate and together we poured through the cluttered relics of her forty years of living there. I found uncashed checks in an Agatha Christie novel. I found letters I’d written from college and crayon drawings I’d made in the first grade. I found newspaper items brown with age about my father opening the Eagle’s Nest and getting this or that award from the Kiwanis or the VFW or the Rotary.
And I found clippings on the deaths of Megan Loughlin and Ruth Chandler.
Obituaries from the local paper.
Meg’s was short, almost painfully short, as though the life she’d lived hardly qualified as a life at all.
LOUGHLIN—Megan, 14, Daughter of the late Daniel Loughlin and the late Joanne Haley Loughlin. Sister of Susan Loughlin. Services will be held at Fisher Funeral Home, 110 Oakdale Avenue, Farmdale, NJ, Saturday, 1:30 p.m.
Ruth’s was longer:
CHANDLER—Ruth, 37, Wife of William James Chandler, Daughter of the late Andrew Perkins and the late Barbara Bryan Perkins. She is survived by her husband and her sons William Jr., Donald, and Ralph. Services will be held at Hopkins Funeral Home, 15 Valley Road, Farmdak, NJ, Saturday 2:00 p.m.
It was longer but just as empty.
I looked at the clippings and realized that their services had been just half an hour apart that day, held in funeral homes about six or seven blocks from each other. I had gone to neither. I couldn’t imagine who had.
I stared out the living room window at the house across the driveway. My mother had said a young couple lived there now. Nice people, she said. Childless but hoping. They were putting in a patio as soon as they had the money.
The next clipping down was a photo. A picture of a young, good-looking man with short brown hair and wide-eyed goofy smile.
It looked familiar.
I unfolded it.
It was an item from the Newark Star-Ledger, dated January 5, 1978. The headline read “Manasquan Man Indicted for Murder” and the story told how the man in the picture had been arrested December 25th along with an unidentified juvenile in connection with the stabbing and burning deaths of two teenage girls, Patricia Highsmith, 17, of Manasquan, and Debra Cohen, also 17, of Asbury Park.
Both victims exhibited signs of sexual assault and though both had been stabbed repeatedly, the cause of death was burning. They’d been doused with gas and torched in an abandoned field.
The man in the photo was Woofer.
My mother had never told me. I looked at the photo and thought I could see at least one good reason why—I might have looked in the paper and seen the picture.
In his twenties Woofer had come to look so much like Ruth it was frightening.
Like all the other clippings this one had been stuffed in a shirt box and put on the attic stairs and the edges were dry and brown and crumbling. But I noticed something along the margin. I turned it and recognized my mother’s writing. She’d written in pencil, which had faded, but it was readable.
Just beside the headline and rising up along the side of the picture she’d written with fine irony I wonder how Donny and Willie are doing?
And now, on the uncertain, unsettled eve of my third marriage, to a woman who would have been exactly Meg’s age had she lived, plagued with nightmares all of which seem to concern failing again, failing somebody, carelessly leaving them to the rough mercies of the world—and adding to those names she’d scrawled along the side of the clipping the names of Denise and Eddie Crocker, and my own name—I wonder too.
Author’s Note: On Writing the Girl Next Door
“Who loves ya, baby?” says Kojak.
Well, with the world’s most trusted Greek selling Atlantic City gambling, who knows? But I do know who and what
The what, broadly speaking, is the unpredictable. Not that some chance encounter with a redhead has me racing back to my apartment for a crucifix and garlic. More along the lines of Alzheimer’s, AIDS, or geese in the jet props. I was walking down Broadway one day when an entire oak dresser came plummeting to the sidewalk two steps ahead of me. That scared me. Scared me and made me mad.
And I feel the same way about the people who frighten me. They piss me off. I resent sharing my planet with creeps like Bundy who look like me and talk like me and who are very charming except that they have this one funny thing about them, gee, they like to bite the nipples off people.
This is not just empathy with the victim. I mean, I have nipples too.
Sociopaths scare me and make me mad. Not just the big-league sociopaths—the Mansons and Gary Tisons—but also the guys who rip off old ladies with land scams in Florida. All these types without a conscience. I know a woman whose husband got thrown off his seat at the Stock Exchange and to cover his debts forged her name to loans totalling over a quarter million dollars, not to mention IRS forms, and now all hell is breaking loose with liens against the house and back taxes and she—with a kid to support who, tragically, still loves the guy the way an eight-year-old almost has to love his father—hasn’t seen or heard from him since March of 1989. Neither has anybody else. He skipped. Nobody can touch him. While the world descends on wife and son like swarms of flies.
I’d wanted to write about one of these bastards for a long time. Their otherness. And what happens to us real people when we believe them to be human.
I found one in Jay Robert Nash’s Bloodletters and Badmen.
Her crime was unusual and wholly repellent.
Over the course of months and with the help of her teenage son and daughters—and eventually, the neighborhood kids as well—she had tortured a sixteen-year-old girl to death, a boarder, in view of her little sister, ostensibly to “teach her a lesson” about what it was like to be a woman in the world.
Her kids reminded me of something out of Lord of the Flies. But forget the kids—because here’s this woman, this adult, giving them permission, orchestrating things and leading them every step of the way in some sick game of instruction that had something to do with a fundamental loathing of her sex and inability to see any suffering but her own. Then transmitting that to a bunch of teenagers. The girl’s friends.
There was a picture of her in the book. Her crime took place in 1965, when she was thirty-six years old. But the face in the book was sixty. Sagging blotchy skin—deeply lined—thin bitter mouth, a receding hairline and dingy hair worn in the style of a full decade earlier.
Deep-set big dark eyes that managed to look both haunted and empty at once. Scary. Right away I was mad at her.
She stayed with me.
Then some years later my mother died, well-loved, in the same New Jersey home I’d grown up in and had known since infancy. In almost every way that counted it was still home base for me. I dealt with both losses gradually, leaving my apartment at intervals and spending a lot of time out there going through her effects, getting to know the neighbors again, remembering.
At the time I was reworking She Wakes, my only supernatural novel to date. I’d shelved it for a while. And it was good to go back to it then because I was in no condition to start something new—or something real—for the moment. A reincamated goddess on a sunny Greek isle felt just about right to me.
But gradually that woman started to insinuate again.
Maybe it was the 1950s hairdo. I dunno.
But when I was growing up, my street was a dead-end street and every house was filled with war-babies. I could imagine her doing it there. And then, if you lived through the 1950s you know its dark side. All those nice soft comfy little buboes of secrecy and repression black and ripe and ready to burst. There was the perfect kind of isolation and built-in cast of characters I could shapeshift after the real ones.
So I thought, kick it back to 1958, when you were twelve. Instead of the midwest, where it really happened, use New Jersey.
And being there, especially through the summer, things kept coming back to me. The smell of the woods, the bleeding damp walls of the basement. Things I’d been too busy to remember for years were keeping me awake nights now. There was too much detail surfacing to resist and I didn’t try. I could even give a nod now and then to what I liked about the time. We had brooks and orchards and unlocked doors. We had Elvis.
But I wasn’t doing Happy Days either. Not since Off Season, my first book, had I worked on a subject this grim. And Off Season was about cannibals on the coast of Maine for godsakes. Nobody was going to take it too seriously no matter now gut-churning I made the thing. Whereas this was about child abuse. Abuse so extreme that writing it I eventually made the decision to soften some of what happened and leave some out altogether.
It’s still pretty extreme.
There wasn’t any getting around that, not that I could see. The problem in fact was to keep it extreme without ripping off all those real live kids who are abused every day in the process.
Posing technical problems helped. I used a first-person voice for one thing, with the boy next door as narrator. He’s a troubled but not insensitive kid who vacillates between his fascination at the very license involved and what his empathy’s telling him. He sees plenty. But not everything. Which allowed me to sketch a few things rather than go at them close-up and full-throttle.
He’s also speaking some thirty years later. He’s an adult now so he can edit. So at one point when the going gets roughest I have him say, Sorry, I’m just not going to show you this. Imagine it for yourself if you care and dare to. Me, I’m not helping.
The first-person voice in a suspense book can automatically shift the reader’s sympathy directly to the object of violence. I’d used it in Hide and Seek to that effect. You know whoever’s talking to you is going to survive so you don’t tend to worry much about his physical safety. (Though you can worry about his moral safety and hopefully that’s what happens here.) But if it’s done right, you’ll worry about the safety of the people he cares about. In this case, The Girl Next Door and her sister.
It’s tricky. Because if the people he cares about are insufficiently drawn or sympathetic or you as a reader just don’t like lawyers or dogs the way he does, you’ll wind up just watching the bad guys, the violence, or both. Or closing the book forever.
But I’m not too worried about that (he says, quaffing deep his cup of hubris.) If the book has a moral ambiguity to it, a moral tension, it’s supposed to. That’s the problem this kid has to solve throughout, a problem with his view of things. And I’m not too worried because I like these girls and I think that’s clear. They’re not just victims. In some ways—especially as they relate to each other—I think they’re pretty heroic.
And because, by contrast, these other types scare me.
Scare me and yes, for being in my face every time I open a paper or turn on the evening news or talk to some woman whose drunken husband’s slugged her again, royally piss me off.
DO YOU LOVE YOUR WIFE?
“Sometimes I feel like you’re … I don’t know, not really there anymore,” she said. “Like no matter what I do, it wouldn’t make any difference, would it. Know what I mean?”
They were lying in bed. He was tired and a little buzzed from the scotches after work. Greene’s The Power and the Glory lay open on her lap. He was halfway through Stone’s Bay of Souls.
She was right. Stone could obviously rouse himself. He could not.
She was heading to California in a few days, leaving behind the chill of New York and his own chill for a week or so. Her ex-lover beckoned. Perhaps he’d become her lover all over again. Bass hadn’t asked.
“I’m not complaining,” she said. “I’m not criticizing. You know that.”
“I know.”
“And it’s not just you and me. Seems like it’s everything. You used to write.
“It’s like part of me obviously.”
“Not the best part.”
“Well. Maybe not.”
She didn’t say the rest of it. Even after three whole years it’s still her isn’t it. She hadn’t the slightest urge to hurt him with it. She was simply observing and leaving him an opening should he wish to talk. He didn’t. It wasn’t precisely the loss of Annabel that was bothering him these days anyhow. It was what was left of him in her absence. Which seemed to amount to less and less—a subtle yet distinct difference. He continued to feel himself rolling far beneath the whitewater wake of their parting. Way down where the water was still and deep and very thin.
“Confront her,” Gary said.
“Annabel?”
“Yes, Annabel. Who else?”
“After all this time?”
“My point exactly. You’re not getting any younger.”
“It’s easier said than done. She’s married now, remember?”
“So are you and Laura. In your very odd way.”
He was referring to Laura seeing her old lover again. Gary didn’t approve and didn’t mind saying so. It was four in the morning. They were closing The Gates of Hell. It was a hot summer night and the thirtysomething crew had come at them fast and furious despite the nine-dollar well-drinks.
“Confront both of them then, what the hell.”
“I don’t even know him. We met once when she was bartending for all of about five minutes. I’m not sure I’d recognize him if he were sitting right in front of me.”
“So maybe that’s part of the problem. You don’t know the guy. So you don’t know what he offers her. You don’t know why him. I mean, sometimes you meet the other guy and he’s not all that much, you know? Brings her down a notch. Sometimes that’s just what you need.
“You miss her and you think you’re missing this … enormous personality. But you’re only seeing her in the context of the two of you. You’ve got no perspective. You’re in there yourself, churning things up. Messing with the perspective. You think you know somebody but you don’t—not until you either live with them or see them in some whole new situation, like with somebody else. That’s my take on it, anyway. And I still think you’re fucking crazy letting Laura fly away to some clown in California.”