Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (11 page)

I said, “You don’t mind parting with this one?”

She shook her head no.

We spent some more time talking about all the details she knew of Joe Neilsen’s life, whether he got good grades, whether he was the sort of kid to get into trouble, again whether he had any friends—male or female—part-time job, credit card accounts, a learner’s permit. The answer to everything was a listless no. “We tried to get him involved with different things, like with the youth group at St. Martin’s, but he was more of a solitary boy. Wasn’t very interested in things outside the house.”

“How comfortable were you and he with his sexual orientation?” I asked.

“The Manwarings told you,” Jacquie stated with a frown. “I could tell when you didn’t react to what I said to Tim. It could have just been a phase, you know? Experimental, right? He could have been wrong.”

Noting to myself that she hadn’t answered my question, I put an information form on the coffee table for her to fill out when she had a chance to look up some numbers and maybe remember other facts. I could spend a lot of time on this, but there were ways to prioritize the fact-finding, too. “Who did the death investigation?” I said. “Metro?”

“Do you mean the police? I have a card he gave me. But I only saw him once. He really didn’t do anything. There was no investigation.” Jacquie had it ready, having assumed I would want it. I looked at the card. Sam Humphries.

“I’ll talk to him,” I said. I would find out if George Manriquez was right about Humphries being thorough. “The ME said there was no autopsy performed.”

“Not … a whole one. Tim said it wasn’t necessary, and he said the medical examiner agreed.” Jacquie rubbed her face hard with both hands. “His body was removed, pronounced dead. Funeral at St. Martin’s. That was the last time I was there. It all went so fast it’s hard to remember what actually happened. It’s as if…”

“You haven’t yet been able to feel that Joe is actually gone,” I finished for her, going into my head where there were other times, other parents.

Jacquie opened her mouth and blew out all her air in one rush, my words punching her in the gut. I regretted them, but there was nothing I could do to soften the moment. She nodded. “He’s in his room,” she whispered, as if he could hear us talking.

“Would you be able to show me?”

Jacquie stood up, and I followed her for another walk, this time up a curving stairway that started in the living room, down a long hallway. It was one of those spaces littered with framed photographs, but I locked in on one of them. It was of all the Neilsens, costumed as the Marx Brothers. They had let Joe be Groucho, a diminutive boy with the glasses, nose, and mustache. He even had a cigar. Tim was Chico, an embarrassed smile, a brown wig under that funny coned cap. And Jacquie as Harpo, in a blond curly wig and openmouthed grin, pretending to blast a bicycle horn in Joey’s ear. That was all it took to see why Tim loved, or had once loved, her.

We kept on to a closed door. Jacquie forced herself to open it, revealing a typical boy’s bedroom done up in brown and forest green. Lots of electronics; I couldn’t tell whether Joe was particularly spoiled or this was just what young people’s rooms looked like these days.

From beneath the corduroy bedspread a sheet peeked that had cowboy boots with spurs on it. Either Jacquie was still buying sheets with cowboys for a fourteen-year-old, or she was thrifty and the sheets were so good they’d never worn out. At any rate, it was all nicely masculine. I stepped inside and looked around, trying to notice details that others might have missed. The only detail I could see was that there were none. Someone had cleaned well. I bet I wouldn’t even find a candy wrapper under the bed.

I turned around, but Jacquie hadn’t followed. She stood at the door of the bedroom and tentatively pointed with a limp index finger at the adjoining bathroom doorway.

“Did the investigator go through this area of the house? Look for missing towels that might have been used to clean up water?”

Jacquie shook her head. “He came up here. I don’t remember much. I was sitting on the couch downstairs.”

So whatever she told me just now was useless. I walked into the bathroom. It was done in that dark stone tiling that hides the dirt but not the calcium buildup from the hard water. No towels hung on the towel rods, and no half-used soap rested on the sink. The sturdy frame over the door to the shower would have made a fine place for a strangling. I opened the glass door, reached up overhead to grasp the frame with both hands, and let my body sag. That was the only thing I touched. Yes, a fine place for a strangling. If I was going to commit suicide I’d do it here, with some pills, not drown myself.

The quiet was so complete, the shower door closed with what felt like a bang. I came back out of the bathroom to find Jacquie still at the bedroom door, her eyes down and to the left, looking at the carpet.

I asked, “Did you see him? After?”

“In the pool, you mean? No, Tim got home first that night.” Jacquie paused, breathed. “I stayed late at my book club.”

“Did Tim call you there?”

“He said he thought I was at the movies and had my cell off. He said he was in shock and wasn’t thinking straight. By the time I got home Joey was already at the morgue. Tim is very efficient that way. He never misses garbage day, either. He always knows when pickup is off by a day. Due to holidays.”

Finally undone by what even she would admit was crazily trivial, she sucked in another huge breath and let it out in a sob. I reached my hand out but, cringing from my touch as if she wasn’t worthy of comfort, she sagged against the bedroom doorjamb.

“Joey’s father showed up at the funeral, not like he’d been involved much up to that point. He just wanted to come and tell me it was all my fault.”

In that moment I could tell that part of her reason for blaming everyone else was that she blamed herself, for staying too late at that fucking book club, sipping that third fucking glass of wine. Oh, those goddamn what-ifs, how they haunt us.

“Did Joseph’s father pay child support?”

“Not much. He doesn’t make the money that Tim does.”

“What does he do?”

“I think he’s selling cars.” So she traded in a car salesman for a doctor, and ended up with a dead son. Not that I was jumping to the conclusion that Tim had done something, that was just the sum of things. I could tell she was thinking along the same lines when she said, “You know, at first I wanted to keep the peace and went along with everything Tim said. But, you know, talking to you just now makes me realize if I can’t have Joey I don’t much care about keeping Tim.”

Tim probably knew that already, before Jacquie did. You can take a woman like Jacquie Neilsen and assume she’s just crazy with grief. It looked like everyone had done that, from her husband to Detective Sam Humphries, who investigated the death.

The fact was, I could understand people losing patience with someone who couldn’t accept the answers, but I couldn’t blame her for questions she had that were never answered. And if there were no answers, maybe she would be contented with knowing that. Maybe that’s all it would take, a lot of time and a little knowledge that something had been done and all the questions asked.

“How long have you been married?”

“Twelve years. Joey’s father left us when he was two. Then I developed this muscle pain and went to Tim as a patient. He diagnosed me with fibromyalgia. We started dating, and he seemed to want us both.”

“Seemed?”

Jacquie shook her head and went tearier. She looked like she was in danger of beginning to either cry or loop again, and I wasn’t sure either of us could take any more of that for the time being.

“How’s the fibromyalgia?” I asked to change the subject.

“It went away for a while, now it’s back.”

Maybe that was the medication Tim had given her. “Are you okay to show me the pool area?”

She nodded, and we went back downstairs, through the family room slash entertainment center, and out some sliding glass doors to the back patio.

The pool was big and curvy with rocks positioned around it to make sort of a grotto effect. A slide curved down between them. “That’s amazing what they can do with those fake rocks,” I said.

I could feel her bristle. “They’re not fake,” she said. You never disparage an Arizonan’s rocks, even a person preoccupied by her son’s death. “Tim had the pool put in when we got married. Said it was for Joey, but I never thought he really liked him.”

I thought of that Marx Brothers photograph. I thought if Tim didn’t like Joey at least he tried. I scuffed my shoes on the patio surface, nice flagstones that would absorb the water without getting slippery. There was no cement lip on the pool, more of a tile rim that went straight to water. That you could slip on.

“And you didn’t see anything,” I said.

“No. Like I told you, he was already at the morgue by the time I got home.”

“Jacquie, hard question here, but I have to ask them. Do you know if Joe ever consumed alcohol?”

She looked at me and I was surprised to see a little hatred in the look. “The investigator asked me that, too.” But she didn’t answer yes or no.

As she was letting me out the front door, though, she said, “Joey didn’t masturbate, either.”

I thought that was an odd thing to mention at parting; “good-bye” always works so much better. I wondered if she had heard some of the rumors about falling into the pool during autoerotic ecstasy. But I could go with this line. I just had to ask and try to keep the same emphasis on every word so it wouldn’t sound sarcastically like
what the hell, lady, everybody masturbates.
“How would you be able to tell?”

Jacquie half-mumbled, “I … I would have seen something. His underwear. His sheets. I would have known.”

I bet she would. I had the feeling anything touching the son’s privates were inspected pretty thoroughly on wash day, and Jacquie didn’t have the maid do it. It occurred to me that his pants might have been down because in his parents’ absence he was pissing into the pool, but I didn’t say that either.

I left the Neilsens’ place with the picture of Joe Joey Joseph and a copy of his death certificate, which was the only official record of the event other than the program for the funeral that Jacquie had. Even though there was nothing much here, I felt kind of a buzz, the kind that comes with a new case when everything is questions and there are as yet no answers. A blank slate kind of feeling where there’s everywhere to go and every kind of possibility. It would be easy to make the same assumptions as everyone else, but that wouldn’t serve Jacquie.

Tim. There were a few too many honestlies and truthfullies and franklies in his conversation. Interrogators will tell you that when suspects sprinkle those words through their dialogue it means they’re hiding something. Was Tim lying about something? Did he perhaps know some truth about his son that he was keeping from Jacquie? And what made him come home when I was there? If he knew, who told him?

Coffee drinkers understand that it becomes not so much a matter of how much caffeine you need, but how much you can tolerate. Feeling a little jangly but assuming I could stand even more, I called Mallory and asked if she wanted to meet me at the Einstein’s Bagels where I happened to be stopped at a red light. She told me she couldn’t leave Owen just then but I should stop by.

“Anything exciting?” she asked.

“I’ve decided to go ahead and investigate Joe Neilsen’s death. I want to know what you know about them.”

“What’s to investigate?”

“I’m getting creepy vibes about the Neilsens.”

“The Neilsens? Oh, come on. Maybe you need to have your vibe meter tuned.”

I laughed, headed back up Oracle, and turned right on Hardy.

Eighteen

The single-story Hollinger home was homier than the Neilsens’ but even more secluded. The side of Pusch Ridge rose dramatically right behind the house, and there was a public hiking trail next to it that started at the road below and ran practically through her side yard.

It was the two-hundred-foot drive up to the house, though, that got your attention. With a slight curve at, I’m not exaggerating, a forty-five-degree angle, you had to put the car in second gear going down. Once you got to the top you couldn’t see neighbors, though there was one off a little to the south of the house, cleverly hidden because it was halfway down the hill that the Hollinger house dominated. The view from the front was a clear shot across the wide valley that only stopped at the Tortolita Mountains fifteen miles away.

Inside, Mallory’s elegant style was all over the place. Bay windows with a mountain out back. Ten-foot-tall sliding glass doors off the master bathroom that you could open onto the patio when you were taking a bath. A swimming pool with a small waterfall, though no slide like the Neilsens had. But that sort of thing.

Mallory had told me she was a trust fund baby from someone who made their money with the British tabloids. She went into the art business for the fun and society, she said, and couldn’t seem to stop making money. She had a gallery in New York, then one in Boca Raton and one in Shaker Heights in succession. While she had sold her last gallery upon retiring out to Tucson with Owen, she had kept some of the art. There was nothing of the Southwest here, no blond wood furniture or Native American themes. Along with the furniture that could have come from a Park Avenue condo, stark and spare, she was into the modern stuff, Picasso, Rothko, Miró, and that’s just what you saw on the way from the front door to the kitchen. I wasn’t familiar with all of the artists, but I could read the signatures and they looked like first string.

Mallory Hollinger had wasted no time getting to know Tucson society by joining the symphony and regional theater groups, so she already knew the people who might associate with the Neilsens. I figured gossip was as good a start to my investigation as any, and besides, I could always use some girl talk, which I’d grown to enjoy. Turns out she knew little more than I thought she would.

Annette, Owen’s home health care nurse, met me at the front door. With one of those little brunette hair helmets that’s good for sports or a busy life, she had a body one describes as taut, like a circus tent, or a barracks bed. Big hands like a man. She had to be that way to toss her patients around the way she did. I liked her because she never acted like Owen or Mallory had cause to feel sorry for themselves.