Chapter 55
Another murder in Hawthorne Heights. Not in Mary’s house this time, but across the street. The sight of those vehicles, their metal heft and flashing lights, and the people who departed them so quickly, so urgently and importantly, all of it took Mary back to that night nearly two decades ago.
Everyone is horrified that such a violent and gruesome death has happened so close to home, so near the place where they sleep and eat their meals, where they taught their children to ride a bike, where they bathed them after, rinsing scraped knees in sudsy water.
But they are also relieved that it wasn’t in their home, that it wasn’t them.
They’re scared, yes, but not as much as they could be.
Mary knows this better than most, and she shares these feelings this time.
There is no blood on her hands. No blood in her house.
It’s Sunday afternoon, and Mary has visitors. She never has visitors on a Sunday afternoon. She never has visitors.
“I’m very sorry for her,” Mary tells the detectives who sit at her kitchen table. “It’s such an awful thing. It’s so shocking.”
“Yes, it is,” says the male detective. Mary has already forgotten his name.
It was a generic name, and he’s a generic-looking man.
The woman detective is not. She’s elegant and memorable, and she’s watching Mary with cool eyes that, Mary senses, can convey a variety of emotions—whatever she chooses.
And that she has chosen this expression of frosty distance, of interested suspicion, makes Mary very uncomfortable.
“Is she okay?” Mary asks. “His wife?”
The detectives exchange a glance, their eyes trailing sideways, finding each other’s.
“I’m sorry,” Mary says quickly. “Of course she isn’t okay. Her husband was killed last night—that was a silly thing to say.”
It was a strange thing to say. They’re expecting her to be focused on her fear—a killer in the neighborhood, suspicious circumstances. But she’s more interested in the people orbiting the man who died and what the living will have to face next. How can she not be, after what she went through?
She went back to bed after she saw the emergency vehicles outside, but she didn’t sleep.
She searched for news alerts with the name of her street, but nothing came up.
Obviously. It was too early. But she’d continued to search, hoping that it was something insignificant—a petty break-in, a misunderstanding.
Not murder. Surely not another murder. Finally, early this afternoon, there was something.
Man found dead in his backyard in Hawthorne Heights neighborhood. Suspicious circumstances. Police are asking anyone with information to come forward. An anonymous tip line has been set up.
Neither the manner of death nor the man’s name were listed in the article, but Mary could picture him, her neighbor. He had thick, dark hair, a trim build. She thought he was in his mid-thirties, born a few years before her son, perhaps. So much life left to live.
“And you don’t have anyone in custody yet? No one saw who did it?” And she suddenly does feel fearful, exposed, the way she’s supposed to. Murder—so unfamiliar this time; distant yet still so close.
“Not yet.”
Is Mary imagining it, the way the detectives’ eyes flick toward the basement door?
“Were you home last night, Mrs. Irvin?” Detective Scott asks with a sense of finality. They’re here to ask questions, not answer them.
“I was home all evening, and all night. The vehicles woke me up, but I stayed inside. It seemed like something awful had happened, but I didn’t want to go out and interfere.”
She saw them from her bedroom window—the neighbors in their pajamas and loungewear, creeping closer with gleeful horror.
“And were you acquainted with your neighbors, Ben and Kate Harvey?”
“I’m afraid not,” Mary admits. “They only moved in, what, a few months ago? I saw them going out for walks on occasion. I think I noticed the woman planting flowers once. But I didn’t stop by to introduce myself. Maybe that wasn’t neighborly of me. But I really do keep to myself.”
The detectives nod as though they don’t doubt this.
Mary’s hermetic existence makes perfect sense. Who would want to be neighborly with her, Mary Irvin? Who would ever ask her to bring in their mail or come by to feed their cat? Why does she still live here? You’d think she’d have moved out a long time ago, considering what happened in this house.
“What about your son, Mrs. Irvin?”
Perkins. The name comes to her as she stares at the man, at the shining patch of scalp on the top of his head.
“Was your son home at the time?”
Detective Perkins’s tone is light and pleased. He wants Mary to understand that he knows. He knows about Owen. He knows what Owen did.
And how strange it is? How wonderful, in some ways, how awful, in others, to have this man, this detective, mention Owen? To make him real to her again, to prove that others know that he still exists.
How’s your son? How’s Owen? her colleagues used to ask her politely when they passed in the teachers’ lounge at the school. It’s been so long since she’s heard his name aloud. It’s been so long since she’s seen him.
“Of course he was home,” Mary tells the detective. “He was asleep, like I was.”
“We’ll have to talk to him, too,” the detective continues. “You know that, don’t you?”
Mary does.
“He’s here, correct? He’s supposed to be here, with you.”
As though she does not know this—the conditions of his parole.
“He’s here,” Mary says softly. It’s true, but it’s also not. “He stays in the basement.”
“Is he home?” asks Detective Scott. She’s already rising, legs half bent as she pushes herself up.
“I believe so,” says Mary, and the detective towers over her. “But you should know—he might not speak with you.”
“He’ll have to,” says Detective Perkins. “Under the circumstances, he’ll have to speak with us. We’re interviewing everyone in the neighborhood. No one is exempt. And especially not him, considering his…history.”
His vehemence is aggressive, and Mary feels herself flinch, just as she notices that Detective Scott is studying her silently, expression curious.
“What are you trying to say, Mrs. Irvin?” Detective Scott drops back onto her chair, as though she knows already that Mary’s explanation won’t be a simple one.
“It’s not that he wouldn’t want to help with the investigation,” says Mary, and she hopes this conveys her confidence that her son did not kill that man. He had nothing to do with it. “It’s that he doesn’t speak at all. Not anymore.”
“He doesn’t speak?” Perkins asks, derisive. “That wasn’t indicated anywhere in his case history.”
“Well, I can’t speak to what his parole officer has and hasn’t put in her reports,” says Mary, hoping that she isn’t getting that young and lithe woman, with her perfunctory visits and gentle but hurried manner, into trouble.
“But it started when he got home. He was sixteen when he was incarcerated in the adult facility. Can you imagine what he went through in there, being that young?” She closes her eyes.
She can’t imagine it—literally, cannot let herself do it.
If she does, she won’t be able to go on.
“When his parole was granted, I picked him up to bring him back home. I was so relieved that he was out. I could keep him safe. But it was too late. He wouldn’t speak. He wouldn’t say a word.”
“I—what do you mean? Has there been a diagnosis?” asks Detective Scott.
“How could there be? He won’t leave. I brought him home, and he went down into the basement.
He lives in the bedroom down there. I leave meals and other things he might need—toilet paper, cleaning supplies, shampoo, that sort of thing—on the stairs for him.
Sometimes he comes up here to take other things that he needs.
But not when I’m around. And he doesn’t speak to me. He refuses to speak to anyone.”
There’s a silence, heavy and judgmental.
“That’s…unexpected, Mrs. Irvin,” says Detective Scott at last.
“Yes, well, it was for me, too. I’ve called doctors and I’ve done my own research.
But it’s clear to me that Owen doesn’t want to deal with any of that.
He just wants to be left alone for now. Maybe he needs to process everything that’s happened.
He’s been through enough. I’ve decided to let him be for a while.
I think he’ll talk when he’s ready. My sweet boy.
What he’s been through.” Mary shakes her head tightly.
She presses her lips together, as though she’s holding her anger inside, letting it turn her lips white, deepening the lines that feather away from her mouth.
“Your ‘sweet boy’ is thirty-three years old, Mrs. Irvin. He’s a murderer.”
Mary turns to her. She expected such words from the male detective. Not her. Scott holds her gaze. She doesn’t back down. Mary feels betrayed.
“You make it sound so simple, Detective. It’s anything but.”
Scott ignores her. “We’ll need to speak to him. Now. Would you like to ask him to come up here or go down and let him know that we’re coming?”
Mary suspects she’s supposed to be grateful that the detective is at least offering her that much. But all she feels is betrayal. Of this detective, and of all the others before her. Of every cog in this massive and crushing wheel of a system that has so completely failed her child.
“I’ll go down,” Mary says. “I’ll let him know what’s going on.”
There’s motive, weight, behind each word. She’s indicating to them now that Owen has no idea what’s going on. Because he had nothing to do with that man’s death.
She stands, and she moves away from the table.
Her heart is in her throat because she has wanted to have a real and unselfish reason to intrude into her son’s space, to see him, to come close, for so long, and now she has one, but it’s possibly the worst reason she could have imagined.
A murder, a stabbing, police here to see him.
Mary opens the door leading to the basement.
“Owen,” she calls into the darkness. “I have to come down.” She wants to give him a warning, but her voice is weak and it trembles. “I’m sorry,” she adds because she is so sorry, for absolutely everything.
She takes a step forward, onto the top stair, the one where she has left meals and notes, gifts and clothes, over the last few years, all of it silently accepted. But nothing ever offered in return.
Mary descends the stairs slowly, somehow hopeless yet brimming with hope. She moves toward the darkness, toward the increasingly musty smell, toward the sound of nothing at all, toward her son.