“Maybe they’re just scared that the same thing might happen to their moms,” Jack said.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I still hate living here.”
“Where would you like to live?” I asked.
“With Grandma,” he said. “I miss her. I wish I could go live with her.”
“Have you asked your dad if you could?” I asked.
“He says he would miss me too much. I think he’s just worried about what people will think.”
“Do you remember when Nick Parrish lived in the neighborhood?”
He shook his head. “I was little when he moved. Gilly remembers him. I think she used to go over there to see the lady or something.”
“The lady? His sister?”
“Yeah.” He hesitated, then said, “I knew it was Nick Parrish a long time ago. Before the cops knew.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t know his name,” Jason said, “but I had seen him.”
“When?”
“Before my mom was killed. He was staring at our house one time when Gilly was baby-sitting. I was kind of little then, too — well, a third-grader, is all — but it scared me.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“I told Gilly. She went out and looked for him. But by then there wasn’t anybody there.”
“You didn’t tell the police?”
“I didn’t get too good a look at him,” he admitted.
“What did you see?”
“I just saw this man in a car. But later, I figured it out — you know, when Gilly remembered he used to live on our street. It was too late,” he said sadly. “Besides, who’s going to believe a kid? It’s like Gilly said, no one would take a kid seriously.”
He reached into the bag of fruit and picked out an orange. He studied it in his hand, then hurled it hard against a tree trunk, where it landed with a pulpy thunk, then managed to cling to the tree for a few seconds before dropping to the ground. When I turned to look at Jason in surprise, he ducked his head, but not before I saw that his face was twisted up — in anger, but not anger alone.
“The other day, I threw something hard like that,” I said. “I thought it would make me feel better, but it didn’t, really.”
“What did you throw?” he asked, talking to his ankles.
“A computer monitor.”
He looked up, eyes damp but wide. “Get out!” he said admiringly. “A computer monitor?”
“Yes. Really stupid thing to do. Someone could have been seriously injured by what I did. I ended up feeling worse than I did before I threw it.”
“So why did you throw it?”
“I was angry. Angry and blaming myself for things that had gone wrong, I suppose.”
“Things that were your fault?”
“Some of them. Some were things that I really could have changed, could have done better. But a lot of it probably would have turned out the same way no matter what.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for example, I thought I should have figured out what Nick Parrish had planned up in the mountains.”
“How could you? Even the cops didn’t know. A bunch of them died.”
“Yes, and maybe that was my fault, because I suspected Nick Parrish of being up to no good. Sort of like you suspected the guy in the car of being up to no good.”
“But maybe if I had told my dad instead of Gilly . . .”
“Was your dad home?”
“No.”
“So maybe the man in the car would have been gone by the time your dad got home. Even if your dad had called the police that night, they would have said, ‘Is the man in the car doing anything?’ and if your dad said, ‘No,’ that would have been that. Maybe it wasn’t even Parrish out there that night.”
“Maybe,” he said, without conviction.
“It troubles you anyway, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I kept hoping that the thoughts that were troubling me would just go away. They didn’t. So now I’m trying to talk about them a little more. It’s hard.”
