Neighborhood Watch by Cammie McGovern Read Free Book Online

that?”
    He stared at me. “You want a life in there?”
    It broke my heart, all that we weren’t saying. “Yes, Paul. I want a life.”
    Though he wrote a few letters, he didn’t come again after that. Seeing him now, I feel a strange mixture of sadness and relief. We have so many touchstones in common. He knows the details of my case better than I do, and the way our life before the murder might have looked fine from the outside but wasn’t always. He knows the secrets we tried to keep. The ones we’re probably both thinking of now. When he finally comes over, it’s nice to hug him. “It’s good to see you, Bets. You look great.”
    “So do you,” I say.
    I ask if he’s held on to the old documents and transcripts from the trial. “Oh, sure,” he says. “Why? What’s up?”
    “Do you remember anything in there about Linda Sue’s cat?”
    He narrows his eyes slightly. It’s as if we’re picking up on our conversation exactly where we’d left off ten years ago. Here’s another detail we shouldn’t forget, another possibility . “There was a cat in her house that day. I saw it when I went over. About three years ago, I got a letter from someone who knew about it.”
    “Maybe they meant the stray? The gray calico with the fluffy tail—you remember that one?”
    Now that he’s said it, I do remember that cat. For about six months, he became a fixture on our block. He’d appear around dusk and follow someone home or pick a porch to sit on. Some of us fed him, some didn’t, but I don’t think he went a night without a house to sleep in and never the same one twice in a row. In the evening he was very affectionate, winding himself around legs and purring, and then in the morning he’d slip out the door and disappear the first chance he got. Barbara once said he reminded her of a few old boyfriends she’d had in college.
    I ask Paul if he ever saw it after Linda Sue died. He considers for a minute and shakes his head. The more I think about this, the more significant it seems. Not the cat but the fact of this letter, the directive tone, the circumscribed admission, as if someone were weary of sitting on his guilty secret and now wanted to get it out in the open. Think about the cat, you nitwit . I had for years and still couldn’t say what it meant. Did the cat walk through the blood and carry off some vital piece of evidence?
    “Do you think Geoffrey might have written it?” I ask tentatively.
    “No.” I’ve always wondered what Geoffrey was doing in the lead-up to my trial. He’d left the neighborhood but had still, in mysterious ways, made his presence felt. I know he called people, told them certain things. “No,” Paul says again. “Geoffrey didn’t know anything about the cat.”
    This seems odd. A minute ago, Paul didn’t either. “You talked to him about it?”
    He leans toward me to explain. “It was in the files of discovery. There was a cat food dish and litter pan.”
    “So you did know about it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “Because I didn’t think it meant anything. I thought it meant, you know, she had a cat. But I asked Geoffrey about it once and he said no, she hated cats.”
    So he’s thought about this, too, and puzzled over it. Maybe he doesn’t want to get caught up in a small matter the way we did before my trial when we dwelled obsessively on inconsistencies that took up all our time and got us nowhere. A muddy footprint on her porch; a phone call Linda Sue made that morning to a lawyer in Hartford. Every revelation felt like a breakthrough until it wasn’t: The footprint belonged to a carpenter who’d worked on her roof the week before; the lawyer didn’t recognize her name. Whatever she was calling him about remained as mysterious as the message she didn’t leave. “I never knew what to think,” Paul says. “Except maybe she was cat-sitting.”
    Marianne pulls me away from Paul to introduce me to a couple of Court TV fans who