Last seen alive on a Wednesday afternoon, around four-fifteen, at the mini-park one block over from ours. Mother had looked out the window, seen Jesse on the swing, looked out again two minutes later, the swing empty but still swaying.
After looking for her for half an hour, the mother called the police, and they swarmed the neighborhood. There was a command center set up within a couple of hours, dozens of cops going door to door, looking behind hedges, checking garages. Volunteer teams of searchers were set up who walked through the nearby ravines. Sarah, who oversaw the team of reporters covering the disappearance, was uncharacteristically quiet about work when she came home. She sat in front of the TV and watched Seinfeld reruns and went to bed early, but woke around three, unable to get back to sleep.
Four days later they found her body in a refrigerator in a second-floor apartment rented by a man, supposedly from out west, who had been going by the name Devlin Smythe. There was a composite sketch. Shaggy headed, moustache, strong chin. Stocky build, they said. A man he’d done some electrical work for recalled seeing a Salvador Dali-inspired melted watch on Smythe’s shoulder (“body art,” the man called it) when he’d rolled up the short sleeves of his T-shirt on a hot day. “He rewired my house,” the man said of Smythe. “He did good work.”
His landlady called the police to say she hadn’t seen him, not since that little girl disappeared, and that he was overdue with the rent. A string of minor break-ins in the neighborhood came to an end about the same time. The police figured she hadn’t lived much more than an hour after her disappearance from the playground. She’d been suffocated.
I followed the case closely, clipping every story, with the idea that I might write about it someday. Maybe take a break from science fiction and write a true-crime story, or a novel based on the incident. But this was a story without an ending, without an arrest, and so my clipping file got buried in the bottom drawer of my desk.
It was also the story that pushed me over the edge, that convinced me it was time to make a life for ourselves someplace else, someplace safer, someplace where we didn’t have to be looking over our shoulder twenty-four hours a day. But as unnerved as Sarah was by Jesse’s murder, it never occurred to her that we should pull up stakes. These things happened. You moved on.
I found myself looking at the ads in the Sunday paper’s real estate section.
“Did you know,” I’d tell Sarah, who was reading through the news pages, criticizing headlines, “that if we moved, like, twenty minutes out of the city, we could get a place twice this size?”
Sarah said, “I can’t believe this. How hard can it be to include a location? This guy gets mugged, we couldn’t give the closest cross streets? People want to know if these things happen in their neighborhoods.” I think, sometimes, working at a newspaper takes all the fun out of reading one.
Instead of responding, I said, “Like this place, out in Oakwood?” I had been drawn to the ads about Oakwood because I had driven out there several times. There was a hobby shop out that way, Kenny’s, that carried a full line of SF-type model kits. “It’s got a master bedroom with an en suite, three other bedrooms, one of which could be turned into a study, and a full basement. I bet we could carve off part of that for a darkroom for Angie. She keeps up this interest in photography, she’ll want that. I might even get back into it. And there’s a two-car garage. Can you imagine if we had a two-car garage? And a driveway? No more sharing an alley with the Murchisons?”
We could get more for our money. The kids could have larger bedrooms. A rec room where they could entertain their friends. I didn’t have to mention anything about how crackheads, hookers, and child murderers weren’t common fixtures at the corners of streets with names like Green Valley Drive and Rustling Pines Lane.
Sarah agreed, one Sunday, to drive out and have a look. We got on the expressway, drove twenty miles, and took the exit that delivered us to Valley Forest Estates in the town of Oakwood. Despite what its name suggested, the development was well above sea level, and there wasn’t a tree in sight. The subdivision was in its early stages, giving it a kind of post-nuclear-attack look. Mounds of dirt, foundation holes, stacks of lumber, cement trucks rumbling by. As I turned into the parking lot for the model homes, Sarah surveyed the landscape and said, “Do you think we need moon suits? Will there be a breathable atmosphere?”
At the sales office, a woman in a pale yellow linen suit, standing at the most high-tech photocopying machine I’d ever seen, ran us off spec sheets and artists’ conceptions and floor plans of all the different models, with details on square footage, custom detailing, broadloom choices, warranties, proximity to commuter rail lines.
“We have many features that can be roughed in, like intercom systems, central vac.”
“Central vac,” I said, in case Sarah hadn’t heard. I did most of the vacuuming in our house, but I figured she’d still be impressed.
“It’s very convenient,” the woman said. “You just empty the canister whenever it’s full. It’s mounted in the garage, just by the door into the laundry room.”
Something clicked for Sarah. “Laundry room?”
“Well, of course.”
“But it’s off the garage?”
“Yes. You can use it like a mudroom, of course, have the kids come in that way. They can slip off their boots and snowpants and enter the house from the laundry room area.” Even when they were little, we’d been unable to get our children to wear snowpants or boots. It was a mix of seasonal denial and a resistance to anything geeklike.
“So let me understand this,” said Sarah. “There’s a laundry room, on the ground floor?”
“Yes, just around the corner from the kitchen.”
“Do you have a model we could look through?” she asked.
I was going to great lengths to mask my real motives in getting us to move out of the city, convincing her that it had nothing to do with paranoia and everything to do with having more space for us and the kids. Meanwhile, Sarah was blatant in her willingness to turn her back on everything the city offered to get a ground-floor laundry room. No more trudging down a narrow flight of stairs to a damp basement.
“You have no idea how great that would be,” she whispered to me as the saleslady walked us through the model homes next to the sales office. I couldn’t tell for sure, but she seemed to be getting turned on.
It didn’t matter which model home we strolled through, they all had ground-floor laundry rooms. And once Sarah became sold on that idea, she was more open to other features, like more cupboard space in the kitchen, two sinks in the en suite bathroom, a walk-in closet (“Oh my God”), and a skylight over where our bed would be. “Great when there are full moons,” the saleswoman pointed out when she noticed Sarah looking skyward.
“Is there a high school nearby?” Sarah asked.
“Well,” the saleswoman said, hesitantly, “not yet. But I’m sure once the neighborhood grows, and demand for educational facilities becomes great, the school board will have no choice but to build one. But there is a bus that goes by and gets them where they have to go.”
We brought the kids out the next week to show them around.
“Kill me now,” Paul said.
“What’s the name of this development again?” Angie asked. “Loserville Acres?”
Now that I had Sarah onboard (“No more traipsing up and down stairs with laundry baskets,” she said on the drive home from our first tour, sliding her hand up the inside of my thigh), we worked on the kids as a team. Bigger bedrooms, huge basement rec room, extra space in the driveway for when the kids got their own cars-
“We’re going to get cars?”