money—now, why do you think that is?”
“You’re like to get me sacked, and I’ve been employed all of one day!” said Bridget.
“They’ll do nothing to you,” said Mary.
“Mr. Borden told me himself that Maggie, the girl afore me, lost her post for telling tales.”
“That’s not what Maggie said.”
“And what did she say?”
“She left of her own accord. She said she was scared.”
“Whatever of?”
“The people in that house.”
Relieved, Bridget laughed.
“Ye can laugh at that?” Mary asked.
“Foolish Maggie, and her loss is my gain.”
“Well, aren’t you the cat that swallowed the cream,” said Mary with some disappointment. It was clear she’d hoped for some more dramatic reaction from Bridget.
“Bitter cream, but yes,” said Bridget, and Mary indulged in peals of laughter.
“I think we’ll get along famously. Might you join me of a Saturday night at Nancy Spain’s Pub for a ceilidh? They do it once a month and open the doors for the women.”
Bridget’s eyes widened. “I would!”
“You’ll be crying at the sound of the uilleann pipes again, as if the green turf were under your feet again. You are from County Cork; are ye not?”
“Aye, from Allihies.”
Mary nodded. “I’m from Mitchelstown. This whole neighborhood’s been transplanted from Cork, it seems. The Bordens better watch themselves if they don’t like our sort encroaching!”
Bridget eyed the other woman and made a point of turning around to survey the windows of the Borden household. “Sound travels,” she observed.
“That it does,” agreed Mary. “And instructs, even. Now then, miss, I’ll collect you out front at half four on Saturday.”
“We’ll walk?”
“Aye, ’tis only five blocks this way,” said Mary, pointing toward Main Street.
Bridget clasped Mary’s hand in sudden emotion. To hear the ballads again! To dance to the rhythms of pipe, fiddle and bodhran and leave behind, for an evening, the oppressive nature of the Borden home. She longed to hear in full force a roomful of the lilting language she grew up with, the tones soft even in anger, what the world called a brogue, for some reason attaching a soft untanned shoe to the glory of the dulcet.
“I’m beholden to ye,” she told Mary. “Truly so.”
JULY 6, 2016
She has one rolling suitcase and a Rubbermaid tub, which holds all her possessions.
And here’s her new apartment. She always rents them furnished; she moves so often, it isn’t possible to haul furniture along with her. She has culled her property to the spare kernel of necessity, because the very word belongings intimates something she can never do: belong.
The apartment’s not bad. She called from Tucson and rented it unseen. In the Boston outskirts, it’s perhaps a little too close to where she grew up, but they always seem to find her, so it hardly matters.
She walks the small hall to inspect the sole bedroom with the dated mirror slider for the closet and the cheap carpet with pet stains. The bathroom is relatively clean, but she’ll reserve judgment until she runs the shower the first time to see if it drains well.
Back in the kitchen, with its flimsy cupboards and scratched linoleum, white gauze curtains lift in the breeze, bringing in a sweet, earthy smell from outside. Brooke has always loved this household drama, wind writ large, but knows it isn’t for her. Other people can relax in semitransparency, aware their shapes are visible to those in the darkness beyond . . . without caring. Others don’t mind that their voices carry into the yard beyond.
But this is not the case for her. She takes one last breath of the outdoors before closing and locking the window. She pulls her blackout curtains from her suitcase and swiftly threads them through the curtain rod, pulling them across the window as the gauze presses to the other side until completely superceded.
She inhales the blessed darkness of privacy. She can relax enough to unpack her small, curated collection of possessions.
Tomorrow, she’ll start her new job at the coffeehouse. The wages she earns being paid under the table are enough to keep her going. She did get a fairly decent insurance payout when her mother was murdered and converted it to traveler’s checks that she cashes only every now and then. She’s learned how to live with very little, studio apartments usually, with cinder-block walls. No cable, no wifi other than what she can catch through her neighbor’s walls. She shops at thrift stores on their 50-percent-off days. She does her own nails.
She always gets a library card and reads for free, and that is the key to her happiness. Brooke reads voraciously in the true crime genre. She takes strange comfort in these devastating tales, because when the killers come for her, it won’t be that bad. They didn’t torture her mother, and her death must have been fairly quick. It’s unsettling, though, that they taunted Brooke with the dinner plates, and that they now amuse themselves with a cat-and-mouse game. She hates that playfulness, the long stretch of years in which they’ve denied themselves closure. Because if they know where she is, why haven’t they already killed her?
They let her move from town to town, reinventing herself, taking a new name. Each time, she thinks maybe she’s gotten away, but then they eventually give her some sign, some indication that they’ve found her.
She’s learned to live with this slow chase, feeling temporary relief—like now—when she’s in a new city. She reads true crime to understand the motives, the thinking behind the pursuit . . . because maybe when they come for her for real, she’ll know what to say.
So she studies up, has read every Ann Rule book. She knows details of strangers’ murders with an encyclopedic memory, probably better than their own family members, loath to hear about and thus visualize their loved ones’ last moments on Earth.
She had started reading at the group home as a way to distract herself from the pain of her mother’s murder, a death so much less gruesome than those in these horrible pages. Her beautiful mom had been pushed off the road by a car that didn’t linger and which no one caught the plates of. A drunk driver, the police had concluded, but she knew better. Instead of murder, it had been called manslaughter. She hated that word. As a girl who grew up speaking both English and Spanish, she found it very strange. Slaughter was how animals became meat, and her mother was not
