"There's nothing in it," she'd say, convinced I was a total moron. "It's not like I get some huge allowance. There's no money in it."
At which point I would explain that most thieves did not have X-ray vision, and wouldn't realize the backpack was worthless until after they'd smashed in the car window and run off with it. And Angie would roll her eyes and say something like "You are becoming totally paranoid, Dad. Isn't there, you know, some medication you could take or something?"
And then there was Jesse.
None of these signs of the neighborhood's deterioration prepared us for the murder of Jesse Shuttleworth.
When I saw her picture on The Metropolitan's front page, I recognized her instantly. I had seen her, often, shopping at Angelo's with her mother. Five years old, curly red hair, a fondness for bananas. Loved to be read Robert Munsch stories, hated Barney the dinosaur.
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?"