She made that slight nod again, but she was still far away in her mind. “That’s what they said,” she whispered.
Now, as she put the pieces of Jennifer Duffy’s answers together, Nikki could see why she had been the one to take her father’s death the hardest. He had never been the father she wanted, and her hope for that to change had died with him. Her father hadn’t seen her off on her first date, hadn’t seen her graduate, would never walk her down the aisle—and somewhere deep down inside there was still a tiny remnant of that nine-year-old girl that believed she was somehow responsible.
“So you grew up to be a librarian,” Nikki said, to move her memory away from the dark corner of her father’s death. “Were books a refuge for you as a kid?”
“You can go anywhere in a book,” she answered, smiling slightly. “Be anyone. And life has to make sense in a book. Real life doesn’t have to make sense. In real life, good people can turn out to be bad people, and bad people can get away with murder . . . and worse. I’ll take a good book over that any day.”
She used both hands to lift her cup to her lips. It rattled on the saucer as she set it down.
“My oldest boy is an artist,” Nikki said. “He draws his own comic books. That’s his escape. He says the same thing. In comic books, the bad guy always gets it in the end. There’s a lot of comfort in that.”
Jennifer Duffy stared out the window, her mind years away, in a place where a nine-year-old girl had to hide away from a bad reality. Her father’s death? Her parents’ struggling marriage? Their unhappy family? Her own unjustified guilt . . .
“Can you tell me about the girls who were living with you at that time?” Nikki asked. “Angie and Penny?”
Jennifer Duffy looked at her, confused. “Why? What could you think they would have to do with anything? They were teenagers.”
“I’m fishing,” Nikki confessed. “I spoke with your old neighbor Mr. Nilsen. He said the girls were kind of wild. Maybe one of them had a bad boyfriend or got in trouble with people in the drug culture. Or maybe they had someone in their family background who was unhappy with them being in the foster care system,” Nikki suggested. “Or someone who didn’t want them talking to a police detective.”
“That sounds like a movie,” Duffy said. “They were just teenage girls. I don’t think anybody cared about either of them.”
“Did you like having them around? It had to be kind of like having instant big sisters, huh?”
“I never liked Penny. She was mean when she babysat for us. And she was a liar and a thief. I wasn’t sad to see her go.”
“And Angie? She was the older one?”
“I liked her. She was quiet, and she was nice to us. She liked to read, too,” she recalled. “She would read to me sometimes,” she admitted, smiling a little at that one small fond memory. “I loved to be read to, but I was supposedly too big to be read to, so I never asked my mom to do it. She didn’t have time anyway. I was the one who read to my little sister and brother at night.”
“And then Angie would read to you?”
“She would sneak into my room, or I would sneak into hers, and we would curl up in bed and take turns reading out loud.”
Her expression changed slowly as she looked inward. A happy memory was slowly overtaken by one not so pleasant, like a cloud passing over the sun.
“Anyway . . . I should be getting back to work,” she said, pulling herself away from the dark thought.
“Angie wasn’t there when your father was shot,” Nikki said, pressing forward. “Do you remember where she was?”
“No,” she said, gathering her purse and pushing her chair back. “Something at school. Really, I need to get back to work.”
“I’ll walk with you,” Nikki said. “I’m parked on Marshall.”
Jennifer Duffy didn’t look happy about having to spend another three minutes with her. They went back out into the damp. The librarian set a brisk pace.
“It must have been hard for you,” Nikki said. “Losing your dad and then losing your surrogate big sister. Did you stay in touch with Angie after she left?”
“No. I never knew where she went. No one would tell me.”
“Do you remember the kid that lived next door? Jeremy Nilsen? He mowed your grass.”
“He was in high school.”
“I know. So was Angie. They must have known one another. Were they friends?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said curtly as she pulled open the library’s outer door. “And I really don’t see the point of this. How could it matter? I have to go back to work. Thank you for the coffee.”
“Thank you for your time,” Nikki said as the glass door closed in front of her. “And you would know,” she murmured, watching Jennifer Duffy disappear into the library. “That is the point.”
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