Some nights, Mr. Duffy would come downstairs to sit at his workbench and clean his guns, which unnerved her. Growing up, she had learned early on not to trust men, and most especially not to trust men who drank. She would watch him from the corner of her eye as she rushed to do her work. He would sit at his workbench ten feet away, slowly taking a gun apart, carefully cleaning each piece as he smoked a cigarette and sipped at a glass of whiskey while old rock music played on the radio.
He had probably been handsome when he was younger, Evi thought at the time—which now seemed ridiculous to her as she stood in her kitchen washing dishes. She was older now than Ted Duffy was at the time of his death. He had been in his late thirties, but he looked older, harder, worn out by his life. Gray threaded through his black hair. Lines dug deep around his mouth and across his forehead.
“I’m just trying to escape,” he said one night a month or so after she had moved in. “I’m not here to scare you.”
“I’m not scared,” she said, too quickly.
He gave her a look. “You realize I get paid to know when people are lying, right?”
He smiled a little to himself when she didn’t answer. His eyes were blue and sad behind the amusement. He had seen a lot, she supposed, doing what he did. He knew all about women like her mother. He knew all about girls like her.
“We’re all just inmates, sweetheart,” he said, taking a sip of his whiskey. “Trying to make it through our stretch.”
She folded a T-shirt on the counter and set it aside. She would have taken the clothes upstairs to fold, but Mrs. Duffy got mad when the clothes were wrinkled from being thrown in the basket warm from the dryer.
“You could just leave,” she said. “If you don’t want to be here.”
She didn’t mean the basement. She had seen and felt the tension between him and his wife. She had heard the way Mrs. Duffy spoke to him, always critical, usually angry. He shot back with sarcasm. They were like snipers in a street war. Full-on battles were loud and nasty. But more often than not, he disengaged and stormed off to his office or to the backyard, where he chopped wood with vicious intent.
“Could I?” He lit a fresh cigarette and blew the smoke up at the ceiling. “Naw . . . You can run from your problems, but you can’t run from yourself. I just try to escape for a while. In here,” he said, tapping a finger to his temple. “Down here,” he said, gesturing to the half-finished space around them.
The basement was one of the ongoing fights between him and his wife. Barbie wanted the space finished with a big family room, an out-of-her-hair place to corral the kids and their friends. So far, all that had been finished was this area. “So far” had been going on for several years. But if the space remained unfinished, it could remain Ted Duffy’s refuge. If he finished the space, it became something else.
“You know that’s what your mom’s doing when she takes drugs, right?” he said. “She’s trying to escape. She can’t deal with the reality of her life, and so she tries to escape. But we can’t escape who we are. That’s the thing. We can’t ever really escape. We can just go to the basement for a while.”
“Do you know my mom?” she asked cautiously, watching him from under her lashes as she folded another T-shirt.
“No.” He picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue and flicked it away. “I know a hundred women like your mom,” he said, his voice tired and rough with a rasp of liquor and smoke. “And a thousand men like me.
“We’re a cautionary tale,” he said with a sarcastic half smile. He lifted his glass in a small toast, then tossed back the last of his drink. “Find something to do with your life that doesn’t make you hate the world, Evangeline.”
She had, but not before she had seen the worst the world had to offer. Not before she hated the world and everyone in it—herself most of all.
She wasn’t afraid of Ted Duffy after that night. She just felt sorry for him. He was a sad man with a sad life who, in the end, died a sad death.
The water in the sink had gone cold again.
Evi pulled the drain plug and turned away, grabbing a towel to dry her hands. The weight of her past had exhausted her. She went and sat down in the dining room, elbows on the table, her head in her hands. That past seemed so long ago—three lifetimes at least. But one knock on the door, and here it was again, twenty-five years later, like it was yesterday.
She picked up the business card the detective had left on the table and stared at the name of the woman who had pried loose the hinges of that box in her memory, setting all those faces free in her mind.
SERGEANT NIKKI LISKA, DETECTIVE
CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE DIVISION, HOMICIDE
Twenty-five years later someone had finally come to ask her what she knew about the death of Ted Duffy.
Evi closed her eyes against the tumult of memories and emotions, and thought, Everything.
And when she opened her eyes and looked around at the life she had fought so hard to get, she knew she would do everything in her power to keep her perfect present from being tainted by a past she couldn’t change.
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