Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [29]
But he was glad when she told him that she wasn’t seeing anyone. He suspected that few men her age were worthy of her, would handle her as gently as she needed to be handled. “They’re all so shallow, so arrogant. Even the ones that pretend not to be,” she’d said.
After nagging her a couple of times and watching her withdraw from him, he let her be. After all, he had never listened to anyone when he was her age either. But he kept a careful watch on her, always ready to come to her rescue should she need him—even if that just meant a late night beer when she was stressing over finals.
But toward the end of the last semester in her senior year, she called him very late, her voice sounding small and scared.
“What’s up? Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. There’s something weird going on in my building. I think someone’s been murdered.”
A few nights earlier, as she sat studying, she had heard what she thought was the quick staccato of gunshots. But since she had never heard a gun fired before, she couldn’t be sure. She had looked out the peephole of her door but saw nothing. A few minutes later her phone rang and she forgot about the incident. But she had “a feeling” about it, she told Jeff. “What kind of feeling?” he asked.
“I can’t explain it, Jeffrey, except to say that it was the same kind of feeling I had in the parking lot that day when I saw the man who killed my mother.”
Over the next few days, she had noticed that the mail belonging to the woman who lived across the hall was piling up in her box. And on the night she finally called Jeffrey, she could hear the woman’s cat crying mournfully. She knew in her heart that her neighbor had been killed.
She lived alone off campus in an apartment in Georgetown. It was a nice building in a good part of town. But since she never overreacted to anything, he went right over, much to the displeasure of the woman sleeping in his bed—who left, incidentally, and never spoke to him again.
When Jeffrey arrived at Lydia’s apartment, they knocked on the neighbor’s door. Even as he stood outside, he caught the unmistakable smell of death. Since this was not an FBI case, Jeffrey had no right of entry. They called the local police.
The police arrived and Lydia’s fears were confirmed. The woman had been shot in the head, had been lying dead on her floor, her hungry cat gnawing on her fingers. Rather than being terrified and upset, as Jeffrey had expected, Lydia began asking questions of the police. Were there signs of forced entry or a struggle? How long did they think she had been dead? She intended to cover the story for the Georgetown University newspaper. Jeffrey was more worried about her lack of emotional response than he would have been if she had had a breakdown. That, at least, would have been more normal.
Jeffrey brought her back to his apartment. She hadn’t said a word on the way in his car, hadn’t shed a tear. She just stared out the window. Once she didn’t have anything to say professionally about how she would cover the story, or questions to ask of him about the possible motives, she had nothing safe to say at all.
“Are you all right?” he’d asked as he closed the door to his apartment.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I thought you would be more upset than you are.”
He knew as soon as he said it that it was the wrong thing to say, that it sounded judgmental, accusing. She turned on him.
“What did you expect? Do you want me to curl up into a ball and start crying for my dead mother? You know, I’ve been on the receiving end of every fucked-up thing this world has to offer. I have my own way of dealing with things.” She did not yell but her voice was a white flame, sizzling with anger.
Then she sank into the couch and put her head in her hands.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“I’m sorry, Jeffrey,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
He sat down next to her and put his arm around her. She looked up at him; he saw the same