The Girl Next Door by Brad Parks Page A

point of outgrowing humble beginnings—it meant you never had to revisit them.
    But the truth, which few people knew, was that he started at a low station. His family was filled with totally unremarkable types, the kind of people who were born, lived, and died without the wider world ever being aware of them. They were cogs in the machine, nothing more.
    His father was an off-the-docks immigrant who worked for a grocery distributor, loading and unloading produce trucks—tomatoes, oranges, whatever was in season. The man never complained about it, until one day he just wore out. He was a few months short of retirement when he suffered a massive heart attack, right there on the loading dock. The forklift he was driving at the time slammed into a wall, spilling a couple skids of lettuce. One of his coworkers said it looked like he was dead before the lettuce even hit the ground. Within a half hour, the mess was cleaned up and someone else was driving the forklift.
    His mother, who had come with his father from the old country, was a homemaker, living in the same fifth-floor walk-up apartment from the day she got married until the day she died. Her husband wouldn’t let her take a job, and in some ways it didn’t matter: she never wanted one anyway. She was content to raise her children, spend time with the other women in the neighborhood, play her bingo, and smoke her Pall Malls. After her husband passed, she got by on their meager savings and a small Social Security check. Then lung cancer got her. She didn’t so much wear out as she wasted away.
    He never talked about his parents. He loved his mother right to the end but, in truth, was always ashamed of his father, with his lack of ambition. His father had never pushed him, never demanded he do anything in school besides show up, never insisted he better himself in any way.
    No, all his motivation was strictly internal. He pushed himself, mostly so he didn’t end up like his old man. He worked and schemed and angled. He took shortcuts now and then, cheated when he had to. He did anything he could to move up life’s ladder. And he’d do anything he could to stay there.
    He wasn’t going to be another cog.

 
    CHAPTER 3
    Having finished with her story, Mrs. Alfaro brought the back of her hand to both sides of her face, wiping away the small tear tracks that had formed. Tommy gave her a moment to compose herself, partly out of kindness and partly because he needed to catch his breath. Mr. Alfaro stood rigidly by his wife, a hand on her shoulder in a small-but-important gesture of consolation. I paged back in my notebook, filling in key words while they were still fresh in my mind. My self-invented shorthand hadn’t quite been able to keep up, and I wanted to get as much of it as I could.
    Of course, the details only mattered so much. The main point was that it was now undeniable: Nancy Marino’s death was no accident.
    Unwitting hit-and-run drivers don’t stalk their prey for days on end, wait patiently down the block and then accelerate when someone gets out of her car. This was a homicide, as cold and simple as if someone had brought a gun to her ear and pulled the trigger. This weapon just happened to take unleaded gasoline.
    Eventually, Tommy started asking Mrs. Alfaro some follow-up questions, providing me the short version of the answers. No, she never got much of a look at the driver. No, she didn’t catch the license plate. No, she couldn’t say for sure the make and model of the SUV. No, she had nothing else to add to her story. She had told us everything she remembered.
    When we were done, I thanked the Alfaros for their hospitality and for their willingness to talk, reiterating my promise not to go to the police or print their names in the newspaper. Soon I was following Tommy back down the front steps to our cars. It was getting toward the middle part of a hot summer afternoon, but it felt like Antarctica in my guts.
    “So what now?” Tommy asked as we