The Girl Next Door

Chapters 21-24

-21-

Despite her mounting exhaustion and Finn's efforts to wear her out, Emma did not sleep well that night, nor for several nights thereafter. Every night, nightmares plagued her, and she'd wake to find her pulse racing and her heart in her throat, on the verge of screaming. Sometimes, to her mortification, she did scream, waking Finn and sometimes even Catie. She hated to spoil their rest. More often when she woke, she slipped out of bed and went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea and read until she felt calm enough to attempt sleep again.

She read Finn's manuscript during these sleepless, solitary hours. She was impressed with his writing style, his ability to paint vivid images and capture complicated emotions with words, the depth of his characters and his sympathy with their motivations, but he was right: something about the book was just off. Finn's manuscript was well planned and well organized, but somehow the chapters didn't quite seem to fit together: something crucial and indefinable was lacking.

Wilbur Tyson, the man who'd served a life sentence for the Cartwright murders and whose prison journals were Finn's main source material, had clearly been damaged and dangerous. Finn had interspersed lengthy excerpts from the Tyson journals into his narrative, and the dark passages revealed a tortured and twisted soul. The decades he'd served in prison had done nothing to cure him of the urge to kill and destroy, and even in the last months of his life, when he'd been a sickly old man in a prison infirmary, Tyson had recounted his evil fantasies in lurid detail. The problem was that his journals were so graphic, so disturbed, that the actual facts of the Cartwright murders—horrid as they were— seemed tame by comparison.

At first, Emma thought the problem might be that Finn had picked the wrong journal passages to include in his narrative. Perhaps in his eagerness to expose the darkest recesses of Tyson's twisted psyche, Finn had been drawn to the most sensational journal entries, and inadvertently allowed the tragedy of the Cartwright family to seem insignificant in comparison. The next night, Emma asked Finn for permission to read Tyson's journals herself. She hoped to be able to flag for him some alternative passages that, while perhaps less explicit, might better fit with the narrative of the Cartwright murders.

She didn't tell Finn, yet, why she wanted to read them. She hadn't shared her thoughts on the manuscript, yet. Who was she to criticize an experienced, published, successful author? -And until she could offer some useful, concrete suggestions, what would be the point?

Finn gave permission grudgingly. He was already worried about her and her inability to sleep, and he was sure the Tyson journals would only make her nightmares that much worse. "He really was a sick bastard, Em," he worried. "Not just the Cartwright murders, either: he wrote about awful stuff. Rape, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia... it's all there."

"I know. You included all that in your manuscript," she said, keeping to herself her suspicion that his choice to include all the worst parts of the journals had not served the true crime narrative well.

Finn just shook his head. "Not all of it, I didn't."

After Catie went to bed that night, though, Finn led Emma into his office and settled her in the leather upholstered recliner in the corner. He pulled a box of dog-eared notebooks out of the closet and set it down beside the chair. "Don't leave these lying around where Catie might find them," he warned. "That kid'll read anything, and I don't want her anywhere near these."

"I won't," Emma promised. "Thank you."

"This isn't a good idea," he grumbled, but he left her to her reading and headed to bed without her.

It didn't take her long to realize that she'd been wrong: Finn hadn't pulled out the worst entries, not by a long shot. Wilbur Tyson's soul was even blacker than she'd known, and Finn had chosen his excerpts with care, leaving out the accounts of gratuitous gore and violence unless it was somehow relevant to the Cartwright story. Reading the journals, Emma soon grasped that Tyson was more of a sexual predator than Finn's excerpts had revealed. Yes, he fantasized about torture and murder, but it was the sex that came before the killing that really revved him up. Tyson was a pedophile. He wrote in chilling detail of choosing his targets, observing them from a distance first, stalking them, ingratiating himself into their circles to gain the trust of their caregivers, laying the groundwork weeks or even months before he made his move. Then he'd strike, subjecting the children to increasingly terrible violations, terrifying and shaming them into silence, until death was the only escape.