The Girl Next Door

(Chapters 5 - 8)

-5-

Emma had not been prepared for Catie’s father’s anger, and she didn’t really understand it. At first she thought he might be upset simply because she was talking to Catie, but she didn’t know why. She tried to remember the few times they’d met during that month when she’d lived with Aunt Olive. The way she remembered it, he’d been almost entirely absorbed with looking after the baby, which was good and necessary, because Phoebe had been strangely detached from the infant. She had seemed reluctant to hold Catie or interact with her. She had barely even looked at her daughter, even when she cried. Emma had heard of postpartum depression, but before meeting Phoebe, she’d never seen it. Phoebe had been listless and withdrawn in her daughter’s presence, and the only time she showed any spark of interest or emotion was when she and Emma went somewhere without Catie. Usually, that had left Phoebe’s fiancé home with the little one, but he hadn’t seemed to mind. In fact, now that she thought back on it, Emma clearly remembered one time when he had thanked her for getting Phoebe out of the house.

Well, obviously he wasn’t grateful anymore. Emma tried not to care. In light of all of the rest of the crap going on in her life, a cranky neighbor was barely a blip on her radar.

It didn’t take her long to learn why he was so mad at her, though. Saturday afternoon, she ventured into the village for supplies, and she hadn’t been in the tiny little grocery store more than a minute before she found herself the focus of everyone’s attention. Strangers stood on tiptoe to peer at her over the shelves. They lurked behind the beverage coolers and peeked at her around corners. When she caught them and made eye contact, they looked away quickly, pretending to be engrossed reading the labels of canned goods and checking the expiration dates on cartons of milk. Emma told herself this was just small-town curiosity, but losing her home to a couple of potentially mafia-connected heavies had made her paranoid. By the time she had filled her shopping basket with staples to make a few basic meals, her skin was crawling with the uneasy sensation of being watched.

The man behind the counter nodded in greeting, but he didn’t smile. He looked about seventy or so, with wispy white hair combed over his balding head, grizzled grey whiskers around his mouth and jaw, and dark eyes behind wire-rimmed bifocal glasses. Something about his dark gaze seemed to convey dislike and disapproval.

“What?” Emma snapped, laying the heavy basket on the counter. His oddly unfriendly reaction, when she’d done nothing to deserve it, put her on the defensive.

The shopkeeper barely lifted one shoulder, just a hint of a shrug. “You’re Helen Fisher’s girl. We heard you were back in town.”

Emma arched one brow. “Back?” she echoed. “I was here for three-and-a-half weeks, twelve years ago.”

“I guess you made an impression,” he replied, ringing up her purchases slowly. This little shop was still in the retail dark ages, without a moving conveyor belt at the counter or barcode scanners or a computerized screen to track purchases. Each item was marked with a little orange price sticker (even things like potato chips, which had the manufacturer’s price printed right on the bag), and the clerk typed each price into an ancient cash register with a tiny display lit with green digits.

“Why?” Emma asked, frustrated. “I didn’t know anybody then, except Aunt Olive.”

He paused with her granola box in his hands and raised his brows in frank disbelief. “Rumor has it you knew Finn McCaffrey’s girl pretty well.”

Finn! That was his name!, Emma recalled, relieved to finally have something to call him other than ‘Catie’s father’— not that she really needed to call him anything, since he’d made it so very clear he’d rather not talk to her again. She turned back to the clerk, still confused by his words: Finn McCaffrey’s girl. “Catie? She was just a baby then.”