I felt a pang and moved on.
Maybe it was just my imagination, but people began to stare. The bicycles, the dribbling basketballs, the sprinklers and lawn mowers, the cries of touch footballers—they all seemed to hush as I passed. Some stared out of curiosity because a strange man strolling in a dark gray suit on a summer evening was something of an oddity. But most, or again so it seemed, looked on in horror because they recognized me and couldn’t believe that I would dare tread upon this sacred soil.
I approached the house at 97 Coddington Terrace without hesitation. My tie was loosened. I jammed my hands in my pockets. I toed the spot where curb met pavement. Why was I here? I saw a curtain move in the den. Mrs. Miller’s face appeared at the window, gaunt and ghostlike. She glared at me. I didn’t move or look away. She glared some more—and then to my surprise, her face softened. It was as though our mutual agony had made some sort of connection. Mrs. Miller nodded at me. I nodded back and felt the tears begin to well up.
You may have seen the story on 20/20 or Prime-TimeLive or some other television equivalent of fish wrap. For those who haven’t, here’s the official account: On October 17 eleven years ago, in the township of Livingston, New Jersey, my brother, Ken Klein, then twenty-four, brutally raped and strangled our neighbor Julie Miller.
In her basement. At 97 Coddington Terrace.
That was where her body was found. The evidence wasn’t conclusive as to if she’d actually been murdered in that poorly finished subdwelling or if she’d been dumped postmortem behind the water-stained zebra-striped couch. Most assume the former. My brother escaped capture and ran off to parts unknown—at least, again, according to the official account.
Over the past eleven years, Ken has eluded an international dragnet. There have however been “sightings.”
The first came about a year after the murder from a small fishing village in northern Sweden. Interpol swooped in, but somehow my brother evaded their grasp. Supposedly he was tipped off. I can’t imagine how or by whom.
The next sighting occurred four years later in Barcelona. Ken had rented—to quote the newspaper accounts—“an oceanview hacienda” (Barcelona is not on an ocean) with—again I will quote—“a lithe, dark-haired woman, perhaps a flamenco dancer.” A vacationing Livingston resident, no less, reported seeing Ken and his Castilian paramour dining beachside. My brother was described as tan and fit and wore a white shirt opened at the collar and loafers without socks. The Livingstonite, one Rick Horowitz, had been a classmate of mine in Mr. Hunt’s fourth-grade class. During a three-month period, Rick entertained us by eating caterpillars during recess.
Barcelona Ken yet again slipped through the law’s fingers.
The last time my brother was purportedly spotted he was skiing down the expert hills in the French Alps (interestingly enough, Ken never skied before the murder). Nothing came of it, except a story on 48 Hours. Over the years, my brother’s fugitive status had become the criminal version of a VH1 Where Are They Now?, popping up whenever any sort of rumor skimmed the surface or, more likely, when one of the network’s fish wraps was low on material.
I naturally hated television’s “team coverage” of “suburbia gone wrong” or whatever similar cute moniker they came up with. Their “special reports” (just once, I’d like to see them call it a “normal report, everyone has done this story”) always featured the same photographs of Ken in his tennis whites—he was a nationally ranked player at one time—looking his most pompous. I can’t imagine where they got them. In them Ken looked handsome in that way people hate right away. Haughty, Kennedy hair, suntan bold against the whites, toothy grin, Photograph Ken looked like one of those people of privilege (he was not) who coasted through life on his charm (a little) and trust account (he had none).
I had appeared on one of those magazine shows. A producer reached me—this was pretty early on in the coverage—and claimed that he wanted to present “both sides fairly.” They had plenty of people ready to lynch my brother, he noted. What they truly needed for the sake of “balance” was someone who could describe the “real Ken” to the folks back home.
I fell for it.
A frosted-blond anchorwoman with a sympathetic manner interviewed me for over an hour. I enjoyed the process actually. It was therapeutic. She thanked me and ushered me out and when the episode aired, they used only one snippet, removing her question (“But surely, you’re not going to tell us that your brother was perfect, are you? You’re not trying to tell us he was a saint, right?”) and editing my line so that I appeared in nose-pore-enhancing extreme close-up with dramatic music as my cue, saying, “Ken was no saint, Diane.”
Anyway, that was the official account of what happened.
I’ve never believed it. I’m not saying it’s not possible. But I believe a much more likely scenario is that my brother is dead—that he has been dead for the past eleven years.
More to the point, my mother always believed that Ken was dead. She believed it firmly. Without reservation. Her son was not a murderer. Her son was a victim.
“He’s alive. . . . He didn’t do it.”
The front door of the Miller house opened. Mr. Miller stepped through it. He pushed his glasses up his nose. His fists rested on his hips in a pitiful Superman stance.
“Get the hell out of here, Will,” Mr. Miller said to me.
And I did.
The next big shock occurred an hour later.
Sheila and I were up in my parents’ bedroom. The same furniture, a sturdy, faded swirling gray with blue trim, had adorned this room for as long as I could remember. We sat on the king-size bed with the weakspringed mattress. My mother’s most personal items—the stuff she kept in her bloated nightstand drawers—were scattered over the duvet. My father was still downstairs by the bay windows, staring out defiantly.
I don’t know why I wanted to sift through the things my mother found valuable enough to preserve and keep near her. It would hurt. I knew that. There is an interesting correlation between intentional pain infliction and comfort, a sort of playing-with-fire approach to grieving. I needed to do that, I guess.
I looked at Sheila’s lovely face—tilted to the left, eyes down and focused—and I felt my heart soar. This is going to sound a little weird, but I could stare at Sheila for hours. It was not just her beauty—hers was not what one would call classical anyway, her features a bit off center from either genetics or, more likely, her murky past—but there was an animation there, an inquisitiveness, a delicacy too, as if one more blow would shatter her irreparably. Sheila made me want to—bear with me here—be brave for her.