44 Charles Street

“I’m not. I still love the house. I just hate what happened there. I keep wondering if there was something else I could have done, or been stronger with her. But I was her roommate, or landlady, not her mother. I couldn’t forbid her to see him. All I could do was tell her she couldn’t have him to the house, but she did anyway when I was gone. And I kept begging her to get help, and stop picking up guys on the Internet. I think she was a lot more complicated than she appeared, with a bad history of abuse from her childhood. Maybe she was drawn to people like that, and she would have found a Brad anywhere. She didn’t need the Internet to do it. We all have our secrets and our problems and our issues. I’m still trying to get over Todd, Marya the death of her husband, Chris is dealing with his heroin addict ex-wife and trying to keep his son safe. We all have our struggles, and I guess things aren’t always what they appear. They weren’t with Eileen. And look what happened to her.” Francesca was crying again when she said it, she had really liked her. And no one she knew had ever been murdered. It seemed like such a terrible way to die, strangled and beaten in her own bed. But he had given her plenty of warning that he was a dangerous man, and she’d still tried to turn it around, instead of running as fast as she could in the opposite direction, which would have been the sane and healthy thing to do. Eileen just wasn’t healthy, and she had been addicted to Brad and his abuse, and had paid the ultimate price. Avery reminded her that the statistics on abusive men and abused women were horrifying. Seventy-five percent of men who threatened to kill the women they were involved with actually did. Now Eileen was just one more statistic instead of the sweet freckle-faced girl upstairs. Her dating games with total strangers and her lack of judgment about them had been her downfall.

Chris went back to the Vineyard the next day to pick up Ian and promised to return as soon as he could. Francesca insisted she was all right. She opened the gallery, and kept her room at the Gansevoort. Her suitcases were still in the front hall of the house from when she arrived, and she had them brought to the hotel. And she told Marya that she didn’t need to rush back either. There was nothing for them to do. Eileen’s room was being stripped and steam-cleaned and repainted, the furniture removed. Her things were being boxed and sent to San Diego after the police went through them and took what they needed as evidence. And then Francesca was planning to close the room and lock it. She didn’t even want to go in there. She was eliminating the top floor of the house for the time being. She couldn’t imagine anyone who would want to live there, knowing someone had been killed in that room. It meant that she would be paying half the mortgage payment, instead of a quarter, with four of them there. It was what she had paid when she lived with Todd. But she couldn’t figure out any other way to do it for now. She didn’t want another tenant to replace Eileen, just Chris and Marya, and of course Ian. They were adults, used good judgment, lived sane lives, and put none of the others at risk, nor themselves. She couldn’t go through the trauma of someone like Eileen again, no matter how much she liked her. And you just never knew what people did in private. Neither she, Marya, nor Chris even had relationships or partners. They were three adults on their own, and one small child, whom they all loved. Eileen had been too immature and too damaged to be responsible, and Francesca blamed herself for not understanding it sooner, before something like this happened. Maybe in another living arrangement, she wouldn’t have been killed. They had all been gone all summer, and she had been easy prey for Brad.