Grace imagined Rachel standing on the wooden stairs of this tiny house, which someone had painted light blue with dark blue shutters. She could picture her making a visor with her hand, checking to see that her baby girl was playing safe and sound in the front yard styled after Edgewater: a dirt patch with some tufts of grass.
After undoing the latch on a rusty, waist-high chain-link fence encircling the property, Grace followed a well-trodden path up a narrow staircase that carried her about four feet off the ground. She rang the doorbell while an American flag flapped in the breeze near her face. She had a passing thought that one of Vince Rapino’s cronies lived here, or maybe somewhere on this street, that he’d see her ringing the doorbell and she’d get paid another visit, this one much worse than the last. She let go of that fear and rang the doorbell a second time.
A window in the white house next door opened up and a woman’s hard-bitten face appeared. She had jowly cheeks that moved independently from the rest of her, and Grace put her age anywhere from a stunningly old forty-five to a far sprightlier sixty-five. Even from a distance, the woman’s blue eyes shone with bright inquisitiveness. She wore no makeup, which made her thin lips appear more compressed. When she stuck her head out farther, Grace got a good look at her mane of straw-colored hair that grew in the same untamed manner as the shrubs dotting her yard.
“You Jehovah’s Witnesses?” she asked in an accent that was unmistakably Boston.
“No … we’re not,” Grace said.
“Good, ’cause my neighbors ain’t home and I was about to tell you screw off,” said the woman.
“Do you know who lives here?” asked Grace.
“You’re ringing the doorbell. Don’t you?”
Grace came down the steps, crossed the yard, and went to the fence separating the two properties. Jack and Annie joined her there.
“I’m Grace. This is my son, Jack, and my sister-in-law, Annie.”
“Yeah, all right,” said the woman. “Wicked happy to meet ya.” It was apparent she couldn’t have cared less who they were, so long as they weren’t from the sect of Jehovah.
“I’m wondering about this house,” Grace went on to say.
The woman poked her head out farther and made a show of looking around the yard. “No For Sale sign,” she said.
“No, not to buy it … but … have you lived here long?”
The woman pulled back a bit, and Grace worried she had scared her off.
“What’s it to you?” she asked.
“I’m wondering if you knew … Rachel Boyd?” Grace inquired.
A sad look came to the woman’s face. “Everyone knew Rachel.”
“She lived here?” Jack asked, pointing to the blue house.
“Yeah, she was my neighbor for a bit. Like fourteen years ago.”
“Did you know her well?”
“What do you care?”
Grace’s mind went blank, but Annie’s thankfully did not. “We’re relatives, actually. We did one of those DNA test things and found out Rachel is Grace’s half sister. We looked her up and, well … saw the terrible news.”
“Terrible,” the woman agreed.
“We really do appreciate your help,” said Grace. “We didn’t get your name.” She prayed this woman didn’t have a great recall for faces and wouldn’t remember seeing hers on TV back when Rachel’s murder broke on the local news.
“Bonnie,” the woman said. “Bonnie Blakely, born and raised right here in beautiful Lynn, Massachusetts.” She leaned her substantial body out the window and stretched her arms wide as if opening herself up to receive not only the goodness of a cloudless day, but also all of the beauty that lovely Lynn had to offer.
“We’ve been trying to learn about Rachel,” Annie said. “We did a public records search and this address came up, so we stopped by hoping to talk to neighbors, people who knew her, see if we could learn more about her, maybe connect with other family.”
“Well, don’t go looking for her crazy daughter,” Bonnie warned.
“Yeah, we read about that, too,” said Grace, hoping she did a good job masking her emotions. “Terrible.”
“Did anyone else live here with her?” asked Annie.
“Nah, she was on her own. Single mom kind of thing.”
“No boyfriends?” Grace didn’t know how the question would go over, but she was hoping to hear that Rachel and Vince had been an item back then. It would bolster the theory that Rapino was Penny’s biological father and Rachel’s murder was some sort of retribution for attempted extortion.