Читать книгу I'll Be Watching You - M. William Phelps - Страница 22

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Two major Hollywood films set the romantic tone for the year 1987: Moonstruck and Fatal Attraction. One showed how a hardworking woman learns to love and trust again while the other explored the darker side of the one-night stand, which had become fairly popular by the mid-1980s. Fatal Attraction proved that although you thought you felt a magnetism toward someone you had just met, you didn’t really know the person. Heading out to a bar, hooking up with someone you shared a drink with, and then heading back home for a romp in the water bed could turn violent and even deadly.

Mary Ellen was forty-four. She had just started a new job at MediPhysics Corporation that April. Elmwood Park was not a bastion of crime. For the most part, Mary Ellen had little to worry about—save for living alone as a single woman. She lived on the second floor, and her landlady lived below. She didn’t know the woman well. But Mary Ellen said the lady was a curmudgeon, an old hag who was paranoid about everything and everyone. “She was really eccentric,” recalled Mary Ellen. “She’d do strange things. When it was cold out, she’d remind me to leave the upstairs bathtub water running as a trickle,” which wasn’t so odd, “but she would leave me a note to do it every single night.”

There was no reasoning with the woman. She had her rules and that was it. Keys were a fascination. The entryway (the main door) to the house, because it was a two-family, was to the left of the landlady’s first-floor apartment. When you entered the building, whether you were heading up to Mary Ellen’s second-floor apartment or the landlady’s first-floor apartment, you had to first go through a main door and either head up the stairs in front of you to Mary Ellen’s, or take a quick left and walk into the landlady’s. This front door, leading into the building, was not supposed to be left unlocked.

Unlike most dead-bolted doors, however, the door didn’t have a latch on the inside; it had a key lock, same as it did on the outside. The landlady was firm about this door being locked at all times, whether you were inside or out. “Always lock it, Mary Ellen,” she’d bark. “Never leave or return home without locking the dead bolt.”

Not only was the lock illegal, but it posed a great danger if you were inside and couldn’t find your keys. There were no windows in the hallway leading up to Mary Ellen’s apartment, or downstairs near the entrance to the landlady’s apartment. “While my daughter came to visit with her baby once,” Mary Ellen said, “I ran out to the store. I came back, and she explained that she had wanted to get something from her car while I was gone, but couldn’t get out of the house.”

It was a strange way to live. However, Mary Ellen overlooked the woman’s odd behavior because, compared to where she had come from, it was like living in a castle. What were a few rules? Even if she didn’t agree with them.