Do You Know Your Neighbor?
A Haunting Story Inspired by Real Life Events
Hey Readers,
It’s spooky season and I can’t think of anything scarier than discovering the dark truth about someone you know. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that the heroes you think you know are really villains underneath their facade.
This week, I’m going to share with you a creative piece inspired by a true story.
Warning: this piece may be triggering as it involves abuse and crime.
Still, it’s an important story that will leave you wondering:
Do you ever really know your neighbor?
Do You Know Your Neighbor?
By: Sarah Crowne
He sits across the table from me with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cookie Dough in hand. He eats from the container, and I marvel at these two facts: That Ben and Jerry’s exists and that you can eat it straight from the pint. I marvel at this because it’s the 90s and my mom only buys Hood Ice Cream, Patchwork flavor. Until now, I didn’t even know Ben and Jerry’s exists.
Mr. Benedict is a tall and classy man that never wears jeans and keeps his hair perfectly combed to the side. He’s the sort of man that seems to be cut from a finer cloth. His every gesture feels precise, every word naturally calculated. A quick tongue for humor, Mr. Benedict can always make you laugh.
He lives alone in a perfect house with a white picket fence, two bathrooms, and three bedrooms. The house is full of antiques and expensive electronics, an odd combination that whispers of the past and hopes for the future at the same time. He has a projector television that takes up half of his living room wall, complete with a surround sound stereo system that booms like the movie theatre. His movies are on large laser disks as big as my grandfather’s Johnny Cash records. A CD collection, large enough for Mr. Benedict to be his own DJ, lines his living room wall. None of these things impress me, though. Not even at 14-years-old. Instead, I admire the framed pictures of his recent trip to Hawaii, the keyboard in his downstairs rec room by the pool table, and the fancy parlor room with a crystal chandelier on the other side of the house. The parlor room is my favorite. Draped in pure Victorian era décor, it’s complete with a fainting couch and a spiral staircase that I am convinced is a secret portal to another time.
“One day, you can get married in the parlor,” he promises. The promise fills my heart with so much joy I could burst. To be married in such a fancy room, imagine that!
I know Mr. Benedict because he’s my neighbor. My mom is also his housekeeper. She scrubs his floors and toilets, dusts his chandelier and polishes the shelves in the parlor that display his Hummel collection. One day, I hear her tell my grandmother that she found dirty condoms in his garbage and a gun under the towels in his linen closet. But no one thinks anything of it. He’s a single man, and he works in law. Not everyone likes him. A man’s got to protect himself, right?
Mr. Benedict is our friend. He comes to our family picnics and is the only one able to light the candles on my great aunt’s 85th birthday cake. He jokes that he can “light anyone’s fire.” He’s been especially nice since my grandfather died of lung cancer. Mr. Benedict even paid for the limo that drove us to the funeral.
I take a bite of ice-cream and feel it dissolve on my tongue. Like a firework inside my mouth, the cold cream and cookie dough explodes with flavor, a sensation so pleasing I don’t want it to end. Kind of like Mr. Benedict and my conversations.
My mother sends me to see Mr. Benedict alone because I’ve been having a hard time with my grandfather’s death. She thinks I need to talk it out with someone like Mr. Benedict. He has a psychology degree, after all.
I don’t want to talk to him about my grandfather, though. I can’t bring myself to say how I keep dreaming about my grandfather’s dead body lying stiff in the coffin, his chest not rising up and down the way it used to when he fell asleep in the Lazy Boy chair. Instead, I talk to Mr. Benedict about hair scrunchies and how I have almost fifty of them now. I tell him about my love for Madonna’s music and that my number one goal in life is to have curly hair like Mariah Carey because having hair like that will solve all of my problems. I ask him what he thinks about the LA Riots. I’m sure he knows a thing a two about the law and the state of the world. I hang on his every word because, well, he’s Mr. Benedict.
At school, some of my friends know Mr. Benedict. They are all kids on probation. I hear one of them talking during study hall about how they went to his house and played pool. My heart burns with envy. I think about how many times I’ve been to Mr. Benedict’s house, and we never played pool. The boy brags about all the things Mr. Benedict lets him do. I remind myself that Mr. Benedict has promised to take me to New York City to see the Phantom of the Opera one day, but only when I turn sixteen.
One day, during our weekly ice cream sessions, I tell Mr. Benedict about my dreams and fear of dying. I’ve been thinking about death ever since my grandfather passed. He reassures me that this is normal, and everything will be okay. I feel so much better after talking with him that I ask if he would talk to my friend, Jack, at school. Jack tried to commit suicide and his family is planning to send him away. I think Mr. Benedict can fix him.
Mr. Benedict agrees to see him. But it’s the last time I see Jack. His family still sends him away. He writes me letters from his new school, but Mr. Benedict tells my mother not to let me talk to Jack anymore. Mr. Benedict says Jack has problems. That Jack has been having sexual fantasies about my mother. Hearing this makes me feel dirty and weird. I don’t want to talk to Jack anymore.
Life goes on like this, visiting Mr. Benedict. Most of the time, our visits involve Ben and Jerrys, but sometimes we eat Häagen-Dazs. We continue our never-ending conversations about the world. Lorena Bobbitt, OJ Simpson, Nancy Kerrigan, Kurt Cobain. I feel smart when I talk to Mr. Benedict. I feel heard.
But one day, he won’t see me. I knock on the door, and he answers, but his face is red, his voice stammers. He’s out of breath. He barely opens the door. Annie Lenox’s Walking on Broken Glass blares from the speakers, so loud, it shakes the house.
“Can’t visit today,” he says, shutting the door before I can ask why. My cheeks turn red, and I feel a strange, gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I feel like I’ve done something wrong. I just don’t know what.
Soon, the truth is out.
Two weeks later, as I get off the school bus, I notice news vans parked up and down our street. My mother is at work, so my grandmother greets me at the door. She instructs me to lock it behind me. Shh… she hushes, don’t say a word. She goes on with instructions. Stay quiet. Don’t answer the door. Not to anyone. I learn that I can’t answer the door because it might be reporters and my grandmother doesn’t want to go on the evening news with curlers in her hair. Besides, she says, there is no way what they are saying about Mr. Benedict could be true.
Except, it is true. The evidence is clear. Mr. Benedict has been raping teens on his caseload for decades. He’s charged with an estimated 220 counts, all of which include sexual assault, hindering prosecution, tampering with witnesses and using unlawful restraint against victims.
For the next few years, I’ll read about all these things in the papers. About how Mr. Benedict pleads no contest to 31 of the charges, conceding that there is enough evidence to convict him. His grainy photo in the orange jumpsuit haunts me.
The evil he leaves behind is horrific.
Eight of his victims become convicted molesters. One, a murderer. In fact, just over one-quarter of the total 157 clients over the decades end up convicted of sexual assault. And it wasn’t just victims in our state, and not just when my family knew him. Mr. Benedict was committing these crimes decades before. If only someone would have done a background check, they’d have found his record. Even his resume was a lie.
And so.
I still eat Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream sometimes. When I do, I remember Mr. Benedict. His crooked smile flickers in my memory, like an old VHS home movie, fuzzy with faraway sound. I can almost hear his smart aleck jokes and see the way he’d wink when I finally got the punchline. I wonder if his jokes were even funny. Or maybe I was just caught up in his spell.
I push the thoughts away and say a silent prayer for all the lives he shattered. I pray that not all of them were left broken. That the evil he left behind was destroyed. Hasn’t festered. I thank God I was never a victim.
But still, the questions never stop. What drove him to do the things he did? Forever and a day after, I’ll always wonder . . . do you ever truly know your neighbor?
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I loved this! That’s a very interesting and sad story!
amazing piece