Jordan was seventeen and Alexa a year younger. Alexa’s family lived in one of those big, 2000s pseudo-mansions that looked less like a single house and more like four discrete houses stitched together. The visitor’s eye went immediately to the pedimented two-story foyer and its oversized transom window through which a sprawling brass chandelier glittered at night. Two of its candle light bulbs had since burned out and required replacement by an electrician in possession of a capable ladder. The foyer’s twenty foot ceilings carried sound great distances, as evidenced when Alexa called out, “Hellooo, anybody home?” Just to make sure. At the time, the only car in the driveway was Jordan’s white Honda Accord. A long, oak staircase unfurled before the front door and on this staircase, Jordan kissed Alexa, his hand pressed against the small of her back. Both felt movie-starish, lost in their perfect world. The house boasted a brick front façade but the other exterior walls were clad in beige vinyl siding to save money. Some Mexicans drove out from Chicago every Sunday to do the lawns of everyone on the cul-de-sac.
The movie star staircase opened onto a long, exposed landing eye level to the chandelier. A film of dust gathered on the sweeps of its arms. Off-white carpet muffled the pair's prior hardwood footsteps. The landing then tucked itself into a hallway, dark, lined with doors. One opened. Alexa chose a powdery blue for her bedroom and her mother furnished it entirely in simple yet expensive whitewashed offerings from Pottery Barn Teen. Her bedspread was printed with the pink silhouette of a beachy sunset. The two young people locked the door and toppled onto the bed, crumpling the horizon. Alexa trusted Jordan. Jordan, she insisted to herself and all her friends, wasn’t that kind of guy. He played soccer admirably and fit the bill of popular and good looking, with the style du jour’s sharp jawline and a sweepy mop of curly brown hair. But deep down in him lurked some sensitivity, almost writerly so. An unusual level of depth for a teenage boy, or so some believed. That’s why Jordan’s palms clammed up with nervousness. His heart reminded him of its presence, giddy and strong as it carried blood from one end of his body to the other. He told Alexa he loved her when he slid his hand up her Charlotte Rousse blouse, marveling at the smooth warmth of her skin. He didn’t want her to think he was taking advantage of her. He really wasn’t.
She was a good, normal girl, by all accounts. Naturally blonde and pretty. A top five student of directionless intelligence. Athletic, track and field. Honor Society. Her desires revolved around going to Boston College and choosing a career involving feelings. English teacher. Psychologist. Maybe speech therapist. She wrote essays about the value of helping people and enjoyed Jane Austen novels. Jordan volunteered at the local animal shelter and didn’t like when his friends made vulgar remarks about women. His parents were both doctors. Divorced, like everyone else’s. Half his schoolmates wrote their college admissions essays about this, the only hardship in their lives able to be exploited. Their so-called broken families.
Jordan displaced Alexa’s bra, savored the swell of soft breast cupped beneath his palm. They’d been dating a year. He whispered Jesus Christ and closed his eyes. This was the last millisecond of life as they knew it.
--The father, Jim Nash, 50 and balding, was married to Bev who used a bottle of hairspray every month and did the kids up the same for Olan Mills Christmas portraits at Sears until ’08 when Sears bottomed out. They were Barrington people. Jim owned three fast food franchises across the county. He got Chick-fil-A into the Midwest market early and the store on Barrington’s main strip mall corner became the darling of the drive-thru scene. It paid for braces and private schools, pool memberships and two BMWs in succession. Bev worked too - as a marketer for the real estate industry. Her job involved describing country clubs as amenity-rich and exclusive and difficult-to-sell houses as unique and palatial. She kept up liberal appearances and played both sides of the political game, as is the case with folks who work with others doing the same. Luncheon people who hire the services of wealth advisors.
Bev didn’t go to college. She and Jim were high school sweethearts back in Middletown, New York and she tagged along with him when he went to Syracuse to study business. Bev’s parents had some money from stocks. Jim’s father owned several rental properties in Orange County but the family lived in a little ranch house which gave Jim the sacred impression that they belonged to the working class and that everything Jim achieved in life he worked hard for. Hard work, a little luck and a smidge of financial help from his parents, that was the secret to success, due upon receipt to all good kids who ascribe to the values of this great nation. The couple ended up in Illinois for Jim’s MBA at U of I during which Bev’s father fronted the cash for that first franchise, a Domino’s Pizza. It was a dud. Bad location. Oversaturated with similar fare. Jim learned his lesson and went into fast casual, an emerging market. Carrabba’s. Red Lobster. Sold those profitably. Bought two Panera Breads and a Chick-Fil-A and that’s when the cash kept rolling in, sustained by teenagers with fresh drivers licenses and moms who wore bigger than average jewelry. Within five years, Jim went from refinancing a modest split level in Naperville to giving talks at Chambers of Commerce, owning a golf cart, and moving into the South Barrington mansion on the cul-de-sac.
The family went to Disney World five times, a satisfactory amount. They owned at least one coffee table book about 9/11. Bev’s least favorite cousin worked in the South Tower which gave the Nashes credibility when talking about the subject, omitting, of course, that the cousin in question was on vacation in France when the whole thing went down. Rush Limbaugh annotated daily life in the house until Bev banished his grating voice to Jim’s car or the basement.
The kids were spanked on rare occasion and in a matter of fact way. Lying, cheating and stealing proved statistically to be the worst sins (in ascending order of severity.) Connor took to baseball, Alexa to Scouts. All four Nashes went to church on Sunday, the kind of milquetoast happy family church where everyone sang songs and God forgave all the scurrilous little sinners. Alexa found church more a formality than a necessity and wasn’t sure exactly what role it played in her life. Connor only believed in God when he found himself holding two fistfuls of baseball bat and in those moments God seemed to believe in him too.
Connor picked up the n-word from Jim who talked frequently about how the Blacks ruined Newburgh, New York, where Jim’s dad was from. Newburgh used to have such a beautiful mall and great, thriving industry until the blacks came up from the south and turned the whole city into a ghetto. He mentioned this every time a black person snagged a good parking space or cut him off in traffic. Just like fucking Newburgh. Alexa knew her father was a racist which brought her shame. It went against the values she’d learned about in Civics class. Martin Luther King Jr and all that. Bev mostly found it embarrassing. Low class, though her views weren’t much different in theory, just in practice. Jim kept his more unsavory beliefs suitably under wraps – every bigot knows bigotry is frowned upon – but they began to eat at him more and more, as did his inability to express them around anyone other than his son who wanted little more than a pass to be transgressive on purpose. Jim scoured the net for crime statistics, kept abreast of the local news which was and remains a stream of consciousness performance piece about what a hellhole Chicago was. Around the time of the 2008 presidential primary, Jim Nash bought the first of many guns and taught Connor how to shoot at a range in Indiana. No one thought much of it. This was normal behavior among his sort at the time.
The house was built in 2005. Three thousand square feet, five bedrooms, four and a half baths. Gourmet kitchen opening up into a two-story great room no one ever used outside of Thanksgiving because there wasn't a TV to watch. The architecture could be described as something in between French Country and Colonial. Its open floor plan ensued light flooding the common areas. Every wall was painted in what Bev called "earth tones" which is realtor-speak for beige. Jim outfitted the home with a state of the art intercom system which he never once used after the kids got cell phones. Where Jordan's parents and the prosecution succeeded was in asserting that Jim, a hateful bigot, was into fringe conspiracy theories and that's what made him delusional and paranoid, thus giving him clear motives for committing the crime. In reality, the things Jim believed in were not so distant from the mainstream. Bogeyman liberals, the family, private property. It was instilled in him by his father that when a man builds himself a family, that's his property, too.
Jim put in the security system shortly after he bought the guns. It was comprehensive. He ordered the equipment from a spy shop in Chicago and had a contractor come and rig it when the rest of the family was at Bev's mother's. The outdoor cameras were not exactly clandestine; they were posted strategically under the corners of certain eaves capturing the best angles of the yard, the front door. The inside cameras, however, were concealed. Most were mounted in spurious smoke detectors attached to the ceilings in common areas. In Bev's office and Alexa's bedroom Jim set up two iPod docks. They were otherwise ordinary save for the numeric display panel in which a camera was visible only to someone looking for it. Each of these cameras sent a feed to Jim's basement office. A rack of recorders next to the gun cabinet stored the video for up to a month before automatically erasing it. He didn't watch the old tapes - his lawyers got the child pornography charges dropped - but sometimes he'd sit in his office, king of his domain, and stare at the feed of twenty-four gray panels waiting for motion. One day, a Tuesday when his car was at the shop, he saw motion.
"It was all for my family's safety, Your Honor," Jim testified from the witness stand. "I just wanted to give the kid a scare, teach him a lesson. I guess we don't believe in tough love anymore these days. Besides, Your Honor, don't you have a family? Don't you have a little girl? Wouldn't you'd do anything and everything in the world just to keep her safe?"
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