06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 Read Free Page B

confidence—Linda was worried. She decided to put off her decision until she had a chance to talk to her brother Gino, who had followed in his father’s footsteps and also worked at Devoe. That night she called Gino’s apartment and asked him, “Do you know James Bergstrom?”
    “Sure,” said Gino. “James works at the plant. I’ve played basketball with him and had a few beers. He’s a nice guy. Quiet. But really a nice guy. You got nothin’ to worry about with him.”
    The next time Caesar called, Linda said it was all right to give her telephone number to his friend.
    A few days later, the phone rang. When her mother called her to answer it, Linda put the headset to her ear and said, “Hello.”
    “Hi,” a soft-spoken man answered. “I’m James Bergstrom. Caesar said I should give you a call.”

Chapter Two
    That night on the phone, James told Linda a little about himself: that he was the oldest in a family of four children, that his father was once in the air force, that his mother was born in Greece, and that the Bergstroms were a staunchly Catholic family. He even mentioned that he was once an altar boy. “You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” he asked.
    “Yes,” she answered. “I am.”
    By the end of the conversation, they had agreed to a date the following Saturday night. Linda, however, preferred not to follow Caesar’s suggestion and attend the quinceañeras . “They’ll have Latin music, and I really like rock ’n’ roll,” she told him.
    Instead, they decided, James would call for her at her home around seven and they would make plans then. “I like to be spontaneous,” Linda laughed.
    “Me too,” said James, whose voice was quiet yet friendly.
    After she hung up the phone, Linda realized she had forgotten to mention bringing Daniel along on the date. “Then I decided that was silly. I didn’t need Daniel. I knew where James worked, knew people who knew him,” she said. “As far as I could tell, I didn’t have any reason to be afraid.”
    Of course, James Edward Bergstrom failed to mention many things that night, things that would have made Linda feel vastly less secure. For a young man—then, like Linda, just twenty—he already had many secrets.
     
    As far as it went, all of what James said about himself and his family on the telephone that night was true. His father, James C., was born in Brooklyn, New York. He’d served in the air force from 1959 to 1971. His exploits were part of the family’s folklore: In military security, he had once traveled with a briefcase chained to his wrist, and there were still classified incidents he referred to in the obliquest terms, barred—he swore—by an oath to secrecy and national security. It was when he was stationed in Greece that James C. met his future bride, Irene Emanuel Lagoudaki, a seamstress, one afternoon when he dropped off a buddy who dated her older sister. James’s future parents kept company for about a year before they married.
    Their first child, James Edward Bergstrom, was born in the 36th Tactical Hospital on the U.S. Air Force base in Bitburg, Germany, at four on a Saturday morning, April 6, 1963. A chubby infant, he was just eighteen inches long yet weighed nine pounds twelve ounces. Their second son, Christopher, came less than a year later, followed by their first daughter, Maria, in 1967, in Tripoli, Libya, where the family was then stationed. Five years later the Bergstroms moved back to the United States, where the baby of the family, Adelaide, was born.
    Catholicism was the centerpiece of the Bergstrom household, but from the beginning they were far from a picture-perfect family. James C. had started drinking when he was a teenager, and when drunk, he had a blustering temper. “My father is an alcoholic. My mom was the only normal one,” said Adelaide about their family life. “She never did anything crazy, except letting it all go on.”
    Unlike Linda’s father, however, James would say that when it