Around us, in the trees, fireflies were beginning to light and float in search of mates. The last hint of pink had disappeared on the horizon, but the heavy heat persisted. It would be a hot night, the kind that fans and open windows would do no good for.
I thought of the dead girl, who would surely have been moved by now, taken from the dirt and moved to a cold place. Refrigerator cold. A place where the low temperature might stall the ebbing breakdown of her flesh long enough to find something, on her body or in her blood, that would explain her presence here, in our town, dead on the side of the road.
James put his arm around my waist and drew me in, ducking his head to kiss me on the temple.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
“Good night.”
The door slammed. The motor turned over, coughed, then roared. James saluted, two-fingered, a cigarette already dangling between his lips.
The truck pulled away, out of the driveway and down the road, the taillights growing small and faint in the deepening twilight. And just as I’d always done, as if nothing had changed, I watched until they were out of sight.
AMELIA
L
uke was coming. Minutes ago, the phone had rung, his tenor-pitched voice in her ear telling her to wait on the curb. She surveyed her bedroom, scanning for any forgotten necessity, any essential object on the verge of being left behind. The small space seemed vast now, nearly empty, twin beds and college-issue pine furniture surrounded by a sea of tile. Shiny, pristine patches on the floor showed where a lamp had stood, where the desk had been. A perfect, dustless rectangle marked the place she had dropped her calculus textbook—months ago, the day she’d dropped the class—never to touch it again. She smiled at the memory of her father’s face when she’d explained, in her careful way, that she had traded in abstract math and imaginary numbers for the true, tactile reality of human emotion. She would not study calculus anymore. She wanted to experience life.
She had discovered the theater in her senior year, fallen almost by accident into a small speaking role when the girl to whom it belonged had left school unexpectedly for a family emergency. With only a week to go before the performance, they only needed someone who could memorize the lines and blocking, do the job, and then stay out of the way. Her roommate, a vivacious and bossy girl playing one of the leads, thought of Amelia.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she had said. “I can’t act.”
“You don’t really have to,” the roommate had cajoled her. “It’s just recitation. Like, mindless automaton. It’ll actually be better if you’re not too emotional.”
“Isn’t there someone else who wants to do it?”
“Not really.”
“I don’t know.”
“Ame, come on! Just try one thing that’s out of your comfort zone, would you? Be bold! You’ll have plenty of time to wear horrible, classic-cut skirt suits once you graduate.”
Amelia had smiled. “All right.”
* * *
She was meticulous, smart, a quick learner. She studied the lines, learned them by heart, attended a dress rehearsal where she moved from place to place according to the notes in the script and the director’s jerky hand movements. Her character was, indeed, mindless—an ignorant woman whose narrow way of thinking would condemn her to a drab, atonal life, moving single-mindedly from point A to point B. Amelia felt the desperation of such an existence, a life lived with eyes closed.
* * *
On the night of the first performance, buoyed by the energy of the crowd and the thrilling sense of her own body, her physical self, owning and occupying the space of the stage, she could sense the cutting edge of her character’s loneliness. Her performance was tinted with it, imbuing the role with surprising depth. The director approached her that night.
“Thank you for stepping in. You did well,” he said.
“Thank you for . . . having me,” she said solemnly. He smiled and raised an eyebrow. She blushed and added, “Er, in the play.”
“It was a pleasure,” he said, still smiling.
She began to blush harder. He clapped her jovially on the shoulder and began to walk away, then looked back toward her.
“If you decide to keep it up, I can recommend a class or two,” he said, looking carefully at her. Her eyes widened.
“Really?”
His smile became a wide grin. He was, she realized, amused by her.
“You’re only in college once,” he said.
* * *
She saw Luke later that night, when she slipped elatedly into his room with a six-pack of beer. He had missed the performance, begging the need to study for an early exam the next morning. He was sitting at his desk, highlighter in hand, still wearing the collared shirt and chinos he’d adopted as his going-to-class uniform. His posture was rigid, his eyes focused intently on the textbook in front of him. He was the picture of a future businessman—her future businessman. She stifled a laugh as she realized that he hadn’t even unbuttoned the top of his shirt. He looked up at the sound.
“Madame Butterfly?” he said, his voice rising unnaturally.
“Not quite,” she said, grinning. She turned a pirouette, placing the beer on his dresser with a flourish, then leaped toward him and swooped in to kiss him on the mouth. Instead of returning the kiss, he turned from her quickly with a pained smile, causing her to catch a mouthful of ear. She mock-spat.
“Yuck! Hey, what’s with you?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Luke, you just cold-shouldered me. What’s up?”
He sighed, pulled her toward the bed, gestured for her to sit beside him. He draped his arm over her shoulders. She looked at him, questioningly. He looked back with knitted brows.
He bit his lip and then said, “You just seem awfully excited tonight.”
“What, you mean, because of the play?”
“Well, that must be it, right? I’ve never seen you so worked up before; you’re all flushed.”
“Oh, well of course I am, dummy,” she said, smiling. “It was an amazing experience, and I’d never done anything like this before.”
“I know.”
“But that doesn’t explain why you’re mad at me, all of a sudden.”
“I’m not mad, Ame.” He ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair. “I’m just surprised. I thought this was a favor you were doing for Christine; you didn’t even seem that excited about it. And then you come in here, acting all crazy—”
“I am not acting crazy!”
“—when I’ve just been sitting here studying all night, alone.”
“Is that what this is about? You’re upset that I left you alone to study?”
He looked sheepish.
“That’s not totally it,” he said. “Obviously, we don’t have to be together every second.”
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s just that you seem so happy. One week rehearsing, and one night onstage, and it’s like somebody set you on fire.”
“It does feel a little bit like that,” she said.
“And this was your only performance, right? You were probably great, and I didn’t even get to see it.” He ran his fingers through his hair again, his lower lip protruding in a little-boy pout. She looked at him, loving him in spite of his ridiculous behavior, and patted his cheek.
“Awww,” she said.
“So now I feel like a jerk,” he continued. “My girlfriend was onstage for the first and only time in her life, and I was stuck back here with my nose in a book.”
She sat, quiet, feeling the finality of those words—first and only. Her silence unnerved him. He looked sharply at her.
“Why do you look like that?”
“I was just thinking,” she said, wary and measuring her tone against his mood. “I was thinking, maybe it won’t be the only time.”
“You’re going to take up acting?” he said, looking almost incredulous. She felt her temper, usually dormant beneath her patient nature, flare up. He had pronounced the word,
acting
, in a sneering, indignant tone that made it sound like some sort of filthy habit.
“I’m not ‘taking up’ anything, Luke.” Her voice was hard. “People study this, you know. Just because it’s not hard science, just because it doesn’t lead to a high-paying job at a hedge fund after college, doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
“What’s not to get? I’ve found something I enjoy doing. I want to do more of it before I graduate, before I lose the opportunity. Why are you against that?”
His look softened. He touched her hand. “I’m not against it,” he said. She looked at him with narrowed eyes. “I’m not,” he said again. “I just thought, maybe you were having a hard time with senior year, or getting hung up about what would happen after graduation. You’re on a good track, Ame. I don’t want to see you sabotage yourself on a whim, just because you’re worried about how things might pan out in the real world. I’m trying to look out for you.”
“You make it sound like I’m going through some kind of phase.”
“All I’m saying is, sometimes people get nervous when the rest of their lives are looming on the horizon. But if you just want to do a little soul-searching . . .” He trailed off.
“If you want to call it that, all right,” she said. “But my mind’s made up, regardless.”
He sighed.
“All right, so what will you do? Join some kind of club, or something?”
“No,” she said. “Joining a club, that just sounds trivial. I’m serious about this, and I only need one finance class to finish my major. I’m going to drop calc, do theater instead.”
* * *
Two days after her college graduation, less than one before the tires of Grant Willard’s truck would shatter her fingers into splintered dust on the roadside, she stood by the window in her empty room. The sense of something changing, of a different life stirring and awakening and unfolding its untested legs, gripped her with feverish intensity. The moment of discovery had passed; she had taken hold of it, her eyes opening to all of life’s limitless possibilities, and now, as she sat in her empty room and waited for Luke, anticipation filled her with the urgent need to go, go, go.
On the street below, a nondescript white sedan pulled carefully to the curb. Luke, squinting toward the sky from behind his glasses, emerged and looked up at her window. Amelia looked down at him, waiting for her, then gathered her single bag and rushed from the room in one, breathless movement. He was here, and she was ready.
She was on her way.
CHAPTER 6
I
n a small town, murder is three-dimensional. We make it that way, elevating it and turning it over until it’s more than a simple tragedy, until it becomes tangible. Murder in a small town is always more than a paragraph in the local paper. In a place so insulated, where lives are so small and gone about so quietly, violent death hangs in the air—tinting everything crimson, weaving itself into the shimmering heat that rises off the winding asphalt roads at noon. It oozes from taps and runs through the gas pumps. It sits at the dinner table, murmuring in urgent low tones under the clinking of glassware.
The shocking death of Amelia Anne Richardson was not Bridgeton’s first. Years before, when I was still young enough that the summer passed in an endless, barefoot tumble of long afternoons, the
ftz-ftz-ftz
of sprinklers and tall glasses filled with cloyingly sweet iced tea, a woman named Sarah DiStefano shot her husband in their kitchen. Robert DiStefano, age forty-two, was dead before he hit the floor. He had been scanning the open refrigerator in search of beer, bent double with his hands resting on his knees and his considerable gut hanging, pendulous, between his straining and out-of-shape thighs. The bullet entered at the base of his skull as he peered into the space between a half-f bottle of ketchup and a foil-covered casserole. He was looking for a can of Coors Light and trying, vaguely, to recall whether it was in 1992 or 1993 that he’d last been able to touch his toes.
The day that news broke, murder was the breeze that whipped through Bridgeton’s streets and the unseasonable chill that rose off the lake to tap its misty fingers against the windows. Neighbors tossed it back and forth over fences; children kicked it around in the street. It brought people together over coffee and at the gas pumps. It spewed from the mouths of the East Bank Tavern’s beer-swilling Saturday crowd.
In a small town, everyone has inside information. If you asked around, you couldn’t find a single person who didn’t know either Sarah, the confessed murderess, or Robert, the unwitting victim. And with both of them gone—one dead, one sure to pass the rest of her years behind bars—there was nothing for it: Whether serving time or dead and buried, Sarah and Robert DiStefano no longer belonged. They were outsiders.
“I knew there was something weird about her,” people said.
“Maybe he had it coming,” they said.
It didn’t matter if it was true. Out of the mouths of Bridgeton’s remaining residents, each scattered anecdote or snap judgment was a fact, an explanation, a final insight into these people who had lived among us, certainly, but who had never truly fit in. To hear them talk, the DiStefanos had fooled no one.
Because he was a lech, a drunk. He was lazy. He would steal the cash from her purse, take it and go out all night, piss it away on booze or stuff it into a stripper’s G-string. He’d run that woman ragged, wrung the life out of her. He’d slept around. She caught him with her sister, her best friend, with a woman named Tiffany, Tammy, or Sheena, a woman who lived in a trailer park twenty miles west of here. He beat his wife, berated her, broke her heart. He was lucky he’d lived as long as he did. He was lucky that he found a woman who’d put up with his shit for a few years, even if she put a bullet in his head at the end. It was his fault.
Or hers.
Because she never fit in. She was odd, nervous, twitchy. She was abrasive. She was too shy. She had jumpy eyes. Or not jumpy, exactly, but eyes set too close together—eyes that said she was capable of meanness, of insanity, of creating chaos with a single flick of her index finger. She was a shrew. She was a witch. She was never satisfied, not with him, not with this town. She heard voices. She took medication. Or didn’t take it enough.
We knew this, all of us, because we’d been told by someone who knew. We knew it. Don’t repeat it, don’t say I told you, but that’s the truth. He had it coming, and there was always something weird about her.
The real events that led to Robert’s death in the kitchen that night—the passing years in which Sarah became increasingly unstable, her struggle to fight it, the pains she’d taken to hide it from her loving but oblivious husband, and her final decline as she became convinced that her husband had been replaced by someone else, a stranger who meant her harm—they didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that the rest of Sarah’s life would play out not in prison, but quietly, her awareness dimmed to a bare glow by medication while she sat in a white-walled psychiatric hospital in a Boston suburb. We may not have known that, but we knew them. And we knew that they didn’t belong here.
Buoyed by that knowledge, with the murder slowly migrating away from the paper’s front page, with the story bleeding and seeping further and further back until it vanished entirely into the past, the people of Bridgeton drew close together.
And so, like murders before it, Amelia’s murder was three-dimensional in its aftermath. It blew alongside the flecks of bloodstained dirt, down County Road 128, and reached town as a howling gale. The chatter was fevered. Frenzied. People came home from the grocery store, from bridge club, from a walk in the park, and massaged jaw joints that were exhausted from gossiping. They stood over fences and talked about the dead girl, the girl with no name, no face, no identification.
But as people talked, they became uneasy. In their vernacular, there was no anonymous death. They had no facts to share, no stories to compare. Nobody knew the victim, and more than that, nobody knew who had killed her. People remembered the death of Robert DiStefano. Thinking of its aftermath, they decided that that sort of murder was preferable—the sort where the names and places and hard facts were all in place. Where everybody knew the players and the plot. After all, it was things like that, those small-town tragedies, that really brought a community closer together.
An anonymous death in a small town, that’s a different thing. It makes people uneasy. They stop gossiping, talk only with trusted friends, or—realizing that nobody can truly be trusted—they don’t talk at all. Instead of settling in the streets or running through the municipal sewer system, murder moves inside. It becomes internalized. It seeps around the corners of locked front doors. It creeps into people’s bedrooms. It runs in their veins.
People sit on their porches, they smoke, they look with narrowed eyes down the darkened streets and into their neighbors’ windows. Inside, murder tiptoes up the back stairs and hides behind a bedroom door.
The people, alone on their porches or gathered quietly around the kitchen table, consider the unknowns. They form theories. They wait for information. And when they go inside, upstairs, when the lights go out and they lie, wakeful, in their beds, they wonder if everything has changed.