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-full 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
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-full 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
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