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.
CHAPTER
7
I
’m fine.
I repeated this to myself as I sat in my car, putting on makeup, wearing black. Black shirt, black pants, black apron: the required uniform at the bistro that had been my after-school job, where I now waitressed Wednesdays through Saturdays. The driver’s-side visor was flipped down, its mirror open, reflecting the bags under my eyes and a healing zit on my forehead. I smeared my lips with gloss.
It was my first shift since summer began, a week since the night that left me watching James disappear down the road. A week since I’d found myself alone again, standing in the yard with a headache and his words,
We can still have this summer,
echoing insistently behind him.
I had walked toward the warm glow of my house, yellow light behind wavy glass windows, safe and bright and with family inside. The screen door had slammed behind me. My mother had called my name.
“Do you want dinner?”
My tongue was coated with wool, cottony in my mouth. It had grown hair. The inside of my mouth had never been drier. My stomach was empty.
I walked into the kitchen where she sat, eating from a white container of Chinese food. Gluey fried rice rode the fork to her mouth. The sight of the food, the grease spots on the tablecloth, and the chunks of artificially colored pork made my throat twitch with nausea.
“I don’t think I want any of that,” I said.
“Well good, because I’m not giving you any,” my mom replied, taking another forkful and winking at me. “Your father is late, and I wasn’t sure if
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.
CHAPTER
7
I
’m fine.
I repeated this to myself as I sat in my car, putting on makeup, wearing black. Black shirt, black pants, black apron: the required uniform at the bistro that had been my after-school job, where I now waitressed Wednesdays through Saturdays. The driver’s-side visor was flipped down, its mirror open, reflecting the bags under my eyes and a healing zit on my forehead. I smeared my lips with gloss.
It was my first shift since summer began, a week since the night that left me watching James disappear down the road. A week since I’d found myself alone again, standing in the yard with a headache and his words,
We can still have this summer,
echoing insistently behind him.
I had walked toward the warm glow of my house, yellow light behind wavy glass windows, safe and bright and with family inside. The screen door had slammed behind me. My mother had called my name.
“Do you want dinner?”
My tongue was coated with wool, cottony in my mouth. It had grown hair. The inside of my mouth had never been drier. My stomach was empty.
I walked into the kitchen where she sat, eating from a white container of Chinese food. Gluey fried rice rode the fork to her mouth. The sight of the food, the grease spots on the tablecloth, and the chunks of artificially colored pork made my throat twitch with nausea.
“I don’t think I want any of that,” I said.
“Well good, because I’m not giving you any,” my mom replied, taking another forkful and winking at me. “Your father is late, and I wasn’t sure if
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