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“What’s your son’s name?”

“That’s John. He’s a very kind, gentle boy. I’ve always been proudest of that. He just graduated from high school.”

“They bumped it up a little—when I went to school here, they made us wait till June.”

“Mmmm. Nice to have the longer summers.”

I smiled. She smiled. I sat down and sipped my water. I couldn’t remember what Curry advised once you tricked your way into someone’s living room.

“We actually haven’t properly met. I’m Camille Preaker. From the
Chicago Daily Post
? We spoke briefly on the phone the other night.”

She stopped smiling. Her jaw started working.

“You should have said that before.”

“I know what a horrible time this is for you, and if I could just ask you a few questions…”

“You may not.”

“Mrs. Keene, we want to be fair to your family, that’s why I’m here. The more information we can give people…”

“The more papers you can sell. I’m sick and tired of all this. Now I will tell you one last time: Do not come back here. Do not try to contact us. I have absolutely nothing to say to you.” She stood over me, leaned down. She wore, as she had at the funeral, a beaded necklace made of wood, with a big red heart at its center. It bobbed back and forth off her bosom like a hypnotist’s watch. “I think you are a parasite,” she spat at me. “I think you are disgusting. I hope someday you look back and see how ugly you are. Now please leave.”

She trailed me to the door, as if she wouldn’t believe I was truly gone until she saw me step outside her home. She closed the door behind me with enough force to make her doorbell chime lightly.

I stood on the stoop blushing, thinking to myself what a nice detail that heart necklace would make in my story, and saw the girl in the red convertible staring at me. The boy was gone.

“You’re Camille Preaker, right?” she called out.

“Yes.”

“I remember you,” the girl said. “I was just a little thing when you lived here, but we all knew you.”

“What’s your name?”

“Meredith Wheeler. You wouldn’t remember me, I was just a little goofball when you were in high school.”

John Keene’s girlfriend. Her name was familiar, thanks to my mother’s friends, but I wouldn’t have remembered her personally. Hell, she’d have been all of six or seven last time I lived here. Still, I wasn’t surprised she knew me. Girls growing up in Wind Gap studied the older girls obsessively: who dated the football stars, who was homecoming queen, who mattered. You traded favorites like baseball cards. I still remember CeeCee Wyatt, Calhoon High prom queen from when I was a girl. I once bought eleven drugstore lipsticks trying to find the exact shade of pink she wore when she said hello to me one morning.

“I remember you,” I said. “I can’t believe you’re driving.”

She laughed, seemed pleased by my lie.

“You’re a reporter now, right?”

“Yes, in Chicago.”

“I’ll get John to talk to you. We’ll be in touch.”

Meredith zipped away. I’m sure she felt quite pleased with herself—
We’ll be in touch
—reapplying her lip gloss and thinking not at all of the dead ten-year-old that was to be the subject of conversation.

I
phoned the main hardware store in town—the one where Natalie’s body had been found. Without identifying myself, I began chatting about maybe redoing a bathroom, maybe getting new tiles. Not too hard to steer the conversation to the killings. I suppose a lot of people have been rethinking their home security lately, I suggested.

“That’s a fact, ma’am. We’ve had a run on chain locks and double bolts in the past few days,” said the grumbly voice.

“Really? How many have you gone through?”

“About three dozen, I’d guess.”

“Mostly families? People with children?”

“Oh, yeah. They’re the ones got reason to worry, right? Horrible thing. We’re hoping to make some sort of donation to little Natalie’s family.” He paused. “You want to come down, look at some tile samples?”

“I might just do that, thanks.”

One more reporting chore off my list, and I didn’t even have to subject myself to namecalling from a grieving mother.

F
or our dinner meeting, Richard picked Gritty’s, a “family restaurant” with a salad bar that featured every kind of food but salad. The lettuce always sat in a small container at the end, a greasy, pale afterthought. Richard was chatting up the jolly-fat hostess when I flustered in twelve minutes late. The girl, whose face matched the pies revolving in the case behind her, didn’t seem to notice me hovering. She was immersed in the possibilities of Richard: In her head, she was already writing her diary entry for the night.

“Preaker,” he said, eyes still on the girl. “Your tardiness is a scandal. You’re lucky JoAnn was here to keep me company.” The girl giggled, then glared at me, leading us to a corner booth where she slapped a greasy menu in front of me. On the table, I could still see the outline of the previous customer’s glassware.

The waitress appeared, slid me a glass of water the size of a shot, then handed Richard a styrofoam trough of soda pop. “Hey Richard—I remembered, see?”

“That’s why you’re my favorite waitress, Kathy.” Cute.

“Hi, Camille; I heard you were in town.” I didn’t want to hear that phrase ever again. The waitress, upon second look, was a former classmate of mine. We’d been friends for a semester sophomore year because we’d dated best buddies—mine was Phil, hers was Jerry—jock guys who played football in the fall and wrestled in the winter, and threw parties year-round in Phil’s basement rec room. I had a flash memory of us holding hands for balance while we peed in the snow just outside the sliding glass doors, too drunk to face his mom upstairs. I remember her telling me about having sex with Jerry on the pool table. Which explained why the felt was sticky.

“Hey, Kathy, it’s good to see you. How’s it going?”

She threw her arms out and cast a glance around the restaurant.

“Oh, you can probably guess. But hey, that’s what you get for sticking around here, right? Bobby says hi. Kidder.”

“Oh, right! God…” I’d forgotten they got married. “How is he?”

“Same old Bobby. You should drop by some time. If you have time. We’re over on Fisher.”

I could picture the clock ticking loudly as I sat in the living room of Bobby and Kathy Kidder, trying to come up with something to say. Kathy would do all the talking, she always had. She was the kind of person who’d read street signs aloud rather than suffer silence. If he was still the same old Bobby, he was quiet but affable, a guy with few interests and slate blue eyes that flicked into focus only when talk turned to hunting. Back in high school, he saved the hooves of all the deer he killed, always had the latest pair in his pocket, and would pull them out and tap drumbeats with them on whatever hard surface was available. I always felt like it was the dead deer’s Morse code, a delayed mayday from tomorrow’s venison.

“Anyway, you guys doing the buffet?”

I asked for a beer, which brought forth a mighty pause. Kathy glanced back over her shoulder at the clock on the wall. “Mmmm, we’re not supposed to serve till eight. But I’ll see if I can sneak you one—old times’ sake, right?”

“Well, I don’t want to get you in trouble.” Just like Wind Gap to have arbitrary drinking rules. Five o’clock would make sense, at least. Eight o’clock was just someone’s way of making you feel guilty.

“Lord, Camille, it’d be the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in quite a while.”

While Kathy went to purloin me a drink, Richard and I filled plates with chicken-fried steak, grits, mashed potatoes, and, in Richard’s case, a jiggly slab of Jell-O that was melting into his food by the time we returned to our table. Kathy had left a bottle of beer discreetly on my seat cushion.

“Always drink this early?”

“I’m just having a beer.”

“I could smell liquor on your breath when you came in, underneath a layer of Certs—wintergreen?” He smiled at me, as if he were simply curious, no judgments. I bet he glowed in the interrogation room.

“Certs, yes; liquor, no.”

In truth, that’s why I’d been late. Right before I pulled into the parking lot, I realized the quick nip I took after leaving the Keenes needed some quick covering up, and drove another few blocks to the convenience store to buy some mints. Wintergreen.

“Okay, Camille,” he said gently. “No worries. It’s none of my business.” He took a bite of mashed potatoes, dyed red from the Jell-O, and stayed silent. Seemed slightly abashed.

“So, what do you want to know about Wind Gap?” I felt I’d disappointed him keenly, like I was a careless parent reneging on a birthday promise to take him to the zoo. I was willing to tell him the truth then, to answer unfailingly the next question he asked in order to make it up to him—and I suddenly wondered if that was the reason he’d challenged my drinking to begin with. Smart cop.

He stared me down. “I want to know about its violence. Every place has its own particular strain. Is it in the open, is it hidden? Is it committed as a group—bar fights, gang rapes—or is it specific, personal? Who commits it? Who’s the target?”

“Well, I don’t know that I can just make a sweeping statement of the entire history of violence here.”

“Name a truly violent incident you saw growing up.”

My mother with the baby.

“I saw a woman hurt a child.”

“Spanking? Hitting?”

“She bit it.”

“Okay. Boy or girl?”

“Girl, I think.”

“The child was hers?”

“No.”

“Okay, okay, this is good. So a very personal act of violence on a female child. Who committed it, I’ll check it out.”

“I don’t know the person’s name. It was someone’s relative from out of town.”

“Well, who would know her name? I mean, if she has ties here, it’d be worth looking into.”

I could feel my limbs disconnecting, floating nearby like driftwood on an oily lake. I pressed my fingertips against my fork tines. Just saying the story aloud panicked me. I hadn’t even thought Richard might want specifics.

“Hey, I thought this was just supposed to be a profile of violence,” I said, my voice hollow behind the blood in my ears. “I don’t have any details. It was a woman I didn’t recognize, and I don’t know who she was with. I just assumed she was from out of town.”

“I thought reporters didn’t assume.” He was smiling again.

“I wasn’t a reporter at the time, I was only a girl….”

“Camille, I’m giving you a hard time, I’m sorry.” He plucked the fork from my fingers, placed it deliberately on his side of the table, picked my hand up and kissed it. I could see the word
lipstick
crawling out from my right shirtsleeve. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to grill you. I was playing bad cop.”

“I find it difficult to see you as bad cop.”

He grinned. “True, it’s a stretch. Curse these boyish good looks!”

We sipped our drinks for a second. He twirled the salt shaker and said, “Can I ask a few more questions?” I nodded. “What’s the next incident you can think of?”

The overpowering smell of the tuna salad on my plate was making my stomach twist. I looked for Kathy to get another beer.

“Fifth grade. Two boys cornered a girl at recess and had her put a stick inside herself.”

“Against her will? They forced her?”

“Mmmm…a little bit I guess. They were bullies, they told her to, and she did.”

“And you saw this or heard about it?”

“They told a few of us to watch. When the teacher found out, we had to apologize.”

“To the girl?”

“No, the girl had to apologize too, to the class. ‘Young ladies must be in control of their bodies because boys are not.’”

“Jesus. You forget sometimes how different things were, and not that many years ago. How just…uninformed.” Richard jotted in his notebook, slid some Jell-O down his throat. “What else do you remember?”

“Once, an eighth-grade girl got drunk at a high-school party and four or five guys on the football team had sex with her, kind of passed her around. Does that count?”

“Camille. Of course it counts. You know that, right?”

“Well, I just didn’t know if that counted as outright violence or…”

“Yeah, I’d count a bunch of punks raping a thirteen-year-old outright violence, yes I sure would.”

“How is everything?” Kathy was suddenly smiling over us.

“You think you could sneak me one more beer?”

“Two.” Richard said.

“All right, this one I do only as a favor to Richard, since he’s the best tipper in town.”

“Thanks, Kathy.” Richard smiled.

I leaned across the table. “I’m not arguing that it’s wrong, Richard; I’m just trying to get your criteria for violence.”

“Right, and I’m getting a good picture of exactly the kind of violence we’re dealing with here, just by the fact that you’re asking me if that counts. Were the police notified?”