WHEN YOUR LETTER CAME through my mail slot, I was preparing to shift gears on the book. I’d moved to Milpitas, gotten a feel for the town: for what it was like now, and for what it had been like before the tech boom changed it the way it changed a lot of places. I’d spent a long time doing preliminary research, and then I’d gotten granular: I’d conducted interviews, scouted important locations, and dug around in the microfiche at the public library. I had primary texts and secondary texts, and now it was time to move into my next phase, where I try, for better or worse, to gather together the twin spirits of time and place and make them real. In my line of work, you have to have something that sets you apart from everybody else: a feel for time and place is the corner on which I set up shop, years ago, when I first started writing about a locally famous double murder whose legend still haunted the town where I grew up.
Like all legends, it felt eternal to me, as non-negotiable as the scenery: the hills, the missions, the coastline, the White Witch. In writing about it and bringing it to life, I’d touched a nerve—not everywhere, but somewhere. I felt confident about my methods in the wake of the White Witch’s success, and had taken those methods elsewhere, with similar results. People liked to read true crime books that brought them inside the house or hospital or garage or basement where it all went down, to feel as though they’d breathed in a little of the menacing air they imagine circulating or hanging stagnant around a crime scene. I got better at what I did. I sharpened my focus and broadened its reach. I didn’t hurt anybody; the proof of my goodwill was in the results.
You sure got San Luis Obispo right, you wrote. I guess we were both there at the same time so that shouldn’t be a surprise. You elaborated on this theme for a number of pages, mentioning places we both might have seen in those days—me as a child, you as a young mother trying to leverage enough control over your life to make the effort feel worthwhile. The Madonna Plaza: you remembered taking Jesse to a petting zoo there one Easter. You remembered that it was unseasonably cold that spring, but that Jesse had loved the animals so much it hadn’t bothered him at all; you recalled all the other mothers huddling together outside the wooden stiles set up in the great parking lot, many of their young children clinging to their coattails, and Jesse inside running wild, touching all the animals and yelling their names. “The llama! The goat! The sheep!”
You remembered discovering that it wasn’t too expensive to take Jesse to see a movie at the Fremont Theater, and doing that when you could: the westerns, the musicals, The Incredible Mr. Limpet. Sitting in the dark with your son, watching a movie and eating popcorn: these were precious memories for you, pearls of incalculable price. When the horror of his final hours on this earth came for you in the middle of the night, as it still did after all these years, you turned to these memories for comfort, and knew you had done what you could to make his life a good one.
But I had made his childhood sound like a nightmare, you wrote. I had saved the worst for Gene Cupp, and you couldn’t say I’d been wrong there, you said; but, by the same token, you couldn’t say I’d been right, because who really knows what a person is going through with their child? In their home? With their family? That was the problem with my book, you said. Everything about it was real except for the people, who could only be one way for me because I had a story to tell, but the story was bigger than that, and the people were real, not characters in a movie whose lives were only important when they were doing something awful.
But there’s a lot more to it than that, you wrote. I get it, though, you probably think I don’t but I do. A story has to be about something, it’s not just about the people in it and everything else that ever happened to them. See? I understand. And then you explained—patiently, in detail, a teacher trying to spell something out for an especially dense pupil—that, however insistent the demands of narrative and convention, there were things beyond and beneath those demands that were just as important, and perhaps more pressing, in the final analysis. You took pains to make it clear that you understood your position wasn’t impartial; you had real skin in the game. Your exact phrase: I know I have skin in the game.
I felt my heart surge in my chest when I read it: even in the early going, it seemed plain enough that you were being careful, so you had to know how that sounded, didn’t you? But I knew you, a little, I thought, and struggled to imagine you intentionally reaching for the harshest metaphor available, the word that would sting most. I wanted to rush ahead through the letter, to find out if you’d undergone some immense transformation in the years since I’d last thought about you. Were you a professor now? A writer? Some sort of spiritual practitioner? I remembered the arresting officer’s account of the arrest of Diana Crane, the one he gave to me personally: It was just dripping through the bags, he’d said. Not just the blood, but, you know, parts and pieces that came off.
And so, you said, ten or so pages in, you had spent a number of years working on this letter, which you knew was long, but you figured that I, as a writer, would understand that sometimes a story takes as long as it takes to tell it, and while you no longer felt like I owed you a hearing—nobody owes anybody anything, you said—you hoped I was honest enough to give you the time you were asking for. The earliest drafts of your letter had been short and angry, with only a few details about your son, how special he had been to you when you were a new mother: those had seemed most important at the time. You were glad those versions hadn’t reached me; you didn’t believe in fate, but each time your envelope returned to you, you’d taken the opportunity to revisit your theme, to try to make it as clear as you could; and now, if this worked and I was still at this address, you felt you’d gotten to the center of it, and that if I would do my part now, that would be nice. Again quoting: That would be nice.
There was a tack hammer on the floor near me; I needed it to pull up the carpet. I looked up from your long letter to catch my breath, and I thought how it’s not every day that a writer like me has a primary text just land on his living room floor like this; and then I looked at the hammer and thought about the work that lay ahead, and I returned to you.
2.
YOU MET MICHAEL JENKINS in 1953, in the parking lot of the A&W where you worked as a carhop. He rolled up in a Dodge Custom convertible with its top down; there were a couple of guys driving newer convertibles around town, but he kept his clean. It looked cool to you.
A lot of people don’t remember how nice you had to be to everybody back then, if you were a young girl working at a diner, or in an office, or at a soda counter. They don’t remember, or they pretend it was different. But it was exhausting: smile all day, get slapped on the ass a few times when you turned your back on them walking back to the kitchen with their orders or after taking dictation at their desks—younger guys, older guys, they all did it. Even your own mother had told you, as soon as you took your first job, that you should be cheerful about it: nobody likes a complainer and it doesn’t do any good.
So you did as you were told, and, as a consequence, didn’t much like your job most days. It gave you a little walking-around money and sometimes your customers were friends from high school, so that was all right. And then Michael drove up in his Dodge, and even though everybody said he was a bad guy, he seemed sweet on you. He spoke gently and asked you questions, and, after a few more visits, he asked you out to the movies.