After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search
Sarah Perry
For her
To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe the truth.
—VOLTAIRE
Preface
One cold March, just a few years ago, I rented a flawlessly clean silver car and drove up to Maine from my home in Brooklyn. I’d made it just north of Boston when the trees started to press in close, and as the network of pavement thinned down to I-95, I began hours of sitting in the dark, following that one road ever north. I held my left hand steady on the wheel at six o’clock, sifted through pop songs and ad spots with my right. I missed my early twenties, when I still had my own car and still smoked, moodily exhaling into the night on my semiannual trips up and down the East Coast, from college to home and back again. Once I entered Maine, I tuned in to WBLM, the classic rock station, one of the few clear signals that holds on through the mountains. ’BLM had been our station, the one Mom and I listened to on countless Sunday drives through tunnels of sunlit trees. I listened to David Bowie and Aerosmith and Fleetwood Mac and Heart, and Mom was alive again, then newly dead again, then long gone and faded away. I still knew all the words.
About an hour into Maine, I finally turned off the highway, winding farther north until I reached my aunt Carol’s house. It was midnight, and I shivered as I got out of the car, unprepared for the crystalline cold that had been waiting for me. Carol and her husband had been asleep for hours, but through a front window I could see they had left the yellow light on over the stairway to my old bedroom. The car door made a sharp sound when I pushed it shut, the trees replying with a softened echo. I stood outside for a minute, head swiveled up to the crowded stars, until something rustled in the ditch along the road, and I remembered where I was, and the fear moved back into me, running along my veins, racing up and down my limbs, warming me and settling in.
The fear waits for me still, always worse when it is dark or cold. But it’s the half hour of transition from day to night that’s hardest, watching the light seep from the landscape, taking with it its illusion of safety. On the rare days when I’m here in winter, when dusk starts sliding over this valley at four o’clock or even earlier, I have to fight against panic. I turn away from the windows, stir my aunt’s soup, sit with my silent uncle watching race cars hypnotically circle an endless oval track. Once it is truly dark out, I feel a bit better: there may be hours of nervousness to get through, but now I’m in them. I’ve been here before, and no matter how bad things get, some part of me always remembers that I’ll come out the other side.
So it’s good that I drove as the darkness came down, listening to the old soundtrack. It all makes sense. It’s more important that this trip be true than easy.
* * *
I get up early the next morning and have coffee and cereal with Carol. She is cheerful and I am cheerful and we do not mention why I am visiting. I don’t visit often.
I get into the car and make my way to the Maine State Police barracks in the town of Gray. It’s a two-hour drive, and I retrace much of last night’s ground, this time in cheerful daylight. I stop at Dunkin’ Donuts and everything tastes like high school.
Twenty minutes later, I turn into the barracks parking lot, sand and salt crunching under my tires, and park in front of a long, low building covered in sky-blue clapboard. This is not the imposing cement-and-glass fortress I’d imagined. There’s a little portico above the entrance, held up by thin blue columns. The windows are small. It looks like a nursing home, or a motel in a deserted oceanside town. There are about ten spots in the parking lot, only two of them filled by cruisers.
A flagpole rises from a closely shorn strip of dull winter grass, and a police officer is raising the flag. He’s the only person in sight: dark gray buzz-cut hair, torso bulky with muscle beneath his neat blue uniform, pulling a flimsy chain, hand over hand. He turns toward me and I pause before getting out. It’s Walt, the detective I know best. I know it’s him, but at the same time I’m unsure; at this distance, cops all look the same. He gives me a broad smile as I step out of the car and walk closer.
Walt greets me with fatherly effusiveness, and I feel guilty for my hesitation. He’s a kind man who has seen the worst of human behavior, with a carefully restrained sense of humor and a broad accent; a north woods version of the classic gumshoe. He’s now commander of the Maine State Police field troop unit in southern Maine, but he spent many of his years in the division devoted to major crimes. A few detectives led Mom’s case over the years, but Walt was the one in charge the longest; he knows so much about my early life, more than anyone. More than my aunts and uncles. More, in fact, than me.
Walt ushers me to a conference room that’s been reserved for the next few days. Susie, a witness advocate from the attorney general’s office, is waiting; she greets me with a warm hug. I haven’t seen her or Walt since the trial four years ago, and this reunion gives me comfort: there is so much I don’t need to explain to them.
Susie is chatty as I settle in and scan the room. This is more like what I had expected: laminated wood conference table, big projector screen, American flag hanging limp in the corner. Susie asks about my apartment, my work, what it’s like in the city. I answer her questions while trying to remember what I know about her. I ask about her fiancé, her teenage niece.
Soon Walt excuses himself to go down the hall to his office, says he’ll be around all day if I need him. Susie and I turn to the boxes and binders on the conference table. There are about ten four-inch binders, each crammed with paper, plus three cardboard file boxes. Susie lifts the tops off them one by one—they, too, are full of paper.