I was surprised to hear that there had been nothing wrong with the phones that night, and we have never really figured out why they didn’t work. Now, I have theories, and those must suffice. In the kitchen, I failed to put the phone back on the hook after it had fallen to the floor, after the beeping of the open line had turned to silence, and so there was no active line to call out on. If you’d like to make a call, you must hang up and try again. And then when I was about fifteen, I had a sudden, unbidden sense memory of having frantically dialed 991 from Mom’s room, rather than 911. The police have always been gracious on this point, have never dwelled on my failure to call out.
The phones are a failure of logic in the story; there is also a failure of memory. Although I could tell Pickett and Lehan everything that had happened from the moment Mom screamed that night, could march through every second and every detail, I could not remember the earlier part of the evening, before Mom and I had gone to bed. There was an utter blankness there, the terror of what came later destroying the final hours of our life together. The police wanted to know if Mom had seemed upset, if she had received any phone calls, when exactly she had gone to bed. No matter what they asked about those hours before the murder, or how hard I thought about them, I could not retrieve those details. It must have been clear to them that I would never get those hours back, because they were surprisingly merciful about them.
On all the other details, though, the investigators were relentless from the start. I gave Pickett all I had, but he wanted more.
“I really, really get the sense that you know who was there,” he said. His attitude was slightly sarcastic, as though I were playing games with him and should cut it out. He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head back, inviting me to go ahead and give up my information.
When I described the sound of the kitchen drawer opening, of a knife being taken out, Pickett wondered how I knew it was a knife; the weapon had not been, and would never be, found. After I’d described, several times, the sounds of the stabbing and the silence that followed, he said, “Let me ask you this. How do you think your mother was hurt?”
Pickett found it suspicious that while I claimed I hadn’t seen the killing, I was sure that a knife had been taken out of our kitchen drawer. He kept asking me why I was so convinced that she had been killed with a knife, was unsatisfied when I said that just seemed the likeliest explanation. When he said, once more, “And what makes you think it was a knife?” I replied, “Because of the sound I heard, and, well, I don’t see how you could use a spoon or anything.” When I read the transcript of this interview years later, I found that response both obnoxious and wonderful. I was proud of my little-girl self for pushing back, even when she was most broken.
Pickett was interviewing me because I was the only witness, as well as the person who was closest to my mother, because the things I had to say were important. But still, he didn’t seem to really listen. He seemed to have already made up his mind, that very first day, about what had happened and who was responsible. His attitude implied that any answers that didn’t conform to his theory were mistaken, ridiculous. He asked me a long string of questions about Mom and Dennis’s fights. I said that Dennis had a temper, that they yelled a lot, and Pickett replied, illogically, “It sounds like you really think a lot of Dennis.”
Later in the interview, Pickett asked the question that most clearly told me that we would never understand each other. “Is it possible that the person that was there is somebody that you care a lot about and don’t want to get into trouble?” he said. “Even though, even though you know what happened was wrong?”
“I don’t know who it is,” I said once again, my voice straining with frustration. My love for my mother didn’t seem to matter much to Pickett; he was not going to assume that I cared more about her than about getting her killer “in trouble.” I realized that to the police—these people who had so much power—I was not a person who could be counted on to behave ethically. I looked at him, still not entirely sure he was serious. But he kept looking back at me, waiting.
I knew that the police and my family thought it would be additionally tragic if the killer was someone known to me, that they thought I would feel betrayed, confused, hurt. But I didn’t care if the killer was someone I knew, or someone I had previously cared about. Mom was dead. Nothing else had meaning. Whether it was a man I knew or a man I didn’t mattered very little in comparison with the fact that I would never see her again. It was one of the many things that no longer mattered at all.
I looked at Pickett’s impatient, self-assured face. “I don’t know,” I said again, slowly and clearly, while cursing my own ignorance. He and Lehan said they thought that maybe I had come out into the living room and seen the man’s face during the attack. But they offered no explanation for how I could have gotten out alive if I had. It was only my certainty that if I had I would have ended up dead that shielded me from a regret that would have torn me apart.
7
* * *
before
Fed up with Ray and her mother, Crystal once tried to run away on her bike—her goal being Glenice’s house, about fifty miles away. She was maybe ten years old; Glenice would have been nearly twenty-two. Crystal may not have understood how far the journey would be, but she knew how to get there because she had paid attention during weekend visits. She made it to the town of Norway, more than fifteen miles away, before night began to fall and Officer Bob Bell, recognizing the skinny, redheaded kid pedaling slowly along the shoulder and crying, picked her up and took her back home.
By the time she was fourteen, Crystal had grown from gangly to graceful, and her hair had shifted from carrots to sunset. She was already more or less living with other families, sharing friends’ bedrooms, avoiding home for days at a time. She’d started dating, and one afternoon, on one of the rare days that found her at the house, she headed out to meet a boy, but Ray decided he wanted her to stay.
Most of the time, Ray was glad for one less nuisance, but once a week or so, he’d get especially drunk and decide that he didn’t like the idea of the kids “running around,” even though when they stayed they could never be quiet enough.
Crystal probably told Ray some story about meeting up with Linda, but he wasn’t buying it; he told her she wasn’t going anywhere. He stared at her from his post near the door, waiting for her to back down or make a move. The boy was waiting; the timing was awful. She grabbed her bag and took long, quick strides across the kitchen, turning her face from her stepfather. Gloria, then twenty-seven years old, was visiting that day, and she sat silently at the kitchen table. She had a miserable look on her face but knew better than to try to help.