Suddenly, Sandy didn’t want to go to work. The Shoe Shop was the absolute last place she wanted to go. Because she knew. She knew if she went to work, this would be real.
She sat down for a minute on her porch. The weathered boards were dewy, and she could feel the moisture through her jeans. Maybe she should just stay home today. But of course, she couldn’t. She had to go see, to prove this was all just a big scare. She’d go and Crystal would be there and everything would be just as it always had been.
Sandy got in her car and wound up the dirt road leading to Route 302, pebbles crunching under her tires. She forgot to turn the radio on.
She drove over the Casco line to Naples. She drove over the causeway, Sebago Lake on one side, Brandy Pond on the other, and watched the gray sky gradually lighten over the dark water. Last night’s bad weather looked like it would stay.
Crystal was always at her bench, right across the way, when Sandy arrived in the morning. Always. As Sandy drove, she kept picturing Crystal standing there, how she would look up and give her that pretty, slightly crooked smile. She thought about how Crystal’s red hair stood out as soon as you walked in. In ten or fifteen minutes, Sandy would arrive at the Shop, she’d walk in the door, and Crystal would be right there, sewing away. If she could just walk in and see her, she would know that Randy was mistaken. If she could just see her.
* * *
Linda’s boyfriend, Mike Douglas, left her house that morning at about five o’clock to make the two-hour drive to his job at Bath Iron Works, where he was a welder who helped build massive warships. He left Linda in bed; she wouldn’t have to get up for another hour or so. Mike was near the Bridgton–Naples line when blue lights suddenly filled the cabin of his truck. He pulled over, confused, pretty sure he hadn’t done anything wrong. The cop who walked up to his window was a guy he knew, Gary Chadbourne.
“Listen,” Gary said. He pulled back a little, cleared his throat. “Listen, Mike, Crystal Perry’s . . . been killed. Last night. We need you to tell Linda. We need you both to come up to Crystal’s house for questioning.”
Mike drove straight back to Linda’s house. She was in a deep sleep. She heard him as though he was underwater. “Linda . . .” And then, sharper, cutting through the fog, “Linda. Wake up.” His voice was loud, urgent. What the hell could he want? Why was he back already?
He told her, the words feeling false and strange in his mouth. “What?! What?” she said. She was angry, confused. It hit her all at once, made her feel like she was coming apart. She kept asking Mike questions he couldn’t answer. He told her that they had to go to Crystal’s, right away, to talk to the police. He helped her get up, get dressed. He walked her to his truck and drove her over.
They parked on the side of the road a short distance from Crystal’s house. The scene was something out of a nightmare, out of a movie. A fleet of white police cars and other official-looking vehicles lined the sandy shoulder of the road, and Crystal’s little car was eclipsed by a large van parked behind it. Huge lettering across the van’s back doors read CRIME SCENE UNIT. Yellow police tape glowed in the deep gray morning fog.
Before Linda could get out of the vehicle, a cop knocked on her window, motioned for her to come with him. They sat in his police cruiser; he told her he just had a few questions. She sat in the front, in the passenger seat. Every few minutes, she nervously glanced over at Crystal’s house, about fifty feet away.
The officer was Charles Stevens, another in a long line of cops who scrambled to learn all they could in those early days and weeks. Linda began by telling Stevens that she and Crystal were best friends, that their birthdays were six days apart. In interview after interview, she would make sure that her listener knew they were best friends, that Crystal was her only best friend.
She immediately mentioned Crystal’s fiancé, Dennis: his quick, fierce temper. She described a call she’d received a few weeks prior. Crystal was crying and frantic; she sounded a little afraid. She and Dennis had gotten into a terrible fight, a screaming match that ended with him grabbing her arm while punching the steel kitchen door. He flung her away from him, then stormed off, leaving her alone in a dark house.
Linda had insisted on coming over, but at this Crystal calmed down, said she was all right. No need to come over, no need to do anything so drastic. There was a limit to how much she would let Linda help. She just wanted to talk. One of her biggest concerns, she said, was that she couldn’t afford to replace things that he broke around her house, and she knew that he couldn’t, either. But sitting in the police car, Linda told Stevens how hard Dennis could punch.
“You guys have to look at that door,” she said. “The kitchen door—it’ll still have knuckle prints in it.” Crystal must have been looking right at them while she assured Linda she was all right. “He wasn’t the right man for her,” Linda added, and this profound understatement seems to reveal a desperate wish: that she had been more forceful when trying to convince Crystal to leave him.
Stevens asked about the last time Linda saw her friend, needed her to tell him the exact day. I imagine her haltingly figuring this out, voice shaking: “Um, it was a Friday, a coupla weeks ago, we went out for drinks. End of the month. Maybe it was Sat—No, no, I went to work that day. Friday . . .”
Stevens would have shifted some papers around on the dash, then opened the car’s inner console and pulled out a small calendar. Flipped back to April. “April 29th?”
“Yes. Yes, that was it. April 29th.” And the date would stay with her always.