Mike had injured his back that day, but he told Linda to go on out and have a good time. She and Crystal went to the three most popular bars in the area around Bridgton: the lounge of the Laurel Lea inn, on the north end of town, then Tommy’s, a dive bar in Naples, just to the south near Casco, then Rick’s Café, also in Naples, on the shore of Sebago Lake. It was weekly karaoke night at the Laurel Lea, but they weren’t singers. They had one beer and left. Tommy’s was too quiet; they didn’t stay there long, either. Rick’s was more lively, so they stayed awhile. A few people would later report that seeing them there was the last time they saw Crystal alive. One, Wendy Avery, the mother of two close friends of mine, asked her if she was still dating Dennis, and she said that she was trying to end the relationship. It wasn’t fair, Crystal said, for her daughter to see her and Dennis argue so viciously.
At the end of that night, the two women went back to Linda’s house. Linda told Stevens that they talked mostly about me. Mom told Linda that I was doing very well in school, that she was proud of me. She said the school wanted to advance me two grades the next year, so I would skip seventh. On the last day she was alive, she would send me to school with a sealed note giving them permission to do so. I read most of it on the bus, pressing the plain envelope to the damp, rattling window. Without this small transgression, these police notes, reaching me so many years later, would have been the first I’d heard of it. She knew I’d be excited, was just waiting for the right moment to tell me.
In the ambulance earlier that morning, Officer Kate had kept me talking, casually, asking about whatever came to mind. My heartbeat had been wild and erratic, my mind crowded with thoughts, sifting through recent days like the fodder of dreams. One of the first things I told her was that I would be skipping a grade in school. For years, whenever I thought about this, it would strike me as a shallow, self-congratulatory thing to have brought up, but I forgave my childish bragging because I had been in shock. Now, though, it makes sense. I was already grasping at school as a way forward, a way out.
That final night they saw each other, Mom repeated to Linda what she’d told Wendy: that she was going to break up with Dennis, mostly because of his terrible temper. I imagine them sitting together in Mom’s little black car. It’s past one o’clock—closing time in Maine—and they don’t want to go inside and risk waking Mike. Linda faces the windshield but occasionally turns to watch Crystal’s expression in the dim light cast from a single bulb mounted on the garage. She can just see her friend’s freckles.
Linda and Mom also talked about my plans to go to college—something few people we knew had done. She knew that leaving Dennis would make this more likely; she knew we both needed peace and stability. She wanted to be strong enough to leave him, to improve our life together, make college and other good things more possible.
Mom and Linda would never see each other again. The next Friday, the weekend before the Wednesday night murder, Linda missed a call. Crystal left an answering machine message, saying only that she wanted to talk.
Linda would never know what Crystal had wanted to talk about, or whether she was in some kind of trouble that Friday night. Whether she needed her. And because Linda didn’t call back that week, she never got to speak to her again. I wonder how long she kept that message. If she might even still have the tape.
* * *
This interview is only a glimpse. In his report of their conversation, Detective Stevens did not paraphrase Linda’s tone of voice, her tears or lack of tears, her rage or confusion or helplessness. I can only imagine what she said, and how she said it, based on the shadow of the woman I knew so long ago.
But the “just the facts, ma’am,” approach that kept Stevens from noting Linda’s emotions in his report is unevenly applied. In the wake of a violent crime, people’s deepest hopes and desires become a matter of official concern. Privacy erodes from day one. The end of the interview lays both of them bare:
“Both she and Crystal had talked of committing suicide because they have been very low emotionally in the past. Crystal would never do anything like that because she was always there for Sarah.” Linda did not expect to be the one left behind.
On the interview summary, there’s nothing written next to “End time,” but I imagine the sun coming up, the gray light turning whiter and whiter, the rain backing off.
Occasionally, Linda would see a policeman enter or leave our house through the front door, the one we hardly ever used. They still hadn’t told her just how Crystal died.
* * *
Back over in Casco, Penny, the friend who raced Mom while hand-sewing, had just gotten out of the shower, at about five thirty, when she heard somebody banging on her door. She rushed out to her kitchen to see four police officers standing there under her porch light. When she let them in, they immediately started asking her if anyone disliked her friend Crystal. Besides Chief Bell, there were two state troopers and a county cop, which seemed like a lot of people to question one person. She had trouble answering them clearly without knowing why they were asking. They asked a few more questions and finally she said, “What’s going on here?”
Chief Bell told her: Crystal had been killed.
Penny’s first thought was for me. The cops assured her that I was with my aunts and my grandmother. They asked about Crystal’s ex-husband, Tom, and Penny was still preoccupied with me when she answered: “I know Crystal wouldn’t want Sarah living with him. Just make a promise, right now, that she won’t go there.”
They couldn’t promise her that, of course. They said something noncommittal, moved on. They asked her question after question. Penny’s mind raced as she tried to provide clear answers. Finally, they left. The moment they pulled out of the driveway, Dennis appeared at her door. Penny lived alone. He must have been sitting across the street, she thought, waiting until everybody left.
When Penny told me about that day, I asked, “How did you feel, with him standing in your house?” This was a sideways way of asking her if she thought Dennis—who was an old friend of hers—was capable of murder, and we both knew it. She said, “I didn’t know what he was gonna say to me. But he just pulled me into a great big hug and asked me what he was gonna do with the rest of his life.” Still, she was a nervous wreck with him standing there, showing up so suddenly. “I didn’t know if he was the one that told the cops to come to my house, and that’s why he followed—I just didn’t know. It just seemed like he was sitting somewhere, waiting.”
For a while, Dennis had worked at the Shop with Penny and Mom, and, like Linda, Penny was plenty familiar with Dennis’s temper, his furious explosions when Mom displeased him or the Shop’s machinery defied him. When I asked Penny how often he had these meltdowns, she said, “Maybe once a day . . . maybe three, four times a week—usually once a day, y’know.” Even though I’d heard about these tantrums by then, I’d expected her to say about once a month. Moments later she said, “He loved your mother. They were gonna get married.”
Penny estimated that Dennis stayed at her house for about an hour and a half that morning. “He just couldn’t pull himself together,” she said. “He just wouldn’t leave.”