There was a hotel desk chair for me: heavy wood, padded vinyl. Keegan sat down in another, handed me a Coke he’d fetched from the vending machine down the hall. I took it and glanced out the window through the gauzy curtains. I could see the occasional car or truck working its way down the wide, pale streets, moving slowly across the pane of glass like a drop of water, silent at this height.
Keegan began slowly. What was my relationship with my mother like? What sorts of things did we do together? Did I know her friends? Was it true what people said, that we were like sisters? All weekend, he would alternate between friendliness and pressure, acting as both good cop and bad. Sometimes he insisted that I had repressed memories from that night, that if I just thought hard enough, and felt relaxed and open enough, I would be able to give him the information he needed. At other times, he spoke as though I was hiding information on purpose. And although I didn’t want to admit it, because the idea seemed too far-fetched, it also seemed as though he was trying to determine if I had something to do with Mom’s murder.
Despite all this, and my well-entrenched suspicion of cops—the general feeling of distaste and disappointment that swept through me each time I saw a blue uniform—I resolved to cooperate with Detective Keegan. I was willing to turn myself inside out for even the smallest chance that I could help find the killer. I actually felt a little bad for him, sent down here to shake up the orphan witness, to do Pickett’s dirty work. I hated that his name was Dale, though; I didn’t want to associate him with anyone I had loved. Since he insisted that I call him by his first name, I avoided calling him anything at all. But I took each Coke he offered, thanked him and drank it, until I was jittery from caffeine and the strain of making nice. When he pressed me, asking the same question over and over, I stayed as calm as I could, even if all I really wanted was to pick up the lamp and hurl it through that tall window.
Now, I listen to recordings of that long weekend, captured on a stack of black cassette tapes. I had to buy a tape deck to play them, and the outdated little device feels like a kind of time machine. The sound quality is uneven, having degraded over the long years; some sections are warped and slow, others manic and anxious, and whole stretches of interview are missing. But much remains, and as I listen, dutifully typing out each word, I often feel like a voyeur. The girl on the tapes is exactly me one moment, and in the next she’s someone else entirely. Her voice is high, her Maine accent still prominent, shot through with fresh bits of Texan twang: “ten” sounds like “tay-en.” Even when she is sobbing, she is agreeable; she tries very hard to deliver what is asked of her. I hear no trace of the angry girl I know lurked within, the girl with the window-breaking rage. The girl who didn’t want to answer the same damn questions over and over and over. But she’s in there. She’s the one who resisted Keegan’s theories and implications, who would not let his desperation for answers twist reality, erode and damage my sanity. She’s the reason I’m still here.
I remember, on top of a stack of paper on the bed, a hand-drawn diagram of my house. It magnetized me. It was so orderly, clearly mapped and neutral, completely unlike the dark chamber that had grown inside my head. Keegan noticed me staring: “I’ve got some diagrams of your house we’re gonna go over—I can see you looking at them—and some pictures. No bad pictures.” Later, when he first pulled the diagram close so we could examine it, he said, in a jokey, game-show tone, “This is your house!?” I don’t think he understood that even the diagram gave me a heavy feeling in my chest, or that calling the house “mine” only made me think of how very not mine it now was, how I would never return. A home can become a crime scene, but the reverse is impossible.
* * *
On that first day, I took a polygraph examination. Although the Supreme Court would later question the reliability of polygraphs as courtroom evidence, they were then and still are a useful tool for police. A polygraph report can reinforce or invalidate different lines of inquiry, help a detective see the path to truth more clearly. It’s a divining rod; it’s not the water.
This test would examine only one question, which Keegan intoned with deliberate pauses: “Do you know for sure . . . that the person who killed your mother . . . was”—and here he inserted one name from a list of seven: Dennis, Dale, Tim, four other male suspects from Bridgton, and a control, Cheryl Peters, the social worker who had first come to Grammy’s house. An additional query was “a name I have not mentioned,” which would mean that I had seen someone but did not know or would not reveal that person’s name. The base question had been carefully written—I could only say that I did not know it was a certain person, not that it definitely wasn’t that person.
Keegan told me about the fight-or-flight response, explaining that the body is faithful to truth: anything else sends it into alarm, raising the blood pressure and quickening the heartbeat and the breath, as though responding to physical threat. He hoped my body would tell him that one of these people might be the killer. “The thing is,” he said, “if you did see someone, your heart’s gonna know.” This combination of the literal and the figurative now strikes me as beautiful.
To take a polygraph examination is to be restrained. Before the test began, Keegan strapped me into the various measurement instruments, explaining the function of each. The first two were black cords across my chest, one high, one low, to measure my breathing. I remember how careful and solicitous he was while putting those on me, and can now imagine how uncomfortable he must have been, alone in a hotel room with a young girl, moving in close. I hear him now on the tape, laughing nervously and saying, “Oh, you’re so skinny!” I rolled my eyes when he said this, not believing him. But once the cords were in place, a serious feeling descended upon me. They exerted a slight pressure that made me feel like I was breathing abnormally. It was a slightly out-of-rhythm feeling, like the pause and stutter of observed footsteps. A tangle of wires sent impulses to a machine housed in a black metal box, where they were recorded by a spidery inked arm scribbling my breath onto the pale blue grid of a rolling cylinder of graph paper. I tried looking at it. I tried not looking at it. I took a deep breath and watched the spider arm go haywire.