I wanna make sure you don’t come up with anything and say, “It must’ve happened this way,” y’know? Did you hear your mom say Dennis’s name, or anything like that? Or Dale’s name? Did she say, “Stop it, asshole,” or anything like that? “You’re hurting me”? . . .
If you were a betting person . . . You must have strong feelings . . . who would you bet did this? It’s up to us to prove it, now. Let us do our job . . .
In response to Keegan’s questions and theories, I answered “I don’t know” at least sixty-two times. Sometimes I said it calmly, sometimes with a lilt of curiosity, sometimes through sobs, sometimes with a monotone, flat dejection.
Keegan told me a story about another girl, a girl who knew more than she had at first admitted. “We had a case up in Maine—this is true; you’ll probably think I’m making this up, but I’m not—there was a girl, twelve years old, saw her mother kill a man. And she helped bury the body. She was twelve years old.” He told me that he had talked to her again and again, for years, and she would not tell him where the body was. Suddenly, after eight years, she came in and told him. “Do you know something?” he asked. “You will not feel good, today, if you tell me. But in the long run, you will feel better.”
Unfortunately, I would not feel better, because I didn’t have anything to tell him. It was like I was trapped in a locked room, and he kept saying that all I had to do was turn the knob, but I didn’t have the key.
“We asked that girl, ‘How close were you two?’ ‘Oh, kinda like sisters.’” Keegan looked at me closely, as if he were peering behind my eyes: “There’s more details there.”
This story did not convince me I had more details. I did not feel a kinship with this girl. I felt jealousy. She could visit her mother in jail. That man had probably been violent, abusive. If I’d had the opportunity, I would gladly have buried whoever came to our house that night.
* * *
I would like to say that my sixty-two I don’t know’s meant that I held firm, entirely faithful to my original story of that night, to my own true memory in Texas, to the night as I remember it to this day. But I did not. Near the end of the second day, after a short break, I looked within my mind, and in the rainy mist of that night, in the weak white light reaching from that one streetlight, a car appeared in our driveway. It was a blue car. Parked right behind Mom’s. A blue car, like, well, Dennis’s. “I don’t know if I’m just seeing it in my head, or if it really happened,” I told Keegan, through tears. To his credit, he did suggest that maybe this image was from another night. But then he led me back inside my house, to the moment when he was convinced I had seen my mother struggling with someone. “Can you describe him at all?”
I said, “I don’t know if I saw the person.” I didn’t say, “I didn’t see the person.” Deep within me, I knew I really had not, but here Keegan was, so convinced that I had. After so many hours of questioning, I now doubted myself at every turn. I was so broken down and frustrated that I was hardly sure of my own name. Suddenly anything seemed possible, and my story felt like just that: a story. Malleable, expandable, expendable. The story of a little girl. Of a girl.
Eventually I said I might have seen Dennis in the house. But when Keegan posed follow-up questions, I could not provide any details. The blue car dissolved into the mist; the supposed figure of Dennis melted into the shadows. When I couldn’t say anything more, I realized that these were just visions, not memories. I was young, after all, still capable of magical thinking—just a year earlier, I’d believed in witches. I was thirteen years old.
When I brought up Dennis, Keegan said, “We’re working on the blood samples now, to see if they match him. We’re looking at him . . . I’m sure you’ve heard about the O.J. Simpson trial, all the blood tests they’re doing.” I wasn’t convinced Dennis was the killer, had no clear reason to think he was. But I did still fear him, in part because I had no other face upon which to focus my fear. I could say I had not seen him that night, but I could not confidently say that I thought him incapable of murder. I had seen his temper.
And so Keegan, and Pickett, too, revived this fear, which grew in the nights following their departure. But they neglected to tell me that Dennis’s DNA had, a full two weeks before their visit, failed to match that found at the crime scene.
* * *
Late that Sunday, Tootsie, Pickett, and I went to the San Angelo police station to have my hands inked for comparison with certain smudges left at the crime scene. I pressed the rivers of my palms to the paper and hoped they wouldn’t match, so we might have the mark of the killer. But the smudges, and the other finger and palm prints at the scene, would all turn out to be mine: the meaningless, careless marks of a child. The erratic mountain ranges of the polygraph reports were unreadable, inconclusive. My words had not helped us, nor had my hands, my fingertips, my heart, my breath. I was nothing more than what I did not know, what I could not tell.
27
* * *
meanwhile
After Mom’s death, our town went on without us, forever. Summer came to Bridgton, the misty rains of May replaced by long, clear daylight. The vacationers from Boston and New York returned to their cottages lining Long Lake and Highland Lake and the ponds, and word spread among them of that pretty young woman’s death. It was the last thing they would have expected of the town they came to as an escape from the world, that escape now exposed as an illusion.
The people of the town talked about the murder in the grocery store, over coffee while their kids played in the backyard, while sitting on the sandy lakeshores. They shared suspicions. They began locking their doors at night.
But the essential rhythm of Bridgton remained the same. The Shoe Shop hand-sewers took their places each morning at their benches, either turning from or gazing over at Crystal’s empty one. Construction workers and contractors and masons continued work on new houses and repair on old ones. The clerks at Renys greeted the same customers, over and over. The Fourth of July fireworks went off without a hitch, exploding into the dark sky above the elementary school ball fields.