And of course, the summer was full of parties. Parties were a good place to talk about the murder, to conjecture and exclaim. Especially late in the night, when some dark and nasty things were said, about Dennis and other suspects, and about Crystal. One of her friends said that Crystal “basically dressed like a prostitute,” a false claim surely born of cruel jealousy but also stifling fear. It was safer for certain people to think she’d had it coming to her; it made it easier to believe it wouldn’t come for them.
Those months had a nervous, hectic energy to them; the murder lurked in the back of everyone’s mind, an anxiety waiting to be let out. The killer could be sitting there next to you at the lake, in line behind you at the bank. He could be at any party; you could brush up against him while pulling a beer from a crammed-full fridge. You could go home with him. You wouldn’t even know.
A central figure in the Bridgton party scene was Donnie Martin. He worked at Tommy’s, drove a blue-black Thunderbird, and had long, flowing hair. He was known as a pretty boy and a cokehead. He had previously worked at the Shoe Shop. Several people said that during that long, strange summer, he had a habit of getting fucked up and claiming that he had killed Crystal. He’d say it with a proud swagger, and then forget all about it by morning.
The police questioned a young woman named Miranda White, who shared a number of mutual friends with Donnie. When the cops spoke to Miranda, they focused on one particular night that summer. She and Donnie had both attended a party at my uncle Ray Perry’s house—Ray’s wife, Stacey, was Miranda’s boss at the Subway sandwich shop. She told the cops that she hadn’t really talked to Donnie that night, or couldn’t remember having done so. But, knowing who Crystal’s ex-husband was, she had another story she thought they might find interesting.
When Miranda got to the party, the place was busy, the living room and kitchen and the basement full of people, including Tom Perry. She grabbed a beer, then worked her way through the smoky crowd to sit on a couch in the living room. She didn’t see Donnie, but Tom was right next to her. She was nineteen; he was thirty-three. It was still early in the evening, but she could see immediately that he was very drunk. At first, he bristled when she sat down, but there was nowhere else to sit, so she stayed put. Eventually he started talking about Crystal.
He was convinced that everyone thought he had killed his ex-wife. He was feeling sorry for himself, and got pretty worked up as he spoke. He claimed that even his own mother thought he had killed Crystal. He hadn’t, he insisted.
He clearly wanted Miranda to sympathize, soothe him. Once his laments wound down, he started being really nice to her. Asked her if she needed anything, and eventually started coming on to her. When she didn’t indicate interest, a switch flipped. He told her to shut up. He called her a bitch.
Tom got more and more drunk, until his brothers Ray and Danny asked him to leave. It was a crowd of big drinkers, but he’d outdone himself. He was ranting and raving, and it was too early in the night for his bullshit. He didn’t want to go home, though, because he was fighting with Teresa. That was why he’d come in the first place: to hide from her.
Ray and Danny finally just pushed him out the door. Tom ran down the porch steps in a rage, seized a car battery, and hurled it through the house’s picture window as everyone leaped back out of the way. The forty-pound box hit that expanse of glass like a bomb going off, and shards flew through the living room like a gust of rain. It cemented the night in the memory of everyone who was there.
* * *
Teresa, too, felt the dark pressure of the murder, like an insistent hand pushing her mind further out of shape. One night that summer, she had to leave her infant daughter with friends overnight because she was hallucinating blood all over the kitchen, was screaming and could not be consoled. She often rambled to friends about Crystal’s injuries, and several found her details so chillingly specific—although ultimately false—that they went to the police. One even recorded Teresa’s phone calls and took notes. It is both disturbing and heartbreaking to read them; the shaky handwriting seems to telegraph panicky fear.
On another night, Teresa went to the bar, with no plan for getting herself home. The man who ended up giving her a ride spoke to the police a few months later. Teresa had kind of invited herself along, he said. He couldn’t really say no. They left the bar and started talking in the cab of his truck, and she brought up Crystal Perry’s murder. She asked him to drive down Route 93, to that house. “We sat in the dooryard for a few minutes,” the man said. “She couldn’t stop thinking of her friend, I guess.” After a few minutes they pulled out, then drove around in aimless loops, passing the house several times. A few hundred feet from our house, they pulled over again, onto the shoulder of the road. The man left the radio on, and the two stepped out onto the pavement and stayed there for a while, dancing slowly in the dark.
28
* * *
after
Gradually, I let my life in Texas gain some traction, distract me from everything I’d lost in Maine. I got to know my neighbor Angela better, and we soon became very close friends. She was petite and stick-thin and hadn’t yet hit puberty, but she was already plucking her eyebrows and shaping her thick brown hair with a curling iron that steamed and hissed when she hit it with her styling spritz. Her weightiest concerns involved which boys liked her or didn’t, and whether she would make the junior cheerleading squad. It was she who initiated me into those rituals of feminine polish that I had seen my mother perform, those things I craved and Tootsie disdained. Angela had the passive-aggressive honesty of a sister, but she kept me from alienating myself with strange clothing or hairstyles. I kept returning to the idea of suicide, obsessing in the shower instead of using that time to bathe, and once, when I hadn’t washed my hair in five days, Angela said, “Wow, why is your hair so greasy?!” I was shamed into compliance, but at least shampooing and conditioning my waist-length hair was a healthy distraction. Sometimes life just doesn’t leave time for misery.