ERIC HARNEY, a former hand-sewer, who once pointed to his head and said, “I’ve got her number, right here.”
FRANK MANZER, whose wife, Noelle, was a slender redhead. Once, after the murder, he pinned Noelle to the bed and stabbed the mattress with a kitchen knife, over and over. She waited until he was dead to tell the police that she suspected he had killed Crystal Perry.
RONNIE FOSTER, who stared at her so intently at the Shoe Shop that she had to move her bench.
MICHAEL HUTCHINSON, a young guy who worked for his father’s masonry company.
A MAN IN A WHITE CAR, NAME UNKNOWN, who once followed her all the way to New Hampshire. She told Dale about it but wouldn’t let him investigate.
AN ELECTRICIAN NAMED DONALD CALLAHAN, who once slept with her, then complained when she scolded him for sharing the details with anyone who would listen. The day after she was killed, he was doing some scheduled work at Chief Bob Bell’s house and told him, “Crystal was a real bitch.”
HER FRIEND AND COWORKER RICHARD TURCOTTE, benevolently in love with her still.
TERRY OULLETTE, who once fixed a sink at Grace’s house and was rumored to have a “fatal attraction.”
RYAN NOVAK, a Bridgton police officer. He became “John Doe” after a fellow cop retrieved his cast-off cigarette for DNA testing.
DAN LAGRANGE, a gray-haired neighbor who occasionally hired Mom to clean his house when she needed extra cash.
PETER KNIGHT, who lived out west somewhere, and called Mom out of the blue the month before she died. He was a registered sex offender by then. Previously known as Junior—the boy she dated before Tom.
LLOYD POULIN, who mentioned Mom’s death from the back of a Bridgton police car after being picked up for being drunk and disorderly. He asked the cop, “How old is her little girl now, sixteen or seventeen? Crystal was a slut, wasn’t she? That daughter is a sweet little thing.”
* * *
Bruce Ingalls, Grace’s neighbor, is one of the most interesting of these men. When Grace married Ray for the second time, the family lived in an apartment for a few months before moving into their house in North Bridgton. Gwen was nine or ten at the time, Crystal seven or eight. In the apartment next door lived a teenage couple: Bruce and his girlfriend. Years later, Gwen would find it strange when Bruce ended up buying the house right next door to Grace and Ray’s, on the other side of town, as though he were following them. After the murder, she found it even stranger. It made her a little suspicious.
Bruce, though, doesn’t seem to have been a bad guy. Despite his established attraction to my mother, I’m convinced that his close proximity to the family in two separate locations was a coincidence. He hired Tom and paid him in cash, but Tom was his friend, and what he did with the money was his business. He figured that was between Tom and Crystal.
Tom now remembers an afternoon when he was on a carpentry job with Bruce, sometime around 1992. They were driving down Main Street near the bank, and they slowed as they saw Crystal entering the crosswalk. She stopped there, in front of the truck, smiled at Bruce, and, as Tom puts it, “did a little dance thing, right in the middle of the road . . . he-he, a little . . . dance thing.” Then she turned and walked away, laughing over her shoulder. “She was playful,” Tom says. “But reserved most of the time.”
When she stopped traffic without even meaning to—literally or figuratively—she knew how to use the moment to quietly get the upper hand. If she sensed that someone saw her beauty, she could add a smile to amplify it. She used what power she had.
It’s fun to be attractive, and I’m glad Mom could occasionally throw a man’s desire in his face, with a lighthearted you-wish taunt. But I also think about her moving her bench away from Ronnie Foster, about her need to tell Dale about that white car that followed her to New Hampshire. I think about the incredible mental pressure of being the target of so much attention and desire, even if she was aware of only some of it. I think about Gwen’s concern about us living all alone out on Route 93, and I remember how mad Mom was when the contractors cut down all those trees in the front yard.
Shortly after the murder, a neighbor of ours named Eric Thibault spoke to the police. We didn’t know Eric well, but I had swum in his pool once or twice. Eric had a theory. “Maybe somebody’s truck broke down,” he told the cops. “And then they went to Crystal’s to use the phone. When they got inside, they would’ve seen how beautiful she was, and tried to rape her. And then I guess she put up a fight, and they killed her.” In this story, the truck breakdown isn’t even a ruse, some premeditated lie to gain entry. It just sort of made sense to Eric that a man could be driven to spontaneous brutality by a woman that good-looking.
And while Mom truly was beautiful, I believe a similar investigation would reveal a similar web of desire around any reasonably attractive woman: a network of men, some benign and respectful, some objectifying and aggressive. Some of the men surrounding Mom were ones she’d dated or otherwise encouraged; others she’d turned down, and still others she’d gently ignored, to spare their feelings. One of them decided that he had the right to take what he wanted. And he became very angry when she said no.
I still maintain that Bruce Ingalls wasn’t a bad guy, as far as I know. But he once demanded of Linda, “Tell me what Crystal’s got against me,” because she had so many times spurned his advances. As though she owed him something.
* * *
It is often simply easier to give men what they want. I once said yes to a man because I was positive that if I said no, he would rape me. He was aggressive and pushy in a way I’d never encountered, flattening me painfully against a cold window when I tried to pull away. In that moment, I saw that if I continued to resist, he might not listen to me, and then there’d be no going back. I didn’t want to take a chance. I didn’t want to be a victim, so I made the best of it. I decided to be agreeable, pliant. It is not always possible to make this decision, but in this case it was. I talked my body into it. I sort of wanted him, but mostly did not.
And I let some men into my apartment recently. I could have said no, but didn’t. The whole time they were there, I was haunted by what could be happening.
I was sitting home alone, middle of the afternoon, in Brooklyn. My building was quiet. Carlos, my friendly upstairs neighbor, the only male neighbor I know, wasn’t home—I knew because his footsteps are always heavy on my ceiling.