I turned to Ashley: “This is Dennis . . .” I could see her face go still, an attempt to hide surprise. She knew who Dennis was, and what he meant. She knew how long it had been since I’d spoken to him, that I’d last seen him that night, in the hospital.
Dennis plopped down into one of the little plastic chairs, long legs spread wide, and started talking. He spoke with the rapid excitement of someone who has been waiting a long time to be heard. He told us he’d gone into the military as soon as Walt took over the case in 1998 and he was cleared through a second round of DNA testing. His job skills training was in installing and maintaining security systems, which reinforced my sense that the universe has a twisted sense of humor—while I was sitting in my bedroom in Texas, eyeing my shut blinds and thinking of him with fear, the Army was flying him to DC to help repair the White House security system.
But Dennis had also focused on special combat training, learning as many ways as possible to kill a man. When he returned to Maine a few years later, he spent most of his free time and energy trying to figure out who had killed his fiancée so he could put to use all that he had learned. He was a man obsessed—he wanted revenge, and he wanted exoneration in the court of public opinion.
“To this day,” he said, “I mean, it happened just this week—people will move out of my line in the grocery store. I’d like to leave Maine for good, to where people don’t know me, but I couldn’t leave until this was solved.”
Ashley and I mostly nodded during that hour. Everything Dennis said was so dramatic, I thought, like in a movie. He was still freshly torn and heartbroken and unable to move on. He’d forgotten, perhaps, that he had often been mean and controlling. Watching him, I could see the wide space of this omission, but strangely it didn’t reduce my sympathy for him. The character traits that made him both an unhappy person and a target of suspicion had only been amplified by the stress and rage and sadness he felt in the wake of the murder. His impulsive, reactive personality had made him both the perfect suspect and the worst survivor.
But he was a good storyteller, and thoughtful. I was struck by his evident intelligence. I’d spent years thinking my mother dated this man mostly because he was there: he was convenient, he was insistent, and he was cute. But now I could see what she saw: an interesting, smart, passionate man. She hadn’t simply been under his power. She had also been a victim of her own kindness, her desire for his better nature to prevail.
Dennis told me that he now shows up early to everything—eternally haunted by the consequences of his running late on the night of Mom’s murder, forever sprinting in a race he’s already lost. He always tries very hard to do exactly what he says he’s going to do. He said, “I don’t wish what happened to us on anyone . . . I’m living proof of what can happen—and so are you—when you say you’re going to do something and you don’t do it.” By “us” he meant me and him.
He also said that he still had the brown paper bag Mom gave him the last time she made him lunch for work. She had drawn a little character on it, a bubbly smiley face surrounded by long curls like hers. I can picture it perfectly; it’s the same face she drew on the notes she put in my lunchbox every day. I wish I’d saved mine, too. He has another present from her; he describes it as “a little stuffed sheep. And I won’t let anyone touch it.” I remember the sheep. His name is Sherman. Denny has pictures, too—some of her, some of me—all in a big wooden chest. He said, “I haven’t opened it in a few years—every now and then I do. Either on her birthday or, y’know, May twelfth. Every now and then, I’ll sit down with a bottle of bourbon and go through it . . . Remember: You never drink to forget. You drink to remember, ’cause that’s what ends up happening.”
Seeing Dennis, and having Susie casually hand us back to each other, seemed to restore a bit of order to the world. I’d been right to hold out against the cops’ implications about him. But I had always had to guard against the chance that the police were right, that his feral temper had snapped. He had long been the face of fear, and now we could sit and talk with each other, trading stories like we were old friends. This gave me a feeling of freedom that I never would have known I was missing.
But at some point, I realized I needed to use the restroom. I missed one break in the conversation, and then another, and another. I just couldn’t leave. I absolutely could not leave that room, couldn’t leave my friend—beautiful, desirable Ashley—in there with him.
It wasn’t a fair thought, I knew. But I also knew that survival isn’t about fairness.
* * *
I became so immersed in seeing Dennis again that for a while I forgot what I was waiting for. Susie had been smart to bring him to me. By the time he’d finished speaking, the opening statements were over in the courtroom, and after a short break, it was finally time to go in.
Susie ushered me into the courtroom, a large, high-ceilinged space filled with winter light streaming through tall windows. The walls were plaster, heavily edged in polished wood paneling, rising to a high ceiling covered in ornate molding. Long oak pews faced the bench and witness box. I sat in the front row, and found Michael Hutchinson immediately, sitting with his lawyer behind a wooden table.
He had gotten hepatitis in prison, was jaundiced. He was wearing a tan sport coat. He didn’t much resemble the person I’d seen in the mug shot, a shirtless young man with tousled hair and a smile, head thrust forward from his rounded shoulders: a sarcastic young punk. It was in prison, apparently, that he had picked up the aura of slow brute strength that one might expect from a killer. His hair was buzzed, neck and forearms thick. He was barrel-chested. His blue eyes were unnervingly pale, but otherwise he was thin-lipped, round in the face, forgettable. His gaze was so blank it was hard to ascribe anything to it at all. He wasn’t even that tall—officially, five foot nine. He could have been nearly anyone on the street, or in the woods, of Bridgton. Or anywhere.
Over the course of the next few days, as I watched the proceedings from the front row, Michael kept his eyes forward, and I could see him only in profile. But when he was led in and out of the courtroom, he always took the opportunity to turn and look at me. His eyes went right to me; he didn’t have to search. He knew exactly where I was. His look remained unreadable—not menacing, not sorry, not ashamed. If I had to pinpoint it, I’d say it was the look of a man who has something to say.