After the trial, my family members and I returned to our respective homes. I flew south, and they went back to the houses they’d lived in for decades, resumed work once again. Friends and neighbors who hadn’t attended the trial or sentencing went on as they had before. Bridgton was still a beautiful little town where a bad thing once happened. My friends in North Carolina talked to me about closure, about relief, but I didn’t feel either of those things. I didn’t even feel safer.
Of course, I was relieved that Michael Hutchinson was finally in jail. I was glad he’d been punished, and more glad that he couldn’t hurt any more women. But each time I heard about another rape, another murder, each time I read another “shocking” news article about the prevalence of these crimes, I felt a kind of paralysis in my limbs, a coldness in my chest. One violent man in jail, out of the thousands, seemed to make hardly any difference at all. I’d stopped fearing Mom’s killer hunting me down long ago; but there were a lot of other dangerous men in the world.
The latter years of my twenties passed. I moved into a nice apartment just a twenty-minute walk from work. I started to buy real furniture—a bed frame, a brand-new couch—and learned to cook a little. Every few months I received an update from Susie, the victim witness advocate: Hutchinson kept appealing both the conviction and the sentencing. He would appeal for a few years, she said, until he was out of options. Standard procedure; no reason to worry.
I wasn’t worried, partially because Susie’s dispatches had a feeling of unreality. They seemed to come from a distant place, one that had little to do with my life of friends and nights out and petty work concerns. Every time I heard from Susie, I was reminded that my mother had become abstract to me. I still sometimes tried to write about Mom, to remember her with clarity, but after an hour or two I would run out of the compulsive energy that had gotten me started. It seemed impossible to do her justice. And I still hadn’t written any stories since I lost her.
Sometimes I conducted cursory research to learn more about new things I’d discovered during the trial. After a few minutes of reading or searching, I would sigh and snap my laptop shut. I would scribble notes—“Call Walt,” “Ask Susie”—but I wasn’t ready to involve anyone else in my search. I was afraid they would ask me why I wanted to know more, and I didn’t have a clear answer.
In the couple of years after the trial, Court TV aired two docudramas about our case—one for a series called Suburban Secrets, one for Forensic Files. I refused to participate in Suburban Secrets. I did watch it when it aired, though. It had been written in a tone of breathy excitement, and the main point was how very shocking it was that this crime had happened in a small town of beautiful lakes and summer camps. It was just another story designed to hold violence at arm’s length, another hollow way for the audience to reassure themselves that this sort of horror could never happen to them.
I was glad I had turned down the Suburban Secrets producers. But a few months later, when the Forensic Files people called, I felt a little different. They insisted that their show wasn’t sensational, that they would focus more on the triumphs of DNA evidence and other technology than on the lurid details of the crime itself. They said the episode would be a testament to the hard work that so many people had put into the case over the years. With some hesitation, I agreed to the interview. I think, when it came down to it, the story felt unfinished. I had a sense of the inadequacy of the trial, of wanting to say more. But when it was time to send me a copy, the producer asked if I wanted the version that would air on television or the “family edit”—the softer, less bloody cut. I opted for neither. I felt like a traitor.
* * *
A few years later, I moved north, closer to the source. I started making a new home in New York City, on the edge of the winter zone. I was angry about those television dramas. Although I had not yet gotten the nerve to do so, strangers had called Walt, strangers had talked to Susie. They had filmed my old town and spoken to my aunts. Two new stories had been added to a long list of newspaper articles and six o’clock news update reels. Two stories that didn’t talk much about Crystal Perry, that just recounted, again and again, the grisly details of her murder. I wanted to do better. Even after the trial, there was so much I still didn’t know. Then I turned thirty, a milestone that felt like a miracle: it looked like I might outlive Mom after all.
Shortly after that resonant birthday, I picked up the phone and called Susie, feeling like a teenager asking permission for something strange and forbidden. Maybe if I read through the police records, I thought, I could make something more meaningful of them. Five years had passed since the trial, but I discovered that I was still welcome to go to the police barracks and see whatever I liked. Susie was perfectly natural on the phone, unsurprised. She had expected me to call someday; she knew the trial hadn’t been enough. “Whenever you’re ready, we can have everything accessible for you in Gray,” she said. “Just let us know when you’re home.”
* * *
During that first record-gathering trip, Susie warned me about more than the pictures that might be hiding in the files. “I know you can handle it,” she said. “But you’re going to learn some things about your mother. Some things you didn’t know before. People have a lot of secrets; you’d be amazed how many secrets people have. There’s some stuff about her friend Linda in there . . . Well. I’m just sayin’. Try hard not to judge your mother. She was a good person, you know that.”
I was reminded then of something that had happened during the trial, a moment that had caused me to question the nature of Mom’s friendship with Linda. Lisa and Walt had told me that they might call Linda as a witness, both to testify to Mom’s character—namely, her devotion to me—and to verify that we had taken all those walks past her house and Hutchinson’s father’s. But later, when they called Linda into the attorney general’s office to ask some preliminary questions, they said, she collapsed. She was extremely upset, shaking and crying and yelling. She was not sober when she arrived.
As soon as I heard this, a strange, clear thought popped into my head. They were lovers, I thought. That’s it. Of course.
And then I immediately pushed this thought away. I had no real reason to think it—no evidence that my mother had been physically intimate with any woman. And anyway, my sudden, illogical conviction was unnecessary, superfluous to more important facts. Linda’s best friend had been violently murdered. She had lived in the same community as the killer for years. It wasn’t so surprising that her sanity had slipped, that stress and fear had addled her mind. Why did I need to make things even more dramatic, make everything about myself? Why had this thought come at me out of nowhere?
That day in the courthouse, I told Walt that I’d considered seeing Linda in the past but that something had stopped me.
“Well, that’s probably good,” Walt said. “She’s . . . she’s not doing well. She’s kinda lost it, honestly.”