“What do you mean, ‘lost it’?” I thought, She must still be so sad. She must be drinking too much or something. I could understand how the trial might be too much for her.
“Just like . . .” Walt looked embarrassed. “Behavior that’s not good. Bizarre. Like . . . here’s one: Somebody called and Bridgton Police had to go over there, ’cause she was sunbathing totally nude on her front lawn. Right there, just ten, fifteen feet from the road. Uh, faceup. And, y’know. Just not bein’ in her right mind, exactly. I mean, she’ll be okay for a while and then do something strange, out of the blue.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.” As though I were saying, Oh, that sort of thing, now I understand. I didn’t understand, but I didn’t want to embarrass Walt by pressing him with more questions. And I didn’t want my voice to shake as I thought about how horrifying it was, picturing Linda’s aging body lying naked and vulnerable on the upward slope of her lawn, right there on High Street.
Susie had mentioned Linda at the trial, too. “She just hasn’t been the same since your mother died,” she said, shaking her head. “The murder really scared a lot of people . . . but it was worse, her losing her best friend, and living alone, too. And then within a year, she dated Hutchinson’s best friend, there, that Ray King. That guy who shot himself in the head a few years later. Everybody was pretty sure he knew something. And then Linda’s other boyfriend, Mike Douglas, was Hutchinson’s cousin, I’m pretty sure. But who knows what Linda knows. Who can even tell now.”
Ray King has been a whisper in the back of my mind ever since that day. I have this scene in my head: Linda and a wiry, bearded man sitting on a summery, pine-plank deck drinking beers, loosely holding hands from one plastic lawn chair to another. Hutchinson stands over them, leaning on the railing, and next to him is a blurry, indistinct woman; there’s a sort of camera lens flare over her. I don’t want to think about her, what could have happened to her. Michael is excitedly telling a funny story, thick hands gesticulating, and Linda laughs, her eyes locked on his while she tips the cool, dewy bottle to her mouth. She has no idea. The friendlier the scene in my imagination, the more terrifying I find it.
But then I think: Maybe Linda wasn’t friendly to Michael Hutchinson when she met him—and it seems she surely would have met him, whether it was on that porch I imagined or in a sunken, carpeted living room or at a bar or at the lake. Maybe she was terrified and silent, because she knew that he had killed her best friend—either because Ray King told her or because there was something else to the story, something only she knew. Maybe sadness wasn’t the only thing that had damaged her sanity.
Within a few hours of arriving in Gray, I found a suggestion that, on at least one night, Mom and Linda’s relationship might have been more than platonic. Pickett interviewed a man named Donald, who claimed that after drinking with Linda and Crystal at Tommy’s, he brought them back to his house. At some point when he returned from the bathroom, he said he found the two women in bed together, and then joined them for a threesome. Even in Pickett’s notes, you can tell how eager this man was to share the details of this story, and he goes on to say that afterwards, he got in a lot of trouble with Crystal for running his mouth. He told Pickett that “one-third of people could see the girls doing that type of thing, one-third knew they did those things, and one-third didn’t believe it of them.” I wasn’t sure what to believe. It was clear that Donald was, to some degree, a bullshitter. But still, I thought about Linda, alone in the back row at the funeral, and it made me terribly sad.
It took me months to get back to Maine, then work up the nerve to call her. I looked her up in Carol’s well-worn phone book, the dense yellow pages spilling fluidly over my lap. Linda’s number was still the same, and I dialed it quickly, breathing light and fast. It was her voice on the answering machine, sounding just as friendly as ever, but she didn’t call me back. I was disappointed, mostly because I was sure she knew things about Mom that no one else did. But I also felt hurt, and strangely abandoned. What if she didn’t want to talk because she thought I knew how close they’d been and I judged her? If I couldn’t reach her, there was no way to explain that their possible intimacy, far from upsetting me, made me happy. I was glad they felt free to express themselves however they saw fit in the moment, even if it might have been only that one moment, that one night. But I think I also sensed that their close connection made Linda the best chance I had for a kind of second mother, though I don’t think I ever could have explained that to her. I didn’t want to face that desire myself.
45
* * *
I struggled through the following May, shouldering the weight of the anniversary of Mom’s death on the twelfth. That night, I lit a single white candle. Drank a glass of the strawberry wine she loved. Felt I should start doing something more. I found my balance again in June, then used the bright months to begin sifting through the stories in the police box. I read interviews with her friends, with members of our family, with acquaintances in town. With people who didn’t know her at all, with former loves and other suspects. I encountered, once more, the theory, voiced by a couple of townspeople, that I’d killed her. In competition over a man. A lot of people who thought they were providing information about us ended up revealing more about themselves.
I got glimpses not just of the crime but of her, the real person my mother was, and I started making long lists of questions. I was most interested in learning more about her: Why did she go to California with Tom? Who in the family knew her best? Who did she call when she was sad? But lurking under all these questions were others, ones I suspected were unanswerable: What, exactly, happened on the night of her death? Why did Michael Hutchinson come to our door? And why did she let him in? Was Walt’s theory right, or was there another story, waiting to be found?