I returned to Maine at the end of the summer and brought my list of questions with me, along with a list of people who might have answers. If there was more to know about the night of her death, I wanted to know it. But more important, I wanted to plunder the collective memory of everyone who knew Mom, gather what artifacts I could, set them on an altar and cast a spell that would bring her back to me, fully formed, if only in my mind. My own memories of her had degraded with time, had been warped and shadowed by the killing. I’d think about a time we had played with our cat in the afternoon sunshine, watching him dart after toys we threw into the soft grass of our backyard, and I’d immediately think about how Max’s scratching post had been found in two pieces, broken in Mom’s struggle against her attacker. I wanted to know her again, separate from what had happened to her.
I started with friends of Mom’s whom I knew but hadn’t been very close to. The stakes were lower with these people; I felt less nervous. Richard—“Hairball”—was happy to hear from me, received me like an affectionate uncle. We sat on his wide deck under the trees while he talked, mostly unprompted. He remembered Mom dancing—how much fun she had, how good she was at it, the best. He remembered everything, really. Still kept a picture of her on his refrigerator. He’d had to leave the Shoe Shop a few months after her death, because he could no longer stand to see her empty bench. His wife had competed with his memory of Crystal until finally they divorced, for a host of reasons.
Next I visited Darryl, another coworker. He told me about a sewing test he’d had to complete at the Shoe Shop: he was a slacker, so his bosses wanted to see how much he could actually produce, to determine how much he’d been messing around. Although hand-sewers were paid by the case, management had to ensure that they sewed enough to be worth employing. Darryl had taken speed pills that day, and Mom kept kicking his bench and whispering, “Slow down! Slow down!” half-joking and half-coaching, so he wouldn’t make himself look too bad by suddenly producing far more than usual. The Shop kept him on, but gave him a daily quota. Darryl also had an ex-wife who didn’t measure up to Mom. I thought about the pockets of loneliness in Bridgton, an epidemic of isolation.
As I sit with these men who still love my mother in some capacity—and there are a few of them—sometimes I feel uncertain about them. Most of them are friendly and kind, and keep repeating that they still think of me as a twelve-year-old girl. I can see them struggling to be candid with me, to tell me things you might tell a grown daughter but you would not tell a child. I don’t want to judge any of them for missing their friend, for remembering her beauty. But some of them seem fixated on her in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Mostly because their fixation is one thing that they don’t hesitate to share with me.
* * *
A year later, when I was back in Maine, I tried Linda again. When her answering machine picked up, I told her that I just wanted to know, one way or the other, if she was able to talk. I said I wasn’t sure if she had gotten my earlier message but that I’d love to see her again. “I have your number in my phone,” I said, “and when I see it, I won’t pick up. That way you can just leave me a message, just so I know either way and know you are getting these calls.” I gave my phone number, slowly, twice. I kept my voice cheery and casual.
This time, she did call back. I was sitting with Carol and Carroll, watching television, when her name came up on the screen of my silenced phone. I stared at it, willing her to leave a message saying yes.
When I saw that she had left a voice mail, I went upstairs to listen. I stood just inside the bedroom door and bent toward the phone, hunching my shoulders as though holding in a secret.
“Hi, Sarah . . . this is Linda. I’m calling you back . . . I . . . I can’t talk to you right now. Um, maybe? Sometime, in the future? I could. But I can’t right now, Sarah. Um, there’s one thing, I certainly can tell you, is . . . your mother loved you more than anything. You were her world. I know that for a fact. Um, good luck? And we’ll stay in touch. Take care, Sarah.”
I put the phone facedown on my dresser and sat on the bed. I suddenly felt very heavy. I had not expected to feel so sad.
I longed to see Linda, and my inability to reach her was nerve-racking; I felt guilty for contacting her, but knew I would have to try again, even though I was afraid of what she might know. But the conversations I was most nervous about having were with family. I was worried about violating the silent circle we’d drawn around Mom and her death. They have said that I never wanted to talk about her, or about “what happened,” but I can’t remember them ever really trying, either. They’ve said I would get angry when they brought up the murder. Of course I did. I was furious. We all were.
Gwen was closest to Mom, so she was the first aunt I spoke with. I drove to her house in New Hampshire, making sure to pass through Bridgton on the way. It seemed important to do so, like part of a ritual that I was instinctively feeling my way through.
Gwen and Dave had lunch waiting for me; for an hour or so, we pretended this was a normal visit. After we all settled in, I started to ask questions, mostly of Gwen, though Dave stayed close in the background, speaking up now and then. I put a recorder on the table; I didn’t want to forget anything about a conversation we might never repeat.
We began with Gwen and Mom’s childhood, and I was happy to give her an excuse to reminisce about the fun they had managed to have. She also mentioned Ray—his temper, the “incidents” that Mom had with him that caused her to leave the house, run away on her bike. About an hour into our conversation, we started talking about Tom.
“I came across a story about Tom cheating on Mom with one of their high school classmates,” I said. “This person who told it—I can’t remember who—said it really broke Mom’s heart. Said that’s where the trouble started between them.”
“Oh yeah?” Gwen said. “I don’t know anything about that. I guess it wouldn’t be surprising, though.”
“So you don’t have any idea who that could be?”
“Would it be Linda? That’d be my only guess,” she said. Then her tone hardened. “But good luck with talking to her.”
I didn’t think that Tom could have cheated with Linda, or that Mom and Linda’s friendship would have survived that. But I wanted to talk about her more. I told Gwen that Linda actually had been the only person to refuse to talk to me so far. I did not say that I half-feared that Linda knew something she would not tell, that I was actually afraid of talking to her, if the day ever came.
Gwen’s voice rose just a little. “That girl makes me very upset. That girl makes me upset as all hell. Because they were extremely close, they went out to bars together. They did . . . a lot . . . of stuff together.”
Dave, half-listening from the living room, said, “Ya think?”
Gwen went on: “And that girl probably knows a lot more than anybody else.”
“They were really close,” Dave said, and let out a little scoffing laugh.
I sat there, my cheeks warming, desperately wanting to know what Gwen meant by “extremely close,” what Dave’s laugh meant. But I could tell that wasn’t the path Gwen wanted to go down, so I let her steer us toward whatever else she wanted to share.
She continued, “I’m very upset that Linda is acting like she’s too emotionally . . . It’s almost like she feels responsible, sometimes, when I think about it. Linda knew this Hutchinson guy, and knew what type of guy he was, to be introducing him to Crystal . . .”