As many times as I’ve tried to remember, I have never been able to recall the hours before Mom and I went to bed that final night. They’re completely gone, wiped out by the violence of what followed. When the police asked me to think back, I had no sense that anything strange had happened, was quite sure we had watched TV, then gone to bed at the usual time—nine o’clock for me, no later than nine thirty for her. But I couldn’t see it—she and I curled up on the couch, laughing. Eating ice cream, or not. The phone ringing, or not. I couldn’t remember what we had talked about, what we had eaten for dinner. I couldn’t remember anything at all, and that emptiness made my loss even heavier. She was just so completely gone.
My memory will not bring that evening back to me; imagination must suffice. I close my eyes, slow my breathing. Here she is now, at my door, for the last time. I’ve brushed my teeth, washed my face, climbed into my high daybed. I’m surrounded by curlicues of white metal and my most special stuffed animals, the ones who get to stay on the bed with me at night. Mom smiles when she peeks her head around the doorframe and says, “All ready?” She’s still wearing her eyeliner, but she is wrapped in a bright blue bathrobe. I say, “Yeah!” and she comes to my bed. When she leans over to kiss my forehead, I see her freckled breastbone through a gap in the robe, and her hair makes a bright cave around me. She smells of vanilla perfume. We say I love you. We don’t know to say goodbye.
Author’s Note
After the Eclipse is a work of nonfiction featuring real people and real events. While it is a memoir, it is a work not only of memory but of journalism, and involved a substantial research component. I conducted dozens of interviews, gathered hundreds of documents, and read and watched as much news coverage as I could find. I reviewed my own personal archives of photographs, home movies, journals, letters, and notes and consulted those of generous family members and friends of my mother. I also visited many of the story’s locations in Maine, returning in all seasons, over a six-year period.
While Part One weaves together different time periods, rather than offering a straight chronology, I have made every effort to verify the sequence of events depicted in this story, cross-referencing my memory and that of others with all available data, placing each event on a master timeline that begins with my mother’s birth and leads nearly to the present day. Police officers’ field notes have been invaluable, especially for the days immediately following the murder, as have interview subjects’ references to contemporary events, such as the eclipse and the ice storm in 1998. Wherever possible, I have confirmed my memories of my own experiences with third parties and with accounts I gave (in writing or while being recorded) in the past, closer to the time of the events depicted. When accounts have deviated significantly, especially in regard to important events, I have tried to present that deviation in the text and discuss what it could mean.
Forensic details come from various documents in the investigation file, including the autopsy report, as well as the testimony of experts at the trial. I reviewed select photographs of the scene for the purposes of this book, but avoided the worst ones. I still have not watched the videotape of the crime scene. The words of the man who called 911 for me from the Venezia—Pasquale Orlandella—are from my transcription of the call recording. The outer world of the book was verified by and built from a variety of sources, including Google Maps, historical weather data online, and contemporary newspapers on microfilm at the Portland Public Library.
Nearly all dialogue uttered by police officers and detectives—with the exception of any names that have been changed to pseudonyms for reasons of privacy—is verbatim from transcripts, either found in the investigation file or from interviews I conducted for the book. Every word of Dick Pickett’s and Dale Keegan’s speech is verbatim. Each uninterrupted sequence of Keegan’s dialogue that appears during my interview in the hotel in Texas is composed of his exact statements, presented in the order in which they appeared, with my responses removed and some of his statements removed for length. The recordings are part of a collection of audiotapes that the Office of the Maine Attorney General sent me prior to the trial, which I transcribed in 2014.
Some of the older police interviews with suspects and witnesses were not tape-recorded, but written up by the officer in a paraphrased report. This is especially true of interviews with individuals more peripheral to the case, and of brief initial conversations the police conducted with key figures while planning to conduct more in-depth interviews later. In these instances, I have worked to represent the tone of the conversation and the personalities of the people involved, combining my prior knowledge with an analysis of the report, keeping an eye out for any deviations from the dry, procedural tone of official documents. The words of Detective Charles Stevens on the morning of the murder are imagined, based on his paraphrasing, as are Linda’s words in that scene. Lieutenant Walter Grzyb’s words are verbatim from transcripts when he’s testifying at the trial. However, in the visit to Dr. Brown, in the DNA match call, in the conversation about Linda’s decline, and in my visit to Gray at the beginning of the book, Grzyb’s words are reconstructed from my notes and memory. Dialogue with Susie Maynard (previously Miller), the victim witness advocate at the time of the trial, is reconstructed. Every quotation during the trial proceedings is pulled directly from the official trial transcript.