“Am I a suspect, Detective Novak?”
He uncrosses and crosses his long legs. “Like I say, the investigation’s ongoing. At this stage we’re just filling in the blanks. We don’t know for sure what we’re looking at. And you’re helping us form a . . .” He cups his hands as if around clay. “. . . a clearer picture.”
“I doubt I can help. I know HP more than I do Saskia, and most of what I can tell you is a decade old.”
His mouth smiles but his eyes don’t. “Just tell me what you know.”
I shrug. “Okay, here we go.”
So, Detective Novak, can we talk about me for a change? In my experience, it’s not a subject that gets much forum and I have a lot to say. It might even end up being cathartic. Thank you—I’ll take it from that slight incline of your head that you’ll let me off-load for a while, whether or not you have a choice.
Let’s go way back and begin with how my parents moved a lot. My mom and dad bonded over their restlessness and rushed to get married in it. They met as amateur actors in a play and once they had me, we were up and moving every three years as if our life was a stage production they thought they were touring. One of my earliest memories is of being four, maybe, and in the middle of cutting out a picture of a turkey from the grocery-store coupons. My fat little hands were squashed right into the scissor handles, cutting in a curve, when my mom started jangling her keys next to my head and telling me we had to go, right now, baby, out the door, let’s go. Right now, leave that, just leave it. She yanked the scissors out of my hand and stood over me while I struggled to find my shoes.
I went through my whole childhood like that. Ready to be yanked away.
The moves were career-related for my father—he’s always been a man with one eye on the success ladder, although if you ask me he must have been climbing the rungs in his slipperiest socks. Ad astra per aspera, Angela—to the stars the hard way. It was tiring watching him. Still, my mother was happy to accompany him as long as each step felt like a social climb. There was a giddiness to their choices in those early years, a strange excitement. Darling, just imagine! Each time they left a place, my parents must have believed they were on their way to somewhere they might actually be happy.
Moving when you’re fifteen is terrifying. It’s not fun, it’s not an adventure, it’s not a wild ride to wonderful things, baby. In Grade 9 I said good-bye to my friends and watched them fade away from me even while I was still standing there. When people get older, they’re supposed to cope better with separation, but I don’t know whether that’s true. Are we honestly meant to believe the important ones will stay with us wherever we go?
We drove three hours northwest to Cove, Vermont, in the fall just as Grade 10 began. You probably love this town to death and all, Detective Novak, you’re probably New England born and bred; but I’ve got to tell you, the first time we drove down Main and Oak Streets it looked like we’d arrived in the sister town of somewhere more exciting, the kind of place you move to because the housing’s cheaper. Sure, Vermont is all covered bridges and maple-candy shops, and life is like the lid of a Christmas cake tin, but when we drove into Cove town center, there was a hardware store, a scattering of bars with faded HAPPY HOUR banners over their doorways and a Tastee Delite with a hand-scrawled sign in the front window that read GET YOU’RE POPSICLES NEXT JULY, YOUR AMAZING—I swore I’d never eat there. The town’s curling rink looked like a Cold War bomb shelter from the outside, and the riveted metal of the roof clanged with raindrops as we drove by with the car windows down.
The house we bought was sad and gray and looked hunched like it was coughing. There was a shoe in the driveway. In the middle of the front lawn was an iron stake driven deep into the dirt, with a rusted chain on the grass.
“Dog owners.” My mother shuddered to my father. “David, we’ll need a commercial cleaner.”
Do you like living in a town of only four thousand people, Detective Novak? Isn’t it a cozy little community? Dad knew and liked the principal of the high school and felt the move to a smaller place would somehow benefit my chances of getting into a good college. It’s all about class sizes, my dear. Teacher–student ratio. Let’s shoot for the Ivy Leagues. He took a job at the Cove Municipal Library, giving up his research post at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston because he had become obsessed with my education. Either he’d lost the trail of his own success and was now starting to sniff out mine, or else he was trying to relive his glorious Yale days where he aced his Classical Civilization class and spent heady afternoons reading The Iliad under the shade of the maples. I never wanted to leave the city. Small towns are a soap opera: you’re either acting or you’re watching.
I went to Lakeside High, although I’m sure you already know that. It was a flat-roofed brick building with basketball hoops out front that had long ago lost their netting. The first day in that school my palms smelled tinny and sour from gripping the iron handrails that led up to the front entrance. The locker they gave me still had stickers in it from the kid before—rainbows that were plastic and puffy and crinkled when you pressed them. I pried them all off with my thumbnail.
At every school I attended, gym teachers sighed when they saw me coming, and Lakeside High was no different. At the end of gym on that first Monday, I went to change back into my regular clothes and there were knots in the ends of my pants, pulled so tight that two people must have put their full weight into the job. I couldn’t tease the knots apart. By the time I sat down in defeat, the locker room had emptied.