She leaned back and rested her elbows on the dock, letting the sun hit her face. Before, she would have defended her friend. She would have rolled her eyes, told him he didn’t understand, maybe even walked away. This time, she felt the warm wood under her forearms and the backs of her legs, and she let the quiet rest between them for a while.
They sat in the sun for far too long, chatting about their classes, about post-graduation plans. It turned out that he was only slightly less aimless than she was. He was a fifth-year senior, squeezing some forgotten credits into one last semester, and would graduate in December, like Betsy, as a Broadcast Journalism major. She was English with an Art History minor. Given the size and sprawl of the school, they’d never had a class together. They talked about what they did when they should have been studying. Betsy had discovered Joan Didion’s The White Album at a used bookstore downtown and was desperate to talk about it with someone, anyone, even if it was only to say how much it affirmed her hatred for the Doors. She told him about the photograph in the museum that she liked to visit and promised to take him there. Gavin talked about Raymond Chandler in an emphatic whisper, like what he wanted to say about Philip Marlowe, and had no one to say it to, had built up inside him like steam in a kettle. Betsy ate it up like a hungry little fish just beneath the surface of the water that leaped at a tiny crumb or the buzz of a gnat.
“Maybe I’ll teach?” he said. “I don’t know what the hell else to do. Definitely not law school like every other dickhead around here.”
“My mom thought that maybe I should be a flight attendant,” she said, forcing back a smile. It was a pop quiz she was praying he’d pass.
“Because you’re clearly such an asset to the service industry,” he said.
“Hey, I am employee of the freaking decade,” she said. Her faced burned red with pleasure. He knew her. He thought about her enough to know her. He was in it as much as she was, already. “But you’re right. Never in a million. I don’t even like planes.”
With that, she stood up, took off her shorts and her Hanes T-shirt, and jumped in the lake, hoping the cool water would calm her skin, flushed and blotchy with excitement, not bothering to remember which bra and underwear she had put on in the dark that morning, and not caring that much. In the cool lake, she could forget about psychokillers and dead girls, about Caroline and even Ginny. All of that would be waiting for her back in town.
CHAPTER 8
SERIAL, AS IN MORE THAN ONE
August 25, 1990: Night
By the time Betsy and Gavin were driving back from that first trip to the lake, both with sunburned cheeks, itchy, bitten ankles, and the remnants of a buzz, Betsy was in deep. Neil Young had been replaced by the Feelies in the CD player. As they sped through the long, tree-lined roads she thought the humming of the locusts, hidden among the leaves, sounded like backup singers, their low, vibrating buzz in perfect rhythm with Only Life. The cool lake water, the sunbaked dock under her skin, the lazy drowsiness of the day, the weird yearning she was feeling for what was happening, even while it was happening, made her think that if she could peer inside her brain she would see the memory forming. At one point, she caught herself staring at the way Gavin’s tattered T-shirt hung over the top of his shoulder and had to talk herself into getting her shit together. From the passenger seat, she could see that his Wayfarers were smudged with greasy fingerprints and that the scruff on his chin was sparse and, from certain angles, a little seedy. But she decided she was fine with it—all of it.
As soon as they were back within city limits, reality was there to greet them. Gavin pulled into Pete’s Chevron to fill up the tank and they ran into Danny, a gangly, perma-grin stoner who wore nubby gray socks with his flip-flops as a sort of signature, the strap that separated the big toe from its companions cramming the fabric between the two digits in the most unfortunate way.
“What up, Gav?” said Danny, as he let the snack-shop door slam behind him with a jangle. He had a pack of sunflower seeds in one hand and a plastic cup for the newly vacant shells shoved into the pocket of his vintage checked shorts.
“Danny,” Gavin announced, in that ambiguous name-shout greeting that didn’t reveal the intentions behind it, no happy “How you doin’, brother” or subtly hostile “Where you been, fucker?” Just Danny.
“What’s your theory on this serial killer thing?” he asked.
“What do you mean, serial?” Gavin said, glancing at Betsy in profile, still in the passenger seat, to see if she could hear him. She could.
“As in, more than one,” said Danny. “It’s confirmed. They found a third body. The first one they found they thought was a fluke, some pissed-off boyfriend who lost his mind. Then they found two more girls early this morning, same weird bite marks on their bodies.”
Danny lifted the empty cup to his lips and launched a shell into it.
“And dude, get this. One of their heads was on the bookshelf.”