It’s hard to explain what followed in those weeks after my parents’ murders. A dark, sucking hole was ripped in the fabric of my universe. Where before I had been loved, secure, thought the world was one thing, after I had been violently instructed that it was another altogether.
Buffeted by the gale-force winds of bone-crushing grief and unspeakable trauma, I was debris from a shipwreck, floating, not even trying to find shore. I began my fifteenth year as one thing, one girl, one kind of person, and ended it as someone else. I survived, but I didn’t. I was a zombie. Dead girl walking. No matter what they tell you, some things you don’t get over. You just don’t. You might still be breathing, walking around. You might still have a cake on your birthday, laugh again, heal some. But you don’t “get over it.”
It was a long time, too long before I started asking questions. I barely had a language for my new universe for the first year; I was still getting used to its unusual gravitational pull. I could barely lift my feet to walk.
Maybe if Detective Earl Bozmoski hadn’t paid us a visit, I wouldn’t have ever asked. Maybe I would have accepted the fact that the men who murdered my parents and thought they murdered me got away with it. I couldn’t identify them. They had been in no way familiar to me—no one who had worked on our property, who I knew from my mother’s life, from my dad’s, from school. I had never seen their faces. Their clothes, their shoes were generic—jeans and boots, flannel shirts, black ski masks. I was able to describe builds, the sounds of their voices, the color of their eyes. They wanted something, something they thought my father had. The house was thoroughly searched. They gathered hair and fibers. There was a single boot print outside the door, a size 10 work boot. One set of foreign fingerprints that didn’t match anything in the system. Hair fibers were collected from my clothes.
The manhunt that night was exhaustive, the investigation tireless. A cop and his wife had been murdered in their home, their daughter tortured, left for dead. It would not stand, no lead too small, the investigation would not end until someone had been made to pay. It wound on and on, long after other cases would have been shelved. Still. Whoever they were, they got away with it.
Nothing was ever found hidden in our house. Whatever they thought my father had, he didn’t have it. Of course he didn’t. He wasn’t an easy man, but I never doubted how much he loved me and my mom. There is nothing he wouldn’t have given up for us. He’d have lain down his life.
? ? ?
“JUST ONE MORE TIME, ZOEY.” Detective Bozmoski, or Boz, as I have come to know him over the years. “As much as it hurts, just tell me one more time.”
I looked to Paul, who nodded solemnly. Boz had come into the city where I’d settled in with Paul. I had started school that week, lay in bed every night crying, was plagued by terrible nightmares, was in twice-weekly therapy. I watched a lot of television—cartoons mostly, SpongeBob and South Park, even other stuff just for babies like Little Einsteins and Special Agent Oso. Anything that wasn’t real, anything that let me vegetate, not think, not feel.
I told him everything again, from the beginning, starting with Seth. It was he who had called the police. He got to the bridge late that night and followed the path I would have taken home, hoping to catch me. He watched, terrified in the trees, as the men dragged me across the property from the barn to the house, Catcher lifeless on the ground. (Catcher survived that night, lived with me and Paul for another couple of years before we had to put him down for dysplasia. At home he could have gotten around, but in the city, he couldn’t manage all those stairs. He was a good boy.) Seth ran, called the police. He probably saved my life that night. For what it’s worth. He told me later that he’d always felt like a coward for running. But he was just a kid. If he’d tried to play hero, he would have been dead. Maybe I would be, too.
Boz was a big man with a thinning head of black hair and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. He wasn’t part of the Lost Valley Police Department; he was from the state police. The case of a murdered police officer never closes, never goes cold. Detective Earl Bozmoski was a dog with a bone.
We went over it again, every detail. The sound of their voices, the shapes of their mouths, the color of their eyes. What they said to each other. Did they ever use names? He was hoping that as my trauma lifted, as grief lightened, that more details would surface. So far, it hadn’t worked that way. Even though that night was on an eternal loop in my thoughts, in my dreams, nothing helpful had emerged from my traumatized recollections.
We sat in Paul’s cramped kitchen, the aroma of coffee in the air. Boz pulled a manila folder from his weathered leather case and laid it on the table.
“I’ve got some pictures here, Zoey,” he said. “I wondered if you might recognize any of these men.”
His hands were thick and calloused, cuticles ragged, nails short. My mother would have called them a workingman’s hands. I liked the sight of them because they reminded me of my father’s hands, hands that worked wood, held a gun, held my hand, lifted and fixed.
He spread four photos out in front of me.
My father used the word mopes a lot, or skulls, meaning low-level thugs, bad men with bad intentions or just the kind moron that fell into trouble because he came from trouble and didn’t know any other way around the world. Men who stole, or had the gene for violence, bad tempers, or just something addled in the head. The men in the photos were all one kind or another. Even at that age, I could see it in the deadness of their stares, in the turned-down corners of their mouths, the ragged complexions, sloped shoulders. But they were all strangers. I looked at their eyes, at their mouths. But there wasn’t any jolt of recognition.
I shook my head. “I don’t know them.”
“If you heard some voices maybe?”
“Maybe.”
He pulled a recorder out of his bag. “Normally, we’d have to do this at the station. But I didn’t want to do that to you right now—when you’re just settling in here.”
“Is it okay?” Paul asked. I nodded.
“They’re all going to say the same thing,” said Boz. “A sentence from the transcript of your initial interview: ‘You’re not going to save your family and get away with that money. Tell us where it is.’?”
I must have flinched because he bowed his head and put that big hand over mine. “I’m sorry,” he said.
The first voice was too high pitched, almost girlish. I shook my head. The next voice had a heavy New York accent; that wasn’t it either. The third voice was deeper. Maybe, but no. The fourth voice sent a bolt of electricity through me, deep, gravelly, cold.
“Zoey?”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling my breath come ragged. I couldn’t swear to it, but every nerve ending in my body was tingling, my lungs compressing.
“Who is he?” I asked.