We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  “Oh, luck. Luck that I got the education that I was able to get. Luck that I married the right person. Luck that I stayed out of jail my whole life. I always believed that luck comes to the well-prepared person, and I mean that only in the sense of scholarship. I worked hard to master—to pretend to master the field,” he corrects. “It sure as hell was worth it.”

  Reconstruction

  WHEN BOYD LEARNED MICHAEL SUMPTER’S name and emailed Sennott a draft of his press statement, he appended a private note to the detective: “If the identity of the suspect was a ‘very bad man who died in prison and had no connection to Jane or her associates’ the DNA match does exhaust the investigative measures and evidence available. It does not, for many, ‘close the case.’”

  I would like to be able to tell you exactly what happened the night Jane was killed. I want to know what to make of the allegations of police misconduct, or of the fact that Gramly can’t let go of the story. I wish I could tell you that the red ochre was an accident—a red herring—revenge—hubris—remorse. I wish I could tell you whether or not it was even red ochre.

  But I can’t. Some days, I don’t even know what to tell you about Jane. I know even less about whether telling a responsible story of the past is possible, having learned all too well how the act of interpretation molds the facts in service of the storyteller. I have been burned enough times to know: There are no true stories; there are only facts, and the stories we tell ourselves about those facts.

  I have tried to be honest about the way in which telling Jane’s story blurred into a vehicle for telling my own. I’ve tried to be honest about the way in which I am a part of the world I’m studying. About the biases I had going into the story that shaped the woman I understood Jane to have been. About the limitations of my imagination as I tried to reconstruct the crime that befell her. I tried to disentangle myth from fact, and to study the iterations of these myths for what they revealed about the storytellers. I have tried to listen to the stories to hear what they weren’t saying. And I have tried to get to know the people who loved Jane, who shaped her.

  But for what it’s worth, after having chastised us all enough for the act of speculation, I bare my bias and offer you my best guess of what happened to Jane the night she was killed:

  I don’t think Sumpter entered Jane’s apartment through the fire escape. I think he entered her building through the unlocked cellar door that was still unlocked days later. I think he waited for Jim to leave and for her apartment lights to turn off. She had changed into her nightgown, and maybe she lit the candles by her bed, to ease herself to sleep. The chemist noted that the candles in Jane’s candelabrum had been left to melt for so long they had bent over. Perhaps Sumpter climbed the back stairwell (which explains why he escaped being heard by the Mitchells), and pulled a leg off her neighbors’ table in the hallway. As described in a police report from the time, the dimension of the table leg, and its attributes—both the blunt wood and the sharp metal where it adhered to the tabletop—possibly fit the description of the murder weapon. Sumpter would likely have passed that table before he entered Jane’s apartment through the rear door.

  That door opened into Jane’s kitchen. Perhaps Jane heard a noise, went to her kitchen, and found Sumpter. As Elisabeth, Don, Jill, and Ingrid were all sure, Jane probably tried to kick the shit out of the intruder—perhaps she picked up the greasy frying pan in the kitchen to wield it as a weapon, leaving a trace of grease on her right hand, and tried to hold him back with her left, which explains the twist of wool in that hand. As in the time she was attacked sophomore year, she was probably too scared to scream. Perhaps Sumpter hit her for the first time in the kitchen—maybe causing the contusion on her right arm, which was wielding the pan, and leaving trace bloodstains in both the greasy frying pan and the kitchen sink. Then he continued his assault on her in the bedroom. I find it believable that he fled through the kitchen window, taking the table leg with him, to the fire escape and the courtyard, leaving the window open in the process. Perhaps he was the one who had left the fingerprint on the glass.

  Detective Colleran’s to-scale diagram of Jane’s apartment.

  Even so, with all the clues lining up just right, I still find it hard to believe that the ochre was an accident. I struggle not to see meaning in the coincidences.

  Jane Sanders Britton

  IN THE MIDST OF MY research, months before we had any resolution to Jane’s death, I had tried to find my own by visiting her grave.

  I went on what would have been Jane’s seventy-third birthday. I had asked Don, Elisabeth, and Boyd if there was anything they wanted me to bring or do or say for them. Boyd asked for a picture of the grave. Don asked me to read a note to her. He said that he didn’t believe in the afterworld, but if he was wrong, the statement would probably make Jane happy. Regardless, it pleased Don to know that something would be said on his behalf. I hadn’t heard back from Elisabeth by the time I took the 9:53 a.m. commuter rail from South Station into Needham Junction.

  I tried writing my own letter to Jane, but I kept starting and stopping. Should I update Jane on what was going on in the world? Should I write what I would have wanted to say if I met her? Thank you for guiding my life this past decade—It felt ridiculous. I was talking to myself.

  I tried again: Hi Jane. This is Becky. I’d like to think you already know that and that you don’t mind me telling your story. It feels like you’re helping me do it.

  It still felt self-involved. And to believe I wasn’t writing to myself was to believe, more firmly, in the existence of the supernatural.

  I didn’t have much time to ruminate. In less than an hour, the train delivered me to her neighborhood. I stepped out into the overcast day that was deceptively humid and warm. The lilacs had just finished blooming.

  I wandered around Needham, walking down her childhood street, peering over the azaleas at her childhood home, wandering down to Farley Pond where Jane and Karen John had gone ice skating—the outer limits of their Big Woods world. I recognized parts of her neighborhood from photos, but I felt a bodily familiarity incongruous with a past that didn’t belong to me. It struck me that I was approaching this trip like a conjuring; Jane had yet to come to me in a dream.

  On almost every resident’s front yard was a copy of the Needham Times, with a single headline visible over the fold: VIGIL HOPES TO HEAL.

  I continued wandering around her old neighborhood, waiting for the caretaker of Jane’s grave to call me back. I had tried visiting her grave two years prior, and I walked up and down the hills of Needham Cemetery, searching for the headstone. When I finally admitted defeat, the friend who had driven me said reassuringly, “You’ll find her eventually.” So this time, I’d called the cemetery caretaker in advance, and he promised to take me to the grave himself. But he had made this promise days ago, and now he was nowhere to be found.

  I checked my phone again and noticed that Elisabeth had emailed and asked, if it wasn’t too late, to get a package of Gauloises for Jane. The gas station attendants just looked confused when I asked if they carried the brand, so I headed to Kinko’s to print a picture of the blue cigarette carton. It was then that the caretaker called and offered to pick me up.

  He was already in the parking lot when I exited the store with the cigarette printout, and I climbed into his pickup truck filled with power tools. His name was Tom, and he must have been in his fifties, balding but trim, with a kind face and blue eyes. He laughed at me for putting on my seat belt.

  We pulled in past the old tomb where, he told me, they used to store bodies in caskets in the winter, piled up, waiting for the ground to thaw. Now it’s the cemetery office.

  He parked the truck in Jane’s section of the cemetery. The grass was thick and freshly mown. We were at the top of a hill, looking down at what must be a hundred gravestones, all gray, some decorated with American flags. He said he might need to consult his book to find her grave, but we decided to give it a once-over first.

>   “There should be three of them together,” I called over to him. I was about ten feet behind him, scanning in parallel a few rows down. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before Tom shouted, “Right here.” He stopped walking, and I raced to catch up to him.

  He read the rectangular stone plaques sunk flush to the ground. “J. Boyd.” “Ruth Reinert.” I knew who the third would be. He kicked the plot with his work boot to clear out the grass that was crowding it and obscuring her name. “And Jane.” He kicked it again. The sound of his sole on the stone made me flinch. It was like he was kicking her, and I felt it in my body. “Jane somebody.”

  The family headstone was about eight feet in front of us, toward the top of the hill.

  “Hold on a sec. Let me see if I got—” he said and headed to his truck before he finished his sentence. He walked back with a metal scraper in his hand, and he kneeled down and took the flat of the blade to the stone to shave off the years. Green lichen had flaked and scaled over the Britton name. Tom kept scraping. “Is he here? J. Boyd.” Jane’s father died in the early 2000s, but no one had come back to give him a death year.

  My thought that I might encounter someone doing the same pilgrimage today, or some flowers left behind anonymously for Jane, was met by the very different and very believable alternative that nobody had come here in decades. It was a comfort to know that Tom, at least, took good care of the land.

  Tom made his way around the headstone to the markers again, and, like an archaeologist spotting a shadow, he looked at the ground and saw what was missing. His tool scraped grass and then dirt. He got down on his knees and edged the lawn, hammering his scraper down into the ground to break the roots and lift up the sod. It made the high sharp sound of metal hitting stone. “I think it’s a four-grave lot.” He cleared it to a recognizable shape. The stone was blank. Tom had found Boyd’s plot.

  He asked me if I wanted a ride back, but I said I wanted to stay a while. I watched him pull off, and I set my stuff down so that her marker was at my knees. I was at her feet.

  The J of her first name was buried in dirt and the DERS of SANDERS faded into the ground. Grass hung over the top of her plaque and dirt encroached on her last name from the bottom. I began to clear the dirt and the grass that had grown thick after fifty years. I hadn’t thought to bring any tools, so I just did it with my hands. I took off my jacket—the sun had come out for the first time all day—and I rose to my knees to get more leverage. It took both hands to yank hard enough to rip the roots of the grass, revealing small curled-up earthworms.

  I had amassed a small mountain of dirt and grass and roots, but there was still more to lift. I used the last of my water to wipe away the dust I’d created. As the water was drying, I recited what Don asked me to say: “Don has never forgotten you and never will, and you remain alive in his memories.”

  Her marker still wasn’t clear enough for the picture I wanted to take for Boyd. Some mud had caked in the letters, and roots still clung to the final S of her middle name. I looked around for a twig sturdy enough to dig it out. The first one wasn’t thin enough, and the second was too brittle. I tried my fingers, but, already caked in dirt, they didn’t do much better than the twigs. And then I saw my pen that had become buried in the dirt and roots and grass. Of course. I picked it up and, drawing my pen tip around the curves, I etched out her name, letter by letter.

  And there, finally, after years of wondering if her grave had any epitaph, was my answer. In a stately serif font, surrounded by an etched double-line border, her stone said nothing more than was absolutely necessary:

  JANE SANDERS

  BRITTON

  1945–1969

  I knew what I wanted to write her. I used the same pen, now weak because it was still clotted in the dirt that had covered her, and my hands, coated with the same soil, stained the paper.

  Dear Jane, I hope I’m telling the story you want me to tell.

  I folded my letter inside the picture of the Gauloises, as if it was a cigarette that Jane could light and look at me with a wry smile and say, Whyyyyy darling.

  * * *

  When I had spoken to Iva Houston in advance of the press conference, she told me not to think of it as anything other than another iteration of Jane’s story. Like Karl’s version, or Gramly’s, or Lee’s, it was a story in service of an end. A revelation of the interests of the storytellers. The DA’s version made the ending seem neat and definitive, but the story was too big at this point for any clear resolution. “There isn’t a right version. It isn’t a wrong version. But it’s their version,” Iva said. “It’s just the most recent iteration of the same damn story.” It also won’t be the last one, she underscored.

  I asked her, “The question is, how do you restore the story to her? How does she get to tell it?” We had come this far, and I still felt like I had no idea how to tell a responsible story about the past.

  “You can’t,” she says. “The only way to do it truly is to have her come back and do it herself.”

  Iva thinks more. “There’s an idea of this that’s becoming increasingly common in anthropology, which is this idea of restorative justice, restorative methodology. You know, things that attempt to establish some semblance of what’s right, what’s just, what’s equitable.”

  In practice, Iva says, I start by giving Jane her name back. And then the best I can do is write: “She was flawed. She had ambition. We’ll never know what might have happened to this person. What she might have done. Just give her her name and explain how this woman was complicated. She wasn’t this dumb young girl, and she wasn’t this vixen. She was like any of us. She was something in between.”

  * * *

  Now, more than a year later, I’ve read almost every line on every page of the four thousand pages of police notes. I’m still in Boston, still in Apthorp House, still looking out the window at my sophomore-year fire escape, still reaching for some resolution to tell me I’m done even if her story will never be. And, as from the beginning, I’m still dancing to her choreography, guided through her history, and my own. Only this time, it’s not just Jay and me clinging to each other in a room of ghosts. Don’s there, too. Elisabeth. Boyd. Stephen Loring. Mike Widmer. And we’re encircled by the past versions of ourselves, waltzing between what was and is and will be—seamlessly sliding from Cronin’s to Flour Bakery, and back again—joined across time by the woman whose short life has structured our own.

  I’m down to my very last MSP file in the stack. And to my own incredulity, I see that there’s a note handwritten in black ink in the top left corner of the first page: “Book 1 1968. J.S. Britton. British Inst of Persian Studies Box 2167. Tehran IRAN.”

  Jane’s journal. The diary she kept the summer in Iran. On unlined paper, about the size of a Moleskine notebook, are her to-do lists and packing reminders for rolls of film and underwear and insect repellent and special delivery stamps and dextrose tablets and the address of Phil Kohl’s family in Tehran. And—there they are. The entries.

  The first is dated June 6, 1968. “Jim,” it begins. Each entry is written as a letter to Jim Humphries. “This book,” she writes, “is a hell of a thing to do to anyone—if you get it it’ll be under circumstances where you can’t answer back.”

  It feels prescient. Celestial.

  “In a way maybe you are two-timing me––with time. I often wonder about that—what kind of person you could have loved, why it stopped. If only I had the time. If if. Miserable word. Almost as bad as time itself.” I can feel—despite knowing that it’s meant for Jim, despite how awfully hokey it is—the blurring again. “You know more about what makes me tick than anyone else, oddly enough.” For just a moment, I let myself believe that she’s speaking to me, that this is her answer to the letter I left on her grave. In it, she bids me: “Be my chronicler, so the tale of the Brit is told throughout the land, or at least that one person remembers me the way I am instead of the way they see me.”

  Acknowledgments

/>   When I started, I didn’t know Jane’s name. I didn’t know where the research would take me. And I certainly didn’t know who killed her. But what I did know is how much luck and how much generosity it would take to get anywhere close to the end of this journey. I was gifted with both, in spades, for this book. So, after more than ten years of reaping the kindness of friends, family, colleagues, mentors, and strangers, it’s nice––if very daunting––to finally be able to say thank you to the people without whom We Keep the Dead Close would not have been possible.

  First and foremost, I have to thank everyone who agreed to be interviewed, many of whose names don’t even appear in the text but whose insight was invaluable for giving me a solid understanding of the time and material. I wanted to give a special mention to a few people, though, starting, of course, with Boyd Britton. Thank you for your time, your candor, and, most of all, your trust. As I told you in California, I promised to do my very best for Jane’s story. I hope you feel like I have lived up to that promise.

  To Jane’s friends from childhood through college––Karen John, Emily Woodbury, Irene Light, Tess Beemer, Brenda Bass, Jennifer Fowler, Cathy Ravinski, Jean Hendry, Lucy DuPertuis, Ingrid Kirsch, Karen Black, and Peter Panchy––as well as to Charlie Britton, I also hope you feel like I have done right by Jane. Elisabeth Handler, I could not imagine this book without you.

  Don Mitchell and Ruth Thompson, I am so grateful for your friendship, your hospitality, your mochi care packages, and your unending belief in me and in this project. Don, thank you also for your photographs, not least the cover image of Jane, which sent shivers in me when I first saw it.

  Mike Widmer, you are a true friend and kindred spirit.

  Morgan Potts and Lily Erlinger. You are where this story began. It feels only appropriate––and very fortunate––that you also took my author photo, Lily.