by Alice Sebold
“Do you want to go in?” Artie asked.
“Everyone else will be inside,” Ruth said.
“I know.”
“Let’s get wet.”
They sat still for a while and watched the drops fall around them, heard the sound against the leaves of the tree above.
“I knew she was dead. I sensed it,” Ruth said, “but then I saw a mention of it in my dad’s paper and I was sure. They didn’t use her name at first. Just ‘Girl, fourteen.’ I asked my dad for the page but he wouldn’t give it to me. I mean, who else and her sister hadn’t been in school all week?”
“I wonder who told Lindsey?” Artie said. The rain picked up. Artie slipped underneath the table. “We’re going to get soaked,” he yelled up.
And then as quickly as the rain had started, it ceased. Sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. “I think she listens,” she said, too softly to be heard. It became common knowledge at the symposium who my sister was and how I had died.
“Imagine being stabbed,” someone said.
“No thanks.”
“I think it’s cool.”
“Think of it—she’s famous.”
“Some way to get famous. I’d rather win the Nobel Prize.”
“Does anyone know what she wanted to be?”
“I dare you to ask Lindsey.”
And they listed the dead they knew.
Grandmother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, some had a parent, rarer was a sister or brother lost young to an illness—a heart irregularity—leukemia—an unpronounceable disease. No one knew anyone who had been murdered. But now they knew me.
Under a rowboat that was too old and worn to float, Lindsey lay down on the earth with Samuel Heckler, and he held her.
“You know I’m okay,” she said, her eyes dry. “I think Artie was trying to help me,” she offered.
“You can stop now, Lindsey,” he said. “We’ll just lie here and wait until things quiet down.”
Samuel’s back was flush against the ground, and he brought my sister close into his body to protect her from the dampness of the quick summer rain. Their breath began to heat the small space beneath the boat, and he could not stop it—his penis stiffened inside his jeans.
Lindsey reached her hand over.
“I’m sorry…” he began.
“I’m ready,” my sister said.
At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.
“How to Commit the Perfect Murder” was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.
ELEVEN
When my father woke up at four A.M., the house was quiet. My mother lay beside him, lightly snoring. My brother, the only child, what with my sister attending the symposium, was like a rock with a sheet pulled up over him. My father marveled at what a sound sleeper he was—just like me. While I was still alive, Lindsey and I had had fun with that, clapping, dropping books, and even banging pot lids to see if Buckley would wake up.
Before leaving the house, my father checked on Buckley—to make sure, to feel the warm breath against his palm. Then he suited up in his thin-soled sneakers and light jogging outfit. His last task was to put Holiday’s collar on.
It was still early enough that he could almost see his breath. He could pretend at that early hour that it was still winter. That the seasons had not advanced.
The morning dog walk gave him an excuse to pass by Mr. Harvey’s house. He slowed only slightly—no one would have noticed save me or, if he had been awake, Mr. Harvey. My father was sure that if he just stared hard enough, just looked long enough, he would find the clues he needed in the casements of the windows, in the green paint coating the shingles, or along the driveway, where two large stones sat, painted white.
By late summer 1974, there had been no movement on my case. No body. No killer. Nothing.
My father thought of Ruana Singh: “When I was sure, I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.” He had not told this to Abigail because the advice made a sort of baseline sense that would frighten her into telling someone, and he suspected that someone might be Len.
Ever since the day he’d seen Ruana Singh and then had come home to find Len waiting for him, he’d felt my mother leaning heavily on the police. If my father said something that contradicted the police theories—or, as he saw them, the lack of them—my mother would immediately rush to fill the hole left open by my father’s idea. “Len says that doesn’t mean anything,” or, “I trust the police to find out what happened.”
Why, my father wondered, did people trust the police so much? Why not trust instinct? It was Mr. Harvey and he knew it. But what Ruana had said was when I was sure. Knowing, the deep-soul knowing that my father had, was not, in the law’s more literal mind, incontrovertible proof.
The house that I grew up in was the same house where I was born. Like Mr. Harvey’s, it was a box, and because of this I nurtured useless envies whenever I visited other people’s homes. I dreamed about bay windows and cupolas, balconies, and slanted attic ceilings in a bedroom. I loved the idea that there could be trees in a yard taller and stronger than people, slanted spaces under stairs, thick hedges grown so large that inside there were hollows of dead branches where you could crawl and sit. In my heaven there were verandas and circular staircases, window ledges with iron rails, and a campanile housing a bell that tolled the hour.
I knew the floor plan of Mr. Harvey’s by heart. I had made a warm spot on the floor of the garage until I cooled. He had brought my blood into the house with him on his clothes and skin. I knew the bathroom. Knew how in my house my mother had tried to decorate it to accommodate Buckley’s late arrival by stenciling battleships along the top of the pink walls. In Mr. Harvey’s house the bathroom and kitchen were spotless. The porcelain was yellow and the tile on the floor was green. He kept it cold. Upstairs, where Buckley, Lindsey, and I had our rooms, he had almost nothing. He had a straight chair where he would go to sit sometimes and stare out the window over at the high school, listen for the sound of band practice wafting over from the field, but mostly he spent his hours in the back on the first floor, in the kitchen building dollhouses, in the living room listening to the radio or, as his lust set in, sketching blueprints for follies like the hole or the tent.
No one had bothered him about me for several months. By that summer he only occasionally saw a squad car slow in front of his house. He was smart enough not to alter his pattern. If he was walking out to the garage or the mailbox, he kept on going.
He set several clocks. One to tell him when to open the blinds, one when to close them. In conjunction with these alarms, he would turn lights on and off throughout the house. When an occasional child happened by to sell chocolate bars for a school competition or inquire if he would like to subscribe to the Evening Bulletin, he was friendly but businesslike, unremarkable.
He kept things to count, and this counting reassured him. They were simple things. A wedding ring, a letter sealed in an envelope, the heel of a shoe, a pair of glasses, an eraser in the shape of a cartoon character, a small bottle of perfume, a plastic bracelet, my Pennsylvania keystone charm, his mother’s amber pendant. He would take them out at night long after he was certain that no newsboy or neighbor would knock on his door. He would count them like the beads on a rosary. For some he had forgotten the names. I knew the names. The heel of the shoe was from a girl named Claire, from Nutley, New Jersey, whom he had convinced to walk into the back of a van. She was littler than me. (I like to think I wouldn’t have gone into a van. Like to think it was my curiosity about how he could make a hole in the earth that wouldn’t collapse.) He had ripped the heel off her shoe before he let Claire go. That was all he did. He got her into the van and took her shoes off. She started crying, and the sound drove into him like screws. He pleaded with her to be quiet and just leave. Step magically out of
the van barefoot and uncomplaining while he kept her shoes. But she wouldn’t. She cried. He started working on one of the heels of the shoes, prying it loose with his penknife, until someone pounded on the back of the van. He heard men’s voices and a woman yelling something about calling the police. He opened the door.
“What the hell are you doing to that kid?” one of the men yelled. This man’s buddy caught the little girl as she flew, bawling, out of the back.
“I’m trying to repair her shoe.”
The little girl was hysterical. Mr. Harvey was all reason and calm. But Claire had seen what I had—his look bearing down—his wanting something unspoken that to give him would equal our oblivion.
Hurriedly, as the men and woman stood confused, unable to see what Claire and I knew, Mr. Harvey handed the shoes to one of the men and said his goodbyes. He kept the heel. He liked to hold the small leather heel and rub it between his thumb and forefinger—a perfect worry stone.
* * *
I knew the darkest place in our house. I had climbed inside of it and stayed there for what I told Clarissa was a whole day but was really about forty-five minutes. It was the crawlspace in the basement. Inside ours there were pipes coming down that I could see with a flashlight and tons and tons of dust. That was it. There were no bugs. My mother, like her own, employed an exterminator for the slightest infestation of ants.
When the alarm had gone off to tell him to shut the blinds and then the next alarm, which told him to shut off most of the lights because the suburbs were asleep after that, Mr. Harvey would go down into the basement, where there were no cracks that light could peek through and people could point to, to say he was strange. By the time he killed me he had tired of visiting the crawlspace, but he still liked to hang out in the basement in an easy chair that faced the dark hole beginning halfway up the wall and reaching to the exposed baseboards of his kitchen floor. He would often drift off to sleep there, and there he was asleep when my father passed the green house at around 4:40 A.M.
Joe Ellis was an ugly little tough. He had pinched Lindsey and me under water in the pool and kept us from going to swim parties because we hated him so much. He had a dog that he dragged around no matter what the dog wanted. It was a small dog and couldn’t run very fast, but Ellis didn’t care. He would hit it or lift it painfully by the tail. Then one day it was gone, and so was a cat that Ellis had been seen taunting. And then animals from all over the neighborhood began disappearing.
What I discovered, when I followed Mr. Harvey’s stare to the crawlspace, were these animals that had gone missing for more than a year. People thought it stopped because the Ellis boy had been sent to military school. When they let their pets loose in the morning, they returned in the evening. This they held as proof. No one could imagine an appetite like the one in the green house. Someone who would spread quicklime on the bodies of cats and dogs, the sooner for him to have nothing left but their bones. By counting the bones and staying away from the sealed letter, the wedding ring, the bottle of perfume, he tried to stay away from what he wanted most—from going upstairs in the dark to sit in the straight chair and look out toward the high school, from imagining the bodies that matched the cheerleaders’ voices, which pulsated in waves on fall days during football games, or from watching the buses from the grammar school unload two houses down. Once he had taken a long look at Lindsey, the lone girl on the boys’ soccer team out running laps in our neighborhood near dark.
What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child.
By August, Len wanted to establish some boundaries for his sake and for my father’s. My father had called the precinct too many times and frustrated the police into irritation, which wouldn’t help anyone be found and just might make the whole place turn against him.
The final straw had been a call that came in the first week of July. Jack Salmon had detailed to the operator how, on a morning walk, his dog had stopped in front of Mr. Harvey’s house and started howling. No matter what Salmon had done, went the story, the dog wouldn’t budge from the spot and wouldn’t stop howling. It became a joke at the station: Mr. Fish and his Huckleberry Hound.
Len stood on the stoop of our house to finish his cigarette. It was still early, but the humidity from the day before had intensified. All week rain had been promised, the kind of thunder and lightning rainstorm the area excelled at, but so far the only moisture of which Len was aware was that covering his body in a damp sweat. He had made his last easy visit to my parents’ house.
Now he heard humming—a female voice from inside. He stubbed out his cigarette against the cement under the hedge and lifted the heavy brass knocker. The door opened before he let go.
“I smelled your cigarette,” Lindsey said.
“Was that you humming?”
“Those things will kill you.”
“Is your father home?”
Lindsey stood aside to let him in.
“Dad!” my sister yelled into the house. “It’s Len!”
“You were away, weren’t you?” Len asked.
“I just got back.”
My sister was wearing Samuel’s softball shirt and a pair of strange sweatpants. My mother had accused her of returning home without one single item of her own clothing.
“I’m sure your parents missed you.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Lindsey said. “I think they were happy to have me out of their hair.”
Len knew she was right. He was certainly sure my mother had seemed less frantic when he had visited the house.
Lindsey said, “Buckley’s made you the head of the police squad in the town he built under his bed.”
“That’s a promotion.”
The two of them heard my father’s footsteps in the hallway above and then the sounds of Buckley begging. Lindsey could tell that whatever he’d asked for our father had finally granted.
My father and brother descended the stairs, all smiles.
“Len,” he said, and he shook Len’s hand.
“Good morning, Jack,” Len said. “And how are you this morning, Buckley?”
My father took Buckley’s hand and stood him in front of Len, who solemnly bent down to my brother.
“I hear you’ve made me chief of police,” Len said.
“Yes sir.”
“I don’t think I deserve the job.”
“You more than anyone,” my father said breezily. He loved it when Len Fenerman dropped by. Each time he did, it verified for my father that there was a consensus—a group behind him—that he wasn’t alone in all this.
“I need to talk to your father, kids.”
Lindsey took Buckley back into the kitchen with the promise of cereal. She herself was thinking of what Samuel had shown her; it was a drink called a jellyfish, which involved a maraschino cherry at the bottom of some sugar and gin. Samuel and Lindsey had sucked the cherries up through the sugar and booze until their heads hurt and their lips were stained red.
“Should I get Abigail? Can I make you some coffee or something?”
“Jack,” Len said, “I’m not here with any news—just the opposite. Can we sit?”
I watched my father and Len head into the living room. The living room seemed to be where no living ever actually occurred. Len sat on the edge of a chair and waited for my father to take a seat.
“Listen, Jack,” he said. “It’s about George Harvey.”
My father brightened. “I thought you said you had no news.”
“I don’t. I have something I need to say on behalf of the station and myself.”
“Yes.”
“We need you to stop making calls about George Harvey.”
“But…”
“I need you to stop. There is nothing, no matter how much we stretch it, to connect him to Susie’s death. Howling dogs and bridal tents are not evidence.”
“I know he did it,” my father said.
>
“He’s odd, I agree, but as far as we know he isn’t a killer.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
Len Fenerman talked, but all my father could hear was Ruana Singh saying what she had to him, and of standing outside Mr. Harvey’s house and feeling the energy radiating out to him, the coldness at the core of the man. Mr. Harvey was at once unknowable and the only person in the world who could have killed me. As Len denied it, my father grew more certain.
“You are stopping your investigation of him,” my father said flatly.
Lindsey was in the doorway, hovering as she’d done on the day Len and the uniformed officer had brought my hat with the jingle bell, the twin of which she owned. That day she had quietly shoved this second hat into a box of old dolls in the back of her closet. She never wanted my mother to hear the sound of those beadlike bells again.
There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth. Lindsey stepped forward from her place by the door.
“Hello again, Lindsey,” Len said.
“Detective Fenerman.”
“I was just telling your father…”
“That you’re giving up.”
“If there was any good reason to suspect the man…”
“Are you done?” Lindsey asked. She was suddenly the wife to our father, as well as the oldest, most responsible child.
“I just want you all to know that we’ve investigated every lead.”
My father and Lindsey heard her, and I saw her. My mother coming down the stairs. Buckley raced out of the kitchen and charged, propelling his full weight into my father’s legs.
“Len,” my mother said, pulling her terry-cloth robe tighter when she saw him, “has Jack offered you coffee?”
My father looked at his wife and Len Fenerman.