by Sarah Perry
But then I think: Maybe Linda wasn’t friendly to Michael Hutchinson when she met him—and it seems she surely would have met him, whether it was on that porch I imagined or in a sunken, carpeted living room or at a bar or at the lake. Maybe she was terrified and silent, because she knew that he had killed her best friend—either because Ray King told her or because there was something else to the story, something only she knew. Maybe sadness wasn’t the only thing that had damaged her sanity.
Within a few hours of arriving in Gray, I found a suggestion that, on at least one night, Mom and Linda’s relationship might have been more than platonic. Pickett interviewed a man named Donald, who claimed that after drinking with Linda and Crystal at Tommy’s, he brought them back to his house. At some point when he returned from the bathroom, he said he found the two women in bed together, and then joined them for a threesome. Even in Pickett’s notes, you can tell how eager this man was to share the details of this story, and he goes on to say that afterwards, he got in a lot of trouble with Crystal for running his mouth. He told Pickett that “one-third of people could see the girls doing that type of thing, one-third knew they did those things, and one-third didn’t believe it of them.” I wasn’t sure what to believe. It was clear that Donald was, to some degree, a bullshitter. But still, I thought about Linda, alone in the back row at the funeral, and it made me terribly sad.
It took me months to get back to Maine, then work up the nerve to call her. I looked her up in Carol’s well-worn phone book, the dense yellow pages spilling fluidly over my lap. Linda’s number was still the same, and I dialed it quickly, breathing light and fast. It was her voice on the answering machine, sounding just as friendly as ever, but she didn’t call me back. I was disappointed, mostly because I was sure she knew things about Mom that no one else did. But I also felt hurt, and strangely abandoned. What if she didn’t want to talk because she thought I knew how close they’d been and I judged her? If I couldn’t reach her, there was no way to explain that their possible intimacy, far from upsetting me, made me happy. I was glad they felt free to express themselves however they saw fit in the moment, even if it might have been only that one moment, that one night. But I think I also sensed that their close connection made Linda the best chance I had for a kind of second mother, though I don’t think I ever could have explained that to her. I didn’t want to face that desire myself.
45
* * *
I struggled through the following May, shouldering the weight of the anniversary of Mom’s death on the twelfth. That night, I lit a single white candle. Drank a glass of the strawberry wine she loved. Felt I should start doing something more. I found my balance again in June, then used the bright months to begin sifting through the stories in the police box. I read interviews with her friends, with members of our family, with acquaintances in town. With people who didn’t know her at all, with former loves and other suspects. I encountered, once more, the theory, voiced by a couple of townspeople, that I’d killed her. In competition over a man. A lot of people who thought they were providing information about us ended up revealing more about themselves.
I got glimpses not just of the crime but of her, the real person my mother was, and I started making long lists of questions. I was most interested in learning more about her: Why did she go to California with Tom? Who in the family knew her best? Who did she call when she was sad? But lurking under all these questions were others, ones I suspected were unanswerable: What, exactly, happened on the night of her death? Why did Michael Hutchinson come to our door? And why did she let him in? Was Walt’s theory right, or was there another story, waiting to be found?
I returned to Maine at the end of the summer and brought my list of questions with me, along with a list of people who might have answers. If there was more to know about the night of her death, I wanted to know it. But more important, I wanted to plunder the collective memory of everyone who knew Mom, gather what artifacts I could, set them on an altar and cast a spell that would bring her back to me, fully formed, if only in my mind. My own memories of her had degraded with time, had been warped and shadowed by the killing. I’d think about a time we had played with our cat in the afternoon sunshine, watching him dart after toys we threw into the soft grass of our backyard, and I’d immediately think about how Max’s scratching post had been found in two pieces, broken in Mom’s struggle against her attacker. I wanted to know her again, separate from what had happened to her.
I started with friends of Mom’s whom I knew but hadn’t been very close to. The stakes were lower with these people; I felt less nervous. Richard—“Hairball”—was happy to hear from me, received me like an affectionate uncle. We sat on his wide deck under the trees while he talked, mostly unprompted. He remembered Mom dancing—how much fun she had, how good she was at it, the best. He remembered everything, really. Still kept a picture of her on his refrigerator. He’d had to leave the Shoe Shop a few months after her death, because he could no longer stand to see her empty bench. His wife had competed with his memory of Crystal until finally they divorced, for a host of reasons.
Next I visited Darryl, another coworker. He told me about a sewing test he’d had to complete at the Shoe Shop: he was a slacker, so his bosses wanted to see how much he could actually produce, to determine how much he’d been messing around. Although hand-sewers were paid by the case, management had to ensure that they sewed enough to be worth employing. Darryl had taken speed pills that day, and Mom kept kicking his bench and whispering, “Slow down! Slow down!” half-joking and half-coaching, so he wouldn’t make himself look too bad by suddenly producing far more than usual. The Shop kept him on, but gave him a daily quota. Darryl also had an ex-wife who didn’t measure up to Mom. I thought about the pockets of loneliness in Bridgton, an epidemic of isolation.
As I sit with these men who still love my mother in some capacity—and there are a few of them—sometimes I feel uncertain about them. Most of them are friendly and kind, and keep repeating that they still think of me as a twelve-year-old girl. I can see them struggling to be candid with me, to tell me things you might tell a grown daughter but you would not tell a child. I don’t want to judge any of them for missing their friend, for remembering her beauty. But some of them seem fixated on her in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Mostly because their fixation is one thing that they don’t hesitate to share with me.
* * *
A year later, when I was back in Maine, I tried Linda again. When her answering machine picked up, I told her that I just wanted to know, one way or the other, if she was able to talk. I said I wasn’t sure if she had gotten my earlier message but that I’d love to see her again. “I have your number in my phone,” I said, “and when I see it, I won’t pick up. That way you can just leave me a message, just so I know either way and know you are getting these calls.” I gave my phone number, slowly, twice. I kept my voice cheery and casual.
This time, she did call back. I was sitting with Carol and Carroll, watching television, when her name came up on the screen of my silenced phone. I stared at it, willing her to leave a message saying yes.
When I saw that she had left a voice mail, I went upstairs to listen. I stood just inside the bedroom door and bent toward the phone, hunching my shoulders as though holding in a secret.
“Hi, Sarah . . . this is Linda. I’m calling you back . . . I . . . I can’t talk to you right now. Um, maybe? Sometime, in the future? I could. But I can’t right now, Sarah. Um, there’s one thing, I certainly can tell you, is . . . your mother loved you more than anything. You were her world. I know that for a fact. Um, good luck? And we’ll stay in touch. Take care, Sarah.”
I put the phone facedown on my dresser and sat on the bed. I suddenly felt very heavy. I had not expected to feel so sad.
I longed to see Linda, and my inability to reach her was nerve-racking; I felt guilty for contacting her, but knew I would have to try again, even though I was afraid of what she might know. But the conversations
I was most nervous about having were with family. I was worried about violating the silent circle we’d drawn around Mom and her death. They have said that I never wanted to talk about her, or about “what happened,” but I can’t remember them ever really trying, either. They’ve said I would get angry when they brought up the murder. Of course I did. I was furious. We all were.
Gwen was closest to Mom, so she was the first aunt I spoke with. I drove to her house in New Hampshire, making sure to pass through Bridgton on the way. It seemed important to do so, like part of a ritual that I was instinctively feeling my way through.
Gwen and Dave had lunch waiting for me; for an hour or so, we pretended this was a normal visit. After we all settled in, I started to ask questions, mostly of Gwen, though Dave stayed close in the background, speaking up now and then. I put a recorder on the table; I didn’t want to forget anything about a conversation we might never repeat.
We began with Gwen and Mom’s childhood, and I was happy to give her an excuse to reminisce about the fun they had managed to have. She also mentioned Ray—his temper, the “incidents” that Mom had with him that caused her to leave the house, run away on her bike. About an hour into our conversation, we started talking about Tom.
“I came across a story about Tom cheating on Mom with one of their high school classmates,” I said. “This person who told it—I can’t remember who—said it really broke Mom’s heart. Said that’s where the trouble started between them.”
“Oh yeah?” Gwen said. “I don’t know anything about that. I guess it wouldn’t be surprising, though.”
“So you don’t have any idea who that could be?”
“Would it be Linda? That’d be my only guess,” she said. Then her tone hardened. “But good luck with talking to her.”
I didn’t think that Tom could have cheated with Linda, or that Mom and Linda’s friendship would have survived that. But I wanted to talk about her more. I told Gwen that Linda actually had been the only person to refuse to talk to me so far. I did not say that I half-feared that Linda knew something she would not tell, that I was actually afraid of talking to her, if the day ever came.
Gwen’s voice rose just a little. “That girl makes me very upset. That girl makes me upset as all hell. Because they were extremely close, they went out to bars together. They did . . . a lot . . . of stuff together.”
Dave, half-listening from the living room, said, “Ya think?”
Gwen went on: “And that girl probably knows a lot more than anybody else.”
“They were really close,” Dave said, and let out a little scoffing laugh.
I sat there, my cheeks warming, desperately wanting to know what Gwen meant by “extremely close,” what Dave’s laugh meant. But I could tell that wasn’t the path Gwen wanted to go down, so I let her steer us toward whatever else she wanted to share.
She continued, “I’m very upset that Linda is acting like she’s too emotionally . . . It’s almost like she feels responsible, sometimes, when I think about it. Linda knew this Hutchinson guy, and knew what type of guy he was, to be introducing him to Crystal . . .”
“Wait,” I said. “You think Linda introduced Mom to him?”
“Potentially, yeah,” Gwen said, her lips tightened in thought. “ ’Cause he was a cousin of Linda’s boyfriend Mike Douglas, wasn’t he? So Hutchinson and your mother probably met through Linda.”
I took a slow breath, tried to stay open to what she was saying. I wanted to know what she thought, and why she thought it. “So you think Mom and Hutchinson met? Or dated? ’Cause there’s no proof . . .”
“Yeah. I mean,” Gwen hesitated. “I thought, I thought that they . . . it was said that he did know her.” I could see her reviewing the facts in her head.
I jumped in. “He said that.”
“True,” she conceded.
“That’s his story,” I said, a little more harshly. I wanted her to tell me something else, some other reason that she thought that Mom and Hutchinson had met, or been somehow involved. But it was clear that even though Hutchinson’s defense hadn’t convinced anyone of his innocence, it had still managed to wend its way into the story of Mom’s life.
“That’s from his side—it was part of his defense,” I said. To this day, there is no evidence that the two knew each other at all. But this is something that’s impossible to prove definitively, and I wanted to keep Gwen talking. I wanted to admit a wide range of possibilities that might lead to insights. So I made myself add, “Not that I actually do know for sure whether they knew each other . . .”
Gwen sat back a little. “Well. Now I have to think, y’know. I have to think about it. ’Cause I don’t know, either.”
We paused for a moment. A chickadee’s call rattled against the silence. Gwen lowered her head a little and looked at me closely. “I . . . I have this question that I want to ask you. And I don’t want to make you mad.” She cleared her throat, folded her hands.
Dave had been walking around the living room, straightening things up, half-watching the quiet TV. He turned to us. “Huhm,” he said. A muted laugh of tense anticipation.
“Okay . . .” I said, a ragged giggle coming out of me, too. Our sudden awkwardness filled me with fear. My skin flooded with the electricity of impending sweat.
“So there’s this thing I’ve been meaning to ask you. And you can turn that recorder off if you want.”
Dave rushed over and jokingly wrapped an arm around my shoulders, as though to hold me back from attacking someone. “Go ahead!” he said to Gwen. We all emitted big, desperate laughs. Ha. Ha. Ha. I suddenly understood that I had stumbled into a moment they had imagined many times. I definitely did not want to turn off the recorder, was glad when they agreed to leave it on.
“So, I don’t even know if you remember,” Gwen began. “There was this day, and we never knew if you remembered it, but maybe it would tell us something if you did.”
In that moment, all the things I had been telling myself—that I was having these conversations, collecting the evidence, to get to know my mother again, that I wasn’t playing detective in my own mystery—fell away. Suddenly I found myself looking into the dark heart of our unknowing, and all I wanted was for Gwen’s long-withheld question to lead us to all the answers, solve all the old mysteries.
Gwen told me about a Sunday in April, about a month before Mom died, when she and Dave had spent several hours with Grammy, drinking coffee and talking, mostly listening to her go on and on. After a while, they gathered their things, stepped backwards down the porch steps. Goodbye, goodbye, they said. We’ll come again next week, give us a call.
Gwen got into the car and Dave slammed his door, started the engine. If you didn’t interrupt Mumma, it could be dark by the time you got out of there. It had been three hours of visiting and they were tired. They hated driving home in the dark—the roads were narrow and winding, and there were quite a few densely wooded stretches between Bridgton and their house, a thirty-five-minute trip. The danger of hitting a deer was real. And they never wanted to come home late on a Sunday, before the workweek. But on that day, it was still early, really—about four o’clock—and as they pulled out of the driveway, Gwen said, “Dave, let’s stop at Crystal’s house on the way home.” She often said this.
“Nah, it’s too late. By the time we leave . . .”
“No, Dave, let’s go. We’ll just stop in for a minute.”
They drove through town, took the inviting Y-shaped turn down Route 93, coasted the one mile from the Venezia to our house. Gravel popped and rolled beneath their tires as they pulled into the driveway behind Mom’s black car. They stepped up onto the side porch, a little slab of cement. As they knocked, they peered through the wide glass pane of the door and saw me sitting on the couch, alone, reading. Upon hearing their knock, I jumped up from the chair, opened the door.
“Hey!” I said. Weirdly drawn out, a little bit louder than usual.
“He-ey!!” Gwen said, echoing me, gentl
y teasing. “What’re you doo-ing?”
I swung the door open slowly. I glanced back through the living room, toward the bedrooms. It was very quiet in the house. “Mo-om!” I yelled. “Um, Mom?”
Something felt off to Gwen. She said, “What’s your mother doing?”
I walked quickly down the hall, tapped on her door. “Mom, uh, Gwen and Dave are here.”
Her reply came muffled through the door. “Ohh-kay.”
I sat back down on the couch with Gwen and Dave; we turned on the TV, volume low. We talked for a couple of minutes. My attention was divided between them and my book, as usual. It was a big book. They’d ask me a question and I’d answer, then look back down and read a sentence or two. Occasionally I asked them something back. I was acting weird, but I was often weird. A few minutes passed, not more than five, but those minutes felt long. Gwen and Dave wondered if Crystal had been napping? Was pulling on clothes and fixing her hair a little?
And then she walked out of her room, followed by a very young man they had never seen before.
It wasn’t Dennis. It wasn’t Tim.
Gwen and Dave froze on the couch. Desperately wished they’d called before coming, or left in a hurry before Mom had come out, made excuses to me about the late hour or something. Awkward tension crowded the oxygen out of the room. Muscles strained in the effort to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was happening.