One day at a time, that’s what addicts were supposed to live by, and Katherine had to admit there was a certain appeal to that. Who couldn’t make it through one day at a time? But days turn into weeks, into years, into lifetimes, and then one day you were dead, with nothing to show for yourself except maybe you hadn’t fucking killed anybody.
She forgave Blake, but it was irrelevant. She didn’t forgive him because he deserved it, but because she loved him, and she probably only loved him because he was handsome and kind to her and also because they were stuck in this muggy self-righteous hellhole together. However much joy he brought her, it could not possibly equal the sorrow he brought to others. It’s not that precise of an equation, Arthur might say. But it was still one worth considering.
Katherine left Paradise Lake and moved back to Oregon, to her parents’ house. She and her dad put a cot and a small desk in the attic so that she could have a little privacy while living with them. They also painted the walls white, with a blue trim. It reminded her, not unpleasantly, of a baby’s bedroom.
She got a job at a shoe store. To her surprise, she liked working there. She liked making small talk with customers, smiling at them, giving them compliments. The constant facade of happiness actually made her a little happier. Arthur would probably have something to say about that. Twice a week, she went to an AA meeting. Sometimes she took the bus, and sometimes one of her parents drove her.
The very first day her parents left her in the house alone, she went online to look for information about the girl Blake killed. There was almost nothing. Did college boys just murder their girlfriends so often that it was no longer newsworthy? It took her twenty minutes to find an article from the Dutchess County Weekly. It was headlined COLLEGE SLASHER FOUND INSANE. The article itself was behind a paywall. Katherine tried to sign up for a free trial period, but the website required a credit card. She didn’t have a credit card. Her parents had confiscated her debit card two years ago, and they kept their credit cards in a safe or on their persons at all times.
She had to wait until her sister, Eleanor, came to visit. Eleanor, her husband, and their five-year-old son, Jackson, slept in Katherine’s room, and Katherine set up a blow-up bed in the office. During the day she played with Jackson, who was mainly interested in the many issues of National Geographic Kids he had brought with him. Katherine sat with him on her lap in the living room and read page after page of facts about zoo animals.
When it was nighttime and everyone was asleep, Katherine walked, soft-footed, into her room, where her sister’s handbag was hanging from the closet door. She slipped the wallet out without a sound. Safely in the office, she left the cash where it was and used her sister’s credit card to subscribe to the newspaper.
Despite its horror movie title, the article was disappointing. It confirmed what Carmen had said, that Blake killed his girlfriend in the woods with a knife. “There’s no happy ending here,” one of the prosecutors said. “In this case, the guilt Mr. Campbell will live with for the rest of his life is more than enough punishment.” Blake’s lawyer was quoted, too, calling the murder “a tragedy.” The article said that Blake had sobbed in court and apologized to his dead girlfriend’s family. Katherine wondered how they reacted to that, how they felt. It was, of course, impossible to imagine. They must have been furious to see him go free. Unless they believed that he really didn’t mean to do it, that it was a tragedy and not a crime. Which was easier to live with?
As she lay in her blow-up bed, Katherine thought of Blake. She missed him. She wanted to tell him all the boring details of her life, and for him to say strange things about them. It was shocking how much she missed him. It reminded her of the summer camp she’d hated as a child, of how homesick she was. She felt as awful and as lonely as she had back then, sitting on the top bunk, writing letters to her parents, begging for them to come and take her home.
She remembered a magazine article she’d read, about the women who wrote letters to Charles Manson in prison, who proposed marriage. Women so sad, it was disgusting. But Blake wasn’t like Manson. He’d only killed one person, and it wasn’t even on purpose, not really. It occurred to her that maybe the difference between a killer and a murderer is whether you’re allowed to forgive them.
This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have with herself. She just wanted to see Blake’s eyes, and if she couldn’t do that, to tell him that she was having dreams again, silvery things that meant nothing but were a relief anyhow, a sign that her brain would belong to her again soon.
Katherine took her mother’s cell phone from its charger in the kitchen and slipped into the backyard. She found Paradise Lake’s number saved in the contacts. A voice she didn’t recognize answered.
“Hello, this is Paradise Lake, a place to heal. How may I direct your call?”
“Uh, hi. It’s me, Katherine. I want to speak to Blake, if he’s still awake?”
“I’m sorry,” said the voice. “I can’t confirm or deny that he’s here. But I can take a message.”
“No, it’s OK,” she said, stupidly. “I’m a former resident. He’s my friend.”
“I can’t confirm or deny that he’s here,” the voice said, again. “But I can take a message.”
“Why would you take a message for someone who isn’t even there?” Katherine asked, irritably.
“That’s our policy, miss. I’m sorry.” The voice didn’t sound apologetic at all. Katherine sighed loudly.
“OK. Uh, tell him Katherine called. And happy Thanksgiving.”
“Would you like to leave your number?”
“Um, sure.”
Katherine hung up the phone, exhausted. No wonder none of her friends had ever called her. All that stupidity probably scared them off.
“The moment you say, this pain is unendurable, you are already enduring,” Arthur had said. But this wasn’t pain. It was something silkier and stranger than that. She sat down on the grass and wrapped her arms around her knees, making herself very small.
Juliet
I met Celeste Hamilton while we were covering the trial of John Logan, the Kingston Killer. She was reporting on the trial for a well-regarded magazine based in New York City. I was covering it for a small local newspaper. I envied Celeste’s job, if not her commute. I had read some of her articles before and recognized her from her author picture: elegant cheekbones, a white-blonde bob. I thought it was admirable that she was pretty enough for television but worked in print anyway.
Celeste was the one who nicknamed Logan the Kingston Killer, even though he technically lived in Barrytown. The alliteration didn’t do what it was supposed to, which was catch the public’s imagination. No one seemed to care that much about John Logan, because no one cared that much about the women he killed.
As far as serial killers go, Logan was boring. No genius-level IQ, no cryptic messages to the police, no delusions of grandeur. He simply killed six women and buried them in the backyard of his house. In his mug shot, his eyes were as pale as a blind man’s, his face waxy and drawn.
“It’s too bad he never ate anyone’s hands, or anything,” Celeste said to me, the first time we spoke. “That could have made your career.”
I laughed in shock because, of course, she was right. At first, I hoped that she would be a kind of mentor, but as time went on, we were both too exhausted for that. “I just don’t have the stomach for this kind of thing anymore,” she confessed to me, less than a week into the trial. “This fucked-up shit. Maybe it’s because I had kids. They made me soft.”
I did not have the excuse of motherhood. I worried that I was just weak.
That winter, I was also working on an article about a Crawford College student named Sara Morgan, who had been murdered by her boyfriend a month after Logan was arrested. Her body was found by a local housewife in the woods that surrounded Crawford College—only twelve miles from Kingston. Sara’s boyfriend, a diagnosed schizophrenic who had recently graduated from Crawford, had confessed almost i
mmediately.
I told Celeste about this while she stirred her milkshake with a long metal spoon.
“It’s creepy,” she said. “But there’s not a connection, is there?”
“Not literally,” I admitted. “But I think, maybe, in a larger sense—”
Celeste cut me off. “I know the article you’re thinking of writing, and they are almost never any good.” She paused. “Maybe yours will be.”
It wasn’t the kind of encouragement I was hoping for, but it was unfair to expect much enthusiasm from Celeste about anything at that point. Neither one of us was sleeping well. A few times a week, I got stomachaches so painful that I couldn’t sit up straight.
But I kept researching Sara Morgan’s case, long after I had to, for reasons I couldn’t fully articulate to myself. I felt bad about it, like it meant I didn’t care enough about Logan’s victims. Maybe I was bored with them. Celeste was right. There was no real connection.
Even if Logan hadn’t been in jail when Sara died, he still wouldn’t have been a suspect. He strangled his victims. Sara Morgan’s throat was cut so deeply, according to the coroner, that her vertebrae were exposed.
My articles were usually human interest, cutesy things: local firehouse dog honored, controversy over parking kiosk, high school auditorium dedicated to late teacher.
Bad things happened here, like they happened everywhere—local man dead of a drug overdose, local woman indicted for vehicular manslaughter—but they were not my department. Our regular crime reporter was on maternity leave, so the Logan trial became my responsibility.
My newspaper had written about Sara Morgan three times. The first headline was SEARCH INTENSIFIES FOR CRAWFORD STUDENT. We covered her again when her body was found and her boyfriend charged with murder, and a third time when he was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. There was no need, according to my editor, for an update. The case was as closed as a case could be.
That didn’t deter me from driving to the Crawford campus to see if anyone would talk to me. This was during the third month of Logan’s trial.
The students at Crawford were mostly dressed in dark wool coats and leather shoes. There were none of the crazy dyed hair and arms full of bracelets that I remembered from my own college days.
I found a girl drinking coffee by herself inside the campus center. Her dark lipstick had stained the edge of the paper cup. She told me her name was Odile. I introduced myself as a reporter, and her eyebrows shot up. When I named the paper, she looked a little disappointed.
“I’m writing an article about Sara Morgan,” I lied. “Did you know her?”
“Oh, no. I mean, it’s a small school, so everyone kind of knows everyone. But we weren’t, like, friends.”
“What about her boyfriend?”
“No. I’ve seen him around. He’s really handsome.” She shook her head apologetically. “That’s weird to say. Sorry. I’ve never spoken to him.”
“OK.” I made my voice gentle. “Can you tell me how you heard about the murder?”
She flinched at the word. Beneath her heavy makeup, she looked extremely young. I wondered if she’d skipped a grade or two at some point.
“They had an assembly. The president made an announcement. It was terrible. People were screaming and crying. I was crying, too, and I didn’t even know her. It’s just awful.”
“People were upset?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’m just curious about the atmosphere on campus. How people have reacted. What they’re saying.” All these college kids, most of them from respected, white, upper-middle-class families. This was probably the closest to violence they had ever been.
“It’s … weird. I don’t know. People are sad, but it’s not like we’re the most cheerful bunch of people to begin with, you know? I think we’re starting to get back to normal.”
Sara Morgan had died only three months earlier. To a bunch of eighteen-year-olds, I supposed, that might as well be an eternity. I thanked the girl for her time and left her my card.
I told Celeste about my trip, hoping she would admire my determination. She didn’t.
“It sounds like a depressing waste of time,” she said. “Don’t you have enough death to deal with?”
“I could ask you the same thing. You’ve been covering this shit for years.” I almost said decades, but I didn’t want her to think that I thought she was old.
She shook her head. “I’ve built up my immunity. You have to do it slowly. Otherwise you’ll have a nervous breakdown. You might have one anyway.”
What did she mean, her immunity? Hadn’t she just told me how having kids had weakened her? I was beginning to suspect that Celeste’s advice, though given with absolute confidence, was at least partly bullshit. I slurped my milkshake, feeling despondent.
“The NGRI is interesting,” Celeste admitted. “Those are rare. Even for rich kids.”
“I know,” I said.
“He must have had a good lawyer. Someone expensive. That could be your angle.”
“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t really give a shit about the boyfriend. Sara was the one I wanted to write about.
“Look at this,” Celeste said, gesturing around the diner, which was empty except for us and an old woman delicately eating a salad. “Six dead women. It should be a media circus. But no one gives a shit.” We were now three months into the trial, and the only reporters who still showed up every day. Sometimes Celeste slept on my couch when she was too tired to drive back to the city.
“Maybe Sara Morgan would make them give a shit,” I said.
She shook her head, a little annoyed. “Do you know how many college girls get killed by their shitty boyfriends?”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s a rhetorical question,” she admitted, slurping. “I don’t have the exact statistics. But, a lot.”
I considered asking about her daughter. I knew that she had one, though she rarely spoke about her. Given what Celeste saw every day, how did she resist the temptation to lock her daughter in a tower? I wanted to lock myself in a tower most of the time. Maybe being a parent required a kind of willful stupidity, a belief that your child would neither be the person to whom something terrible happened nor be the person who did the terrible thing. I wished I could ask her, but in the context of what we were discussing, the topic felt obscene.
I moved to upstate New York after graduate school because my boyfriend, Sean, had inherited a house from his mother. I could never get used to that part of the world, how unrelentingly grim it was, with its empty houses, its disused gas stations and naked trees lining the highway. Winter was actually a relief, the snow covering everything like a thick, soft blanket.
According to Sean, it was not always like that. A lot of people moved up to Poughkeepsie to work at IBM in the early 1980s, including his father. It was, briefly, a nice place to live. In 1993 the company cut over three thousand jobs, and the area has been suffering ever since.
When we first moved here, Sean took me to a restaurant in downtown Saugerties. As we were ordering appetizers, a woman came up and started licking the window, her whole tongue, dotted with sores, pressed flat against the glass.
At home, I hung up my coat and sat down at my desk with a glass of whiskey. Next to my computer was a bright purple sticky note with the names and ages of all of Logan’s victims.
Jasmine Ware, 32
Paulina Gonzales, 31
Meadow Simpson, 24
Mary Knapp, 27
Amber Lawson, 33
Vanessa Freeman, 19
Sara Morgan was twenty-one years old. I wished that I had chosen a different color. The purple struck me now as garish, maybe even disrespectful.
I decided to call my mother. She lived in the city. I spoke to her two or three times a week on the telephone, and visited at least once a month.
“Hi, Mom. Everything OK?”
My mother was a psychiatrist. Her office, on
the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was decorated with white orchids in terra-cotta bowls, and blue douppioni curtains. Framed above her desk was a drawing I made when I was five or six, of a golden retriever wearing a crown. I wasn’t sure how I came up with that. We never had a dog. My dad was allergic.
“Yes. How are you?”
“I’m good. I’m a little worn-out. This trial …” I didn’t really want to talk to her about it.
“Oh, I’m sure. Is it almost done?”
“Hard to know.”
“Those poor girls,” she said, and I knew that she was saying that because she didn’t know anything about them yet. Not that my mother would say that they deserved to die for being poor or trashy or unlucky, but she, like many, would prefer to save her grief for the Sara Morgans of the world. It is snobbishness, and a particularly cruel variety of it, but it’s something else as well. At a certain point, you realize the world is so bad, that it’s easier to pretend that people deserve the terrible things that befall them. That way, at least, you can pretend that you are safe.
“Are you proud of it?” she asked me.
“What?”
“Of what you’re writing, Juliet. Do you think it’s good work?”
If I were a teacher, I would give myself a B. If I was generous.
“Yes.”
“And it’s not—you know. Those awful trashy pieces that they always write about these sorts of things.”
People write awful trash because other people read it, is what I wanted to say. She was right that sometimes stories about violence were gratuitous and exploitative. But sometimes they were just true.
“No. Just the facts. Nothing lurid.”
“Good, good. You know, I was thinking, maybe you should come to the city for your birthday. We can do something nice. Go for dinner.”
My thirty-third birthday. Thirty-three, with no husband, no children, and a career not nearly glittering enough to justify those absences.
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