I found a parking place right in front of Haskie’s General Store. Next to the store was the old brick New Canaan depot from the days when the L&S Railroad carted timber and passengers between Wells River and Barre. The old station was now an antique shop that had a neatly hand-lettered sign on the door that said CLOSED FOR THE SEASON—SEE YOU IN THE SPRING! It had been owned, since I was a little girl, by the Miller family. They made their money on the summer people and the leaf peepers who came up each fall.
I undid my mother’s seatbelt and walked with her into the store, which also served as the New Canaan post office. Jim Haskaway, the bearish man who owned the store, was town postmaster and chief of the volunteer fire department. It was an old-time general store with a few aisles of groceries, a case of guns and ammo, a good selection of hardware and camping supplies, and, of course, the obligatory displays of maple syrup and I LOVERMONT keychains. The wide-planked pine floor creaked, a coal stove burned in the corner, and Jim’s fire and police scanner sounded out chimes, with staticky voices reporting the latest disasters.
“Why are we here?” my mother asked. She looked around suspiciously.
“To get eggs, Ma, remember?”
“The Griswolds have eggs. Lazy Elk says they’re no good because they’ve got a speck of blood in them—oh, look! It’s Jim Haskaway!” She said this in the tone of delight and surprise she’d use if we’d run into him by chance at the San Diego Zoo, not in the store down the road from her home, the store he’d owned and operated for a good thirty years.
“Morning, Jean! How are we doing today? And Miss Kate, back in town, huh? Grown up to be just as pretty as her mom.” Jim gave us a wink. He stood resting his elbows on the counter. There were two other men talking with him in low voices. All of them wore plaid. They continued their conversation as I guided my mother to the cooler.
“Said the body was the same as that other girl. Same cuts. Naked,” one of the men reported.
“They’ve had dogs in those woods all morning,” another said. “Brought in the forensics van. I heard the F.B.I. is up there now.”
“The troopers picked up Nicky first thing this morning,” Jim said.
“Won’t keep him long,” replied the shorter, fat man. “He was drinking at Flo’s ’til closing. Made some trouble with a guy from outta state who come up to huntin’ camp. Yeah, you bet everyone at Flo’s will remember Nicky being there. It wasn’t him who hurt that girl.”
I grabbed a dozen eggs from the cooler, then fixed myself a large coffee, trying not to be too obvious about eavesdropping. So Nicky was still in town, picking fights at Flo’s. Old outlaw Billy the Kid. I had to smile.
My mother followed me around docilely, humming quietly. At the counter, I picked up the morning paper and saw the headline: “Murder in New Canaan.” There was a school photo of a pretty girl with shoulder-length blond hair, a smattering of freckles, and a slight gap between her two front teeth. Jim nodded at the front page as he rang me up.
“Happened right in those same woods. Right behind your mother’s little shack. Kids say it’s a haunted place up there. I say it’s a hell of a place to go fooling around in. Now this. Poor kid. Just thirteen. She wasn’t gone from the others fifteen minutes. They didn’t hear a peep. You all didn’t hear anything strange last night, did you?” The other two men studied me, waiting to gauge my response. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in plaid.
I shook my head, feeling inexplicably like I was about to lie. I thought of my mother’s dirty nightgown and socks, wondering when she’d gone out, where she might have wandered to, what she might have seen. Surely nothing. She’d probably just strolled around in the yard. Ghost of New Hope Past.
“Not a thing. We didn’t hear a thing. We just noticed the police cars on our way here. There’s a news truck there now, too. Channel Three.”
“Opal must be a mess,” Jim went on.
“Opal? Raven’s daughter?” I said.
Jim gave me a look of pity—which Opal did I think he was referring to?
“Lord, Kate, she was there in the woods. It was her best friend who got killed.”
“Jesus,” I said, shivering.
“Damn terrible thing,” said Jim. “They’re saying she was killed the same way as that Griswold girl all those years ago. You remember that whole mess, I’m sure. You went to school with her, didn’t you?”
I nodded, felt the old sting of accusation. “We were in the same grade, but we weren’t really friends. I hardly knew her.” The old lie came easily, despite how many years it had been since I’d had to tell it.
“Yeah,” Jim continued, nodding, “what a mess that was. I remember how quick they were to point the finger at poor Nicky Griswold. But then they arrested one of the guys from up at New Hope, didn’t they? What was his name…I can’t think of it now. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. They had the wrong guy. Never did get the right one. Never did. Well, let’s see, that’ll be three eighty-nine,” Jim said, looking down at the cash register, turning back to business.
I found my mother studying the rack of magazines. She had a copy of Deer Hunter in her hands and was staring at the dead doe on the cover. A man in blaze orange was propping the gutted animal up like a tired dance partner about to do the last waltz.
“Come on, Ma. Let’s go home and make pancakes.”
“What’s happened to that girl?” my mother asked, and I realized she must have been listening.
“Nothing,” I lied. It’s just that we’ve been dropped into my own funny little idea of hell, but hey, what of it? We’ve got strawberry pancakes to make. My favorite. You remember.
My mother dropped the magazine back into the rack upside down and walked up to the group of men talking at the counter.
“What’s happened to that girl?” she demanded.
“Murdered,” the fat one said before Jim could get a chance to stop him.
“Poor thing,” my mother said and all three men nodded.
I took her arm and led her from the store.
I kept thinking about Opal, wondering how much of it she might have seen. I knew all too well how it felt to have your best friend brutally murdered. It was something you never got over.
“You knew her, didn’t you?” she asked as we were going out the door.
“Who?”
“The dead girl. You used to wait for the bus with her. All those mornings. Wasn’t she your friend?”
“No, Ma. Just a girl I knew. And that was a long time ago.”
“Poor thing.”
5
Early May, 1971
DEL AND I HAD BEEN ARGUING for days about whether or not I really lived in a tepee. In the end, I gave in and agreed to take her up the hill so she could see for herself.
“Now you’re not just a hippie but an Indian, is that it?” Del had asked during our argument.
“I’m not an Indian.”
“Your Ma an Indian?”
“Nope.”
“Your daddy?”
“I don’t have a daddy. We live with Mark in the tepee. Mark’s not an Indian, but he has an Indian name. Lazy Elk.”
“That’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard. Hippies don’t make no sense at all.”
It had crossed my mind over the previous weeks that I should invite Del home in some legitimate way—my mom would have been thrilled for me to bring someone home, even creepy, scrawny Del Griswold. My mother often asked how things were going at school, if I was making friends.
“Sure,” I lied. “Lots of friends.”
“What are their names?”
“Well,” I said, chewing my lip for inspiration, “my two best friends are these girls Ellie and Sam.”
“What about that girl down the hill? The little Griswold girl?”
“Oh, we’re not friends.”
“Why not?”
“She’s kinda creepy. The kids all call her the Potato Girl.”
My mother made a tsk-tsk sound and shook her head.
“I hope
you don’t call her that.”
“No. Never.”
My mother smiled and ruffled my hair. I was her good girl, friends with the popular, bright-faced kids, knowing better than to make fun of outsiders.
Still, I wondered what it might be like to bring Del to New Hope. I tried to imagine her sitting down to communal dinner in the big barn, tried to picture how she might look as Gabriel served her a wooden bowl full of lentil soup. She would make faces, kick me under the table, think she’d gone to sleep then woke up on Mars.
But Del was my secret as much as I was hers and I never did invite her home. Instead, we agreed to view the tepee from a distance, to spy on my own home like a couple of Peeping Toms.
WE HAD BEEN WALKING through the woods for ten minutes when we passed the turnoff for the old cabin. I wondered if Nicky was there, smoking and looking at magazines, and I hoped we’d run into him on our way back to the Griswold place.
That’s when Del said, “I know someone who’s got a crush on you.”
I had this eerie feeling she’d read my mind—but maybe she’d just caught me glancing down the tangled trail.
My face flushed.
“Who?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
“Kate and Nicky, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” she sang. “He’s got it real bad for you. Ain’t you the lucky one? But before you count your lucky stars, you should know a thing or two about my big brother. See, he’s got his share of secrets. A few of ’em, bad. B-A-D spells bad.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe I’ll tell and maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll let you find out on your own. I’m just saying things ain’t always what they seem.” She fiddled with her sheriff’s badge. She wore a stained pink T-shirt with the same corduroy pants she’d had on for days. Her hair was wet from a shower she’d taken just before I met her. She smelled like moist earth dusted with baby powder.
“Who says I want to know anyway? Who says I’m even interested in your big, ape-y brother?”
“You sure seem interested when you’re with him, Desert Rose. You two are acting like little love birds already. It’s enough to make a person wanna puke.”
It was true that I thought about Nicky a lot, felt a strange, live-wire sort of excitement when I was near him. But the idea that this was visible to Del embarrassed me.
“Is Desert Rose really the color you painted your room?” I asked, eager to change the subject.
“Nah. Daddy said I can’t.” She paused for a beat, looked at the ground, frowned like she’d just remembered something. Then she was back. “I’ve got the paint sample from Thurston’s Hardware, though! I’ll show it to you sometime. It’s real pretty. I named you after a real pretty color.”
“I’d like to see your room sometime.” I had tried often to imagine what it might look like. If she really did have all the wonderful things she bragged about—the four-poster bed, a collection of more than one hundred plastic horses, the tails from those baby pigs in a canning jar full of rubbing alcohol.
“Can’t. Daddy says we can’t have friends over. Stevie and Joe can have their girlfriends sometimes, that’s okay with Daddy, but they’re almost grown up anyway. Daddy says family should be enough.”
As strange as things were at my house—if you could call a circle of canvas draped over poles a house—things seemed stranger still at Del’s. I lived in a world of almost no rules—Gabriel believed kids would do a good job raising themselves if they weren’t confined by adults and their hang-ups. Del, I knew, got slapped around when she didn’t clean her plate at dinner.
As we walked, I told Del about my life at the top of the hill—camping out in the tepee, eating dinner in the big barn with the other New Hope members. I told her how Lazy Elk would turn on the little battery-operated radio in the tepee at night and pull my mother up to dance. Sometimes they’d get me to join them, too, all of us doing these crazy moves—pretending to be robots, snakes, birds. We’d swoop circles around the tepee, cawing like a family of ravens.
Lazy Elk was trying hard to be a dad, but I couldn’t take him seriously. He told me stories every night about Trickster Coyote and began calling me Katydid. Sometimes I helped him make his jewelry, piecing together necklaces from twigs, stones, and bits of glass and wire. I’d go with him on collecting missions where we’d come back with our pockets full of pretty stones, pop tops from beer cans, and old shotgun shells.
“Stuuupid!” exclaimed Del when I told her this. “Who the hell wants to wear jewelry made from junk?”
I told her about the feather in his hat. How he called it a talisman.
“And I thought my daddy was crazy,” she said.
“He isn’t my daddy. He’s just Mark. He’s okay. Just kinda goofy.”
The truth was, Lazy Elk was the closest thing to a father I’d ever had. I never knew my own dad, and none of my mother’s other boyfriends had stuck around very long. All my life, I’d secretly hoped for someone to come along and fill that daddy void, and if that someone happened to wear a floppy hat, make jewelry out of junk, and dance like a bird, so be it.
“What is it he calls himself? Droopy Moose?”
I started to laugh. “Lazy Elk,” I said. “Come on now, we have to be quiet, we’re getting close.”
I could see the top of the tepee through the trees up ahead where the path ended and smell the smoke from the outdoor mud oven beside the big barn. I heard voices and struggled to make out who they belonged to as Del and I crept closer.
I knew the other residents of New Hope pretty well by that time and liked them all despite their various oddities. Gabriel was a smart man with a lot of patience. He was the one to go to for help with complicated homework or any sort of moral dilemma. His wife, Mimi, was a good ten years younger than he but her love for him was clear. It seemed to border on worship. He was her life and whatever visions he had for New Hope became hers by default.
Bryan and Lizzy were the only others who’d been there since the beginning. They were in their forties and made pottery, which they sold at craft fairs. They lived in a little shack next to the goat barn. The goats had been Lizzy’s idea. She thought New Hope could make some money selling their milk, making cheese, maybe even goat’s milk soap. Then, after the goats arrived, she discovered their milk dries up unless they keep getting pregnant—and the offspring are somehow disposed of. That seemed cruel to Lizzy, so the goats served little purpose except for the excitement they caused each time they found their way through the fence and into the garden or through some open doorway. Once, they’d eaten a hole through our tepee’s canvas.
Shawn and Doe were a young couple who lived in a log hogan behind the greenhouse. Shawn was the resident mechanic and tinkerer. He kept the cars and tractor running. If something was broken, he was the guy who could fix it. Doe spent most of her time with Raven, a fussy baby who didn’t like to be ignored.
Zack had been a freshman at Dartmouth when he read an article Gabriel had written for a socialist newspaper on the nature of community. Zack had hitchhiked to meet Gabriel and spend a weekend at New Hope—and just never left. When he wasn’t reading battered paperback copies of Siddhartha and The Communist Manifesto, he was playing Bob Dylan songs on his beat-up six string. Zack was enamored of Gabriel and would spend hours in quiet but animated discussions with him about what a truly democratic society would look like.
AS THE TREES THINNED OUT to scrubby pine saplings and the ground leveled off, I recognized the voices of Doe and Mimi coming from the clearing. Del and I hid behind a huge boulder beside the entrance to the path. The tepee was just to our left, so close we could smell the damp canvas. To our right was the big barn. Between the two structures was the dome-shaped mud oven where we baked all our bread. Beyond the smoking, clay-covered mound, we could make out one end of the vegetable garden and the stuffed scarecrow my mother and I had made.
Doe and Mimi were standing at the long wooden table in front of the oven, kneading bread dough with their backs to us. Both
women had long hair down past their shoulder blades—Doe’s was black and curly, Mimi’s was chestnut brown and straight. Raven was snoozing on a blanket in the shade under the work table.
“Told you I lived in a tepee,” I whispered. Del only nodded in response, her eyes wide, taking everything in. We strained to hear Doe and Mimi.
“I’m just saying it isn’t right the way he treats you,” said Mimi. “Refusing to even acknowledge the baby is his. I mean, who does he think he’s kidding?”
Weird. Were they talking about Shawn? He doted on Raven—and Doe, for that matter.
“He knows,” Doe said back. “Of course he knows. I think the problem is that he doesn’t want other people to know and that’s cool with me. I mean, Raven’s mine. She’s still gonna be mine whoever I say the father is.” She crouched down and stroked the baby’s forehead.
“Well, I think it’s disrespectful,” Mimi continued. “It’s like he’s lying, that’s all. Lying to everyone here—to her most of all. I think it’s lousy. I think he can be so goddamn lousy. Gabriel thinks so, too.”
“Is it really Gabriel’s place to pass judgment? I mean, let he who is without sin cast the first stone and all that.” Doe stood up from Raven and grabbed a tray of bread, which she carried over to the oven and pushed in using the large wooden paddle that hung beside the oven door. She stretched, reaching her arms up to the sky and leaning left, then right. Then she turned around to face Mimi, and Del and me, too.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Doe said. “I didn’t mean to insult Gabriel. That was kind of low. He’s not the one I’m angry with.”
“So you admit you’re angry with him?” Mimi asked.
“No. Not really. Sometimes it’s just hard. To keep a secret like that.”
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