How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  When she told them her latest story, Kimberly Crepeaux was sitting at Liz’s kitchen table with a cup of coffee that she didn’t drink, just pressed between her hands. She was also wearing Liz’s jeans, which flapped around her feet like she was a child trying on her mother’s clothes, and a sweater that was a closer fit, too long but snug enough.

  Vehicles had followed her since the day she got out of jail, she said. Different types, sometimes a car, sometimes a truck, sometimes a van. But they were always there. She’d been free for six days before the first window was shot out at her grandmother’s house—her mémère, as Kimberly called her, the French-Canadian word for “grandmother”—and then someone started coming by in the night, shining flashlights in the windows, and that scared her grandmother and made Kimberly’s daughter cry, and she knew she had to leave.

  “They hadn’t done anything wrong,” she said. “Ava, she’s just a little baby girl. And Mémère, she’s only wanted me to be better than what I am, my whole life. They didn’t deserve this. I mean, Mathias is keeping me from getting a job even!”

  Barrett and Liz exchanged a look—this was the Kimberly everyone knew, the sob story, the excuses, the tall tales.

  Kimberly shook a cigarette out from a saturated pack and reached for her lighter.

  “Please don’t smoke in my home,” Liz said.

  Kimberly sighed and tossed the damp cigarette down.

  “How has he kept you from getting a job?” Barrett asked, trying to keep this thing moving.

  She told them how she’d applied for jobs up and down the coast, always with employers who had a history of working cooperatively with the parole office. Some showed interest, but by the next day the job was gone. For all of this, she blamed the outsize—or outlandish—influence of Mathias Burke. People in town didn’t understand Mathias like people in jail did, Kimberly explained. Everybody on the outside liked him, respected him, or didn’t know him. People on the inside, though? “He scares them shitless,” she said. “Men who aren’t scared of anybody, they’re real careful using his name. He’s never been arrested, never been inside once, but he scares people.”

  This was pre-confession Kimberly, the prolific source of rumors that couldn’t be verified, and Barrett knew that Liz’s fuse was burning down fast.

  “Tell me something new, Kimberly,” he said. “I can’t go to bat for you with the same old shit.”

  She did that jutting-chin gesture of the only child that she resorted to so often and said, “Jeff Girard sold drugs. He didn’t just use them. He and his cousin sold them.”

  “Okay. What does that have to do with the murders?”

  Kimberly shrugged.

  “Something new,” he said, trying to keep the fatigue out of his voice, “that has a connection to the murders.”

  “Um…well, that’s harder. Oh, hang on—you know those parties Ian Kelly would throw? Down at the private beach by his house?”

  Barrett nodded. Ian enjoyed hosting, particularly for the locals, liked presenting himself as a man of the people as opposed to the privileged outsider.

  “The bonfires?”

  “Yes! Exactly. Well, there were drugs at those bonfires. That girl who drowned earlier in the summer, Molly Quickery? I heard she might not have drowned at all. That she was dead before she went into the water because she’d OD’d at one of those parties. Which would not have surprised me. Molly Quickery was a wicked mess. I mean, she made Cass Odom look, like, classy. Guys liked her because of her boobs, but she was a slut. Molly Quicker-Lay, that’s what the guys used to call her. I heard so many stories about her, you wouldn’t even believe it. I heard one story about her giving a blow—”

  “It was in the paper.” Liz’s voice was tight with anger.

  Kimberly cocked an eyebrow. “The story about her blowing two guys at the same party was in the paper?”

  Liz put her hands to her temples. “No. The story about the cause of her death was in the paper. She was dead before she went into the water, and I know that because I wrote that, and therefore anyone who can read might know it too. So let’s stop pretending like that is some sort of an insider tip.”

  Liz was close to losing her temper, and Barrett felt the same way. They were watching Kimberly spin her tires now, hunting for traction, but she didn’t have anything new.

  “What does any of this have to do with Ian?” he asked.

  “Well, they were his parties. He might’ve been selling the drugs.”

  This was unlikely—Ian Kelly had no arrest history and no need for money, so the risks and rewards of drug dealing were a very poor fit for him.

  “You told me that Ian died because he was a witness to a hit-and-run,” Barrett said. “That’s the whole story, which you now insist is the truth again.”

  “Right. It is the truth.”

  “Then why do we care if he did drugs or sold drugs? What does that have to do with you three taking his body down to the pond and stabbing him after an accident?”

  “I’m not saying one has anything to do with the other, but, it’s, like, proof that I’m still trying, right? I’m the only one trying to keep people interested in the truth, Barrett.”

  He wanted to slap her. All of the pity he’d felt watching her in the water was gone again; she was just the same old Kimberly, taking him along for the ride.

  “Girard left evidence,” he said. “Nobody else did. That’s a problem, Kimberly.”

  She shrugged.

  “Why did you even tell me the story?” Barrett asked. “You’d been lying to me for weeks. Why did you decide to tell the truth?”

  She stared at the table. “The card,” she said. “That stupid old card. I don’t know why she kept that. I didn’t even…I mean, it wasn’t even a very nice card. I just wanted her to know that she’d been lucky, right? She’d had a good mom for a while, which was more than I had. And she still had a good dad. She was lucky.”

  Her voice had gone faint, and she lifted her hand as if to wipe away a tear but scratched the side of her face instead. “I just remember the way Howard looked at her,” she said softly. “The way he held her hand so tightly that day when she came back to school, and the way he looked at her when he finally let her go…you could just tell how scared of her he was. Because he loved her so much. And we took her from him. Everything he was afraid of back then, we made true.”

  She looked up again, eyes bright. “I’m sorry I waited, but now I’m trying, at least. Everyone says, Prove it, prove it, prove it. But I don’t know how to do that! All I know is that I was there when Mathias hit Jackie, I was there when he cracked Ian’s skull with that pipe, and then their bodies were in my own hands in the water!” Her voice was rising, high and shrill now. “I can tell you that I picked up a knife and stabbed him through that plastic and he was still trying to breathe and he was looking right at me, I can tell you that, but you don’t want to listen! Because I’m a liar, I’m Kimmy Crepeaux and all I do is take drugs and lie! That’s what you people want to believe! But I held their bodies in my own hands and I carried them into that pond and it is the truth! So you fucking prove it!”

  She emphasized each word of the last sentence by smacking Liz’s glass-topped table with her palm.

  For a moment, nobody said anything. Then Liz gathered herself and said, “You were arrested trying to buy heroin last week. If you want to improve your credibility, that’s not the best way to go about it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Liz took that with only a slight widening of the eyes. “In my house and wearing my clothes, no less,” she said. “Charming.”

  “And staring at me like I’m nothing more than shit on your shoe the whole time. Did I try to buy drugs? Absolutely. You want to know why? Because I’m scared.” She reached for the damp cigarette and twisted it in her fingers. “And because I know what I saw! What I did. I know what I did.” The cigarette broke and spilled wet tobacco onto the tabletop. “He was breathing,” she said, her voice desperate and implor
ing. “He was breathing, and his eyes were open. He was looking at me.”

  She swept the broken cigarette aside and stared at Liz. “Think about that, and then tell me you wouldn’t want to take something that could make that memory go away.”

  She was mesmerizing. If she was a liar, Barrett thought, she really was the best.

  “What about the truck?” Kimberly said. “That helps me, right? I was right about the truck, except for the paint. Don’t you think that’s strange? That I had the right truck, if I was making it all up?”

  “Except for the paint is a big problem,” Barrett said, although she was hitting a nerve here, the memory of the body shop, when he’d opened the door of the old Dakota and looked at the bench seat and thought that she’d described it just right. “I’ve talked to people about this, Kimberly—nobody repainted that hood. It was old and rusted and gray. It was not what you claim to have seen.”

  She blinked and her eyes suddenly filled with tears that didn’t spill.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I was scared when you didn’t find the bodies, but then I thought, well, Mathias moved them, that’s all. But the truck paint was…” She swallowed. “The paint makes me think I’m crazy. I’m telling you all these things, and I know they happened, right? I was there. I saw them. I did them. But the police brought me pictures of the truck, and they explained all of this scientific bullshit about how the rust that was there couldn’t have been painted over or whatever. I didn’t know what to tell them. The hood was real bright white, too bright, and there was a black cat on it with red eyes. Who makes something like that up? But then they tell me it’s not possible, and they had pictures and paint samples and rust samples and…”

  She ran out of breath. Reached for the broken cigarette and then stilled her hand.

  “Maybe they’re right,” she said. “But if they are? Then I’m crazy, not a liar. Because I know what happened that night.” She looked up and stared first at Liz, then at Barrett. “I know who I killed.”

  26

  She drank two beers and then fell asleep on Liz’s couch. They stood above her until they were sure she was asleep, like parents watching a child, and only then did they move to the kitchen.

  “She can’t stay here,” Liz said.

  “I know that. I’ll put her up in a hotel or something.”

  “What are you doing, begging to be fired?”

  “I don’t know what else to do with her. She won’t go home, and she won’t go back to…”

  Liz arched her eyebrows. “Won’t go back to where?”

  He blew out a long breath, glanced at the room where Kimberly was sleeping on the couch, and said, “She was staying on Little Spruce. In Howard’s cottage.”

  “Kimmy Crepeaux is staying where Jackie Pelletier lived?”

  “Shh!” He held up his hands against her rising voice, and she lifted her own in response against her rising temper, then she turned from him, pressed her fingers to her temples, and shook her head slowly.

  “The studio is locked,” he told her.

  “What difference does that make!”

  “It makes one to Howard, I can assure you of that.”

  He told her about the phone calls then, and his trip to see Howard in the middle of the night.

  “Howard believes her?” she asked, staring at the diminutive form of Kimberly Crepeaux curled up on her couch. Kimberly was snoring softly.

  “Yes,” Barrett said. “Howard believes her. And now you’ve heard her out in person. So tell me: What do you think?”

  Liz leaned on the kitchen island, looked at him, and then away. “I don’t want to tell you what I think.”

  If he hadn’t known her so well for so long, he might have misinterpreted this gesture, this statement. But he was remembering the way she’d responded when he’d told her about the lies his grandfather had offered. She had looked away from him that day because she hadn’t wanted to disagree with him. She was looking away from him today because she didn’t want to agree with him. In both circumstances, she saw risk for him on the horizon. There was no reason for him to have such certainty except for the familiarity of people who had long understood each other in the darkness.

  “Liz?” he said. “I need to know.”

  She turned to face him, her hair sweeping across her cheek.

  “I understand now why you believed her.”

  “But you still don’t?”

  She bowed her head. He could see the top of the tattooed script that traced just below her collarbone. “Two hours ago, I’d have said no chance. When I got the first call saying you’d been seen with her down in Port Hope, I was devastated that you’d come back to listen to that, to her. But…”

  She crossed the kitchen and stepped into the small sunroom that served as her dining room. She sat down and stared at the pines, looking exhausted.

  “I certainly believe this much of what she said—the truck is the biggest problem. It’s one thing to say that her whole story rests on bodies in a pond that turned out not to be in that pond. It’s one thing to say that they were shot, not stabbed. We can believe that happened later, right? We can believe Girard helped Mathias move the bodies, maybe. But the truck is harder. You put out that bulletin for a white truck with a black cat painted on it, but the truck you found at Girard’s with their blood in it was completely different.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That is a problem.”

  “There are plenty of people around here who still think she told part of the truth, actually,” Liz said.

  “What part?”

  “That she was an accomplice to murder, and that she was in the Dodge Dakota when it happened. The rest of it—who was with her, how Jackie and Ian were killed, and what was done to them—is still up for debate.”

  He nodded. He’d had plenty of time to think of those options himself. To wonder whether he had gotten to the right woman but extracted the wrong story from her.

  “She believes what she’s saying,” Liz said. “I never saw that before, I only heard it from you. But she believes her story.”

  “Yes, she does.” He leaned against the kitchen island and they studied each other in the fading light. “So I’m back where I started.”

  “Prove her story?”

  “Right.” He glanced at the couch. “And figure out what to do with her.”

  “One night,” Liz said. “She can stay for one night.”

  “You don’t have to do that. I haven’t asked you for that, and I won’t.”

  “If you’d asked, I would have said no,” she said, and she gave a familiar wry smile with only the corner of her mouth. “When was the last time you slept, Rob?”

  “It’s been a few hours.”

  “You look like shit. Go get some rest. I’ll stay down here and keep an eye on your girl. I probably should hide the knives.”

  “Bad joke.”

  “Who said it was one?”

  He stepped down into the sunroom and knelt before her, put his hands on her thighs, and looked up at her. “You know why I’m doing this. I’ve got to put some certainty behind this one. For Howard, for Amy and George.”

  She leaned down and touched his forehead softly with her lips, then rested her face against his.

  “I know why you’re doing this,” she said. “And you can keep telling yourself those are the reasons. In the meantime, Rob, be careful listening to that girl’s story. Whether it is true or not, it can burn your life to the ground.”

  27

  Liz woke him at four in the morning with the news that Kimberly was gone.

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Walked out of my house wearing my clothes, that kind of gone.”

  He sat up, moving to push the covers back but catching nothing but air. He hadn’t even undressed, just gotten his shoes off before lying back on the bed and falling into a deep and troubled sleep.

  “I heard her go out the side door and when I went to yell for her, she started running up the dri
ve,” Liz said.

  Barrett pulled on his shoes and went down the steps and outside. He couldn’t see anything but trees and shadows. The drive was a long winding path through the woods that led out to the rural, two-lane highway that ran between Camden and Augusta. There was never much traffic on it, and at this time of morning, it was completely silent.

  He got into his car and started down the drive, figuring he’d have to gamble on turning east or west and guessing that she would have gone east, back toward the coast, when he came around a curve and she was pinned in the headlights. She was standing at the end of the driveway, trying to light a cigarette while staring at her phone. Her face was lit a ghostly blue from the screen. When he got out of the car, she looked back at him and wiped her eyes with the heel of the hand that held the cigarette, blotting fresh tears.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Got a ride coming. I know she doesn’t want me there, and I don’t want to be there either. Can’t sleep there, can’t sleep out at Little Spruce. I just need some friggin’ rest, Barrett. That’s all.”

  “Where are you going to rest?”

  She made a dismissive gesture. “I got a friend coming.”

  “Who?”

  “None of your damned business.”

  He reached back through the open window and shut off the engine.

  “I’ll wait with you, then.”

  “I don’t need you to wait with me. Go on back to bed.” She was looking up the road uneasily. “I’ll call you tomorrow, tell you where I am.”

  “No, thanks. You called me all the way back from Montana. Remember that? I’d rather know where you are. I don’t have time to waste finding you.”

  Headlights interrupted them, winding up the road from below. They were both silent as the car approached—an old Saturn that sounded like a steam locomotive. The car pulled up beside them, the window slid down, and a voice from inside said, “Yo, Kimmy, who’s your friend?”

  It was a young white kid with a thin beard tracing his jaw, most of his face hidden by the shadows from his Red Sox cap, but Barrett knew the car. The last time he’d seen its driver, he’d been fighting for breath on the floor of the Harpoon.