Weird Bobby was in his late twenties, thirties tops, but he was considered an elder statesman in town. He wore an Orioles hat pulled low over a mass of curly hair and his signature tube socks up to his knees under threadbare Converse high-tops. Jacob, with dirty blonde hair, a dirty red T-shirt, dirty, shredded Levi’s, and dirty work boots, was gorgeous in the filthiest possible way. Once, she caught him sneaking out of Ginny’s room at 5:00 a.m., but his then-girlfriend, a beatific Deadhead named Marion who wore long, Indian print skirts with bells stitched around the waist, was none the wiser. Marion had disappeared earlier that summer after a Dead show in Atlanta and no one expected to see her back anytime soon.
Teddy’s equally dirty blonde hair was snarled in the back of his head like a toddler’s. His glasses, sort of round and square at the same time, a mottled tortoise, slipped off of his nose, and his tattered blue oxford shirt, Duck Head cutoffs, and leather flip-flops hinted at a preppy past that was getting little upkeep. He played with a bottle cap, absentmindedly, listening to Weird Bobby’s nonsense.
“I bet he’s some total psycho, like Jason, with a, a hockey mask or something. Maybe a chain saw! Or a sickle,” said Weird Bobby, who punctuated every sentence with a silent, body-shaking giggle. The conversation had steered toward the murders, since the news had spread slowly across town and eventually made it here, a place that seemed immune to current events of any kind. Nobody seemed to have any new information, but that didn’t stop them from repeating it.
“I heard the cops were tracking down all of the first victim’s old boyfriends, like it was some kind of lover’s spat gone batshit crazy,” said Jacob, taking a long drag from a cigarette. Betsy spotted his soft pack of Camels on the table, and he offered her one.
“What do you think, Betsy? Psychokiller on the loose?” asked Teddy with a smirk. No one had bothered to introduce her, and this seemed like the closest she’d get.
“I don’t know,” she said, blushing from the focus suddenly trained on her. “I’m thinking it’s a good idea not to go to sleep tonight so I can make sure I don’t, you know, never wake up again.”
She was dead serious, but it got a big laugh nevertheless.
“We can arrange for that,” said Weird Bobby, shaking again. “Who wants another?” And he walked over to the bar to replace the empty steel bucket full of longnecks with a full one.
Gavin and Betsy took their beers to the end of the dock and sat with their legs dangling over the water. In the distance, there was a small Boston Whaler on the move, its engine buzzing like a lawn mower. Otherwise, the lake was silent.
“So this is J.D.’s,” she said, leaning down to graze the water with her fingers.
“Ah, first-timer, are we?” he said. “Not much to it.”
“Nah, but it’s great. I’d keep it a secret, too.”
“How do you know Teddy, anyway?” he asked. She suspected that he feared another failed fling with a friend, which would make her officially un-datable, according to unspoken guy protocol.
“We played cards together once awhile back and he was in this Nineteenth-Century Lit class I took last year,” she said. “He’s a friend.”
She paused.
“I’ve seen Jacob play a few times. He may have hooked up with a friend of mine,” she said. “But I’m told he left before dawn. I guess he snuck out in the middle of the night? I took that as a very subtle but bad sign.”
“Yeah, that’s subtle alright.”
“Weird Bobby, is, uh, interesting?”
“Yeah, it’s a well-deserved nickname,” he said. “The story goes that he inherited a little money when his grandparents died a few years back and just decided to stay here, never graduate.” He shrugged. “The guy’s a professional Frisbee golfer. And by pro I mean he’s won a couple of fifty-dollar Little Caesars pizza gift certificates. He’s harmless, but he’s fucking crazy. The thing is, he always has parties, and so he always has friends.”
“Huh. Seems like he’s goal-oriented,” she said.
“What about your crew? Ginny and Caroline? They’re real sweethearts,” he said, his tone confirming that he knew them better than she thought he did.
“Ginny’s a drunk, but she is a sweetheart, no joke. Caroline is complicated.”
“So you three were tight?” he asked her. “And now, it seems, maybe not.”
“Yeah, something like that,” Betsy said, first describing Ginny, how close they were, but she explained that when she left the sorority it put a strain on their friendship. Ginny interpreted Betsy’s criticism of the way things worked at the house as a criticism of her, which it was, in a way, but she knew they could get past it. Caroline was less understanding, and started mocking Betsy’s “new life/new look” approach to starting over, telling her that her wardrobe downgrade made her look like a homeless twelve-year-old boy. Things between them were limping along until just after spring break, when Betsy met John. Caroline knew that Betsy had a thing for a tennis player from New Jersey named John, despite the fact that he was a business major and had a girlfriend from back home who went to a real college in New England. Betsy met him at a party and she fell for him, hard. They made plans to study a couple of times, but Betsy was too subtle for John, and unwilling to ruin the long-distance girlfriend’s life, so they became friends, as a consolation prize. Caroline, who met him with Betsy once in the stacks of East library, was more aggressive. That the two of them started hooking up on the sly shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but that she was so mean about it to Betsy was shocking, even for Caroline. Betsy showed up at Caroline and Ginny’s apartment on a Tuesday night, unannounced, with her well-worn Seventh Sign videotape in hand (she found the combination of late-1980s Demi Moore and clumsy religious apocalypse imagery irresistible). She found John the tennis player in Caroline’s room, on the bed, cramming for an Econ midterm. When he saw her, he stuffed his book in his backpack, grabbed his shoes, and squeezed awkwardly past Betsy in the hall, as she stood there mute, filled with rage. Never had she felt so stupid and betrayed.
“Nothing happened between you two. Nada,” said Caroline, jumping to defend herself before Betsy could speak. “What’s the big offense? Did you pass him a note and ask him to check the box? This isn’t seventh grade, Betsy. You may have liked him, but you never touched him, so he’s totally fair game.”
Betsy stormed out of the apartment, humiliated, feeling more naive than ever. It wasn’t the first time she had been angry with Caroline, but it was the first time they stopped speaking.
Three-way calling was a novelty, and Caroline used it prodigiously in her schemes. When she got bored and mean at night, she’d put mortal enemies and venomous exes on the phone together while she sat holding the mute button, giggling wildly.
“Hello,” said Betsy.
“Hello,” said John.
“Who’s this?” asked Betsy, fearing the worst. Melissa had her own phone line at the house, and only Caroline and Ginny knew she was staying there and had the number.
“What do you mean who’s this? You called me.”
“I didn’t call you. You called me.”
“Is this Betsy Young?” he’d asked, his tone growing hostile.
“Holy shit, it’s John, isn’t it?” Only Ginny and Caroline knew she was staying at Melissa’s. Only they knew the number.
“You should know since you just called me.”
“Listen, I didn’t call you. It’s Caroline. She three-wayed us just to torture me.”
Of course, he didn’t believe her. He was too stupid to suspect anyone of such bizarre and pointless mischief. After the third time it happened in a week, he called her a psycho and a stalker, threatened a restraining order, and slammed down the phone. When Betsy confronted Caroline and suggested, just a suggestion, that she may have a problem, like a sociopathic problem, Ginny was the mediator.
“Caroline, what is your deal?” shouted Betsy. “Jesus, you have no mercy. Zero. You’re like a serial killer or something.”
&nb
sp; “Oh my God, you have completely lost your sense of humor,” she replied. “John the limp-dicked jock with the virginal girlfriend in New Hampshire is a waste of my time and yours. If you weren’t so earnest all of a sudden you’d play along.”
“Guys,” Ginny pleaded, “can we please just stop? You can’t throw away our friendship over some guy in madras shorts. He is way too impossibly boring for that.”
Caroline’s total lack of remorse confirmed that Betsy was now on the wrong side of a ruthless bitch, and their trips to the drive-thru liquor store in Ginny’s car to bat their eyelashes for free bottles of cheap wine were over, maybe forever. This all happened in early May. By the time spring semester ended three weeks later, Caroline and Betsy were speaking again, but just barely.
Then Betsy told Gavin about Godzilla. Caroline and Betsy crashed a party near campus sophomore year. They just happened to be walking by after studying in the library one night. Betsy would never have thought to go in to a party on her own, uninvited, with total strangers. But Caroline couldn’t resist. They walked in the front door and went straight for the keg, where Betsy grabbed two Solo cups and waited in line, feeling more than a little conspicuous. When the host of the party, a sweaty, pale engineering major named Rich, who was smart and nice, and therefore no one she would have met otherwise, introduced himself, Caroline disappeared to the back bedrooms. Rich and Betsy chatted about how massive their school was, how they’d both been there for so long and neither face triggered a flicker of recognition. Betsy had started to feel good about the night. Maybe she’d meet some new people, branch out a little bit? Maybe she’d finally learn what an engineer did? But she had barely filled the second cup when Caroline appeared in the doorway, motioning to her to leave.
“Right now?” she mouthed across the room, but Caroline was out the door.
“Thanks for the beer, Rich,” she said. “My friend has to go. Guess I’ll see you around?”
“Yeah, sure, no problem,” he said, confused by the sudden departure.
“I hate to tear you away from your new boyfriend,” Caroline said, once they were back on the sidewalk, downing her beer. “Geek much?”
She took out a cigarette and lit it with a flame shot from a tiny dragon monster’s mouth and then tossed the perfectly weighted specimen into Betsy’s hands.
“I got this for you,” she said. “Courtesy of Rich.”
That he had collected these lighters, painstakingly, at flea markets, from mail-order catalogues in the back of Mad magazine or wherever you’d find something this strange, and that Caroline had plucked one from its mates on the shelf of his bedroom at his own party, which she was allowed to enter only on the remotest chance that nerdy Rich would get some action that night, was of little consequence to her. She’d also cleaned out his medicine cabinet of an expired Percocet prescription and some Tylenol with codeine.
“Thank God for wisdom teeth,” said Caroline, shaking the bottle like a maraca, a little demonic glint in her eye.
Had Betsy told him her last name? Had she mentioned where she worked? Had it not been for the crashed keg party, she would have survived her entire undergraduate experience without seeing Rich once. Now, thanks to Caroline, she was sure she’d pass him weekly on the way home from work and she could already feel the searing hatred of his eyes boring into her skull. She remembered the feel of the lighter, which was hard and cold and fit perfectly in her palm.
“That,” said Gavin, squinting in the sun, rubbing the back of his head, “is one malicious bitch.”
They were quiet for a minute. She had never told anyone that story.
“You’ve got some pretty selective morals, Gav,” she said, sitting up, suddenly defensive of her onetime friend, sensing his judgment of Caroline, and of her by proxy, even though she agreed wholeheartedly with his assessment.
“That’s totally different. I took a CD from a record store. I didn’t cock tease some stranger at a party and then lift his prized possession,” he said.
“I wasn’t teasing him. And I didn’t steal it.”
“So you brought it back, right? The lighter?” he asked. Until then, the thought hadn’t occurred to her. She mumbled some kind of excuse.
“Oh shit, Bets. You’re just as bad as she is if you don’t,” he said.
“He probably doesn’t even live there anymore,” she said, raising her voice a little. “Rich is off engineering somewhere with other engineers and has forgotten all about it.”
“But, really? You kept it?” he said.
She was quiet again.
“I know. You’re right.”
She leaned back and rested her elbows on the dock, letting the sun hit her face. Before, she would have defended her friend. She would have rolled her eyes, told him he didn’t understand, maybe even walked away. This time, she felt the warm wood under her forearms and the backs of her legs, and she let the quiet rest between them for a while.
They sat in the sun for far too long, chatting about their classes, about post-graduation plans. It turned out that he was only slightly less aimless than she was. He was a fifth-year senior, squeezing some forgotten credits into one last semester, and would graduate in December, like Betsy, as a Broadcast Journalism major. She was English with an Art History minor. Given the size and sprawl of the school, they’d never had a class together. They talked about what they did when they should have been studying. Betsy had discovered Joan Didion’s The White Album at a used bookstore downtown and was desperate to talk about it with someone, anyone, even if it was only to say how much it affirmed her hatred for the Doors. She told him about the photograph in the museum that she liked to visit and promised to take him there. Gavin talked about Raymond Chandler in an emphatic whisper, like what he wanted to say about Philip Marlowe, and had no one to say it to, had built up inside him like steam in a kettle. Betsy ate it up like a hungry little fish just beneath the surface of the water that leaped at a tiny crumb or the buzz of a gnat.
“Maybe I’ll teach?” he said. “I don’t know what the hell else to do. Definitely not law school like every other dickhead around here.”
“My mom thought that maybe I should be a flight attendant,” she said, forcing back a smile. It was a pop quiz she was praying he’d pass.
“Because you’re clearly such an asset to the service industry,” he said.
“Hey, I am employee of the freaking decade,” she said. Her faced burned red with pleasure. He knew her. He thought about her enough to know her. He was in it as much as she was, already. “But you’re right. Never in a million. I don’t even like planes.”
With that, she stood up, took off her shorts and her Hanes T-shirt, and jumped in the lake, hoping the cool water would calm her skin, flushed and blotchy with excitement, not bothering to remember which bra and underwear she had put on in the dark that morning, and not caring that much. In the cool lake, she could forget about psychokillers and dead girls, about Caroline and even Ginny. All of that would be waiting for her back in town.
CHAPTER 8
SERIAL, AS IN MORE THAN ONE
August 25, 1990: Night
By the time Betsy and Gavin were driving back from that first trip to the lake, both with sunburned cheeks, itchy, bitten ankles, and the remnants of a buzz, Betsy was in deep. Neil Young had been replaced by the Feelies in the CD player. As they sped through the long, tree-lined roads she thought the humming of the locusts, hidden among the leaves, sounded like backup singers, their low, vibrating buzz in perfect rhythm with Only Life. The cool lake water, the sunbaked dock under her skin, the lazy drowsiness of the day, the weird yearning she was feeling for what was happening, even while it was happening, made her think that if she could peer inside her brain she would see the memory forming. At one point, she caught herself staring at the way Gavin’s tattered T-shirt hung over the top of his shoulder and had to talk herself into getting her shit together. From the passenger seat, she could see that his Wayfarers were smudged with greasy fingerprints and that t
he scruff on his chin was sparse and, from certain angles, a little seedy. But she decided she was fine with it—all of it.
As soon as they were back within city limits, reality was there to greet them. Gavin pulled into Pete’s Chevron to fill up the tank and they ran into Danny, a gangly, perma-grin stoner who wore nubby gray socks with his flip-flops as a sort of signature, the strap that separated the big toe from its companions cramming the fabric between the two digits in the most unfortunate way.
“What up, Gav?” said Danny, as he let the snack-shop door slam behind him with a jangle. He had a pack of sunflower seeds in one hand and a plastic cup for the newly vacant shells shoved into the pocket of his vintage checked shorts.
“Danny,” Gavin announced, in that ambiguous name-shout greeting that didn’t reveal the intentions behind it, no happy “How you doin’, brother” or subtly hostile “Where you been, fucker?” Just Danny.
“What’s your theory on this serial killer thing?” he asked.
“What do you mean, serial?” Gavin said, glancing at Betsy in profile, still in the passenger seat, to see if she could hear him. She could.
“As in, more than one,” said Danny. “It’s confirmed. They found a third body. The first one they found they thought was a fluke, some pissed-off boyfriend who lost his mind. Then they found two more girls early this morning, same weird bite marks on their bodies.”
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