So it was eight-fourteen on a gray morning in March—March the eleventh, in fact, as indicated under “Date of Entry” on the Soames Middle School report card I still possess—that I first beheld Lucy Sparrow crashing out her front door, slamming it shut behind her and charging heedlessly into the street. She was wearing sandals, blue jeans, and a tattered T-shirt—which, all these years later, I can state with confidence because in the slightly more than a month that I knew her, I never saw Lucy Sparrow wear anything else. There were different colored shirts, but they were all the same, all of them badly worn and frayed. She would wear the same shirt for a week, having found it on her bedroom floor in the same place she deposited it every night. Only when I would point out that it reeked to high heaven would she lift her arm, stick her nose into her armpit and inhale. “Mmm-yeah!” she would call out. “Lucy’s ripe!” But she would change the shirt.
She was a tomboy, and not particularly pretty. Her face was square, blockish; her most typical expression was a scowl, and when she smiled an auxiliary chin would appear. She was not fat, but she was heavily built, with muscular arms and breasts preternaturally developed for a sixth-grader. Girls didn’t like her because she was loud, rude; boys found her unnerving. And yet later I would see that, when she was in a peaceful, reflective mood, her face relaxed and happy, she would have moments of startling beauty: the hard angles would dissolve, her icy blue eyes soften, and her blonde, nearly silver hair, invariably tangled and rat’s-nested, would bounce and glisten. This was a Lucy few would ever see. I myself saw her hardly at all, yet my memory of those few occasions remains as vivid as any memories I have. I found her mesmerizing to look at, a rough, blowsy, hard-edged angel.
That first morning, however, the encounter was limited to my backing away from the bus door as this hurricane of a girl came rushing up to it, backpack slung carelessly over her shoulder. “New?” she said, glancing at me in the moment it took for the door to slide open. I nodded. “Good luck—you’ll need it,” she said, turning away and mounting the first step. Over her shoulder she added, “This place is a fuckin’ dump!”
As homicidal maniacs go, the Riverbed Killer was a small-timer. He claimed only three victims, of whom Lucy Sparrow was the last. His entire spree lasted a mere two weeks, not even long enough for the community to begin to panic—by the time the bodies began to be discovered he was already dead, shot down in a police chase outside Santa Barbara. This was only days after Lucy’s body was found, what was found of it, in the dry riverbed off the freeway: strewn about in pieces, like the other two. Compared to the Gacys and Dahmers of the world, the Riverbed Killer’s case contains nothing especially memorable. And yet today, on the more comprehensive websites devoted to serial murderers (and I cannot help but wonder what sort of people create these sites), there he is. There are his victims. Trista Sanchez, Tina Blake, and Lucy, who looks much as I remember her, although I’ve not seen even a photo of her in thirty years. In fact, she looks exactly the same, except that it seems impossible she could have been so young—or that I could. The picture is in black and white, no doubt scanned from an old newspaper story or yearbook. Lucy Sparrow.
And there are pictures of the investigation, as well, old news shots of local police and Santa Barbara County detectives standing in the riverbed, sorting through debris. There are no photos, thank God, of the actual crime scenes. It’s strange for me to realize that such photographs must exist today, buried in the ancient, disused files of law enforcement agencies and news organizations in central California. Somewhere, if one only knew where, one could go to an old file cabinet, open it, and draw forth a sheaf of papers which would include images of what was left of Lucy Sparrow when they found her. For that, if anything, turns out to be the Riverbed Killer’s sole distinguishing point: the sheer brutality of his methods. The basement he had outfitted with ball-and-chain, lockable metal staples set into concrete walls, a bed with leather restraining devices such as one finds in mental asylums, a Spanish Inquisition-style “rack.” And his tools: sledgehammers, knives, sharpened screwdrivers, a band saw, a high-powered electric drill with a huge assortment of drill bits. There was a specially-constructed drain in the middle of the floor. All this he had purchased or built himself. The drill appeared to be his favorite instrument of all. Each victim’s skull contained dozens of sharply-defined, cleanly-made holes which investigators somehow knew were drilled—some of them, at least—while the victims were alive. I don’t know how anyone can determine such facts. I tell myself I don’t believe them. But I do.
At that age, friendships among girls are mercurial, fast-fading; today’s best friends for life are tomorrow’s bitterest arch-enemies. This is the age when the worst female qualities—and they are female qualities: bitchiness, backstabbing, rumor-mongering—come to the fore, with no counterbalancing sense of empathy or pity. If it’s true that hell is other people, then surely one division of that hell can be found among the girls of any typical middle school.
Lucy Sparrow was a denizen of such a hell, though I did not see that clearly then. With her smelly clothes, bellowing voice, and boyish ways, she was a perfect target for the girls I quickly identified as the important ones, the “in” crowd: Susie Shaw, Michelle Price, Melissa Deaver, pretty little ego machines who painted their nails at recess and talked about their hair and shoes and argued over who was hotter, Shaun Cassidy or Andy Gibb. I had known such girls at my earlier school, in Stockton, and feared them. I knew my shyness, my virtual terror of human interaction would cause them to create new nick-names for me, as indeed it did: “Miss Stuck-up,” of course, but also—within just a few days of my arrival—“Bitchy Britches,” and, most memorably, in reference to my physique, “Concentration Camp.”
Lucy had it worse. From the very first day, sitting in Mrs. Peterson’s homeroom, I heard whisperings.
“Lezzie’s here today.”
“Yeah, Dyke-o-rama’s back.”
“Michelle, you really should kiss her. She likes you best.”
“Eww! You kiss her.”
Lucy could hardly have failed to hear these remarks—she was only two seats in front of these girls—but her head remained angled over the book she was reading, her hair tumbling over her face so that I could not read her expression. Since I knew she lived across the street from my house, I naturally felt that we might be friends.
We had all our classes together, but Lucy and I did not speak until lunchtime. I had yet to say a word that day other than a few murmured “hellos,” and was sitting on the grass looking absently at a group of boys running up and down the field when a loud thwack startled me into looking to my right, where the tetherball pole stood. Few seventh-graders used it, I would learn; tetherball was considered kids’ stuff, for the elementary schoolers who took their lunch an hour before us. But there was Lucy, slamming away at the ball with her closed fist. She would hit it, watch it with hawklike intensity as it swung around on its rope, and then smash it again, grunting. I watched her for what seemed quite a long time, the ball angling into the air, swooping and dropping, Lucy’s fist punching at it. She never missed, and she hit hard. Like a boy, I thought.
“Hi,” she said finally, glancing at me, sweat glistening on her forehead. She kept on watching and striking, watching and striking. “Wanna try?”
I swallowed nervously, but managed to stand up and approach her. The ball glided toward my head.
“Go on, hit it, hit it!” she cried.
I swung at it with the heel of my palm, connected rather feebly. It swung lethargically back toward her.
“Look, like this,” she said, showing me her clenched fist. “Wham!” As she said it, she sent the ball hurling back around in fast circles again, and I found myself ducking away from it. This made Lucy laugh, the first time I’d heard her do so. It was a big, raucous sound, far larger than one would imagine for someone her size. “Don’t be chicken,” she said. “C’mon, try!”
I stepped back toward the ball, closed my fist, and swu
ng, missing it completely, which, surprisingly, didn’t make her laugh again: in fact, it silenced her. On its next revolution, Lucy grabbed the ball and held it, looking at me.
“Look, c’mere, I’ll show you.” I hesitated. “C’mere,” she insisted, and I moved toward her. “Hit it with the side of your fist, like this.” She illustrated. “You’ve gotta keep your eye on the ball. You missed because you looked away. Here, see?” To my surprise, she reached down, grabbed my hand. “Make a fist. Right. Now hit it like this.” She pressed the side of my fist against the ball. “Okay? Now, look. Step back. I’ll swing it at you, just gentle. See if you can hit it like I showed you.” I was afraid she would sock it again, but no, she lofted it softly around the pole so that it arrived, smoothly and slowly, near my raised fist. I swung, connected imperfectly, and the ball spun off in the other direction. “Not bad,” she said, catching it. “Here, try again. Now watch it, keep your eye on it.”
For the next several minutes I swung my arm at the ball, gradually getting better at it, while she and I talked—or rather, she asked questions and I answered them. How did I like the school? How did I like Mrs. Peterson? Mr. Thorndyke? And what was my name, anyway?
“Fran,” I said, preparing to swing. “Fran Carpenter. It’s really Frances, but people call me Fran.”
“Fran. Hm. Girlie name. Oh, well. I’m Lucy.”
And with that we were friends. On some level Lucy frightened me, her aggressiveness and insistence, but on the other hand, she seemed to be taking an interest in me, something no one at my other schools had ever done. I knew that I was spending time with a misfit, that the important girls were probably watching right now, already branding me a loser—hanging around with Lucy Sparrow, playing a little kid’s game!—as indeed they were, and did. But it didn’t matter. Swatting away at that silly tetherball, I abruptly found myself feeling, for a few moments at least, quite happy.
When the bell rang ending the lunch period, Lucy took the ball for a few final swats. Scowling, she said, “This one’s for Susie Shaw,” slamming the ball as she uttered the last name; it swung around, then she grabbed it again and said, “This one’s for Michelle Price,” and the thing whirled around once more; finally, “This one’s for Melissa Deaver!” The ball spun crazily around the pole as, giggling wildly, best pals already sharing a secret, we ran off to class.
It turned out that we were both newcomers, aliens to the undistinguished town of Quiet, California. Lucy and her mother had only arrived in November, four months earlier. Their home, as I had seen it from across Kendale Road, was a wreck; cans, trash, and car parts were spread across the yard (“Most of it’s the landlord’s,” Lucy would say, “but we get blamed for it”). The lawn itself, what there was of it, was patchy and brown, dead. As for the house itself, its paint was cracked and chipped everywhere; one front window was held together by strips of masking tape. “My mom rents it,” Lucy told me that first afternoon. “She’s a waitress.” She pointed vaguely. “That’s where she is now.” What a contrast it was to my aunt and uncle’s house, which was much larger and beautifully maintained, with a pristine lawn kept up by a team of weekly maintenance men.
“The neighbors hate us,” Lucy would say later. “Mr. Silva called my mom a pig to her face. I was there. But she can’t afford any better.”
She invited me to her house after school that first day, and I felt as nearly salacious thrill at the idea of stepping into such an abode of ill repute, so different from my own home, my own obsessively organized life. “C’mon over,” she had said. “I get bored as shit.” Aunt Louise had acquiesced when I arrived home, nodding in her dour way, saying only, “Keep out of trouble,” before returning her attention to her TV game show and Marlboro cigarettes. (I never quite knew why she watched the shows; she never seemed to take any pleasure in them, never smiling, never laughing. Yet she never missed them, especially Match Game and Family Feud.)
I found my heart beating fast as I rang Lucy’s doorbell.
“Hi,” she said, opening the door and grinning. “Welcome to Dumpland!”
A friend, I thought. My friend!
Inside the house was a shambles too. Dirty clothes lay everywhere, soiled dishes, old magazines and newspapers; there was an open box of tampons on the kitchen table in the midst of dozens of spilled cigarettes and empty Coors beer cans. A broken chair lay forlornly in the corner, one leg snapped in half. The living room carpet, what there was of it, had once been blue, but it was covered now with brown and yellow and orange stains. To my sense of order there was something shocking about the scene, as if I were looking at someone naked: Dirty people lived here, it seemed to me, filthy people. I was obscurely thrilled.
“Who takes care of you when your mom’s not home, Lucy?” I asked as we treaded through a dark hallway toward her bedroom.
“Takes care of me? Nobody takes care of me,” she said. “I take care of myself.”
Though I had gone through many difficulties, particularly when my parents forced me to travel to this little town hundreds of miles from where I’d grown up in order to live with Frank and Louise (Why? What did I do? What did I do?), I had never, then or now, come home to an empty house: first my mother, then Louise had always been there, with the sound of the TV or their voices on the telephone—something, at least, to ensure that I wasn’t coming home to loneliness, silence, death. There’s no one home, I thought to myself in horror, studying Lucy. There’s no one home here, no one at all.
“We can go to my house, Lucy,” I said. “My aunt’s there.”
She scowled. “Why? That’s a stupid idea.”
Her bedroom was exactly like the rest of the house. Her clothes covered the floor to such a complete degree that the carpet couldn’t be seen at all; her bed was unmade; there were stuffed animals in tumbledown confusion on every shelf and window sill. A few magazines were scattered on the floor, some of them open and gaping. There was an old record player in one corner and collapsing heaps of 45s next to it. Such a contrast to my own room, the bed made to nearly military standards of perfection, clothes washed, ironed, and hung in the closet, bookshelf with its titles alphabetized and well-dusted, schoolbooks stacked by size on the desk, pencils sharpened to a fine point and waiting in a jar. And still, I knew, still I was not good enough.
“Let’s play some tunes,” Lucy said, putting a 45 on the record player: Boston’s “More Than a Feeling.” I watched her from the doorway as she danced lightly with the music, eyes closed, tousling her hair. “My mom gets these records from the jukebox at work,” she told me. “Once people don’t play them anymore, the owner gets rid of them and gets new ones. I mean, he just throws them away. So I get them now. It’s cool. The only thing is, they’re kind of old. But some of them are great. I listen to them all the time. Music just does something to me.”
I sat down gingerly on the bed. The sheets, I noticed, smelled. I took a stuffed tiger in my hands and looked at it.
“That’s Gus-Gus,” she said, smiling as she danced. “All of these guys have names, every one. There’s Gilbert and Short Stack and Miss Mooch, Boo-Boo and Rag Bag and Big Sam…I guess I have like fifty or sixty. And I love ’em all.”
I was surprised—I certainly hadn’t associated Lucy Sparrow with anything like cute stuffed animals. I suspected Melissa Deaver and her ilk hadn’t either. I felt that I was being allowed to peer into Lucy’s secret heart, to see aspects of her that no one else saw. It was a strange, exhilarating feeling.
I should explain that, for whatever reason, I did not then (nor do I now) possess a gift for friendship. I was always the child who sat in the corner studying her book, never participating in games or sports unless I was forced to. When that happened, I invariably embarrassed myself, falling and skinning my knee at hopscotch, striking out or dropping the ball in softball. I was humiliated by my body, my buck teeth, my skinny frame that caused other children to call me “Skeleton” or “Scarecrow.” I was smart, I knew, but I also knew that I would trade all the brai
ns in my head for the kind of personality and grace that would allow me to be part of the lives of the other kids, the ones who mattered.
So what for anyone else would have been just a minor, quickly forgettable hour or two at a friend’s house was, for me, something quite extraordinary. In fact, I was not only amazed at Lucy; I was amazed at myself. Whatever shallow pools of self-confidence I had ever possessed when I lived with my parents were utterly depleted that strange morning I was made to board a bus to Santa Barbara, of all places, for “a little visit with your aunt and uncle”—even though I knew, bewildered as I was, that for a little visit I couldn’t possibly need as much luggage as was being sent along with me. Why do I have to go? Are you coming too? For all our apparent wealth—modest, but wealth—I was dimly aware that not all girls lived with parents who used needles and syringes in the middle of the night, who seemed to pass out for days on end, who had peculiar people visiting the house at odd hours; parents who would constantly warn (in a gentle, humorous tone, yet with cold steel in it) Don’t tell anyone what goes on here. I knew, I knew! I was a bright girl, I didn’t have to be taught twice. I learned my lessons and lived by them. Of course I told no one. I kept my body, my clothes, all my possessions as neat as humanly possible, as perfect as they could be, so that I myself might become worthy of the two of them, worthy of anyone, that someone—Mom or Dad or some bright stranger—would come to me at last and say: You’ve done wonderfully, you’re an angel on earth, I love you, little girl, I love you.
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