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My breath came short as I cried impulsively, “They’re bitches!”

  Lucy looked at me, shocked; then she laughed. I guessed why: there I stood, small, shy, mousy in my cardigan and skirt, a nondescript little girl swearing at the top of her lungs.

  “C’mon,” she said, smiling, “we gotta go in.”

  Giggling, we ran hand-in-hand across the grass.

  —Three—

  THIRTY YEARS LATER I was surprised to discover that Soames Elementary hadn’t really changed. Like my old house, of course, it seemed smaller, differently-dimensioned; but the buildings and corridors were all instantly familiar to me. It was a Saturday, so the place was deserted; I could hardly help but feel a certain level of melancholy as I ambled past old familiar windows and doors in what seemed a lifeless universe. I peered into Room 10, Mr. Lowther’s old room, and wondered who taught there now. I leaned down to the oddly low drinking fountain outside what had been Mrs. Petrie’s room, took a sip of lukewarm water. A breeze blew a stray sheet of paper along the side of the building. There was no one near, no one at all.

  I made my way out onto the grass behind the school, where the playground still stood. There was a big blue building off to my left which I’d never seen; I wondered what it was. Part of the big open area in back had been converted into a softball field, I saw, complete with pitcher’s mound and dirt base paths and a protective fence behind home plate. Beyond the grass, in the fields behind the school’s property, there were a few more houses than there had been. But again, it was all recognizable, and this surprised me, even depressed me somehow.

  Finally I walked toward what we’d thought of as the little kids’ playground and saw that it still contained swings and sandbox, though the jungle gym wasn’t the same; it was a bigger, brighter structure before me now, clearly made or at least coated with some substance other than the solid steel I recalled. It stood dully in the spring light, no doubt less dangerous than the old metal contraption I remembered, yet curiously uninviting.

  At last I wandered to where the tetherball pole had stood, and found to my amazement that it was still there. Not the same pole, certainly—this looked far too bright and polished to have been here for more than three decades. But that this particular intersection of space and time still held a tetherball pole: the fact was incredible to me.

  No tetherball, however. A cord for one dangled listlessly against the pole, but where the ball should have been there was only empty space. I looked across the grass, felt the strange sensation of somehow being in two places at the same time—or rather different times. The little girl I’d been suddenly felt very close. A wave of emotion coursed through me, though I couldn’t have named what I felt. After a moment it passed, leaving me alone in the bright sun.

  It was in the town library that I began to understand the real reason I’d returned to Quiet, California.

  The library itself had been completely remodeled; once past the familiar Victorian-style exterior, I would never have known where I was. Gone was the crepuscular darkness of the building I recalled, with its echoing hardwood floors and dim reading lamps and huge card catalog standing like a sentinel by the front door. The old-fashioned leather-bound chairs with their hard brass brads were nowhere in evidence. Instead this was a sunny, cheery room with big windows, lightweight portable furniture, color-splashed posters, and glowing computers lining the walls.

  The rosy-cheeked woman behind the desk was extremely helpful. She was perhaps ten years younger than I and looked younger still in her bright yellow sun dress. She was fascinated to learn how long ago I’d lived here and claimed to remember Frank and Louise Cartmill, though I couldn’t imagine how since I’d never seen either of them with a book. She told me that Mrs. Klibo—the librarian I’d known—had passed away fifteen years before.

  “And what do you do, now?” she asked, smiling, friendly.

  “Children’s books,” I told her, without elaborating. I didn’t mention that several of them were on her shelves. “I was wondering,” I asked, “what information you might have about the Riverbed Killer.”

  I dislike clichés, but it was a fact: her face fell.

  “Oh,” she said. “Of course.”

  I realized instantly that the Riverbed Killer must still be a sore point with the locals of Quiet, California. In a way this was strange. He was hardly famous; in fact, he was entirely forgotten except by the handful of ghouls who study such people. He certainly wasn’t remembered in the way that others were—Starkweather, Whitman, Bundy, Dahmer. In comparison to them he was a small-timer. He claimed, after all, only three victims, hardly enough by the 1970s to even make the national news. Still, I found myself wondering how many more people had ever been murdered in this little town and its environs in the decades since. Few, certainly; quite possibly none. And so his notoriety here had gone on, though I suspect he was rarely mentioned in conversation today.

  “What did you want to know?” she asked, her demeanor notably cooler now.

  “Well—you see, I knew one of his victims.”

  She cocked her head. “Did you?” Sympathy returned to her voice.

  I nodded. “The last one. Lucy Sparrow.”

  “Lucy Sparrow.” She seemed to think about it. “The name sounds familiar.”

  “Yes, well…she was the last.”

  “And you knew her.”

  I nodded again. “I knew him, too.”

  “McCoy?”

  “Yes.” I could picture him now, the red-veined black eyes, the jumbled teeth. “But I didn’t know him well. Lucy—actually, she was my best friend.”

  This brought the woman completely back to my side. “Oh,” she said, her face stricken, “I’m so sorry.”

  Thirty years later, and she still expressed sympathy. As well, perhaps, she might: for it never goes away. It just goes dormant. It hides. It hid in me for three decades at the bottom of a deep pool of feeling and memory that had been, or seemed, placid and peaceful. But something had happened when I began to think of Quiet, California again: the pool had begun to stir, the waters to thrash and heave. And when I arrived here things I’d forgotten, things that I never knew I remembered at all, began to surface, chief among them the ghastly, intolerable thought, the unresolved grief and rage of knowing that Lucy shouldn’t have died. That I had a chance to save her—and failed.

  “I’m wondering if you have much information about the case,” I said. “I’ve looked online. There isn’t a lot there.” I’d found his picture on a few sites devoted to serial killers, along with a basic paragraph here and there describing his crimes and listing the victims: Maria Sanchez, Trista Blake, Lucille Sparrow. There was one website that had images of each girl, pixilated black-and-whites obviously reproduced from newspapers of the time, and there she was, Lucy, in what looked to be a school portrait, her long hair brushed back off her forehead, tidier than it usually was, her smile big and crooked. It was the first time I’d seen her face in all those decades. She looked younger than I remembered her, of course. She looked like what she’d been. A child.

  “Well,” the librarian said, “we have our old microfilm files. You could look up the News-Press articles from back then. It might take some time.”

  “I’ve got time.”

  She led me into a separate small room which contained nothing but a single aged microfilm machine and row upon row of file cabinets, each of which contained little indexed spools of film.

  “I’m afraid nobody comes in here anymore,” she said. “Everything’s a bit dusty. Do you know how to work the machine?”

  I nodded, smiling. “Graduate school.”

  The day was quiet in the library, only a few children returning overdue books and a patron or two using the computers, so she stayed with me for a while, helping me isolate dates and spool up some of the film strips. The images blurred by on the illuminated screen: lots of Nixon, Kissinger, Vietnam, Ford. But she knew the dates I was looking for, and quickly found the first headline: Local Girl Missing. This was the
Maria Sanchez case. I remembered it vaguely. She was a high school girl who had vanished; at first, I recalled, her boyfriend was considered the prime suspect. It came back to me as I read. Then, a month later: Girl’s Remains Found. In the riverbed, almost directly under the bridge. Only a day or two after that, Another Girl Missing. Trista Blake, a second high-schooler. The police swarmed the riverbed, of course, and found her quickly, about a mile north of Maria Sanchez’s body.

  My heart was slamming against my chest as we came to the next headline, which I’d never seen. Third Girl Missing. And then: Third Girl’s Body Located Outside Town. There: Lucy Sparrow, twelve, the youngest and final victim, was found “scattered across a wide area” in the riverbed south of town among the wild grasses and mud. She was chopped into pieces. Her head was drilled full of holes.

  I continued to read, engrossed by article after article. It almost seemed as if this story had nothing to do with me or anyone I’d ever known. Had I really lived here? Had I actually known one of the victims? The events of thirty years past had taken on a legendary quality in my mind, as if they were things I remembered from a storybook I’d once read. Later news items headlined the investigation: Local Mechanic Michael McCoy Arrested in Murders, announced the most important of these. But of course, I was long gone from Quiet, California by then.

  “Excuse me?” It was the librarian, behind me in the doorway. “I’m sorry, but we’re closing now. We close at one o’clock on Saturdays.”

  I exhaled, staring at the screen, tiredness suddenly overcoming me. I’d been sitting here for nearly two hours.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked.

  I stood, stretched, began putting away the last microfilm reel. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not sure what I was looking for. But you’ve been very helpful.”

  She smiled as she went back to the main room, gently herded children toward the door. At last, packed and ready, I headed toward the exit myself.

  “You know,” she said, “his sister still lives around here. Sarah.”

  “McCoy’s sister?”

  She nodded, eyes toward the floor.

  “I don’t think I knew he had one,” I said.

  “She lives out on Blackstone Road.” She gestured vaguely. “Ten miles or so out of town. She has a different name. Shaw. Her husband died a few years ago.”

  “How interesting,” I said, neutrally.

  “I’m sorry you couldn’t have come back for a happier reason,” she said, smiling sadly at me.

  “So am I, yes. Well…thank you again.”

  I walked down the steps, hearing her shut and lock the door behind me. Then I turned to take another look at the familiar old Victorian façade, carefully repeating to myself: Sarah Shaw. Blackstone Road. Sarah Shaw. Blackstone Road.

  Yes: I was beginning to understand the real reason I’d returned to Quiet, California.

  —Four—

  FROM THAT DAY forward, in the mercurial way of young girls, Lucy and I were best friends. I could hardly believe it. I’d never been one to make friends easily; I was always the one that my peers derided as Stuck-Up Girl, Miss Prissy Face, Full-of-Herself Frances. My clothes were weirdly formal for someone my age, little blouses and cardigans, skirts, perfectly-shined shoes; never for me the blue jeans or T-shirts or sneakers of other kids. I rarely spoke to anyone, and when I did I was aware of a tone in my voice that was remote, almost cold, though I didn’t mean it to be. At my old school, in my old life hundreds of miles from Soames Elementary, I was in the habit of spending my recesses and lunch periods entirely alone, sitting under a familiar oak tree with my latest book from the library, often Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys or Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, books I was always careful with, never underlining or dog-earing a page. I was so fastidious that sometimes I couldn’t begin reading at all if I found that I didn’t have a proper bookmark with me.

  My room at home had been the same way. My bed was always perfectly made, my desk immaculate with its textbooks carefully stacked by size next to the jar of flawlessly sharpened pencils. In my closet, all was order: formal dresses on the left, skirts next, then blouses and other tops, and finally my coat and sweaters. Beneath them sat, in militarily-precise lines, my shoes. I would habitually organize these things, along with the underclothes and more casual items in my bureau. It gave me satisfaction and comfort to see the shoes a bit straighter than before, my panties folded more crisply. It took my mind off the screaming and crashing noises that reverberated throughout the rest of the house.

  I’d re-created that room here. The room itself was smaller; the desk I’d been given was older and rather scratched, and the bed sagged; but as much as I could I’d gathered together a duplicate of my bedroom at home. Like at home, I had my own bathroom next door; it too was kept spotlessly, obsessively clean.

  “Never seen a kid act like her before,” I overheard my Uncle Frank say once, in his roughhewn smoker’s voice. It wasn’t a compliment.

  The rest of the house was, however, a complete contrast to my real home. There we’d had two stories, polished banisters, shining floors, Alba the maid; here everything was reduced. The rooms were small, the furnishings cheap. My aunt and uncle habitually kept the curtains closed all throughout the house, so that everything was bathed in a perpetual semi-twilight. And it was quiet. The only sound would come from Louise watching her game shows at a low volume in the afternoon with her beer and cigarettes or the rustle of Frank’s newspaper, which he sat reading in shirtless suspenders while puffing on short, squat cigars. Neither of them worked—the word disability was spoken on occasion—so they were both there most of the time, silently shambling from room to dark room, speaking in murmurs, dully living out their days.

  What a contrast to Lucy’s house too, but in the opposite way. Uncle Frank and Aunt Louise, though no great shakes as home owners, kept their home and property in respectable condition; Lucy’s place was something else entirely. The house itself, also a rambler, had splintered and broken woodwork everywhere; the paint was flaking off large parts of the front—you could actually see piles of old gray paint chips lying in the dirt where they’d fallen. One window was cracked and repaired with electrician’s tape. Tiles were missing from the roof. The front lawn was like a battlefield, the lawn itself mostly pitted holes of dirt. Old tires were scattered aimlessly about, milk crates, a baseball bat in two pieces. The driveway was oil-spattered and crumbling.

  Inside was the same. The first time I entered the house—the day we met, the day we socked the tetherball together and made fun of the popular girls—I experienced a very nearly sexual thrill at beholding how Lucy lived. I’d never seen anything like it. The carpeting was dirty, even burned in spots. Clothes, Lucy’s and her mother’s, lay strewn everywhere. The kitchen table was covered with spilled Cheerios. Plates and dishes covered with crumbs and time-stiffened sauces were in the sink, on the countertops, on miscellaneous tables and shelves throughout the house, with lines of ants marching to and from many of them. Though the house represented the opposite of how I lived, how I thought I wanted to live, I loved it immediately; loved the grime, the filth, the slovenliness of it. It seemed raunchy somehow, and thrilling as a result.

  “C’mon, catch!” Lucy cried, grabbing a spongy Nerf football off a living room chair and tossing it to me.

  “Lucy,” I said, “who’s here? Is your mom here?”

  “Nah,” she said casually, catching the red-and-yellow ball as I threw it back to her. “She’s at work. Gets home in a couple of hours.”

  I was shocked. For all the madness that had occurred in my home, there had always been someone there when I arrived after school, if only Alba. Lucy was alone.

  “We could go to my house,” I said, the ball flying into my arms again. “My aunt and uncle are there.”

  “Why?” she said. “That’s a stupid idea.”

  That day we played catch (in the living room, I kept thinking, amazed), drank Cokes, and
waded around in Lucy’s bedroom, which if anything was even more dramatically chaotic than the rest of the house. Her clothes covered the bed, the desk, the carpet. A Nerf basketball hoop stood crookedly in the corner, a lone blue sock dangling from it. Stuffed animals littered the floor. And she had a huge number of records, all 45 rpm singles, in collapsing piles everywhere.

  “Hey, let’s get some music going in here,” she said enthusiastically, pushing away a shirt and bra (She wears a bra! I thought) to reveal a little record player on a table in the corner. “My mom gets these from the Yellow Jacket,” she said, flipping through the records. “From the juke box. When they get new ones they just throw the old ones away, so my mom gets ’em for me.” She dropped to the floor on her knees, searching. “Hm…The only problem is that they’re kinda old, you know? But I have a radio, too, to hear the new stuff. Do you listen to the America’s Top Forty?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The show. With Casey Kasem? It’s on every Saturday morning, nine to noon.”

  “I—no.”

  She made a sour face. “Fran, you’re really out of it, you know that? I need to teach you up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you standing there for, anyway? You look like you got a bus to catch or something. Help me find ‘Frankenstein.’”

  I knelt beside her, picked up a few of the records and looked at their titles. At twelve I was only vaguely aware of pop music; none of the names looked familiar to me.

  “What’s the Yellow Jacket?” I asked finally.

  “That’s the bar where my mom works. It’s downtown. She’s a bartender.”

  I thought about it. “I didn’t know there were bartenders who were—you know, ladies.”

  “Oh, Fran, you’re such a retard. Hey, here it is!” She held up the record triumphantly, moved to place it on the turntable. Soon the guitars and synthesizers and drums were pounding and Lucy jumped up, gyrating, shaking her hair wildly.