THE SUNRISE IN MIAMI DEVELOPS like a Polaroid—slowly and out of nothing. I scan the morning’s Boston Globe headlines. There isn’t anything, and I worry I’ve just imagined that they’ve cracked the case. What if Sennott is merely planning to announce that they were able to develop a profile? Or even less than that?
I’m in the last row of the plane, and we’re on the tarmac. A loud sound, like an engine falling off, rattles everyone. The flight attendants behind me, despite their training, or maybe because they think no one can hear them, don’t conceal their reaction. “Jesus Christ. What was that?” one says. “Thunder,” another answers. The cabin gets bright from some unseen lightning bolt. That would be fitting, wouldn’t it, I think morbidly.
* * *
The second my plane lands in Boston, just before noon, I check my phone. My hands are freezing again, and I haven’t had an appetite in days. But there are still no headlines or texts or alerts. Only an email from Don saying he hasn’t heard anything.
I make my way back to my little tree-house bedroom in Harvard Square, knowing that at this rate, barring an unannounced press conference, I won’t hear anything until 4 p.m., when Sennott knows that Don will be back from the doctor. But beyond setting Twitter alerts for the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, I struggle to do anything productive. I force myself to eat lunch. I unpack, make some coffee. I try to write, but how can I when I don’t yet know the ending? Three hours is nothing in the grand scheme of my years of waiting, but it’s an incredible amount of time to watch tick by.
At my desk, I’m surrounded by my cork boards of index cards and pictures, all pinned up with dissection needles. There’s a picture of one of the young men who accompanied Lee Parsons in Guatemala in January 1970. He’s sliding down the canyon––lithe, with his shirt unbuttoned. There’s Lee himself hunched over some mushroom stones in a museum, studying the artifacts, unaware of the camera. A few wisps of his dirty-blond bangs tumble over his glasses. Is that what his hair looked like as he lurched at Jane? Did his glasses stay on after the first blow? I can’t make it work in my head.
Lee Parsons. (Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM969-48-00/2.3)
“What is a good story?” one index card says, good underlined to emphasize the moral connotation of the word as much as its strict traditional sense. “Who controls the past?” another one asks.
My phone lights up. DONALD MITCHELL, it says, a relic from when I put his name in my phone before I knew him, when he wanted nothing to do with me. I pick up.