CHAPTER 6

In a small town, murder is three-dimensional. We make it that way, elevating it and turning it over until it’s more than a simple tragedy, until it becomes tangible. Murder in a small town is always more than a paragraph in the local paper. In a place so insulated, where lives are so small and gone about so quietly, violent death hangs in the air—tinting everything crimson, weaving itself into the shimmering heat that rises off the winding asphalt roads at noon. It oozes from taps and runs through the gas pumps. It sits at the dinner table, murmuring in urgent low tones under the clinking of glassware.

The shocking death of Amelia Anne Richardson was not Bridgeton’s first. Years before, when I was still young enough that the summer passed in an endless, barefoot tumble of long afternoons, the ftz-ftz-ftz of sprinklers and tall glasses filled with cloyingly sweet iced tea, a woman named Sarah DiStefano shot her husband in their kitchen. Robert DiStefano, age forty-two, was dead before he hit the floor. He had been scanning the open refrigerator in search of beer, bent double with his hands resting on his knees and his considerable gut hanging, pendulous, between his straining and out-of-shape thighs. The bullet entered at the base of his skull as he peered into the space between a half-full bottle of ketchup and a foil-covered casserole. He was looking for a can of Coors Light and trying, vaguely, to recall whether it was in 1992 or 1993 that he’d last been able to touch his toes.

The day that news broke, murder was the breeze that whipped through Bridgeton’s streets and the unseasonable chill that rose off the lake to tap its misty fingers against the windows. Neighbors tossed it back and forth over fences; children kicked it around in the street. It brought people together over coffee and at the gas pumps. It spewed from the mouths of the East Bank Tavern’s beer-swilling Saturday crowd.

In a small town, everyone has inside information. If you asked around, you couldn’t find a single person who didn’t know either Sarah, the confessed murderess, or Robert, the unwitting victim. And with both of them gone—one dead, one sure to pass the rest of her years behind bars—there was nothing for it: Whether serving time or dead and buried, Sarah and Robert DiStefano no longer belonged. They were outsiders.

“I knew there was something weird about her,” people said.

“Maybe he had it coming,” they said.

It didn’t matter if it was true. Out of the mouths of Bridgeton’s remaining residents, each scattered anecdote or snap judgment was a fact, an explanation, a final insight into these people who had lived among us, certainly, but who had never truly fit in. To hear them talk, the DiStefanos had fooled no one.

Because he was a lech, a drunk. He was lazy. He would steal the cash from her purse, take it and go out all night, piss it away on booze or stuff it into a stripper’s G-string. He’d run that woman ragged, wrung the life out of her. He’d slept around. She caught him with her sister, her best friend, with a woman named Tiffany, Tammy, or Sheena, a woman who lived in a trailer park twenty miles west of here. He beat his wife, berated her, broke her heart. He was lucky he’d lived as long as he did. He was lucky that he found a woman who’d put up with his shit for a few years, even if she put a bullet in his head at the end. It was his fault.

Or hers.

Because she never fit in. She was odd, nervous, twitchy. She was abrasive. She was too shy. She had jumpy eyes. Or not jumpy, exactly, but eyes set too close together—eyes that said she was capable of meanness, of insanity, of creating chaos with a single flick of her index finger. She was a shrew. She was a witch. She was never satisfied, not with him, not with this town. She heard voices. She took medication. Or didn’t take it enough.

We knew this, all of us, because we’d been told by someone who knew. We knew it. Don’t repeat it, don’t say I told you, but that’s the truth. He had it coming, and there was always something weird about her.

The real events that led to Robert’s death in the kitchen that night—the passing years in which Sarah became increasingly unstable, her struggle to fight it, the pains she’d taken to hide it from her loving but oblivious husband, and her final decline as she became convinced that her husband had been replaced by someone else, a stranger who meant her harm—they didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that the rest of Sarah’s life would play out not in prison, but quietly, her awareness dimmed to a bare glow by medication while she sat in a white-walled psychiatric hospital in a Boston suburb. We may not have known that, but we knew them. And we knew that they didn’t belong here.

Buoyed by that knowledge, with the murder slowly migrating away from the paper’s front page, with the story bleeding and seeping further and further back until it vanished entirely into the past, the people of Bridgeton drew close together.

And so, like murders before it, Amelia’s murder was three-dimensional in its aftermath. It blew alongside the flecks of bloodstained dirt, down County Road 128, and reached town as a howling gale. The chatter was fevered. Frenzied. People came home from the grocery store, from bridge club, from a walk in the park, and massaged jaw joints that were exhausted from gossiping. They stood over fences and talked about the dead girl, the girl with no name, no face, no identification.

But as people talked, they became uneasy. In their vernacular, there was no anonymous death. They had no facts to share, no stories to compare. Nobody knew the victim, and more than that, nobody knew who had killed her. People remembered the death of Robert DiStefano. Thinking of its aftermath, they decided that that sort of murder was preferable—the sort where the names and places and hard facts were all in place. Where everybody knew the players and the plot. After all, it was things like that, those small-town tragedies, that really brought a community closer together.

An anonymous death in a small town, that’s a different thing. It makes people uneasy. They stop gossiping, talk only with trusted friends, or—realizing that nobody can truly be trusted—they don’t talk at all. Instead of settling in the streets or running through the municipal sewer system, murder moves inside. It becomes internalized. It seeps around the corners of locked front doors. It creeps into people’s bedrooms. It runs in their veins.

People sit on their porches, they smoke, they look with narrowed eyes down the darkened streets and into their neighbors’ windows. Inside, murder tiptoes up the back stairs and hides behind a bedroom door.

The people, alone on their porches or gathered quietly around the kitchen table, consider the unknowns. They form theories. They wait for information. And when they go inside, upstairs, when the lights go out and they lie, wakeful, in their beds, they wonder if everything has changed.