CHAPTER 14

On the morning of the arrests, exactly one month to the day after Amelia Anne Richardson’s body had made its prostrate pilgrimage from the dirty and dusty roadside to the cold, clean interior of the morgue, a dark, heavy wall of mounting cloud had appeared above the western mountains. A rising wind, insistent and tinged with the damp promise of a late July thunderstorm, blew coldly down the quiet streets and brushed its clammy fingers against the limp faces of the parched and shuddering leaves. The sun grew unsure of itself and fled the sky. Inside, people tiptoed through the tepid indoors of their carpeted hallways, stepped over their thresholds into the moving air, and sighed with relief at the promise of rain.

For a few short hours, it seemed that the unsettling presence of murder, mystery, and irreversible change that had haunted our streets all summer would finally, finally be washed away.

The news blew into town before the second set of handcuffs had clicked into place around the beefy, blue-veined wrists of the suspects, picking up speed as it raced through phone lines and over hedges, banging through front doors, barging into kitchens where it surprised families in the midst of their unhurried Sunday breakfasts. It rushed eagerly down the streets, richocheting off the bare, sun-faded faces of stately white homes and wrapping in a breathless tangle around the trunks of old trees. Beneath the austere ceiling of the hilltop Presbyterian church, gossip skipped up and down the aisle and murmured in the spaces between the worn wood pews, until the black-cloaked pastor, his flushed face and thinning hair grown shiny and damp with frustrated perspiration, paused midsermon and said, “Excuse me, but I must insist that the noise stop immediately.”

Later, long after the speculation had given way to sad and dissatisfying truth, it was discovered that three words had been scribbled in the margins of one of the ancient church hymnals. The hasty ink bled its black accusation back through ten parchment-thin pages, the letters growing fainter and then disappearing entirely on page one hundred and fifty-seven, just beside the first verse of “My Soul in Silence Waits for God.”

IT WAS THEM.

It had to be them. We knew it, we all did—the neighbors who talked from the sides of their mouths, the women who waited until the kids had gone to bed before phoning a friend to trade theories, the beer drinkers in the East Bank Tavern who turned on their stools, glasses raised, and toasted the untrustworthiness of outsiders. Because in a town like this, there were the people who belonged, and the ones who didn’t. And the dead girl, the one with skin like clean white paper and expensive highlights in her blood-soaked hair—that girl wasn’t one of us. If you had asked anyone, anyone at all, we’d have told you as much in a heartbeat. And who had killed her? Who could have? Who would have?

Them.

And just as they had done before, just as they always did, people came together and talked about what they’d always known.

Because there had always been something wrong with the summerers. They were too snide, too snobby, too suspiciously ready to throw their money at substandard lakefront property in a town with no real cachet. They talked to us using short sentences and slow language, pandering to grown men as though they were stupid children. Until they wanted something; then, they seeded their speech with four-syllable words and hoped that the lies in between would slip by unnoticed. They had driven up the prices in the grocery with their demands for imported foods, organic vegetables, strangely shaped and weird-smelling artisanal cheese that none of the locals would touch. They had cheated someone’s cousin out of his rightful claim to a lakefront lot. They had built those guarded gates and chosen the narrow-eyed assholes who staffed them. They called us “boy” and “hey, you” and “dear,” called us “honey” and “sweetie” in voices that rang with condescension and held no kindness.

They had always wanted to take what wasn’t theirs.

They had taken that poor girl’s life.

But better that it should end like this—when the guilty men were cuffed, dragged, shoved into the backseats of two police cruisers, and everyone knew the reasons why.

“He had an affair with her,” people said.

“She was obsessed.”

“She threatened to tell his wife.”

He had dragged her into the dark and savaged her there by the side of the road. He had hit her with a pipe, with a rock, with the bare blunt force of his dirty fists. Or that it had been both of them; they had raped her together, or one at a time, one man holding her thin arms while the other tore her dignity to shreds. It was a conspiracy. It was a reluctant cover-up. It was cold-blooded murder with a side of blackmail. Don’t say that I told you, but you can trust me.

I heard it from someone who knows.

Later, when the the truth came out—when it turned out that the men from Silver Lake were guilty not of murder, but of taking it upon themselves to beat the living shit out of a caramel-skinned landscaper who’d looked, as they later told the police, “suspicious”—the same eager souls who had excitedly spread rumors of resolution through the cool, breezy morning were finally forced to redial, recant, admit that the real story had been anything but. The sun reappeared with blazing strength in the five o’clock sky. It baked the sidewalks and streets until the heat rose in thick, shimmering waves and each blade of grass bowed its slender neck in dazed submission. It sucked in the air and spit it back at us, lung-clogging hot. People stepped outside, looked to the west with longing, and recognized the familiar deadweight of murder in the unmoving air. The sky was bare, the clouds vanished. The earth was cracking, and Amelia Anne Richardson’s body grew colder, drier, deader, in its anonymous plastic shroud.

And murder, standing just inside the open door, leaned closer and whispered, “It will never rain again.”