EPILOGUE

On the August evening that Amelia Anne Richardson’s ashes were scattered, tossed away on a gentle wind that blew coolly up the interstate and toward the coast and finally poured into the churning mouth of the Boston Harbor, a team of fast-moving police officers stormed the sides of a small, clapboard house nestled in the Cape Cod dunes. They slipped through the door in a rush of gleaming guns and starched, clean blues.

They found him sitting at the kitchen table, with his head in his hands and two months of sparse-straggle beard brushing against the yellowed collar of his undershirt.

Unwashed and whipped.

Exhausted.

He did not struggle.

As he crossed the gravel drive with his steel-clasped hands behind, the angry ocean wind blew harder. It kicked up sand and grit, rattled the windowpanes, sent stinging granules against the sagging skin of his face and into the wet, dull glass of his tired eyes. It had been weeks since he slept.

When an officer pulled her bag from the trunk of his car, untouched and holding all the clothes she’d never worn that summer, he began to cry.

* * *

That morning, I padded softly down a worn burgundy carpet lined on each side by long wooden pews while whispers filled the space behind me. Rumors fell lightly at my heels and sank into the threadbare beige patches where too many feet had walked before.

I kept my head down.

I laid a white rose on the coffin.

I stopped in front of Richard Mitchell, whose skin and hair still glowed with the kiss of western sun, and told him I was sorry.

He turned his face away.

When I found my way outside, stumbling in my too-pointy shoes and lurching into the fresh, light heat of the morning, I discovered that the thorned stem had left an angry welt on the pale-veined swell of my wrist.

I wouldn’t have forgiven me, either.

* * *

Autumn came to town before I left. It arrived unexpectedly in the old maple by the creek, where I sat with James and then sat alone, where I watched silently as reds and oranges and browns began to seep in from the corners of the leaves and the sun sank sooner, lower, vanishing with a whisper of the coming cold. The light grew slanted as the earth leaned away toward winter. In the moving air, the long green necks and slender blooms of the last late-summer hostas breathed clean white perfume into the air.

Later, after the medical examiner quietly confirmed the inevitability of Amelia Anne Richardson’s death from her initial injuries—that a blow to the head had only hastened by an hour the moment when her life slipped away—he came back. We sat together in the dark, passing the bottle between us, until he pitched it away and the night was filled with the shrill sound of breaking glass, and there was nothing more to say. He would receive probation and community service for interfering with an investigation. I would testify at the trial of the men from Silver Lake, pointing at each of them in turn while terms like “internal bleeding” and “manslaughter” and “burden of proof” were tossed around the room and the piggy eyes of Craig Mitchell, martyr, gazed implacably from an oversized photograph propped on an easel.

Later, the slender hands of the boy I’d loved clasped my waist and found their way around my neck, wound into my hair, cupped the hard angle of my jaw. He tried to kiss me. I turned my face away.

“Nobody blames you,” he said.

“Maybe somebody should,” I said.

They called me a “cooperating witness.” It’s a nicer word than “guilty.”

* * *

I don’t come back anymore. I am gone, moved along, vanished from the minds of my neighbors if not from their memories. I disappeared down the road with the windblown ashes of a girl who died too soon. When people talk about the murder—either murder, any murder—they rarely mention my name. My parents have moved away. In the quiet streets, along the dust-dry country roads, by the brimming, babbling waters of Silver Lake, there is nothing left of us. Of me. I don’t come back anymore.

But one day, some day, I will. Maybe. Hopefully. I have learned that knowing where you’re going means remembering where you’ve been. I’m not afraid of what lurks behind me, or ahead. And while I make no promises, I have learned again, though tentatively, to make plans.

And if fate carries me back to this familiar place, I will come gladly and with hope. Tires singing on the weathered asphalt, wind whipping in my hair. I hope to search for the overgrown opening between the trees where a rutted road leads to an open field, and smell the scent of crushed grass in the fading light. I hope to always know the back roads, and the shortcuts, and the place by the side of Route 128 where the dust and dirt once mixed with blood. I hope to roll slowly past the long drive at sunset, under the high canopy of trees that reach up, away, farther and fuller with the passing years. I hope, when I pass the skeletal, half-hidden house, that he doesn’t live there anymore.

That the windows are empty, and the dust has settled.

That there is nobody left to remember that summer.

That Amelia Anne Richardson is dead and gone.

And that the only thing left, heavy and sweet in the violet twilight, is the scent of wild roses.