She had to wait until her sister, Eleanor, came to visit. Eleanor, her husband, and their five-year-old son, Jackson, slept in Katherine’s room, and Katherine set up a blow-up bed in the office. During the day she played with Jackson, who was mainly interested in the many issues of National Geographic Kids he had brought with him. Katherine sat with him on her lap in the living room and read page after page of facts about zoo animals.
When it was nighttime and everyone was asleep, Katherine walked, soft-footed, into her room, where her sister’s handbag was hanging from the closet door. She slipped the wallet out without a sound. Safely in the office, she left the cash where it was and used her sister’s credit card to subscribe to the newspaper.
Despite its horror movie title, the article was disappointing. It confirmed what Carmen had said, that Blake killed his girlfriend in the woods with a knife. “There’s no happy ending here,” one of the prosecutors said. “In this case, the guilt Mr. Campbell will live with for the rest of his life is more than enough punishment.” Blake’s lawyer was quoted, too, calling the murder “a tragedy.” The article said that Blake had sobbed in court and apologized to his dead girlfriend’s family. Katherine wondered how they reacted to that, how they felt. It was, of course, impossible to imagine. They must have been furious to see him go free. Unless they believed that he really didn’t mean to do it, that it was a tragedy and not a crime. Which was easier to live with?
As she lay in her blow-up bed, Katherine thought of Blake. She missed him. She wanted to tell him all the boring details of her life, and for him to say strange things about them. It was shocking how much she missed him. It reminded her of the summer camp she’d hated as a child, of how homesick she was. She felt as awful and as lonely as she had back then, sitting on the top bunk, writing letters to her parents, begging for them to come and take her home.
She remembered a magazine article she’d read, about the women who wrote letters to Charles Manson in prison, who proposed marriage. Women so sad, it was disgusting. But Blake wasn’t like Manson. He’d only killed one person, and it wasn’t even on purpose, not really. It occurred to her that maybe the difference between a killer and a murderer is whether you’re allowed to forgive them.
This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have with herself. She just wanted to see Blake’s eyes, and if she couldn’t do that, to tell him that she was having dreams again, silvery things that meant nothing but were a relief anyhow, a sign that her brain would belong to her again soon.
Katherine took her mother’s cell phone from its charger in the kitchen and slipped into the backyard. She found Paradise Lake’s number saved in the contacts. A voice she didn’t recognize answered.
“Hello, this is Paradise Lake, a place to heal. How may I direct your call?”
“Uh, hi. It’s me, Katherine. I want to speak to Blake, if he’s still awake?”
“I’m sorry,” said the voice. “I can’t confirm or deny that he’s here. But I can take a message.”
“No, it’s OK,” she said, stupidly. “I’m a former resident. He’s my friend.”
“I can’t confirm or deny that he’s here,” the voice said, again. “But I can take a message.”
“Why would you take a message for someone who isn’t even there?” Katherine asked, irritably.
“That’s our policy, miss. I’m sorry.” The voice didn’t sound apologetic at all. Katherine sighed loudly.
“OK. Uh, tell him Katherine called. And happy Thanksgiving.”
“Would you like to leave your number?”
“Um, sure.”
Katherine hung up the phone, exhausted. No wonder none of her friends had ever called her. All that stupidity probably scared them off.
“The moment you say, this pain is unendurable, you are already enduring,” Arthur had said. But this wasn’t pain. It was something silkier and stranger than that. She sat down on the grass and wrapped her arms around her knees, making herself very small.
Juliet
I met Celeste Hamilton while we were covering the trial of John Logan, the Kingston Killer. She was reporting on the trial for a well-regarded magazine based in New York City. I was covering it for a small local newspaper. I envied Celeste’s job, if not her commute. I had read some of her articles before and recognized her from her author picture: elegant cheekbones, a white-blonde bob. I thought it was admirable that she was pretty enough for television but worked in print anyway.
Celeste was the one who nicknamed Logan the Kingston Killer, even though he technically lived in Barrytown. The alliteration didn’t do what it was supposed to, which was catch the public’s imagination. No one seemed to care that much about John Logan, because no one cared that much about the women he killed.
As far as serial killers go, Logan was boring. No genius-level IQ, no cryptic messages to the police, no delusions of grandeur. He simply killed six women and buried them in the backyard of his house. In his mug shot, his eyes were as pale as a blind man’s, his face waxy and drawn.
“It’s too bad he never ate anyone’s hands, or anything,” Celeste said to me, the first time we spoke. “That could have made your career.”
I laughed in shock because, of course, she was right. At first, I hoped that she would be a kind of mentor, but as time went on, we were both too exhausted for that. “I just don’t have the stomach for this kind of thing anymore,” she confessed to me, less than a week into the trial. “This fucked-up shit. Maybe it’s because I had kids. They made me soft.”
I did not have the excuse of motherhood. I worried that I was just weak.
That winter, I was also working on an article about a Crawford College student named Sara Morgan, who had been murdered by her boyfriend a month after Logan was arrested. Her body was found by a local housewife in the woods that surrounded Crawford College—only twelve miles from Kingston. Sara’s boyfriend, a diagnosed schizophrenic who had recently graduated from Crawford, had confessed almost immediately.
I told Celeste about this while she stirred her milkshake with a long metal spoon.
“It’s creepy,” she said. “But there’s not a connection, is there?”
“Not literally,” I admitted. “But I think, maybe, in a larger sense—”
Celeste cut me off. “I know the article you’re thinking of writing, and they are almost never any good.” She paused. “Maybe yours will be.”
It wasn’t the kind of encouragement I was hoping for, but it was unfair to expect much enthusiasm from Celeste about anything at that point. Neither one of us was sleeping well. A few times a week, I got stomachaches so painful that I couldn’t sit up straight.
But I kept researching Sara Morgan’s case, long after I had to, for reasons I couldn’t fully articulate to myself. I felt bad about it, like it meant I didn’t care enough about Logan’s victims. Maybe I was bored with them. Celeste was right. There was no real connection.
Even if Logan hadn’t been in jail when Sara died, he still wouldn’t have been a suspect. He strangled his victims. Sara Morgan’s throat was cut so deeply, according to the coroner, that her vertebrae were exposed.