My articles were usually human interest, cutesy things: local firehouse dog honored, controversy over parking kiosk, high school auditorium dedicated to late teacher.
Bad things happened here, like they happened everywhere—local man dead of a drug overdose, local woman indicted for vehicular manslaughter—but they were not my department. Our regular crime reporter was on maternity leave, so the Logan trial became my responsibility.
My newspaper had written about Sara Morgan three times. The first headline was SEARCH INTENSIFIES FOR CRAWFORD STUDENT. We covered her again when her body was found and her boyfriend charged with murder, and a third time when he was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. There was no need, according to my editor, for an update. The case was as closed as a case could be.
That didn’t deter me from driving to the Crawford campus to see if anyone would talk to me. This was during the third month of Logan’s trial.
The students at Crawford were mostly dressed in dark wool coats and leather shoes. There were none of the crazy dyed hair and arms full of bracelets that I remembered from my own college days.
I found a girl drinking coffee by herself inside the campus center. Her dark lipstick had stained the edge of the paper cup. She told me her name was Odile. I introduced myself as a reporter, and her eyebrows shot up. When I named the paper, she looked a little disappointed.
“I’m writing an article about Sara Morgan,” I lied. “Did you know her?”
“Oh, no. I mean, it’s a small school, so everyone kind of knows everyone. But we weren’t, like, friends.”
“What about her boyfriend?”
“No. I’ve seen him around. He’s really handsome.” She shook her head apologetically. “That’s weird to say. Sorry. I’ve never spoken to him.”
“OK.” I made my voice gentle. “Can you tell me how you heard about the murder?”
She flinched at the word. Beneath her heavy makeup, she looked extremely young. I wondered if she’d skipped a grade or two at some point.
“They had an assembly. The president made an announcement. It was terrible. People were screaming and crying. I was crying, too, and I didn’t even know her. It’s just awful.”
“People were upset?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’m just curious about the atmosphere on campus. How people have reacted. What they’re saying.” All these college kids, most of them from respected, white, upper-middle-class families. This was probably the closest to violence they had ever been.
“It’s … weird. I don’t know. People are sad, but it’s not like we’re the most cheerful bunch of people to begin with, you know? I think we’re starting to get back to normal.”
Sara Morgan had died only three months earlier. To a bunch of eighteen-year-olds, I supposed, that might as well be an eternity. I thanked the girl for her time and left her my card.
I told Celeste about my trip, hoping she would admire my determination. She didn’t.
“It sounds like a depressing waste of time,” she said. “Don’t you have enough death to deal with?”
“I could ask you the same thing. You’ve been covering this shit for years.” I almost said decades, but I didn’t want her to think that I thought she was old.
She shook her head. “I’ve built up my immunity. You have to do it slowly. Otherwise you’ll have a nervous breakdown. You might have one anyway.”
What did she mean, her immunity? Hadn’t she just told me how having kids had weakened her? I was beginning to suspect that Celeste’s advice, though given with absolute confidence, was at least partly bullshit. I slurped my milkshake, feeling despondent.
“The NGRI is interesting,” Celeste admitted. “Those are rare. Even for rich kids.”
“I know,” I said.
“He must have had a good lawyer. Someone expensive. That could be your angle.”
“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t really give a shit about the boyfriend. Sara was the one I wanted to write about.
“Look at this,” Celeste said, gesturing around the diner, which was empty except for us and an old woman delicately eating a salad. “Six dead women. It should be a media circus. But no one gives a shit.” We were now three months into the trial, and the only reporters who still showed up every day. Sometimes Celeste slept on my couch when she was too tired to drive back to the city.
“Maybe Sara Morgan would make them give a shit,” I said.
She shook her head, a little annoyed. “Do you know how many college girls get killed by their shitty boyfriends?”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s a rhetorical question,” she admitted, slurping. “I don’t have the exact statistics. But, a lot.”
I considered asking about her daughter. I knew that she had one, though she rarely spoke about her. Given what Celeste saw every day, how did she resist the temptation to lock her daughter in a tower? I wanted to lock myself in a tower most of the time. Maybe being a parent required a kind of willful stupidity, a belief that your child would neither be the person to whom something terrible happened nor be the person who did the terrible thing. I wished I could ask her, but in the context of what we were discussing, the topic felt obscene.
I moved to upstate New York after graduate school because my boyfriend, Sean, had inherited a house from his mother. I could never get used to that part of the world, how unrelentingly grim it was, with its empty houses, its disused gas stations and naked trees lining the highway. Winter was actually a relief, the snow covering everything like a thick, soft blanket.
According to Sean, it was not always like that. A lot of people moved up to Poughkeepsie to work at IBM in the early 1980s, including his father. It was, briefly, a nice place to live. In 1993 the company cut over three thousand jobs, and the area has been suffering ever since.
When we first moved here, Sean took me to a restaurant in downtown Saugerties. As we were ordering appetizers, a woman came up and started licking the window, her whole tongue, dotted with sores, pressed flat against the glass.
At home, I hung up my coat and sat down at my desk with a glass of whiskey. Next to my computer was a bright purple sticky note with the names and ages of all of Logan’s victims.
Jasmine Ware, 32
Paulina Gonzales, 31
Meadow Simpson, 24
Mary Knapp, 27
Amber Lawson, 33
Vanessa Freeman, 19
Sara Morgan was twenty-one years old. I wished that I had chosen a different color. The purple struck me now as garish, maybe even disrespectful.
I decided to call my mother. She lived in the city. I spoke to her two or three times a week on the telephone, and visited at least once a month.
“Hi, Mom. Everything OK?”
My mother was a psychiatrist. Her office, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was decorated with white orchids in terra-cotta bowls, and blue douppioni curtains. Framed above her desk was a drawing I made when I was five or six, of a golden retriever wearing a crown. I wasn’t sure how I came up with that. We never had a dog. My dad was allergic.
“Yes. How are you?”
“I’m good. I’m a little worn-out. This trial …” I didn’t really want to talk to her about it.