“Oh, I’m sure. Is it almost done?”
“Hard to know.”
“Those poor girls,” she said, and I knew that she was saying that because she didn’t know anything about them yet. Not that my mother would say that they deserved to die for being poor or trashy or unlucky, but she, like many, would prefer to save her grief for the Sara Morgans of the world. It is snobbishness, and a particularly cruel variety of it, but it’s something else as well. At a certain point, you realize the world is so bad, that it’s easier to pretend that people deserve the terrible things that befall them. That way, at least, you can pretend that you are safe.
“Are you proud of it?” she asked me.
“What?”
“Of what you’re writing, Juliet. Do you think it’s good work?”
If I were a teacher, I would give myself a B. If I was generous.
“Yes.”
“And it’s not—you know. Those awful trashy pieces that they always write about these sorts of things.”
People write awful trash because other people read it, is what I wanted to say. She was right that sometimes stories about violence were gratuitous and exploitative. But sometimes they were just true.
“No. Just the facts. Nothing lurid.”
“Good, good. You know, I was thinking, maybe you should come to the city for your birthday. We can do something nice. Go for dinner.”
My thirty-third birthday. Thirty-three, with no husband, no children, and a career not nearly glittering enough to justify those absences.
“Oh. That’s really nice of you. Sean and I already have plans, though.”
“Of course. Just thought I’d ask.” She sounded a little skeptical. We both knew that Sean wasn’t a plan-making kind of person, though he did, occasionally, come through.
“I should get going,” I told her. “Still have work to do.”
“Of course. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
The click of the line warmed me with relief.
I wondered about the parents of Sara’s killer. His father ran a small but successful chain of health food stores in New Hampshire and Maine. His mother taught middle school French. He had an older sister, Gemma, who was also present at his hearing. She had her first child in June.
Being a parent sounded like hell to me. Mr. and Mrs. Campbell probably spent at least two decades dealing with the terror of their daughter ending up like Sara (or Meadow, or Jasmine). What would they do now that their own son was one of those people they’ve been afraid of all these years?
Once, when I was in high school, I stole four tubes of cheap lipstick from a drugstore—two pink, one red, one purple. When my mother found them, price tags still stuck on, under the sink in the bathroom, she told me that the next time I did something like that, she’d call the police herself. I wouldn’t be a good parent if I protected you from the consequences of your own actions, she said.
The killer’s parents had hired a lawyer, a good one, from New York, to represent their son. Did that make them bad parents? Bad people? He and Sara had dated for almost three years. Surely Sara had met his family, maybe even visited them once or twice. Did they spend the holidays together? Had she ever joined them on a family vacation? Did she send Gemma a baby present? Were they invited to Sara’s funeral? When I spoke to them, all they would say was that they were very sad for the Morgans’ loss. Their son’s lawyer, I suspected, had instructed them not to say anything else.
I finished my whiskey and poured myself another glass, then drank it as I stared out at the snow and waited, anxiously, for Sean to come home.
The feeling wasn’t new—I had felt it, in varying levels of intensity, since I met him—but it got worse after I started covering the Logan case. I wasn’t completely sure why. It was a kind of horror that made me crave intimacy. It made me crave this man, who was, statistically, the person most likely to murder me. Sean and I met at a party during my second year of graduate school. We slept together that night, at his house, on his dirty bed with its dark blue sheets.
A week later, I ran into him at the grocery store. He hugged me and kissed my cheek. He greeted me with such joy, as if I were a childhood friend, as if I were someone he had loved for a long time, not a girl he’d fucked once. I really liked that. I gave him my number, and he called me the next day.
Four days a week, Sean works at a retirement home. The rest of his time he dedicates to playing keyboards in his band, Kill Olivia.
“Who is Olivia?” I asked him once.
“Uh, no idea. They were called that before I joined.”
“You never asked?”
“No. I don’t think it’s even a real person, honestly. It just sounds good.”
I stood in the kitchen for a long time, staring out the window. Then I poured myself another drink.
“How do they manage it? Serial killers?” I asked Celeste once. “I can barely keep my shit together, and I only have one job.” I was having a lot of days when things like showering and buying groceries seemed not only pointless but basically impossible.
“It energizes them,” she said, without hesitation. “They’re at work, they’re waiting in line at the DMV, whatever, and they’re thinking about what they’ve done, what they’re going to do. It’s how they get through the day.”
Often violence is a kind of eruption, like Sara Morgan’s murder. I thought of the beautiful Crawford campus, the little brick buildings, the manicured lawns covered in snow, the thin, clever students in their expensive winter shoes. Some of them would be talking about her in therapy for years, I knew. Even if they didn’t know her well, their proximity to something so cruel would change their world. It would be like coming home and finding a wolf waiting for you in the living room, licking its paw.
But occasionally violence could be something else entirely. Sometimes an unthinkable, unforgivable act, or in Logan’s case, a whole series of them, could make everything around it shine. I saw it for myself when I drove to his house, that terrible, ugly old house where he killed six women. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other ugly old house, except for the smell.
Still, it was as if all that death formed a kind of halo around the house. If I believed in ghosts, I might have thought it was the six women, hovering above, as if to say: He kept us in his basement like so much trash. But look at us now. We’re angels.
I felt it again whenever I brought up the topic of Logan, the way even people like Sean, who knew so much better, got just a bit excited at the idea of what he did. Like there was glamour to it—glamour in the oldest sense of the word, a kind of illusion, an awful magic. As if killing six women were so terrible that it makes a person just slightly supernatural.
I should have known better, too.
When I heard the door open, I nearly broke my neck, leaping out of my chair to greet him.
“I’m working on a new article,” I told him, as he took off his shoes and hung up his coat. “About this other murder, at Crawford.”
“Christ. Another one?”
“Yeah. Unrelated. A college girl. Her boyfriend stabbed her.” I knew he slit her throat. But “stabbed” was easier to say. You could keep a conversation going if you used the word “stabbed.” “Slit” silenced a room.