There had been a creative writing assignment she’d done for the instructor at the prison about growing up in her home. Some of the other inmates wrote about trauma, moving constantly or in the middle of the night, being homeless, hunger. Comparatively, the piece Kennedy scribbled was light and full of adolescent longing, and she realized now that she’d painted the past with an optimistic brush. She had forgotten how the walls of the Wynn house could feel like they were leaning toward her. “Close your eyes,” the instructor, Christina, had said. “What do you see? What do you smell?”
Kennedy suddenly leaped over the detritus, catlike, onto the purple duvet of the bed. She stared up at the posters, and between them the blank spots where investigators had taken others they deemed “objects of interest.” The movie poster for Basic Instinct had been removed by police because it was about a serial killer. Laine and Gerry had objected to the image of Sharon Stone’s fingernails tearing into Michael Douglas’s back. There was another poster their parents detested that had gone too: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, naked except for tube socks they wore over their penises, as though having a teenage-sized amount of desire automatically made a person suspect. The detectives had seized Kennedy’s diaries. The copy of Jane Eyre. Some poems she had written. They’d taken school textbooks from both girls with graffiti inside the covers that had been scrawled by numerous hands over the years, hoping to divine secret plots out of the palimpsest of sluts, gross, penis-breath, love him (with hearts), and hottie.
One officer had held up a CD by My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult as though it were evidence, exclaiming in his rural accent, “Woo boy. Got something here.” The album was Confessions of a Knife and it was not a good look.
The week of the killing the investigators had shown Kennedy photographs to try to jolt her: the wounds blunt, flat, with dark bruising around them, as if they’d been punched into Haley. “Now, who did this?” they asked, waiting for her to implicate herself or Berk. She spat tears, not words.
At the pretrial they did their best to find a fiction that would support Kennedy having a motive. The prosecutor even read aloud from her copy of Jane Eyre after dramatically taking it out of evidentiary plastic. He called Haley a “Christian martyr, like Helen Burns in the book. And like Helen, Haley died at the hands of a sick, evil cult.” He read Kennedy’s own annotation in the book, blown up and projected onto a slide. “‘Haley is our Helen, methinks.’ That, Your Honor, is the defendant plainly grooming a sacrifice.”
Kennedy always felt she had written it to show that Haley was her best friend, that they would stand up for each other, the bond unbreakable. But she never got to tell them that. They were already preparing another slide: a page where she had circled Lowood, the name of Jane and Helen’s school, and written in Longwood beside it, the suburb where Haley had lived.
The defense attorney rose and argued: “Your Honor. We’re prepared to have several scholars from UVA testify that interpretation of Jane Eyre is without merit and simply ridiculous. The character of Helen Burns died of consumption, no violence whatsoever. The works of Charlotte Brontë should not, cannot be entered into this trial’s evidence.
“If Haley is Helen, then please tell me: who in this scenario is Rochester?” her attorney railed. “Find Rochester and you’ll find her killer!”
Even at that young age, Kennedy had realized what lawyers did: waste a lot of time.
Now Kennedy jumped off the bed and dodged across the room for the bathroom. She made it to the toilet before the dry heaves began. After, she rinsed her mouth with Scope and went back in her room and lay down, shivering. Foolishly, she’d thought the crime would be gone after serving her sentence, but finally being in her teenage room didn’t bring freedom, only frightening reminders.
Chapter 3
Everett Kimberson leaned his elbows on the sill of the bedroom window looking out at the downtown. It was one of the only condo towers in the city, sleek, shiny, and modern amid the wide white-pillared historical buildings Richmond prided itself on. He’d bought it with the money from the civil suit against the Wynns and gotten the key half a year before. In his early twenties, every time he’d planned for an apartment, or a room away at school, it had somehow gotten short-circuited. As move-in day grew closer, Marly Kimberson’s face would take on that behind-glass look, as though parts of her were being permanently pinned down. She never told him not to go. She would say that if Haley’s death meant her surviving child could live a better life, then Jesus meant for something to come out of the pain. That method was more effective and he always pulled out, angering his friends and losing deposits.
The condo was something she’d been able to come to terms with gradually—his mom could see it unfolding in a solid and predictable manner, the amount of time it took for them to finish the building while Everett showed Marly photos and conceptual renderings on a website. It didn’t mean his departure was really permanent.
He used the apartment more as a clubhouse with friends than a living space, a place to drink and let off steam. It was furnished, but the drawers and closet were half-empty, as he often returned to his mom’s house in the suburb of Longwood. For the amount his family had struggled to get what they deserved for their suffering—the long duration of the civil suit against the Wynn family had driven his parents finally apart, if Haley’s death hadn’t done that already—it did seem like he ought to have been able to bring more happiness into the place. Everett had had a Budweiser flag as a curtain on the large window—it was his only decorating decision—but the condo association had made him take it down. There was really no other use for the condo, except sex. But that he felt worse and worse about.
“Don’t go,” Everett said over his shoulder to the woman in his bed. He knew she wasn’t asleep even though she’d been lying there for over an hour. “I don’t want you to.”
He heard her stir, the rustle of sheets as she sat up. A moment later she was standing behind him, her arms around his waist, one hand on his chest. She’d come the day before and stayed over, something she hadn’t done yet. Everett could feel the smooth touch of her underwear and the warm press of her against his back. She left a kiss low on his shoulder blade as she put her face and her hair against him. Everett watched the white trail an airplane made across the steely November sky. He knew she hadn’t meant to sleep over. Carter had places to be.
“Why shouldn’t I go?” she asked. “It’s what I’m supposed to do. I have to be with them.”
Everett turned to face Carter. He put a hand against her light brown hair and looked down into her eyes. “Once you go, you go.”
Carter stood on tiptoe and reached her arms around Everett’s neck, kissing him on the mouth. When he pulled away again she sat down on the bed and began to tug her jeans on.
“Do you know when we were young I used to have her dreams?” Everett watched her retrieve a pale pink bra from the floor and put it around her shoulders. It was a front-loader, and she pushed her breasts into the cups and secured them. “Not her dreams exactly. More like things that had happened to her that day, even if I wasn’t there for them. Sometimes stupid things. Her playing with a neighbor’s dog with a rope knot, or writing something on the chalkboard and the class laughing. She peed her pants in first grade because she’d been holding it in; she was ashamed to use the bathroom because they had fussy locks and she thought someone might walk in on her.”