There are two types of people in this world: those who drive by fast, avoiding the scene of a tragedy, and those who slow to a crawl, chicken heads bobbing up and down through the windows just to catch a glimpse of where a young girl died.
After the tragedy on the farm, we got a little of both types. Those who wanted to avoid us, and the creeps who wouldn’t leave us alone.
At school, there were stirrings … I heard a few things, but since I was only in third grade at the time, a lot of the true grisly details were shielded from us.
But it didn’t stop us from creating our own.
“Someone killed her. Hacked her up with a chainsaw. She must have pissed someone off right good.”
“I heard aliens abducted her then dropped her down from the sky.”
“They fed her to the pigs on the Breyas farm.”
“Oink oink, Natalie. Oink oink.”
Lies. All lies.
We didn’t even own pigs, dammit.
It wasn’t until I turned the ripe age of fourteen, the same age Jenny was when she died, that I learned some things that were true.
Jenny Juliott wasn’t killed on my family’s farm—she was dumped there. She had been strangled and stabbed, and the police knew who did it, because the killer confessed: the confessor’s name was Chrissy Cornwall.
Chrissy Cornwall: resident Austin tough girl who grew up on the “other side of the tracks”. It just so happened that that “other side” was across the creek and through the woods from my family’s farm.
Chrissy was fifteen when she committed the murder. She had jet-black hair, oddly streaked with flakes of gray at an early age—or was it white, like lightning? I couldn’t be certain. I knew her even less than I knew Jenny.
Chrissy and Jenny were not friends; they didn’t even attend the same school.
Chrissy was “homeschooled” by her mother—and by “homeschooled”, I mean that they requested to teach her at home but never did. Unlike Jenny, who grew up in a nice middle-class home with a stay-at-home mother and a pastor father and attended Austin Middle School with most of the other kids in town, Chrissy was an outcast. An unknown.
Jenny bought ripped jeans from outlet malls and painted her nails black with twelve-dollar polish. Chrissy’s pants were ripped with time, and from scrapping with her hoodlum brothers on the front lawn of her daddy’s trailer lot.
Jenny was smart, pretty. Chrissy was … I don’t know what you’d call her. Poor white trash, I guess.
On paper, Jenny and Chrissy had nothing in common. But there was one thread that tied them together, and that thread had a name: John Bishop.
John went to school with Jenny and the others, and he and Jenny were dating. But, unbeknownst to Jenny and the rest of the kids, John had a girl on the side—the dirty girl whose parents didn’t send her to school, the girl with the strange black-gray hair who lived in a trailer.
And that trailer was a hop and a skip from my family’s farm.
There were many people to blame for Chrissy’s actions—her parents for their lack of supervision and education, the state for not following up on reports of abuse, the school for letting a girl who didn’t attend there kidnap another in the school parking lot …
But most of all, we blamed the guilty party: Chrissy herself.
She was jealous and angry, and determined to make Jenny pay for messing around with John, whom she felt she had a claim to.
Those are the scarecrow details.
Over the years, much more has come out. But some parts are still a mystery. I guess when it comes down to it … you can never fully understand the heart of a person—why would anyone kill someone over a stupid boy? And to do it so brutally…
I hadn’t thought about the case in over a decade. Chrissy had been tried and convicted, sentenced to life in prison despite her age at the time of the crime. I used to be obsessed, but not any more.
The media had forgotten, as had I; we’d moved on to similar cases, ones with gorier details and more exciting bylines splashed across the nightly news.
But, of course, Austin hadn’t forgotten. And as much as I tried to push it away, I hadn’t let it go either. Jenny was always there; a memory, a warning … a piece of my childhood I couldn’t get back. Perhaps there was a small part of me that blamed her death for the fallout of my own childhood…
A lot can change in thirty years—but a lot can stay the same.
The third step on the corkscrew staircase still creaks when I step on it; the bathroom and cellar still stink of Clorox and mold like they did when Mom and Dad lived here.
Inheriting my family’s farm ten years ago should have been a blessing, and when I was thirty, it had sort of felt like one. But thirty turned into thirty-five, and just last week, I celebrated my fortieth birthday the way I did my thirty-ninth—alone.
Wearing only socks and undies, I tiptoed from my room—my parents’ former bedroom—and made my way for the stairs. Every light in the house was off, which was how I liked it. If I can’t see the shadows, then they can’t see me…
As I wound my way up the stairs, I caught a glimpse of moonlight through the picture windows in the kitchen … it can’t be much later than two, maybe three, in the morning…
So, what woke me?
There were sounds, but nothing unusual. The creaky old floorboards, the low hum of the refrigerator downstairs, the soft ticking of the grandfather clock in my office, which I’d converted from Jack’s old bedroom.
Sometimes I caught glimpses of the place as it was before … Mom in the living room reading paperback mysteries, Dad at the table with the Times, and Jack mounted up in the living room watching Star Wars … their ghosts,
