old neighborhood when he could. He took these risks early in the morning or late at night, when the wild pheasants that had once been plentiful still traversed the road and his headlights would catch the hollow glowing of their eye sockets as they skittered from one side of the road to the other. There were no longer teenagers and young children sent to pick blackberries just up to the edge of our development, because the old farm fence that had hung so heavily with them had been torn down to make room for more houses. He had learned to pick wild mushrooms over time and gorged on them sometimes when staying overnight in the overgrown fields of Valley Forge Park. On a night like this I saw him come upon two novice campers who had died after eating the mushrooms’ poisonous look-alikes. He tenderly stripped their bodies of any valuables and then moved on.
Hal and Nate and Holiday were the only ones Buckley had ever allowed into his fort. The grass died underneath the boulders and when it rained, the insides of the fort were a fetid puddle, but it stayed there, though Buckley went there less and less, and it was Hal who finally begged him to make improvements.
“We need to waterproof it, Buck,” Hal said one day. “You’re ten – that’s old enough to work a caulking gun.”
And Grandma Lynn couldn’t help herself, she loved men. She encouraged Buck to do what Hal said, and when she knew Hal would be coming to visit, she dressed up.
“What are you doing?” my father said one Saturday morning, lured out of his den by the sweet smell of lemons and butter and golden batter rising in pans.
“Making muffins,” Grandma Lynn said.
My father did a sanity check, staring at her. He was still in his robe and it was almost ninety degrees at ten in the morning, but she had pantyhose and makeup on. Then he noticed Hal in an undershirt out in the yard.
“My God, Lynn,” he said. “That boy is young enough…”
“But he’s de-lec-ta-ble!”
My father shook his head and sat down at the kitchen table. “When will the love muffins be done, Mata Hari?”
In December 1981, Len did not want to get the call he got from Delaware, where a murder in Wilmington had been connected to a girl’s body found in 1976 in Connecticut. A detective, working overtime, had painstakingly traced the keystone charm in the Connecticut case back to a list of lost property from my murder.
“It’s a dead file,” Len told the man on the other end.
“We’d like to see what you have.”
“George Harvey,” Len said out loud, and the detectives at neighboring desks turned toward him. “The crime was in December 1973. The murder victim was Susie Salmon, fourteen.”
“Any body for the Simon girl?”
“Salmon, like the fish. We found an elbow,” Len said.
“She have a family?”
“Yes.”
“Connecticut has teeth. Do you have her dentals?”
“Yes.”
“That may save the family some grief,” the man told Len.
Len trekked back to the evidence box he had hoped never to look at again. He would have to make a phone call to my family. But he would wait as long as possible, until he was certain the detective in Delaware had something.
For almost eight years after Samuel told Hal about the drawing Lindsey had stolen, Hal had quietly worked through his network of biker friends to track George Harvey down. But he, like Len, had vowed not to report anything until he was sure it might be a lead. And he had never been sure. When late one night a Hell’s Angel named Ralph Cichetti, who admitted freely he had spent some time in prison, said that he thought his mother had been killed by a man she rented a room to, Hal began asking his usual questions. Questions that held elements of elimination about height and weight and preoccupations. The man hadn’t gone by the name George Harvey, though that didn’t mean anything. But the murder itself seemed too different. Sophie Cichetti was forty-nine. She was killed in her home with a blunt object and her body had been found intact nearby. Hal had read enough crime books to know that killers had patterns, peculiar and important ways they did things. So as Hal adjusted the timing chain of Cichetti’s cranky Harley, they moved on to other topics, then fell silent. It was only when Cichetti mentioned something else that every hair on Hal’s neck stood up.
“The guy built dollhouses,” Ralph Cichetti said.
Hal placed a call to Len.
Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I’d had or imagined having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den.
I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing – my death – connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there watching.
At Evensong one night, while Holly played her sax and Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer joined in, I saw him: Holiday, racing past a fluffy white Samoyed. He had lived to a ripe old age on Earth and slept at my father’s feet after my mother left, never wanting to let him out of his sight. He had stood with Buckley while he built his fort and had been the only one permitted on the porch while Lindsey and Samuel kissed. And in the last few years of his life, every Sunday morning, Grandma Lynn had made him a skillet-sized peanut butter pancake, which she would place flat on the floor, never tiring of watching him try to pick it up with his snout.
I waited for him to sniff me out, anxious to know if here, on the other side, I would still be the little girl he had slept beside. I did not have to wait long: he was so happy to see me, he knocked me down.
Seventeen
At twenty-one Lindsey was many things I would never become, but I barely grieved this list anymore. Still, I roved where she roved. I collected my college diploma and rode on the back of Samuel’s bike, clinging on to him with my arms wrapped around his waist, pressing into his back for warmth…
Okay, it was Lindsey. I realized that. But in watching her I found I could get lost more than with anyone else.
On the night of their graduation from Temple University, she and Samuel rode his bike back to my parents’ house, having promised my father and Grandma Lynn repeatedly that they would not touch the champagne tucked inside the bike’s pannard until they reached the house. “After all, we’re college graduates!” Samuel had said. My father was soft in his trust with Samuel – years had gone by when the boy had done nothing but right by his surviving daughter.
But on the ride back from Philadelphia down Route 30, it began to rain. Lightly at first, small pinpricks flashing into my sister and Samuel at fifty miles per hour. The cool rain hit the hot dry tar of the road and lifted up smells that had been baked in all day under the hot June sun. Lindsey liked to rest her head between Samuel’s shoulder blades and take in the scent of the road and the scrappy shrubs and bushes on either side. She had been remembering how the breeze in the hours before the storm had filled all the white gowns of the graduating seniors as they stood outside Macy Hall. Everyone looked poised, for just a moment, to float away.
Finally, eight miles away from the turnoff that led to our house, the rain grew heavy enough to hurt, and Samuel shouted back to Lindsey that he was going to pull off.
They passed into a slightly more overgrown stretch of road, the kind that existed between two commercial areas and that gradually, by accretion, would be eliminated by another strip mall or auto parts store. The bike wobbled but did not fall on the wet gravel of the shoulder. Samuel used his feet to help brake the bike, then waited, as Hal had taught him, for my sister to get off and step a few feet away before he got off himself.
He opened the visor of his helmet to yell to her. “This is no good,” he said, “I’m going to roll her under those trees.”
Lindsey followed behind him, the sound of rain hushed inside her padded helmet. They picked their way through the gravel and mud, stepping over branches and litter that had gathered at the side of the road. The rain seemed to be getting heavier still, and my sister was glad she had changed out of the dress she’d worn to commencement and into the leather pants and jacket that Hal had insisted on getting her despite her protests that she looked like a pervert.
Samuel wheeled the bike into the stand of oaks close to the road, and Lindsey followed. They had gone the week before to get haircuts at the same barber shop on Market Street, and though Lindsey’s hair was lighter and finer than Samuel’s, the barber had given them identical short, spiky cuts. Within a moment of removing their helmets their hair caught the large drops that filtered through the trees, and Lindsey’s mascara began to bleed. I watched as Samuel used his thumb to wipe the traces from Lindsey’s cheek. “Happy graduation,” he said in the darkness, and stooped to kiss her.
Since their first kiss in our kitchen two weeks after my death, I had known that he was – as my sister and I had giggled with our Barbies or while watching Bobby Sherman on TV – her one and only. Samuel had pressed himself into her need, and the cement between the two of them had begun to set immediately. They had gone to Temple together, side by side. He had hated it and she had pushed him through. She had loved it and this had allowed him to survive.
“Let’s try and find the densest part of this underbrush,” he said.
“What about the bike?”
“Hal will probably have to rescue us when the rain stops.”
“Shit!” Lindsey said.
Samuel laughed and grabbed her hand to start walking. The moment they did, they heard the first thunderclap and Lindsey jumped. He tightened his hold on her. The lightning was in the distance still, and the thunder would grow louder on its heels. She had never felt about it the way I did. It made her jumpy and nervous. She imagined trees split down the middle and houses on fire and dogs cowering in basements throughout the suburbs.
They walked through the underbrush, which was getting soaked despite the trees.
