June didn’t want to move on. She couldn’t move on. She hounded her daughter’s best friend, Danielle, until Martha, the girl’s mother, firmly told June to leave her alone. June would not be so easily deterred. She called Grace’s other friends into her office, demanded they tell her every detail about her daughter’s life. She turned into a tyrant, firing off warning shots at anyone who dared resist.
She studied her daughter’s death the way she had studied for her degrees, so that by the end of it all, June could’ve written a dissertation on Grace’s suicide. She knew the left wrist was cut first, that there were two hesitation marks before the blade had gone in. She knew that the cut to the right wrist was more shallow, that the blade had nicked the ulnar nerve, causing some fingers of the hand to curl. She knew from the autopsy report that her daughter’s right femur still showed the dark line of a healed fracture where she’d fallen off the monkey bars ten years before. Her liver was of normal size and texture. The formation of her sagittal sutures was consistent with the stated age of fifteen. There were 250 ccs of urine in her bladder, and her stomach contents were consistent with the ingestion of popcorn, which June could still smell wafting from the kitchen when she ran upstairs to find her daughter.
The lungs, kidneys, spleen, and pancreas were all as expected. Bones were measured, cataloged. The brain was weighed. All appeared normal. All were in the predictable margins. The heart, according to the doctor who performed the autopsy, was unremarkable.
How could that be? June had wondered. How could a precious fifteen-year-old girl, a baby June had carried in her womb and delivered to the world with such promise, have an unremarkable heart?
“What’s that?” Richard asked, peering at her over the newspaper. When she shook her head, he said, “You’re mumbling a lot lately.”
She couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was annoyed or concerned. Did he know that today was the day? Was he ready to get it over with?
Richard had always been an impatient man. Twenty-one years in an eight-by-ten cell had drilled some of that out of him. He’d learned to still his tapping hands, quiet the constant shuffling of his feet. He could sit in silence for hours now, staring at the wall as June slept. She knew he was listening to the pained draw of breath, the in-and-out of her life. Sometimes she thought maybe he was enjoying it, the audible proof of her suffering. Was that a smile on his lips as he wiped her nose? Was that a flash of teeth as he gently soaped and washed her underarms and nether regions?
Weeks ago, when she could still sit up and feed herself, when words came without gasping, raspy coughs, she had asked him to end her life. The injectable morphine prescribed by the doctor seemed to be an invitation to an easy way out, but Richard had recoiled at the thought. “I may be a lot of things,” he had said, indignant, “but I am not a murderer.”
There had been a fight of sorts, but not from anything June had said. Richard had read her mind as easily as he could read a book.
He’d as good as killed her two decades ago. Why was his conscience stopping him now?
“You can still be such a bitch,” he’d said, throwing down a towel he’d been folding. She didn’t see him for hours, and when he came upstairs with a tray of soup, they pretended that it hadn’t happened. He folded the rest of the towels, his lips pressed into a thin line, and June, in and out of consciousness, had watched his face change as if she were looking at it through a colored kaleidoscope: angry red triangles blending into dark black squares.
He was an old man now, her husband, the man she had never bothered to divorce because the act would be one more reason for her name to appear beside his in the newspaper. Richard was sixty-three years old. He had no pension. No insurance. No chance of gainful employment. The state called it compassionate probation, though June guessed the administrators felt lucky to get an old man with an old man’s medical needs off their books. For Richard’s part, June was his only salvation, the only way he could live out the rest of his life in relative comfort.
And she would not die alone, unattended in a cold hospital room, the beep of a machine the only indication that someone should call the funeral home.
So the man who had robbed her of her good reputation, her lifelong friendships, her comfort in her old age would be the man who witnessed her painful death. And then he would reap the reward of the last thing, the only thing, they could not take away: the benefits of her tenure with the public school system.
June chuckled to herself. Two birds with one stone. The Harris County Board of Education would remit a check once a month payable to Richard Connor in the name of June Connor. They would be reminded once a month of what they had done to June, and once a month, Richard would be reminded of what he had done to her.
Not just to her — to the school. To the community. To Grace. To poor Danielle Parson, who, last June had heard, was prostituting herself in order to feed her heroin addiction.
June heard a loud knocking sound, and it took a few seconds for her to realize the noise was conjured from memory, something only she could hear. It was Martha Parson banging on the front door. She’d pounded so hard that the side of her hand was bruised. June had later seen it on television; Martha held the same hand to her chest, fist still clenched, as she talked about the monster in their midst.
Grace had been dead less than a month, and the police were back, but this time they were there to arrest Richard.
Whenever June heard a child make a damning statement against an adult, her default position was always disbelief. She could not be blamed for doing this at the time. This was not so many years removed from the McMartin preschool trials. False allegations of child abuse and satanic sexual rituals were still spreading through schools like water through sand. Kern County. Fells Acres. Escola Base. The Bronx Five. It was a wonder parents didn’t wrap their children in cellophane before sending them into the world.
More girls stepped up for their moments in the spotlight: Allison Molitar, Denise Rimes, Candy Davidson. With each girl, the charges became more unbelievable. Blow jobs in the faculty lounge. Fingerings in the library. He’d let them watch adult movies. He’d given them alcohol and taken suggestive photographs of them.
June immediately pegged them as liars, these former friends of Grace. She thought with disgust about the fact that she’d had these girls in her home, had driven them to the mall and the movie theater and had shared meals with them around her dinner table. June had searched the house, the car, Richard’s office at home and school. There were no photographs. The only alcohol in the house was a bottle of wine that had sat in the back of the refrigerator since June’s birthday. The cork had been shoved down into the open bottle. She’d pried it out, and the smell of vinegar had turned her stomach.
If June Connor knew about anything, it was teenage girls. Half her school day was spent settling she-said arguments, where rumors and innuendo had been used by one girl to tear down another. She knew the hateful, spiteful things they were capable of. They lied as a way of life. They created drama only to embrace the fallout. They were suggestible. They were easily influenced. They were spiteful, horrible human beings.
She said as much to the detectives, to the media, to the women who stopped her at the grocery store. Anyone who met June Connor during that time got the same story from her:
For his part, Richard was outraged. Teaching was his life. His reputation was sterling; he was one of those teachers students loved because he challenged them on every level every single day. He had devoted himself to education, to helping kids achieve something other than mediocrity. The previous year, four of his kids had gone on to full scholarships at Ivy League schools. Twice he had been voted teacher of the year for the district. Every summer, former students dropped by his classroom to thank him for making them work harder than they had ever worked in their lives. Doctors, lawyers, politicians — they had all at some point been in one of Richard’s English classes, and he had done nothing but help them prepare for their exemplary lives.
That first week was a blur; talking to lawyers, going to a bail bondsman in a part of town June had not known existed. There was an entirely different language to this type of life, a Latin that defied their various English degrees:
There is no bond tighter than a bond of mutual persecution. It was June and Richard against everyone else. It was June and Richard who knew the truth. It was June and Richard who would fight this insanity together. Who were these girls? How dare these girls? To hell with these girls.
June had often lectured Grace about responsibility. Like most children, Grace was a great subverter. Her stories always managed to shift blame, ever so subtly, onto others. If there was a fight, then Grace was only
