trees, the lake only a matter of yards away, so that as I got out of my car, I could hear its waves lapping softly against the shore, which calmed me even more.
Rebecca didn’t wait for me to join her, but walked quickly to her door. As I approached, moving across the moist grass, I could hear the keys tinkling softly as she drew them from the pocket of her skirt. She faced the door, her back to me, the long dark hair falling to her shoulders as she searched for the right key.
She found it quickly, opened the door, and turned on the small lamp that rested on a table beside it. I followed her inside, then stood silently, watching her as she moved about the room, depositing her things in various places, the briefcase on the table by the window, her small black handbag in a chair by the door. A few feet away, I could see her bed, cluttered and disheveled, through a partially open door.
“Would you like something to drink?” Rebecca asked.
“No, thanks.”
She nodded toward a chair to my right. “Sit down.”
I did, then watched as she took a seat opposite me, drawing her legs up under her in a gesture that seemed casual and unstudied, as if she’d become somewhat more at ease in my presence.
“I’m sorry about what happened in the restaurant,” I told her.
“What did happen, exactly?”
“I saw it all. The murders, I mean. The way he killed them one by one.”
“How much do you actually know about the murders?” Rebecca asked. “How they were done, that sort of thing.”
“Not much, really,” I admitted. “I know he used a shotgun.”
“So what you ‘saw’—I mean at the restaurant a few minutes ago—that wasn’t based on anything you knew?”
“No.”
“You never actually saw any of the bodies, right?”
“No,” I answered. “I never went inside that house again.” I shrugged. “I used to say that I never saw any of my family alive again, but actually, I never saw any of them at all.”
I could remember a few things about that morning, however, and I told Rebecca what they were. I remembered my mother standing at the kitchen counter as I raced by her on my way to school. And Jamie walking far ahead of me, his cap pulled down against the morning rain. And I remembered Laura, the feel of her fingers wrapped around mine as we walked toward school together. “Bye, Stevie,” she’d said, as she’d dropped me off at my school, then moved down the sidewalk, a slender girl with long dark hair, a body disappearing into a net of rain.
“Laura was the last one I saw,” I told Rebecca.
“And she was walking alone? Not with Jamie?”
“They never walked together.”
“But they went to the same school, didn’t they, the one a few blocks from the grammar school where you went?”
“Yes, but they never walked together,” I said. “I always walked with Laura.”
“Who did Jamie walk with?”
“Nobody,” I said. “He didn’t have any …” I stopped, remembering something. I waited until it was clear in my head, then I told Rebecca.
“Someone put flowers on his grave,” I said. “Not my mother’s or Laura’s. Just Jamie’s.”
“When?”
“Just before I left for Maine with Uncle Quentin,” I answered. “Aunt Edna took me over to the cemetery so that I could say good-bye. They’d all been buried side by side, with Laura on one side of my mother and Jamie on the other.”
It had been a cold, snowy day, the wind snarling around us as we’d climbed the low hill that led up to the graves. It had played havoc with Aunt Edna’s long black coat, whipping at it madly while she struggled forward, tugging me along with her, sometimes harshly, so that I’d tripped occasionally and gone facedown into the snow. “Get up, Stevie,” my aunt had kept saying. “Get up! Get up!”
It had taken us almost five minutes to reach the graves, and by that time Aunt Edna was exhausted. She clutched irritably at her coat and glared down at the three snow-covered mounds, each with its own gray stone. My eyes were drawn to the one on the right, to Laura’s grave. A layer of snow nearly covered her name. I could make out only the large, ornate “L” and the faint outline of the final two letters. The date of her birth was completely covered, but I could see the word “Novem ber” carved below it, though the date and year were covered with snow.
Aunt Edna jerked my hands. “Say good-bye, Stevie,” she snapped.
Obediently, I whispered, “Good-bye, Laura,” then repeated the process with my mother and, at last, with Jamie.
“That’s when I noticed the flowers,” I told Rebecca. They were small, blue flowers, and the wind had nearly stripped them, but I could see a few buds, nonetheless. There were no flowers on the other graves, just on Jamie’s.”
“Where did you think they’d come from?” Rebecca asked.
To my surprise, I recalled exactly where I thought they’d come from. “Well, I remember looking at them and thinking to myself, ‘He’s still here.’“ I stopped and looked at her somberly. Even to me, it seemed too bizarre to be true. “I was only nine,” I admitted, “so who else could I have possibly thought might put them there? Who else
