Also by Lindsay Hunter

Daddy’s

Don’t Kiss Me

Ugly Girls

Eat Only When You’re Hungry

RENEGADE BOOKS

First published in the United States of America by Roxane Gay Books,

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Renegade Books,

an imprint of Dialogue

Copyright © Lindsay Hunter 2023

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-349-13070-5

Renegade Books

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.dialoguebooks.co.uk

Dialogue Books, part of Little, Brown, Book Group Limited,

an Hachette UK company.

For everyone who’s still here

Contents

Part I

A House on Hot Springs Drive

Theresa

Jackie

The Realtor

The Boys

Nick

Jackie

Nathan

Theresa

Jackie

Adam

Douglas

Cece

Jayson

Jackie

Cece

Nathan

Jayson

Jackie

Theresa

Part II

The Crime Scene

Jessica Blender

Nick

The Investigative Journalist

Douglas

Adam

Samuel

Cece

Nathan

Cece

Jayson

Mike Shasta

Jayson

Jackie

Part III

Douglas

Cece

Acknowledgments

PART I

A House on Hot Springs Drive

The house didn’t ask for what happened, for what it had to hold, for the echoes it muffled, the wetness it dried. It was just a house, a collection of rooms. A divided space.

One of them hadn’t pushed the couch all the way into the corner, so it was a spot used for the little one to hide things or hide herself or cry when she got a little older and the house wasn’t so big anymore. There was a coin there still, dusty and forgotten, but at one time it had been her special thing, her beloved. The house knew how some things could feel gifted, how they suddenly appeared or were suddenly seen, how it could stop one of them in their tracks with wonder. A beam of sunlight angled through the sliding glass doors over and over and over and over and over and over, day after day after day after day after day after day, and the child played in it, the big ones stood in it with their hands on their hips, looking around, or they rushed through it, exploding the dust motes into chaos until they settled, calmed, into the beam, twirling and falling, and sometimes there was no one at all in the room, just the house and the light, and then one day the girl noticed it, saw the sunbeam, how it looked triangular, or like a blade, how it sliced into the room and was yellow but even more colors once she looked closer, and the house could do nothing but offer it. The house had no hands to wring, no shoulders to straighten, no eyes to see, no lips to lick. The house was just a house, imbued with its people and their strangeness, the loneliness they only showed to the house, the way the mother stared at herself in the mirror and pulled at her face or stood to the side and tried to make herself into a new thing, something taller and less slouched, something that smiled, something that could look at itself without trying to make itself into a new thing. Something that could endure the mirror, and the mirror in the next room, and the one in the bathroom, and the one by the door, and the one in the visor in the car, and the one in the reflection of a window, and the one inside her that showed something ruined, misshapen, discarded. The house wanted her to see the sunlight sword her daughter stood in daily now as though it filled her with something. The mother watched the daughter sometimes and in those moments the mother was beautiful, calmed, intact. The house saw how you could thrash alone to the loud music absorbed in the walls and you could throw all the pillows from your bed and you could throw something special into the trash and take it to the curb, where it was no longer of the house, and how there was power in that. In a banishment. The mother stood. Every day she stood, the way a house does, and she made her own light, the way a house does, and the house was just a house for a time. A loveliness, when a thing can just be a thing.

Does a house feel itself being noticed? Does it know its yellow windows, glimpsed from the outside, are irresistible? Is it the house’s fault for offering itself up so easily, so helplessly? Anyone can open a door; that’s not up to a house. Anyone can peer in, snoop around. Anyone can lie in wait. The child in her corner, the boy in the garage, always the house’s shame. Its smell, its stains, its darkness. The boy, when did he get in? Had he always been there? Was he like the furnace kicking on, day after day, over and over, a rheumy inhale and then an endless, roaring exhale? Was he the mice scurrying inside the walls; was he the blown fuse, easily thrown; was he the stuck window, the loose floorboard? Was he part of the house? Did the house do that to the mother? Did the house make a mess it couldn’t clean up? The house doesn’t know. The house can only offer what it has: screams, and stains, and blood, and the mother, slowly sinking toward the floor. She had a name. The house used to know it.

Theresa

In the Lindens’ garage there were plastic bins containing Christmas decorations, stockings and garland and the delicate papier-mâché angels and bells Cece Linden made in school that Theresa Linden wrapped in newspaper and sealed in bags, only to see that they’d flattened and crumpled as she unwrapped them every December. There were lawn tools, bicycles, old paint cans. High on the three inner walls were bare planks bracketed eighteen inches apart, shelves Adam Linden made himself shortly after the family moved in. They were too high up and the upper shelf remained empty. Lined up on the lower shelf were large plastic soda cups Adam used to store nails in every size, screws, washers, and bolts—things he’d bought in bulk over the years so he’d have something to put on the shelves. When the winter sun began to set, light streamed in through the wide, squat windows at the side of the garage that faced the Stinsons’ and showed spiderwebs as thick in the corners as the whorls of hair Theresa pulled from her daughter’s brush. Cece had never liked the garage. Later it would seem like a sign, something she should have paid attention to.

In the summer the air inside the garage turned thick, scented heavily with the smell of the Lindens’ cars and the wood walls and dust and faintly with the evergreen-scented candles Theresa used in her Christmas Eve centerpiece. On the bare concrete floor there was an oil stain in the shape of a hand, its fingers splayed wide. It was a late summer morning the day Theresa Linden’s body was found there, her face in the hand, her body curled as if it were in sleep, her hair blooming petals of blood and bone.

Theresa is seven years old, watching her sister use a rope to swing way out over the lake. Carissa lets go, falls, the water exploding around her, but it’s Theresa who gasps just before Carissa goes in. Like she can hold Carissa’s breath for her. Carissa surfaces, coughing, raking her hand down her face and over her hair. “Come on,” she calls to Theresa. But the rope is too far away to reach, dangling into the mucky water. “I think the hot dogs are ready,” she yells back. It seems like a sure way to distract her sister, but Carissa doesn’t go for it. “Oh my God, Rese,” she laughs. “You’re just afraid you’ll break your vagina.” This is how Theresa comes to be seen, in the way that family lore clings to stories that are illustrative but unfair, as someone who is afraid to take risks. “Forget it,” her sister will say any time she refuses to try a cartwheel, or a cigarette is offered, or someone holds a car door open, offering to whisk her away from school. “She’s afraid she’ll break her vag.”

Theresa is eighteen, and Carissa is twenty and pregnant, and the sisters are walking through Sears pointing at clothes and toys and soft, fluffy blankets the baby will need. They’ve named him Roy, a joke name Theresa came up with to cheer Carissa up, but now the name has stuck, the baby is Roy. Roy will have ears that stick out and scrawny legs like Carissa. “Thank God I don’t have to buy any of this crap,” Carissa says, looking away. Theresa knows she’s trying not to cry. Roy is being adopted by a couple they’re not allowed to meet. The day he’s born, Theresa’s mother has to ask the doctor to sedate Carissa so they can take the baby from her. “Don’t let them take him,” she says to Theresa. Her hair is sweaty on her forehead, her face pale. She’s whispering, but everyone can hear her. They all nod, of course, of course, no one will take him. Finally, she falls asleep, and Theresa watches Roy as they change his diaper, swaddle him in a new blanket, and wheel him out of the room in his bassinet. When Carissa wakes, it’s only Theresa in the room. Carissa sits up, looks around, knows. “I knew you’d be useless,” she says, and puts her hands over her face. They watch Ricki Lake on mute. At the commercial breaks, Theresa hands Carissa a new Kleenex.

Theresa is twenty-two, lying on the futon in her apartment, its broken spring knuckling her shoulder. She’s just had an abortion. She holds the remote but the TV is dark. She turns and vomits into the trash can she’d placed there just in case. She traded shifts so she could have this and the next day off. Her boyfriend thinks she’s cramming for a final. She’s told no one, only written a few lines of it in her diary. She longs to call Carissa, but imagining what her sister will say is enough to stop her. Carissa has two children now, goes to church every Sunday, works as the supervisor at a landscaping company, celebrates Roy’s birthday every year. Ungrateful is maybe something she would say to Theresa. Evil. Careless. None of it is louder than the relief Theresa feels.

Theresa is twenty-six, working in customer relations at the corporate offices of a national bank. She hasn’t had sex in three years. She has a brief, intense friendship with Samantha, a coworker. They take long walks at lunch and feed each other from paper sacks and spend every evening at Theresa’s, legs over each other’s laps, watching talk shows. Samantha is gone one day, fired, and it turns out she’s been forging Theresa’s signature on withdrawal papers.

Theresa is twenty-nine on a date with a man who says he plays semi-professional rugby. One of his eyes is swollen shut and he angles that side of his face away from her. Out of tenderness for his injury, she goes to bed with him but they can’t kiss because her brow might bump into his wound. He has stiff sheets and a lamp on the floor and a bare window she looks out of after they’re finished. “It’s hard to tell how high up we are,” she says. “The window is just a square of sky.” He pats her shoulder. After some silence, he says, “I actually have a girlfriend.” When Theresa gets home, she sees there is some blood on the shoulder of her favorite blouse, and she drops it into the trash can. “It’s time to grow up,” Carissa tells her. Carissa is pregnant again, and has to go, bath time is the worst. “Just pick someone and stick with them.” She hasn’t said the thing about Theresa’s vag in years, but it’s there in the subtext. Stop being so choosy, so scared. Start your life already.

Theresa is thirty-one when she meets Adam. She’s at a bar with her manager, a new low, and he’s just excused himself to go to the bathroom. All night, he’s found ways to rub himself against her, standing at the bar waiting for drinks or holding her chair out for her, and it’s clear he’d like her to come to the bathroom with him. But she’s already seen Adam. He’s with someone, a very pretty woman with a girlish headband in her hair. It’s that headband that clears the way for Theresa, that lets her walk up to the bar and pretend to ask for a drink, elbowing Adam as she does. Up close, he’s familiar. He has kind brown eyes, broad shoulders that curve slightly inward. He smiles at her; she sees that one of his front teeth crowds the other. “I think I know you,” she says. “Don’t I?” His date looks back and forth between them, the straw from her drink clamped tight in her mouth. “Remind me,” he says. She wants to collapse into his arms. Finally, she thinks. Carissa was right.

Theresa is thirty-two at the wedding. She wears an off-the-rack dress that is two hundred dollars more than she wants to spend and too tight across the chest. Carissa, her matron of honor, weeps loudly through the ceremony. “My sister always seemed like the lonely type,” she’ll say in her speech later that evening, using the back of her wrist to dab at her eyes. She’ll raise her glass and Theresa will see how happy Carissa is for her. She’ll hug Carissa, thank her for seeing what Theresa couldn’t see, but Theresa is uncomfortable that her family sees her that way, a lonely woman, nearly a lost cause. She’s lonely then and there, with everyone toasting her and Adam, with him bending to kiss her neck and whisper that her boobs in her dress are making him hard.

Theresa gets pregnant. It’s exactly like in the commercials, with the test that shows two pink lines and the husband who comes home and sees it and doesn’t know what it means, then grabs her and hugs her tight. The calls to family, Carissa shrieking and dropping the phone, the standing in what will be the baby’s room and imagining the stuffed giraffe, the comfy rocker, the diapers stored neatly on shelves. “This baby is so lucky,” Adam will say, resting his hand on her still-flat stomach. “You are going to be an amazing mom.” She drives by the abortion clinic only once. That she doesn’t get out of the car, doesn’t want to get out of the car, is enough for Theresa. Soon enough, the baby kicks, turns its whole body. “Do you ever think about Roy?” she asks Carissa on the phone. It’s been years since they’ve said his name, Carissa the mom of four now. All those years ago, just twenty years old, Carissa had felt those same jabs, flops, kicks. “Roy?” Carissa says. “Oh, Roy.” They are silent, listening to each other breathe, and then Theresa changes the subject to diaper pails.

Theresa is thirty-three when she gives birth to Cece. She won’t let them take her, won’t let them wheel the baby out to be weighed or bathed. The baby stays with her, in that room. “You’re being silly,” Carissa says. “The baby still has afterbirth in her hair. Let them take the poor thing.” Theresa struggles out of bed, wets a soft blue washcloth, and washes Cece’s head as best she can. Her scalp feels like velvet and Theresa is positive she sees the baby smile.

And here, the day Theresa meets Jackie Stinson, is where the story—the one neighbors and acquaintances and reporters and true crime enthusiasts love to tell and retell—here is where that story begins.

There’s something familiar in Jackie, too. She’s brash like Carissa, and funny like her too. But unlike Carissa, Jackie seems to find something she needs in Theresa. A stasis, a peace, some quiet. It’s easy to look back, after everything that will happen, and assume that there was some deeper meaning behind their friendship. More likely, it was a simple transaction—each woman needed a friend. New moms struggle to make friends, everyone knows that. Best to find someone equally in the thrall of infanthood, equally unable to talk about anything outside of diaper rash and feeding schedules and exhaustion, someone who can laugh about the disgusting state of their nipples and sit patiently during a bout of weeping.

The story ends this way: Several years from that day in the maternity ward, Theresa will find out Adam and Jackie are fucking. She’ll walk in on her husband with his head between Jackie’s legs, crouching the same way he does when they’ve lost something under the couch, his legs tucked under his ass and his weight in his hands, fingers splayed. He’ll be moving his head rapidly and Theresa will want to laugh. He never was good at finding anything.

The next day, Theresa will be murdered in her own garage. They’ll find her murderer with blood in his hair, on his face, in his nail beds, even some inside his socks. He’ll still be holding the crowbar. “I wasn’t sure where to put it,” he’ll tell the officer.

Jackie

There are some things, looking back, that I now believe I deserved.

I met her the day Jayson was born. Nick and I arrived at the new hospital built on the red clay of the old fairgrounds, Douglas riding Nick’s shoulders and amniotic fluid trickling into my socks. They said I nearly had Jayson in the hallway outside the delivery room. “Shh now,” the nurse kept saying, pushing my hair back on my head with the hot, wet palm of her hand. The rubber soles of her shoes shrieked on the brand-new floor. “You shush,” I finally said. I couldn’t see Nick or Douglas but I heard Nick tell the room I was a firecracker. I knew Douglas shouldn’t be in there, that he could probably see all my bells and whistles and that he felt afraid. I leaned up to tell Nick to take Douglas out, go get him some crackers from the vending machine, and out the baby slid. “Jesus,” the doctor yelled. The baby was scrawny and red, and didn’t want to eat, even when the nurses dripped sugar water on my nipple. He bopped his face against my breast and gave up, opening his mouth as if to bellow, though all that came out were angry little squeaks. “Aw,” one of the nurses said. “It’s like he can’t find you.” They took him to the nursery for bottles and he thrived. Away from me, he thrived.

Having a baby at the new hospital was something we’d looked forward to. Douglas was born in a squat concrete building that had three beds to a recovery room and dusty Christmas holly in the corners, though it was midsummer. The new hospital had generous windows along the back of the building facing the clay and the patches of wild switchgrass and, beyond that, a new subdivision of identical brick duplexes going up. The front of the hospital faced a sprawling parking lot and a four-lane road, and I guess there were fewer windows because of it. My room was at the front of the building, no window. “It’s a nice television,” Nick said, aiming the remote, Jayson over his shoulder like a dish towel and a spray of spit-up trickling down his back. “You can tell they splurged.”

“Mommy wants a window,” Douglas said, tucked in next to me, his head lolling on my aching breast. I couldn’t remember saying so out loud, but he looked at me the way he did a lot back then, proud to know something about me his daddy didn’t.

“That’s true, chubs,” I said, combing my fingers through his hair.

“They have ESPN!” Nick said.

Walking to visit Jayson in the nursery, I’d pass her room. Theresa’s. Her bed was by the window, which framed a piece of landscape that looked like a poster you might buy at Walmart for your guest bedroom. Sky, waving grasses, red clay. The TV off. Sun on her face. The baby in a pink swaddle always in her arms. Once, her husband brought balloons; another day, a box of chocolates. I watched him kiss her forehead, hold the baby like a bouquet, hand it back. Warmth spread through me and down my legs. I remembered when Nick didn’t know how to hold a baby.

Finally, one day, I went in, drawn to the light in the window and the quiet woman before it.

“You seem a lot better at this than I am,” I said. I was supposed to show up at the nursery at feeding times, and I did, but a few nurses had commented that most mothers showed up more. “Don’t you want to hold your baby?” they asked. Theresa, she wanted to hold her baby.

“Better at what?” she said. Her voice was deeper than I thought it would be. “Having hemorrhoids? Ignoring my stringy hair?”

I moved closer and I could see now that her face was oily and her gown was stained and her ankles were swollen, massive.

She had a window, and I didn’t, and it bothered me, but it drew me to her as well. Motherhood is an eternity of noticing, a prison of noticing. And once you notice, you have to decide whether or not you’re going to do something about it. We’re out of milk. The toilet won’t stop running. Your husband comes home late and then even later. You got a crappy room in the maternity ward. Does it matter whose fault it is? What are you going to do about it?

I don’t know if she’d agree with me. I never asked her. She was a good mother, and I was a bad one. Am.

All those years ago, I sat at the foot of her bed. “I’m Jackie,” I said.

“Theresa,” she said, and told me her baby was Cecilia, Cece for short. A banner plane flew low, crossing left to right in the frame of the window, the switchgrass bending with it. SHOP CHEAP AT SACKS, it read. Why do I remember that? Sometimes I think I keep these things for Cece. Maybe I’ll see Cece one day, and maybe she’ll ask me about her mom, and I’ll have something to give her. If only, I find myself thinking, she’d want something from me.

“Remember when this was the fairgrounds?” Theresa asked.

I nodded. We looked out her window, trying to place what ride was where. “I let the boy who ran the funhouse follow me in once,” I said. “I let him touch me under my shirt.” I’d never told anyone, not even Nick. While it was happening it had seemed exciting, the boy following me closely, his breath warming my neck, his fingers cold and bony. But there was a bright bulb over the exit door, and in the light I could see he wasn’t a boy but a man, perhaps nearly as old as my father, his mouth open and panting slightly, and I’d felt a rush of power and shame that made the whole thing feel unspeakable. Theresa laughed a little because I’d told it laughingly. She looked down at her baby nursing. “Honestly, I hope no one ever touches my boobs again.” I loved her immediately. Isn’t that how all the great hatreds begin?

I ended up having four babies, but she only ever had the one. I think about that a lot. Why give a mother like me all those kids, and a mother like her just one? It feels like I won something, some prize I don’t even want.

It turns out that feeling never goes away. The wondering why. There once was a woman named Jackie, and sometimes she let life happen to her, and sometimes she didn’t. At the end she stood around and thought, What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?