So Much Pretty (7 page)

She was a long-legged skinny kid at the time, with wavy blond-white hair. A very small girl. Just baby-looking. She had these tiny freckles and big blue eyes, translucent eyes. She was really just a sweet kid. Had an incredibly alert mind. I liked Alice. I knew how it was to be the littlest kid in class. It can make you pay extra attention to the details.

Later that year she won a county-wide science contest funded by the poultry industry, for designing a parachute and landing device for a raw egg. She built it out of foam and wire and the plastic things that hold six-packs together. She could launch the egg, and with this thing she built, it would land without breaking nine out of ten times. Very cool thing for a child to be able to do.

By the time she started high school, we were running stories about her or her projects twice a year. She was top of her class, she was captain of the swim team, volunteered as a hospital aide. Few parents could ask for more in a kid. But she wasn’t the typical “good student.” You always saw her doing things around town, kind of weird things, like trying to draw the world’s longest hopscotch game in chalk on Main Street. There was no interference with traffic, but Dino put a stop to it after four or five blocks.

She and her friends also played a game they called Bigger Better.
Alice and this tall skinny boy I used to think was her brother and another girl named Megan would come by the newspaper office sometimes after school with random objects and ask if I would trade them something bigger or better. They did this all through town, these sweet, bored, nerdy kids. They would start out with a rubber ball or a paper clip around three o’clock and end up with a used microwave or a cracked and moss-covered lawn ornament by the time they had to go home, then start it all again the next day. The best they did was start out with a spool of thread and end up with a dented apartment-sized washer/dryer that actually worked. I offered them fifty bucks, but they let it go for a bag of Hershey’s Kisses. Bigger Better would be the resonant theme for Alice throughout the time she lived in Haeden. She was an achiever.

It’s true that I was the one who made decisions to cover this kid, but anyone would have. She was incredible—and not a rich kid, no private lessons or things like that. Just, you know, herself. Her dad worked part-time for Soil and Water, and I often got maps and information from him. Her mom worked from home on occasion, proofing medical textbooks. I loved writing about her until I hated it.

Unlike the White case, the Piper case produced mountains of official information, and nothing the police gave me was redacted.
Nothing
. They would just hand stuff over like I was their buddy, names, addresses, and phone numbers still visible. Not a line of black marker. Illegal shit, too. Like names and addresses of juveniles. This was unusual, as I hadn’t been able to get even the blotter from Dino when I first got to town. He said the paper never needed the blotter before, and there was nothing to report. “You think people want to read gossip about their neighbors being in a domestic?” he’d asked. “Or about somebody’s uncle touching ’em where they shouldn’t? People don’t want to read that kind of stuff about their neighbors; that’s not real crime, it’s just sad. Plus, that shit gets around before the paper comes out, so I don’t know why you’d need the blotter.”

During the Piper investigation, I would walk into the little police station and ask to see documents, and the secretary would hand them over, whole depositions and interviews. I thought I’d gotten lucky and tried to hide it from Dino, but although he wouldn’t say anything for attribution other than the usual “we are pursuing all avenues,” he would give me anything I asked for. Even things I didn’t ask for. He thought he had uncovered a conspiracy. That belief is the one thing he and Alice Piper had in common. Belief that they were seeing evidence of a cell. There were times when I suspected Dino truly thought he was going to tie it all back to Al Qaeda or Earth First.

People don’t know much about the details, and consequently, a lot of details were simply made up. The event happened two weeks after White’s body was found, not the next day, which has become the common urban legend. It wasn’t like that.

Reporters from everywhere descended on the town. They were using the nut graphs from my original stories, filing their pieces from the Alibi or the Rooster, stopping in to the
Free Press
to talk. To try to get me on record. I knew I had primary-source stuff they didn’t, and a better understanding of the locals and the cops, despite Dino’s feelings about what I’d written. And I knew they wanted to fuck me over in the national press too. I had to stay on top of the story. For a lot of reasons.

What I had seen and what I had researched were not working out well for me in those months before my twenty-ninth birthday. I’d put up with five years of living in Haeden, writing about high school football games and town board meetings so I could use my downtime to gather information about state and federal environmental policies. So I could see how it all worked, find out where things were quietly buried. I had not expected to get drawn into any real town news at all. I spent my time between forensics and file photos. And if I went a day without writing, I would start to feel physically ill.

The
Free Press
had pictures of Alice on file from the time
she was in seventh grade, which everyone wanted later. We sold prints of the one you’ve seen. It was taken the summer before it all happened. In it she’s smiling, tan and freckled and hair short and choppy and bleached from the sun. She has this loving look on her face, standing in front of the butterfly house she designed for the elementary school. Butterfly was her event, and the swim team sponsored the project for the little kids. In the picture her shoulders are strong and defined, her body an athlete’s body, her eyes bright, ice blue, a dimple on her left cheek. She is looking straight at the camera. I read somewhere that someone had enlarged and reproduced it, that it became a staple of college-town poster shops, a decorative motif for the walls of many young women’s rooms.

Claire

HAEDEN, NY, 1998

C
LAIRE WATCHED AS
the dark green Lexus pulled up to the curb in front of the Rooster and Theo stepped out, then reached back into the car for something that he put in his pocket. He stood a minute and waved as the car merged back onto Route 34, then he headed into the bar.

“They just drop him off like that?” Harley asked. “Why do they never stay?”

“Too good for us,” Ross said, but he only half meant it. He was proud of his sister the professor, and he liked being with the boy. Plus, he knew she didn’t like the old-time music, and it would only offend people if she hung around rolling her eyes. Theo walked through the dim bar toward the back booth where they sat. Claire watched him smile when he saw Ross. He was wearing the same shirt he’d had on the day before, and it looked like someone had used a wet comb on his hair. Before he reached their table, Alice called to him from the dartboard, and he ran to her without a hello to his uncle.

“He’s too good for us, too,” Gene joked.

“Nah,
he’s
got his priorities straight,” Harley said. He looked at his watch briefly and then back to the small stage by the front window. Then he propped his elbows on the table and smiled. His long gray hair just touched his shoulders. He said, “As long as we’re on the subject of snobs, didjah see the Haytes bought a bunch of new signage over there at their shit ranch? Me and Annie were over to drop off some Girl Scout cookies for Bev, and they got those alleys between the tanks marked with street signs now—one of ’em is Niklaus Way.”

“Shit,” Ross said.

“I don’t get it,” Claire said. She leaned her back against Gene’s chest at the booth where they were all sitting, and he wrapped his arms around her waist. His hands were rough, fingernails dirty. His forearms were deeply tanned now, the band tattoo turning ever bluish and indistinct. He had never been stronger since they had been together, or happier. When he rested his chin on her shoulder, she could smell Dove soap.

“Oh, they’re naming parts of their property after golfers, is all, but I wonder how much the signs cost.” Harley looked up just as Alice ran by, following Theo toward the door, and he caught her around the waist. “Hey, little Al, before you and your boyfriend start running off.” He pulled a rectangular envelope out of his pocket. “I got you them bee-balm seeds from Annie.”

“Thanks!” She kissed him on the cheek. She opened the envelope and peeked inside. “Thank you very much.”

“Now, these oughta attract the right kind of insects to your garden,” he said. “You let us know if you want some different variety, ’cause she’s just got ’em all saved up and waiting. And don’t forget, you gotta date with Annie to teach you how to make a slug trap with beer.”

Alice hugged him around the neck.

“All right.” Harley patted her on the back. “
Now
you can go.”

“Where are you off to?” Gene asked Alice.

“The river.”

“Pay attention,” Ross and Claire said in unison.

“Don’t go farther than the base of the bridge,” Gene said.

“That’s like two feet away!” Alice complained.

“That’s right,” Gene said, then turned back to the conversation at the table while the children ran out. “That dairy’s had a pretty big effect on the surrounding land. I’d be surprised if anything within a few miles of where they’re dumping their shit will be able to certify organic.”

As always, this was a conversation killer. The table waited
for Gene to explain some technical thing about soil that would depress them, or describe some new dire situation with giant agribusinesses like Gen-Ag-Tech, then finish with the demand that they all go to more town meetings. Heavy as that topic was, Claire knew it pleased him to talk about it. He loved the fight. In the city, after he had left his job and started the greenhouse, he was out at meetings a few times a week, or up in Union Square with his urban farm buddies, getting the word out. In Haeden, town meetings were fine once a month, but nobody would come every time like he wanted. And they stopped giving him the “I’ll try to show up” line because it meant he’d call their houses, offer to give them rides. Show up with Alice and a loaf of zucchini bread and a gallon of cider.

Claire hated to see this happen. She knew people should get more information in a town this size, but she also knew how far away everyone was from one another, how much time they spent driving or working during the day. Gene didn’t get tired like other men. He never had. “You should be making this speech over at the Alibi,” she said. “You’re preaching to the converted here.”

“I’m trying to
motivate
the converted,” he said. They all laughed.

“Yeah, besides,” said Ross a little drunkenly, “we don’t need no Alibi, pardon the pun. They don’t care about the dairy. They’re all a bunch of rich folks over there—thinking
we’re
the rich folks ’cause we went to college.” He paused and nodded at them, then seemed to realize he hadn’t quite made a point. “That GI Bill helped me make some cash, boy. Can’t tell you how valuable my degree in American studies turned out to be.”

“I’m sure,” Claire said. “You get ten dollars more an hour on roofing jobs if you can quote from
The Pentagon Papers
.” They laughed and clinked their pint glasses, but these things did disturb Claire. How little money they had and how much they’d all studied something else and had no training or history
in the things they were doing. The fact that if they didn’t have the garden, they really would be scraping by. They made just enough for rent and bills and thirty dollars a week for groceries; the fact that the garden depended on the weather and on their health—things largely outside of their control—was mentally exhausting. She was still baffled by how anyone lived on upstate wages. And despite all the cries of poverty at the Rooster, she suspected most of the people she was talking to had family wealth, had safety nets. She knew they did in Constant, though it was a sore subject.

“You know I’ll show up, man,” Harley said to Gene. “But this shit’s been going on for years, and I mean like fifty years. The Haytes got more than a couple connections helping them out.” He finished the rest of his pint. “Best thing is for everyone to just have their own garden. Don’t eat from farmers that contract with them, so you don’t get all the chemicals and shit.” He patted Gene on the shoulder and went back to the circle of chairs by the bar’s front window, where his wife was already tuning her stand-up bass. Annie was tall and strong. She had the knotty hands of a string musician, her salt-and-pepper bangs hung above dark blue eyes, and her face was lined from smiling. She winked at Harley as he walked toward her. Claire watched her mouth the words “Hi, lovey” to him. Claire adored them. Somehow they’d made it work here. And somehow Harley did manage to stay on top of all the politics without losing faith when things didn’t go their way. She wondered if he’d been like Gene when he was younger. Annie and Harley reminded her of their friends in the city. They shared a similar fatalism. Playing out every week, planting their own food, bitching about the suburban mentality, trying to do what was right, not even entertaining an idea that regular people, people concerned about their status or standing, were anything but jackasses. Annie had told Claire one time that she and Harley were having financial troubles and they made themselves feel better by saying “Oh well—if it doesn’t work out, we can always
kill ourselves.” Annie laughed so hard telling her that, she had to wipe tears from her eyes, and Claire was struck by how hard and how weird they were and she loved them.

The rest of the band finished their drinks at the bar or headed for the bathroom before the next set. The group was made up of older folks, men and women in their fifties and sixties who had moved to Haeden as hippies when they were young. And taken the “back to the country” idea seriously enough to start a band in which one of the principle instruments was a washboard. They were a beautiful spectacle, exuberant and especially buoyed by four or five pints as the day cooled down after work. They were like godparents to Gene and Claire, kind and grateful that a young, like-minded family had moved to town. Claire rested her back against Gene’s chest and listened to Harley sing.
Shady Grove, my true love, Shady Grove, I say, Shady Grove, my true love, bound to go away
.