The Lovely Bones (21 page)

Occasionally one of the tour guides or teachers would notice him standing there, unfamiliar even if amiable, and he would
be met with a questioning stare. He had a thousand lines to give them: “I used to bring my children here.” “This is where
I met my wife.” He knew to ground whatever he said in connection to some imagined family, and then the women would smile at
him. Once an attractive, heavy woman tried to engage him in conversation while the park guide told the children about the
winter of 1776 and the Battle of the Clouds.

He had used the story of widowhood and talked about a woman named Sophie Cichetti, making her his now-deceased wife and true
love. It had been like luscious food to this woman, and, as he listened to her tell him about her cats and her brother, who
had three children, whom she loved, he pictured her sitting on the chair in his basement, dead.

After that, when he met a teacher’s questioning glare he would shyly back off and go somewhere else inside the park. He watched
mothers with their children still in strollers walk briskly along the exposed paths. He saw teenagers who were cutting school
necking in the uncut fields or along the interior trails. And at the highest point of the park was a small wood beside which
he sometimes parked. He would sit in his Wagoneer and watch lonely men pull up beside him and get out of their cars. Men in
suits on their lunch hour or men in flannel and jeans would walk quickly into that wood. Sometimes they would cast a look back
in his direction—an inquiry. If they were close enough, these men could see, through his windshield, what his victims saw—his
wild and bottomless lust.

On November 26, 1974, Lindsey saw Mr. Harvey leaving the green house, and she began to hang back from the pack of running
boys. Later she could claim she had gotten her period and all of them would hush up, even be satisfied that this was proof
that Mr. Dewitt’s unpopular plan—a girl at regionals!—would never work out.

I watched my sister and marveled. She was becoming everything all at once. A woman. A spy. A jock. The Ostracized: One Man
Alone.

She walked, clutching her side in a false cramp, and waved the boys on when they turned to notice her. She kept walking with
her hand on her waist until they turned the corner at the far end of the block. At the edge of Mr. Harvey’s property was a
row of tall, thick pines that had been left untrimmed for years. She sat down by one of them, still feigning exhaustion in
case any neighbor was looking out, and then, when she felt the moment was right, she curled up in a ball and rolled in between
two pines. She waited. The boys had one more lap. She watched them pass her and followed them with her eyes as they cut up
through the vacant lot and back to the high school. She was alone. She calculated she had forty-five minutes before our father
would begin to wonder when she’d be home. The agreement had been that if she trained with the boys’ soccer team, Samuel would
escort her home and have her back by five o’clock.

The clouds had hung heavy in the sky all day, and the late-fall cold raised goose bumps along her legs and arms. The team
runs always warmed her, but when she reached the locker room where she shared the showers with the field hockey team, she would
begin to shiver until the hot water hit her body. But on the lawn of the green house, her goose bumps were also from fear.

When the boys cut up the path, she scrambled over to the basement window at the side of Mr. Harvey’s house. She had already
thought of a story if she was caught. She was chasing a kitten that she’d seen dart in between the pine trees. She would say
it was gray, that it was fast, that it had run toward Mr. Harvey’s house and she’d followed it without thinking.

She could see inside to the basement, where it was dark. She tried the window, but the latch lock was pushed in. She would
have to break the glass. Her mind racing, she worried about the noise, but she was too far along to stop now. She thought
of my father at home, ever mindful of the clock near his chair, and took her sweatshirt off and balled it around her feet.
Sitting down, she braced her body with her arms and then kicked once, twice, three times with both feet until the window smashed—a
muffled cracking.

Carefully, she lowered herself down, searching the wall for a foothold but having to jump the final few feet onto the broken
glass and concrete.

The room appeared tidy and swept, different from our own basement, where heaps of holiday-marked boxes—
EASTER EGGS AND GREEN GRASS, CHRISTMAS STAR/ORNAMENTS
—never made it back on the shelves my father had built.

The cold air from outside came in, and she felt the draft along her neck pushing her out of the shimmering semicircle of shattered
glass and into the rest of the room. She saw the easy chair and a little table beside it. She saw the large alarm clock with
luminous numbers sitting on the metal shelving. I wanted to guide her eyes to the crawlspace, where she would find the bones
of the animals, but I knew, too, that regardless of drawing a fly’s eyes on graph paper and excelling that fall in Mr. Botte’s
biology class, she would imagine the bones were mine. For this, I was glad she went nowhere near them.

Despite my inability to appear or whisper, push or usher, Lindsey, all alone, felt something. Something charged the air in
the cold, dank basement and made her cringe. She stood only a few feet from the open window, knowing that she would, no matter
what, be walking farther in and that she had to, no matter what, calm and focus herself to look for clues; but right then,
for one moment, she thought of Samuel running ahead, having thought he would find her on his last lap, then running back toward
the school, thinking he would find her outside, and then assuming, but with the first trace of a doubt, that she was showering,
and so he too would be showering now, and then waiting for her before he did anything else. How long would he wait? As her
eyes mounted the stairs to the first floor before her feet followed, she wished that Samuel were there to climb down after her
and trace her movements, erasing her solitude as he went, fitting into her limbs. But she had not told him on purpose—had told
no one. What she was doing was beyond the pale—criminal—and she knew it.

If she thought about it later, she would say that she had needed air and so that was what had gotten her up the stairs. Small
flecks of white dust collected at the tips of her shoes as she mounted the stairs, but she didn’t notice them.

She twisted the knob of the basement door and reached the first floor. Only five minutes had passed. She had forty left, or so
she thought. There was still a bit of light seeping in through the closed blinds. As she stood, again, hesitating, in this
house identical to our own, she heard the thwack of the
Evening Bulletin
hit the stoop and the delivery boy ring the bell on his bike as he passed.

My sister told herself that she was inside a series of rooms and spaces that, gone through methodically, might yield what
she needed, provide her the trophy she could take home to our father, earning her freedom from me that way. Competition always,
even between the living and the dead. She saw the flagstones in the hall—the same dark green and gray as ours—and imagined
crawling after me when she was a baby and I was just learning to walk. Then she saw my toddler body running delightedly away
from her and into the next room, and she remembered her own sense of reaching out, of taking her first steps as I teased her
from the living room.

But Mr. Harvey’s house was much emptier than ours, and there were no rugs to lend warmth to the decor. Lindsey stepped from
the flagstones onto the polished pine floors of what in our house was the living room. She made echoes up the open front hall,
the sound of every movement reaching back for her.

She couldn’t stop the memories slamming into her. Every one had a brutal report. Buckley riding piggyback on my shoulders
down the stairs. Our mother steadying me as Lindsey looked on, jealous that I could reach, with the silver star in my hands,
the top of the Christmas tree. Me sliding down the banister and asking her to join. Both of us begging the comics off our
father after dinner. All of us running after Holiday as he barked and barked. And the countless exhausted smiles awkwardly
dressing our faces for photos at birthdays, and holidays, and after school. Two sisters dressed identically in velvet or plaid
or Easter yellows. We held baskets of bunnies and eggs we had sunk in dye. Patent leather shoes with straps and hard buckles.
Smiling hard as our mother tried to focus her camera. The photos always fuzzy, our eyes bright red spots. None of them, these
artifacts left to my sister, would hold for posterity the moments before and the moments after, when we two girls played in
the house or fought over toys. When we were sisters.

Then she saw it. My back darting into the next room. Our dining room, the room that held his finished dollhouses. I was a child
running just ahead of her.

She hurried after me.

She chased me through the downstairs rooms and though she was training hard for soccer, when she returned to the front hall
she was unable to catch her breath. She grew dizzy.

I thought of what my mother had always said about a boy at our bus stop who was twice as old as us but still in the second
grade. “He doesn’t know his own strength, so you need to be careful around him.” He liked to give bear hugs to anyone who
was nice to him, and you could see this dopey love drop into his features and ignite his desire to touch. Before he was removed
from regular school and sent somewhere else no one talked about, he had picked up a little girl named Daphne and squeezed
her so hard that she fell into the road when he let go. I was pushing so hard on the Inbetween to get to Lindsey that I suddenly
felt I might hurt her when I meant to help.

My sister sat down on the wide steps at the bottom of the front hall and closed her eyes, focused on regaining her breath,
on why she was in Mr. Harvey’s house in the first place. She felt encased in something heavy, a fly trapped in a spider’s funnel
web, the thick silk binding up around her. She knew that our father had walked into the cornfield possessed by something that
was creeping into her now. She had wanted to bring back clues he could use as rungs to climb back to her on, to anchor him
with facts, to ballast his sentences to Len. Instead she saw herself falling after him into a bottomless pit.

She had twenty minutes.

Inside that house my sister was the only living being, but she was not alone, and I was not her only company. The architecture
of my murderer’s life, the bodies of the girls he’d left behind, began to reveal itself to me now that my sister was in that
house. I stood in heaven. I called their names:

Jackie Meyer. Delaware, 1967. Thirteen.

A chair knocked over, its underside facing the room. Lying curled toward it, she wore a striped T-shirt and nothing else.
Near her head, a small pool of blood.

Flora Hernandez. Delaware, 1963. Eight.

He’d only wanted to touch her, but she screamed. A small girl for her age. Her left sock and shoe were found later. The body,
unrecovered. The bones lay in the earthen basement of an old apartment house.

Leah Fox. Delaware, 1969. Twelve.

On a slipcovered couch under a highway on-ramp, he killed her, very quietly. He fell asleep on top of her, lulled by the sound
of cars rushing above them. Not until ten hours later, when a vagrant knocked on the small shack Mr. Harvey had built out
of discarded doors—did he begin to pack himself and Leah Fox’s body up.

Sophie Cichetti, Pennsylvania, 1960. Forty-nine.

A landlady, she had divided her upstairs apartment into two by erecting a Sheetrock wall. He liked the half-circle window
this created, and the rent was cheap. But she talked too much about her son and insisted on reading him poems from a book
of sonnets. He made love to her on her side of the divided room, smashed her skull in when she started to talk, and brought
her body to the bank of a creek nearby.

Leidia Johnson. 1960. Six.

Buck’s County, Pennsylvania. He dug an arched cave inside a hill near the quarry and waited. She was the youngest one.

Wendy Richter. Connecticut, 1971. Thirteen.

She was waiting for her father outside a bar. He raped her in the bushes and then strangled her. That time, as he grew conscious,
coming up out of the stupor that often clung on, he heard noises. He turned the dead girl’s face toward his, and as the voices
grew closer he bit down on her ear. “Sorry, man,” he heard two drunk men say as they walked into the nearby bushes to take
a leak.

I saw now that town of floating graves, cold and whipped by winds, where the victims of murder went in the minds of the living.
I could see his other victims as they occupied his house—those trace memories left behind before they fled this earth—but I
let them go that day and went to my sister.

Lindsey stood up the moment I focused back on her. Together the two of us walked the stairs. She felt like the zombies in
the movies Samuel and Hal loved. One foot in front of the other and staring blankly straight ahead. She reached what was my
parents’ bedroom in our house and found nothing. She circled the hallway upstairs. Nothing. Then she went into what had been
my bedroom in our house, and she found my killer’s.

It was the least barren room in the house, and she did her best not to displace anything. To move her hand in between the
sweaters stacked on the shelf, prepared to find anything in their warm insides—a knife, a gun, a Bic pen chewed on by Holiday.
Nothing. But then, as she heard something but could not identify what it was, she turned toward the bed and saw the bedside
table and, lying in the circle of light from a reading lamp left on, his sketchbook. She walked toward it and heard another
sound, again, not putting the sounds together. Car pulling up. Car braking with a squeak. Car door slamming shut.

She turned the pages of the sketchbook and looked at the inky drawings of crossbeams and braces or turrets and buttresses,
and she saw the measurements and notes, none of which meant any-thing to her. Then, as she flipped a final page, she thought
she heard footsteps outside and very close.