Read All Over

The summer Melissa turned 12 was when the murders happened. Or more precisely, when the two victims disappeared. At least a handful of Wilston’s 5063 residents stubbornly held out hope until both bodies had been recovered. In early June, Marissa Johnson, the 32-year-old, had gone missing after she left for her receptionist job at a veterinarian’s office. Just a few weeks later, Melinda Gacy never came home after going go-karting with her uncle and some friends. As the haze of Independence Day weekend set in, hushed conversations about the disappearances thrummed alongside the cicadas.

Melissa read every detail about the cases in the Wilston Bugle. Each week, the coverage would become more breathless, lurid. When Melinda’s body was discovered just days after the sulfur scent of fireworks had cleared the air, naked and bound at the wrists to an old black birch tree in the forest that stretched the county line, the headlines screamed: PRETEEN MURDERED IN OUR BACKYARD. The text was superimposed on the sixth grade class photo of Melinda that had become inescapable that summer, and which captured the essence of early adolescent awkwardness: the big Coke bottle glasses, an ambitious, asymmetrical bob she probably would have regretted later in life, a smattering of acne along her jawline. Meanwhile, “missing” signs featuring Marissa’s thin-lipped smile and long blond hair were posted on every storefront.

Even at her age, reading the newspaper was normal, expected in her household. Melissa’s mom had been a writer at the Bugle since Melissa was a toddler, publishing human interest stories on all the characters who gave their small town its charm: the hippie glass blower, the single mom who’d started her own cheesecake business she ran out of a van, the mustachioed eccentric who restored Model Ts. When Melissa was two years old, she used to take naps under her mom’s desk, soothed to sleep by the white noise of the keyboard and the heat of a nearby radiator. But she read the murder coverage furtively, when her dad was out mowing the lawn or her mom was occupied in the garden, channeling some latent awareness that those stories conveyed certain truths about the world that she was expected to still dutifully ignore.

It didn’t escape her that both victims had names just a couple letters removed from her own. As she lay in bed at night, counting the seconds between the thunder claps and flashes of lightning to gauge each summer storm’s retreat, Melissa became convinced that the similarity was more than mere coincidence. It was only a matter of time, she told herself. She was next.

Soon, the same sense of premonition overcame her in the light of day. When her piano teacher went to answer a phone call, briefly leaving Melissa alone in the cavernous church rehearsal room where she had her lessons, she broke out in a cold sweat. At the public pool where she celebrated her birthday each year, she scanned the lawn chairs and picnic tables for any men sitting alone, letting her ice cream cake melt into a puddle as she kept vigil. The commencement of the school year brought no relief. As she waited at the bus stop on chilly September mornings, despite being within shouting distance of her front door, Melissa scrutinized each passing vehicle, bracing herself for one of them to slow to a halt. In her mind’s eye, her would-be abductor drove a pick-up truck, probably red.

And each Thursday, the paper kept coming. It was hard to imagine Melinda in the grisly configuration the Bugle recounted every week. It was impossible not to.

****

By the time Halloween rolled around, Melissa’s preoccupation with the murders had reached full-blown obsession. She no longer simply read the coverage, but clipped the relevant articles once each week’s paper had moved to the recycling pile, careful to time her excisions so that no one would notice the missing pages. She kept each article, folded in half and sometimes in quarters, in a shoebox underneath her bed, which soon became two. She used a highlighter to emphasize key facts and scribbled notes in the margins, her fingers becoming smudged with ink.

She’d committed to memory what both victims had been wearing when they disappeared. These details appeared in the newspaper more than once. Melinda had been dressed in cut-off shorts, a red tank top, and her Adidas sneakers with the rainbow laces. She’d put in her new contacts, which she thought made her look older and more sophisticated. Marissa had been wearing a sleeveless sundress and sandals, bracing herself for eight hours behind a desk in an office with unreliable air conditioning amidst the thick Virginia humidity.

At school, only one friend, Chloe, had any sense of Melissa’s new hobby. Chloe and Melissa had been close ever since Wendy, Melissa’s mom, interviewed Chloe’s mom Abigay for the paper when the girls were in the fourth grade. Abigay was from Jamaica, and had started selling beef patties at the local farmer’s market after moving to Wilston with Chloe and her older brother Devon, bringing much needed flavor to the bland local food scene. Matthew, Chloe’s stepdad, was a white, Wilston-born college professor with two teenage sons of his own, and whether it was her fluency moving between two cultures or a lifetime of being the only girl in the house, Chloe brought a degree of confidence and charisma to everyday interactions that Melissa could only quietly dream of emulating.

When Melissa got on the bus on Halloween morning, relieved once again to have survived her 10 minutes at the bus stop, Chloe, donning a black cat ear headband to mark the occasion, had saved a seat for her. As Melissa approached, she could tell something was different.

“Did you hear?” Chloe stage whispered, as Melissa eased into the seat next to her and put her backpack between her feet.

“Hear what?” she said, intrigued but mildly suspicious as she took in Chloe’s wide eyes. She glanced around to see if whatever news Chloe had to share was likewise animating conversations throughout the bus, but she didn’t notice any of her schoolmates with the same rapt expressions on their faces.

“They arrested the uncle,” Chloe pronounced, her voice taut with the thrill of breaking news. “Everyone knew it was him but they finally did it. They found his pocket knife in the woods.”

“Wait, what do you mean?” Melissa said. “When?” Her sole source of info on the cases was the Bugle. The nightly news rarely covered happenings in Wilston, and though the family computer was newly equipped to surf the web, she only used it to play Oregon Trail. Melissa found herself feeling jealous, betrayed, even, that Chloe had somehow scooped her, despite her months of diligent recordkeeping. Her heartbeat accelerated.

“Michael told me,” Chloe explained. Her older step-brother was a new recruit with the Wilston Police Department, having taken the entrance exam right after high school. “He said the guy didn’t even put up a fight. You could tell by the look on his face that he was guilty and he knew it was over. And now he’s in jail.”

Melissa had anticipated this moment for months, and she could tell from Chloe’s triumphant expression that she was expecting a big reaction. She waited for the wave of relief that a resolution to the case should surely bring. Even if Marissa’s likely killer was still out there, she’d always assumed that whoever had kidnapped Melinda, presuming it was a different person, posed the bigger threat to her personally. After all, they were nearly the exact same age. If she’d lived a few streets over she and Melinda would have even gone to the same school.

But instead her sense of dread stayed firmly rooted, and alongside it, an unsettling feeling of loss. Following the investigation had at least given her unease a focal point, sharpening but also delimiting her fears. Yet as it seemingly reached a conclusion, she felt none of the solace she’d expected. A door had opened within her that summer, and an arrest and conviction would not close it.

****

November passed in a fury. All of a sudden the sun was setting at 5:00pm, and the air had shifted from crisp to cold. The trees were barren, the pretty phase of fall having come and gone. Melissa occasionally thought of Melinda’s family, what it must feel like to approach the holidays with her gone. Several years ago her maternal grandmother had died, but that was a predictable kind of loss. Their grief, she imagined, was incalculable.

Meanwhile, her own life was brimming with small humiliations. A few days before Thanksgiving, Melissa got her first period while wearing her favorite khaki flares. She’d had to go to the school nurse and borrow a pair of Wilston Junior High sweatpants for the rest of the day--the second time she’d required a midday outfit change in as many weeks. One morning after math class, all three of the sixth grade homeroom teachers had cornered her to stage an intervention about her spaghetti strap shirt, one of her favorite thrift store finds. “It’s not fair to the boys,” Miss Spencer had said. “They get easily distracted.” The sheer cardigan sweater Melissa was also wearing was deemed insufficient as a coverup, and so she begrudgingly donned her P.E. shirt until the bell rang.

After Melinda’s uncle John had been arrested, the case moved relatively quickly. A jury was impaneled, the prosecutor made a harrowing opening argument. The Bugle increasingly illustrated its coverage with courtroom sketches or John’s mugshot, his handlebar mustache somehow making his guilt seem all the more obvious. Former classmates and family members continued to leave flowers and small tokens of remembrance at the makeshift memorial that had been created in the pagoda by the soccer field at Melinda’s school. But as the temperatures continued to drop, their contributions slowed.

****

In December, there was finally a break in Marissa’s disappearance. Her car had been found in a national park two hours away, seemingly abandoned. Police were combing the property and felt confident they would have an answer about her disappearance within days, if not hours. Her ex-husband had once again been called in for questioning.

The Bugle broke the news, but Melissa didn’t have a chance to read the paper after school as normal. Her mother’s car was waiting for her at the curb when 8th period ended. Wendy honked the horn when she saw her daughter come out. Melissa cut across the grass toward the car, a quizzical look on her face.

She didn’t have to wait long for an explanation. “Chloe’s missing,” her mother said as soon as Melissa opened the door, her face grave and colorless. “Abigay’s been looking for her all day. She never came home from school yesterday. Have you seen her? Where do you think she could be?”

Melissa felt her insides hollow. She struggled to catch her breath enough to respond as snippets from the headlines clouded her vision and echoed loudly in her ears. Only when the ajar car door began to ding did Melissa realize she’d frozen in place, as if time itself had stopped.

“I have no idea.” Her voice shook as she hoisted herself into the passenger seat. “She didn’t say anything to me. I just assumed she was sick.”

Wendy held her gaze for one meaningful extra second before pulling away from the curb. “We’re going to drive to her house. Abigay’s at the police station, they were no help on the phone so she decided to go in person. Are you sure you can’t think of anywhere she might have gone? Anything she’s said the past few days?”

“Mom, I told you, I have no idea. She didn’t mention anything. If I knew where she was I would say so.”

Melissa’s breath began to steady but she felt her cheeks unwittingly redden, struck by her mother’s mildly accusatory tone. Yet perhaps it was all in her imagination. The past few months–as she’d been covertly monitoring the cases, justifying her wardrobe choices to women 20 years her senior, and navigating the banal brutality of junior high, where one misstep could doom one’s reputation–had left her in a defensive posture, increasingly aware that all manner of misfortune, tragedies large and small, could easily be attributed to her choices.

Wendy sighed audibly and put on her turn signal. They drove in silence toward Chloe’s neighborhood. As they turned into Chloe’s driveway, Abigay was parking in the garage. Even from a distance Melissa could see her face was wet with tears.

****

That weekend Melissa and Wendy joined a search party. Along with Matthew and Chloe’s brothers, they combed local parks and posted missing person flyers in shops and restaurants around town. Abigay stayed home by the phone, calling every friend and relative she could think of. Each time the phone rang she immediately broke out into a sweat, her hope to hear Chloe’s voice on the other end of the line unbridled and visceral. Chloe’s dad pledged to come down later in the week, seemingly setting aside the utter rancor of he and Abigay’s divorce, and her aunt was driving up from North Carolina to provide support.

The school week passed in a blur. Wendy insisted on joining Melissa at the bus stop each morning and meeting her there in the afternoons, and though the first day she felt a twinge of embarrassment, Melissa actually took comfort in her mother’s company. The bus rides themselves were lonely, and Melissa typically stared out the window in silence, distracting herself by assessing all the Christmas decorations adorning the front lawns they passed en route. Every year the lights and lawn ornaments seemed to get more extravagant, as if there were an unspoken competition to express Christmas cheer. She couldn’t pay attention in class, repeatedly parsing her last conversations with Chloe and daydreaming about the trips to the ice rink they usually took this time of year.

On Thursday the Bugle arrived and Melissa scoured it for mention of Chloe’s disappearance, filled with an irrational hope that the newspaper would reveal some break in the search she hadn’t heard directly from Chloe’s family. Instead, she found nothing. The cover story offered a grim final update on Melinda’s case. Her body had been discovered in a pond during the state park search two weeks before. Shortly thereafter the ex-husband confessed, and a perfunctory trial was set to begin in weeks.

A week later the front page story was about the high school wrestling team reaching the state championship. In the crime section on page A7, below the fold, was a small story about Chloe, next to a write-up about the scourge of graffiti at the local movie theater. “Parents Concerned After Another Local Girl Goes Missing,” the headline read. There was a small photo of Chloe’s smiling face, though the resolution was so poor she was barely recognizable.

****

On New Year’s Eve Melissa was awoken by the phone ringing at dawn. She heard her mother in the kitchen, speaking in soft but urgent tones. Shortly after replacing the phone in its cradle, she appeared in Melissa’s doorway. Tears were streaming down her face but her lips were curling upward, her laugh lines visible.

“They found her,” she said. “She’s coming home.”

Wendy came and sat on Melissa’s bed and folded her in her arms, smelling her hair and kissing the top of her head the way she would when she was a toddler. Melissa said nothing but Wendy could feel her daughter’s body quietly wracking with sobs. She used to be disturbed by Melissa’s silent way of crying but now took comfort in its familiarity, feeling blessed to have had the time and the attention to learn her child’s idiosyncrasies.

As the relief washed over her, it occurred to Melissa that her mother had been reading all the same news articles. All the moms had. And that well before the murders they’d all probably had an eerie feeling at a bus stop or averted eye contact at a gas station or felt their breath quicken when they heard footsteps behind them in a parking lot. The isolation she’d felt in her anxiety was false. The terror was miserably mundane.

As it turned out Chloe had been with her father the whole time. He’d picked her up after school that day with an exuberant “surprise!,” reassuring her that her mother had granted permission for the visit. Along the five-hour drive up to New York, Chloe had become increasingly convinced that was not, in fact, the case, but she had no way of contacting home. Her father spoke feverishly about how they would celebrate Christmas together, painting a picture of extravagant gifts and home cooked meals. But when they got to his sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment, the fantasy quickly gave way.

For the next two weeks Chloe barely saw sunlight. Her father left for work at 5am, leaving her with no keys, no money, and an out-of-service phone. He’d installed a lock on the outside of the door, which his delinquent landlord had failed to notice. She passed the time watching old VHS tapes and eating microwaved popcorn, taking breaks to gaze out the window at the slowly gathering snow clouds and the ant-sized pedestrians going about their daily routines twelve floors below, oblivious to her captivity. In the evenings, her father would come home with microwaveable meals or occasional take-out, smiling widely and barraging her with small talk and questions about school and her college plans as if they were just a regular father-daughter duo, reunited after a long absence. At last, a knock on the door late one afternoon set her free. After her ex-husband had never shown up in Wilston as he’d promised, Abigay had become suspicious, and called the police to do a wellness check. Hours later, Chloe was on a flight home.

That night, as she heard her dad get into the shower and her mom settle in for some New Year’s Eve programming, Melissa crept downstairs to where a fire still smoldered in the wood stove. She put the two shoe boxes down and one by one fed each newspaper clipping to the flames. She watched the headlines singe, the corners of the pages curl and blacken. The photos soon reduced to ash. When she’d finished, she put the boxes in the recycling, washed her hands, and joined her mother to watch the ball drop in Times Square before heading to bed, where she was quickly engulfed in a dreamless sleep.