The day that Cheryl Lee Costello went missing, Michelle and I skipped school. The two events were unrelated—we wouldn’t learn about Cheryl’s disappearance until we saw it on the six o’clock news. Michelle just wanted to skip because that’s what she liked to do, and she talked me into doing it because it wasn’t like we were missing anything important. It was the last week of senior year and I’d already been accepted into college; I could miss AP European History for one day. Because of the curfew and the fact that everyone in town knew who we were, we couldn’t go to the mall or do anything fun so we spent the day in Michelle’s bedroom, watching daytime TV and smoking the shitty weed she stole from her older brother. It was mostly dust, mold-colored and sour, and Michelle laughed at how much I coughed.
“Did you even inhale?” she asked, watching me hack up a lung on her shag carpet. I nodded weakly, eyes watering, though I wasn’t sure I had. She took the joint from me and finished it off in one long pull, pressing her lips against her screened window to blow the smoke out. On the TV, Sally Jesse Raphael was interviewing a woman who was convinced her teenage daughter was trying to sleep with the mother’s new boyfriend.
“I don’t get the whole young girl-older man thing,” Michelle said. She had just painted her nails and was fishing through a bag of Cheetos. She gestured to the TV, her fingers a blurry conglomeration of purple glitter and orange dust. “He’s not even cute. He just looks wrinkly.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You think Mr. Klein is cute.”
“That’s not the same thing.” Michelle offered me the bag of Cheetos and I waved her off. “He’s not that old, plus he has good taste in music. He’s not, like, wrinkly.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“Guys like that are so creepy,” Michelle said, her eyes fixed on the television. “You know what I think it is? They go for girls who are younger because everyone their own age thinks they’re creepy too. Fucking perverts.”
I picked at Michelle’s bedspread, a limp gray chevron blanket constellated with crumbs and cutouts from magazines. “Yeah,” I said again. Michelle glanced over at me and grinned.
“Are you bored?” she asked.
“No,” I lied, pulling a long thread out of the bedspread. A miniature Simon Le Bon, glossy and creased, leered up at me. Based on what I knew about skipping school from movies, I had expected it to be more exciting. But there wasn’t much we could do in a town as small as Bonney, where everyone knew everyone and they especially knew Michelle, hard to miss ever since she’d dyed her hair white-blonde and taken to wearing fishnet tights with everything. We’d spent most of the day listening to music and Michelle told me about her dream from the night before, which involved being eaten by a wolf, spit out, and then getting stabbed to death by a cowboy. I never remembered dreams. I knew I had them, but all I ever experienced was a vague sense of unease, like I had fallen asleep during an important exam. Michelle said this was because I stressed myself out too much, which was probably true.
She tipped her head back and dumped the rest of the Cheetos in her mouth. “What are you doing tonight? My brother is gonna drive me and Kate to Tacoma to see this band his friend’s in. No IDs. Wanna come?”
Kate was this girl that Michelle started hanging out with recently who went to the Catholic school in town and didn’t like me. I couldn’t stand Michelle when she was around Kate, the two of them huddled together and laughing at some private joke, eyes mocking and bright like birds of prey.
“I can’t, sorry. I have clarinet practice,” I said. Michelle wrinkled her nose.
“You’re still doing that? You already got into college. Isn’t that some filler shit for the
application?”
I shrugged. I think Michelle knew I was lying—as it was, my clarinet instructor had canceled all lessons for the foreseeable future because she was scared to leave her house after dark—but she didn’t press. She was probably relieved.
“Your loss,” she said lightly, licking her fingers. “One of these days I’ll get you to come with us. What time is it?”
I checked my watch. “Two-thirty,” I said. School would be letting out now. “I better get going, my mom will be expecting me.”
Michelle rolled over onto her stomach and turned her eyes back to the TV.
“Later,” she said, but before I made it to the door she stopped me.
“I almost forgot to give you this,” she said, pressing a cassette tape into my palm. “I made you a new one. It’s mostly X-Ray Spex and Bowie. Since you liked them so much from the last one.” On the label in purple Sharpie she’d written the title of the mix: SONGS OF INNOCENCE.
“William Blake, right?” I asked. She grinned.
“See, you’re getting better,” she said. Michelle never put much energy into school, but she loved the Romantics. All the mixes she made were named after her favorite poems; she knew my mother didn’t like much music that came after 1962 or so, and she called the tapes “my artistic education,” her ongoing repayment for helping her pass precalculus last year.
“Thanks, M,” I said, starting down the front steps.
“Listen to it on your way home!” She called behind me.
“I will,” I said, even though I wouldn’t. I was always on edge walking home these days, what with all the disappearances. Michelle must have been thinking about it too, because before she closed the door, she yelled, “Don’t let the Butcher get you!”
It was unusually cold that day, a shock to my system after the musky warmth of Michelle’s bedroom. I took the same walking path I always did, the only one in town that still had streetlights and followed the river that cut the valley in half. That was the year that the blackberry bushes never died, and the trail along the river was nearly overgrown. The berries themselves had shriveled up into little black juiceless husks at the end of summer, filling the air with the smell of decaying fruit. But the vines never withered, despite the city’s best efforts to beat them back with the usual arsenal of weed whackers and local herds of goats when that didn’t work. Michelle’s house was on the other side of the river from mine, what people like my mother considered “the bad side of town” because it was mostly mobile homes and gas stations. A dense slick of fog had settled around the valley in the morning and hadn’t lifted, a grim contrast to the daffodils and cherry trees that lined the streets. In the distance, the lights of the giant new casino made the sky glow a sickly yellow, and not for the first time that year I regretted never learning how to drive.
Xeroxed flyers with black-and-white photographs of women were stapled to the streetlamps, bleary collections of white teeth and dark hair, eyes black and almost pupil-less. There were so many new ones going up all the time that I didn’t even look at the names anymore. They all said MISSING.
◆
According to the news, Cheryl Lee Costello was a bright and popular member of the Bonney Valley High School community, a promising student with an interest in art and design. The picture that KING 5 used was two years out of date, a grainy flash photograph of a pale, thin-lipped Cheryl in a floor-length dress who barely resembled the girl we went to school with, the girl who wore cutoffs no matter how cold it was and had a safety pin through her belly button.
“Who chose that picture?” My aunt yelled at the television. “If they think anyone is gonna be able to find her off of that, they’re delusional.” She was staying at our house because her husband had left her for his aerobics instructor and had taken my bed, claiming she had a bad back.
“Well, they probably won’t find her, given that she’s already dead,” my mother said. “Jessica, set the table, please.”
I didn’t know that the school calls your parents when you don’t show up. My mother had grounded me for two weeks and forbade me from seeing Michelle ever again, something that we both knew was not going to happen. For starters, there was nobody else at school who would eat lunch with me.
“You know I dated Ted Bundy in college?” Aunt Judy was looking at me now, eyes big behind her smeared glasses. “We were in the same engineering class at UW. We went out twice. It’s a miracle that I’m alive at all.”
“I thought you met in the library,” I said. Her story was always changing: first it was one date, then two, and once Aunt Judy intimated that he had tried to bludgeon her to death in his car. Other variations depicted him as a perfect gentleman, so delicate that Aunt Judy was shocked to learn that he had ever killed anyone. My freshman year track coach had a similar story, as did Michelle’s mother. They all wanted to believe that he would have slept with them if he’d had the chance, or that they would have fought him off and won.
“A girl like that, I don’t know what her mother expected,” My mother said, frowning at the television. “Letting her run wild, it’s no wonder she ended up where she did.”
“Well, I hope she’s not dead,” I said into the silverware drawer. My mother nodded, her expression growing pious.
“Oh, of course,” she said. “None of us want her to be dead. I’ll say a rosary for her this evening.” Rosaries were her answer to everything: the Berlin Wall, University of Washington winning the Pac-12 championship, a missing high schooler. Nothing a few rounds of Hail Marys couldn’t solve.
The assumption was, of course, that Cheryl Lee had been killed, as a lot of girls were getting killed those days, but she was the first one from our high school. Up to that point, the killer, whom the more irreverent media outlets had taken to calling “The Bonney Butcher,” even though his victims had been found all over Green River Valley and not just here, had favored the hookers and crack addicts who haunted Pacific Highway in the wee hours, girls who wouldn’t be missed by most people. But everyone knew Cheryl, or at least knew her reputation, the rumors-that-weren’t-rumors about how the bartender at Bumpy’s let her drink without a fake ID and how someone saw her giving the vice principal a handjob in his car on the Fourth of July last summer. Her mother worked at the all-night diner on the highway and was gone a lot. Her father was dead, a victim of the timber mill in the next town over that had, until recently, been the number one threat to Bonney’s citizens.
Most of the boys at school said that they’d slept with her at least once, each story more unlikely than the last: Ken Cunningham said she was a dominatrix, Randy Pteri swore that she had sucked his dick for twenty minutes in the hot tub without coming up for air, Marcus Kurtz claimed to have “rocked her world” and made her cum seven times in a row. Cheryl wasn’t pretty, at least according to the other girls at school. Michelle assumed they were just jealous, because Cheryl was fun and didn’t give a fuck about what other people thought of her. Even when the rumor started sophomore year that she had both Chlamydia and Hep-C, she got invited to all the parties and always showed up at the school dances with a date, usually one of the less-intelligent second-string football players, which was still more attention than I was getting. All the mothers in town looked sideways at her, forbade their daughters from associating with her, even though Cheryl Lee Costello was just a product of Bonney as much as anyone else, the natural outcome of a town full of girls who married their high school boyfriends and had babies before they could legally drink, got jobs at the furniture warehouse or the sports bar and died in the same place they were born. At least Cheryl made it seem like she was having fun.
“Maybe she’s not dead,” I suggested to Michelle the next day. We were sitting behind the
school, Michelle smoking and me watching her smoke. Another body had been found at the banks of the Green River up in Sumner, a nineteen-year-old pregnant girl named Felicia Pierce, but still no sign of Cheryl.
Michelle shook her head. “She’s definitely dead,” she said. “It was only a matter of time until the Butcher started picking off the high schoolers.” In recent weeks Michelle had started carrying a knife and was trying to convince me to join her Tae Kwon Do studio.
“Don’t call him ‘the Butcher,’” I said. “That makes him sound like a supervillain or something.”
Michelle stubbed her cigarette out in the mud. “Well, when you think about it, he kind of is,” she said. “The police can’t track him down, even though he’s not being very meticulous. Usually they’re better at that sort of thing.”
“Maybe the police are stupid,” I said. Michelle laughed.
“Easy there, little anarchist,” she said. “They’re not gonna like that up in Pullman.”
“Maybe not,” I said. She looked sideways at me, yesterday’s mascara collecting under her eyes like ashen snowflakes.
“You’re not gonna join a sorority or anything when you get there, right?” she asked. I shrugged.
“I don’t know. My aunt was in one. She liked it.”
Michelle made a face and fished in her backpack for another cigarette. “Fuck that. You have to promise me you’re not gonna become one of those dumb girls who only cares about clothes and boys and stupid stuff like that.”
“No, of course not,” I said. We’d had this conversation a dozen times over the last few weeks. “But that’s how everyone makes friends in college. And it’s not like I have such good luck making friends as it is.”
Michelle lit another cigarette and blew a puff of smoke out across the field. Overhead, the flock of crows that nested in the valley began their evening descent.
“I’ll try not to take that personally,” she said.
I was going to Washington State University in the fall. Michelle was going nowhere. She assured me that she didn’t need college to be a musician, that she knew people in Olympia who could get her gigs with good bands and help her tour. She and Kate were writing songs together; Michelle wanted to be Debbie Harry, like all the cool girls did. My mother didn’t like that I was friends with Michelle and thought she was trashy, but not in the same way that Cheryl Lee Costello was trashy. Michelle was just poor, and her house was smaller than ours, and her older brother Toby had been in jail for selling weed to high schoolers in the Pik-Kwik parking lot. My mother was a hiring manager at the Weyerhaeuser facility where Michelle’s mother worked as a janitor. Michelle dyed her hair and had a nose piercing and didn’t have a boyfriend, which was always a red flag for my mother, even though I didn’t have one either.
“I think she might be a lesbian,” my mother told me once, with a tone that suggested she was informing me of Michelle’s recent entanglement with CIA operatives in Cuba. I didn’t care—she had always been nice to me, nicer than any of the youth group prudes that my mother shoved at me who wore high-collar blouses and wrote Bible verses on their Converse and talked about how being Christian was “the real rebellion.” Ours was a friendship of convenience, always had been, ever since we all started high school and the girls I played volleyball with decided I was too mopey for them. I helped Michelle with her math homework, she made me seem slightly more dangerous to my mother, and we both had someone to hang out with on Friday nights. It was unsaid, but I knew that we would probably never talk after high school was over. Soon I would be out of Bonney, with its moss-fringed sidewalks and topless bars, rain-soaked underwear and discarded cigarette cartons littering the undergrowth like limp confetti, and Michelle would be here, molding along with it. Girls who stayed in Bonney ended up pregnant, addicted, or dead, or some hideous combination of the three—and if they were lucky enough to avoid that, they’d still be stuck in Bonney, which was punishment enough.
If it were up to me, I would never come back to Bonney again; WSU wasn’t far enough away for me, but they had a good veterinary medicine program and I got in-state tuition, which my mother appreciated. College was my first stop—afterwards, I imagined, I could settle somewhere warmer and more vibrant. Southern California, maybe, or Arizona. Somewhere the sun could boil the water out of my insides, where the roads were dry as bleached skulls and the air didn’t smell like wood pulp and gasoline. I couldn’t be like my mother and Aunt Judy, still in the same place thirty years later, every day the same. I hoped for her sake that Michelle would get where she wanted to go, but I wasn’t planning on sticking around to find out.
◆
The rest of the week leading up to prom, all anyone could talk about was if the dance was going to get canceled. Cheryl was still missing, and although her body hadn’t been found, it was all but assumed that she was dead, unofficially added to the tally of the Butcher’s victims. Some of the students argued that it would be disrespectful to have the dance when she was still missing, while others—mostly the girls who had been nominated for prom court—made the case that since Cheryl was’t even a senior, it shouldn’t matter. The KING 5 news station sent a camera crew down to interview us, part of an investigative series on the family and friends of the Butcher’s victims. The reporter they sent couldn’t have been much older than us, twitchy with dark hair and a salmon-colored suit. She stood in the hallway outside the cafeteria for an hour, shoving her microphone into the face of any student who moved slow enough to let her.
“How do you think Ms. Costello would like to be remembered?” she asked, her voice bouncy and chipper. A junior in a Letterman jacket stopped, eyeing the mic like it was an extended sword.
“Uh…” he said. His friends snickered, edging into camera range. “I think she was a great girl,” the junior said. “She definitely, uh, made an impact.” Behind him, his friends started air-humping, and the cameraman stopped recording.
“It’s so fucked up,” Michelle said, watching the boys shove each other down the hallway. The news anchor looked bewildered. “She’s dead and they’re still treating her like trash.”
“Maybe dead,” I said. That morning my mother had put a can of mace in my backpack and told me that if someone put me in the trunk of a car, I should punch out the taillight and put my arm through.
“That way, the other drivers will know you’re being kidnapped,” she explained. Aunt Judy let out a barking laugh from the couch.
“He’s not gonna put you in a trunk,” she said, never taking her eyes from the television. “He’s just gonna kill you.”
“Have you changed your mind about prom?” I asked, and Michelle shook her head.
“I’m protesting,” she said, but against what she didn’t say. “Kate and I are gonna get drunk at the river with some of her friends.”
“Sounds thrilling,” I said, and Michelle rolled her eyes.
“More fun that stupid prom,” she said, and there was an edge of irritation in her voice that surprised me. Usually I could tell when she was really annoyed and when she was just pretending, but some days it was more difficult than others. She seemed annoyed all the time recently. But then, everyone was on edge in Bonney.
“My mom is making me go,” I said it like an apology, and Michelle’s face softened. She raised her arm like she was reaching for my shoulder, then dropped it suddenly.
“Come find us after if you can,” she said. “Your mom doesn’t have to know.” I turned to go to lunch, but Michelle marched over the anchorwoman who gratefully extended her mic once again.
“Cheryl Lee Costello is the coolest fucking person at this school, and I hope the Butcher burns in hell,” she said, her gaze barrelling down the camera that had hurriedly trained on her. “Anyone who says anything bad about her is just jealous, and if she’s listening to this I hope she knows we’re all thinking of her.”
The anchorwoman let out a high, nervous laugh and motioned at the cameraman.
“That was great, hon,” she said, and Michelle beamed.
“I don’t think they’ll let you say ‘fuck’ on the news,” I said, following her down the hallway.
“Someone had to stand up for her,” Michelle said. “People love to talk a big game around here, but nobody ever does anything.”
I felt implicated by this, but I didn’t say anything. If I tried to defend myself she’d say something cutting and true, and I wasn’t in the mood.
◆
Prom was Saturday. I walked to the youth group kids’ house in my dress, a crepey purple thing that my mother picked out, an exchange I made to avoid her setting me up with one of her Bible study friends’ sons. I stood alone amongst a throng of giggling couples during the photo line, choking on a poisonous combination of nervous sweat and overzealously-applied Victoria’s Secret perfume. It was my first dance—Michelle and I had skipped every dance of high school so far, usually electing to watch late-night TV at her house or go see Rocky Horror at the movie theater in Tacoma. Sometimes we just drove around, looking in the windows of people’s houses from the street, insides glowing warm and yellow against the night, and imagined what those lives must be like. Every time, Michelle insisted it was much more fun than a stupid school dance, and I always agreed.
At the dance, the girls cuddled their pink-skinned boyfriends and passed around a flask of Malibu rum, everyone shouting over the noise of the shitty band the school had hired. Michelle would probably have loved them. Maybe she knew them.
“I can’t believe high school’s almost over,” said Nina Fosse, who was commuting to UW next year and would live with her parents. Shelley Kurtz nodded, trying and failing to hide how drunk she was.
“This is the best night,” she slurred, her head lolling. Her date hefted her onto his lap and bounced her like a dummy. I pulled a few petals off one of the roses in our table’s centerpiece.
“How come your friend’s not here?” Nina asked me, an earnest attempt at including me in what could pass for conversation. I rolled the petals under my fingers.
“She didn’t want to come,” I said. Nina pulled a sympathetic face.
“That’s too bad,” she said. “She’s going to miss the best night of high school!”
I doubted that, but I forced a smile at Nina anyways. Shelley was starting to doze off on her date’s shoulder.
“Are you coming on the mission trip with us this summer?” Nina asked. I shook my head and she pouted like she was actually sad I wouldn’t be there.
“Well, you should help with the summer camp,” she said. Her breath smelled like coconuts. The musicians ground to a halt before launching into a slow, wailing instrumental number.
“We’ll see,” I said. When Nina left for the bathroom, I snuck out the back door and went to find Michelle. She was with Kate by the river with a group of kids I didn’t recognize, not far from the school; someone had started a campfire on the riverbank, and in the dim light I watched them pass a smoldering joint around, the delicate clink of glass bottles mingling with the rush of the water. The ground was soft with new rain, and my heels sank deep in the mud as I walked.
“You look so fucking stupid!” Michelle howled when she saw me, tipping her head back and laughing. She handed me a tiny bottle of tequila. Kate’s brother delivered ice to the airport and had a habit of stealing the mini liquor bottles that were always around.
“Shut up,” I said. Michelle squinted at me.
“Did I hurt your feelings? Come on, Jessica, lighten up. Those Phi Beta-whatever girls are gonna be a lot harsher than I am. Gotta get used to it.”
She never called me Jessica—always Jess, even when she was angry with me. I unscrewed the tequila bottle and drained the whole thing in one swallow. I must have made a face because Michelle laughed again.
“I forgot you don’t know how to drink,” she said, and Kate laughed. They were both drunk and I felt tired. Behind Michelle, the water glimmered darkly, and for a moment I imagined Cheryl Lee Costello there, eyes fixed sightlessly on the starry sky as she drifted downriver.
“You shouldn’t be out so late,” I said lamely. “It’s past curfew.”
Michelle smirked at me, her eyes glimmering.
“Oh no, is it past curfew?” she said, words melting together. “Are you gonna arrest
us?”
“Shut up,” I said again. “I’m going home. If you want to come with me, you can.”
Instead, Michelle opened another mini bottle of vodka and drained it.
“Miss Goody-goody,” she chanted. “How was prom with the God Squad? Did they
convert you?”
“Fuck you,” I said. “My mom made me.”
“Oh,” Michelle said. “Your mom made you. Fuck your mom.” She spun around, staggering to her knees. “You always do what she says, anyways.”
“Michelle, shut up,” I said. I could feel a headache starting at the base of my skull, either from the alcohol or the tension in my shoulders, I couldn’t tell.
“Whatever, just go join your sorority and be a bitch like the rest of them.” She had moved out of the firelight and I couldn’t see her face. I waited for her to laugh, to say something cutting and funny to let me know she forgave me, would keep forgiving me like she always did, but I was met with silence.
“Fuck you,” I said. “See you never.”
It was a pretty lame comeback, and they all laughed, watching as I stumbled up the
bank of the river in my floor-length dress. I had no way of getting home, so I started walking. I felt suddenly sick, everything going fuzzy at the edges even though I was barely drunk, and I stopped to puke in the blackberry bushes, going down hard and feeling the fossilized thorns dig into my palms. I heaved there for a while, but nothing came up, tears and snot mingling on my face. When I stood and wiped my eyes, my head was clearer, but my stomach still churned. Across the river, a single house’s lights were still on, and I watched a man move into his living room with a case of beer in his hand. He raised an arm and threw something to someone in the house I couldn’t see.
I was very alone. I took off my heels and started running.
On Monday, news broke that several people had seen Michelle’s brother Toby behind the Rambler with Cheryl Lee Costello the night before she disappeared. Nobody really thought that Toby Chait, all ninety pounds of him, was capable of killing Cheryl, but the police got a search warrant for his house, found pot and ecstasy under his mattress, and threw him back in jail for possession.
“You’re not going over to that house anymore,” my mother said when it happened. I didn’t say anything.
The first time I walked by Michelle’s house over the summer, there was nobody home. She called my house once, but my mother answered before I could and told her to leave me alone. I saw her at the library in early July, sitting at a back table with Kate and working on lyrics. I waved, and she waved back.
“Long time no see,” she said. Her voice was agonizingly even.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “My mom is being weird. About the whole…thing.”
Michelle’s mouth was a straight line. She hadn’t brushed her hair and her roots were coming in. She looked like a zebra, and normally I would have told her this, because it’s the sort of thing we’d tell each other, but it didn’t feel right. Kate’s eyes flickered between the two of us.
“Well, see you around,” I said, and turned to go. I heard them giggle as I walked away.
I got a job at the antiques store on Main Street, sitting in freezing AC for eight hours a day while bored window-shoppers sifted through other people’s garbage. I went to youth group, read all the books for my Intro to American Lit course, made dinner for my mom and Aunt Judy, and took the dog for walks during daylight hours. I taught at the Sunday school Bible camp and hung out with Nina and I told myself that it was good that things ended the way they did. I had never had any intention of staying in touch with Michelle after going to college anyways.
The last mixtape she made was called “Listen, this is the noise of ABBA.” It was sitting on my front porch one afternoon when I came home from work near the end of the summer. True to its name, the playlist was wall-to-wall ABBA, Michelle’s favorite band of all time and one of the few that my mother liked as well. One Blondie song at the end, because it was her trademark. I didn’t recognize the poem; it didn’t sound like any of the Romantics. The summer ended and my mom and Aunt Judy drove me over the mountains to Pullman, and I didn’t say goodbye to anyone.
Michelle went missing in October. When Nina told me about it I convinced myself she’d just run away, to Olympia or Portland or wherever people were making music these days, and hadn’t bothered to tell her parents. She’d told me at least a dozen times that was how she wanted to do it.
“They don’t care what happens to me anyways,” she’d say, and I’d pretend to know what that felt like.
I tried calling Toby once, just to see if he knew where Michelle had gone, but he didn’t answer, and I never tried again. By that time I was fully ensconced with a biology major from Coeur d’Alene who only listened to country music and accompanied me to all my sorority mixers, and I was thinking about changing my major to economics. I barely even called home. I guess I could have called Michelle’s mom. I still remember their phone number, the way it was taped to the top of the phone in case anyone ever asked for it, the numbers bleeding out underneath the scotch tape against the floral wallpaper.
They caught the Bonney Butcher around the time I graduated college, an air traffic controller from Bothell who strangled women in his truck and dumped the bodies in the Green River. He’d fuck them from behind—in his testimony he called it “rear entry”—and then strangle them. He claimed he had an addiction, that he killed so many girls he forgot to keep track of their names. They’re still finding girls now. Every spring, the swollen river will volunteer a few remains that the snowmelt had dredged up, and the local media will descend into Bonney for a few days, and then leave again like the flock of crows that nest in the valley every night. Now that he’s in jail, it’s mostly theater, each new victim just another name that can be added to his rap sheet, another dozen years tacked on to his lifelong sentence. All anyone could talk about was how unassuming he was, how articulate; had they met him on the street, they would have never guessed he’d killed at least fifty women.
I didn’t read the paper so I didn’t know she was dead until days later. My mother cut it out of the News Tribune and sent it to me. There was no note attached, which felt significant. I could imagine what she’d said when she read it: Well, I’m not surprised. A girl like her…
There wasn’t even a picture. Just her name, approximate age. They found a toe, discovered by a fisherman. Apparently towards the end the Butcher got into dismemberment. In the documentaries that followed, the made-for-television movies, the short-lived prestige television drama, Michelle was never mentioned. There were no interviews, no tidbits about how she was allergic to hazelnuts and had a crush on Scott Bakula from Quantum Leap, no quotes from her grieving family and friends. Maybe because she was near the tail end, and not one of the exciting victims—she wasn’t a runaway, not being pimped out by her boyfriend, not a good-time girl like Cheryl. I thought about trying to get in touch with her brother, or even Kate, when I went back to town for Christmas, but I didn’t.
Sometimes I drive by the cemetery where they buried her, the one across from Bumpy’s Bar where they buried Cheryl. It’s a Catholic cemetery, big and mossy with a statue out front of a long-haired angel cupping her face in her palms. Michelle wasn’t Catholic, unless she converted and didn’t tell me. Honestly, it seems like the kind of thing she might do.