Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Prologue

She wouldn’t have heard the back door glass being punched out, not in those winds. Later, the blueberry cop would say the Gazette reported they gusted up to fifty miles an hour, and that was in Kalamazoo, safer inland. Where she was, close to Lake Michigan, they would have raged louder. Hawking across the ice cliffs at the shore, building their furies as they screamed across the frozen fields, sucking the red branches of the lifeless blueberry bushes into grotesque tendrils, like twists of frozen blood, the winds could have hit her narrow little cottage at sixty, seventy miles an hour. Shingles clattering, windows banging, her place must have sounded like a cheap pine coffin being beat on by a hundred angry hands. She wouldn’t have heard the glass break.

Nor would she have felt the sudden chill. Her thermostat was set down to a frugal sixty degrees, and there were gaps in the siding a fat man could stick his thumb through. There was no knowing what the inside temperature was that night-if it even was night-because nobody came by for days. By then the frigid air blowing through the three broken windows-the one on the kitchen door, broken carefully inward; the other two, larger, smashed out in panic, spraying bloody glass all over the snow-packed drive-had chilled the house to freezing.

She’d fought. In her frenzy and her fear, she’d thrown herself at those two big windows. Each time, she’d been grabbed and dragged back, dripping bloody shards onto the frayed living room rug. I tried to step around them, but they were everywhere, crunching under my feet like bits of old bones.

There was blood in the bedroom, too, frozen little droplets on the faded floral wallpaper, the oak table, the bare plank floor. On the knurled wheel that turned the rubber platen of the ancient black Underwood typewriter.

I stopped, took a breath, like always when I saw one of those old Underwoods. A long time ago, I’d known a girl who owned a typewriter like that, a blond girl with a boy’s name. I was with her when she bought it, helped carry it home, watched as she turned it upside down to scratch her initials on it to make it her own.

Outside, in the dimming light, the wind rustled, restless, waiting. I eased the old typewriter over and bent to look for marks made long ago. My eyes stung, wet. From the cold of the cottage, I told myself. From the horror of the butchery that had happened there.

It had nothing to do with the past.