Grim and Darling

Chapter Five

Three months after it happened, the blood and the knife and the dead girl and the missing sister, I started investigating my first suspect.

Matthew Blanchard.

I didn’t even know why I was following him. He was just some loser from the edge of town who had eight mangy dogs and a rotting double-wide. He was fat and balding and smelled like fish. If he couldn’t even bathe regularly, I don’t know why I thought he was capable of murder, but I followed him anyway. He didn’t work, not that I could tell, just orbited steadily between the sagging couch on his front porch, the stinky bar down on Columbine, and the grocery store where he bought dog food in bulk and cans of tuna fish by the thousands. He would be the last person on earth who was fast enough, smart enough, or sly enough, to break into my house and murder a couple of girls right underneath my nose.

But his boots. Those boots. They matched that print in the yard.

At least I thought they did.

Until I stole one off his porch and realized it wasn’t the right size.

After Matthew, it was Stanley Franklin.

He owned the hardware store downtown, and I knew it was too easy, too obvious, but he had access to that same kind of screwdriver they found underneath the porch. The Dewalt with the fat black and yellow handle like gripping a giant bee in your hand with its stinger all rusted and dull.  I spent hours loitering in the aisles, pretending to inspect electrical couplings and threepenny nails, while I watched Stanley out of the corner of my eye. He always wore plaid. Plaid in different colors and patterns, but always plaid, and always tucked into his jeans. He never took off his wedding ring and never took off his baseball cap either, but that was because he was balding beneath it. He had a nice smile, but serial killers always had nice smiles until you knew what they were capable of. I snuck into the back of his pickup and snapped the lock on his toolbox with a bolt cutter.

He did have that same brand of screwdriver. In fact, he had that particular screwdriver, not only one but two of them. Both of them shiny, rust-free, obviously well taken care of.

Angela  Webber. She worked the graveyard shift at the gas station that sat on the county line, almost four miles out of town. She got divorced a few years ago and had fallen off of every wagon. She was forty pounds heavier. Forty ounces of beer every forty hours. Forty years old with only four years left to live, but I didn’t know that part yet. She used hair dye like other people used toothpaste and smoked a pack and half a day of those long skinny cigarettes that smell like vanilla. Her mouth was puckered, her eyes were pinched, and she never smiled, not once in the whole time I watched her. Her daughter died years ago, before I was even alive, because one of those vanilla cigarettes caught the curtains, and the house went up faster than a hay barn in August. She always scowled at us when we came in to buy gum and sour candies, licking her lips like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to yell at us, or eat us. Exactly the kind of woman Alice probably annoyed the bejesus out of at the end of a long shift.

I followed Angela until I intercepted a piece of her mail, a printout from Dr. Singer‘s office, basically convinced that she had stolen Alice to replace her dead daughter.

Her blood type was O positive.

Timothy Samuels.

The librarian. Who better to be a murderer than the smartest guy in town?  Too much quiet time, too many books, enough research to cover his tracks and pull off the perfect crime. Big brains and idle hands and all that nonsense. It was obviously the reason he’d gotten away with it. He lived in a cute little house on the main drag painted pastel blue with every color of tulip imaginable in the front yard. A cherry tree and a porch swing and a bird bath. A little white fence and a big crumbly chimney and lace in the windows. It was the kind of place they made movies about. A basement of horrors, except he wasn’t even in town that night.

He’d been on vacation in Hawai’i with his mistress while his wife was at a knitting conference somewhere in the Midwest.

Three years later, I was still at it.

Three years later, no one has escaped my scrutiny.

I followed the girl who bagged groceries at the D&R out near PA, the one with the lazy eye and the alcoholic boyfriend. I followed the guy who ran the old antique store at the end of Main Street, the one that was really just a place for everyone to drop off their junk and call it vintage. I followed a nurse from the clinic who stopped at the liquor store on her way home every day and woke up shit-faced every morning. I followed a group of boys who plagued the high school hallways and smoked weed in the abandoned opera house on the weekends. The lady who taught yoga at the community center. The guy who cleaned the courthouse on Wednesdays, the police station on Fridays, and the library on Tuesdays, at nine pm sharp. I followed the entire town, one way or another. Everyone came away with clean noses, clean hands, clean consciences.

At least when it came to dead girls.

I was going to solve this shit if it killed me.

I was beginning to suspect that this shit might actually kill me.

Next

AN:

Hadley Hemingway is the sun to my meadow.