tape you.”
Someone else would come forward. Another friend. They wouldn’t need my story to get a conviction. Girls, he’d said. There were others. Even if I was the other woman in Ramona’s mind, I didn’t need to be in theirs. I talked for almost an hour then stopped.
“I don’t remember any more,” I said, and I didn’t, not really. I hadn’t for a long time.
The house reeled, too bright, nothing in its expected place. My body felt wrong, far away and not my own. After the detectives dropped me off, I stood inside the door and held out my hands. I touched my fingers as if I’d never seen fingers before. In the living room I stared at the nudes. Not one looked back at me, the faces haircurtained, buried in armpits, turned away, or cut from the frame.
Until I saw her photo in the Telstar, I’d forgotten Ramona. I never thought about what happened and I never talked about it. Today, I’d rewarded the detectives’ questions. They’d picked at the details and prodded until I told more than I’d bargained. The cops had my statement now. I’d signed it so they could read it in court and I wouldn’t have to appear. Since Alex didn’t follow murder trials, he needn’t find out. I could stay the same in his eyes. I could forget again.
In my office, I kneeled in front of the box and turned the Telstar over. Ramona had worn Ray-Bans for her arrest, and a pink turtleneck. She’d rounded out, but little else had changed in five years. I brought the paper to my desk. My novel outline had hit a hundred pages. The novel needed scenes. I tackled one in which the ghost watches the sculptor with her lover. Soon I switched to my stack of character cards. I crossed out the sculptor’s description and wrote “blonde.” Then “Ramona.” I scribbled over the card and shredded it. Cards were stupid and they weren’t writing. I shut off my computer and grabbed a notepad. With the Telstar on my knee, I leaned against the box and wrote. I wrote what I saw and what I thought and what I might have thought. Some of the places changed, our names, too. I put Ramona’s side in, but writing it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t think I would do it again.
The first time Peck saw her, Mona was applying lip gloss in the parking lot of the Rodeo strip mall. Peck was seventeen, had moved to Westwoods three weeks earlier, and was sticking Velcroed poker chips to the New Releases shelf near the window of Venus Video when she saw this woman in a black leather mini and a pink ripped T-shirt with the word “City” across the front in script. The woman had long platinum hair and wore a police cap and frilly anklets inside white leather pumps like the ladies in the ZZ Top videos. She stood on the asphalt in the “Reserved for Venus Video” spot. Her perfectness bugged Peck. Her phoniness. She looked like nobody Peck had ever seen close up, not in Kashag and certainly not here, and Peck couldn’t stop staring at her, trying to break the whole into pieces she could understand. She applied the lip gloss so slowly, dabbing the fuzzy end of the applicator on her puckered lips, dipping the stick in the pink container, swiping it back and forth, loading each lip with oily goo. Peck could imagine the candy smell. The Vaseline taste. The lip gloss irked her.
At the time Peck saw her applying the pink lip gloss at the Rodeo strip mall, Mona lived with Jim Hawkes at 17 Covered Wagon Trail in a detached home that backed onto a field. She had met Jim the previous Christmas at a law school pub she’d gone to with Larry Buxton, her Man & Society teacher. She went home with Jim and never left. She worked as one of three legal secretaries at the small firm of Henderson, Albert & Tizz. A picture of her Rottweiler, Albert, sat in a brass frame on her desk. The Rotty wore a blue kerchief and stood splay-legged and smiling on Wasaga Beach, an orange KONG at his feet. Jim had a dog allergy so Albert lived with her parents in the Smythefield subdivision west of Main Street and north of Buyers World mall. Mona liked the fields behind 17 Covered Wagon Trail. She liked squinting at the light on the pond water and hearing the cracked sounds of the ducks. Smythefield had no open spaces. It had older and taller trees. She liked being the only one walking the streets in no shade. She liked the sameness of the houses. By June 1985, she was engaged. She was planning her wedding. She had girlfriends both older and younger than seventeen. She liked a good caper and was impressed when she walked into Venus Video and Peck Brown was watching Bonnie and Clyde.
chapter 2
The summer Peck was nine, her mother ran away with another man. Peck was playing with Malcolm Salter next door when his mom brought her a can of root beer and said, “Go home now. Your dad wants you.”
That night, and for many nights afterward, she felt dead, as if her mother had murdered her.
In the years that followed, she read the paperbacks about the Black Donnellys and Jack the Ripper her mom had left in the bathroom. With her mom’s card, Peck signed murder books out of the Kashag Public Library. She looked at the victims before their deaths, the women in headscarves and sunglasses, the men in suits with skinny ties, and she looked at the killers’ hooded eyes and beat-down faces in their mug shots. Sometimes she looked at the bodies and their dumping grounds. Bodies on couches or beds, in ditches or fields. Some books blanked out the corpses. Others showed autopsy photos with pulpy mouths, glassy stares, bloodsmears.
She imagined her mom killing her. She pictured her body stuffed in the rocks, her mom’s thumbprints bruised into her throat. When the police lifted her up, maggots would drop off. The police would gag at the smell. Then they’d put her mom in jail. Faced with the autopsy photos, her mom would say, “Shoot, she was prettier when I knew her.”
Her mom was Margery Virginia and she was Pauline Elizabeth and her dad was Harold Ray Brown. Nobody called him Harold — nor Harry, a name for a rounder, balder man. He was Hank. When other men said it, especially when drinking, it came out like a swear. Sometimes it sounded like Hunk. She pictured him as a side of meat, rosy brown and slimy. He called her Peck for the hard kisses she gave. She liked to call him Heck. Heck no, it’s not a bother. What the heck. I’m gonna give you heck. A watered-down cuss. A non-word. She liked that Heck rhymed with Peck.
One fall during moose season, Malcolm Salter from next door came into her kitchen swinging a plastic bag.
“Want to see?” he said, and Peck said, “Sure.”
Grinning, he displayed a moose heart with veins and tubes and fat. One whiff of iron blood and she kicked him. Malcolm snatched the bag away and kicked her back.
She helped Hank do the tanning. They mashed the brains into a paste over a fire. He staked the hide on racks behind the shed, and she worked it soft with a stick.
One time Hank presented her with a deerskin purse, from his first. “She stood out like sawdust against the snow,” he said. Peck pictured the bullet hitting the doe’s glowing heart and a cooked venison roast revealed in a burst of wood shavings. “I had this made for your mother, but she left it behind. Might be she wanted you to have it.” He spoke with a strangled cheeriness. Stiff, she watched him hang the strap from her shoulder, his features receding as if washed out by sudden, heavy rain. The purse moved like cloth and had a stubbly nap Peck liked to brush against her skin. She stored it under her bed with her mom’s library card and feathered clip inside.
At twelve she wrote her first story. Her characters laughed and swung their Cher hair as they killed whole families in inventive, domestic ways. They always got caught, though, and not by their daughters, either.
Peck stopped talking about her mom, but Hank didn’t. He told stories about Margery as if they’d had coffee that morning. If she ever came back, Peck figured he’d yield like worked skin.
In June 1980, five years before they moved to Westwoods, Hank turned thirty-five. Peck was twelve. The morning of his birthday, she caught her orderly father standing in the kitchen in boxers and a vest. A gob of shaving foam trailed along his
