After the Eclipse Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Split

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Forward, Forward

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  Coda

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Perry

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Perry, Sarah, date, author.

  Title: After the eclipse : a mother’s murder, a daughter’s search / Sarah Perry.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017003442 | ISBN 9780544302655 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Perry, Sarah, date. | Perry, Crystal. | Murder—Maine—Case studies. | Children of murder victims—Maine—Biography. | Mothers and daughters—Maine—Biography.

  Classification: LCC HV6533.M2 P47 2017 | DDC 362.88 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003442

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover photographs: courtesy of the author and © Jules Bucher/Science Source/Getty Images (eclipse)

  eISBN 9780544302211

  v1.0817

  For her

  To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe the truth.

  —VOLTAIRE

  Preface

  One cold March, just a few years ago, I rented a flawlessly clean silver car and drove up to Maine from my home in Brooklyn. I’d made it just north of Boston when the trees started to press in close, and as the network of pavement thinned down to I-95, I began hours of sitting in the dark, following that one road ever north. I held my left hand steady on the wheel at six o’clock, sifted through pop songs and ad spots with my right. I missed my early twenties, when I still had my own car and still smoked, moodily exhaling into the night on my semiannual trips up and down the East Coast, from college to home and back again. Once I entered Maine, I tuned in to WBLM, the classic rock station, one of the few clear signals that holds on through the mountains. ’BLM had been our station, the one Mom and I listened to on countless Sunday drives through tunnels of sunlit trees. I listened to David Bowie and Aerosmith and Fleetwood Mac and Heart, and Mom was alive again, then newly dead again, then long gone and faded away. I still knew all the words.

  About an hour into Maine, I finally turned off the highway, winding farther north until I reached my aunt Carol’s house. It was midnight, and I shivered as I got out of the car, unprepared for the crystalline cold that had been waiting for me. Carol and her husband had been asleep for hours, but through a front window I could see they had left the yellow light on over the stairway to my old bedroom. The car door made a sharp sound when I pushed it shut, the trees replying with a softened echo. I stood outside for a minute, head swiveled up to the crowded stars, until something rustled in the ditch along the road, and I remembered where I was, and the fear moved back into me, running along my veins, racing up and down my limbs, warming me and settling in.

  The fear waits for me still, always worse when it is dark or cold. But it’s the half hour of transition from day to night that’s hardest, watching the light seep from the landscape, taking with it its illusion of safety. On the rare days when I’m here in winter, when dusk starts sliding over this valley at four o’clock or even earlier, I have to fight against panic. I turn away from the windows, stir my aunt’s soup, sit with my silent uncle watching race cars hypnotically circle an endless oval track. Once it is truly dark out, I feel a bit better: there may be hours of nervousness to get through, but now I’m in them. I’ve been here before, and no matter how bad things get, some part of me always remembers that I’ll come out the other side.

  So it’s good that I drove as the darkness came down, listening to the old soundtrack. It all makes sense. It’s more important that this trip be true than easy.

  * * *

  I get up early the next morning and have coffee and cereal with Carol. She is cheerful and I am cheerful and we do not mention why I am visiting. I don’t visit often.

  I get into the car and make my way to the Maine State Police barracks in the town of Gray. It’s a two-hour drive, and I retrace much of last night’s ground, this time in cheerful daylight. I stop at Dunkin’ Donuts and everything tastes like high school.

  Twenty minutes later, I turn into the barracks parking lot, sand and salt crunching under my tires, and park in front of a long, low building covered in sky-blue clapboard. This is not the imposing cement-and-glass fortress I’d imagined. There’s a little portico above the entrance, held up by thin blue columns. The windows are small. It looks like a nursing home, or a motel in a deserted oceanside town. There are about ten spots in the parking lot, only two of them filled by cruisers.

  A flagpole rises from a closely shorn strip of dull winter grass, and a police officer is raising the flag. He’s the only person in sight: dark gray buzz-cut hair, torso bulky with muscle beneath his neat blue uniform, pulling a flimsy chain, hand over hand. He turns toward me and I pause before getting out. It’s Walt, the detective I know best. I know it’s him, but at the same time I’m unsure; at this distance, cops all look the same. He gives me a broad smile as I step out of the car and walk closer.

  Walt greets me with fatherly effusiveness, and I feel guilty for my hesitation. He’s a kind man who has seen the worst of human behavior, with a carefully restrained sense of humor and a broad accent; a north woods version of the classic gumshoe. He’s now commander of the Maine State Police field troop unit in southern Maine, but he spent many of his years in the division devoted to major crimes. A few detectives led Mom’s case over the years, but Walt was the one in charge the longest; he knows so much about my early life, more than anyone. More than my aunts and uncles. More, in fact, than me.

  Walt ushers me to a conference room that’s been reserved for the next few days. Susie, a witness advocate from the attorney general’s office, is waiting; she greets me with a warm hug. I haven’t seen her or Walt since the trial four years ago, and this reunion gives me comfort: there is so much I don’t need to explain to them.

  Susie is chatty as I settle in and scan the room. This is more like what I had expected: laminated wood conference table, big projector screen, American flag hanging limp in the corner. Susie asks about my apartment, my work, what it’s like in the city. I answer her questions while trying to remember what I know about
her. I ask about her fiancé, her teenage niece.

  Soon Walt excuses himself to go down the hall to his office, says he’ll be around all day if I need him. Susie and I turn to the boxes and binders on the conference table. There are about ten four-inch binders, each crammed with paper, plus three cardboard file boxes. Susie lifts the tops off them one by one—they, too, are full of paper.

  “So . . . there’s a lot here,” she says. “I’m not sure what you’re lookin’ for, but you can have anything you want.”

  We agree that I’ll sit down and sort through everything, and that as I identify things I’d like to take with me, I’ll hand them to her and she’ll make copies. I am embarrassed by her generosity; I had expected to do all the work myself, but she assures me she’s happy to help. She’s set aside three whole days. As I start sifting through handwritten police notes, transcripts of interviews, and forensic documents, it becomes clear that I want nearly everything. I don’t know yet what will be helpful; I need to get it all home with me so I can really look at it. Hold it close. Think. So many other people have seen this material, and now I want it for myself. The prosecution kept the story necessarily simple: here’s the man who killed her; this is how he did it. But a violent act is an epicenter; it shakes everyone within reach and creates other stories, cracks open the earth and reveals buried secrets. I want those stories, those secrets.

  My mother’s killer had twelve years of freedom before he was identified. In all those years, the state police and the cops in my hometown kept searching, kept interviewing, adding to this huge file. When asked why he and his colleagues remained so actively involved in this particular case, Walt said there were two reasons. The most obvious was that they had a huge amount of evidence; the case was tantalizingly solvable. But there was a more personal reason, too. They were angered and saddened by the fallout: the only child of a single mother, left alone.

  Susie warns me, right away, about photos. She thinks she pulled them all out, but the files are disorganized, having passed through so many hands over the years. I agree to give her any photos I find without looking at them, if possible. I saw them at the trial four years ago; I don’t need to see them again.

  About an hour later, I pull a sheet of paper off a pile and beneath it is a photo, facedown, thick smooth paper with the brand name printed diagonally in ghostly blue. Susie’s down the hall, and because she’s not standing right here, my hand turns it over before I can stop. I watch this hand move of its own accord, and as the photo flips, I think, I can take it. It’ll be fine. But it’s the worst one, a horrifying picture of my mother’s body. A close-up. And I am instantly angry with myself. I am tired of this impulse to wound myself so that I can prove that I’ll heal.

  When Susie comes back, I say only, “I found a photo,” and hand it to her. She sighs, makes a clucking noise with her tongue, apologizes. I hold my face perfectly still. If I worry her, she might put a stop to this. And if there are more file boxes somewhere, I don’t want her holding them back.

  For four hours, I do my best to flip through documents quickly, taking stock of them, adding each item to the “yes” or “no” pile. But it’s hard not to get sucked in, and some of the interviews are magnetic. When Susie’s in the room, I try to keep a neutral face, but when I smile, I can feel my mouth twisting weirdly. My movements feel sharp and fast and unnatural. Each time I find a particularly bizarre detail, I share it out loud, and my laughter is edged with hysteria. Susie easily joins in, makes me feel more human. She’ll say, “Oh, yeah. I remember that guy. He’s a total friggin’ nutcase.” She is professional without being impartial, which feels like a gift.

  I’m laughing with Susie when Chris Harriman comes into the room, having just returned from the field. I don’t know Chris very well. He began working on the case after I’d left Maine for college. He’s younger than Walt, and smaller, with a round, affable face. He tells me he went to high school with Mom, although they weren’t close friends. He was an athlete, so they ran in different crowds. But he remembers her bright red hair.

  He surveys the conference table and then says, “Do you want evidence?”

  Susie jumps in. “Evidence?” she says, suddenly serious. “Like what?”

  “Y’know, like stuff from the house. We’ve got it all downstairs in the basement. By law, you have to keep everything for fifty years.”

  I’m curious about this evidence. I’ve always felt like I was missing some childhood photo albums; maybe those will turn up. I tell Chris, “Yeah, sure, that’d be great,” like someone just asked if I want a cup of coffee. But then I picture a vast basement beneath us, cement walls lined with hundreds of these cardboard storage boxes. In my mind, the place is dark, moisture leaking in from cracks in the walls. A subterranean maze holding fifty years of family time capsules, with all the worst memories preserved.

  Chris comes up with a box about twenty minutes later. He sets it on the table next to the others, then goes back to his office. Susie goes down the hall with another binder to copy. It’s a big one; I know she’ll be there awhile.

  I walk over to the new box and lift the lid. Inside is a folded sheet of plastic, wrinkled, vacuum-sealed around something. I take it out and unfold it; it’s about the size of a newspaper. I look at it and my thoughts grind against one another, the gears slipping and slipping, until finally they catch and I understand what I’m seeing. Between the layers of plastic is a pair of underwear, white cotton with small flowers. A urine stain. The underwear seems too big, until I remember that Mom always bought bigger sizes than she needed to. A funny sort of modesty. And I remember the detail about the stain, from the autopsy report I skimmed through an hour ago.

  I fold the plastic again and lay it down next to the box. My forehead feels prickly, and the air in the room is suddenly too thin. I put both hands flat on the table for a moment, and its surface is cool and solid beneath my palms.

  The next item in the box is a framed photograph of Mom and her fiancé, Dennis, a man ten years her junior. The Sears photographer had posed them like mother and son, and we’d all been too embarrassed to correct him. Beneath that is the calendar that hung on our kitchen wall. The calendar feels tainted, having hung in the room where she died. But I’m so happy to see Mom’s neat, looped handwriting, the same half-cursive script I remember from lunchbox notes and birthday cards. On the fifteenth of January, she’s written the amount of her house payment: $271. I think about how much I could help her now, how easy it would be to come up with that money. I flip through the months, smiling sadly over fun things we did, dates of movies and hikes along nearby mountain trails. The notes are plentiful, four or five per week, and it’s thrilling to read them. I’m grateful to have these memories back, to remember again how full our life was. I get so drawn in that when I turn to June and find it suddenly blank, it takes me the longest time to remember why.

  * * *

  That night when I get into bed, I am nervous and jumpy. I need to clear my brain so I can relax enough to sleep, but behind my closed eyes all I can see is that underwear. I see the little flowers and the yellow stain and the wrinkles under the thick plastic. The moment keeps playing on a loop in my short-circuited brain. “Do you want evidence? ” I think I do.

  I’m just not sure of what.

  Part One

  Split

  1

  * * *

  before

  I want to tell you about my mother.

  I am trying to detail her precisely. Primary fact: she did all the motherly things. She was mostly gentle and affectionate, and I always knew I was loved. Her friends and family tell me that I was the most important thing in her life, that she said it often and showed it clearly.

  She tucked me in almost every night of our life together, those twelve years. She sang to me while sitting on the edge of my covers, smoothing my hair with a gentle hand.

  When I was sick or crying, she came to me with a cool washcloth for my head. She called me Cutie Pie longer than I
would have wanted my friends to know. She made me pancakes and bacon most Saturday mornings, and let me drown them in lakes of syrup while I watched Garfield, my favorite cartoon, and she watched with me. She made sure my homework was done, my lunch was packed, and my sweater matched my shoes.

  But this is all familiar stuff, and adds up to so many other women who love their children.

  Let me try again.

  My mother was full of energy and passion. She believed in the souls of housecats and in the melancholy of rainy days. She believed in hard work, and the energy she poured into her job—hand-sewing shoes at a factory—seemed boundless. She believed in spontaneity, and once urged me to sing into her boyfriend’s CB radio on a common frequency, the two of us calling out that we were “b-b-b-b-bad to the bone!” until he emerged from the House of Pizza, hands full, shaking his head while we giggled.

  She was graced with bright red hair, a golden tone of red I’ve seen only a handful of times. As a child, I never tugged on the wrong coat sleeve in the grocery store, I never wandered away and got lost; I just kept that bright hair in sight. Now, on those rare occasions when I see a woman with that hair, my mouth goes dry. I stare and keep on staring, and my hands feel empty, and I hope she doesn’t notice.

  In the short Maine summer, she sunbathed for hours, lounging on a narrow strip of lakeside sand, reading a novel behind oversize white plastic sunglasses. She was very thin, with finely turned collarbones and a constellation of freckles all over her body, which would deepen and multiply as the day passed. I baked along with her, my blond hair glowing blonder as the summer rushed toward bittersweet fall, when the trees turned red and yellow and orange, like a fire burning up all those languid weekend afternoons.

  A couple times a year we would drive to the ocean just south of Portland. Her favorite thing to collect from the beach was sand dollars, and I loved walking up and down the yellow sand and finding them for her. They were plentiful when I was little, but something changed as the years went on. The water got colder, or warmer, or there were more predators than before.