Today the baby is wailing. Jeremy, six years old, just off the yellow school bus home from kindergarten, eats his after-school snack in a hurry, dreaming of getting away from the noise, dreaming of the fun to be had out in the woods.
At the end of the road there is a weathered white house and, behind it, a thatch of woods. The woods are the dense, deciduous, swampy kind, the kind in which rotting leaves mingle with the earth and the ground gives soft way beneath the boy’s feet. Though the thatch is very small, with only a single ravine like a scar in the earth, a single place to play war or dream of hiding away forever, these woods are Jeremy’s favorite place to play.
He asks his mother for the BB gun. She takes it down from the shelf that keeps it safe from the baby and hands it to him. Jeremy runs out the door. Two children near his age, a boy name Joey and a girl named June, live in the white house by the woods, and though Jeremy likes exploring on his own, it’s more fun when Joey can join him. He goes to their door and he knocks.
A man answers. The man wears thick glasses. He has a small head and large jug ears. At twenty-six and only 140 pounds, Ricky Joseph Langley is slight for a grown man—but still much bigger than the boy. He, too, grew up in this town. Now he rents a room from Joey and June’s parents, whom he met when he started working with their mother, Pearl, at the Fuel Stop out on the highway. He’s supposed to pay Pearl fifty dollars a week, but he’s never been able to afford it. He makes up the money in babysitting. Just a few days ago he looked after Joey and Jeremy. He brought them soap when they were in their bath.
“Is Joey here?” Jeremy asks.
“No,” Ricky says. “They went fishing.” It’s true. Joey’s father and the boy packed up poles just twenty minutes ago and drove out toward the lake. They’ll be gone all afternoon. “They’ll be back soon,” Ricky says. “You can come in and wait if you like.”
Jeremy plays at this house every week. He knows Ricky. Yet he pauses.
“Why don’t you come in?” Ricky says again. He opens the door wider and turns away. Jeremy walks over the threshold, carefully props his BB gun against a wall near the entryway, and climbs the stairs to Joey’s bedroom. He sits down cross-legged on the floor and begins to play.
Ricky climbs the stairs after him. He wants only to watch Jeremy play—later he will say this, later he will swear to it. But the watching changes something in him, and from this point on it is as if he is in a dream. He walks up behind Jeremy and hooks his forearm around the child’s neck, lifting him into the air. Jeremy kicks so hard his boots fall off. Ricky squeezes.
Jeremy stops breathing.
Maybe now Ricky touches him; maybe now he can admit to himself what he’s wanted since seeing Jeremy in the bath. Maybe he doesn’t. In all that will come from this moment, the three different trials and the three different videotaped confessions and the DNA testing and the serology reports and the bodily fluid reports and the psychiatric testimony and all the sworn sworn sworn truths, no one but Ricky will ever know for certain.
Ricky picks up Jeremy, cradling the boy as if he were simply asleep, and carries him into his own bedroom. He lays him out on the mattress. He covers Jeremy—no, this is a body now; he covers the body—in a blue blanket printed with the cartoon face of Dick Tracy, detective. Then he sits at the edge of the bed and pets the blond hair.
There’s a knock on the door downstairs. He goes to answer it. In the entryway stands a young woman. Her hair is the shade of brown that is often a childhood blond.
“Have you seen my son?” When Lorilei asks this, she is three months pregnant.
“Who’s your son?” he asks.
“Jeremy,” she answers, and Ricky realizes he already knew.
“No,” he says, “I haven’t seen him.”
She sighs. “Well, maybe he’s gone to my brother’s.”
“Maybe,” Ricky agrees. “So why don’t you come on in? You could use our phone. You could call your brother.”
“Thank you.” Lorilei steps inside. To her right, propped up against the wall, is a Daisy-brand BB gun, its long brown barrel shiny and smooth.
But she steps to the left. She does not see the gun. He offers her the phone and she dials, looking for her son.
TAPED CONFESSION OF RICKY JOSEPH LANGLEY, 1992
Q: Do you know why you killed Jeremy?
A: No. I ain’t, I never even thought I could, I mean, that’s the first time.
Q: And what made you decide to do it?
A: I couldn’t tell you. I’m still fumblin’ with it in my mind, trying to figure out, you know. It’s like I know I did it, but yet it’s like if, something you read in the newspaper.
Q: Sort of like a dream for you, Ricky?
A: I guess. I couldn’t really … I don’t know how I’m supposed to act.
Q: But you know you did this?
A: Yeah.
Q: Now, you’ve had problems with kids in the past.
A: Yeah.
Q: You want to tell me about those?
A: It’s just, I can’t explain. I guess that’s my destiny, okay, it’s true.
Two
New Jersey, 1983
Nine years before Ricky Langley will kill Jeremy Guillory, when he is still eighteen years old and I am five, my parents buy a gray Victorian house that squats at the top of a hill in the New Jersey town of Tenafly. All around the house the lawns are manicured, but high, reedy grasses surround the gray Victorian, and the wood on one side of the porch has started to rot. The house has been abandoned for six years. The afternoon we move in, the neighbor boy stands in the grass at the side of the porch, watching. Blond hair cut in a kitchen-bowl bob, jeans ripped and bleached like my mother won’t let me wear. Behind the boy is a gray stone house, all its windows dark. Sometimes a cat walks up to him, crossing the driveway from his front yard to ours, and he reaches down to scratch its head before the cat saunters off. There seem to be many cats. The boy watches as we make trip after trip into our new house, my two sisters and my brother and I carrying boxes of our stuffed animals, teetering stacks of the large cardboard bricks we’ll use to build forts. In this house, my father has told us, we will have a playroom all our own.
Eventually the neighbor boy calls me over. I walk to the railing and squat down. The white posts that line the porch accordion his face like cartoon jail bars.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
I tell him.
“You’re moving in?”
He looks like he’d be a grade ahead of me, maybe two. I want to say something clever, but “yeah” comes out.
He’s chewing on something as he watches me. I catch a flash of pink. Gum. “The dad who used to live here strangled the mom. In the kitchen,” he adds.
“Did she die?” I’ve only recently learned this word.
“No.”
He puts his hands in his pockets and watches me, chewing. We’re silent for a moment. Then my mother calls.