“So we don’t know who that was,” Dave said. “We just don’t know. We can’t remember the name.”
Gwen said, “It was a one-syllable name, and I swear to God, the more I think about this and dream about this, over and over and over, I almost swear she said ‘Mike.’ And it scares me to death that it could’ve been him right there. I saw a picture of him when he was like eighteen, and he had a babyish face then. The problem is, we could never go to the police and say, ‘That was him!’ We can’t do it.”
“We can’t. We can’t picture the face from that day.” Dave shook his head.
“But it was a moment,” Gwen said. “We always remembered, we were so embarrassed. She was supposed to be engaged to Dennis at the time.”
“And so then, after the trial, we were thinking, ‘Does Sarah remember that day?’” Dave looked at me.
“No,” I said. “I don’t remember that at all.” I shook my head. “Not at all.”
Gwen sighed. “I didn’t want to make you upset. ’Cause I can’t bring this any clearer to myself. So I was hoping that, if you might have remembered, even if you were pissed at me, or embarrassed that I said it, that you might then recall something about that day. I was going to be like, ‘Oh my God. Maybe we just figured it out.’”
And I sat there and thought about what it would be like in that very moment if I suddenly had a memory of Michael Hutchinson in our house. It would have told a story, sure. But would that story bring any satisfaction? It wouldn’t change anything, ultimately—not her death, not his guilt.
But I also think this: If Gwen’s story had knocked my memory loose, maybe we could have “figured it out” years earlier, maybe long before the DNA match, if not for her worry that I’d be embarrassed about my mother sleeping with one man when she was engaged to another. As though I would value fidelity to a controlling and obsessive fiancé over my mother’s right to pursue joy where she could find it.
I was frustrated that I didn’t remember that afternoon, and I was a little angry that Gwen and Dave hadn’t ever asked me about it before. I’d spent all that time with the police, being interrogated about everything from major facts to tiny details, while they had failed to mention this to anyone at all. Maybe if they’d said something in 1994, they would have still remembered the name. But they didn’t want to embarrass anyone. How dangerous shame is.
But I know that they were more disappointed than I was. They had been thinking about this for years.
And I did realize, sitting there with Gwen and Dave, that if there’s more to know—however ultimately unsatisfying it might end up being—I do want to know it. I try to whisper to the shrouded part of my brain that holds old memories, willing it to pass that long-ago afternoon forward into the light of consciousness. Later today. Later this week. Later this year. I can wait.
Nothing has come. The idea of interviewing Hutchinson has started to press on me. Maybe he’d tell me something, whatever it was that was in his eyes when he looked at me in court. Why not.
Every kind soul I know tells me not to do this, that to sit and talk with Hutchinson is to risk my heart, my mental health. That it’s not worth it. But the thing is, I still feel connected to him. I still feel like there’s something that only we know. Something I just can’t remember.
46
* * *
I keep going back to Bridgton, talking to more and more people, casting a wider net that I fear I’m becoming tangled in. I’m collecting facts, certainly, and theories about “what really happened”: alternatives or supplements to Walt’s educated guesses, to Lisa Marchese’s logical courtroom arguments. And I’m learning more about other people’s experiences of Mom’s death, what her loss has meant to them, what it means that the world no longer includes her. But I have a selfish motivation, too: I want to exist up there, really and fully. I want to be present, no longer an abstract concept—the girl who left, the girl who went down south. There is still a small part of me that misses my original home, that never wanted to leave Bridgton. But I can never live there again. New York is close enough. And just far enough.
My search turns up new information all the time, some of which produces more questions than answers. Miranda White, for instance—the woman who told the police about my father’s explosion at Ray Perry’s party—actually appears in the investigation file a few times. The first is long before that party. It’s May 14, 1994—two days after the murder.
That first time Miranda spoke with the police, she was the one who called them; they weren’t seeking her out. She told Pickett a story about the night Mom was killed. She was working late that night, making sandwiches at Subway. Closed up the shop around one in the morning. While sharing a cigarette in the parking lot after taking out the trash, Miranda and her coworker saw an ambulance leave the municipal garage across the way. She immediately thought of her boyfriend, she said. He was a troublemaker; maybe he had gotten himself into trouble. She jumped into her car and followed the ambulance. But then, she said, she turned around near the Venezia, did not follow all the way to our house. She never said what made her turn around, why she didn’t follow the ambulance until it stopped, but she had already passed her boyfriend’s house by then. When she pulled up to the stop sign at the end of Route 93 to turn back into town, a vehicle came up behind her, fast, blinding her with its lights. She was emphatic that the bright headlights made identifying the vehicle impossible. She turned onto High Street, passing her boyfriend’s house on the way back into town, and, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, continued home to her parents’ house. The vehicle tailing her turned off on a side street, she said. When she got home, she heard on the police scanner that the ambulance was on its way to the Venezia. Her dad told her to go to the police with her story, that since she’d been in the area, she needed to talk to them.
In that interview, Miranda didn’t give her boyfriend’s name, or if she did, Pickett didn’t write it down. When he interviewed her over a year later about Donnie Martin and the night of Ray Perry’s party, he noted that she also repeated “pretty much” the same story about the night of the murder. Pickett ended his summary: “She was dating Michael Hutchinson who lived up on Route 302 at the time.”