Chapter oneI can smell the kerosene. The police tape is the only thing that separates me from the men loading a pickup truck with bloodstained blankets, sheets, pillows—even a couch. I grip the bicycle handlebars so tight my knuckles turn white.
There are a lot of volunteer men here. And there are a lot of people like me, standing behind this barricade, crying. I use the sleeve of my coat to wipe my eyes and my runny nose. All around I hear sniffling and whimpering. Two blood-soaked mattresses are chucked onto the pile. Foreman Taylor puts a teddy bear in the back and digs for his keys in his pocket.
He starts slowly down the lane. I push my bike across the grass and lean it up against a fence post. He drives right through the police tape, straight across the road, into the wheat field. We lookie-loos turn and watch him unload it all. After everything is stacked into a pyramid, the teddy bear’s placed on top, like a star on a Christmas tree. He lights a match and tosses it. Smoke fills the air as everything that once belonged to my friend and her family burns.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Mr. Stoecklein says, walking up behind me.
“Then where should I be?”
“Well, not here,” he says, crossing his arms.
“But Nancy—”
“Is dead.”
Chapter Two Mrs. Walker’s history class doesn’t seem to matter now. I walk in late while she’s lecturing about President Lincoln’s assassination.
“‘On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and a Confederate sympathizer, fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC.’” Mrs. Walker is reading from a book.
Nancy was shot, too. Nancy’s dead. I care about that. Lincoln? Not so much. Not even a little bit. I don’t know him. I know, I mean, I knew Nancy.
Sue Kidwell and Nan Ewalt found them—the entire Clutter family—Sunday morning, on their way to church. Sue was Nancy’s best friend. She’s not even in school today.
Nancy promised I could borrow her red velvet dress for the Sadie Hawkins dance; she was bringing it to Sunday school. Reverend Cowan told the congregation the god-awful news.
“This morning, I was called out to Holcomb to the River Valley Farm. There has been an incident,” he’d said, pausing to rub his eyes. “
I’m saddened to report that the Clutter family—Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon—are deceased.” I cried when I first heard. I cried again at the crime scene. It feels like some part of me hasn’t stopped crying since. Especially at the headlines.
Clutter Family Slayings Shock, Mystify Area Everyone likes—I mean, everyone
liked—the Clutter family. Well, I guess not everyone.
People in town think that Bobby did it. You know, killed the Clutters. But I know that Bobby didn’t do it. Bobby is,
was, Nancy’s boyfriend.
Mrs. Walker taps me on the shoulder. “Hon, the bell’s rung.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I grab my bag, leaving a tissue behind.
Mary Claire stands in the hallway with her books to her chest, staring at a photo of Nancy on a wall next to a row of lockers.
“Carly, can you believe it?” she says. “Things like this don’t happen here.”
Chapter ThreeMy boyfriend, Seth, has to go to Garden to run an errand for his mom, so he puts my bike in the back of his truck. It’s a tenminute drive, and once we get there, he parks on the square and goes inside a store while I stay fiddling with the chipped knob on the radio, moving it back and forth, trying to find something to listen to on the AM stations. Anything but farm reports and market reports. I don’t care what the going price of cattle and wheat are at the moment. I hear a no-nonsense voice, stern and to the point, and stop moving the knob. The reception is low, static mostly, but a news bulletin breaks through.
“A local family was found murdered Sunday in their home—” Click. That goes off.
I look out the window and see Bobby’s truck, and he’s sitting inside with the engine turned off. Mrs. Parker, or as everyone in town calls her, Mrs.
Nosy Parker, walks by and glares at him before rushing down the sidewalk and into a nearby store. People in town have been giving him that look. A knowing look. A look of
I know what you did. Before I know it, I’m walking over there.
He’s alone, staring out the windshield. I knock on the window but he doesn’t move; he stays facing forward. I climb inside and slam the door shut.
Bobby and Seth are considerably different in appearance. Where Bobby is tall and muscular, with dark curly hair and light green eyes, Seth is short, pudgy, with blond hair and dark brown eyes. Bobby’s cuter than Seth. Yes, I said it. Everyone knows it. Bobby’s out of my league. But it doesn’t matter anyway. He belongs to Nancy—belonged to Nancy. Besides, I’m still the new girl in town. Seth was the first boy to ask me out to go cruising around on this square on a Sunday afternoon. Seth’s popular, and being the new girl, I wanted to be popular. Really, I wanted Holcomb to be like Manhattan, even if everyone around me agreed that my Manhattan is the wrong Manhattan. This, they tell me all the time.
“You probably don’t want to be seen with me,” he says.
“Why?”
He looks over at me. “You know why.”
“I don’t believe what I hear.”
“Yesterday, we were supposed to go cruising around town.”
“Bobby—” I touch his hand, the one that rests on the steering wheel. “I was at home when I heard. My pop told me.” He sniffs and rubs his forehead. “My brother and I drove out to the farm. There were emergency vehicles everywhere. They surrounded the house and blocked the entrance. I went home and called Sue.” He squeezes the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles turn white. “That night we went to the funeral home in Garden—”
“Bobby, you don’t have to talk about it.”
“Do you think if I don’t talk about it, it’ll just go away, that I’ll forget?”
“No.”
The clouds part, sending rays of late-fall sunshine directly into my eyes. I pull down the visor to shield my face.
“Nancy was lying there in that casket. Not moving. She was wearing the red dress, the one that she made for 4-H—”
“I was supposed to borrow that dress. She was bringing it to Sunday school.”
“Carly—”
“Now she’s going to be buried in it for all eternity.”
“It’s just a dress,” he says.
“It’s not. It’s Nancy’s dress.”
“We wanted to go see the spook show on Saturday night. But her dad said no. What if . . . ? Nancy wouldn’t have been home.” He turns to me.
I look out the passenger-side window. Seth’s walking out of the store and down the sidewalk toward his truck. Seth nods at Bobby and then nods at me to get out.
“We’ll talk later,” I say, glancing over my shoulder as I open the door.
He shakes his head. In the sunlight I notice the dark circles under his eyes. “You say that now.”
“I say that always.”
Seth’s waiting with the engine running and the volume to the radio turned up high. “Come on, Carly, you know better than that,” he says, eyeing Bobby’s truck.
“What?”
He puts the truck in reverse and takes me home.
Copyright © 2017 by Amy Brashear. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
