To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

The Stott household was the picture of middle-class placidity, but it didn’t matter how ordered your life was; murder flew in like a brick through a window and no one was ever ready.

“Individual murders could be solved or punished, but murder itself, of course, could never be solved,” he wrote. “That could not be done without solving the human heart, and without solving the history that has rendered the heart so dark and desolate.”

“They do like to take care of sick people and to ostensibly seem to be feeling,” Kirn said. “They’ll sit there and tell you how devastated they are, and they’ll use all the right words, and maybe even emote, but it’s overdone or just off in some way. Because emoting is something they are imitating.”