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Ann Nash, age nine, was found on August 27 in Falls Creek, a bumpy, noisy waterway that ran through the middle of the North Woods. Since nightfall on the twenty-sixth, when she went missing, a search party had combed the forest. But it was hunters who came across her just after 5 a.m. She’d been strangled close to midnight with a basic clothesline, looped twice around her neck. Then dumped in the creek, which was low from the long summer drought. The clothesline had snagged on a massive rock, and she’d spent the night drifting along in the lazy stream. The burial was closed coffin. This was
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“Why else would you pull out a dead little girl’s teeth?” “He took her teeth?” “All but the back part of a baby molar.”
Wtf
A boy for the Nashes, but a disappointing one.
“Them, him, whatever. The bastard. The sick baby killer. While my family and I sleep, while you drive around doing your reporting, there is a person out there looking for babies to kill. Because you and I both know the little Keene girl isn’t just lost.”
What happened to the bike?
Then I lifted up the sleeve of my shirt and wrote her full name—Ann Marie Nash—in
🤔
She pulls at her eyelashes. Sometimes they come out.
I’d written Natalie Keene in its place. I decided to leave it for luck.
Wedged in the foot-wide space between the hardware store and the beauty parlor was a tiny body, aimed out at the sidewalk. As if she were just sitting and waiting for us, brown eyes wide open. I recognized the wild curls. But the grin was gone. Natalie Keene’s lips caved in around her gums in a small circle. She looked like a plastic baby doll, the kind with a built-in hole for bottle feedings. Natalie had no teeth now.
She also wore blue to Marian’s funeral, and so did Marian. She was astonished I didn’t remember this. I remembered Marian being buried in a pale pink dress. This was no surprise. My mother and I generally differ on all things concerning my dead sister.
Okay but why so many dead girls
There was not one child in the church.
I wondered if the tooth for a tooth part disturbed anyone else.
I saw Katie Lacey, my old best friend from Calhoon High, in her own well-coiffed circle, the exact mirror of my mother’s group, minus twenty years. She kissed me on the cheek when I approached.
wanted him to like me, not just because it would make my job easier, but because his bluster reminded me of Curry, who I missed.
“Got called out one time because Ann had killed a neighbor’s pet bird with a stick. She’d sharpened it herself with one of her daddy’s hunting knifes. Natalie, hell, her family moved here two years ago because she stabbed one of her classmates in the eye with a pair of scissors back in Philadelphia.
“My friend, he was here when she got Natalie,” the kid said. “James saw her. She was wearing her nightgown. They were playing Frisbee, over by the woods, and she took Natalie. It would’ve been James, but he decided to stay here on the field. So Natalie was the one right by the trees. James was out here because of the sun. He’s not supposed to be in the sun, because his mom’s got skin cancer, but he does anyway. Or he did.”
“The woman who took Natalie.”
Natalie missed and it went into the grasses by the woods, and the woman just reached out and grabbed her. Then they were gone. And James ran home. And he don’t come out since.”
the sake of full disclosure, I should add that my mother owns the whole operation and receives approximately $1.2 million in profits from it annually. She lets other people run it.
“She took her. No one believes me. I’m not scared. I just need to stay in the house is all. My mom has cancer. She’s sick.”
“Yeah. She smiled at me. For a second I thought it might be all right. But she didn’t say anything. And then she stopped smiling. She put her finger to her lips to be quiet. And then she was gone into the woods. With Natalie.”
dick on my wrist in looping cursive.
Why does she write names on her wrist/arm?
retreated to my room, away from that horrible little girl, who was not like Marian at
Sometimes my scars have a mind of their own.
eleven.
my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked.
was a lingual conservationist.
Marian died on my thirteenth birthday.
was the pretty girl (with, how sad, the dead sister). And so I was popular.
can quiet them down by thinking of vanish,
want to cut. Not small words either.
stayed at the hospital twelve weeks. It’s a special place for people who cut, almost all of them women, most under twenty-five. I went when I was thirty. Just six months out. Delicate times.
It’s impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.
Scars peeked out of a shirtsleeve. Richard looked up just as I was putting my hands back beneath the table.
A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It’s the kind of place that leaves a mark.
My grandparents grew angry twin tumors to match my mother’s expanding tummy, and were dead of cancer within a year of my birth.
She was twenty, he was thirty-five, with family money that my mother didn’t need, having plenty of her own. Neither
Ann’s daddy, Bob Nash.
“John Keene has moved out of his parents’ house,”
“Into Julie Wheeler’s home. The carriage house out back.”
“John Keene is Natalie’s big brother,
“It’s going to be all about how good they are to take John in and give him a little breathing room while he mourns.”
“I’m serious. Camille, let me say this: Right now, way things are with your mother, you’re better in Chicago. You should go back soon.”
“She tutored Ann in English and spelling. Your mother and Ann were very close. Ann was very proud she had an adult friend.”
began crying before I’d even reached my car.
teeth, and gave it a little bite.
have a guy in my office—sensitive. When I got passed over for a promotion, he suggested I sue for discrimination. I wasn’t discriminated against, I was a mediocre reporter. And sometimes drunk women aren’t raped; they just make stupid choices—and to say we deserve special treatment when we’re drunk because we’re women, to say we need to be looked after, I find offensive.”
Wow
The day I picked up that knife is a tight second.
It was an ancient one-room schoolhouse, tilting slightly to one side, vines weaving in and out of its slats.
It was the first time I’d been kissed in almost three years. I ran my hands between his shoulder blades, the rose crumbling down his back. I pulled his collar away from his neck and licked him.
