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I hoped I’d walk into the police station and be informed that Natalie Jane was already found. No harm done. Seems she’d gotten lost or twisted an ankle in the woods or ran away and then thought better of it. I would get in my car and drive back to Chicago and speak to no one.
i wish that it was that simple </3
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.
oh my god.. that poor baby
“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.”
what...
The townsfolk had pried out the rocks, loaded them in the back of a pickup, and smashed them just outside town. It was a poignant gesture of faith, as if such destruction would ward off future evil. Seems it didn’t work.
GOD 💔💔💔
Sometimes it is all too loud.
So somewhere along the way, in those ten blocks, they got her. My wife will never forgive herself. Never.” “What do you mean, they got her?” “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.”
I’d like to say that I pity him, but now I fear I’ll never be able to pity again.
this is too real
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.
oh my god NOO :((
The whole time I was thinking about Natalie going to autopsy, and how I would like to sneak in and put a fresh Band-Aid on her knee.
this is when the tears fell 😭
The Bible says, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But let us not dwell on revenge. Let us think instead of what Jesus urged: Love thy neighbor. Let us be good to our neighbors in this difficult time. Lift up your hearts to God.” “I liked the eye for an eye stuff better,” grumbled a man behind me. I wondered if the tooth for a tooth part disturbed anyone else.
The same girls I’d run into at the edge of the forest. They were huddled together laughing until one of them, again the prettiest, motioned over at me, and they all pretended to hang their heads.
...pretended??
Kids grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.
“This isn’t some stranger, and I would guess you know it.” “I would have thought you’d prefer it to be a stranger.”
“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. Her daddy quit his job at some big business, just so they could start over. In the state where his granddad grew up. In a small town. Like a small town don’t come with its own set of problems.”
“James saw the woman take Natalie. It was just the two of them, and they were playing Frisbee, and 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.”
“She was wearing a white bed dress with white hair. She was just all white, but not like a ghost. That’s what I keep saying.” “White like how?” “Just like she’d never been outside before.”
“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.” He shrugged again. “I’ve already told all this before.” “To the police?” “First to my mom, then the police. My mom made me. But the police didn’t care.” “Why not?” “They thought I was lying. But I wouldn’t make that up. It’s stupid.”
seems that if you had a fairly detailed description of a murder suspect, you might want to let people around here know, so they can be on the lookout. But you haven’t, so I’d have to guess you’d dismissed his story.”
The problem started long before that, of course. Problems always start long before you really, really see them.
rt
Instead I drink so I don’t think too much about what I’ve done to my body and so I don’t do any more. Yet most of the time that I’m awake, I want to cut.
saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in. I 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.
“It’s my maiden cloak. I’m going to the forest to play Joan of Arc. The girls will burn me.”
ummm no ma'am
Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother, and this more than anything about her turns my stomach. She worries over people she’s never met who have a spell of bad chance. She cries over news from across the globe. It’s all too much for her, the cruelty of human beings.
No one had witnessed the abduction of Ann Nash last August. She’d simply vanished, her body turning up a few miles away in Falls Creek ten hours later. She’d been strangled about four hours after she was taken. Her bike was never found. If forced to guess, I’d say she knew the person. Grabbing a child and her bike against her will would be a noisy business on those still streets. Was it someone from church, or even the neighborhood? Someone who looked safe.
The choice of the two girls also seemed senseless. If not for Natalie Keene, I’d believe they were victims of sheer dumb luck. But if James Capisi wasn’t lying, effort had been made to get that girl at the park, and if it was indeed that particular girl the killer wanted, then Ann was not sheer caprice, either.
middle class, and the Nashes had been in Wind Gap for generations. The girls weren’t friends. Their only connection was a shared viciousness, if Vickery’s stories were to be believed.
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.
She wants all relationships in the house to run through her.
By the time my sister finally died, I was grateful in a way. It seemed to me that she’d been expelled into this world not quite formed. She was not ready for its weight. People whispered comfort about Marian being called back to heaven, but my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby.
“Ohhh guys, what if he’s killing all the freaks?” Amma giggled. “Wouldn’t that be perfect?” The crying girl looked up at this and smiled. Amma pointedly ignored her. “He?” I asked. “Everyone knows who did it,” the husky blonde said. “Natalie’s brother. Freaks run in families,” Amma proclaimed. “He’s got a little-girl thing,”
In Amma’s snideness, I caught a whiff of desperation and righteousness. Like she’d whined at breakfast: I wish I’d be murdered. Amma didn’t want anyone to get more attention than her. Certainly not girls who couldn’t compete when they were alive.
“Talk to the parents. If you can’t break anything, I want that profile on the dead girls. This is human-interest stuff, not just straight police reporting. Talk to other parents, too, see if they have theories. Ask if they’re taking extra precautions. Talk to locksmiths and gun dealers, see if they’re getting extra business. Get a clergyman in there or some teachers. Maybe a dentist, see how hard it is to pull out that many teeth, what kind of tool you’d use, whether you have to have some sort of experience. Talk to some kids. I want voices, I want faces. Give me thirty inches for Sunday;
...more
“But I still think it’s a man. Can’t picture a woman doing all … that to a baby. I hear John Keene has no alibi. Maybe he wanted to kill a little girl, saw Natalie all day every day, and couldn’t take it, the urge, so he went out and killed another little tomboy, girl kind of like Natalie. But then in the end he couldn’t resist, took Natalie too.” “Is that the talk?” I asked. “Some of it, I s’pose.”
“She tutored Ann in English and spelling. Your mother and Ann were very close. Ann was very proud she had an adult friend.”
hm
I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me.
For a while I convinced myself that Adora’s distance was a defense constructed after Marian. But in truth, I think she’s always had more problems with children than she’d ever admit. I think, in fact, she hates them.
I remember my mother, alone in the living room, staring at the child almost lasciviously. She pressed her lips hard against the baby’s apple slice of a cheek. Then she opened her mouth just slightly, took a tiny bit of flesh between her teeth, and gave it a little bite. The baby wailed. The blotch faded as Adora snuggled the child, and told the other women it was just being fussy. I ran to Marian’s room and got under the covers.
what the fuck
that violent streak—the tantrum, the smacking of her friend, and now this ugliness. A penchant for doing and seeing nasty things. It suddenly reminded me of the stories about Ann and Natalie. Amma wasn’t like Marian, but maybe she was a little bit like them.
Because that means the day has ended. I like checking days off a calendar—151 days crossed and nothing truly horrible has happened. 152 and the world isn’t ruined. 153 and I haven’t destroyed anyone. 154 and no one really hates me. Sometimes I think I won’t ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. Three more days to get through until I don’t have to worry about life anymore.
“You could kill me right now and Dick still wouldn’t be able to figure it out.”
what is this kids deal
“You tell that story to the police, and they’ll know the truth in an hour. It will look even worse for me. No one really thinks I’d kill my own sister.”
except for the part where they DO think you killed your sister bro
I believed the boy. He cried in public and told silly stories about his sister and played with his girlfriend’s hair and I believed him. I could almost hear Curry snort at my naiveté.
“They saved her left eye. Her right was, uh, ruined.” “Natalie attacked both her eyes?”
OH MY GOD
“I don’t mean this to sound cruel,” Tish began, “but it seems like part of your heart can never work if you don’t have kids. Like it will always be shut off.”
sorry, what the fuck????
“Someday I’ll carve my name there.”
wild
“You didn’t hear this from me, okay?” she continued. “The girls, Ann and Natalie, they were biters.” “What do you mean, biters?” “Both of them. They had serious tempers. Like scary-time tempers. Like boy tempers. But they didn’t hit. They bit.
yikes