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“Travis Blake, a third-generation Army Ranger who was awarded the Silver Star for his heroic actions in Afghanistan, has confessed to brutally murdering his girlfriend, Jennifer Dean, and dumping her body somewhere in the thousand cubic miles of this great lake.” When the reporter said the name of the murder victim, her photograph appeared. The man watching the TV report drew a sharp breath and sat up straighter on the sofa. In the dark room, only the light from the television made his face visible. It was a cruel face; soulless; the face of an assassin.
It was all the same every year. And that’s how I liked it. I never wanted it to be different, not even a little bit. It’s funny. When you’re young, you always want things to change. You want to grow up. You want to go to new places, do new things. But in the end, it’s the things like Christmas, the things that are always the same, that you love the most.
He realized suddenly that he liked May. He felt for her. She was like her house, he thought. Hidden behind slogans and bumper-sticker thought formulas. Broken and neglected like the house, but once fine. He taught at a college, after all; a pierced tongue and tattoos and defiant cant was not a disguise that could hide much from him. He suspected he was looking at a young girl in terrible emotional pain, too much pain for her to come out into life and engage with its complexities. But he liked her heart, he thought. His instinct told him her heart was kind.
“Maybe a man’s life becomes an allegory when he tells it. It does work like that, you know. We reveal ourselves in the stories we tell.”
“We reveal ourselves in the stories we tell,” Winter said—and was then annoyed to find he had quoted Margaret Whitaker without thinking. The therapist was beginning to get under his skin. “I saw the book you wrote for the children in the school library. You must have already been making your plans when you wrote it. It was a story about a dead woman who had suffered terribly and yet remained a beautiful and loving spirit, haunting a tower. Travis’s sister, May, told me you and Travis used to come to this tower sometimes to be alone. I added the two facts together.”
