Murders Without Crows

Small town, few people.

It was the mantra I grew up with, the one that my mom always said when I was growing up. Rumors flew faster than light, and walls are always thinner than you ever give them credit for.

Who was hitting whom. Which dogs were biters. Which farmer didn’t care for their animals properly. Which kids needed an extra meal and a safe space. Which men the girls needed to stay away from, and not get stuck in a room alone with.

Small town. Everyone knew everyone, parents working to give their kids a better life, raise their kids in relative safety. We weren’t naive, we knew accidents happened, especially with farm equipment thrown into the mix. We knew un-watched kids could get into heaps of trouble with woods, rivers, roads, but still we roamed. We knew strangers can bring a bunch of trouble, but not so much as the person that slept down the hall.

Growing up the in the seventies and eighties, I felt our town was in a time warp, and I was actually growing up a small bubble of the sixties that time must have missed when sweeping up at the end of the decade. We had television, we watched the evening news, we had two city newspapers (morning and evening), and a very active town newspaper. We knew about that world out there, and what was going on. It just didn’t happen here in our sleepy town. Biggest thing that happened was the cleanup after Hurricane Agnes.

Imagine the shock when the bubble popped.

Not just one murder. Six.

Two in town. Two up on the ridge, where the perpetrators killed themselves. Two in another small town over the county line.

What I knew at the time, compared to how they were portrayed in the newspaper, was vastly different. We kids (I was seventeen! Practically an adult!) were kept from some of the details, but they got out anyway. How the kids were untouched as their parents died, but were scarred for life. How the assholes who did this were each other’s drinking buddies, whining to each other as they bellied up to one of many sleazy bars in the county, drinking and wailing how their former significant others did them wrong. How they idolized a certain movie. How they decided, while sober, that carrying out their revenge fantasies on each other’s problems was the way to go.

A touch too much Strangers on a Train, and not enough Dragnet. They didn’t have the brain power to think it all the way through, as do most killers. Yay, she doesn’t get my kid anymore! Yay! Wait… but, I’ll get caught, and go to jail, and now my kid won’t want to see me any more because I killed Mommy…

You might detect from my writing that I hold more than a little contempt for these jerkwads. And you are quite correct. I have no patience or tolerance for people who rip six families apart, not including the futures of the kids involved, because some women dare hurted their fewwings.

Nothing like waking up before the alarm, the scanner going off like a smoke detector, knowing the pile of police cars completely shutting off the southern end of the street out of town weren’t there for the ambience, and learning from kids at school what was going down.

And being scared out of our mind, because one classmate was missing.

Small town. Few people.

Everyone know everyone.

We didn’t know Kath was okay till the paper came out the next morning. But she was being debriefed, and she was a mess, because she lost her mother and father in one night. And acting stepfather, who was a kinder person than her sperm donor.

Murder was a thing that doesn’t happen in our town. Up the block. In a house.

It happened- well, elsewhere. On a street in a big city. In a crack house, we had those now. Down at the dockside, if you listened to the old timers. Having the local TV stations come out of Philly helped enforce that illusion of separation, because it all happened there, not here.

And once the excitement faded, all that was left was a hollow numbness. You couldn’t escape it, not when all you had to do was look at Kath’s eyes to see the truth.

There is an excitement to seeing a horrible thing. It comes with the adrenaline, the microphone in the face, the light of the video camera, the scritch of the journalist’s pen as he scribbles down the leading story. Top of the fold.

Excitement in a small town.

We were all worried about the kids. Finding family members to take them in. Funerals, probate, division of property when you’re supposed to be studying math and making eyes at your crush. Two funerals that no one wants to go to, because they’re cold-blooded murderers, but still you go, stone-faced, if for no other reason than to make sure they’re going in the ground and staying there. Because family.

Fewer people.

We kept our eyes on Kath. Therapy? In the eighties? A joke, at best. But we would walk with her, and talk near her, and hold our bodies in such a way that she knew she was included in the conversation. We felt like we invented cliques, and we could darn well turn them on and off with the roll of a shoulder. All of us made sure our shoulders were never turned in such a way to let her feel excluded or alone.

People magically appeared to sit aside her when she sat down anywhere. She had rides “home,” wherever it happened to be that day. Watching helplessly as their families coped with grief and feeding more kids and who would take in a toddler and do they keep the houses or sell them for trust funds. Oh, yeah, and do well on that math test, okay?

We had buried one of our classmates the year before. That one hurt, too. Accident, they were out drinking, underage of course, the drunker one realized he couldn’t drive and gave the keys to his buddy. His buddy put the car right into a tree, killing the passenger. His best friend. But it was an accident. Bad choices all around, but still an accident. The buddy eventually drank himself to death, though we all tried over and over to tell him that it wasn’t his fault.

But, still, an accident.

The whole school showed up to his funeral. We cried on each other’s shoulders in the parking lot.

Small town.

All of our parents showed up to the victims’ funerals. We kids were told to stay at home with grandparents, though Kath’s best friends were there for her. Only a handful of people showed up at the killers’ funerals, and some of their older kids flatly refused. Consequences of a family deliberately shattered; they were shunned in death.

Fewer people.

And suddenly, our sleepy town was in the news. It was back on the map; Brigadoon’s spell banished. And we were rising seniors, and we were dealing with the AIDS crisis, and Solidarnosk, and Lockerbie, Jimmy Bakker. Prozac, Lasik, Hubble, fiber optic cables, computer viruses, The Simpsons.

Ay, caramba. What a way to be catapulted into our present, much less our future.

It can happen here. It wasn’t those people any more. It was us, too.

Our town changed. The sense of community was fractured. Strangers were supposed to be the murderers, not family! Not drinking buddies! Not guys that lived one town away! Many family secrets started coming out: incest, family abuse, why we don’t talk to that person anymore. My dad had to get involved a few times concerning my own safety, and I was told about our own “family” members that weren’t safe to be around, and why. And people in town. And people at church.

We didn’t used to lock the doors.

We used to trust that the neighbors would keep a protective eye out for us.

Many of us moved away. Even fewer returned.

I’m back in town now, after living elsewhere for most of twenty-five years. Hubby and I make a point to talk to the neighbors, and catch up on the local gossip, and keep an eye out when things happen. I was the one helping out at two different car crashes with deer, even staying with the one and driving her home with her groceries after the tow truck took her smashed car away. We walk the alley and sidewalks, know our neighbors’ names. Well, their dogs’ names, more like, because, you know, priorities. When strangers break down, I’m usually the one who gives them directions, because our town eats your internets.

Old time friendliness.

Getting rarer, but I do what I can.

You cannot imagine my mixed feelings, coming home with my parents, and seeing the box of kittens dumped in the middle of the road. My parents can’t deal with emergencies, but I can. Hubby and I headed back, and we got two of the last three. You cannot imagine the next night, going to eat at the local restaurant across the street, when the hostess asked us how the kittens were doing. How did they find out?

We picked up those kittens just a few feet from where the murderers’ bodies were found. The relief of being able to say “where we found the kittens” or “kitten ridge” instead of “where they found the killers.” Sure, that road has a name. Betcha no one around here knows it without having to think about it first.

Small town, few people. Everyone knows each others’ business, like it or not.

But I avoid one house up near the end of town. It’s usually vacant, anyway, because no one who buys it stays long. Oh, we’ll talk to them, sure, and the post office is still the hot spot for gossip and town information. But they don’t stay long, and it’s not the town that’s the problem.

Newer couples are coming in. They’re having families, and doing their best to settle in. I play with my granddaughter, living a few doors down, with my aunt and uncle living beside them. And my grandmother’s ride-or-die bestie will stop when we’re in the garden, and we’ll reminisce about my grandmother’s… quirkiness.

Small town.

With a few more people.