by Sarah Perry
But the essential rhythm of Bridgton remained the same. The Shoe Shop hand-sewers took their places each morning at their benches, either turning from or gazing over at Crystal’s empty one. Construction workers and contractors and masons continued work on new houses and repair on old ones. The clerks at Renys greeted the same customers, over and over. The Fourth of July fireworks went off without a hitch, exploding into the dark sky above the elementary school ball fields.
And of course, the summer was full of parties. Parties were a good place to talk about the murder, to conjecture and exclaim. Especially late in the night, when some dark and nasty things were said, about Dennis and other suspects, and about Crystal. One of her friends said that Crystal “basically dressed like a prostitute,” a false claim surely born of cruel jealousy but also stifling fear. It was safer for certain people to think she’d had it coming to her; it made it easier to believe it wouldn’t come for them.
Those months had a nervous, hectic energy to them; the murder lurked in the back of everyone’s mind, an anxiety waiting to be let out. The killer could be sitting there next to you at the lake, in line behind you at the bank. He could be at any party; you could brush up against him while pulling a beer from a crammed-full fridge. You could go home with him. You wouldn’t even know.
A central figure in the Bridgton party scene was Donnie Martin. He worked at Tommy’s, drove a blue-black Thunderbird, and had long, flowing hair. He was known as a pretty boy and a cokehead. He had previously worked at the Shoe Shop. Several people said that during that long, strange summer, he had a habit of getting fucked up and claiming that he had killed Crystal. He’d say it with a proud swagger, and then forget all about it by morning.
The police questioned a young woman named Miranda White, who shared a number of mutual friends with Donnie. When the cops spoke to Miranda, they focused on one particular night that summer. She and Donnie had both attended a party at my uncle Ray Perry’s house—Ray’s wife, Stacey, was Miranda’s boss at the Subway sandwich shop. She told the cops that she hadn’t really talked to Donnie that night, or couldn’t remember having done so. But, knowing who Crystal’s ex-husband was, she had another story she thought they might find interesting.
When Miranda got to the party, the place was busy, the living room and kitchen and the basement full of people, including Tom Perry. She grabbed a beer, then worked her way through the smoky crowd to sit on a couch in the living room. She didn’t see Donnie, but Tom was right next to her. She was nineteen; he was thirty-three. It was still early in the evening, but she could see immediately that he was very drunk. At first, he bristled when she sat down, but there was nowhere else to sit, so she stayed put. Eventually he started talking about Crystal.
He was convinced that everyone thought he had killed his ex-wife. He was feeling sorry for himself, and got pretty worked up as he spoke. He claimed that even his own mother thought he had killed Crystal. He hadn’t, he insisted.
He clearly wanted Miranda to sympathize, soothe him. Once his laments wound down, he started being really nice to her. Asked her if she needed anything, and eventually started coming on to her. When she didn’t indicate interest, a switch flipped. He told her to shut up. He called her a bitch.
Tom got more and more drunk, until his brothers Ray and Danny asked him to leave. It was a crowd of big drinkers, but he’d outdone himself. He was ranting and raving, and it was too early in the night for his bullshit. He didn’t want to go home, though, because he was fighting with Teresa. That was why he’d come in the first place: to hide from her.
Ray and Danny finally just pushed him out the door. Tom ran down the porch steps in a rage, seized a car battery, and hurled it through the house’s picture window as everyone leaped back out of the way. The forty-pound box hit that expanse of glass like a bomb going off, and shards flew through the living room like a gust of rain. It cemented the night in the memory of everyone who was there.
* * *
Teresa, too, felt the dark pressure of the murder, like an insistent hand pushing her mind further out of shape. One night that summer, she had to leave her infant daughter with friends overnight because she was hallucinating blood all over the kitchen, was screaming and could not be consoled. She often rambled to friends about Crystal’s injuries, and several found her details so chillingly specific—although ultimately false—that they went to the police. One even recorded Teresa’s phone calls and took notes. It is both disturbing and heartbreaking to read them; the shaky handwriting seems to telegraph panicky fear.
On another night, Teresa went to the bar, with no plan for getting herself home. The man who ended up giving her a ride spoke to the police a few months later. Teresa had kind of invited herself along, he said. He couldn’t really say no. They left the bar and started talking in the cab of his truck, and she brought up Crystal Perry’s murder. She asked him to drive down Route 93, to that house. “We sat in the dooryard for a few minutes,” the man said. “She couldn’t stop thinking of her friend, I guess.” After a few minutes they pulled out, then drove around in aimless loops, passing the house several times. A few hundred feet from our house, they pulled over again, onto the shoulder of the road. The man left the radio on, and the two stepped out onto the pavement and stayed there for a while, dancing slowly in the dark.
28
* * *
after
Gradually, I let my life in Texas gain some traction, distract me from everything I’d lost in Maine. I got to know my neighbor Angela better, and we soon became very close friends. She was petite and stick-thin and hadn’t yet hit puberty, but she was already plucking her eyebrows and shaping her thick brown hair with a curling iron that steamed and hissed when she hit it with her styling spritz. Her weightiest concerns involved which boys liked her or didn’t, and whether she would make the junior cheerleading squad. It was she who initiated me into those rituals of feminine polish that I had seen my mother perform, those things I craved and Tootsie disdained. Angela had the passive-aggressive honesty of a sister, but she kept me from alienating myself with strange clothing or hairstyles. I kept returning to the idea of suicide, obsessing in the shower instead of using that time to bathe, and once, when I hadn’t washed my hair in five days, Angela said, “Wow, why is your hair so greasy?!” I was shamed into compliance, but at least shampooing and conditioning my waist-length hair was a healthy distraction. Sometimes life just doesn’t leave time for misery.
I was a few inches taller than Angela, and stouter, even at my thinnest; I mostly felt large and ungainly next to her. She had an easy, compact cuteness that, for a time, I attempted to emulate, wearing flowered skirts and polo shirts rather than my usual ripped jeans and loose tees. Her ideas about beauty and behavior were, at the very least, a track I could follow. Being around her sharpened my desire to be small, harmless. I ate less and less: another way to practice restraint, to banish that little girl called Heifer. I’d finally gotten thin—108 pounds at nearly five-six—and it’s hard now to tell if I was trying to be more beautiful or if I was still trying to erase myself.
I quickly grew to prefer Angela’s house to Tootsie’s—it was a relaxed, comfortable place where I could borrow her easier life for hours at a stretch. Her mother, Donna, was the first true stay-at-home mom I’d ever met. She was like a blond, Texan Sally Field, with big, highlighted hair and a twangy voice. She had competed in beauty pageants “as a young lady” and now kept very busy raising Angela and her quiet little sister, Katie. I remember eating cookies in Donna’s spacious kitchen while she asked me about school, about Tootsie and her little boys. Angela’s father, Bill, was in the Air Force, but he had an ease that was alien to both Tootsie and Jimmy—he liked a beer after work, he watched action movies with us, and he was a big Cowboys fan. He had a cheesy mustache, and he gave great hugs. Bill told me that his branch of the military was generally more laid-back than the Army, a sentiment Tootsie once echoed, but with scorn.
The Eilers were like a television fam
ily, and I found their bland rituals both fascinating and comforting. The neighborhood itself was soothing in its uniformity and order; for months I’d had to count the houses from the bus stop to be sure I’d come home to the right one. On cooler nights, Angela and I camped in a small tent in her backyard, talking late into the night. We talked so much, in fact, that we unwittingly developed a sort of twin speech, wherein we could listen to each other and speak to each other simultaneously with little confusion. Angela felt like a little sister to me, because she had been sheltered from so much of what I’d witnessed and experienced. I already had my period, and she was terribly jealous. I clued her in to the general mechanics of sex, which I had divined from movies her parents would have forbidden, plus the overheard, quiet shufflings that had emerged from behind my mother’s bedroom door. But I kept my knowledge of grief and terror to myself. I didn’t want to darken the sunny childhood that she was still enjoying. When I discovered that Pickett had briefly interviewed her when they came down, I felt defensive of her. “They asked if you were ever cruel to animals,” she said. “It was so weird. You love kitties!” She didn’t seem to understand that this question meant they could be evaluating me as a suspect. Still, I watched her carefully, looking for signs of fear.
* * *
January 1995 approached, and I thought of it as merciful. I held tight to the idea of a new beginning, or the possibility of one, someday. But this would be a shadow year, too.
On January 24, the O.J. Simpson trial began. I still felt like I contained a great darkness, poison that I didn’t want anyone to see, and now the outer world was a gauntlet of blood-spattered tiles, accusations of Nicole’s infidelity, and those terrifying black gloves. Everyone had an opinion, from kids in my math class to adults I overheard in Walmart. Murder was everywhere, the sexiest thing. I couldn’t hide from it, so instead I hid myself. I saw again how excited people got when they talked about a killing, and I didn’t want them turning that excited interest upon me. I listened mutely while people went on and on, and I said nothing. The police in Maine collected DNA samples from more men and sent them off to the FBI lab in DC, while much of the country learned about this technology for the first time.
The O.J. trial was a mess from the start, but at least they had the guy. All they had to do was convict him. It was just a matter of time—he was right there, it was so obvious. Both cases were missing the murder weapon, which I understood to be no small challenge for a prosecutor. I had to see that this detail could be overcome, once a viable suspect was identified. I needed to see that he was the only missing piece, that when we put him on trial, he’d be convicted. The man who killed Mom wouldn’t have the benefit of a high-powered legal team, money, fame. As a white girl from an overwhelmingly white state, I had little understanding of how race factored into the trial, and thought more about how men dominated women, how the rich dominated the poor. Like most of America, I was focused primarily on what the O.J. trial meant to me. If O.J. went down, I reasoned—even while knowing that my reasoning was fanciful—Mom’s killer would, too.
I didn’t want to see O.J.’s face every day, and I got tired of seeing Nicole’s bloody patio and the door that could have kept her safe, if only she’d known not to open it. But Tootsie and Jimmy were captivated; it seemed that whenever I passed the living room TV, there was O.J. I saw his lame pantomime when he tried on the gloves found at the murder scene, the smirk that pulled at the side of his mouth. In the days that followed, I kept waiting for someone—a reporter or commentator—to wonder why, if he was supposed to be innocent, he hadn’t at least feigned sadness or disgust at handling gloves covered with the blood of a woman he had once loved. But I never heard anyone make that point. I even mentioned it to a friend once, but she just shrugged. It seemed that nobody was much interested in Nicole. To America, O.J. was special, whether or not he was a murderer: he was charming, famous, and physically heroic. Nicole was just another beautiful woman.
When the verdict came, acquitting O.J. of murder, everyone in my classroom jumped up and cheered. Everyone but me.
In that moment it was abundantly clear: even if the police identified the man who killed Mom, even if we waited years for that glorious day in court, we might be disappointed. The law was imperfect, vulnerable to human whim. I could not wait for justice to come heal me.
29
* * *
always
From this distance, I can look back and see, objectively, that Mom was not model-perfect. She was thin, with flaming hair and pretty eyes, but she also had pale eyebrows and crowded teeth. It takes my sharpest concentration to see these imperfections; like many daughters, I will always consider my mother to be the pinnacle of beauty. And she was truly striking. In the small town of Bridgton, many people agreed.
After Mom’s death, when the police interviewed Earl Gagnon—a friend of Tom’s who worked at the Shop—he said, “A lot of guys looked at her—pleasing to the eye, you know.” The full record of interviews, and the stories of other townspeople, back him up. There are too many to detail in full, but here is a partial list of men who, in the days and weeks and years following Mom’s death, were known by police or rumored by others to have been attracted to her:
BRUCE INGALLS, a contractor who lived next door to Grace, who helped Tom avoid his child support responsibilities by paying him in cash.
SCOTT MITCHELL, Mom’s friend Valerie’s husband, who looked just like Tom Petty.
GLEN KNIGHT, her friend Kim’s husband, a self-righteously pious born-again Christian who now works as a prison warden.
DONNIE MARTIN, the one who had that habit of bragging that he’d killed her.
ERIC HARNEY, a former hand-sewer, who once pointed to his head and said, “I’ve got her number, right here.”
FRANK MANZER, whose wife, Noelle, was a slender redhead. Once, after the murder, he pinned Noelle to the bed and stabbed the mattress with a kitchen knife, over and over. She waited until he was dead to tell the police that she suspected he had killed Crystal Perry.
RONNIE FOSTER, who stared at her so intently at the Shoe Shop that she had to move her bench.
MICHAEL HUTCHINSON, a young guy who worked for his father’s masonry company.
A MAN IN A WHITE CAR, NAME UNKNOWN, who once followed her all the way to New Hampshire. She told Dale about it but wouldn’t let him investigate.
AN ELECTRICIAN NAMED DONALD CALLAHAN, who once slept with her, then complained when she scolded him for sharing the details with anyone who would listen. The day after she was killed, he was doing some scheduled work at Chief Bob Bell’s house and told him, “Crystal was a real bitch.”
HER FRIEND AND COWORKER RICHARD TURCOTTE, benevolently in love with her still.
TERRY OULLETTE, who once fixed a sink at Grace’s house and was rumored to have a “fatal attraction.”
RYAN NOVAK, a Bridgton police officer. He became “John Doe” after a fellow cop retrieved his cast-off cigarette for DNA testing.
DAN LAGRANGE, a gray-haired neighbor who occasionally hired Mom to clean his house when she needed extra cash.
PETER KNIGHT, who lived out west somewhere, and called Mom out of the blue the month before she died. He was a registered sex offender by then. Previously known as Junior—the boy she dated before Tom.
LLOYD POULIN, who mentioned Mom’s death from the back of a Bridgton police car after being picked up for being drunk and disorderly. He asked the cop, “How old is her little girl now, sixteen or seventeen? Crystal was a slut, wasn’t she? That daughter is a sweet little thing.”
* * *
Bruce Ingalls, Grace’s neighbor, is one of the most interesting of these men. When Grace married Ray for the second time, the family lived in an apartment for a few months before moving into their house in North Bridgton. Gwen was nine or ten at the time, Crystal seven or eight. In the apartment next door lived a teenage couple: Bruce and his girlfriend. Years later, Gwen would find it strange when Bruce ended up buying the house right next door
to Grace and Ray’s, on the other side of town, as though he were following them. After the murder, she found it even stranger. It made her a little suspicious.
Bruce, though, doesn’t seem to have been a bad guy. Despite his established attraction to my mother, I’m convinced that his close proximity to the family in two separate locations was a coincidence. He hired Tom and paid him in cash, but Tom was his friend, and what he did with the money was his business. He figured that was between Tom and Crystal.
Tom now remembers an afternoon when he was on a carpentry job with Bruce, sometime around 1992. They were driving down Main Street near the bank, and they slowed as they saw Crystal entering the crosswalk. She stopped there, in front of the truck, smiled at Bruce, and, as Tom puts it, “did a little dance thing, right in the middle of the road . . . he-he, a little . . . dance thing.” Then she turned and walked away, laughing over her shoulder. “She was playful,” Tom says. “But reserved most of the time.”
When she stopped traffic without even meaning to—literally or figuratively—she knew how to use the moment to quietly get the upper hand. If she sensed that someone saw her beauty, she could add a smile to amplify it. She used what power she had.
It’s fun to be attractive, and I’m glad Mom could occasionally throw a man’s desire in his face, with a lighthearted you-wish taunt. But I also think about her moving her bench away from Ronnie Foster, about her need to tell Dale about that white car that followed her to New Hampshire. I think about the incredible mental pressure of being the target of so much attention and desire, even if she was aware of only some of it. I think about Gwen’s concern about us living all alone out on Route 93, and I remember how mad Mom was when the contractors cut down all those trees in the front yard.
