Ruth felt a raindrop.

“Then my dad broke down and said a little girl had been killed. I was the one who asked who. I mean, when he said ‘little girl,’ I pictured little, you know. Not us.”

It was a definite drop, and they began to land on the redwood tabletop.

“Do you want to go in?” Artie asked.

“Everyone else will be inside,” Ruth said.

“I know.”

“Let’s get wet.”

They sat still for a while and watched the drops fall around them, heard the sound against the leaves of the tree above.

“I knew she was dead. I sensed it,” Ruth said, “but then I saw a mention of it in my dad’s paper and I was sure. They didn’t use her name at first. Just ‘Girl, fourteen.’ I asked my dad for the page but he wouldn’t give it to me. I mean, who else and her sister hadn’t been in school all week?”

“I wonder who told Lindsey?” Artie said. The rain picked up. Artie slipped underneath the table. “We’re going to get soaked,” he yelled up.

And then as quickly as the rain had started, it ceased. Sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. “I think she listens,” she said, too softly to be heard.

It became common knowledge at the symposium who my sister was and how I had died.

“Imagine being stabbed,” someone said.

“No thanks.”

“I think it’s cool.”

“Think of it – she’s famous.”

“Some way to get famous. I’d rather win the Nobel Prize.”

“Does anyone know what she wanted to be?”

“I dare you to ask Lindsey.”

And they listed the dead they knew.

Grandmother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, some had a parent, rarer was a sister or brother lost young to an illness – a heart irregularity – leukemia – an unpronounceable disease. No one knew anyone who had been murdered. But now they knew me.

Under a rowboat that was too old and worn to float, Lindsey lay down on the earth with Samuel Heckler, and he held her.

“You know I’m okay,” she said, her eyes dry. “I think Artie was trying to help me,” she offered.

“You can stop now, Lindsey,” he said. “We’ll just lie here and wait until things quiet down.”

Samuel’s back was flush against the ground, and he brought my sister close into his body to protect her from the dampness of the quick summer rain. Their breath began to heat the small space beneath the boat, and he could not stop it – his penis stiffened inside his jeans.

Lindsey reached her hand over.

“I’m sorry…” he began.

“I’m ready,” my sister said.

At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.

“How to Commit the Perfect Murder” was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

Eleven

When my father woke up at four A.M., the house was quiet. My mother lay beside him, lightly snoring. My brother, the only child, what with my sister attending the symposium, was like a rock with a sheet pulled up over him. My father marveled at what a sound sleeper he was – just like me. While I was still alive, Lindsey and I had had fun with that, clapping, dropping books, and even banging pot lids to see if Buckley would wake up.

Before leaving the house, my father checked on Buckley – to make sure, to feel the warm breath against his palm. Then he suited up in his thin-soled sneakers and light jogging outfit. His last task was to put Holiday’s collar on.

It was still early enough that he could almost see his breath. He could pretend at that early hour that it was still winter. That the seasons had not advanced.

The morning dog walk gave him an excuse to pass by Mr. Harvey’s house. He slowed only slightly – no one would have noticed save me or, if he had been awake, Mr. Harvey. My father was sure that if he just stared hard enough, just looked long enough, he would find the clues he needed in the casements of the windows, in the green paint coating the shingles, or along the driveway, where two large stones sat, painted white.

By late summer 1974, there had been no movement on my case. No body. No killer. Nothing.

My father thought of Ruana Singh: “When I was sure, I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.” He had not told this to Abigail because the advice made a sort of baseline sense that would frighten her into telling someone, and he suspected that someone might be Len.

Ever since the day he’d seen Ruana Singh and then had come home to find Len waiting for him, he’d felt my mother leaning heavily on the police. If my father said something that contradicted the police theories – or, as he saw them, the lack of them – my mother would immediately rush to fill the hole left open by my father’s idea. “Len says that doesn’t mean anything,” or, “I trust the police to find out what happened.”

Why, my father wondered, did people trust the police so much? Why not trust instinct? It was Mr. Harvey and he knew it. But what Ruana had said was when I was sure. Knowing, the deep-soul knowing that my father had, was not, in the law’s more literal mind, incontrovertible proof.

The house that I grew up in was the same house where I was born. Like Mr. Harvey’s, it was a box, and because of this I nurtured useless envies whenever I visited other people’s homes. I dreamed about bay windows and cupolas, balconies, and slanted attic ceilings in a bedroom. I loved the idea that there could be trees in a yard taller and stronger than people, slanted spaces under stairs, thick hedges grown so large that inside there were hollows of dead branches where you could crawl and sit. In my heaven there were verandas and circular staircases, window ledges with iron rails, and a campanile housing a bell that tolled the hour.

I knew the floor plan of Mr. Harvey’s by heart. I had made a warm spot on the floor of the garage until I cooled. He had brought my blood into the house with him on his clothes and skin. I knew the bathroom. Knew how in my house my mother had tried to decorate it to accommodate Buckley’s late arrival by stenciling battleships along the top of the pink walls. In Mr. Harvey’s house the bathroom and kitchen were spotless. The porcelain was yellow and the tile on the floor was green. He kept it cold. Upstairs, where Buckley, Lindsey, and I had our rooms, he had almost nothing. He had a straight chair where he would go to sit sometimes and stare out the window over at the high school, listen for the sound of band practice wafting over from the field, but mostly he spent his hours in the back on the first floor, in the kitchen building dollhouses, in the living room listening to the radio or, as his lust set in, sketching blueprints for follies like the hole or the tent.

No one had bothered him about me for several months. By that summer he only occasionally saw a squad car slow in front of his house. He was smart enough not to alter his pattern. If he was walking out to the garage or the mailbox, he kept on going.

He set several clocks. One to tell him when to open the blinds, one when to close them. In conjunction with these alarms, he would turn lights on and off throughout the house. When an occasional child happened by to sell chocolate bars for a school competition or inquire if he would like to subscribe to the Evening Bulletin, he was friendly but businesslike, unremarkable.

He kept things to count, and this counting reassured him. They were simple things. A wedding ring, a letter sealed in an envelope, the heel of a shoe, a pair of glasses, an eraser in the shape of a cartoon character, a small bottle of perfume, a plastic bracelet, my Pennsylvania keystone charm, his mother’s amber pendant. He would take them out at night long after he was certain that no newsboy or neighbor would knock on his door. He would count them like the beads on a rosary. For some he had forgotten the names. I knew the names. The heel of the shoe was from a girl named Claire, from Nutley, New Jersey, whom he had convinced to walk into the back of a van. She was littler than me. (I like to think I wouldn’t have gone into a van. Like to think it was my curiosity about how he could make a hole in the earth that wouldn’t collapse.) He had ripped the heel off her shoe before he let Claire go. That was all he did. He got her into the van and took her shoes off. She started crying, and the sound drove into him like screws. He pleaded with her to be quiet and just leave. Step magically out of the van barefoot and uncomplaining while he kept her shoes. But she wouldn’t. She cried. He started working on one of the heels of the shoes, prying it loose with his penknife, until someone pounded on the back of the van. He heard men’s voices and a woman yelling something about calling the police. He opened the door.