will stay that way unless I say the word. And I’ll never say the word, as long as you are good to me.”
Gabriel has the keys to Papa Pete’s Cavalier, the money from Papa Pete’s wallet, and of course, he has the gun. He says he’s leaving, and if I’m good, he’ll take me with him, alive. I don’t want to ask him where the gun came from, or how he got to my house in the first place with no car. But I’m guessing that it has to do with the people watching Jenny, and so I’m going to try and be good, even though I feel as though my whole life has been pulled out from under me and I can’t close my eyes without seeing Papa Pete—the shell of him on our living room floor, blood pooling all around.
I will be good. I will be good. I will be good. Please help me to be good.
A week ago, I was so excited about this assignment. Mrs. Brixton told our class that she would keep the letters and send them to us at our future homes in the year 2000, when we will be the age that she is now.
Aurora Grace, the one thing in the world that I know I want to be is a mother, your mother. The idea of writing you a letter now that you can read someday gave me what Papa Pete would have called “purpose” and “direction” and all kinds of other things I’ve never had enough of. It made me so happy, I actually thanked Mrs. Brixton for the assignment. But now, I know I’ll never be able to turn it in. School is out in less than a week. And one way or another, I will be gone by sunrise.
With love,
April (Your Future Mom)
Two
Quentin
“IT WAS THE girl.” The old man leaned forward, bracing against the worn-out armchair as though he were trying to escape its grasp. “April Cooper. She was the real killer.”
Quentin Garrison watched his face. He was very good at describing people, a skill he used all the time in his true crime podcasts. Later, recording the narration segments with his coproducer, Summer Hawkins, Quentin would paint the picture for his listeners—the leathery skin, the white eyebrows wispy as cobwebs, the eyes, cerulean in 1976 but now the color of worn denim, and with so much pain bottled up behind them, as though he were constantly hovering on the brink of tears.
The man was named Reg Sharkey, and on June 20, 1976, he’d watched his four-year-old daughter Kimmy die instantly of a gunshot wound to the chest—the youngest victim of April Cooper and Gabriel Allen LeRoy, aka the Inland Empire Killers. Two weeks later, his wife, Clara, had decided her own grief was too much to bear and committed suicide, after which Reg Sharkey had apparently given up on caring about anything or anyone.
Quentin said, “Wasn’t it LeRoy who pulled the trigger?”
“Yes.”
“But you blame April.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Reg stayed quiet for several seconds. Quentin resisted the urge to fill in the dead air. This was a trick that often worked in interviews, the subject finally relenting and spilling his guts—anything to put an end to that awful, uncomfortable silence.
Quentin listened to the hum of the air conditioner and the whoosh of a passing truck. Just outside the shaded window, a bird shrieked—a blue jay, Quentin thought, or some other similar species put on this earth to destroy radio broadcasts. He was glad Summer had talked him into the cardioid mic—it was so much better at cutting out background noise than the omnidirectional he’d planned on taking. You’d be surprised at how many distracting sounds there are in a typical living room, Summer had said. And she’d been right. Of course, if Summer had seen this place, she’d never have called it typical.
Reg’s living room was a time capsule, from the faded plaid earth-toned couch, to the Formica coffee table, to the avocado-green ashtray and matching coasters that looked as though they hadn’t been unstacked since the premiere of the very first Star Wars movie. There was a coffee-table book of photography—The Best of Life Magazine—and a few dusty TV Guides, one of which had Fonzie on the cover. It was as though Reg Sharkey had attempted to stop the clock on June 19, 1976, before his family had crumbled into a billion pieces.
Quentin took in the line of photographs on the mantelpiece—almost all of them of Clara and Kimmy, holiday photos