Mr. Bellafont often thought of the murdered Mrs. Boll. Dark-haired and dark-eyed with a curvy, pleasing figure–stabbed to death in her house along with her family. At the library, in the archives, he’d pore through the color photos. He’d have to ask the librarian to fetch them for him. They kept them in a locked drawer at the back of the room, across from a row of plastic-krinkled murder mysteries. Seems about right, Bellafont would think. And the sheriff, khaki-clad: “Sure, I’ll show ‘em to ya.” The autopsy photos: Mrs Boll covered in black blood, dried on her neck and cheeks, drops on her forehead and around her head on the linoleum, halo-flecks. Eyes open, hair pushed back in a yellow headband, skirt billowing away from her hips, torn so that her silky thigh showed.

Both rooms in dilapidation. In the sheriff’s office, dents in the drywall, one a wide, shadowy hole near the floorboard. “I kicked the shit out of that,” the sheriff confessed. “Was having one hell of a day.” In the library the book shelves sagged, extra volumes piled up on the floor. Bellafont was nine years old in 1959; still he knew her and she knew him. At smoke-filled parlor parties, at church, marching past him, prim and proper, to a front pew. Her profile in the sunlight: white skin whitened, blanched against the heavy black of her hair and the dark red of her lips. Sometimes when she’d pass, her eyes would flit to the side and catch his. Nine years old and she’d smile at him–so slightly you might have not known.

Her killer, Miss Peotone was a different sort all together. Lesbian–though in those days no one used the word. Her picture was in the library’s archives, too: a rail-thin little thing smooshed between two other women on a living room couch, cigarette in hand. Her two friends were smiling. Her face was tilted so you could see her long nose, though her eyes were turned towards the camera. The smoke she was exhaling hung in a frozen billow just outside her lips. One lens of her cats-eye glasses reflected the flash; the other beady crow-eye peered out from the photo. This, very different from the mug shot in the sheriff’s office. In that one, her flushed face full on, no glasses, her hair in a frizzled mess, her eyes red and raw. Bellafont, even at fifty-nine years old, was a strong man, hair streaked silver but very full. His shoulders stayed broad and round, even if his chest had softened and his belly now generously protruded over his belt. In the library or in the sheriff’s office, standing, manilla folder opened, vaguely aware that someone was looking at him, he liked to think about just what he’d do to Miss Peotone. Just what punishment he’d mete out. Someone like her, someone who did what she did, nothing was too cruel. It wasn’t just Mrs. Boll that she’d killed. Both Mr. Boll and their six-year-old son Jack: hacked and sliced; between them 32 separate wounds. Their pictures too–the husband’s empty eyes, the boy’s eyes closed as if sleeping–in the sheriff’s manilla folder.

He’d read enough now, Bellafont had, that he held the whole crime in his mind–almost as if it were a memory. The gaps and holes and confusion of the “official” story fell away. Official versions always did. You could never trust the official version. There was no need anyway. Close your eyes and step through it.