No One Will Miss Her
Kat Rosenfield
Dedication
For Noah, who thought it sounded like a good idea
Prologue
My name is Lizzie Ouellette, and if you’re reading this, I’m already dead.
Yes, dead. Beyond the veil, passed-on and gone. A fresh-minted angel in the arms of Jesus, if you believe in that sort of thing. A fresh pile of chow for the worms, if you don’t. I don’t know what I believe.
I don’t know why I’m surprised.
It’s just that I don’t want to die—or didn’t, I guess, especially not like that. There one moment, gone the next. Erased. Obliterated. With a bang, not a whimper.
But like so many things I didn’t want, it happened anyway.
The funny thing is, some people will say I had it coming. Maybe not in so many words, maybe not quite so out in the open. But give it time. Just wait. One of these days, maybe a month or two down the road, somebody will let it fly. Down at Strangler’s, in that magic booze-emboldened hour before the neon Budweiser sign clicks off for the night and they turn on those death-glare fluorescents so that the barman can see what a mess everyone made, so he can swab down the sticky floor. One of the old-timers will toss back the dregs of his fifth or seventh or seventeenth beer, and stand up on unsteady legs, and hitch his sagging pants up to that under-the-gut sweet spot, and say, “It ain’t like me to speak ill of the dead, but the hell with it—good riddance to her!”
And then he’ll burp and shamble off into the restroom to splatter a poorly aimed piss everywhere but into the bowl. And with not so much as a meaningful look at the sink on his way out, either, even though his hands are crawling with a whole day’s worth of dust and grit and grime. The old man with stains on his pants, dirt under his fingernails, a topographical map of busted capillaries racing over the strawberry bulb of his nose, maybe even a wife at home with a week-old yellowing bruise around her eye from the last time he hit her—well, he’s the salt of the earth, of course. The hometown hero. The beating heart of Copper Falls.
And Lizzie Ouellette, the girl who started her life in a junkyard and ended it less than three decades later in a pine box? I’m the trash that this town should’ve taken out years ago.
That’s how it is, in this place. That’s how it’s always been.
And so that’s how they’ll talk about me, once enough time has passed. Once they know I’m cold in the ground, or burned to ashes and scattered on the wind. No matter how terribly and tragically I died, old habits die harder. People can only pull their punches so long, especially when it comes to their favorite target, and even if the target isn’t moving anymore.
But that part, that will come later.
Right now, folks will be a little bit kinder. A little bit softer. And a little bit careful, because death has come to Copper Falls, and with death comes outsiders. It wouldn’t do to tell the truth, not when you don’t know who might be listening. So they’ll clasp their hands and shake their heads and say things like, “That poor girl was trouble since the day she was born,” and there will be real pity in their voices. As if I had any say. As if I conjured trouble from inside the womb so that it was already there, waiting to catch me as I tumbled out, a sticky web that tangled up all around me and never let go.
As if the same people who are clucking their tongues right now and sighing over my troubled life couldn’t have spared me from so much pain, if they’d spared just a little thought, a little grace, for their junkyard girl.
But they can say what they like. I know the truth, and for once, I have no reason not to tell it. Not anymore. Not from where I stand, six feet under, finally at peace. I was no saint in life, but death has a way of making you honest. So here’s my message from beyond the grave, the one I want you to remember. Because it will be important. Because I don’t want to lie.
They all thought I had it coming.
They all thought I was better off dead.
And the truth, the one I realized in that last, horrible moment before the gun went off, is just this:
They were right.
Part 1
Chapter 1
The Lake
Just shy of ten o’clock on Tuesday morning, the smoke from the junkyard fire on Old Ladd Road began to move east. The junkyard had been burning for hours by then. Unstoppable, marked by that putrid column, black and billowing, that could be seen for miles—but now the column was a front, pushed by the rising wind. The wispy points of its poisonous fingers crept down the road and went drifting through the trees, toward the lake, and toward the lakefront, which was when Sheriff Dennis Ryan sent his deputy, Myles Johnson, to start clearing out the houses there. Fully expecting to find them empty, of course. Labor Day was a month gone, and with it the tourist season, such as it was. The nights were longer now, and colder, tinged with the promise of an early frost. That last weekend, pleasant little curls of wood smoke could be seen drifting above the houses, as the folks staying there lit their little fires against the evening’s chill.