“Is this some kind of publicity thing?”
“No, it’s to—”
“Buy our participation,” Allison said.
“No. No! See, I want to help. I want to—”
“You don’t want to help,” she said, her voice like a dull blade. “People always come here to write a book or make a TV show or a podcast or whatever. But you . . . you give us a room for children at the library, all as a way of buttering us up?”
Allison was directing all this at Carson, but Stevie was there, curling up inside, as the entire town of Barlow Corners turned to watch Allison remove the bones of Carson’s spinal cord one by one. The most charitable of the expressions showed embarrassment; most were cold and disgusted. Stevie felt herself getting a bit faint. She considered simply dropping
to her knees and crawling away, under the picnic tables, out of the tent, across the green, into the woods, never to emerge. Nate and Janelle watched from maybe ten feet away, helpless. They may as well have been on the other side of a moat full of alligators.
“I’ll tell you what you can do,” Allison said. “You can take your picnic and your food trucks and your podcast, and you can shove it.”
“I really just want to dialogue. . . .”
Allison gripped the plastic tablecloth of a nearby picnic table, and Patty Horne hurried up to her.
“Let’s go,” she said to Allison. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I’m fine,” Allison said, her voice dry.
Allison lowered her gaze from Carson and looked at Stevie for a long moment. Stevie couldn’t read her expression, but whatever it meant, it propelled Stevie backward and away from Carson and out the side of the tent. She quick-walked across the green, not looking back. She could hear footsteps behind her, and Nate and Janelle caught up.
“Yiiiiikes,” Nate said. “Wow. Wow. Wow.”
“You okay?” Janelle asked.
“Fine. I just . . .”
“Yeah. We saw. Everyone saw.”
They stopped once they reached the statue of John Barlow. The base was large enough for all three of them to sit, and they could hide around the back. Looking at it up close, Stevie could see that it wasn’t a particularly good statue—it
was slightly formless, a generic figure of a man on a generic rendering of a bored-looking horse.
“It’s ugly, isn’t it?” said a voice from behind them.
Patty Horne had left the tent and come to join them. She walked up, hands tucked in her jean pockets.
“I remember when they unveiled it,” she said. “They pulled off the cloth and everyone was quiet for a moment. My friends and I burst out laughing. And . . . don’t worry about Allison. She doesn’t mean it.”
“It definitely sounded like she meant it,” Nate replied.
“Well, she probably meant it for him, not for you. We get . . . tired’s not the word. . . . We get inflamed, I guess, when people come back and try to make something of the case. It’s like we heal and then the wound opens again. It was hard enough for me, but Allison lost her sister. It doesn’t matter that it was in 1978.”
“I’m not here to inflame, or . . . anything like that,” Stevie said.
“I know you’re not. You’re a kid.” The slight was inadvertent, Stevie felt, and she didn’t take it personally. “Some days it still feels unreal, like a story about someone else. Other times, like tonight actually, it feels like it just happened. I can remember so much about it—how it felt. It was warm like tonight. We would sit here on the green or go down to the Dairy Duchess for ice cream. I still go there sometimes and half expect to see Diane waiting tables.”