‘That’s the biggest cat I’ve ever seen,’ I said, stroking it.
‘This is Cujo. He’s a Maine Coon,’ said Nikki, smiling at the cat like a proud mother.
‘Cujo?’
‘Well, I thought it was funny.’
The cat rubbed his head against my hand and chirruped again.
‘He’s beautiful,’ I said.
‘And he knows it.’
I petted the cat for a minute. Finally I said, ‘Does Everett Miller have any relatives left in Penance? Any friends?’
‘No, he doesn’t.’ Her frown had returned. ‘Why are you asking all these questions? Are you a reporter or something?’
‘I am a journalist, yeah.’
Her smile vanished. ‘In which case, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’
She escorted me to the door before I had a chance to protest. I thought she was going to snatch back the copy of A Night in the Woods she’d lent me, but instead she just held the door open. A little sheepishly, I went out.
‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave it. Stop asking questions.’
I must have looked confused.
‘Sooner or later, you’ll bump into somebody less friendly than me.’
She shut the door and locked it behind her.
Meet someone less friendly than her if I kept asking questions? Okay, now I really was intrigued.
Chapter 7
Monday
There was something on the ground in front of the Butlers’ cabin. I stood by the kitchen window, peering out and wishing my eyesight was as good as it used to be. I was tired. Jet lag had prevented me from getting to sleep, so I’d stayed up late making notes for the article I was now sure I wanted to write.
Before leaving Penance, a little shaken from how my encounter with Nikki had ended, I had managed to get online. I immediately searched for ‘murders Penance 1999’ and found a few news stories that had originally been published in a Portland newspaper and a now-defunct paper that covered Aroostook County. There were photos of the two victims, Eric and Sally, including a photo of her on her wedding day, smiling beside her husband, Neal. It seemed as if the editor of the Aroostook Eagle was trying to make a point, and I detected a whiff of judgement in the way the story was written, as if the teachers had paid the price for their adultery. Cheat and die was the subtext.
Most interesting to me was the reproduction of Everett Miller’s school yearbook photo. I was shocked to learn how young he was: he would have been just seventeen at the time of the murders.
In the yearbook photo he had long black hair and a wispy beard. There was a hint of eyeliner, like he’d been wearing make-up and hadn’t scrubbed it off properly before the picture was taken. He was scowling, his gaze refusing to meet the camera lens. The Portland paper had interviewed several people in Penance who described him as ‘odd’ and ‘a freak’。 Of course, more than one person had blamed ‘that Devil’s music he listens to’。 Somebody said they’d heard he was a Marilyn Manson fan.
I thought back. The Hollow Falls murders had happened just a couple of months after the Columbine shootings. The perpetrators of that terrible massacre had apparently been part of a group called the ‘Trenchcoat Mafia’， and the media had latched on to the idea that they were fans of Marilyn Manson. I’d written a piece about it at the time. In the summer of 1999, shock rockers like Manson and his fans were taking their turn as scapegoats for everything that was wrong with the world. From what I’d learned, Everett’s tastes were more hardcore than Manson, stuff that was too noisy to ever make it on to MTV, and I could see how the people of Penance would find it easy to believe that the local ‘weirdo’ was guilty – especially when they learned about the Wolfspear music video David had mentioned to me. Later, I found a link to the video on Reddit and it was indeed disturbing, with its scenes of sex and bloody murder in the woods. I could imagine it being shown to a jury to convince them of Everett’s warped tastes and love of violent imagery. It was the kind of thing that could send someone to prison.
Not that there was anything to say he wasn’t guilty. There was forensic evidence, namely Everett’s bandana. On top of that, the moment suspicion had fallen on him, he had run. In fact, as far as I could tell from the reports, no one had seen Miller since a few hours before the murders, at dinner. His mother couldn’t tell if his bed had been slept in because his room was such a mess she rarely went in there. ‘Everett pretty much kept to himself,’ she’d said.