Before She Knew Him(7)
Hen’s father, a lawyer, tried to talk the family of Daphne Myers into dropping the charge, but they refused. In the end a plea agreement was struck, Hen agreeing to continued psychiatric treatment and community service. She also agreed, very willingly, to leave Camden and to never make contact with Daphne again. Her father asked the judge to seal the testimonies, and the judge agreed, but not before several local news outlets had picked up on the story. Daphne, to her credit, never spoke to reporters, and neither did Hen, of course, and the story eventually died, despite one feature article titled “Cat Fight Between College Freshmen at Camden College Turns Deadly.”
“I was sure it was schizophrenia,” her mother said, driving Hen back to upstate New York, “because of your uncle. But turns out you’re just batshit crazy like everyone else in this family.” She’d laughed, then apologized. It was what she did.
After a year back at home—six months spent in a hole so deep and so black she thought she’d never feel joy again, and six months in a gradual return to normalcy—she’d enrolled at the State University of New York at Oneonta. It was there that one of the professors introduced her to engraving, and she felt as though she’d found her life’s purpose.
Lloyd, who knew all about the disaster that was Hen’s freshman year at Camden, brought it up to her as she was becoming more and more obsessed with the death of Dustin Miller.
“It’s different,” Hen said, irritation making the skin of her chest and neck flush red.
“How is it different?”
“This is an actual crime, on our street. I’m not trying to persecute someone. I’m not paranoid.”
“But you’re a little manic right now, I can tell.”
Later, when things got worse, Hen started to believe that Lloyd had somehow pushed a magic button when he used the word manic to her, that it began the three-month period during which she started to study every unsolved homicide in New England for the past ten years, looking for a connection with Dustin Miller. It was also during this time that she’d gotten into an argument with her shift manager at the art supply store where she worked part-time. She stopped going to work, telling Lloyd that she’d be a full-time artist. He said he thought they could swing it, but wanted her to at least give her notice at the store.
“You might need a reference one of these days,” he said. “I just don’t think you should burn this bridge.”
“You’re right,” Hen said, but she couldn’t bring herself to call the store. She simply stopped leaving the house, immersing herself in work and studying unsolved murders (she was now looking outside of New England for possible leads). Then one day in November she woke up late and confused, her body aching, and drained of any desire to ever create a piece of art. Lloyd came home to find her still in bed. He tried to talk with her but she wouldn’t stop crying.
“We’ll get through this,” he promised. “But I need you to do me a favor, okay?”
“Okay.”
“If you feel suicidal you need to let me know. You can’t leave me, no matter what. You need to stay alive.”
Hen promised Lloyd that she wouldn’t leave him, and in the end, she kept her promise. For two months she lived in a world of dread and anxiety, her only constructive thoughts ones in which she imagined the way she’d kill herself. But she’d made a promise to Lloyd, even though down deep she knew he would be better off without her. Finally, after a day in which she’d gotten behind the wheel of their shared car with a plan to drive to the North Shore and drown herself in the ocean, she told Lloyd, when he’d returned from work, that she needed to be in the hospital. He drove her to the emergency room that night.
Hen spent two weeks in a psychiatric ward, then another two weeks in outpatient care, receiving, along with a new cocktail of meds, a series of electroconvulsive treatments. She began to feel better—not immediately, but over time. Her old world—a desire to create art, to see friends, to plan trips—returned. Over time, the terrible episode receded into the past. She was receiving more offers for illustrations than she had time to do, and her fixation on Dustin Miller, on unsolved murders in general, disappeared. One of the benefits of the electroconvulsive therapy was that her memory of the whole episode was hazy at best, and some of it was completely gone. She and Lloyd, who had always considered having children, made a final decision to not have any. Instead, they agreed to move out of Cambridge and find a larger house somewhere in the country.
Hen finished her coffee, grown cold in the mug. Now that she’d reacquainted herself with the Dustin Miller case, she was more convinced than she’d been the night before that her new neighbor was Dustin’s killer. Most of what she’d read was old news, but there had been a large Boston Globe feature on the unsolved murder that had run in July, back when Hen was orchestrating the exhausting move (“We’re never moving again, you realize that?” Lloyd had said), and she’d somehow missed it. There wasn’t a whole lot of new information in the feature, but it included some details about Dustin’s time at Sussex Hall, during which he’d been accused of sexually assaulting a fellow student. Either Hen had forgotten this detail or it was only being revealed now. No, she thought, there was no way she would’ve forgotten it. Not a chance. It made everything fall into place. The alleged sexual assault took place during that year’s Junior Olympics of fencing, held in St. Louis, Missouri. Her neighbor Matthew Dolamore, a teacher at Sussex Hall, obviously knew Dustin—he’d probably been one of his teachers. Maybe Matthew knew that the sexual assault—never proven—had actually happened. Five years later, he murdered Dustin out of revenge, or a sense of justice, and took the fencing trophy. It was ludicrous, somehow, but also entirely possible. Hen needed to see the trophy, however, and make sure it had the correct date and place. Then, and only then, she would call the police. It was her duty, right? Maybe she could even do it anonymously.