Description
Charles had given us maps and a police report when we visited him in Oklahoma City. He pulled out one map, of Hardheim and its surroundings, and pointed. “This is where Jennifer was…uh…murdered,” he told us. At the time, I wondered if his hesitancy over the word indicated uncertainty. But later I found that I, too, was reluctant to say it: murder. Not an easy word.
We had this itinerary we’d been given: Jennifer’s last stops on this earth. Did we think visiting them would make sense of things? I tried to tell myself we were on a kind of pilgrimage, which made it sound okay, even more than okay: important. Dignified. There were stations we had to visit. The first was Münchingen—the place where a truck driver had let Jenny off before first light on a cold November morning. The place where she drank a cup of coffee.
Three o’clock in the afternoon, and Shirley, of Shawnee Memorials, just across Harrison Avenue from Fairview Cemetery, was not taking any s**t off my dad. We had come here at my urging; Dad had mentioned that he still needed to order a stone to mark the plot where Jenny’s and Edith’s remains were...
Published 04/28/11
The sound of pistons pumping, a lawn-mower pulse and wheeze, comes up behind her, and she looks over her shoulder to see the VW coming up fast: black and chrome, some of the shine worn off and anyway looking duller in this flat November light. She keeps her thumbs hooked under the leather of her...
Published 04/22/11