he ran to my house. He was hysterical, babbling and breathless, but Mom understood him well enough to let him lead her by the hand to the graveyard. She was the one who called 911.
An ambulance arrived only minutes after the police cars. But it was too late. Nica was already gone, a bullet from a .22 lodged deep in her left kidney. Time of death was established as between 6:45 and 7:30 A.M., though she’d likely been shot earlier. The knowledge that it took a while for her to bleed out—hours, possibly—was almost more than I could bear, and I knew if I thought about it, really thought about it, I couldn’t. So I didn’t think about it. Wouldn’t let myself.
It was surprisingly easy not to listen once I set my mind to it. When the details of the murder were told to me, I just sort of let them wash over my brain and out my ears. Which is why I’m not exactly clear on how the police deduced that whoever killed Nica probably wasn’t a stranger to her. But deduce it they did. And when it was discovered that I was the last known person to have seen her alive, they were very eager to talk to me.
Oh, those endless, bleached-out hours going over my story with Detective Ortiz. The stale air of that box of a room at the back of the station, the hard plastic of the chair, the can of Coke gone warm and flat from sitting out too long, me saying the same words in the same order again and again, telling Detective Ortiz everything Nica told me the day before, skipping only the part about the new guy—an omission for Jamie’s sake, it would hurt him to know she’d moved on so fast—just wanting to go to sleep, that total exhaustion, where even my face was numb, and none of the talk mattering anyway because she was already dead dead dead.
Her sophomore year, Nica was named homecoming queen. The victory was a fluke. Not that she wasn’t one of the prettiest girls in school. In fact, she was probably the prettiest. Which should’ve all but killed her chances. A word about Chandler: Chandler, as a school, thought it was too cool for school, too cool for a lot of things. The only way it would deign to participate in any of the traditional rah-rah teen rites of passage was ironically. And Nica, as it so happens, lost the vote. She came in a distant second to Quentin Graham, a Mississippi boy who showed up to class several days a month in a Chanel suit and pillbox hat. But the administration refused to recognize a male, no matter how chicly turned out, as a legitimate contender. (Refused, basically, to recognize the other meaning of the word queen.) And Nica won by default.
It was an utterly forgettable event in her life. She sat next to Mr. McFarlan, the assistant headmaster, wearing a crown—a Burger King one, borrowed for the occasion from Maddie’s boyfriend, Ruben Samuelson—for five minutes at morning chapel the day before alumni weekend. That was it. The only reason the title rates a mention is because it was a detail so seized upon by the media after she died. It put, I think, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on her loveliness, made it official. Officially poignant, too. And pretty soon it started to seem as if her full name actually was Homecoming Queen Nica Baker.
Edgar Allan Poe, in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (Studies in American Literature: The Rise of the Supernatural, Ms. Laine, sophomore year), stated that, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” And Nica was not just dead, she was murdered. Raped, too. Her story thus offered up the most potent narrative combination known to man, everybody’s favorite set of lurid extremes: sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, kiss kiss and bang bang. The public couldn’t get enough.
Once Nica’s identity was released, our house was besieged. TV news crews, journalists, and photographers were all camped out on our lawn, waiting for a whimper, a tear, a twisted feature—some scrap they could wolf down, some tasty little bite that would tide them over until the real meat came: a break in the case. Trespassing on private property was illegal, so the police set up a barricade, pushing the motley crew back, forcing it onto the sidewalk and street, which made its presence feel no less oppressive, and getting in and out of our driveway near impossible. I’d say the experience was surreal except I hate that word. It was surreal, though, the merciless intensity of those people calling out my name, my mom and dad’s names, the flash cameras constantly going off, giving the scene the queasy, too-bright, side-tilted quality of a hallucination.
Mom, Dad, and I fought back the only way we knew how. By withholding. After that first day, the police pretty much left us alone. They were very polite, deferential almost, less because of who we were, I think, than because of what Chandler was, the influence it wielded in Hartford. And once they were done probing us, our stories and our alibis, we returned to the house, retreated to our rooms to cry. Well, Mom and I to cry, Dad to I don’t know what. His eyes were bone-dry, as if they were unable to weep or didn’t see the point. But mostly we retreated to our rooms to wait. Eventually, we reasoned, boredom would set in or another sensational crime would be committed—a murder victim who was even younger than Nica, who was actually rich, not just by-association rich, who got violated more egregiously, more bloodily, more kinkily—and the restless pack would move on, leave us to grieve in peace.
Five days passed. Six days. A week. Then two weeks. And, still, the case was no closer to being solved. All the statistically likely guys—Dad, Jamie, Ruben, the two or three male students with a documented history of aggression toward female students, even several of the male teachers who were on campus that weekend—had been ruled out as suspects. Plus, my family was staying mum, giving up absolutely nothing. Sections of the crowd, I noticed, were starting to break off; there were fewer news vans parked along the curb. The strategy seemed, finally, to be working.
And then, Dad got careless.
It was three o’clock in the morning. The street was quiet, almost staged-looking, the houses that lined it resembling props on a movie set, all lit by a moon that was high and round and bright as a lamp, casting a soft golden glow. And Dad, convincing himself that all was as harmless as it appeared, decided to take the garbage out for Tuesday morning pickup.
From a window in Nica’s room I watched him as he carried the bags to the curb, one over each shoulder, seeming to stagger under their weight, three or four pounds at the most. He’d just finished stuffing them into the blue plastic can, was standing under the streetlight, lid still in hand, eyes turned to the ground as if he were trying to remember where he was and how he got there, when a woman emerged from behind the Wheelers’ hedges. She was older than any of the media people I’d seen so far, and sadder, her soft brown eyes baggy, tired-looking, her camera-ready makeup smudged and starting to fade, ending abruptly at her jawline. Heavier, too, her bosomy flesh making her appear almost maternal.
“Mr. Baker! Mr. Baker!” she said. “Do you have time to speak with us?” She was out of breath from running the ten or so yards across our lawn. It put funny spaces between her words. And her skirt had hiked up. I could see the control-top portion of her pantyhose, her chubby thighs. I felt sorry for her.
Dad turned wearily, gave his back to her and the denim-shirted man with a camera trailing in her wake.
“It’s been two weeks and the police still have no suspects,” she said. “Care to comment?”
Slowly he started making the trek to the front door.
“Do you think they’re doing everything they can to find your daughter’s killer?”
He kept walking, maintained his plodding pace, like he didn’t even hear her. He was almost at the porch steps.
A little desperate now, “You want to know what I think? I don’t think they are. I think they’re too scared to conduct a real investigation. I think they’re afraid to go after any of the kids at this school—your school, Mr. Baker, the school you and your wife have devoted your lives to—because they believe that if they do, the kids’ fathers will come at them with a team of high-priced defense attorneys, make sure that the only jobs in law enforcement they’ll be able to get after this case are at the mall.”
This time he heard her, and what she said stopped him cold. My dad’s always been a gentle guy—mild, slow to anger, unconfrontational in the extreme, rarely yells and never swears. So it was something of a shock when I saw him do a sharp one-eighty, march back to where the reporter was standing. He was still holding the garbage lid, and now had it thrust out