On the Saturday morning after Tanya Koval went missing, the fathers formed search parties and spread throughout the neighborhood, dividing it into quadrants. They checked inside sheds and the corners of yards, hunting for a flash of red. She had last been seen walking home from school wearing a red sateen jacket. They all hoped to find the body. None of them believed she was still alive. It was an era of danger, realized. Their hearts beat hard, ready to stop at the sight of her, to call out, to turn her over and look at her face, notice the marks on her neck from a strangling, her jeans pulled down past pale thighs.

They picked through their neighbors’ backyards, secretly thrilled to cross property lines, stepping over stone walls and the invisible lines of propriety, peeking into neighbors’ sheds, taking note of the markers of status within. The Aucoins owned a riding mower, John Deere no less, whereas the Morriseys had a rusty set of lawn darts and old plastic bags of moldering leaves in their shed. The smell of gasoline and rotting plywood in the shadows.

Bill Harte found a dead possum in back of the Williamson’s, near a little creek, its mouth open, its tiny teeth, white and pearlescent, frightening. Gary Rounder found a live snake, black and moist, slithering through a patch of half disintegrated leaves. He told no one. Gary felt guilty even though he hadn’t done anything, had certainly not killed the girl, though he’d seen her around and had imagined things.

All the fathers had.

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Those of us old enough to join the search made a beeline for the pits, an open span of turned-up land left over from the construction of the neighborhood. Tanya’s older brother, Chris, a senior who’d been accepted at the University of New Hampshire on a wrestling scholarship, worked his way through the woods beyond the pits, bushwhacking, branches whipping back behind him. If he bushwhacked far enough he’d reach the Sprung River, where a rope swing hung from the limb of an old maple tree, even though the river ran only three feet at its deepest. Every summer one of us broke an arm trying to jump in. The rest of us searched the pits, remembering when we’d ridden our bikes out here when we were kids. We didn’t usually see the pits in the daylight anymore. We were grouchy and wanted to return to bed, but we also wanted to be the one to find her, wanted to be able to tell that story.

But it was Chris who found her. First he found the red jacket, placed atop brambles like a beacon, sleeves outstretched so it looked as if a torso was still inside. The sateen was spotless, the red of a fresh holly berry or a cardinal. Her jeans and panties had been balled up in the mud under the brambles. And Tanya herself, or Tanya’s body, was curled on her side, naked, her hair, usually so carefully kept, gone wild, covering half her face. The hair was the only thing alive about her; it wanted to hide the rest of her. He saw a jaw, a cheek, but not her eyes. It had rained the night before, and her bare body was muddy.

“What the fuck?” he said, the words falling from his mouth. “Over here!” he yelled.

Fathers barreled through the underbrush. Within a minute men were surrounding Chris, pushing him, gently but firmly, away. Mrs. Garrison led him out of the copse, her arm around his shoulders, while Mrs. Marsh hurried over with a pink blanket they wrapped Tanya’s body inside, hiding her face.

Later, some of us would claim we’d seen the body, that we had seen her legs ripped open, her pussy gashed, her tits cut off, but the adults formed a protective barrier around the body, as if it were a totem that could teach us more about the world than we were ready to know. No one younger than Chris Koval saw her body. It was wrapped in the pink blanket, carried out by a phalanx of adults, slid into the back of the Gere’s paneled station wagon, and driven straight to the St. Anselm’s Police Department, Mr. Gere at the wheel feeling sanctified by his important position in the tragedy.

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Police arrived within ten minutes of the body being found to search the crime scene, starting at the entrance to the pits, at the end of the Victorian Street cul-de-sac. They cordoned off the brambles where the body had been found, the little patch of fieldgrass below a copse of evergreens. They collected the wadded jeans and panties, the sateen jacket, the bra and shirt found in a ball ten feet away, in separate evidence bags to be tested for fingerprints, blood typing, and the earliest forms of DNA testing. They were frustrated that the body had been moved before they could inspect it. The crime scene had been compromised, first by the removal of the body then by the obliterating footsteps of dozens of people, so their chances of finding the killer were already seriously diminished. Why were people so stupid, they wondered, putting their hands on their hips, shaking their heads, regarding the crime scene. It was almost like they didn’t want the killer to be caught.

We watched the police with a new suspicion born of nothing in particular. Just a feeling. We were god-fearing, rule-following people (mostly) who had always looked upon law enforcement as our protectors, but we doubted they could do anything in this case. They hadn’t prevented the atrocity from happening, so why should they be expected to solve it?

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During Mass at Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows that Sunday, Father Proster made references to a local tragedy. His homily was on the virtues of community, and, even though he didn’t name the crime or the victim, we all knew what and who he was referring to. As he spoke, Proster’s glance often fell on the empty space in the pew where the Kovals customarily sat.

In the following weeks, Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows would pray for Tanya Koval following every Mass, and she would become the tacit or overt focus of many of Father Proster’s homilies. Proster remembered the girl. He had watched her while giving homilies, or when he was performing some other part of the service, the Liturgy of the Eucharist or the Liturgy of the Word, and had wondered how his voice was reverberating in her ribcage, what effect he was having on her. She had been a distinctive-looking young woman, with the iciest blue eyes he had ever seen. Those eyes had stared up at him from out of the pew for years. He remembered her as a child. Her eyes had always seemed more adult than the rest of her. Who knows what was happening behind them? Something, surely, not entirely holy.

Following Mass every Sunday, Father Proster would shake hands with our families on the steps leading to the parking lot, in front of the large, modern church with its angles of tinted glass and planes of brown wood. Proster was kind and patient, warm and friendly; sometimes he would be out on the steps for an hour or more. After the last family had drifted away, back to our station wagons and sedans, he would return to his office and crawl out of his vestments. He would sit in a comfortable shirt and pants in his office in the rear of the church, looking out the window, contemplating.

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We were held in suspension, a collective state of shock, following the discovery of Tanya Koval’s body. On the Sunday following the discovery, after church, children walked dogs, rode bikes, played capture the flag. Families did yard work, picking up deadfall from trees, preparing flower beds, raking out dead leaves from the understory. Some of us burned branches and leaves in metal drums, others raked them into piles we hauled into our backyards, miniature wildernesses full of ferns and stone walls, some featuring creeks, some backed up to the real wilderness.

A pick-up game of tackle football started in the side yard of the Henderson’s, the kindly old couple who gave out apples on Halloween, and a game of street hockey broke out on Georgian Avenue. We all stopped whenever we heard a car, looking up, freezing. Sometimes we didn’t need to hear anything in order to freeze; shadows passed over us and we stopped as one, looking around, embarrassed. Tackles were not as vicious as usual. Trash talk was milder. People walking past each other on the street smiled sadly, shook their heads, and sometimes exchanged greetings, but suspicion had grown up between us, snaking like weeds through all our thoughts.

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Every mother prepared something to bring to the Kovals. Tuna casseroles, potatoes au gratin, lima bean casserole. Various pies and brownies. Chilis and soups and bread. Banana bread, cranberry nut bread, orange walnut bread. They made things from recipes cut out of Family Circle and Woman’s Day and delivered the food in casserole dishes under foil or in foil bread pans that did not need to be returned. Chris answered the door and took the food from the mothers’ hands, thanking them politely before closing the door again. He was such a good boy, athletic and intelligent and so good looking. He was clearly broken up by the death of his sister. The mothers could see the memory of discovering his sister’s body on his face, where it would sit for the rest of his life, turning him ugly as he aged. Secretly they were thrilled by it. They refused to acknowledge those feelings, though they came out in various ways, in bedrooms and living rooms for the next couple weeks.

The mothers imagined the Kovals, Peter and Shelly, inside the house, in the addition they’d had built, an airy, open space featuring a large television and overstuffed furniture, with pergo floors. It was where Tanya, after pushing the furniture to the edges of the room, had practiced her dancing. The mothers imagined the Kovals sitting on the overstuffed furniture staring into space. Or they pictured Mr. Koval alone in the basement in his workroom, pretending to work on something but really just sitting staring at an old picture album, the tacky pages sticking together as he tried to turn them. Pictures of his sweet little girl throughout the years. Her first dance outfit. Sleeping in a onesie in her crib. Looking up with a toothless grin from a yellow-tiled bathtub (before they’d had the bathroom remodeled). There were pictures of her with friends, during Christmas parties, wearing Halloween costumes (a ballerina one year, a pirate the next), in the mountains when they would go camping.

The mothers imagined Mrs. Koval in the darkened bedroom sobbing, or unable to sob. Paralyzed, not even there. Not a person, not a woman, anymore. Fallen into a dark space between one part of her life and another, one she could not begin to imagine, a life as the mother of a dead girl. The mothers imagined her ashen face, her empty eyes. The unending pain of a mother. The failure and shame that would form a bubble around her for the rest of her life.

They imagined the open door to the girl’s bedroom, her things scattered around, and thought of their own daughters’ messy bedrooms. The heaped clothes of a teenage girl, and such a pretty one, too, her leggings from dance class, her leotards, designer jeans, shirts and bras and panties in brightly colored heaps here and there, messy but not messy messy, not the way boys’ rooms got. There would be no food left on the floors, though maybe there would be a glass of Kool Aid on the dresser. There would be posters on the walls, pop stars, maybe Sean Cassidy, a memento from her youth, maybe the poster for a ballet she dreamed of performing in one day, a brightly colored plastic radio on the dresser next to a matching Princess phone, her cans of Aquanet and bottles of body spray, a mirror edged with photographs, some strips of three from photobooths at Hampton Beach. A Poloaroid of her dressed like Madonna in a half shirt last Halloween, with three friends, her little tan stomach peaking through black lace.

Hidden in various places around her room would be half-finished packs of cigarettes and liquor bottles, maybe marijuana, a small baggie of brown weed shoved into her old turtle-shaped retainer case. A handful of valium she’d stolen from her friend’s mother’s medicine cabinet, expired but still effective. The names of boys would be scrawled inside her notebooks–her first name linked to boys’ last names. Tanya Stalling and Tanya Thibodault and Tanya Moore. Some of the names had the ring of porn stars. Maybe there were more sinister things hidden in more secret places. Letters exchanged between her and a stranger, a shadowy man who wrote like a lover but looked like a monster.

The mothers wanted there to be some explanation for the incident, some way they could pin at least some of the blame on her. They hoped there were no dark secrets like that, for the mother’s sake, but they hoped so, for their own. They wanted the girl to be complicit, in order to put their own girls’ innocence in contrast. They wanted to believe, despite all the evidence of their own experience and the copious evidence of human history, in the inviolability of good daughters.

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On Sunday night we slipped out of our houses, edging out back doors or climbing through windows. If our parents were negligent or if we were old enough, on the verge of adulthood, we stepped out the front door and walked down the middle of the street. We lit cigarettes and feathered our hair with combs kept in the back pockets of our jeans. We wore denim or leather jackets. We stepped over or ducked under the yellow caution tape stretched across the entrance to the pits, or we walked around the entrance and slipped between the trees on either side. The tape was an attractant, not a deterrent. Bottles clanked inside bookbags, baggies of weed were wedged in the front pockets of acid-washed jeans. It was too cold for partying outdoors, and we wouldn’t have done it if not for the discovery of the body, but now there was no question: we rubbed our hands together and braved the chill wind. This was an obligation, a solemn rite. There was no planning. No one had to be told to gather; we simply gathered.

We hoped Chris Koval would show up, that he would come down to the pits and tell us the story of discovering his sister’s dead body. We imagined him walking through the pits, lifting up the branches, seeing the bright red jacket on the bush in front of him, imagined how it must have felt. It must have felt like something blooming in his chest, a wild weed sprouting from his lungs. An overwhelming physical sensation, like being on the edge of a cliff, or beside a waterfall. The way his breath must have stopped, the way his brain must have struggled to make sense of the body laid out before him. We hoped he would come and perform the suffering victim for us, though we suspected he wouldn’t. We wouldn’t, if we were him. We would hole away inside ourselves and maybe never come out again.

We built a bonfire at the edge of the pits, fifteen feet from where the body had been discovered, arranging chunks of deadwood into a pyre. Our faces looked normal at first, until the fire flapped in the wind and changed our expressions, shadows twisting mouths from grins into grimaces and back again. We made pilgrimages to the spot where the body had been found, as if it were sacred, kneeling to touch still-matted grass. We could see her shape in the grass. We wanted to fit our own bodies inside the shape, and we would have if we were alone, but that seemed disrespectful and we were here to pay homage. She had died for us.

We told stories about Tanya Koval, most apocryphal. In the stories, she was either a saint or a slut, often both at the same time. She had slept with multiple boys at once or she was a virgin, more pure than any girl could ever hope to be. Holding out for love, if not marriage. She was the most talented dancer any of us had ever known— there was consensus on that. She had practiced for hours every week. She talked about some day dancing professionally, and it didn’t seem like a pipedream, the way so many of our dreams seemed. She had auditioned for dance companies in Boston and New York City and was waiting to hear back. Some of the girls in her dance class had been jealous of her, had hated how easy she made everything seem, how perfect her body had been for everything she wanted it to do, but now they talked about how supportive they had been, and how kind Tanya had been, not stuck-up at all, even though she was obviously so much better than they were. They talked about how they had all lifted her up and wanted her to do great things, supported her ambitions. They had been proud of her.

Not only was Tanya a talented dancer, she was also a brilliant student, with a 4.0 GPA, taking honors classes, Latin, even, who had earned a perfect score on the verbal section of the PSAT and a nearly perfect score on the math. She was going to go to Harvard or someplace like that. An Ivy, for sure. She had planned to see the world and help poor people in other countries, and she would have done it, too. It wasn’t just talk with Tanya, the way it was with some of us. She had truly cared about poverty and the fate of the world. She had loved everyone. She had clearly been the best of us. So why her?

The girls imagined themselves as Tanya, while the boys imagined raping and killing her, in more or less detail. We couldn’t stop ourselves. The fire bounced off our eyes. There were smirks that passed quickly, hidden in the mutating expressions caused by the fire. Some of the girls broke down and had to be comforted.

We couldn’t believe that this had happened here, but secretly we had all hoped for something like it, had, in fact, been waiting all our lives for it. We had grown up on stories of abduction. Psychotic hitchhikers and serial killers. There had been a grisly murder on Ferndale Avenue five years earlier, in a neighborhood not far away, and we would sit in the backseats of our parents’ cars watching the street sign pass and imagine things, scared, intrigued, made aware of the darkness of the world all around us: easy to forget when all we saw were identical houses and bucolic nature. We wondered if this murder was connected to that earlier one. Another raped and murdered girl. Had the Ferndale killer ever been caught, we wondered?

Growing up we would talk redrum and chant Bloody Mary in mirrors three times at midnight. Some of us had older brothers who snuck us into Halloween and Friday the 13th. Some of us read Stephen King novels about vampires, rabid dogs, and haunted cemeteries, or we passed around Satanic Bibles. Satanic rites were supposedly being performed in the woods, in the northern part of St. Anselm’s, near the pond. We had expected tragedy to touch our lives at some point— the only thing we hadn’t known was who the victim would be. We had all secretly dreaded and hoped that we were marked.

Some of us paired off and found dark places in the woods to fuck, holding on to the rough bark of trees, our bodies on the edge of control. Many of us got so drunk we puked. We played music on the boombox someone had brought out to the pits, mostly heavy metal, Mötley Crüe and Dio because that’s how we felt. Past midnight we mellowed into Led Zeppelin, acoustic songs interspersed with louder electric blues. We couldn’t believe how good and full and alive we felt. The world had taken on an edge we had never felt before. We felt special, chosen, and we were relieved that chosen didn’t mean dead.

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When we returned to school on Monday, we felt marked by our proximity to tragedy. None of us, aside from Chris Koval, had seen the body, but we all felt as if we had. We were all prone to false memories. Her pale, naked body, violated, contorted, almost unrecognizable. We saw her dead eyes wide open in her dead face, icy blank blue stares.

Some of us took the experience as a badge of honor and told anyone who would listen what we had (supposedly) seen. Clots of curious students formed in the hallways of the elementary and jr high and high schools. We talked about the body with a kind of brazen care, tenders of a strange and bloody legacy. Our listeners shook their heads slowly, mouths falling open, or their faces hardened as they tried not to let the images enter and affect them. The images spread virally, all of us picturing poor, dead Tanya Koval’s body, the parts of her body that had just developed mangled and mutilated. Some of us pictured her violently, others in loving, precise detail.

At least half of us realized we had been in love with Tanya Koval, even though she had never been on a date because boys had feared her. She was so sure of herself, so smart, so beautiful. We balked at the word, but it was the only one that fit: Tanya was not cute or pretty; she possessed the fully realized beauty of a grown woman. The girls who desired her kept that desire to themselves— it was not an age of Gay-Straight Alliances and LGBT Pride. It was an era of deep closeting and deeper shame, the first rumblings of the AIDS epidemic at the periphery of our lives about to sweep across the country.

Others of us felt marked in a different way, as if we were responsible for the murder, or were potential next victims. We did not talk to anyone about anything. We skulked down hallways like sharks, silent, hovering, never stopping, aware of the shadows that stretched behind us even under the fluorescent lights of the school. We kept our knowledge shut tightly inside our heads, and, while we hated those who commanded a crowd, we also recognized the impulse for attention, for the sharing of shadows. Hatred, wonder, and confusion mixed inside us. Lust and sorrow and fear.

It suddenly seemed as if the world was and always had been dangerous; we just hadn’t realized until now. We looked at our teachers in a new way. We became skeptical of men. Mr. O’Dwyer could probably rape and kill any one of us, and he probably wanted to. He probably spent half the time he was supposed to be teaching planning it. Mr. Sanders would probably drown us, holding our heads under the water with his large, sure hand until we stopped struggling. Mr. Roberts, the Industrial Arts teacher, could use his tools to hack us limb from limb before he disposed of our bodies. We pictured him like a mad butcher, hands and work apron cloaked in blood.

We had entered a world full of obscure desires. We were not sure, yet, whether we would ever escape that world. Maybe, we thought, this was the world.

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It was impossible not to wonder what the mortician had to do in order to make her face presentable, something like what it had looked like alive. We wondered what had been done to the body. The mortician wouldn’t have to make the body whole again, because it was covered with a pink dress, hands overlapping on her stomach, lace details on the long sleeves and around the torso. The dress was sweet and strange. Strange, because it wasn’t a dress Tanya Koval would have worn in real life. No girl her age that year would have. The dress was frilly and girly, and the pink did not compliment the skin that had somehow retained a tan throughout the winter.

No doubt the dress had been selected by Mrs. Koval, who stood beside the open casket, blank-faced, her soul having slipped out of her body and run through the floorboards. The girls noticed how pretty Mrs. Koval was— or had been at one time. At one time she would have attracted the attention of all the men in any room she walked into. The girls didn’t know anything about her, but imagined a romantic past for her. International travel, a series of love affairs ending with Mr. Koval. And Mr. Koval… they had never noticed him before, either. A middle manager at Digital, he was actually kind of handsome. He didn’t have the beer belly so many fathers had, he still had all of his hair, salt and pepper and feathered the same way his son’s was, and he looked strong and stoic, a man who held everything inside him.

A sense of wonder pervaded the room, the biggest room of Andretti’s Funeral Home. The carpet was thin and green, floral details around the edges. The chairs were wingback, upholstered green. There were “Italian” flourishes, columns built into each corner of the room, landscape paintings of cliff-side mediterranean villages on the walls. There were too many flowers in the room, bunches and bundles, bouquets, the odors cloying. Everyone in town, it seemed, had sent flowers. Sending flowers was an easy way to appear to care about the tragic death of one of their children.

We were protective of Tanya, dismissive of anyone who came from other parts of town, even if they had some claim on her: the girls in her dance class, old friends from her Girl Scout troop or softball team. We formed protective circles around the basket full of photographs, around the guest book, around the body in the casket. People from outside the neighborhood paid their respects and left quickly, sensing they were not welcome here.

The girls remembered times they had hung out with Tanya, when she had been one of four or five girls prowling the mall, wandering through the amusement park, or massing at Friendly’s, sitting in booths eating sundaes and laughing. They remembered how she had always gotten the most attention, how jealous they had been of her. Spiteful, envious, petty. She had not brought out the best in them. They thought about how cool she’d been, how she hadn’t cared when boys looked at her and flirted, how cold she could be to them. The way she treated boys was funny and awe-inspiring. She had power over them but refused to use it. Sometimes, they knew, she spent time with older boys who had already graduated. Doing what, they wondered. They wondered about the secret life they were sure she had. (Part of it had to be her fault, right?) Their favorite times were when they would drink wine coolers in the woods or someone’s basement when someone’s parents were away, and they would tell jokes and stories and laugh. They laughed so much. She had been so much fun.

Stories were told at the funeral home, too, and, like the stories told around the bonfire, these stories were mostly lies. Sweet lies, but lies all the same. How kind and perceptive and funny Tanya Koval had been. How perfect in every way. Her unbounded potential. Her particular beauty. Her dance teacher, Miss Anna, broke down in front of everyone and had to be led away by her husband, a burly man underdressed in a gray polo shirt and black slacks. We all noticed the bulge of a gun in his pocket and wondered.

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We expected another one of us to be plucked, at any moment. Murders rarely came singly during that time period. Murders came in matched sets, or in large collections. All murders were potentially serial. We imagined sisters or friends abducted. The girls were obviously in the most danger, but the boys were not safe either. There was no guarantee that the killer was after only girls, although, knowing what we knew, that seemed most likely. Girls were always in the most danger. That was the world we had been born into, a girl-hating, girl-abducting, girl-devouring world.

Now the girls’ bodies were even more endangered than usual. They were being looked at, weighed, judged as meat and as potential vessels of pain and hatred every second of every day, even alone. They had all heard what had been done to Tanya Koval, in detail. Some of the stories were true, while others were extreme versions of the truth, a truth brought into being by dark desire. Two things were perfectly clear: Tanya Koval had been a virgin, and she had been raped after she was murdered, which made it all even more horrible.

Some girls started wearing baggy clothes, sweatpants and their boyfriends’ jeans, while others dressed the way they always had, the way they were “supposed” to. They did their hair up with Aquanet, elaborate routines that ate hours out of every week, and wore clothes bought at Merry Go Round, Benetton, and Banana Republic. Sweaters and stirrup pants. They descended on the local mall in small groups, laughing, sharing Orange Juliuses and talking about boys, the way they always had. Pretending things were normal was a defense mechanism. What else were they supposed to do? Freak out all the time?

Some of them dreamed of escaping, of going to college and “becoming” something… but what? They didn’t want to be what their mothers were: housewives, nurses, or teachers, or working alongside men at the cutting edge of whatever industry they entered, battling for respect. The first female engineer or the first female doctor or the first female whatever. They wanted unlimited options they knew they would never get. They pretended things were the same as they had always been. And in a way they were right. The murder of Tanya Koval simply threw reality into a starker light. Their limited lives were always already endangered.

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At the local cemetery, schoolkids did tracings on vellum in full sun, wearing windbreakers, hooded sweatshirts, and jeans, their hair tousled by the wind. They traced obsolete names— Captain Clifford Crowninshield, Elizabeth Powter, Eliza This and Ebenezer That and Celia Something Else, dead babies, dead mothers, dead fathers, 9 yrs, 84 yrs— and skulls with wings sprouting from ear holes. The oldest headstones dated from the 1700’s, the time of St. Anselm’s founding. The schoolkids watched the small funeral caravan pass. The burial was restricted to immediate family.

The children stopped now and then to glance over at the people clustered around the open grave. Only those of us from the neighborhood knew who was being buried, her name already legend: Tanya Koval, The Dead Girl. The others thought about members of their own families who had died. They watched the group walk back to their cars and drive away, the little caravan exiting the cemetery again.

The morbid among us wanted to walk over to the coffin and open it, wanted to look at The Dead Girl inside, to gaze upon death. We imagined The Dead Girl would haunt the cemetery, wearing the frilly pink dress she’d been stuffed in (we’d heard stories from older siblings) forever. She had been murdered, and worse, whatever that meant. We imagined coming back to the cemetery when it was dark and getting spooked out, the girl a skull with wings that nipped at our ankles and dive-bombed our heads.

We were disappointed when our teachers herded us back toward the school buses, robbing us of seeing the coffin lowered into the ground and the undertakers spilling in the first shovelfuls of dirt. We imagined the sound of dirt hitting the coffin lid, the reverberating thud while pebbles scattered to the side. We imagined the girl inside, dead Tanya Koval, opening her eyes, looking up and all around her at the darkness, and screaming.

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At Easter, we thought about Jesus rising from the dead. The story behind the holiday seemed more real now. We imagined the flesh and meat of the story more clearly, the way He would arise, His side coated with tacky blood scabbing over the wound, the pains in His joints, His rib cage aching with each labored breath, the blood in His matted hair, the feeling of filth covering His body like microscopic bugs. How thirsty He must have been. We imagined Tanya Koval rising from the dead in a similar manner, the door to her coffin flung open and Tanya stepping out with her dancer’s legs, in her pink dress, hair dusted with grave-dirt. Maybe Tanya Koval was the Jesus we needed in the late twentieth century. Maybe she could take our new, modern sins. Maybe she was our sacrifice.

We had built a shrine in the woods where her body had been found. There were several teddy bears holding hearts, some stuffed bunnies that got matted and muddy following the first rain, two pairs of old, pink ballet slippers: small, wrinkled, fetal shapes. There were also darker tokens of a more dangerous past. Packs of Marlboro Lights. Small airplane bottles of Southern Comfort. Someone had carved “I fucked Tanya Koval” into one of the nearby trees. It must have taken hours, each letter cut down to heartwood. Sap seeped from the letters. The dedication was impressive, though no one believed it. Tanya had been a virgin when she was raped. Someone else left a long note professing her love. “You never knew, and now you never will,” the note ended. The paper was pink, perfumed, and folded, and it had been left after the first rain. Within weeks it would be pulp.

We rode dirt bikes around the makeshift track in the pits, shivering each time we passed the corner that led to the copse. There were nightly parties of varying sizes, from a couple lonely wastoids standing around a tiny fire passing a joint back and forth to a hundred kids, most from outside the neighborhood, tourists who wanted to feel the edge of the mortal world, gathered around bonfires that blazed in the night sky. It seemed strange that the birds had returned and new life was burgeoning, the buds of trees unfurling to become leaves again, while death still lurked in our midst.

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When the amusement park at Nocambie Lake opened for the season, half of us flocked to our summer jobs there, getting rides from parents or carpooling in old Fords and Volkswagens. Some of us had worked beside Tanya Koval the previous summer. We remembered her in the required white polo that contrasted nicely with her tanned skin, her vibrant blue eyes. Her skin had taken on a bronze cast over the summer that made her eyes even more prominent. She had been perfect and mysterious and desirable, and most of the boys regretted that we’d never at least given it a try. No one had ever seen her with a boy, and only other very pretty girls knew how lonely she must have been.

We worked the cotton candy machine, our hands and arms becoming coated with invisible sugar until the coats crusted and cracked, or we ran the rides. Sometimes college kids who worked at the food stands and the restaurant by the lake shore would entice high school kids back to dorm rooms or into the woods to get high or fuck or both. There was always the possibility of, and sometimes the reality of, transgression.

We forgot all about Tanya Koval for days at a time. Sometimes no one (aside from the Kovals) thought about her at all. We thought about whoever had murdered her and gotten away with it, but less and less. Life was returning to normal, shadows retracting back into the woods. Groups of us drove to the White Mountains or Salisbury Beach, and we worked our summer jobs at the race track or the amusement park. We met in the pits at different times, on different nights, different configurations of people with little overlap. Groups were becoming more defined. There were now heads and jocks who wouldn’t talk to each other. Music largely defined us. Hair metal and speed metal, post punk and pop. The boundaries were rigidifying.

It amazed us that the world could go on exactly as it had before.

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Then the murderer was caught. A local man, one of the fathers. A predator in our midst. He was Portuguese-American. Like many of the fathers, he had moved from the mill city over the state border to St. Anselms, and he had lived first on Fernwood Avenue. He had three sons and a wife who had never suspected anything, not really.

Reading news about Richard Piras, the murderer, the fathers felt stirrings. They would never have done what Piras had done, yet part of them felt like they had. Guilt ran inside them like molten steel being molded into strange shapes. They had watched the girl walking in the neighborhood. They had seen her among other girls, and they had seen her alone. They saw the friends of their daughters wearing miniskirts or tight stirrup pants or short shorts, and they had desires. They knew it was wrong, and most of them brushed those desires aside, but reading what Piras had done… they were jealous, some of them. All of them, a little.

They turned on news radio as they drove down Routes 93 and 495 toward Chelmsford and Braintree, where they worked in plants developing new ways to kill people, and listened to stories about Richard Piras. No one would have suspected him, and if he’d been smarter, he could have gotten away with it. They’d nabbed him with DNA. His sperm inside the girl. Piras was quiet, a good man to all appearances, the Little League coach of some of their sons. And a good one, too. They had trusted him with their boys.

They thought about the woods at 3:30 in the afternoon, sunlight falling on her skin.

They hated Richard Piras and thought he was the worst kind of trash— thought he should get the death penalty, be fried in the electric chair. They hated him more because they recognized themselves in him. They sat looking at their daughters across the dinner table, closing their eyes against all the possibilities in the world. How could they protect their daughters from things that moved even inside them? They were all prone to the same virus. Popular movies were full of it. They thought of the poster for Jaws, the pretty girl skinny-dipping in the ocean, her long limbs, her golden hair, the monster lurking in the water beneath her. They thought of the perfection of limbs, pale and skinny, that could be pulled apart. They lay awake at night while their wives slept, imagining the act, the images a carousel, their hands pressed against her mouth, yanking down her jeans, pressing themselves inside her. They jerked off, sometimes with their wives sleeping beside them, snoring peacefully, the danger of being caught ramping up the pleasure, sometimes in the bathroom or in workrooms, hearts throbbing painfully, hardly able to believe how disgusting they were, how abject. They half-hoped and half-feared they would kill themselves in this way, the veins in their temples bursting. It would be just recompense for what they made possible in the world.

On weekends, they acted as they always had, playing catch with their sons, taking their families out for ice cream, going to the movies. They sat in restaurants laughing. They sat in pews at various churches, listening to Father Proster if they were Catholic, but not really listening, thoughts wandering, eyes on the arms and bare shoulders of teenage girls, the girls’ faces, their hair, feeling unholy. Before Richard Piras, they had not looked, had not contemplated, and now they blamed him. It was his fault. He had brought this into the world. But of course he hadn’t. They had been contemplating all along.

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The murder affected all of our lives. For most of us, the effect was tangential. We now felt the constant presence of shadows and monsters. We came to realize that we were and always had been in a labyrinth, and that the minotaur was around any corner, ready to rape and kill us, ready to rape and kill our family and friends, ready to rape and kill our own children, if we were to have them. We thought about the lost girl at odd moments. Tanya Koval, the name a signifier of so many things. She would become our patron saint, our lady of eternal sorrows. We would pay homage to her. She would become a perfect image in our mind. What we were and what we could have been, what we should have been, what we could never be.

Whenever we called home, from college or our later adult lives, we would get news from our parents, who all remained behind. How Robert Piras, the murderer, got cancer ten years after being sent to Walpole, how he died in prison, was buried in the prison cemetery. How the Piras family moved away. Some of us returned home and buried the knowledge inside us, learned to live with it, while others fanned out across the country, carrying the contagion with us. It could burst out in moments of spectacular violence.

It would come to seem like, and then to be, a story out of another era, the 1980’s, a time of bright yellow wallpaper, brown furniture, synthetic pop. A period in which death pervaded our culture. The Vietnam War had just wound down, leaving behind veterans wounded in every conceivable way. There were intermittent race riots in cities across the country. Terrorists were hijacking airplanes and holding passengers hostage on hot tarmacs. Drugs had turned deadly: angel dust leading young men to jump out windows, crack ravaging entire city neighborhoods. One life did not mean all that much in the big scheme of things, but in our lives it did.