A Winsome Murder Read online

  Neither has anyone else, Jillian thought.

  The waitress brought over a tiny bowl mounded with containers of cream.

  “Eat?” she asked, setting it down.

  Lachlan, still listening to his messages, glanced at his watch and said no.

  “You?” she asked Jillian.

  “No, thanks.”

  The waitress left and Lachlan put down his phone. “Sorry about that.” He emptied a few creams into his coffee. “So,” he said, “this idea, this story of yours. Talk to me.”

  Jillian lit another cigarette. “Mr. Lachlan,” she said, “I’m sure you’re very busy. I drove three and half hours and I have to be back by five, so here’s the pitch. If you don’t like it, thanks for your time.”

  Lachlan took a long sip of his coffee, and said, “Go.”

  “Winsome Bay, Wisconsin. Bucolic small-town America. Apple pie, county fairs, Corn Queens, unlocked doors. Then a murder. The brutal killing of a young girl. First murder in the town in sixty years. A sort of Fargo meets Northern Exposure meets In Cold Blood. A killer on the loose. Will it happen again? Weekly installments written in chapters. Creative nonfiction.” Jillian leaned into the table. “A true crime story evolving in real time. The reader gets my point of view, not some famous author who churns out a book a month, or brilliant about-to-retire detective on his last case, but me, someone who usually writes children’s books and has never even been on a crime scene before. Someone who doesn’t like dead bodies. Someone who is scared to even put this murder down on paper.”

  “What murder?” Lachlan asked.

  “Deborah Ellison. It happened a week ago.”

  “I’ve heard the name.”

  “The girl in Wisconsin.”

  “I read about it.”

  “They found her body in the town right next to mine.”

  Despite his best efforts not to, Lachlan began to listen more closely. “Tell me more.”

  “Here’s the angle. I don’t apologize for my lack of experience, or my fears, I write about them. I write about the very same fears my reader has. This story is bound to get ugly, lurid, unimaginably horrific, and I want to make the reader complicit with every turn of the page, just as I’m complicit every time I write one. Our reader doesn’t have to go on. They can put the story down. I don’t have to write it. I can stick to children’s books. But neither of us stops. Just like the killer who could have stopped, but didn’t.” Jillian mashed her cigarette into the ashtray. “That’s what I want to write about.”

  Lachlan waved for more coffee. “Any suspects?”

  “No. But I’ve already interviewed a few people from the town who knew the victim and her family, and I’ve got a meeting set up with the chief of police there.”

  “You think there’s enough to make a serial out of it?”

  Jillian took a thin manuscript out of her bag and placed it on the table. “This is rough. There’s enough there for two, maybe three installments.”

  Lachlan took up the pages and leafed through them, silent for a moment. Small-town murder, he thought, rural Midwest, it might sell. Might even increase sales in Iowa and Minnesota. He could make an offer: option to publish upon approval, no advance. Not much risk.

  “Mr. Lachlan,” Jillian said, “I can write this.”

  Lachlan looked across the table and held out his hand.

  “Call me Kevin.”

  J. McClay/Killing/American Forum

  The Killing of Deborah Ellison

  Three and a half hours northwest of Chicago, deep in the hinterlands of Wisconsin, I drove past a sign that said Welcome to Winsome Bay, Home of the Wildcats. As I took the next left, a rural, angled lane, the inside of my car suddenly shadowed and cooled as an endless emerald wall appeared out my driver’s-side window: Corn, corn was everywhere, thick leaved, rainforest green, eight to ten feet tall. Every square foot of earth in Winsome Bay that didn’t have a house on it seemed to have corn growing on it. If not corn, then soybeans or hay: timothy grass, bluestem, red clover, alfalfa. I continued driving, passing field after field of green gridded farmland, the crops pushing right up to the backyards of homes and businesses.

  West of the Wisconsin River, just below Friendship, Winsome Bay doesn’t have a bay at all but a medium-sized lake, one of over fifteen thousand left behind after the glaciers melted away some ten thousand years ago. No one in the town seemed to know why the lake was called a bay when it wasn’t one, and no one really seemed very interested in the question. The town had a population of 632 and boasted a high school, a public swimming pool, three churches, and four bars. A sign on the local liquor store said Wine, Cheese, and Bait.

  Night crawlers were $2.50 a dozen.

  Jillian saved her document, scrolled up to the top, and began editing the first few paragraphs of her new story. At five that morning, she had hobbled into her sweatpants, hustled down the stairs to the kitchen, poured a thermos of coffee—preperked on a timer—and headed out the back door, wide awake and ready to work. She’d tugged open the creaky barn door of her writing studio, a converted carriage house in her backyard, and made her way up the stairs, avoiding whatever spider webs and bat guano had accumulated overnight. She unlocked the door and hit the lights. She had tried writing in the house when Michael was little, but found it torture. At fourteen now, he was used to waking up alone. He’d been making his own breakfast since he was seven. In the days when he still liked Jillian, he used to take breakfast out to her studio: badly microwaved eggs, cold toast, too chocolaty chocolate milk, and a small alp of ketchup. A lifetime ago. Before iPhones and puberty.

  Jillian poured another cup of coffee.

  She hadn’t been this focused and ready to write in a long time.

  Farther into Winsome Bay the farmland was interrupted by a smattering of residential streets and a small downtown. The streets there, double-wide with angled parking stalls, were lined with a modern Midwest mix of pickup trucks and minivans. The oldest building, a restaurant called the Grainery, has been in business since 1873.

  I drove past a fabric store with a quilt and an American flag hanging in the window. I passed the Dew Drop Inn tavern, a sign on its door touting the Friday night fish fry and prime rib special. I continued on, out of the downtown area, past Saint Francis church, a gorgeous redstoned cathedral in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose architectural school, Taliesin, only two hours from Winsome Bay, still functions today. I thought the church to be quite modern looking for a small Midwest town: single storied, sleek and low to the ground, its lengthy run of roof dipping gently in the center and gradually rising to peaks on either end. One wall of the building, from peak to foundation, was made entirely of stained glass, in deep cerulean blues and ruby reds.

  I stopped and got out of my car to take a look, catching the faint smell of pig manure in the air, or, as it’s more commonly referred to here, “the smell of money.” Walking into the hushed lobby I felt as if I were in somebody else’s house and they weren’t home. Behind glass doors to my right I could make out the altar and a wide expanse of pews before it. The room was streaked with the colors of the stained-glass windows, their beams drifting silently across oaken pews in steep angles as the sun flitted in and out of clouds outside. The sacristy was made of numerous panes of glass, framed in golden oak, as was everything in the church. Oak abounded, honey colored.

  Its splendor stilled me.

  I took a few notes, returned to my car, and as I pulled away I noticed a new playground going up beside the church, donated, as a sign said, by the Elks Club. A flight of boys on mountain bikes squealed by, popping wheelies and laughing, trying to outrun the last few weeks of summer. On the corner of Erlanger and Mill Road a brown-haired girl, maybe twelve, in an orange tube top and denim shorts, sold sweet corn pyramided high before her on a rusty-legged card table. All this and many other such summer sunset scenes were playing out along the peaceful streets of Winsome Bay. I saw no signs, however, that this was a town where a young girl had recen
tly been horribly, brutally murdered.

  At the end of their senior year, Gary and Neal Peterson posted a comment on Facebook saying that Melissa Becker and Deborah Ellison should run for “Queen and Queen” of the prom. Until then the relationship had been pretty discreet, but still, people talked. Plus Gary and Neal had had no luck trying to have sex with Deborah or Melissa all through high school so they had to find some other reason for being turned down besides their own inherent repulsiveness.

  The summer before senior year, Melissa lost her leg to the cancer. Deborah had stayed with her as much as possible through the whole ordeal: the follow-ups, the chemo, radiation, physical therapy. Insurance covered only the most basic prosthesis, so Deborah helped organize a fund-raiser to buy Melissa a top-of-the-line artificial leg. She even got along with her mother then, and despite the cancer, it was a good time, a close time, when everyone in Winsome seemed to be a little more thankful for the things they had, when people acted just a little kinder. But that was before it all came out and the town discovered that there was “something going on” between Melissa and Deborah.

  “Why are you doing this to us?” her father screamed at her. “Why?”

  “Oh my god—this has nothing to do with you!”

  “It doesn’t? You know what they’re saying about us? The whole town?”

  “I could care less what this stupid town thinks!”

  “Well, you’re going to start caring.” He grabbed Deborah’s scrap-book off the hallway table. “This is done! You hear me? It’s over!” He tore out the pictures of Melissa.

  “Dad, please, no! Dad, stop!”

  Deborah’s mother stepped into the hallway, “Tom! Tom, what are you—”

  He whirled on her, “Shut up! Get the—just shut up!”

  She retreated to the kitchen, noticeably smaller. The incredible shrinking woman. All fog and vodka. Deborah tried to grab the book from her father, but he wrenched it away, knocking her to the ground. He raised his hand to strike her, but stopped suddenly, his arm trembling. “When you’re eighteen,” he said, calmly, “you do whatever you want, but until then, while I’m feeding you and putting clothes on your back, you do what I say. Do you understand me?”

  Nothing from Deborah.

  He laid out each word for emphasis. “Do you understand me?”

  She nodded.

  Her father left the house.

  Deborah gathered up the pieces of Melissa’s pictures.

  Her mother stayed in the kitchen the rest of the night.

  Later, when things calmed down, Deborah’s mother tried to reason with her husband, tried to get him to understand his daughter, or at least to have a mature discussion about the situation. It didn’t work. He wasn’t built for that kind of conversation. Each attempt quickly escalated into what Deborah called an adult version of a temper tantrum, born of an inherited ignorance, which, tick-like, only burrowed deeper when challenged.

  Her mother then brought over the local priest to talk with Deborah and her father. Maybe he could help, she’d thought. But no. The subject was far outside his scope of practice, and the painfully awkward counseling sessions invariably ended up with a generic prescription to pray. So Tom Ellison, devout man that he was, dragged his daughter to church every Sunday and knelt beside her on the bishop’s spanking new and improved kneelers and made her pray for forgiveness. And she did. She prayed just as she’d been taught. She prayed with every cell in her body and her mind and her heart, and she squeezed her thin fingers together till they hurt and she dug her skinny knees into those friggin’ kneelers and she asked her God, with an open heart, she asked him or her or whomever, she asked to know that if this was wrong, if what she felt for Melissa was evil, if it was this horrible abomination that her father kept screaming about, then he or she or whoever should let her know it right then and there.

  He or she or whoever made no response.

  It was the great scandal of the town, that shithole town with all its petty, ignorant people who had nothing better to do with their time than trying to justify their own worthless existences by trashing everybody else’s. Nobody posted comments on Facebook about the not-so-secret drunks in Winsome Bay, or the women sleeping with other women’s husbands, or the men having sex with girls twenty years younger than them, or the graying front-pew couple in church who never missed a Sunday but watched hardcore porn behind locked doors while their kids machine-gunned people into masses of bloody flesh on the newest Xbox slaughter game; nobody posted comments about the girls who drank, or did pot or meth or coke, or who had been having sex since they were twelve—no, nobody called Father Ryan and tried to help them.

  That summer the girls were kept apart. Deborah worked at the Subs ’n’ Spuds sandwich shop. Dropped off, picked up, and curfewed. Melissa was sent to a camp for disabled athletes in Pennsylvania for six weeks. She returned in August, and still, the families kept them apart. And after the graffiti on the school walls, and the prank phone calls, and Facebook, and the textings, after the looks and the sneers and the laughter from the righteous and religious, Melissa Becker’s family moved to Minnesota.

  Deborah went off to college in La Crosse.

  Melissa died in November.

  The cancer had come back. In her lymph system and lungs.

  Something spilled out of Deborah that day and never filled again. She had sex, she had relationships, but she never felt that thing again, that flutter in her heart. Her parents had been paying for college and now it made her physically sick to take their money. She dropped out of school and moved back to Winsome. She didn’t know why; it was the last place on earth she wanted to be. To spite her parents maybe, she thought, to spite the whole town. She lived in a rundown apartment by the lake. She avoided her parents. Avoided friends. Her father tried to make contact with her. She wouldn’t respond to him or anyone. And then the drinking started, and the drugs, and the tattoos, and the piercings—she wanted to do things to her body, to brand it, to cut it, to use her body like a huge fuck you scream. She slept with women. They meant nothing. She slept with men. They meant less. She hitched rides to Chicago and whored herself there to pay for drugs and rent. She had sex with Winsome men on drunken nights back at her apartment, thinking, How’s this, Dad? Is this better? Are you happy now? Huh? Are you and Father Ryan and God okay with me now?!

  And it might have gone on like that.

  But that she met someone.

  On a good day of writing, when the ideas were really coming, 5:30 in the morning couldn’t come quickly enough for Jillian. On a bad day, she dreaded the eerie blue numbers on her digital alarm more than estimated taxes. On this morning, out in her office, writing, coffee in hand by 5:38, the ideas were coming. She’d had a phone interview the day before with a young officer on the Winsome Bay police force, Dan Ehrlich.

  J. McClay/Killing/American Forum

  Winsome Bay has always been a great place to raise kids. People still leave their doors unlocked and the keys in their cars. You can forget your money at any of the stores in town and come back later to pay, and mail with just your name on it will still find its way to your house.

  Mixed in with the local population of Winsome Bay are a lot of refugees, as officer Dan Ehrlich told me, an unassuming man who sounded too young to be a police officer. “Refugees,” he elaborated, are people who have left big cities like New York or Chicago to settle out in the country. Some seem to be running away from something, others seem to be running toward something. They’ve brought a little diversity to the town too, which ethnically looks a bit like a modern-day Viking settlement: fair skinned, blond, and blue eyed. There are also a number of “hippie types” living around Winsome, said Ehrlich, quickly adding that he meant no disrespect by the term. He stammered the slightest bit before explaining further. A lot of them had moved into the houses of farms that had failed in the late seventies. The two-hundred-acre farms, chopped up and auctioned off into forty-acre lots, were ideal for growing organic produce. A pretty good cr
owd shows up every Saturday when these farm families come into town in their rubber boots, rain slickers, and Rastafarian hairdos to sell vegetables at the Winsome Bay Farmers’ Market, which basically consists of two pickup trucks and a few old card tables. “They’re a bit different at some things,” Ehrlich said, “but if weren’t for them, there’d be hardly any farming going on here at all.”

  This still beautiful community is in danger of being transformed into what most small towns outside of larger cities look like today: a jammed conglomeration of fast-food chains, gas-grocery-liquor stores, and used-car dealerships. Urban sprawl is spreading, quickly, and its negative impact on rural America is undeniable: reduced green space and animal habitats, pollution, economic disparity, petty crime, and drugs. Heroin has had an alarming resurgence here, as well as crystal meth and marijuana.

  And now, a murder.

  Today, there is a little less winsomeness in Winsome Bay.

  Jillian took a break and went back to the house to make some breakfast.

  Maybe all of her morning’s work wouldn’t make it into the final draft, but she thought that fleshing out the location and the feel of the town would help her readers get a greater sense of the world in which this horrible story happened.

  The story.

  Jillian had been waiting for it to show itself, for it to tassel itself out of the images she’d been living with for so long. That’s the way it usually happened for Jillian: An image would strike her and, for some reason, would not leave her alone. It would hound her thoughts. Then she would start to see similar patterns everywhere she looked. The earliest promptings for her story had begun showing themselves long before the murder had even happened.

  Jillian had been driving home from a swim meet with Michael. It was late. As they drove into town, they passed a carnival, one of those traveling companies you often see in school or church parking lots: kind of seedy, kind of fun, all the rides just a little too greasy and dirty, like the people running them. This one had been set up on a large expanse of lawn in front of the high school. A giant red-and-white-striped tent stood center, patched up and stitched together with wide knots of graying sutures, mendings from years of teardowns and put-ups. There were games and rides, loud mechanical music, food stations, barkers, a glittering of colored lights flashing on and off everywhere you looked—a mobile Chuck E. Cheese, only outdoors. As Jillian drove past, Michael asked if they could stop. It was late and she was tired, so Jillian said they could go tomorrow. They won’t be there tomorrow, Michael complained, they’ll be gone. Of course they’ll be there, Jillian said. They’ve just set everything up. They’ll be there for the whole weekend.