0–July
It was the body on the parade float that did it. It topped the list of things you don’t expect at a Fourth of July parade. Not only that, but all the stops had been pulled out, the way they were every year. It was just how the Putnams did things.
I mean the whole shebang. Hot dogs, cotton candy, a midway with prizes and a Ferris wheel and a carousel. Miss Putnam’s Cove ’55. The Mayor, Theobald Putnam himself, as Uncle Sam. The whole works.
My parents made me go. Their argument wasn’t anything like You don’t want to spend the last summer of high school alone at home, do you? Instead, it was The Perlmans are going. Don’t you want to spend time with Roy?
Roy. Roy, the golden boy. That was what everyone called him. By our small-town high school standards, he was ruler of the roost. Star athlete in every sport he played, varsity and first string and all that. His mom was old New England money, and I’d heard Mom say he probably had a trust fund that would support him until he was forty.
And he also happened to be my next-door-neighbor. Just my luck. I’d known him since preschool, and in our town everyone knew each other. We’d had the same teachers every year, and he’d always managed to get the seat assignment close to mine. Some years it was in front of me, others behind, and still more to my left or right. We weren’t even close alphabetically. I guess karma just had it in for us.
I went. Just to get Mom to stop pestering me about Roy. Honestly I couldn’t have cared less about spending time with him, and frankly, I didn’t want to. It wasn’t that he wasn’t nice – he was – or that he didn’t like me back – which he did. There were, honestly, other things that I was more interested in doing, actually. But I think our parents conspired against us, forcing us into proximity to each other – maybe in the hope that I’d be enticed by something about him. Which I definitely was not.
That Fourth of July was hot and cloudless. I trailed my parents and my younger sister Monica down the main street, already crowded with everyone waiting for the parade to start. Anyone who might’ve caught a glimpse of me would have said I looked bored, and I was.
So. There we were. My parents waving to Mayor Putnam, in the lead car, dressed in his Uncle Sam outfit. Monica, standing on her tiptoes, saying Up high, Dad, I wanna see.
And then, with the float called Spirit of Putnam’s Cove, this year depicting the first pilgrims who settled here in the 1600s, the parade ground to a sudden halt. It took a second for Mayor Putnam to realize what was happening, just like the rest of us. Especially the tourists from out of town, most of them trying to get a better view by pushing everyone else out of the way.
Mayor Putnam climbed out of the car and went running down the street to the intersection. I heard Mom grumbling about those faulty floats.
Someone’s dead. That was what the whispers were saying. Dad scooped up Mon, even though she was eleven going on twelve and in my opinion too big to be carried around. Mom’s hand caught my shoulder and held on tight, not because she was restraining me, but because she was trying to hold herself up.
I heard Mayor Putnam, reassuring everyone it was nothing to worry about. Just an accident.
Accident was a word that was tossed around a lot that summer after that. I still had no idea what had gone on at the parade, even though my friends had plenty to say about it. Donna, especially, thought it was Old Man Marshall’s doing, because he was always prowling around his cabin on the outskirts of town with his sawn-off shotgun. But Old Man Marshall also had a grandson to raise, a boy named Deacon who was in our year at school. He didn’t have time to go wandering around town killing people and putting their bodies somewhere for everyone else to find.
It was at Needler’s, the one place my parents let me get a job because it was a craft store, that I heard anything different. It was run by three women – sisters – who always sat together behind the counter and the big old till on it like the three Fates from Greek myth. Their faces were as brown and wrinkled as raisins, and Mom had once said they’d even been old when she was my age.
Raised in sin, she was, said one sister, the one holding a massive skein of yarn.
Not an ordinary death, said the second, the one weaving.
Had it coming the whole time, said the third, taking out a pair of large silver shears. I was busy re-doing the display in the window and trying not to listen to them. But it was the snip of those shears that I heard the most clearly, all the way across the shop floor. And I couldn’t help thinking that she’d just foretold the future.
