“So what can I help you with?” he asked.
“Do you mind if I record this?” Stevie said, getting out her phone. “Not for the podcast. For me. Just to remember.”
Paul gave an expansive gesture that indicated she should do as she liked.
“I guess . . . ,” Stevie said, and then regretted starting that way. She needed to sound more sure, more confident. But that was easier said than done. She was facing a man who had lost a brother, as Allison had lost a sister, and Patty had lost her friends. Everyone around here had lost, and she felt it in her bones.
Paul was waiting. She needed to stop sounding so unsure.
“Your brother,” she said. It was not a question, but Paul seemed to understand. “If that’s okay,” she added.
Paul nodded, his chin dipping toward his chest a bit.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve been talking about what happened to my brother—about everything that happened here—since I was seventeen years old. It’s been with me for most of my life. My brother died in December of 1977, about seven months before the murders. It was right before Christmas. He was in the junior high band. He played the trumpet. They were doing a special long rehearsal for a holiday concert. I was home. I was watching Starsky and Hutch downstairs and doing homework. The phone rang and I heard this . . . scream from upstairs . . .”
He stopped and looked down at his coffee for a moment.
“It was our neighbor, Mrs. Campbell, who called,” Paul said. “It happened right around the corner. He would have been home in a minute or two. Someone came around the corner and mowed him down. Mrs. Campbell heard it happen and ran out, she was with him when . . .”
He shook his head.
“He didn’t die right away. She stayed with him while the ambulance came. He died en route.”
“And people think Todd Cooper was the one who—”
“I don’t think,” he cut in. “I know Todd Cooper was the one who hit him. Everyone knows Todd Cooper was the one who hit him.”
His voice rose a bit and Patty looked up from her cake decorating. Paul cleared his throat a little. “Why don’t we step outside?” he asked. “It’s a nice morning.”
The temperature had climbed even in the short period they had been in the bakery, and Stevie felt herself immediately start to sweat.
“This is a small town,” he said as soon as they were clear of the door and any passersby. “Everybody really does know everyone. And it’s not like there are any secrets about what happened with Todd and my brother. Certainly Patty knows all about it. But it always feels best to maybe keep this conversation—well, I don’t know. It’s a reflex.”
They drifted toward the green and sat down on one of the benches by the statue.
“The town felt even smaller back then,” he said. “Everyone was in and out of everyone else’s house or yard. We all knew what everyone else was up to. I knew Todd. We were good friends. Todd drove a brown Jeep with a red stripe. He drove fast, with the music up loud. And he drove high, he drove drunk. Lots of people did back then. Todd did it a lot. I was in the car many of those times. There were near misses that we’d laugh off. That night, it wasn’t a near miss. Someone saw him. There was a girl named Dana Silverman, who was in band as well. She was walking home from the same rehearsal. She said she saw his Jeep turn the corner of Mason Road and Prospect Avenue right after the accident, and that it was going fast. She even saw the green fuzzy dice he had hanging from the rearview mirror. The next day, after the accident, Todd didn’t drive to school. He turned up in his girlfriend Diane’s car. That had never happened before.”
“Did anyone ask why?” Stevie asked.
“I asked Diane why, lots of people asked her why. She said Todd’s dad took the keys because he’d gotten a D on a major test. Like I said, I knew Todd. I rode in that car and I knew all about his life. His dad might have been pissed about a test, but his dad never took his keys.”
“Didn’t the police question him?” Stevie said.
“The police said they did. He said he was at home all night. His parents said the same thing, said they were all sitting in the living room watching TV.”
“But they would have looked at the car.”
“So you’d think,” Paul said, smiling mirthlessly.
“No one checked the car?”
“After the accident, the Jeep wasn’t in the driveway, where it normally would have been. No one saw that car for a week. And then, after a week, the police gave us some report, some form, that said that someone had gone out and looked at the Jeep and that it was fine and showed no signs of damage. It was dated the day after the accident, but no one—no one—thinks that’s when they actually went over and looked at it. Again, this is a small town. Todd’s father was the mayor. He said his son was home all night, so his son was home all night. The Jeep vanishes, the Jeep reappears a week later, and the police say the Jeep is fine. So the Jeep was fine.”
“Did anyone keep the bike?” Stevie asked. “They could check for paint.”
“I think about this all the time,” Paul said, shaking his head. “This was 1978. No one knew to ask about things like that. Years later I went back and asked about the bike, but there’s no record of what happened to it. It’s gone. I assume they got rid of it. I mean, it was a hit-and-run in a small town. It was sad, but not a lot could be done about it. That was the general attitude.”
“So if everyone knew it was Todd, what happened?”
“Well, there were basically three camps in town. There were people who thought Todd did it and supported us. There were some people who thought Todd was innocent—not many, but a few. Those people make me furious, but not as furious as the third group, which I think was the biggest group of all—the people who knew Todd did it and chose to do nothing. They knew Dana saw him. They knew the car was missing for a week. They knew it all, but they thought, It was just an accident. Why ruin a kid’s life over an accident? They knew the mayor was lying, but they put it down to protecting his kid. Being a good dad. Those are the people I could never forgive.”
He had to pause for a moment and shift in his seat. Stevie could see the weight he still felt, all these years later.
“I had to go back to school with the guy I knew had run my brother down and gotten away with it,” he said. “I had to see him every day. I avoided him, and he avoided me. I was also dealing with the fact that I was a gay, closeted jock in the late 1970s, so I was trying to compensate and seem really . . . whatever straight and manly looked like then. It wasn’t an easy time, but we got through it. My parents were amazing people. My dad wanted justice. Fairness. He didn’t want revenge. He wasn’t that kind of person. He wanted people to do the right thing. He never stopped trying to get someone to look into it. When the local police let him down, he tried the state police. When the state police couldn’t help, he went to the local press. He talked to everyone who would listen. He would have kept going, but seven months later, Todd was dead.”
He lifted his hands gently as if to say, And that was that.
“You were at the camp that night,” Stevie said. “The night of the murders.”