Chapter 1 ~ pg. 3

At this rate I’d get through the book in a touch under a decade. I grabbed another beer from the cooler and decided while I was there I might as well grab two. Did I mention the cooler came with the chair and is by default, attached to the chair? Well it is.

Anyways, I knocked back the two beers and chased them down with egg salad. My stomach content and the alcohol finding its way into my bloodstream, I decided to take another crack at the book. It was almost noon and I was behind on my three-word-a-minute quota. I found the first page and began reading:

Autumn in Maine is like nowhere else. The leaves fall from the trees a harvest gold and trickle to the ground a deep cherry. The lobster catch is at its peak, fisherman’s cages teeming with the vermillion crustaceans. The sun wakes a nation, crawling across the Atlantic a refulgent auburn. Last October, Maine was blanketed in red. Not by the leaves, not by the lobsters, not by the sunrise, but by the blood of eight young women. Truly, last autumn in Maine was like nowhere else.

I peeled the label off the beer bottle, smoothing it out like a crisp dollar bill, and thought about the last sentence, Truly, last autumn in Maine was like nowhere else.

I had to credit Mr. Tooms, he may lack all levels of morality, but his writing did capture the solemnity of the period. It was around this time last year when the first woman was found. I’d been living in Philly at the time and the murder had earned a small write-up on page eighteen of The Philadelphia Inquirer. I remember this distinctly because it was the first time anything from Maine made the paper.

Maine’s papers were a different story. In a state with the lowest crime rate in the country, finding a woman in thirty pieces is front page news. One of the lesser papers, the Waterville Tribune, ran an article written by, noneother than, investigative journalist Alex Tooms. The paper was on the verge of bankruptcy and had nothing to lose by running Tooms’ vivid and grotesquely accurate accounts of the murders. The newspaper sold more copies in October than it had the entire nine months prior.