An Unsolved Murder-Mystery

When I read the first few paragraphs of Karen Brown's 'Needs' published in The Atlantic on August 31, 2021, it sounded like a standard murder-mystery unsolved. It was set in 1966 in Windham County, Connecticut. That was an America when men worked and women kept house. 

I was like, hmmm, small town social mores versus expectations of women's changing roles in the corporate world and at home. It didn't turn dramatic. The gem in the narrative is in its small-town setting, domestic landscape, and the quiet horror of it all. Nobody expected someone they knew to be murdered in their home, and a murderer unaccounted for. 

The writer explained her approach when writing the story, 

I approached the story without any idea who my narrator would be. I was simply trying to create the world of the crime. But eventually, her voice emerged, and the story as she knew it unfolded. Voyeurs and writers are careful observers of the lives of others, making assumptions that translate to an invented closeness. In some ways, this can feel like a transgression. But the writer’s agenda is always unearthing a truth about the situation, the characters, or the world they inhabit.

Murder victim Patty and the unnamed narrator are neighbors, and lived across the street from each other. There was a lot of talk about the murderer, an unfaithful husband who married his girlfriend before his wife's trial ended. There was the mother-in-law who was accused of murdering Patty, but she somehow had cancer and died in the hospital without being questioned further.

The town wanted the suspect caught so they could go back to leaving their doors unlocked, take their walks in the woods again in peace. The summer night, filled with the sound of katydids and crickets, became a space they awoke to jolted by fear. Patty’s husband and Doris were longtime residents. Doris’s former employers attested to her diligence and care in their households, as if they’d forgotten that her hospitalization had been cause for dismissal. She was a jewel, they said. The children loved her so. When it was proved that the teenager accused of the crime was elsewhere at the time Patty was killed, he was exonerated. He left town as soon as he was able, and many still assumed this was proof of his guilt and were grateful. 

Patty's body was found by her husband (who was already seeing his girlfriend before the death), and the unnamed narrator's husband. Their neighbor's murder haunted them too. They wondered if Patty had a lover. They couldn't figure out who would kill, and more importantly, why. It kept coming back to Doris, but she was dead. Even if she did it, there wasn't legal restitution anymore. Years went by and the murder became an unsolved mystery. Readers could hazard our own guesses though. 

Tonight, we head to bed and beyond our bay window I can just make out the lights of the new subdivision. They tore down Patty’s house a few years ago. A developer bought the land and the woods and now it is an enclave of modern homes—all glass and stone and cantilevered rooflines. Houses built up into the woods where the Old Leatherman’s cave sits. Fields groomed into neat lawns.

My knees ache. My palms tingle.

I hear him stumble in the bedroom, banging his shin. I hear his soft groan as he settles on the bed, ever the impatient love interest, still mourning Patty. The past remains bottomless, a dark lake from which we drink. I have tricked him into imagining himself the murderer out of spite. All these years blaming Doris, and he is only partly right—Patty’s murder was a woman’s crime. The fork, the cord. The iron cord, not the toaster. A table fork first. These were the things at our daily disposal. Dish towel, oven mitt, apron, phone book, salt and pepper shakers, ashtray. Meat fork. We made our use of them as needed, need driving us to their use.