The Red Parts Read Online Free PDF

plain brown stocking. Not hers. “An import into the scene,” as they say. Embedded so deeply and wrongly into her skin that it appears here as a cartoon. Her face and shoulder and armpit are luminous, light sources unto themselves. Her armpit looks especially white and tender, like the armpit of a little girl. An armpit that’s never seen the sun.
    After the first few photos, Hiller comes over to our bench. He whispers to us that the next is particularly gruesome, that we might not want to see it.
    It shows Jane’s neck after the stocking was removed , he whispers. The furrow is quite deep.
    My mother repeats this information to my grandfather, who is sitting to her right and whose hearing isn’t good enough to make out the low decibel of Hiller’s whisper.
    He says we might not want to see this one , my mother says into his ear. The furrow is quite deep.
    Huh? my grandfather asks, what’s that?
    YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO LOOK AT THIS ONE , she repeats in a stage whisper as she lowers her head toward her knees.
    On her way down she whispers to me, Tell me if I should look.
    With my mother bent over I feel suddenly exposed on the bench, the sole bird left on a wire. I just sit there dumbly staring at the screen, waiting for the next image to come up, feeling about as able to control what I allow in as an antenna.
    I am developing little methods, however. Each time an image appears I look at it quickly, opening and closing my eyes like a shutter. Then I look a little longer, in increments, until my eyes can stay open. I know the image will stay on the screen for some time, until the attorneys and their witnesses have said everything about it that needs to be said. So there’s no rush. You can acclimate to it slowly. And the thing is, you do acclimate.
    Well? my mother whispers from her bent-over pose.
    It’s not so bad , I whisper back, but you might as well not look.
    AS WE FILE out of court at the end of this day, my grandfather slaps my mother’s and my backs and says confidently, Well , that didn’t hurt us.
    I have no idea what he’s talking about.
    Speak for yourself , I want to say.
    Or, That’s what you think now—but just you wait.
    Or, What do you mean by “hurt”? What does “hurt” mean to you?
    I hold him up on one side as we descend the stairs, and he holds on to the railing on the other. At the bottom he hugs me closer and says, You know you’ll always be my Janie.
    Jesus, Grandpa , I want to say. Did you see how your Janie looked in there? She didn’t look so good.
    But I just nod, as the automatic doors of the courthouse swing open, and deliver us back out into the oppressive summer heat.
    COURT TV later reported:
    As the washed-out pictures were flashed onto a large projection screen, jurors appeared solemn. A few women on the panel looked toward the victim’s relatives, seated in the front row of the courtroom. On three separate occasions, Hiller approached the family to warn them that he was about to show disturbing pictures, but each time, Dan Mixer, the victim’s ninety-year-old father, replied, “I’ll stay.”
    THE PERSON WHO first discovered Jane’s body on the morning of March 21, 1969, was a young housewife named Nancy Grow. I had read about this woman and her discovery in many different places over the years—in The Michigan Murders , for example, she makes a cameo appearance as “Penny Stowe.” I had also written a poem about her in Jane. I never dreamed of seeing her in the flesh.
    Now in her sixties—birdlike, restrained, her nerves taut under her skin—Grow resurfaces at the January hearing to describe her encounter with Jane’s body over three decades ago. She does not seem happy to do so. Nonetheless, she politely explains how her son brought her a bloodstained bag he’d found on his way to the school bus, how she shooed him off, then took a look around her street. She walked over to Denton Cemetery, stopped outside its chain-link fence, and stood there at Jane’s