At the time Peck saw her applying the pink lip gloss at the Rodeo strip mall, Mona lived with Jim Hawkes at 17 Covered Wagon Trail in a detached home that backed onto a field. She had met Jim the previous Christmas at a law school pub she’d gone to with Larry Buxton, her Man & Society teacher. She went home with Jim and never left. She worked as one of three legal secretaries at the small firm of Henderson, Albert & Tizz. A picture of her Rottweiler, Albert, sat in a brass frame on her desk. The Rotty wore a blue kerchief and stood splay-legged and smiling on Wasaga Beach, an orange KONG at his feet. Jim had a dog allergy so Albert lived with her parents in the Smythefield subdivision west of Main Street and north of Buyers World mall. Mona liked the fields behind 17 Covered Wagon Trail. She liked squinting at the light on the pond water and hearing the cracked sounds of the ducks. Smythefield had no open spaces. It had older and taller trees. She liked being the only one walking the streets in no shade. She liked the sameness of the houses. By June 1985, she was engaged. She was planning her wedding. She had girlfriends both older and younger than seventeen. She liked a good caper and was impressed when she walked into Venus Video and Peck Brown was watching Bonnie and Clyde.
chapter 2
The summer Peck was nine, her mother ran away with another man. Peck was playing with Malcolm Salter next door when his mom brought her a can of root beer and said, “Go home now. Your dad wants you.”
That night, and for many nights afterward, she felt dead, as if her mother had murdered her.
In the years that followed, she read the paperbacks about the Black Donnellys and Jack the Ripper her mom had left in the bathroom. With her mom’s card, Peck signed murder books out of the Kashag Public Library. She looked at the victims before their deaths, the women in headscarves and sunglasses, the men in suits with skinny ties, and she looked at the killers’ hooded eyes and beat-down faces in their mug shots. Sometimes she looked at the bodies and their dumping grounds. Bodies on couches or beds, in ditches or fields. Some books blanked out the corpses. Others showed autopsy photos with pulpy mouths, glassy stares, bloodsmears.
She imagined her mom killing her. She pictured her body stuffed in the rocks, her mom’s thumbprints bruised into her throat. When the police lifted her up, maggots would drop off. The police would gag at the smell. Then they’d put her mom in jail. Faced with the autopsy photos, her mom would say, “Shoot, she was prettier when I knew her.”
Her mom was Margery Virginia and she was Pauline Elizabeth and her dad was Harold Ray Brown. Nobody called him Harold — nor Harry, a name for a rounder, balder man. He was Hank. When other men said it, especially when drinking, it came out like a swear. Sometimes it sounded like Hunk. She pictured him as a side of meat, rosy brown and slimy. He called her Peck for the hard kisses she gave. She liked to call him Heck. Heck no, it’s not a bother. What the heck. I’m gonna give you heck. A watered-down cuss. A non-word. She liked that Heck rhymed with Peck.
One fall during moose season, Malcolm Salter from next door came into her kitchen swinging a plastic bag.
“Want to see?” he said, and Peck said, “Sure.”
Grinning, he displayed a moose heart with veins and tubes and fat. One whiff of iron blood and she kicked him. Malcolm snatched the bag away and kicked her back.
She helped Hank do the tanning. They mashed the brains into a paste over a fire. He staked the hide on racks behind the shed, and she worked it soft with a stick.
One time Hank presented her with a deerskin purse, from his first. “She stood out like sawdust against the snow,” he said. Peck pictured the bullet hitting the doe’s glowing heart and a cooked venison roast revealed in a burst of wood shavings. “I had this made for your mother, but she left it behind. Might be she wanted you to have it.” He spoke with a strangled cheeriness. Stiff, she watched him hang the strap from her shoulder, his features receding as if washed out by sudden, heavy rain. The purse moved like cloth and had a stubbly nap Peck liked to brush against her skin. She stored it under her bed with her mom’s library card and feathered clip inside.
At twelve she wrote her first story. Her characters laughed and swung their Cher hair as they killed whole families in inventive, domestic ways. They always got caught, though, and not by their daughters, either.
Peck stopped talking about her mom, but Hank didn’t. He told stories about Margery as if they’d had coffee that morning. If she ever came back, Peck figured he’d yield like worked skin.
In June 1980, five years before they moved to Westwoods, Hank turned thirty-five. Peck was twelve. The morning of his birthday, she caught her orderly father standing in the kitchen in boxers and a vest. A gob of shaving foam trailed along his jaw as he tilted his head back and poured a stream of milk down his throat. Other changes followed. He came home earlier from his horseshoe tourneys and what he called his “Poke Her” nights. He mentioned Margery less and limited himself to one girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old horsewoman named Sue Smedley. And he started the plan. The plan he said would give them something to show for their lives. The plan that meant moving. He applied to more than a hundred companies and pored over MLS catalogues with house listings north and west of Toronto. He would get a good job and set up a life far from his friends. From Kashag. Peck could only watch as Hank grew up.
By the time they moved south, Hank had worked there for four years, at Apco Moulding running a machine that made margarine tubs. He drove the two hours and change each way and took twelve-hour shifts, three nights on, two days off; four nights on, three days off; sometimes seven and seven.
Peck’s chief impression of this period was Hank collapsed stubble-cheeked on the couch, tan boots lolling, sock bottoms black, coveralls faded airplane grey with musky grease stains. Measured snores replaced the ripping songs that used to follow his benders.
When he was upright between shifts after a sixteen-hour sleep and a shave, his smile had a new quality, and he held Peck in his gaze. He acted proud and on the verge of a promise. Peck hated him then, but she had no right. He was throwing their lives through this upheaval to give her a better future, but she worried that one day she might look up from her murder stories and find he, too, had stepped out for good.
Malcolm Salter grew tall and hard-shouldered the summer before Peck left for Westwoods. They took to playing Monopoly in the Salters’ trailer and talking about the Beatles. Peck had fallen in love with Paul McCartney after she’d found out he was fourteen when his mother died of cancer. John Lennon had seen his mother get hit by a streetcar, but he had Aunt Mimi. Whom did Paul have? She didn’t tell Malcolm that she wrote letters to Paul or that she wrote Paul’s replies. In the letters, Paul called her “my love” and told her maybe he was amazed. She would go to Scotland and work as a nanny at the McCartney sheep farm, and Paul would love her and Linda would bow out. She believed in the goodness of Linda.
One day, at the end of a treatise on the backward looping of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Malcolm straightened his money piles. They’d turned on the lamps and closed the curtains against the sun. He picked at the vinyl piping on a cushion.
“Let’s go into the house,” he said. “I’ll show you my Beatlemags.”
She scooped up four houses and placed a hotel on Indiana Avenue and said, “As long as we come back to this game.”
Inside the door, one set of stairs led up to the kitchen and another to a curtained-off area of the basement. Malcolm had taped a collage of Beatles pictures to the unpainted drywall.
Malcolm fetched