Read What Has Become of You for Free Online Page A

guess you could call a minor serial killer from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. He killed a preteen girl in Vermont, a teenage girl in New Hampshire, and a teenage girl right here in Maine, in my own hometown. There may have been other victims, but those were the only ones they pinned on him. I’m afraid his crimes were eclipsed by the much more publicized crimes of Ted Bundy.”
    “Whatever gave a little lady like you an idea to write a book about a thing like that?” the man asked, seeming genuinely perplexed.
    A little lady like you.
This struck Vera as rich. “Well, for one thing, the crimes really happened. And I personally find Schlosser very interesting.” Vera realized she was having a hard time saying the word
Schlosser
. Her next drink had arrived, and she took a long pull from her straw. “For another thing, crime itself is interesting.”
    The man named Sam or Stan said, “You oughta write one about that little girl they found choked to death. Now that’s a story right there.”
    “Funny, you’re not the first person to suggest that to me recently,” Vera said. “However, I suspect that story isn’t finished yet. Despite what the public seems to think, I don’t think they’ve arrested the right guy. I could be wrong, and I hope, for the sake of all the other little girls out there, that I am. Do you want to know what I think?” She leaned in a little closer to the man—not trying to be provocative, exactly, but wanting to be sure he heard her.
    “Sure, honey,” he said. “Who do you think did it?”
    “Well, that I don’t know. I was just going to tell you an idea that I’ve often thought about. See, sometimes I think it’s a fine line between being a writer and being a serial killer. It’s all about creation versus anticreation. Building versus destroying. They both require a lot of energy, don’t they? The difference between the two vocations might as well be arrived at by a coin toss. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one more likely to keep me out of jail.”
    The man named Sam or Stan processed this for a second or two. Then he muttered something about needing to excuse himself to go to the restroom. She knew he would not be returning to his seat near her. She was terribly tickled with herself. Nearing the bottom of her fourth gin and tonic, she wondered why the drinks were hitting her so hard; rummaging around in her recent memory, she recalled that all she had eaten that day was a small ham sandwich, consumed at six in the morning. The air around her was beginning to feel soft and muted and velvety, which wasn’t unpleasant; it was, however, a sure signal that she should leave soon.
    Once outside the bar, she found that a bitter wind had unexpectedly picked up—the first wintry night in more than a week—and as she drew her coat closer around her and ducked her head, a couple of frat-boy types rounding the corner and heading toward the bar shouted, “You’re going the wrong way, baby!” She smiled at them, head still held low. Was she supposed to act offended? She never knew how to negotiate such things.
    The more she walked, the more evident her excesses became. She felt as if she were swimming through the streets of Dorset with the purpose and precision of a shark, yet she somehow also felt as though she were seeing herself at a great distance, hurrying home, trying to look sober and dignified and, yes,
driven
, while the real Vera floated fuzzily overhead. Her bladder strained with fullness. On one of her more recent late-night walks home from the bar, when no one else was out on the streets to witness this, she had not been able to make it home before her bladder let go—her tights and shoes were soaked by the time she let herself into her apartment, and she’d felt morbidly ashamed. The last thing she needed was to become one of those drunks who soiled herself.
    Five blocks away from her apartment, she became aware of an even greater cause for concern than