Small Towns and Dead Bodies

I grew up in a small New England town, and all the clichés are true. We never locked our doors at night. We rode our bikes without helmets. We didn’t have smartphones or medical bracelets back then. People let their dogs run wild and unleashed. 

My mother occasionally locked us kids out of the house until dinnertime. We’d go for long walks in the woods or play down by the stream without any adult supervision. We’d come home when the blood-orange sun had dropped below the horizon and the first star of the evening had twinkled to life.  

My hometown was typical of other small towns, surrounded by woods and farms and wildflower meadows and rolling hills. Main Street was quaint, full of Victorian-era mansions and art deco redbrick buildings. There was a town green, an ice rink, a bus station and a community garden. In the spring, the foliage was gorgeous. By October, the trees blazed a spectacular orange-and-gold color, setting the world on fire. The seasons were amazing. They added grace to the landscape. 

Our neighborhood was family friendly, full of historical colonial homes, ranch houses, and turn-of-the-century farm houses. We watched out for one another, mourning our losses and celebrating our good fortune. We knew the names of the mail carrier, the postal clerks, the grocery baggers and trash collectors. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. 

In our small town, rumors spread like a contagious virus through the community’s veins—invisible yet potent. It was best to avoid the troubled family across town—pills on the bedside table, more pills in the medicine cabinet, the mom with her boozy breath, the dad with his bitter eyes. And don’t buy your shoes at the discount store where the smiling middle-aged salesman liked to fondle ladies’ feet. And stay away from the old man with the cloudy eyes who stood on the edge of his property after school let out and tried to talk to you. He lived in a house with swings and a jungle gym, but never any children.  

We learned about the town’s secrets through osmosis. Through insinuation. The truth was pliable. Speculation flowed from lips to ears, like a child’s game of Telephone.  

There were halfway houses, pyromaniac kids, eccentric cafeteria ladies, haunted houses, drunk dads, pill-popping moms, people selling drugs behind Dunkin’ Donuts, a man who burned down his hardware business to collect on the insurance, and a troubled kid who once brought a dead duck to school for show-and-tell. Scandalous rapes were covered up, and the local boys often escaped punishment, but somebody had to carry the shame. A teenage girl I knew miscarried in the bathroom at Burger King and ended up in a home for teenage runaways where she was constantly trying to run away.

Nobody spoke about these things except in hushed whispers. There were strange events we never acknowledged but that existed in the cracks and crevices of our perfect town.  

One of my best friends lived a few streets over. Every day after school, the bus would stop at the bottom of her hill, and she would hurry past a crumbling old Gothic house surrounded by dark woods and a weed-choked lawn. She would run past this house, because—she once told me—the person who lived there threw knives out the window at random passersby, and my imagination was too strong not to believe her. I never asked her why she didn’t call the police. She just kept running up that hill on her way home from school.

I was warned not to babysit for the “Smith” family—a professional couple with three boisterous little kids—because the dad would hit on you on the ride home. He’d park his car in front of your house, but he wouldn’t let you out of the Cadillac—not just yet. He kept you there as his hostage, asking an endless series of questions. He talked in a soft unctuous voice and stared at you with his moist eyes, until you became so unnerved you bolted for freedom. “Thanks for the ride!” The porch light never felt so welcoming.  

Sometimes the town’s everyday events seemed shadowy and menacing—the rah-rah pep rallies, the cut-throat flower shows, the winter ice-carving competition with its chainsaw-wielding contestants, shotgun weddings on the town green. There was a distinct Twin Peaks undertone of decay beneath the glossy candy-colored cheer. The curbside appeal of white picket fences and manicured lawns hid the junked cars propped on cement blocks out back. 

Most of my friends were good kids. We did our homework. We had library cards. We attended community events and volunteered at the local food bank. We took music or dance lessons and joined the school chorus or the soccer team. We did as we were told, and we did it with a smile.

But we had our own secrets.

As cynical teenagers, my friends and I would drive around the country back roads, getting stoned and talking about leaving this deadbeat town and moving to the city—any city—while we blew smoke out the windows of our parents’ cars, afraid that the smell of cigarettes and weed would leech into the upholstery. We snuck vodka from our parents’ liquor cabinets and refilled the bottles with tap water so they wouldn’t suspect. We thought we could fool them, as if they’d never been teenagers themselves.

During the summer, when the air was balmy and the stars were out, you could drive over to the old shopping plaza that was going to be torn down in the fall. You could lie there on the warm hood of your father’s Chevy with your best friend and name the constellations. You could smell exhaust from the traffic on Route 17 and hamburger grease from the Dairy Queen across the way. You could go to random parties and end up inside random houses. You could bum cigarettes from friends and wave your hands frantically whenever you exhaled, trying to keep the smell of tobacco from seeping into your skin and hair, but you could never really hide the fact that you were only pretending to be a grown-up.

Living in a backwoods town, embarrassed by your lack of sophistication, you decided that you would fake it until you made it, only you never really made it out of there, no matter how far away you moved, because small towns have a way of clinging like cigarette smoke and leeching into the very fabric of your being.  

Surprise. You will always be a small-town girl.

There were actual murders happening in other tight-knit communities like ours. Fifty miles away, over the course of a year, three young women were strangled with their own bras and left by the side of a highway. A suburban mom disappeared from her home in the middle of cooking breakfast, only to be found face-down in a swamp two towns over. A girl who had a gift for playing the piano was beaten to death with a large rock in the northwestern part of the state.  

These gruesome tragedies were laid out in a dry, matter-of-fact fashion in the local papers, and they cast a shadow over my innocence. People liked to say “nothing ever happens here,” but the world of small towns seemed fraught with hidden dangers. How could you know everybody, and yet not know some people at all? 

When I entered high school, girls and women started disappearing across the state. Many years later, was it discovered that a serial killer had been operating statewide, but the police hadn’t connected all the victims yet. My mother explained how to make myself safe. Dress modestly, keep your head down, never talk to strangers.  

But there were so many places I used to bike to all by myself—dead end roads, abandoned farms, isolated parks, remote hillsides. I was a dreamer, a wanderer, the kind of person who was destined to become a writer and weave imaginative stories. When I look back, I realize that I could’ve been one of those nameless, faceless victims who disappeared in broad daylight. Gone forever. 

And yet…

And yet growing up in a small town full of friends and family and charming traditions and incredible natural beauty gave me so many gifts—the freedom to wander, the willingness to take risks, a fascination with invention, the complexity of people’s characters, their struggles and yearnings, the drama of it all, the peaceful tranquility of the woods and meadows. I also learned that just because a town is small, doesn’t mean it’s not big enough to contain magnitudes of evil.

Eventually, I left my hometown and moved to a big city with my husband, and then we moved to an even bigger city, but as a writer I’ve always wondered—what if I’d never left home? And then I thought—what kind of person would stay, and what would her reasons be? And what if she became a police detective? What awful secrets might she uncover? What terrible atrocities might be woven into the idyllic place that she loves?  

All of those “what if’s” eventually formed the Burning Lake mystery series. Growing up in small-town America with its mysterious undercurrents of secrets definitely played into the invention of Natalie Lockhart, a rookie detective who finds herself in the middle of a gruesome murder case where she must fit the pieces together and link up the strange violent events that threaten to tear her beloved hometown apart.

In my latest book, The Shadow Girls, Natalie is still trying to navigate her relationships with her boss, Lt. Det. Luke Pittman, and her boyfriend, Hunter Rose, and lay to rest a few ghosts from her past. Specifically, she wants to know what happened to the high school friend who disappeared on the night of their graduation.  

As the book opens one chilly winter morning, she’s called to the scene of a truly ghastly murder. There’s a dead body inside Murray’s Halloween Costumes, and the killer has placed a red plastic clown nose on the victim, gruesomely mocking him.  

She soon discovers an underground bunker inside the victim’s house, where it appears he held at least seven women hostage.  But the hidden basement is all sealed up, and the girls are no longer there—only the evidence of their horrifying years of captivity.

Where are the Shadow Girls now? Are they dead? And what happened to Natalie’s best friend who disappeared over a decade ago?  Could Bella Striver be the eighth and final Shadow Girl?

There’s something wicked in Burning Lake…