Billie Girl

Chapter Six

I guess life had a way of balancing things out, because it wasn't long after I started seeing Blake that the first Grand Rapids strangling took place in possibly the quaintest part of town... Gaslight Village. If you drove through and blinked, you could have missed the whole area. But if you were walking through it at a causal pace, well then it took perhaps as long as it took one song to play on your cellphone, a really short song at that.

A girl–not a girl that I knew, but a girl who had recently graduated from my high school–was found lying behind a church on Lake street. She had been out walking her dog. Someone had seen her dog circling around the area with its leash dragging behind, barking and howling. A passerby read the tag and contacted the owners. But the next question remained. Where was the dog walker? It didn't take long to find the body of the girl. The newspaper said she had been strangled. Her name was Lisa Noback. She was planning to teach English in Vietnam for a summer before studying fashion photography at Kendall College, which is about the trendiest art school in the area. In the picture in the Grand Rapids Press she was half-smiling with a perfect set of white teeth. It just looked to me like the camera-person didn't wait long enough for her full smile to take shape before snapping the photo.

Blake and I were a newly formed couple since we had met in September. And I really think we would not have become such an intense item (or whatever you want to call us) if it were not for the strangler effect and the holiday effect. I clung to him will all my strength during this trying time in my town.

The first killing in August did not get more than local news coverage. But the second one, which took place just two weeks later in September when everybody headed back to school (everybody but me) got national attention. I didn't know the other girl, but this last girl found behind that Church, I knew. Tina was a friend of a friend. It really upset me because she had just shed something like forty-five pounds and had recently transformed herself into a real stunner. She was still curvy. I saw her at a symphony concert my Mom took me to, and she was dressed in this sleek red dress with a very revealing plunging neckline that practically went down to her navel. I was like, geez, does she think this is the red carpet for the VH1 awards or something? This is just a regional symphony of Grand Rapids. I guessed with her new svelte confidence she was out to shake what her mamma gave her. That night at the symphony she was with this guy that must have been like fifty. He had a graying goatee and a pot belly under his starched white shirt and tie. For God's sake, it looked to me like she was out with one of her guidance counselors from school. I spoke to her briefly and she introduced him as "my new other half," which actually sounded creepy in a 70s kind of way. He shook my hands really hard and I thought he might twist my thumb out of whack. Turns out he ran a writer's workshop at the local Barnes and Noble, and when I told him I did some journalling he said I should come come on down and workshop my work. "I promise you we don't bite, and our opinions are worth as much as you pay for the which is nothing at all." I didn't tell him, but I would never want to workshop my writing. Not yet. Not now, it would be like giving a news report to some strangers about everything that was going on with me. I would rather that my readership be in Norway or Denmark. I sensed Europeans might "get me." But the point was that, there was Tina, vibrant, sensual and alive and flaunting a man old enough to be her dad. And then she was gone. Just like that.