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That house went on the market and ended up selling for something like
$800,000. Across the street from it were some worn down Craftsman
style houses, the kind people used to buy in kits from the Sears Roebuck
catalogs back in the '20s and '30s, now rented to broke college students.
I liked to walk my dog around that area.

Every wooden lamppost or telephone pole served as a com-
munity bulletin board. They were all covered in the miniature drawer
handles of staples that no longer held paper. Usually there would be
a couple fliers per pole-yard sales, ads for make-money-from-home
schemes, missing pet posters.

For about a month in the spring of200S, there were police
sketches of a nondescript face on every pole, tacked to all the cork
bulletin boards on campus and taped to the glass doors of all the local
shops. Village Imports, Starbucks, Brewed Awakenings, K-Mart, Bert's
Compact Discs. Cafe Gelato. Payless ShoeSource. A man had raped and
strangled a girl to death, a 20-year-old college student in her apart-
ment, then burned the place down with her body inside. The apartment
complex where she lived wasn't far, just across Elkton Road, maybe a
five- or ten-minute walk from where I lived. It was reported that there
was graffiti on the walls of her apartment, but for the time being, police
were not disclosing the nature of it.

The girl was Lindsey Bonistall. There's now a bench dedicated
to her memory in front of her high school in White Plains, New York,
and a website online for the same purpose. I haven't seen the bench, but
it's safe to say it's better than the website.

That's not to undermine the good intentions of the website,
but it was only started, never finished, and those of the links that don't
lead to a six-year-old "coming soon" page seem phoned-in, like remem-
bering Lindsey turned out to be a hassle. The section that's meant to
have biographical information appears to be her resume. Under work
experience, it has her as part of the waitstaff for Cafe Gelato "2004 -
present."

The rental house my family lived in was owned by the funeral
home next door. Our driveway was split off the entrance to their
parking lot, so we'd see a lot of mourners rolling by. We'd see women
crying and men wanting to cry, but not crying, and we wouldn't think

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