BooksBarbecue
Back We Were Killers Once Save as PDF
Chapters (65)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty–one
  25. Twenty–two
  26. Twenty–three
  27. Twenty–four
  28. Twenty–five
  29. Twenty–six
  30. Twenty–seven
  31. Twenty–eight
  32. Twenty–nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty–one
  35. Thirty–two
  36. Thirty–three
  37. Thirty–four
  38. Thirty–five
  39. Thirty–six
  40. Thirty–seven
  41. Thirty–eight
  42. Thirty–nine
  43. Forty
  44. Forty–one
  45. Forty–two
  46. Forty–three
  47. Forty–four
  48. Forty–five
  49. Forty–six
  50. Forty–seven
  51. Forty–eight
  52. Forty–nine
  53. Fifty
  54. Fifty–one
  55. Fifty–two
  56. Fifty–three
  57. Fifty–four
  58. Fifty–five
  59. Fifty–six
  60. Fifty–seven
  61. Author’s Note
  62. Acknowledgments
  63. Also by Becky Masterman
  64. About the Author
  65. Newsletter Sign-up

We stopped. Then at the same time he started to laugh and I started to cry. The commonality was that both were a little hysterical. Carlo’s laughter was the first to fade. He picked up the edge of his T-shirt, held my chin with one hand, and wiped a glop of snot from my wet upper lip with his other. He didn’t let go of my chin. It struck me that the last time I had looked into his eyes this way was when we were making love. How strange that a few days ago I wasn’t sure I could forgive Carlo, and today I wasn’t sure he could forgive me.

What we were dealing with now, what we were, was bigger than my petty jealousy of Jane. That had been before he watched how, without hesitation, I could kill a human being. And worse, with what relish. And I had to face the fact that Carlo loved me, perhaps not as much as he had ever been capable of loving, but enough. Whether it was enough was up to me.

Carlo loved me the way I loved him: maybe not exclusively, but uniquely, and no matter that I wasn’t all that good a person. I knew this.

It had to be enough.

Maybe that’s the unique difference between romance and marriage; it’s not about losing ourselves and changing into the other person, or what we think the other wants. That’s for the infatuation stage. No, marriage is about repeatedly forgiving the other person for not being us.

I couldn’t remember a romance novel ending that way, but then I haven’t read that many. Hm … a romance for grown-ups … it chafes, but it’s where the marital rubber hits the road.

Author’s Note

This is a work of fiction. But parts of the story are drawn from fact. Truman Capote made Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Smith famous in In Cold Blood, the “nonfiction novel” about the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas in late 1959. I tried to stay true to Capote’s account, and more important, to the facts as I found them in police reports and prison archives. Dozens of links between the story according to Capote and my own fictions are here for the interested reader, making the book different from historical fiction, and more of a puzzle in which fact is not altogether apparent.

For example, meeting the young unnamed boy on the road, and the episode of collecting the bottles, was related by Perry Smith to Truman Capote. That the boy left his grandfather to die, joined up with Smith and Hickock, and was the one who killed the Walkers, is my story.

Capote mentions an article in the Garden City newspaper around the time of the Clutter case which told of the killing of ten local dogs. This is factual, but the perpetrator and the motive are fiction.