Hoffman's novel starts on a beautifully idyllic morning where we find Jorie and her husband Ethan staying in bed rather than going to work. They have been married for 13 years,but are still hopelessly in love. On this beautiful morning where the sun is shining, flowers are blooming and birds are singing this couple go back to bed and reaffirm their love. Ever since they met in a bar they have been together, and have had a son called Collie. Ethan is a pillar of his community - he is a contractor with a very busy workload, trusted with the keys of his neighbours and even coaches kid's baseball in his spare time. Hoffman's descriptions of these two characters are so flowery and dream-like that some of our readers knew that something was going to happen to shatter this illusion. Nobody's life is that perfect and one reader commented that they were already making her sick a few pages in!
The idyll is soon shattered by a knock at the door and in the following silence Jorie drops her coffee cup to the floor as she senses that everything is about to change. Someone has recognised Ethan from his other life, the life before he met Jorie and turned his life around. In that life he was a heartless man with no moral compass. He was a juvenile delinquent with a devilishly handsome face. Women loved him and he left home to live with his mother's friend. The relationship was abusive and when he'd taken all of her money he left to find something new. Sadly for one girl he stopped over in her home town. Rachael Morris worked in the general store, she lived on a farm and had a horse, she was fifteen years old. Ethan, or Byron Bell as he was called then, convinced her to close the store and go swimming with him one afternoon. She takes him to Hell's Pond and as they part he asks her if he can visit that night. He tells her he will drive to the farm after dark and flash his lights, but when he gets there Rachel doesn't appear. Byron is affronted by this,He felt she promised him something and he is going to get it. He climbs into the window, and climbs into her bed. Rachael is fast asleep but when she wakes, she fights him like a wildcat, but Byron rapes her and to keep her quiet he bangs her head against the wall. Afterwards, he wonders why there is so much blood - surely she was 18 and not a virgin - but the blood is also on her head and on the wall and he realises she is dead.
Collie's friend Kat suspected something was wrong with Ethan and didn't like to be alone with him. She notices he has no reflection and the readers thought that was an odd detail that had thrown them off. One or two wondered if he was a vampire! She sees a late night show about unsolved crimes and recognises Ethan as Byron, then reports him to the authorities. Kat is torn between her love for her friend Collie and doing the right thing. Ethan's arrest is shown to devastate Jorie and Collie, but also wider family and the whole community. We talked openly about our experience of murder and how it affects people; one or two of us had experience of the murder of a friend, or a school friend who committed crime that left them shocked and confused. In the book, Ethan's co-worker Mark Derry doesn't know what to think. He goes off the rails for a couple of days and then decides to defend Ethan, by organising a campaign with rallies to raise money for his defence. His thinking is that Ethan can't be guilty, but then as he confesses to Jorie, Mark decides that his good work in the town atones for what he did in his past. Ethan keeps repeating that he is not the same person as he was then.
This led to an interesting discussion about atonement and whether people can truly change. Some members felt people can change and have their lives turned around. We talked about cases where this had actually happened and eventual sentences were more lenient because they'd taken into account this change. Some of our readers believed in redemption, but others were more skeptical.I felt he had atoned to the wrong people, because as we saw later in the book another community had been devastated by his crime.Jorie doesn't know what to think. She distances herself from Ethan straight away, only visiting the jail infrequently, and concentrating on Collie. With no money coming in, Jorie has to put the house up for sale and move in with her mother. She feels that the person she was in love with was a mirage. She can't connect with him any more. People are shocked by how little she is supporting him, but for some of our readers this is where Ethan reverts to type. Kat's sister Rosarie starts to take an interest in him, and puts on her make-up to visit the jail. There are rumours of flirting and Kat is worried that her sister is about to make a big mistake. Jorie feels the only way she can decide is by visiting Rachael's home town, so she makes a road trip. She uses the local library to read about the case and meets Rachael's childhood friend. She agrees to ring Rachael's brother and asks him to meet with Jorie and surprisingly he agrees.
Jorie and James have a kinship that comes from both being victims of the same man. The farm is remote, and James is clearly a man used to living alone after the death of his parents. He reveals that he found the bloody clothes that Ethan left in the field after his crime, as he changed outfits with the scarecrow. He ran back to the house and raised the alarm. James takes Jorie up to Rachael's room which has never been changed since her death. With Jorie the reader takes in the cuddly toys, the posters, and the framed photos of Rachael riding and with friends. This is a little girl's room and when James talks about trying to scrub the bloodstain from the wall behind the bed, Ethan's crime really comes home to the reader. Some readers had picked up that Ethan was drunk, confused and thought Rachael was older than she was. Others felt that he had been sober enough to drive and climb up into a window without accident, so why was he too drunk to see the stuffed animals and posters? It was felt that he was a man intent on getting what he wanted and to hell with everyone else.
Our discussions showed us how a town would be torn apart because similar arguments would be going on at every dinner table. We all felt that we would struggle to stay with a partner if this happened, and shared experiences we'd had where someone was not what they seemed. We all enjoyed the book and Hoffman's writing, and enjoyed how she explored these complex relationships. The dilemma creates so much discussion and led us all to think about how we take people on trust and what we would want to know about a partner before we started a relationship. The truth is we have to continue taking people on trust to create partnerships and friendships and none of us would do differently to Jorie who met the man of her dreams in that bar.
