Highway Thirteen: Stories

“Wisdom ripples through this extraordinary collection of stories.”

“This book isn’t about why serial killers do what they do, it is about the ripple effects on the lives of people who are one or two or five or fifty steps removed from those horrors.” (Fiona McFarlane interview with Deborah Treisman, March 24, 2024, www.newyorker.com)

McFarlane does a splendid job creating these ripple effects. The most brilliant of the dozen stories do not depend particularly on this series of crimes having taken place. Not that the crimes enter by happenstance. They might have been other crimes. The fact that McFarlane has used these adds greater pungency to the tales set in 12 different years (not chronologically) and in at least nine different towns and cities. The tales are united by the murders, and it is interesting to see how ingenious McFarlane is in utilizing the murders in situations ranging from a chaperoned trip to Rome by a passel of English schoolgirls to a trick-or-treat night in Austin, Texas, to a tale of two flight attendants.

“Abroad,” set in Austin in 2011, features an Englishman, Simon, abroad because of his wife’s job. He answers the door Halloween night, much after everyone else has come through, to a small girl, deliciously described “She’s so small, and imperfectly green, as if someone began the job of coloring her face with gusto, and then grew bored . . . An off-duty witch, a witch on casual Friday . . .” The candy bowl is rather empty because Simon is new to trick-or-treat, he only bought half-size bars. Simon asks the little girl if the hour isn’t somewhat late, but she claims to live a block away only, the source of all the party noise.

He offers to get his wife to accompany her home, fearful of her safety, his fear stemming from the disappearance of his sister in Australia 21 years ago when he was 12, also a fear from is Methodist parents of who/what is about on All Hallowed Eve. While getting his wife, the little girl grabs all the candy and runs off. Simon scours the neighborhood, finds the party, inquires after the little witch who has made it home, but he insists on seeing her. Waiting for her, Simon falls in with the little witch’s attractive older cousin on a swing. He wants to ask her name. “He feels with a dreadful certainty that it will be Angie [his dead sister] and that to hear her say so would be unbearable . . . If she were to say Angie, he would have to ask questions. Where are you? What happened? Did it hurt? . . . And he would have to hear the answers and live with them.” A ripple so strong to be a wave.

An interesting variation on the theme of ripple effect is the last story in the book, “Lucy.” Lucy is the mother of the serial killer. But the Lucy story starts when she is eight and ends before she marries the killer’s father. Her family is not an easy one—brother, cousins, an uncle, at odds most often, drinking, moving in and out. A brother’s wife and child come to live. “Lucy is disgusted by all of it, and mostly by what she recognized as the stinginess of her own heart.” Moments later, she sees Jan Biga’s headlights out the window. The name of the murderer is Paul Biga. A pre-ripple story.

There are two chaperones in “Chaperone,” Sister Mary Placid, a teacher at the girls’ school; and Charlotte Gibson, the about-to-be-divorced mother of one of the girls. Charlotte is taken on the town by the young hotel manager who proceeds to get her drunk and, on the way back to the hotel pushes her into an alcove her the forced tryst is broken up by Grace, one of the students who is supposedly tucked in at the hotel.

Sister Mary Placid, on the lookout for the two missing members of the troop, “saw sullen grief on Charlotte Gibson’s face and a weary, almost noble acquiescence; on Grace’s face she saw the easy scorn of the young, who can’t imagine the ways in which the world will bend them.” Such literary clarity and foresight are not often found together. Sister Mary Placid learns 18 months later that Grace had escaped being dragged into a man’s car while hitchhiking in Australia, scratching and kicking. The ripple, in a very strong story of a young girl saving her classmate’s mother from shame.

The closest the reader comes to an understanding of the killer is given by the woman who was his high school teacher and hired him to work in her garden in “Demolition.” “There are no perfectly ordinary adolescents, that each of them is strange, and bewildered, and in mourning, because they’re all in exile from their childhoods, just as they all longed to be.”

The collection contains statements and quotations and observations like the last, not usually found in story collections, especially those touched by crime and dealing in ordinary lives.

Wisdom ripples through this extraordinary collection of stories.