Page 24 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

I wasn’t wrong. It was such judgment that caused me to change my name and move across the country when I was eighteen, so that no one would be able to connect me with them and what they’d done.

The mean girls in high school were one thing—by the time I graduated I’d learned to tolerate them well enough—but the groupies were something else.

My father, in particular, grew a large following of men who were convinced that he was a kind of god.

Both types of people—the obsessed and the condemning—were something I wanted to avoid.

My parents buried the women in the woods.

Forensic analysts were able to determine the order in which the women were killed, based on the skill involved in the dismemberments.

Murder was like anything else—most people were bad at it, because most people had little to no experience.

Both of my parents struggled to hold on to hobbies.

They’d start something new—knitting, or exercise—only to abandon it out of boredom within a couple of weeks.

Apparently, killing never got boring. There were always new things to try and ways to improve.

Outside of moral wrongness, the primary reason why most people didn’t murder anyone was fear of getting caught.

What they didn’t realize was that, depending on the state, only around 50 to 70 percent of such crimes were solved, and the majority of the solved cases were committed by someone connected to the victim.

My parents and the women had no connections.

Their interactions were supposed to be limited to a one-night fling.

Even when cameras caught glimpses of my parents’ faces in the crowded bars where they met their victims, it was difficult to identify who they were, never mind connect them to multiple deaths.

They tore the first body apart. What choice did they have?

They had no power tools, and it was too difficult to lug an entire corpse to the car for disposal.

My father had the ability to make everything my parents did sound rational.

I had no doubt that, if he’d been allowed to speak to the jury members one-on-one, he would’ve been released.

The first dismemberment was a bloody affair.

Remnants of their work stuck around for weeks, like glitter after an art project.

“Did someone get hurt?” I asked.

My mother gave me a confused expression.

“Now, why would you ask that?” she replied.

Because my parents buried the bodies in the woods, hiking became a kind of inside joke to them.

“We love to hike,” my mother told servers at restaurants, while wearing stilettos and a dress with a revealing cut, and she and my father would laugh.

I would laugh too. It was funny! My parents were so obviously not outdoorsy people.

They were constantly tricking me into thinking that I was having a good time, when I was their unwitting accomplice in murder.

There was nothing special that they did to hide the bodies, no secret lair or unknown cavern.

People theorized that their carelessness was because they wanted to be caught.

Once they got over the initial shock of the arrest, my parents delighted in the attention.

My mother strutted in front of the cameras, and my father adopted a pseudo-intellectual persona.

They were loved and reviled, which was their favorite combination of affection.

However, I knew that they didn’t need murder to draw that kind of attention.

People looked at them everywhere they went.

My father was at the center of every picture that he’d ever been in.

No, the reason why they took little care in hiding the bodies was hubris.

My father thought he was smarter than everyone else, and my mother was convinced of her main-character status.

Main characters didn’t get caught. They didn’t age or go to prison.

My mother’s plan was to be a young, beautiful killer for the rest of her life.

Irritatingly, they weren’t totally wrong. In the end, it wasn’t the bodies in the woods that brought them down. To this day there were victims the police hadn’t found.

“You probably think I’m disgusting,” I told Aidan when I’d finished my story.

That was when things went dark. I’d thought it had been nothing, the result of the tequila that we’d drunk. I couldn’t remember what else I’d said or what he’d told me.

Unlike a lot of women my age, I didn’t watch true crime documentaries.

I told people that was because of a moral objection to the way that they tended to center on the killers rather than on the victims. All those forgotten women.

The real reason was because I understood that they never captured the whole story.

There were always screams that went unheard, bloodstains unwashed.

I wanted a world that was palatable. I wanted the social media version of myself—the matchmaker engaged to the doctor—to be the full truth of who I was, someone who didn’t know what it sounded like when people were dying.

Early in our courtship, after my broken ankle healed, Noah took me hiking. I’d expressed reticence, disguising it as a squeamishness about bugs rather than admitting the truth, that it reminded me of what my parents had done.

“Please?” he said, and I went because I wanted him to love me.

It had been a beautiful fall day, the woods a phantasmagoric blend of red and orange hues.

“I see why you like this,” I said, leaves crunching beneath my feet.

Things were different at night during the beginning of February. Living in Minneapolis made it easy to forget what true darkness looked like outside the city. I used my phone as a flashlight as I ventured deeper into the woods. In my other hand, I carried a plastic bag that contained the heart.

I’d heard people describe how they regressed when they went home and visited their families.

I couldn’t relate, because my father was dead and my mother in prison.

My parents left me alone so often that I’d been forced to grow up fast. I could barely remember my small self, what it had been like to be young.

But walking through the woods, I became her again.

I wanted my parents to be there to hold my hand.

I worried that I was somehow responsible for the heart, though I knew that I hadn’t committed the killing.

I thought about whom I could tell. No one. I could tell no one.

I paused at the unusually shaped tree that Noah had pointed out to me.

“It’s the kissing tree,” he’d said, and then shown me where other couples had carved their initials into the trunk.

We did the same, with the tip of a ballpoint pen that I’d dug out of the bottom of my bag.

Our initials were still there, NR + AS .

I thought of the look on his face after we fucked on Saturday night, a mixture of guilt and satisfaction.

It occurred to me that maybe Noah had liked having an affair because he was a person who had followed the rules his entire life.

For him, it was probably enjoyable to break from his cookie-cutter mold.

I was the opposite, constantly trying to squeeze myself into confines that didn’t know how to hold me.

How nice it must be to commit a wrong for pleasure rather than necessity.

I learned to steal because I was hungry rather than because of a desire for any kind of rush.

I was hiding an organ in the woods because someone had delivered it to my house.

I ventured off the marked trail and into the night. Most people, I knew, stuck to the paths that were laid out before them. I just needed to go far enough away that no one would be able to identify the heart from a distance.

When I reached a suitable place, I knelt and tried to dig into the earth, but the ground was frozen.

Even if I’d had a shovel, penetrating the dirt would’ve proved impossible.

In the end, I had to settle for covering the heart with a pile of leaves.

I wasn’t so stupid as to do an internet search for how long it took organs to decompose, but I assumed it would be quicker than for a whole body, due to the absence of bones.

There were small things to be grateful for.

I hoped that it was over, that the heart was an end rather than a beginning, though I knew death wasn’t really like that.

My parents’ actions had escalated . That was the term often used in crime procedurals on television.

They’d gone from bringing women home to bringing women home to kill.

That went from once or twice a year to every couple of months to being a regular occurrence.

Killing was a ball rolling down a hill—until it reached an obstacle.