Tell Me What You Did

On the live stream, Hindley asks Poe to contextualize the events leading up to her mother’s murder. Poe states that her parents were always close, but their relationship was focused on her and not one another. As she grew up and began to push them away, their relationship struggled. Poe’s mother began an affair at 37.

Poe knew her parents’ email credentials and regularly read through their inboxes. One day, she discovered an email from lhutchins20@aol.com, referencing a meeting happening the following day. Hutchins detailed his excitement for the upcoming sexual encounter and asked Margaret to come up with a safe word. Margaret chose the word gentle.

At Muddy Waters, Poe pauses her retelling, overwhelmed. She wants to tell Kip the rest of the story but feels that her father should be the first to know. Poe leaves the coffee shop to visit her father, feeling that Hindley could be hiding in plain sight, watching her.

This chapter is a continuation of the live-streamed conversation between Hindley and Poe. Hindley tells Poe to walk her audience through July 12th, the day Hutchins and her mother were scheduled to meet. Poe recalls that she tried to convince her father to take off from work, but he refused. He didn’t kiss Margaret goodbye on his way out. Poe was home with her mother all day but was too nervous to confront her, feeling helpless to stop the encounter.

At 3 p.m., Margaret suggested that Poe go to her friend Effia’s house. Poe considered refusing, but she wanted to make her mother happy, so she went. Poe stayed at Effia’s for about an hour, then headed home early. She had decided to catch her mother with Hutchins, imagining that the shame of being discovered would end the affair.

Poe says that she often feels sorry for herself and the trauma she’s gone through, which remains on her like “an unwashable stain” (82). This feeling of self-pity only lasts until she thinks of what her parents have endured.

Poe drives to Manchester to speak to her father, who lives alone with his cat Grimm in a house he bought after the McMillian home was burned down. Upon seeing him, she feels a mixture of “happiness and despair” (87).

Poe enters her father’s house, which has been “frozen in time” (88) for the past 17 years. She notes that her father looks older than his 66 years because of his eyes, “eyes that look like they’ve seen too much” (88). She agrees to spend the night and promises to cook dinner for her father.

Over dinner, Poe and her father drink two bottles of red wine, with Poe noting that they both use drinking as a coping mechanism. She asks him to move out to be closer to her, and he counters by asking her to move back home. Poe says she doesn’t want to be back in Manchester.

Poe steels herself, then tells her father that she has been keeping a secret. Before she begins to confess, she closes her eyes to avoid seeing his pain.

This chapter is a continuation of the live-streamed conversation between Hindley and Poe. Hindley instructs her to revisit the scene of her mother’s death in vivid sensory detail, threatening to cut off his hostage’s other little finger if she doesn’t comply. Poe shakily describes how she entered her house just after four, sensing an “electric thickness” in the air. As she made her way toward her parents’ bedroom, her resolve to intervene weakened as she thought of her mother’s reaction. Poe convinced herself that her mother’s “heart [had] to break” (98) to bring their family back together.

Outside the bedroom door, Poe heard her mother and Hutchins having sex. As she rested her hand on the doorknob, preparing to open it, her mother began screaming. Opening the door, Poe witnessed a naked Hutchins kneeling over her mother on the bed, stabbing her over and over. Poe watched, frozen, as her mother died.

Hutchins turned and saw Poe in the doorway. He approached her, covered in blood. Poe took note of his “cold, fierce, jaded” (100) eyes. Hutchins whispered, “she didn’t say the safe word” (102).

Poe recalls how Hutchins threatened to come back and kill her remaining family if she told anyone what she had seen. He zip-tied her and locked her in the bedroom closet, then poured gasoline onto the bed and set the house on fire. After starting the fire, Hutchins released Poe and told her to go outside and pretend she’d just arrived to a burning house. Terrified, Poe complied. Hutchins washed himself off, changed into Poe’s father’s clothes, and fled on foot.

Hindley and Poe continue their live-streamed conversation. Hindley thanks Poe for her detailed recollection. He says that she must have nightmares about the crime, and Poe replies that she has only had one pleasant dream in the past 17 years. She recounts the dream, in which she walked through an endless green field under a blue sky. In the middle of the field she found a large oak tree, where she sat for hours. Poe usually wakes with a feeling of dread in her chest, but when she awoke from this dream, that feeling was briefly gone.

The morning after Poe confesses to her father, the two of them discuss Hindley. Poe’s father wants to contact the police, but Poe refuses, afraid that getting the police involved might unearth her own crime. She agrees to stay another night in Manchester.

Poe drives to Pine Grove cemetery but decides not to visit her mother’s grave. Instead she heads to the Stone Rose, a local coffee shop. The Stone Rose is owned by a woman named Alice Hill, who is famous for surviving a stabbing at the age of 14. While living in the UK, she was attacked by two other teenagers. The assailants were motivated by their obsession with the popular graphic novel character “Mister Tender,” a creation of Alice’s own father. Alice’s family moved to Manchester to start anew.

Poe recounts that six or seven years ago, there was a resurgence of interest in Alice’s case, which led a man named Jack to obsessively stalk Alice. On Halloween night, Jack tracked Alice down and stabbed her. He escaped, making Alice’s attempted murder the second largest cold case in Manchester, behind the murder of Poe’s mother.

Poe spots Alice sitting at a nearby table and feels compelled to introduce herself. Alice says that she’s a fan of Poe’s podcast but warns her that she would not be willing to appear on an episode, as she does not wish to bring more attention to her case. Poe tells Alice that she admires her strength in surviving two murder attempts and admits that she is dealing with some “bad stuff” of her own. As she turns to go, Alice asks how bad Poe’s “bad stuff” is. Poe invites her to listen to next week’s live episode.

This chapter continues the live-streamed conversation between Hindley and Poe. Hindley tells Poe to walk him through how she tracked down and killed Leopold Hutchins. Poe recounts moving to Queens after college, eking out a living as a freelance writer and renting a tiny apartment with a roommate. She searched for Hutchins for a year to no avail. After a year, Poe realized that she needed to change her mindset. She began working out to get into fighting shape and started thinking of Hutchins differently—rather than the boogeyman who haunted her childhood, she began to see him “as [her] prey” (119).

At the Manchester house, Poe’s father proposes that he move in with her until Hindley’s campaign of harassment ends. Poe initially resists, but when he breaks down, telling her that he feels obligated to protect his child, she relents. Deep down, Poe knows that she doesn’t want to be alone, but being vulnerable continues to be difficult for her.

Poe, her father, and Grimm drive back to Burlington. They have dinner out, then return to the farmhouse, where Poe arms the house security system and disables Bailey’s automatic dog door so that Grimm can’t slip outside after her. Before her father goes to bed, Poe hugs him goodnight. Though physical affection is unusual for them, Poe states that “the deep grooves of the past don’t have to chart the course of the future” (127).

Alone in the kitchen, Poe opens her old laptop, which has a VPN attached. She only ever uses this device to research Leopold Hutchins. When Poe met Hutchins in New York, he went by the moniker Leonard Avery. Now, she googles Leonard Avery but finds only the same short article in the New York Post that has existed for the past seven years. As Poe puts the laptop away, she notices that the framed photo of her mother, which she always keeps perfectly straight, is turned 90 degrees.

Poe walks through the farmhouse in a panic, checking for signs of a break-in, but finds nothing. Her security system hasn’t alerted her to any suspicious persons in the past several days, and video footage turns up nothing unusual.

On the transcribed live stream, Poe describes how she spent months learning self-defense and taking fitness classes. She made profiles on several dating websites to search for Hutchins but found nothing. As she contemplated Hutchins’ predatory nature, she realized that rather than searching for him, she should let him find her.

The narrative returns to the week before the first live stream. Five days pass with no word from Hindley, though the planned episode is only two days away. On October 23rd, Poe reflects on the approaching Halloween holiday. She loved Halloween as a child, but after her mother’s murder, fake gore and danger longer appealed to her. She spent every Halloween inside with her father, ignoring the world outside.

Poe and her father sit down to dinner together. Poe pours herself a glass of vodka and him a glass of bourbon in preparation for another confession.

As she drinks, Poe tells her father that she created fake dating profiles in New York after seeing her roommate use dating apps. She uploaded a picture of her mother, the same one that is framed in her office, and used the nickname “Maggie.” It only took three days for the man she believed to be Hutchins to message her.

With Hindley’s prompting, Poe recounts how a man named Leonard Avery messaged her: “Hello, Margaret McMillian” (143). Poe believed that he was Hutchins using a pseudonym, but when she checked his profile, the photo looked nothing like her recollection of Hutchins. Poe reserve image-searched his profile picture and found it was a photo of a serial killer named Randy Steven Craft. With a renewed conviction that this must be Hutchins, Poe agreed to a date.