For the fifteenth anniversary, Laura’s murder was featured on a true crime show called Not That Kind of Place: Murder in a Small Town. David’s mom had agreed to be interviewed for the first time. The show made the case that Greg Dykma, the security guard who lived in a trailer at the gravel pit, was the murderer. This had been a rumour at the time. David had thought his mom and dad believed it, but it never made much sense to David — they’d been neighbours for years. The show had renewed interest in the case. There were more articles and then podcasts.
Coming up on the twentieth anniversary of his older sister’s unsolved murder, and immediately in the wake of his mother’s sudden death — his father having passed some years earlier — David McPherson learns that his mom was planning to grant an exclusive interview to a freelance journalist; a relentless investigator who now has his sights set on the reclusive David himself. Nearing forty — alone, disinterestedly employed, and living in a semi-finished “suite” in his parents’ basement — David will need to navigate grief and his mother’s estate, all while dodging the journalist and finally facing the true scenario surrounding his sister’s murder. Not That Kind of Place plays out on two levels: It explores the current obsession with unsolved murders — the articles, podcasts, and online citizen-sleuthing that turn personal tragedy into public fodder — and it also explores how living at the centre of such a tragedy affects a victim’s family members. In order to burst David’s bubble of stunted naivety, author Michael Melgaard shows him interacting with several of his sister’s high school friends; and as David learns the sort of pressures his redneck town did, and does, assert on the underprivileged, he’ll need to come to terms with the idea that maybe Griffiths is that sort of place after all. I found the writing in Not That Kind of Place to be a bit straightforward and unadorned for my tastes — and I don’t know if I really understood how David could be nearing forty without ever seeing the dangers faced by the underclasses in his hometown — but Melgaard eventually reached me with the point he was making about the blinders of privilege: Canada on whole likes to think of ourselves as not the sort of place where people are exploited or discriminated against or murdered while out for an evening run, but, of course, it happens every day. Rounding up to four stars; Melgaard totally landed the ending. (Note: I read an ARC and passages may not be in their final forms.)
Three days after Laura went missing, her Discman was found on a logging road on the far side of the mountain. Reporters came to Griffiths to cover the story of a pretty blond girl from a good family who got straight As, who volunteered at an old-folks’ home, who candy-striped at the hospital, who captained her basketball and volleyball teams, and who was certainly not going to be found alive.
As David goes about Griffiths; an hour from Victoria on Vancouver Island — dodging the journalist and taking care of his mother’s affairs — he crosses paths with the same bad cop over and over (a sluggish loudmouth who resents wasting resources on helping “hookers” and the homeless), and while on the one hand that character felt cartoonish, the interactions did force David to wonder if the fruitless investigation into his sister’s murder proved the local cops’ incompetence…or their corruption (they never got beyond blaming an ex-con security guard, even if they could never prove it). And as David has interactions with three of his sister’s former friends (one who sought him out, one met by chance, one he laid in wait for), he learns, apparently for the first time, about the drug runners, sex traffickers, and biker gangs that profited from the area blue collar workers (the loggers, miners, and fishermen who worked and partied beneath the notice of his mountainside subdivision), and whose criminal presence in the town represented danger for the vulnerable.
I did like the varying perspectives David confronted through his interactions with Laura’s old friends: The still grieving self-declared “best friend” who maintained a relationship with his mom and who now insists she has the duty to meet with journalists, “People cared about her and it’s not your right to judge or to try to keep people away. You don’t own Laura’s story.”; the former dropout, now hippie-dippie yoga teacher who says, “It may be hard for you to face this, but your sister died so that you could become who you are today. Holding onto the past will keep you there; you need to be free. Laura gave us a gift.”; but especially that of the social worker who most understands the roots of violence, “It could have been a hundred different things, but it would have started small, because a guy thinks he can behave a certain way, and maybe Laura pushed back and then he goes farther and realizes he could be caught and named. It escalates to the point where he’s gone too far because he crossed a line he never thought about.” This last viewpoint meshes with a recording David finds of his mom explaining to the journalist how much rougher the town used to be for young women in her day, and that’s the part that really resonated with me: I grew up in a redneck town — my brothers were hard partiers who sought violence as recreation — but we all raised our kids in nice neighbourhoods in nicer towns that gave them a better story about who they are and where they’re from. David’s nice home on the mountainside gave him a better story than his parents had had, and just like it had shielded him from the violent reality of his hometown, that shield may have prevented Laura from recognising danger when it came for her.
He could try to explain what he’d learned to James, but David wasn’t sure he understood it himself. He hadn’t had the words, before. When it happened to his sister. When people got killed here. When things happened over and over and someone would say it wasn’t that kind of place. He had known that wasn’t true, but he hadn’t known why. Carolyn knew. Staci knew. His mom knew; she had tried to tell James. But why would James understand if no reporter had before? He would just write the same story, with a few new twists David’s mom had given him.
In the end, David will need to decide whether or not to meet with the journalist: Is there value in telling the story again if it probably won’t solve his sister’s cold case? Is there value in exposing Griffiths as exactly the kind of place where underprivileged people go missing and get murdered all the time? Or should he continue to refuse to participate in the true-crime-as-entertainment trend? As I wrote above: I enjoyed both the big picture treatment of this trend and the exploration of the blinders of privilege. In addition to satisfyingly showing David lose his blinders and his naivete, Melgaard wraps this up with a sort of perfect ending. Totally worth the journey to get there (even if I had quibbles along the way).
