With the 2009 Easter holiday and college graduation only a few weeks away, even the most random moment for Amy Butcher — young, sheltered and carefree — was a catalyst for celebration.
From the fire escape outside her apartment in Gettysburg, Pa., Butcher watched a pink sky usher in the new moon, then cast shadows over the student dorms until all she could see was a tour guide's swinging lantern, lighting the way for ghost-hunting Civil War tourists. She phoned her friend Kevin. He sounded distant, but they met up at a bar to toast their undergraduate years.
The night wound down and Kevin insisted on walking Amy the one block to her apartment; insisted on seeing her to the safety of her doorstep.
Within hours, Kevin stabbed his ex-girlfriend, Emily, 27 times, killing her.
"We had no idea what our futures held, and that's precisely what we talked about the night he killed her: how we were scared, no, terrified, because we had no idea what came next," Butcher writes in her riveting and visceral debut, "Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder."
What came next for Kevin was an arrest, a psychiatric report, a plea deal and 27 to 53 years in prison.
What came next for Butcher — on the surface, anyway — was a move away from her raw memories of Gettysburg and toward the safety of graduate school in Iowa.
Underneath, an obsession grew. That carefree feeling she'd once enjoyed was just an illusion. Fear — of men, of being alone, of a glance lasting a beat too long — took its place just as that moon usurped an innocent pink sky.
