Meditation on murder

Teen girls’ spirits watch over town haunted by their brutal deaths.

“How can you make a story from what you don’t know?” asks a character in Scott Blackwood’s luminous, uncanny inquiry into the aftermath of violence, “See How Small.”

It’s a challenge Blackwood tests to its furthest limits, beginning with a monologue in the novel’s opening pages, where it isn’t entirely clear at first what has happened, or who’s speaking.

“We have always lived here,” says an unknown voice, “though we pretend we’ve just arrived. That’s the trick, to make forgetful shapes with your mouth so everything feels new and unremembered. But after a while we slip up. A careless word, an uninvited smell, a tip-of-the-tongue taste of something sweet, makes the room suddenly familiar — and we have to begin again.”

“We” are the spirits of three teenage girls — Zadie, Elizabeth and Meredith — who have lived inside an ice cream parlor since they were murdered by men who they say “did things to us,” then bound and gagged them, and set fire to the shop.

In the timeless realm they inhabit, they can’t or won’t explain whose “bright, bare foot” and “hopeful turn of ankle” they’re talking about, or who found them and “clothed us in light.”

This fragmented narrative sets the tone for the rest of the book, whose puzzle pieces — 60 brief but vivid chapters that move back and forth in time — fit together to tell a story based on a similar, asyet-unsolved crime that took place in 1991 in Austin, Texas, where Blackwood once lived.

What is known of the murders, and their effects on the community, is seen mainly through the perspectives of five characters intimately tied to the girls’ deaths: Kate Ulrich, the mother of Zadie and Elizabeth; Jack Dewey, the firefighter who found their bodies; Hollis Finger, a brain-damaged Iraq war veteran who may have seen the killers that night; Michael Greer, a 17-year-old boy who drove the getaway car; and Rosa Hell- er, a reporter who covers the crimes.

Present in all their lives are the shades of the three girls who watch over the town and make occasional visitations, trying to connect with and heal those they left behind.

In his dreams, the fireman sees and talks to them “as they would be now, five years later, in their early twenties, near the same age as his daughter.”

Hollis, whose visions of the girls occur in broad daylight, sees them sitting in the trees above an outdoor performance of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” where they catcall, “crumble and smoke,” and comment on the actors and lines from the play.

Kate’s memories summon back from the dead her two daughters, who return home for Christmas dressed in “tank tops ... with their toenails newly painted seashell pink,” following her to the laundry room. There, they know that she “thinks for a moment she can smell our perfume but decides it’s just the fabric softener.”

The dead, we learn, are only a heartbeat away from the territory of the living, especially when a violent act leaves those left behind unmoored, at sea in an unbearable, unrecognizable reality. ” See?” ask the girls. “See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?”

Further eroding the customary boundaries are characters whose consciousness is porous, to put it mildly, from the start. Hollis, for instance, “often confuses what’s already happened with what’s to come,” his vision skewed and pocked with archaeological imagery and biblical references. Michael’s drug addiction increasingly strands him in a netherworld shared with the killers and his dead brother. In one marvelous scene, an elderly, former sci-fi actress confuses Michael’s visits with a film in which only women were allowed on her “lonely planet.”

As time passes, the girls, trapped like insects in am- ber at the age at which they were killed, continue to mature in the afterlife. They return, partly, to encourage others to do the same. Their wistful desires for normalcy often brighten a novel that might otherwise be unremittingly grim. In an effort to heal their grieving mother, they prod her and Jack with cryptic suggestions about dating: “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” Zadie asks him, à la Lauren Bacall.

Littered with missing children, the dead and the disappeared, “See How Small” reverberates with the enigma of the crime itself. Blackwood renders his characters’ emotions, thoughts, memories and dreams as an ethereal hive mind, tethering them together with shared images and repeated phrases, one of the most intriguing of which is “I have carved you into the palm of my hand.” (As the girls would say, “Discuss.”)

The facts of the crime — suspects, tipoffs, hair-brained theories and evidence — keep the reader invested in a possible resolution, but not much adds up. A police search of a man’s house yields grotesquely doctored toys but nothing else. A stranger matching the description of one of the killers assures two homeless men that fire can express “the fiercest love of all” — but never resurfaces. It’s a testament to Blackwood’s powers of invention that these false leads walk us further into the dream, not out of it.

As Rosa says, “Some stories don’t have an ending even if you want them to.” In this radiant retelling, rather than connecting the dots — which on the book’s cover resemble a diffuse pattern of raindrops or melting snowflakes — the author trains his brilliant microscope on each one, enabling us instead to glimpse infinite possibilities.