Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman by Alice Mattison Page A

to a park.” I remembered a nature preserve in Litchfield I’d visited with a former boyfriend, and without waiting for an answer, I made a U-turn and drove north.
    â€œIt wasn’t well-maintained,” Pekko said. “I want a truck that belonged to someone who appreciates trucks.”
    â€œRight,” I said. “Did you know that the first act of the New Haven government, when they set it up in the sixteen hundreds, was a murder trial?”
    â€œAnd what does that mean?” said Pekko, suddenly paying attention.
    â€œWhat does it mean ?”
    â€œWhat are you implying?”
    â€œI’m not implying anything,” I said. Gordon had been away at a conference that week, and I’d read for hours without a plan, obeying impulse. The archive included pages photocopied from a history of New Haven. Its government, I explained to Pekko, had been modeled not on the English common law system but on one derived, somehow, from the Bible. It was based on a system that had been established for Massachusetts but never used. New Haven—briefly called Quinnipiack—was established while an Indian named Ne-paumuck awaited trial for murder. Once the state was set up, he was tried and decapitated.
    â€œWhy are you so interested?” he said.
    â€œIt’s a good subject,” I said. “I’ve been making a pile of material having to do with murder in New Haven. Obviously somebody who worked in that office was thinking about it, because there’s a lot of stuff, and I know I could find more—I mean, when you think about some of the murders that have taken place here, just in the years I’ve lived here. And their importance. What happened on account of them. Alex Rackley. Penney Serra. Christian Prince. Malik Jones.”
    â€œMalik Jones wasn’t murdered.”
    â€œTechnically, no.”
    â€œHe wasn’t murdered.”
    â€œI read the police report on Malik Jones the other day,” I said.
    â€œWhat are you up to?” Pekko said tensely, turning in his seat, angrier than I’d seen him in a long time.
    I was interested in his anger, not afraid of it, almost amused. I don’t know what I should have done, but I pretended I was alone, monologuing in the shower. “Marie Valenti,” I said. “Marie Valenti. The one nobody can forget. Oh, God, and Suzanne Jovin.”
    The truth is that except for Nepaumuck’s victim, nobody can forget any of the abovementioned people (and quite a few others), all murdered or at least killed in New Haven. Alex Rackley, a Black Panther, was executed by the Black Panthers in 1969. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins were accused of conspiracy leading to the murder, and the trial, in 1970, was the occasion of rallies and riots. Penney Serra, a young New Haven woman, was murdered in a big downtown garage in the summer of 1973. Marie Valenti was eigh-teen years old, an honor student, when she was found dead on the New Haven Green in 1976. Christian Prince was the Yale student whose death Gordon remembered, killed by New Haven kids who robbed him. Malik Jones was a black New Haven boy who was shot by an East Haven cop after a car chase. Suzanne Jovin was a Yalie killed on a December evening on a residential street—the street where Ellen lived—in 1998. A professor was suspected of the crime, but he’s never been charged.
    Penney Serra’s death, in the garage, increased the public’s loss of faith in the safety and bustle of downtown, which grew less bustly and less safe after she was killed. The murder was unsolved for decades. A Waterbury man, identified by DNA, has just been convicted of her murder—in the spring of 2002, as I write this. But the murder of Marie Valenti—unsolved after almost as many years—might make people feel even worse. She was the granddaughter of a New Haven grocer, and hundreds of people had watched her playing with her little brother in the aisles of