Parsley was cookie-cutter in its appearance. With just under 30,000 residents, it looked like a charming, pretty post-card. All of the gardens were perfect, the church (Anglican, of course), mosque, and synagogue were immaculate, and it was difficult to find anyone who didn’t smile and say hello to you. Until it got dark. Then, Parsley was not ‘Always on Your Side’, as the roadside sign chirped when you arrived for god-knows-what. The small town didn’t have much of an industry once the rapeseed dried up last summer. And once the jobs disappeared, so did the happy affect of Parsley residents. But the elimination of an industry didn’t foment the hostility; darkness and ire lived in the essence of the terroir.
She’d been hit by a car twice when she was a kid. Twice on the same block, by the same driver, on the same day. She’d fallen, felt bewildered, gotten up and was tapped again. The driver was distracted and hadn’t seen her the first time he knocked her down. When she stood up and looked at the driver the second time, he appeared surprised to see her but didn’t stop the car to ask if she was alright. She hadn’t been hit that hard, even though she’d ended up spreadeagled on the pavement. This was a time before cell phones and pagers; the distraction could have been a sandwich, a shitty song on the radio or a bee in the car. She never found out because once the driver believed that Cassidy was okay, without getting out of his car, he maneuvered around her slowly and drove on to wherever he could bounce little girls onto the road with no consequence.
Her father nicknamed her Kitten because he believed she had nine lives. She was born premature and remained small for her size. She’d fallen down stairs, choked on a piece of fish, run through a plate of glass at a wedding, flew off a hill on her dirt bike at a wrong angle, and had juvenile meningitis. It was a marvel she was still alive. But that miracle was to about to be tested as she approached her 30th birthday.
Cassidy knew she was going to be murdered before August 15, but she didn’t know how.