Miracle Creek

Matt drives to the 7-11, realizing that his fingerprints could have been on the cigarette pack, but no one would ever know because his hands were so damaged in the fire. He also wrote the note Elizabeth claimed to have found, meant for Mary. However, Matt worries that the police will now show his picture to the clerks at the 7-11. Fortunately for Matt, the clerk he had bought the cigarettes from is gone, and when he calls, the person who answers says that particular clerk had been gone for almost 10 months.

Matt next drives to meet Mary down by the creek. The first time it happened, Matt was thinking about his relationship with his wife and her obsession with having children; their sex life had become clinical, and fodder for embarrassing conversations with his in-laws. He was standing by the creek before a dive, mulling all this over, when Mary appeared and asked for a cigarette. Mary reminded Matt of his wife when they were young, and he leaned in to kiss her but changed his mind, telling her only that she had a mosquito on her face. However, they continued to meet until the week before the explosion.

At this meeting, after day two, Matt only wants to make sure that Mary never told anyone about their meetings, but she is furious with him, and asks why he told his wife Mary was stalking him. Matt has no idea what she is talking about and Mary reveals that Janine was at the creek right before the explosion, that she had confronted Mary and told her that Matt “was too nice to say, but [Mary] was stalking [Matt]” and it needed to stop (147). Janine then threw a pack of cigarettes, matches, and a note from Mary on the ground, the same items the investigators assumed were Elizabeth’s. Mary wonders if they should tell everyone about what happened, but Matt thinks it will just “confuse the issue” that what he and Mary and Janine “were doing has nothing to do with the fire” (148). Secretly, Matt also worries that the investigators will think he or Janine had something to do with the fire.

Mary goes to the creek and thinks of everything she learned. When she first woke up in the hospital, after the explosion, she had been sure that Matt’s wife, Janine, was responsible for the explosion. However, her mother had told her about the evidence against Elizabeth “her smoking, child abuse, computer searches, and on and on” (151), and Mary had assumed she was wrong; finding out that Janine lied about Matt has made Mary much less sure. She is also confused by the investigator’s testimony that the protestors had an alibi, because her father claimed they were “driving around their property only ten minutes before the explosion” (152). Mary is terrified of revealing her knowledge, especially “the humiliating details of her birthday night with Matt” (151) but resolves to do so if what is revealed in court the next day is not “the most shocking, incontrovertible proof of Elizabeth’s guilt” (152). 

Janine goes to her kitchen cupboard and retrieves the note mentioned at the trial. She has kept it in a wok, a wedding gift from one of Matt’s cousins who had purchased it even though it wasn’t on the bridal gift registry because “it seemed so appropriate.” Janine did not say that “[w]oks are a Chinese thing, not a Korean thing”; she simply “thanked her for such a thoughtful gift” (153).

During the Thanksgiving after she and Matt were engaged, this same cousin had commented that Matt had “an Oriental fetish, some men are just like that” (154), not knowing that Janine had heard her. Janine was infuriated at the woman’s racism, wondering “[w]hy was ‘fetish,’ with its connotation of sexual deviance, reserved for Asian women and feet? It was offensive” and “bullshit.” Indeed, Janine wants to know “[w]ho decided it was normal to be attracted to blondes and Jews and Republicans, but not to Asian women” (155).

Throughout her marriage, Janine brushed off such racism, but when she found the notes from Mary, it all came rushing back. When she found the first one, Matt claimed that it was “from a hospital intern whose passes he’d rebuffed” (155), but after finding more she quickly realized that they were from Mary. After the explosion, when Janine realized the investigators were looking for a note, she had returned to the scene “in the middle of the night to retrieve the things she’d stupidly left behind. She couldn’t find the cigarettes or matches; the note was the only thing she found, behind a bush near a square area cordoned off with yellow tape […]” (153). Janine quickly destroys the note.