Promise Not To Tell

It’s a common rite of passage for children to grow up hearing and telling ghost stories, and in small towns there’s always one or two eccentric individuals people tell stories about. In the small town in rural Vermont where Kate Cypher grew up, the subject of these stories was Del Griswold, aka Potato Girl. We’re introduced to Del in the opening lines, minutes before the new murder.

“When the Potato Girl was murdered, the killer cut out her heat. He buried it,
but the next day, she rose again – from that exact same spot.” Ryan poked the
campfire with a stick for emphasis, sending a shower of sparks up into the night.

A grubby, misfit of a child, Del’s mother had died. Her father was abusive, and some of her brothers had already left the family farm. Described by some as slow, and by others called a retard, Del was in a special education class at school.

The only friends Del had were the other “retards” at school who would never be accepted anyway. Until Kate, lonely and curious, started cutting across the Griswold family farm in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the girl said to ride naked on a limping pony… They said her daddy was her brother, that she had chickens in her bed, that she only ate raw potatoes.

As is often the case, the rumours were exaggerated and the truth was far more interesting. Kate and Del became secret friends. Del’s brother Nicky taught Kate how to shoot, and together they smoked and explored and grew up.

However, once the kids at school figured out Kate talked to Del, she risked being ostracized and tormented along with her alienated friend. Kate did what any grade five student in her place would probably do: she lied, denied her best friend, and her ultimate betrayal happened the day of Del’s murder. Kate has lived with the guilt of what she did, of being the last person other than Del’s killer to see her alive, ever since. As Kate assumes the narrative she tells us:

There isn’t a soul in town who hasn’t heard of the Potato Girl, though. She is,
by all accounts, the most famous resident of New Canaan – which is funny because,
back when she was alive, she was just a skinny kid with scabby knees who, you
could tell just by looking, would never amount to much.

How wrong we all were.

Thirty years after the unsolved murder of her secret best friend, Kate returns home after her mother is burned in a fire. Forced to deal with the fact that Jean Cypher’s mind has almost been lost to Alzheimer’s and that she can no longer function on her own safely, Kate is facing difficult choices about long-term care for her mother, and removing her from the compound she’s called home for three decades.

The night of Kate’s return another girl is murdered in the woods. The murder happens on the old farm property where Del’s family had lived and where Del was murdered, a property close to the commune where Kate grew up, within walking distances of Jean Cypher’s house.

The murders are disturbingly similar. Naked, strangled, a patch of skin removed from the chest. The new crime forces skeptic Kate, who does not believe in life after death or ghosts, to confront her own demons from the past, and to question whether or not her murdered friend Del is, in fact, haunting the woods, tormenting the living, looking for justice.

This story involves intersecting timelines, and this is one of the more challenging approaches to storytelling to pull off. What further complicates PROMISE NOT TO TELL in the beginning is the volume of backstory inserted in chunks in the early chapters. In chapter one Kate is our point of view character, but we are given background on six other characters, with pieces of their history presented to us, and only two of those characters are introduced within the context of current events.

However, the bumps with the timelines are few and soon smooth out. The result is that PROMISE NOT TO TELL does something few books do: It picks up with each successive chapter, and by the middle of the book it’s impossible to put it down. Stories about returning to the home of your childhood to face the ghosts of your past aren’t new, but McMahon puts a unique spin on it. The narrative is simple yet captivating, and although the plot sounds simple enough from the outset – surely Del’s murderer has killed again, after all these years – there are plenty of suspects to sort through, and a number of creepy things happen that will give even the most stalwart skeptic goosebumps. McMahon capitalizes on the childhood fears almost everyone can remember, the groans from the wind, the creaks of an old house, the feeling someone is watching you, and the weight of the guilt that makes you feel as though everyone can see inside your soul and know the lies you’ve told.

PROMISE NOT TO TELL is clear about the kind of story it is, and the significance of past events, from the very beginning. The reader is given hints and teasers about all of the secrets that must be revealed over the course of the book. This may not appeal to some readers, who don’t like obvious foreshadowing. However, McMahon is one of those authors that skillfully hides the truth in plain sight. We know about the Potato Girl’s murder from the opening lines, but it will be several chapters before we have the whole story, while we’re getting background on other characters that doesn’t seem as critical, but McMahon does not indulge herself with unnecessary details. Ultimately, there is a sense everything has contributed to the story.

One of Del’s few real friends describes them as onions, with all these layers to peel off, and the same could be said of PROMISE NOT TO TELL. On the surface, it’s about the journey home, about righting wrongs from your past. Peel away the layers and it’s about friendship, trust, betrayal, guilt.

There are also some interesting subplots to the story. I really appreciated the fact that McMahon didn’t try to hit us over the head with profound revelations or stick the parallels under our nose in such a way to be sure we caught them, and yet they were there. Kate, as a child, not knowing who her father was. Doe, another woman at the compound where Kate lived, giving birth to Raven, and the ultimate revelations about the identity of Raven’s father…

Revelations that would upset Kate’s life and change things for her forever, although she didn’t realize it at the time.

In the current storyline there are other revelations pending, about affairs, about parentage, about secrets others are carrying. What I found of particular interest was how Raven had become Jean’s surrogate daughter of sorts, a more favourable replacement for Kate in her long absence. Upon Kate’s return Raven’s daughter Opal is bonding with Kate, and the jealousy Kate once felt about Raven and her mother has been transferred to Raven as she tries to keep Opal and Kate apart.

There are many other revelations throughout the story, but they never felt forced or contrived to me. You had a sense from the outset that there would be a lot of secrets exposed, and some of them are subtle and stunning, and in their own way as disturbing as the horrific crimes that form the backbone of the story.

In what might seem an unusual move, the opening prologue and last chapter of the book are the only parts not told from Kate’s point of view. We are bookended with Opal’s perspective on events, and while at first I found the shift at the end jarring, I ultimately felt it was fitting.

PROMISE NOT TO TELL proved to be an absorbing read. If you need to sleep try to set it down before you read the first quarter of the book, because after that it’s soon impossible to pry yourself away. I found myself turning the final pages well past midnight, eyes burning but mind racing as I still tried to piece together the truth and guess the outcome. An excellent debut, well worth seeking out.

I look forward to McMahon's next book.