Our Little Secret

The local library has a map of the town from 1985, tacked to a corkboard. It’s a clean grid of streets, a tidy diagram of a safe, predictable world. But there’s a second map, an invisible one, made of whispers and what-ifs, that has been drawn over it for decades. This other map is about proximity to a ghost. On this map, certain houses glow faintly with suspicion. A specific patch of woods is a dark, empty space. The route from a family’s front door to a pizza parlor down the street is no longer a simple line, but a tear in the fabric of the community, a path that ends in an unanswerable question. This second map is carried in the minds of everyone who lived there, a collective, unspoken inheritance of sorrow and fear.

That second map—the one of memory, trauma, and unresolved mystery—is what drove investigative journalist Kevin Flynn and true crime author Rebecca Lavoie to write this book. As hosts of the popular podcast Crime Writers On…, they had covered hundreds of stories, but the 1985 disappearance of nine-year-old Sarah Pryor from their own backyard in Massachusetts was different. It was the case that shaped their understanding of crime as something that happens to an entire community. They watched for decades as the official investigation stalled, while the unofficial story—the whispers and suspicions—grew more tangled. They felt compelled to finally overlay the two maps, meticulously tracing the cold case evidence against the living memory of a town haunted by its own little secret.

Module 1: The Anatomy of a Cold Case

The murder of Danny Paquette was a public secret. On a crisp Saturday morning in 1985, Danny was shot and killed while working on his property. Dozens of people in the small town of Hooksett, New Hampshire, quickly learned who was responsible. Yet, the case went cold for twenty years. This was due to the crime's most powerful shield: the silence.

The authors reveal a critical insight. A community can collectively decide that a murder is a form of righteous justice. Many people were not sorry Danny Paquette was dead. Rumors about his character, particularly his alleged abuse of his stepdaughter, Melanie, circulated widely. This public perception fundamentally changed how the crime was viewed. For many, it was a problem that had been taken care of. The killer even received letters from strangers calling him a hero. This moral justification became the bedrock of the community's silence.

But here's the thing. This silence was an active, collective decision that required maintenance. The long-term collateral damage of a single violent act extends far beyond the immediate victim. The book methodically traces the ripple effects of that single gunshot. It ruined the lives of his family, the shooter's family, and the network of friends and neighbors who were forced to carry the secret. The weight of this knowledge created a "gang of five" high school friends bound by fear and loyalty, a woman who wrote anonymous letters to police out of guilt, and a brother who spent two decades relentlessly seeking answers. The secret became a cancer, slowly poisoning relationships and lives from the inside out. This leads us to the initial investigation, which was stymied by this wall of silence.