The Last Good Day of the Year Page 6

  Susan comes running out the door and wraps her arms around my mother from behind, wrangling her back into our house as the rain starts. In our living room, my mom sobs into Susan’s chest while Gretchen and Abby—Hannah still in her arms—hurry into the kitchen.

  “Shh, shh,” Susan says, stroking my mom’s hair as if she were a child. “She’s gone, honey. It’s okay now.”

  “It’s not okay. It’s never going to be okay. Never, never, never, never.”

  “Shh. I’ve got you. Take a deep breath.” Susan meets my gaze and mouths Call your father, but I don’t know where to find his work number.

  “It’s never going to be okay.”

  “Shh. I know. I know. I know it won’t.”

  Through the living room window, I can see Remy walking around in the downpour, trying to pick up the papers Helen left behind, though most of them have started to dissolve into pulp that will easily wash away with the rain. Hannah’s tap shoes dangle from his free hand. When he sees me staring at him, he waves the drippy papers and gives me a slight shrug, as if to say it’s no problem for him to clean up the mess, even though it’s not his.

  I felt for his family more than anything, you know. Jack and I go way back, all the way to Little League. This didn’t used to be the kind of town where people had crazy secrets and kids couldn’t play outside without having to worry about getting pestered by perverts. It was a nightmare for that whole family from the time Stevie had his accident in the swimming pool. It was like the doctor left a couple of wires unattached when he was putting Stevie’s head back together, but most of the time it didn’t seem like a major malfunction. He got headaches all the time and forgot little things he’d known all his life; Helen was always reminding him what their phone number was. Other times, though, something would misfire and he’d screw up big. Their neighbors who lived at the end of the street had a bunch of kids of all different ages. I guess they left their house unlocked a lot of the time because the kids came and went at all hours. One day the wife comes home with her twins and a trunk full of groceries—in the middle of the day while the other kids are all at school and her husband’s at work—and she sends them right upstairs for a nap and then finishes bringing in her groceries and putting them away, and when she goes up to check on the kids she finds Stevie asleep in her bed. He was fast asleep under the covers, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  After the thing with the Myers girl, people would hardly look at them. It wasn’t more than two or three months before the business went under. Helen would sit there all day by the register without seeing a single customer. Jack told me they were eating supper one Sunday when a condom that someone had filled up like a balloon with shit came flying at the window and exploded all over the place. They didn’t deserve all the hate people shoveled onto them—as people, you know? They weren’t bad people. It broke my heart to see things end that way for them. Back in high school, we thought Jack would walk on the moon someday, and Helen would be pretty forever. You know what I mean? It seemed that if something so awful could happen to Jack and Helen, then probably we were all fucked.

  So if you’re asking do I think it happened the way they say, what do you expect me to tell you? Yes, I think he killed that little girl. Otherwise he’s just the unluckiest bastard who ever lived. But nobody can figure out what he could have done with her after. She’s not in his house, I know, because we tore that place apart from top to bottom. I hated to do it, but it’s my job, and here’s how decent Jack and Helen are: they let us into the house and didn’t say a word the whole time, because they knew we didn’t have a choice in the matter, and afterward I shook Jack’s hand and said I was sorry but what else could I do, and he said it’s okay, Tom, I know, but Stevie didn’t hurt her.

  Even so, I don’t know that he should have been tried for murder. Not without a body. I’m not saying I think she’s alive, but shouldn’t the court have to prove it? You get a miracle every now and then—remember that girl in Canada who’d been missing for twenty years? Didn’t they find her a mile from home, locked up in someone’s wine cellar? All I’m saying is, it happens.

  I’m still friends with Jack and Helen. I’m a Christian, and I’m not going to abandon them in their hour of need. I don’t blame them for not believing Stevie could have done anything to that little girl. Would you want to believe it about your child? He’s their only kid; that’s what parents are supposed to do. People want to look at Stevie and think, Oh, they all must be monsters, the whole damn family. They’re not. They just got a bad egg.

  Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, pp. 66–67

  Chapter Eight

  January 1986

  The way our lives unraveled over the next year made for a captivating story for those whose curiosity outweighed their grief, from our neighbors to the local news audience, and eventually the rest of the country. Prior to that day, our town had little experience with major crimes; aside from some garden-variety domestic violence and a handful of drug users who sometimes required legal attention, the worst thing that had happened was the 1979 suicide of Marvin Gill, a sixteen-year-old boy who’d hung himself from a beam in his attic one night after a Boy Scout meeting. (Whenever they drove past the Gill residence after Marvin’s death, my parents would wonder out loud how his parents could possibly stand to keep living in the same house.)

  Our town had twelve police officers, none of whom had any experience with kidnappings. Ego was never an issue in the investigation; state police were called in immediately and given full control. They divided Shelocta into a grid and organized the citizens to conduct shoulder-to-shoulder searches of every square inch. Teams worked in shifts to scour the town for sixteen hours each day. Everybody wanted to help: anonymous casseroles showed up on our doorstep with such regularity that most of them ended up in the trash. A tip line received dozens of calls each day, none of which yielded any valuable information. Housewives distributed thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate to the searchers, who persisted in spite of single-digit temperatures and a growing tremble of doubt that Turtle would be found alive, if at all. Throughout all of this, Steven was in a jail cell less than six blocks from my house.

  Two weeks into the new year, an overnight storm dropped fourteen inches of fresh snow on Shelocta in less than eight hours. Police called off their official search. If Turtle was anywhere outdoors, she wasn’t alive.

  I slept with my parents most nights for years afterward, either between them in their bed or on the floor beside it. Long after they’d both swallowed their last sedatives of the day and gone to sleep, I stayed awake with my eyes closed and kept track of their breathing, constantly reassuring myself that there was nobody in the room but the three of us. My brain replayed the same nightmare every time I slept deeply enough for dreams: Remy and I were building a snowman in the woods behind our houses when I looked down to see Turtle’s face staring up at me, her mouth wide open and frozen in a permanent scream beneath a sheet of ice.

  In Davis Gordon’s book, he uses the word “colored” to describe how my life, in particular, was changed. He talks a lot about the coloring of my worldview, my sense of security and vulnerability. All I can ever picture is a large, shadowy villain hovering above me, wielding a handful of crayons. It’s funny how much we rely on euphemisms to soften the blow of an ugly truth. When my parents spoke about things like “bringing Turtle home,” what they meant was bringing her body home, but nobody would dare say it that way. Even today, we still do it. There’s an expression in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.” It didn’t take long for my parents to realize that we were entertainment for plenty of people, a status that made the most horrific details of Turtle’s case the most sought after. Steven’s parents had it worse in the press, but there were still plenty of stories that stung. “Parents of Missing Toddler Were Intoxicated, High on Night of Disappearance.” “Tabitha Myers: Could She Have Been Saved?”

  Davis seemed different from the other reporters. More than anything, h
e claimed he wanted to help us find closure. That word gets thrown around a lot in situations like ours, and usually people don’t understand how impossible it can seem in the thick of all the pain. As if what happened that night is a book we’ve all been reading together, and one day we’ll come to the last page and finally be able to put it down forever. But that would mean our lives follow a predictable narrative that is required to make sense somehow in the end, which is so clearly not the case.

  Davis meant more to my dad than he did to anyone else in our family. My father had always been the kind of person who preferred calm to chaos. After Steven went to prison and my family moved away, it seemed as though even the smallest ripple in his thoughts could set off days of emotional agony. He talked about the past with Davis, and how the smallest decision could change a person’s whole future for better or worse without any rhyme or reason. But if you can’t figure out the moment when something starts to happen, how can you determine when it ends?

  My mother had no patience for my father’s meandering thoughts. She followed a different path. It led her through fields of marijuana to mountains of Valium and Xanax, where a river of codeine flowed into a lake of Everclear. By then she was chewing whole pills into dust—sometimes three or four at a time—between her teeth instead of swallowing them with water.

  Davis was willing to listen to my father’s miserable philosophizing all day, if he thought it would help. He seemed to truly care about us. When he told us all he wanted was to help us find some peace, we believed him. Why shouldn’t we have done so? He’d devoted his career to solving other people’s mysteries. His first book had followed his own modern-day investigation into his aunt Carolyn’s 1966 murder, which he eventually solved. “I made a promise to my mother before she died,” he told us, “that I would find the person who killed her sister, and that’s what I did.” And he showed us a picture of his aunt. She was a pretty girl, barely eighteen years old when her naked body floated to the surface of Keystone Lake on a summer morning during the Age of Aquarius, ruining one unlucky fisherman’s day.

  My family was living in Virginia by the time Davis took an interest in us. He traveled back and forth between there and Shelocta throughout the spring and summer of 1988. He interviewed everyone who knew anything about the case and followed up on every tip the original investigators had dismissed as irrelevant, scrutinizing them for any hint that might lead to my sister’s body. My mother kept a picture of his aunt Carolyn on our fridge, and sometimes I’d catch her staring at the dead woman whose face had become hope personified for us, as though she were a benevolent force from beyond guiding us toward the closure we’d heard so much about but never experienced.

  Davis spent hour after hour at our home, where he looked through photo albums with my mother and listened as she described every detail of my sister’s interrupted life. His fingers touched the blanket that had swaddled Turtle as a newborn at the hospital; they felt the blunt ends of the lock of hair my mother had saved from Turtle’s first haircut. My father kept in frequent touch with Davis long after he finished his research and returned to his home in New York to start writing the book. His wife sent us a Christmas card that year, and Davis watched Super Bowl XXIV at our house. He even bought me a pogo stick for my tenth birthday.

  But it turned out he’d spent plenty of time talking to Steven and his parents, too. We knew that, of course, but we had no idea that he’d reached out to them with a promise similar to the one he made us. Maybe he liked them more. Maybe Helen Handley makes a better lasagna than my mom. Maybe she and her husband guaranteed Davis a lifetime of free dry cleaning. Or maybe he’s just an asshole. From the moment his book hit the shelves six years ago, Davis has spent every penny of the profits on a new defense team for Steven.

  In Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, Davis uses words like “mercy” and “compassion” and “forgiveness” when he discusses the broader issues of crime and punishment and the many failures of the American justice system. My father read the book before anyone else in our family. He stopped talking for a few weeks after he got to the end. I don’t mean that he was quieter than normal—I mean he stopped talking altogether. He began staying home from work for days on end to smoke weed in our basement and sort through boxes of his old baseball cards. He lost job after job for not showing up, failing a random drug test, or giving everyone he encountered the creeps by refusing to make eye contact with a single one of his coworkers for months.

  My mother didn’t read the book at all. She changed our phone number and donated my pogo stick to Goodwill, but she left the picture of Davis’s aunt Carolyn on our fridge. It stayed up for almost a year, finally disappearing a few weeks before Hannah was born.

  The book was an instant bestseller. Because of it, there are plenty of people who have some level of doubt about what happened to Turtle that night. Theories range from the unlikely to the impossible to the insane. People—especially those who aren’t fully informed—came up with some impressively creative scenarios. An unlikely one: the idea that Steven didn’t act alone, and that Turtle is still alive out there somewhere. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve imagined it: one day the phone rings, and the voice on the line informs us that my sister has been living for a decade in another state, happy and well cared for by some individual (or individuals) who only wanted a daughter to love. Now that her true identity has been realized, she is swiftly returned to her rightful home and family. Ten years of misery evaporate in a moment as she falls into our arms, looking exactly the way we’ve pictured her all these years. That night, we all sit around the kitchen table and eat hot dogs and coleslaw, Turtle’s favorite meal. Our family lives happily ever after. Roll credits.

  Impossible: despite having a motive and opportunity—and despite the fact that both Remy and I clearly identified him as the man we’d seen carrying Turtle away—Steven Handley was wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit.

  Insane: the idea that one of my or Remy’s parents might have been involved, or even me and Remy ourselves.

  The truth is not nearly so exciting or complicated. No matter what happened to Turtle that night, it’s delusional to hope that she might still be alive. Even finding her grave—if she has a proper one somewhere—seems like too much to wish for most days. There have been countless tips and theories that have provided my parents with grains of hope over the years, but none of them have blossomed into anything but disappointment, each letdown another tiny death for us to grieve.

  The biggest comfort at this point is also the most gruesome: though none of us ever says it out loud, we all understand that our only real wish is for Turtle to be long dead. Let her spend eternity oblivious to the ugliness that seeped into every empty space she left behind.

  Letter from Steven Handley to Gretchen Myers

  Dear Gretchen,

  I hope you like the flowers. I’m not sorry about what happened today. I don’t know why your father is destroying my life. His cruelty makes me sick, when all I’ve done is love you and treat you like the princess you are. He sits in his house like a king playing a twisted game with his subjects. I am not obsessed, I am IN LOVE. How would he act if someone yanked away the person he loved most in the world for no good reason? He’s messing with the wrong man. Nothing changes; we’ll just have to be careful. I’ll be in the school parking lot on Friday morning. Same spot, same time (unless it snows and I have to pick up a shift.)

  I love you!

  —Me

  Reprinted with author’s permission.

  Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, p. 81

  Chapter Nine

  Summer 1996

  We were pariahs in Shelocta as much as we were celebrities. How many people can say that their fifteen minutes of fame was also the single worst thing that’s ever happened to them? At first everybody wanted to help, but once they all realized Turtle was never coming home, nobody knew how to treat us. Most people tried to avoid my family as much as possible.

  Even Abby, who had barel
y spent a day apart from Gretchen in years, pulled away for a long time. Her dad and Darla showed up to volunteer for the search parties that assembled at the end of our street every day for almost two weeks. They tried to help in other ways, too, even though they weren’t always successful. Ed Tickle got into a fistfight one day with a reporter who’d followed Gretchen all the way home from school, asking her if she ever thought about killing herself over what had happened to her sister. Darla brought over her makeup kit one day and spent hours giving me a makeover while my mother stayed in her bedroom. Darla liked to have the television on while she worked; she said having soap operas in the background kept her mind engaged. During a quiet scene in The Days of Our Lives, we could hear my mother sobbing all the way upstairs. Darla turned up the volume and kept right on dabbing my lids with eye shadow as if nothing had happened, but I remember thinking it was taking her an awfully long time to finish my makeup. When she was done, she braided my hair and painted my toenails before starting to work on her own manicure.

  “You don’t have to stay here all day with me,” I told her. “I’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t mind if you don’t mind.” Darla always seemed so glamorous to me, but her heavy makeup and shellacked hairdo weren’t nearly as impressive up close. “When I was a little girl, about your age, my mom left me home alone all the time.”

  “Really? That’s so cool.”

  “Yeah, well, it ain’t legal.”