The Last Good Day of the Year

by Jessica Warman

  “I don’t know,” Remy says. “Just some guy, I guess.”

  “But what is he doing there?”

  “I don’t know, Sam,” he says impatiently. “Maybe he knows Mr. and Mrs. Souza.”

  I frown at him. “Mr. and Mrs. Souza don’t have any friends.”

  “You’re probably right,” he admits. “But I’m sure it’s nothing. He’s just a guy in the woods. There used to be dirt paths running all over the place back there. He looks confused, don’t you think? Maybe he was lost.”

  “But we saw him somewhere else once. Don’t you remember?”

  “Should I?” He holds the photo closer to his face. He looks at it for only a second before flinging it back at me as though it’s a Frisbee. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve smoked a lot of weed since then, Sam. My memory’s not so sharp.”

  “We saw him by the railroad tracks, Remy—the tracks that run along the river uptown. You have to remember it. It was Gretchen’s fourteenth birthday. She and her friends went horseback riding, and we begged to go along to see the horses, but we were too little to ride. A couple of the girls who worked at the stables took us on a walk, and he was there.”

  Remy shrugs. “Sorry. I don’t remember any of that.”

  I remember the girls’ obvious resentment at having to babysit the two of us.

  “We were on the tracks inside the tunnel. The stable girls were way back. They weren’t paying any attention to us. Remember? We went into the tunnel and he was there, walking and singing a song. He gave us marbles. He seemed nice at first, and then he started singing that creepy song.”

  “He started singing?” Remy laughs at me. “Are you messing with me right now?”

  Susan interrupts us, calling down from the top of the stairs: “Are you hungry, Sam? I made tuna salad.” She pauses. “Is Remy down there with you?”

  “Yeah, Mom, I’m here.”

  “Okay … You kids having fun?”

  “So much fun, Mom. So much. More than you could ever imagine.”

  “You have to be a smartass, don’t you? Listen, I have to run over to the school for a little while. Can you switch the laundry around for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “You have to run the sheets on hot water. Don’t forget.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And keep the door cracked. You don’t want to inhale all those paint fumes.”

  Remy sighs. “We will, Mom.”

  “There’s Pepsi in the fridge. Sam, do you drink Pepsi?”

  “I’m not thirsty right now. Thanks, though!” I can picture her standing in the doorway up there, her purse hanging from her shoulder, probably worried that if she comes down she’ll see us half-naked or something. Remy and I listen in silence, tracking her footsteps as they travel out of the kitchen and down the hall, until she leaves the house. We hear the garage door open and close, followed by the chiming of the grandfather clock in the foyer, announcing that it’s noon. I realize I haven’t eaten a thing all day, but I’m not the least bit hungry.

  “Okay—what were you telling me, now? He sang to us?”

  I nod.

  “Let’s hear it, then,” he says, grinning, and I know he doesn’t believe me. “Maybe it’ll trigger a memory.”

  I try to remember the melody. When I close my eyes, I can remember seeing the words forming between his lips and glimpsing his tongue, which looked like it was growing a layer of white mold; I remember the way the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled like old lace.

  Oh, say, do you know

  That a long time ago,

  There were two little children,

  Whose names I don’t know.

  They were stolen away

  On a bright summer’s day,

  And left in the woods

  In a place far away.

  Then I see it: the briefest flicker of recognition in Remy’s eyes. “Was he wearing a hat?” he asks.

  “Yes! You’re right—a cowboy hat!”

  He frowns. “Yeah, maybe I do remember him. Why does it matter?”

  And when it was night

  So sad was their plight

  The stars were not out

  And the moon gave no light

  They sobbed and they sighed

  And they bitterly cried.

  He pressed a marble into the palm of my hand, then gave one to Remy, but I never saw it. He kept his voice quiet as he sang, probably so the girls from the stable wouldn’t hear him. They were behind us, maybe thirty feet away. I wasn’t scared. It was the middle of the afternoon on a bright, warm day, and we were within shouting distance of dozens of houses.

  And when they were dead

  The robins so red

  Took mulberry branches

  And over them spread

  And all the day long

  They sang their poor song

  Poor Babes in the Woods!

  Poor Babes in the Woods.

  I thanked him for the marble. “You’re welcome, my dear,” he said, and then he knelt down in front of us and held out his hand for us to shake. “If you keep that with you, wherever you go, I’ll always know exactly where to find you.”

  I pulled my hand back. He smiled at me, his teeth so straight and white they might have been dentures. He jerked forward a few inches, snapping them at me, as though he were going to bite. I screamed, which got the attention of the teenage girls from the stable. Remy and I ran out of the tunnel, and I immediately felt safer in the bright sunlight. When I looked back at the man, he waved at us before he began strolling away slowly, hands clasped behind his back. A long, dark braid poked out from beneath his cowboy hat and snaked halfway down his back. The marble felt so hot in my palm that I dropped it onto the tracks. I could have sworn it was a swirl of blue, green, and white, like a tiny planet Earth, when he first tucked it into my palm. Now it was all black. It shined so fiercely in the sun, opaque as a piece of coal.

  I remember. And I don’t know why yet, but I know it matters.

  Chapter Twenty

  Summer 1996

  Abby Tickle is raiding our refrigerator as if she hasn’t eaten in days, which she used to do all the time when she and Gretchen were kids. It annoyed my mom back then, and I’m sure it would annoy her today. She’s held a grudge against Abby’s sort-of stepmother, Darla, that goes all the way back to when Gretchen and Abby were in the second grade together. Our mom volunteered to be their homeroom mother, but the title went to Darla instead. “She’s not Abby’s mother, she’s her father’s girlfriend. It’s homeroom mother, not homeroom girlfriend.”

  There were other reasons why our mom didn’t like Abby, long before Steven came into the picture. Abby refused to babysit me whenever Gretchen wasn’t available. There was one time in particular that our mom never got over: she was cleaning our house and wanted me, Turtle, and Remy out of her way, so she marched us down the street to the Tickle residence to see if Abby would keep an eye on us for the afternoon. Abby said no, even though she wasn’t busy. She wouldn’t even let us past her front door. My mom took us home, and I ended up tripping over the vacuum cord and giving myself a bloody nose, staining our carpet.

  As Gretchen got older, my mom was annoyed that my sister preferred the Tickle household to her own. She resented Darla, who was young and sexy and had a way with teenage girls that my mother simply did not possess. Our dad thought it was funny. He told my mom she was just jealous of Darla.

  “Why on earth would I be jealous of that woman?”

  “Sharon, calm down. She’s a nice woman. She’s a free spirit.”

  “A free spirit? Is that what people are calling it nowadays?” Darla wore tight miniskirts and low-cut shirts and carried a bottle of hairspray in her purse, which she would pull out and reapply whenever the mood struck, even if she was in the middle of the grocery store.

  Abby is improvising a BLT sandwich in our kitchen, which is to say that she’s got the B but none of the L or T. She squirts a blob of mayonnaise onto a heel of bread,
spreading it around with her finger before smashing the whole thing together. She isn’t using a plate, and when she picks up the sandwich, she brushes the bacon crumbs that are left behind on the counter onto the floor.

  The TV in the living room is turned up loud enough that we can hear the rerun of Beverly Hills, 90210 all the way over in the kitchen. The show was Gretchen’s choice, and I haven’t been paying a bit of attention when a single thread of dialogue breaks away from the rest of the story and seems to be shouted instead of spoken, as though the words are deliberately finding their way to my ears.

  “Steve Sanders? He would never hurt anybody.”

  “I’m telling you that Steve Sanders raped me, Brenda.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “It’s true. Steve Sanders raped me.”

  It’s those tiny, inescapable things that can drive you crazy: hearing his name out loud, even when it’s referencing someone else; every blond-haired little girl you see from a distance or up close; the sound of snow crunching beneath your feet. Look hard enough, and it’s possible to see her in everything.

  Does Abby even realize why she says what she says next? “Will you go to his execution, Sam?”

  “Shut up, Abby,” Gretchen says through gritted teeth, nodding at Hannah, who is coloring at the kitchen table.

  Abby replies with a loud whisper that everyone can hear. “She doesn’t know what we’re talking about.”

  Cue Hannah, raising her head in interest: “What’s an execution?”

  Gretchen pinches her best friend hard on the arm. Abby yelps and drops her sandwich to free up both hands to smack my sister’s face. They’ve always fought like a pair of feral cats, claws and all. Before I know it, Hannah and I are watching, open-mouthed, as they swipe at each other. Hannah is entertained. To her it’s all slapstick; they’re not swearing or yelling—they aren’t speaking at all, actually, and the near silence makes it that much more mesmerizing. But she can’t pick up on all the ripples from a thousand tiny sparks of friction that have been building up over the years, crackling in the air all around us. Gretchen slaps and claws, while Abby seems partial to hair pulling. The whole thing lasts for maybe only twenty seconds. When they stop, it seems more like they’ve been pried apart by an unseen force that drains their will to fight in an instant than that there’s been a resolution. They both take a minute to catch their breath before shifting back into conversation as though nothing has happened. I close my eyes and see fireworks bursting against a black sky. I can almost smell the ashes as the last embers fade.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  January 1986

  Remy and I waited only a minute or two, if that long, before we rushed upstairs to tell our parents that Turtle was gone. The rest of the night was an agonizing blur of time for everyone in our house, but Susan Mitchell managed to remember the crucial fact that, when Remy and I appeared in the living room, Eddie Money was on television performing “Take Me Home Tonight” live from the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration. The song lasted from 1:49 to 1:54 a.m. Police put the kidnapping sometime between 1:45 and 1:48 a.m. At the time, they told my parents that it was a great start on the investigation, and that whoever had taken my sister couldn’t have gotten far. They told us that most of the time when a kid disappears in the middle of the night, nobody realizes what has happened until the next morning. I remember one of the detectives using the phrase “ahead of the eight ball,” with a big smile on his face. Nothing to worry about, he said. We’ll have her home by morning.

  Of course, the same detective didn’t bother to ask me or Remy if we’d seen the man who took Turtle. He left to search for her, and it wasn’t until much later that his coworker sat us down in the kitchen with hot chocolate and finally asked the right questions. You hear all the time about police incompetence and botched investigations, and it’s no joke: police detectives are only human. It was the middle of the night on New Year’s Eve. Later on, we’d learn that three of the four officers who’d initially been dispatched to our house were drunk as skunks. They did a good job hiding it—missing children in subfreezing temperatures tend to sober people up pretty quickly—but they eventually lost their jobs, which I guess was the city’s way of apologizing for such a monumental screwup. A few years ago, one of them died after falling asleep in his car while it was parked, engine running, in his garage. His ex-wife wrote us a letter afterward, telling us that he’d never forgiven himself for being drunk that night, and that we shouldn’t feel bad about his suicide, because at least he had some peace now. She said it had ruined their marriage. My parents tore the letter up before they threw it away. As far as I know, they never responded to the woman.

  By the time Remy and I named Steven as the man inside the Santa suit, it had been hours since he’d walked out of our basement with Turtle in his arms. That’s a lot longer than forty-eight minutes. But Steven insisted he’d gone straight home after Gretchen and Abby kicked him out, and there were plenty of witnesses to back him up.

  Steven’s father, Jack, had spent his evening at the Moose Lodge with a few other men from the volunteer fireman’s association. When the club closed down for the night around 12:30, they moved the party to Jack’s house and started a game of cards. All five of the men were lifelong residents of the area. People who knew them considered them decent men, not the kind of folks who’d be willing to lie to protect a killer, even if he was the son of a close friend.

  At 1:28 that morning, they got a call about a structure fire in the woods on the northern end of town. As one of them put it to police, “We knew the drill. You don’t screw around getting pretty when something’s burning. We were on our way out the door before Jack hung up the phone.”

  When they left the house around 1:30, Steven’s bedroom door was open. Jack Handley and his friends all saw him asleep on top of his comforter, still dressed in the Santa suit. They arrived at the scene of the fire, an abandoned motor home at the end of a dirt road in the woods, about ten minutes later. The place was already half-eaten by flames. There was no saving the building. Jack and his friends stuck around for less than twenty minutes before they headed back to their card game. When they got back to Jack’s house a little before three in the morning, Steven’s bedroom door was closed.

  Oddly enough, they were all able to verify the time based on what they’d seen on the television when they walked into the living room. Like my own family, and probably like most of the families in our town, the TV had been tuned to channel 4 all night, where Dick Clark was ringing in the New Year in Times Square.

  When questioned separately, all five men remembered the same thing:

  “Neil Diamond was singing ‘Sweet Caroline’ on the stage in Times Square.”

  “It was Neil Diamond, and he was doing that song—the one that goes ‘bam-bam-bam.’ You know the one I mean? I don’t listen to music much.”

  “It was ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond. My wife’s name is Caroline, so I’m pretty familiar with that one. She always makes me turn it up and sing along when it comes on the car radio.”

  “ ‘Sweet Caroline.’ I don’t know who sings it—that Jewish guy. He looked ridiculous.”

  “Neil Diamond, ‘Sweet Caroline.’ Of course I’m sure. I don’t live under a rock.”

  And they were right: Neil Diamond was the next-to-last performer on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve of 1986; Stevie Wonder followed him to close the show, which ended at three in the morning. All five men were awake for the whole thing. If they were telling the truth, it meant that Steven had woken up—or he’d been pretending to be asleep—driven four miles to our house to steal Turtle, and made it back home and into bed in under an hour.

  What could he have done with Turtle in such a small window of time? Why would he go home and fall asleep, only to wake up a few hours later to commit the same crime he could have pulled off much earlier? Steven’s lawyer asked these questions again and again throughout the trial. How could Steven have known we would b
e in the basement that night? Did he come into our yard, dressed like Santa, with the intention of breaking in and harming one of us? Was he looking for Gretchen? Or was he trying only to scare us, but somehow things got out of hand? Maybe he panicked. Maybe he didn’t mean to hurt Turtle. Maybe it was all a horrible accident.

  I guess any of those scenarios is possible, but anybody who might know for sure isn’t telling. In the meantime, the best we can do is to fill in the blanks with our imaginations. Twenty-four additional minutes bring us to the forty-eight-minute total, give or take, in which Steven’s whereabouts aren’t backed up by multiple eyewitnesses. Steven is the only one who knows, without any doubt, what he was doing in those moments. Here’s something we do know for sure: if he used those forty-eight minutes to kidnap my sister, the act wasn’t costing him any sleep.

  Partial Transcript of Police Interview with Clayton Barnes, Conducted January 4, 1986

  Clayton Barnes: We were worked up from the call. That’s why we didn’t fall asleep as soon as we got back. Fire gets your adrenaline pumping, and then you have a hard time winding down. There was a movie that came on after—the one with the killer tomatoes. By then I was ready to hit the sack, but Jack said Helen would throw a shit-fit if he let me drive home, so I slept on the couch for a few hours.

  Detective: Helen wouldn’t have wanted you to drive?

  CB: She’s a real mother hen like that. Always worried about her boys. What did I care? I was sleeping real deep, too, until the cops come banging on the door while it was still dark outside. That’s when all hell broke loose.

  DET: How did Steven react when the police showed up?

  CB: Well, he was scared. That’s how it seemed to me. He reacted the way you or I would react if someone woke us up from a dead sleep to accuse us of kidnapping.