The Last Good Day of the Year

by Jessica Warman

  “Here,” I say, taking it from his hand, “I’ll show you how.” He watches as I peel each colored sticker from its square, being careful not to tear any of them as I line them up along the edge of the table, until the yellow stickers are the only ones remaining on the cube. Then I rearrange the stickers in order by filling in one side at a time, from red to blue to orange to green to white.

  “You know that’s not how it’s supposed to be done,” Noah says.

  “I know. But nobody can tell the difference, can they? Not if they didn’t see me.”

  “But that’s cheating, Samantha.” He smiles. “I know you’re not that kind of girl.”

  “I’m just trying to help you.”

  He grabs my hand. “Do you think it was my fault?”

  “Yes.”

  “She hates me. Her family hates me. All her friends hate me. When they found out why she was walking home alone, they told everyone. People I don’t even know have told me they hate me, and you’re holding my hand. If I try to kiss you, I think you’ll let me. Why would you do that? What’s the matter with us, Sam?”

  I’ve never bothered asking myself that question until now. “Maybe we’re bad people. Or maybe we’ve just done terrible things.”

  “I’ve done terrible things. You haven’t.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Nothing as bad as what I did to Laura.”

  “No, Noah.” I lean forward and kiss him on the mouth. Just once. Then I move my lips close to his ear. The words sound like a whisper and feel like a howl: “What I did was so much worse.”

  In January 1986, there were nine convicted sex offenders on the Indiana County registry. Police were able to verify alibis for all but two of them. Darren Shepherd, age thirty-three, was on probation after serving thirteen months of a five-year prison sentence for pleading no contest to indecent sexual assault on a minor. His victim was his girlfriend’s thirteen-year-old daughter. Darren couldn’t prove he was home all night on New Year’s Eve, but police ruled him out based on his looks alone. Darren was six and a half feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds. He was also African American.

  But the other man, Brett King, matched Steven’s physical traits more closely. Like Steven, King was white and stood around five feet nine inches tall. Steven weighed one hundred forty-three pounds; King weighed one hundred fifty. He’d worked as a custodian at Mother of Sorrows Elementary School from 1978 until the spring of 1984, when a female third grader told the school nurse that King had snuck up on her in an empty classroom after recess one day. Before she had a chance to leave the room, he exposed himself to her. While King was in jail awaiting trial, three more students came forward with similar stories. He made parole after serving ninety days of a thirteen-month sentence and moved into a studio apartment above a bar in Shelocta called the Golden Pheasant, owned by his sister, Marcia.

  King told police he’d been home alone all night on New Year’s Eve, but Marcia was the only person who remembered seeing him that evening: “He came down around maybe 11:30. It wasn’t too long before midnight. I saw him dropping quarters into the cigarette machine near the bathrooms.”

  King was forbidden to enter the bar during business hours. Too many locals knew what he’d done; Marcia was afraid she’d lose customers if anybody knew her brother was living above the bar.

  “I saw him for only a minute from the back, but I know my own brother. He didn’t stick around. He got his smokes and went back upstairs.”

  Turtle Myers had attended morning preschool at Mother of Sorrows on Tuesdays and Thursdays starting in September 1983. King claimed he didn’t remember her.

  Marcia didn’t think her brother was capable of planning a crime. “They tested his IQ in prison. He’s dumb as a box of rocks,” she told me. King’s IQ was tested twice in his adult life. He scored a 99 on his assessment in 1983. But on the earlier test, which he took in 1970 as part of a failed attempt to join the military, his score was 118, which is considered average. Nineteen points is a significant difference. It’s not impossible that King intentionally did poorly on the test he took in prison, hoping it would make him seem more sympathetic.

  And there’s more: at around three in the morning on January 1, 1986, Jenny Hicks called the Indiana County emergency line to report a disoriented customer at the all-night diner where she worked as a waitress. She told the dispatcher that a man with blood on his face and clothing had stumbled inside and gone straight to the bathroom. “He left a few minutes ago, and now there’s blood all over the sink and floor.”

  Jenny locked the bathroom door and waited for the police to respond. When nobody had shown up by five o’clock, which was the end of her shift, Jenny cleaned the bathroom and went home. Could that man have been Brett King? We’ll probably never know. Jenny doesn’t think so; she told me the man in her restaurant that night was definitely not Brett King or Steven Handley.

  Police didn’t follow up on her 9-1-1 call for another twelve hours. “I guess they had their hands full that day. They didn’t even go to the restaurant right away—they came to my house. I asked the cop if he thought they’d test the bathroom for things like blood and fingerprints. He said it wouldn’t matter since I’d already cleaned everything up with bleach.

  “He said the guy was probably a drunk who’d been in a fight. I didn’t understand how he could be so certain. I mean, the man I saw didn’t have a bloody nose or a split lip. He didn’t look like he’d been in a fistfight. He looked like he’d just murdered someone. That’s the first thought that popped into my head, the minute I saw him: it looks like he just finished killing someone.”

  Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, pp. 183–84

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Spring 1996

  Davis Gordon is the keynote speaker at this year’s Mid-Atlantic Conference of True Crime Writers and Investigative Journalists. When Noah and I finally reach the convention center, I have to buy a pass for the conference just to get inside the building. The pass costs me forty dollars, which is more money than I have in my wallet; I have to dig through Noah’s car to come up with the last dollar in change.

  Since he doesn’t have a pass, Noah has to wait outside. I stand in line for almost an hour until I’m finally face-to-face with Davis.

  “Samantha.” He glances at a woman dressed all in black standing nearby. Maybe she’s his publicist. She raises her eyebrows, and he tries to alert her to my presence without me noticing by tilting his head ever so slightly in my direction.

  “I’m not going to make a scene, if that’s what you’re worried about.” I look behind me, where there’s still a long line of people waiting for Davis to sign their copies of his book. “I doubt your followers would tolerate it.”

  “Have you been calling my house?” he asks.

  “No.” I pause. “Maybe.”

  “It’s okay. I’d be happy to talk. But why did you keep hanging up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is there something in particular on your mind?”

  “Yes. No.” I’m too nervous to think straight.

  Davis considers me standing in front of him, obviously hurting and confused. Until the book came out, I had liked him so much. I can tell he wants to help me, but now that I’m here, it’s clear this isn’t the right time or place.

  “I can’t talk to you right now, Samantha. Can you wait until after the signing?” He looks at his watch. “I’ll be done in an hour. We can get lunch. How does that sound?”

  The woman in black appears at his side. “Everything okay here?” she says brightly, smiling at me with intense, unblinking eyes.

  “Everything’s fine,” he tells her, not taking his eyes off me.

  “Good.” She looks down at my hands and sees that I’m not holding a book. “Did you want to have something signed?”

  “No.” I can’t believe we came all this way, and he’s telling me to leave.

  “We need to keep the line moving.”

  “I can
’t stay for lunch. I have to go home,” I say. I pause. “My parents don’t know I’m here.”

  “I won’t tell them. Are you sure you can’t wait, though?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “You can call me whenever you want, Sam.” He smiles. “Don’t hang up next time.”

  “Thanks.”

  I’m about to walk away, feeling defeated and ridiculous, when he reaches for a stack of bookmarks printed with the cover image from Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt. “I can still give you an autograph.”

  “That’s okay,” I say, looking at the woman still hovering behind him, giving me a dirty look for holding up the line.

  “Wait, Sam.” He grabs my wrist and stares at me. “You really should take one.”

  I wait for him to scribble something on the blank side of the bookmark. When he’s finished, he slides it picture side up across the table. I shove the bookmark into my purse and walk away without reading it. As soon as I’m out of the room, I duck into the first bathroom I see.

  There’s no autograph—just a message written in Davis’s messy handwriting: Ask Gretchen about Frank Yarrow.

  “We were fighting because I’d said hello to a guy I knew at Ruby Tuesday’s, Dan Shaffer. He was the manager there. I hadn’t seen him in ages. We were in the high school marching band together. You get close to everyone in marching band, because you spend so much time together. Even though I graduated a few years ago, it would have been weird if I hadn’t said anything to him.

  “Levi was screaming at me in the car, and Tara was crying in the backseat, and it had started to rain. It was one of those quick, heavy summer storms. We were on the two-lane road that goes past the golf course. It was something like ninety degrees that day. When Levi pulled over and kicked me out, all I could think about was getting Tara from her car seat so he wouldn’t drive away with her. I didn’t think about my flip-flops on the floor of the front seat, or how they’d just put down a new layer of asphalt on the road. Then Levi drove away, and the rain had stopped, and I was holding Tara in my arms and crying. The soles of my feet were already getting blistered.

  “Steven—people always called him Stevie back in high school—I knew him from band, too. He was in the concert band, not the marching band like me, but we all practiced together sometimes. I knew all about his accident at the prom, and what happened at Penn State, and how he was supposedly damaged goods. It was a big deal at the time; I was only a sophomore, so I wasn’t at the prom that year, but everyone had heard about it. Stevie was one of those guys everyone liked: jocks, band geeks … So when he pulled off to the side of the road and told us to get in his truck, I didn’t think twice about it. He looked the same as I remembered him from high school.

  “I was terrified that Levi would come back and see us with him and think I had … Well, it’s hard to say what Levi might have thought. I told Stevie to get us out of there. I was shaking. Tara was crying. Her diaper needed to be changed, but I’d left my bag in Levi’s car. So Stevie stopped at Kroger for diapers and wipes on the way to my parents’ house. He dropped us off, and that was it. I didn’t see him after that, not until his face was all over the news.

  “I wasn’t afraid of him. Neither was Tara. She was only a toddler, but kids have a way of knowing when they shouldn’t trust someone. I feel so stupid now when I think about getting into his truck like that, but don’t you think I would have sensed it if he’d been planning to hurt us? I can tell when a person isn’t … He didn’t seem any different to me. All the stories I’d heard about Stevie and how much his accident screwed him up in the head didn’t describe the man who drove us home that day. He didn’t give me the same feeling I got around Levi. What else was I supposed to do, walk until my feet bled? We could have been hit by a car, or gotten heatstroke. Stevie was my angel that day.”

  Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, pp. 300–302

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Summer 1996

  I wake up covered in sweat from a dream in which I’m standing across the street, watching a fire tear through the houses on Point Pleasant. The Souzas’ dogs are howling in a window, trapped, pawing at the glass.

  It takes me a few seconds to realize that I’m in our living room, not my bedroom. I must have fallen asleep watching television. The running water I hear is coming from the kitchen faucet; in my dream, it was the sound of a gushing fire hydrant.

  I recognize Gretchen’s footsteps in the kitchen. She lets the faucet run for a long time while she splashes water onto her face.

  She opens a nearby cabinet and fumbles in the dark for a glass to fill with water. Everybody else is asleep. It’s the middle of the night.

  “Hurry,” someone whispers to Gretchen. It’s Abby.

  My sister starts to cry softly. “I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Shh.” Abby murmurs something I can’t quite hear.

  “I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” Gretchen babbles, her voice growing dangerously loud. Our mom is a light sleeper.

  “We’re almost finished.”

  “I’m so scared.”

  “Don’t be. I’m the one who should be scared.”

  Gretchen’s voice grows raspy and frantic. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Nothing can hurt me.”

  Gretchen gulps down water. She struggles to calm her breathing. The ice maker in our freezer rumbles to life, startling them.

  “Let’s go,” Abby whispers. “We’re going to wake someone up.”

  They don’t move. Neither of them says a word for at least a minute. I peek over the edge of the sofa and see Abby leaning against the counter. Her arms are wrapped around Gretchen. My sister’s face is buried in the space between Abby’s neck and shoulder. Abby’s eyes are closed. Her makeup is streaked with tears. She reaches up with a trembling hand to touch my sister’s short hair.

  “Shh,” Abby says again, repeating the sound over and over into Gretchen’s ear like a mother trying to calm her fussy child. Then she opens her eyes and looks straight at me. I expect her to yell or to walk over and smack me, but she doesn’t react at all. She just closes her eyes, smoothing Gretchen’s hair while my sister cries, and it occurs to me that Gretchen might not love any of us as much as she loves Abby.

  After the two of them slip out the back door, I count to fifty in my head before slowly getting up and tiptoeing toward the kitchen. Without turning on the light, I look around the room for any clue to what they might have been doing in here.

  My mind understands before my eyes can fully recognize the sight. It swiftly knocks the wind out of me, as if I’ve been shoved into a deep, dark hole and I’m still falling. Nothing else in the room seems to exist: only the stuffed bear on the table. His eyes are flat and black against his white, furry face. His torn ear is mended with a thick scar of purple thread.

  His name is Boris. He was Turtle’s teddy bear, and he was in her arms when Steven took her away.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Summer 1996

  The sun is finally rising. Light streams through the trees in the forest, casting shadows on the ground all around me. The playhouse in Remy’s yard looks alive as the gaps and cracks in the old wooden planks seem to burst into brightness where the sunlight overflows.

  I’ve been awake for hours, uncertain about what to do next. I don’t know how Abby and Gretchen came into possession of Boris, but I have a pretty good idea.

  On hot nights, Remy likes to sleep with his bedroom window open. I stand beneath it and softly call his name until he appears, still half-asleep. I’m holding Boris behind my back so Remy won’t see him right away. “Let me in,” I say in a stage whisper.

  He disappears from the window, stumbling into the basement a minute later to unlock the sliding glass door.

  “My parents are already up. You could have just knocked on the front door, you know.” Now that we’re up close and he’s a little more awake, he notices that I’m still wearing the same
clothes from yesterday. I’m sure I look awful, but I couldn’t care less. After I found Boris, I took him up to my room to get a better look in private. I wasn’t going to let my parents discover him in the kitchen like that; the shock might have killed my father. I sat in a corner and studied his fur, which has become more gray than white after so many years. I felt the weight of his stuffing and ran my finger along the tight machine stitches of his seam and then the wider, less precise purple stitches where Mrs. Souza reattached his ear. I was looking for anything at all that might suggest he was a replica, not the original Boris.

  It is the same bear. I show him to Remy. “Do you remember this?”

  Remy stares at Boris for a minute without comprehending, and then I see the recognition fill his eyes. He barely touches the curve of purple thread with one trembling finger. He seems afraid to actually feel the fabric, as though something awful could be transmitted by prolonged contact with this artifact of tragedy. “Where did you get this?” he breathes.

  “From Gretchen and Abby. They came into the house in the middle of the night. I heard them talking in the kitchen. Gretchen was crying. Once they were gone, I found him sitting on the middle of our kitchen table.”

  Remy starts to cry. “But that’s impossible.”

  Yet here we are. While I was waiting for the sun to rise this morning, Davis Gordon’s telephone number popped into my head without any conscious attempt on my part to remember it. I won’t call him today, though; I need to talk to Gretchen and Abby first, and then probably my parents.

  “Why do you go to Helen Handley’s house and shovel her snow, Remy?”

  “What?” He wipes his eyes, smearing tears and snot all over his flushed face. “Are you kidding me? Where did Gretchen and Abby get this bear? That’s the question you should be asking, Sam—where the hell did they get this?”