Dead Last

by Amanda Lamb

  I didn’t tell Adam the whole story right away. It came out in bits and pieces. But when I finally unburdened myself and told him the entire truth, he was so understanding. I didn’t expect him to be judgmental. Adam wasn’t like that. But I did expect that he might be afraid to get involved with someone like me.

  I told him the full version of my story the night before we got engaged. I knew it was about to happen. We had traveled to this beautiful resort in the mountains for a long weekend. At the time, we were living in Washington, D.C. I was interning at a local news station, fresh out of graduate school, trying to land a job. Adam was working on the Hill for a congressman from Virginia, where he grew up. We flew from D.C. to Asheville, North Carolina, and strangely, he decided to carry-on a duffel bag instead of checking it. After seeing his death grip on the bag, I figured out that there was something inside he was afraid to part with. And I was right. It was a diamond ring.

  My intuition told me he was going to propose on the trip. I couldn’t let him attach himself to someone who was so broken, without giving him all the information he needed to make a sound decision. This way he could always back out. It was important for me to give Adam a way out. But he didn’t take it.

  Instead, he listened and pulled me in for a hug. “You never cease to amaze me. Thank you for sharing that part of your life with me.”

  The next night at dinner, after a toast to our vacation, with two glasses of chilled Pinot Grigio, he slid out from the table, got down on one knee, and took my hand. “Will you share the rest of your life with me?”

  The other people in the restaurant turned to watch, and let out a thunderous cheer when I nodded through my tears—tears for the proposal, tears for Adam’s understanding, tears for my mother.

  “Peekaboo has been Mazie’s horse since she was big enough to ride. She used to climb up on a box to get on him. So naturally, when Mazie started feeding Princess, Peekaboo got a little jealous,” I snapped back into the moment and realized I had been letting her talk without interruption for at least ten minutes. This made me cringe thinking about having to go back and listen to the entire interview again at the station. I always tried to keep my interviews short, asking only the questions I needed to elicit just enough sound on tape for the story. I kept copious notes so I could quickly find the exact quote I needed. Today was not going to be that kind of day.

  “Marjorie, so basically the two animals started interacting through Mazie? And they made a love connection?”

  “Well, sugar, I’ll get to that.” She sounded disgruntled by my effort to speed things up, “but we’re not quite there yet.”

  Oh, we’re there, Marjorie, we’re there. But I couldn’t say that out loud. I knew I had to let her get to the point in her own time. I just hoped it would be soon.

  6

  Unspooling

  “Bat-shit crazy.” Buster grinned as we pulled out of Marjorie’s driveway. “Where in the hell does Janie find these kooks?”

  “Facebook,” I said, without looking up from my iPad. I was trying to catch up on dozens of emails I had received while knee-deep in Marjorie’s vortex and my own distracted thoughts. “She wasn’t that bad. Just a country gal.”

  “Seriously, that’s some kind of crazy. And she’s the main event in our story,” he said, hands off the steering wheel, palms in the air.

  “When has that ever stopped us from putting someone on TV?”

  “True that.” Buster shook his head vigorously like he was trying to erase the memory of the last forty-five minutes. “And that dude, Brady. Man, he was like someone who crawled out of a cave. I thought he just might come back out to the porch with a shotgun and blow us both away. Kept hearing the theme song to Deliverance in my head.” Buster hummed a few bars of the banjo ditty.

  I popped Brady’s full name into my state prison records app and looked him up while Buster continued to pontificate. He was not one to shy away from a soapbox.

  “I bet he’s hiding. Bet Brady’s not even his real name.”

  Over the years, Buster and I had interviewed our fair share of characters. We had knocked on the doors of drug dealers, killers, prostitutes, you name it. We’d traveled dirt roads to trailer doors guarded by angry dogs on chains. We had taken cover when we interviewed gang members. We’d hiked deep into the woods to interview homeless people in tent cities. We’d talked to drunk people, people on drugs, people with no teeth, people with no clothes. And they all had a story. And yes, sometimes they were a little bit crazy. I learned there were fifty shades of crazy, and we got to meet a new kind almost every single day. My job was a lot of things, but it was never dull.

  “It’s not as bad as I thought it was,” I said, after scrolling through Brady’s record. “Mostly misdemeanors, petty larceny, simple assault, possession—just pot, a couple DWIs. Oh, there’s also one indecent exposure. Probably peeing while drunk on a public street. He didn’t strike me as a pervert.”

  “Speaking of crazy, let’s get back to the lady who claims her husband is trying to kill her, but won’t go to the police” Buster pursed his lips as he spoke.

  “I really don’t think she’s crazy, but I don’t know exactly what she is, to be honest. There are just some things about her story that don’t add up. But on the other hand, I’m afraid not to believe her. I don’t want something bad to happen to her, something I may be able to prevent.”

  “If she’s truly afraid for her life, why is she screwing around with you? Why isn’t she banging on the door of the police department asking for help? Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “True. I agree, but it’s not a typical situation. She wants proof before she accuses him of something outright.”

  “Then why not hire a private investigator? That’s what everyone does when they suspect their spouse of cheating. They don’t latch on to a local news reporter and hope she can crack the case like it’s some new series on Netflix. Seriously, I think this lady has been watching way too many movies or true crime shows.”

  “Their money is co-mingled. He would find out if she hired a private investigator to check him out.”

  “Come on, you tell me a big-wig public relations diva like this woman doesn’t know how to siphon some funds out of her joint account and use it for whatever she wants? I think this lady is full of shit, and you’re buying it. I don’t think you should be so quick to help her. What is it about her that makes you want to jump right back into this world of murder and mayhem that you swore off when Adam died?”

  As much as I hated to admit it, Buster was right. Most of the time I was pretty good at parsing good people from people who meant harm to me, but Adam’s death had stripped me of this ability. I was constantly second-guessing my judgment.

  “Hello, anybody in there? Are you listening to me?” Buster reached over and rapped on my head with his knuckles.

  “Yes, I’m listening. I’m just taking a moment to think about what you said. You’re right. There’s a possibility Suzanne could be playing me. But you didn’t see how scared she was in the hospital, how terrified she was when she thought Tanner was following us during our run. I think she is telling me the truth. But I do need to figure out exactly what’s going on with her. As soon as we get back into town, I’m going to call her and tell her I need to meet with her immediately.

  “Not so fast, sweetheart. First things first. What’s for lunch?”

  O

  I wasn’t sure what I remembered, what came from what other people, and what came from newspaper clippings I read when I was older. I knew there was a lot of blood. The only time I saw blood before that was when I fell on the black asphalt playground at preschool and scraped my knee. So I just assumed my mother had a bad cut. But when I shook her, she didn’t wake up. I remembered that clearly. I thought she was sleeping, but everything looked funny. Her hair was matted, thick with blood, and her eyes were partially open. She didn’t look like my mother. Something was very wrong. I was too young to understand that a single bullet had caused
all that damage.

  I walked around her, poking her with my little fingers—on her shoulder, on her back, on her leg, on her feet—hoping she would wake up. She was always very ticklish, but when I tickled her feet nothing happened.

  “Mommy,” I whispered, so I wouldn’t startle her. But she didn’t respond.

  “Mommy,” I said a little louder, rounding her body again, my tiny hands making a trail on the stained hardwood floors that lined our hallway, as I crawled around her. That, I learned about later from the news reports.

  “Mommy,” I yelled. Nothing.

  The next thing I remembered, I was in my father’s arms. I don’t know how much time had passed, but I knew I was safe and that everything was going to be okay.

  O

  I couldn’t let what happened to my mother happen to Suzanne. That was the bottom line. Even though I didn’t know her well, I felt that we had crossed paths for a reason, and that I owed her my attention and my help. If I didn’t at least try to help her, and something bad happened, I would never forgive myself.

  I decided it was time to tell Suzanne about Maria Lopez, about her pregnancy. Maria being pregnant didn’t mean she was carrying Tanner’s baby, but it sure raised red flags. If it was Tanner’s baby and he was in love with her, then maybe he did have a reason to want Suzanne out of the picture. But it all seemed so surreal, like the plot of a bad television movie. Didn’t people get divorced anymore? It was a question I asked every time I covered a domestic violence murder.

  I stirred my yogurt mindlessly as I listened to Marjorie’s interview on my headphones at my desk in the middle of the newsroom and tried to block out the ambient noise around me—two people laughing in the cubicle to my left, the printer chugging away to my right, an anchor and a photographer shooting a segment to promote the evening news, a few feet in front of me. A newsroom was a living, breathing thing, like a tornado constantly swirling around you. Your choices were to stay out of its way by hiding in some distant conference room, or to allow yourself to get swept up in it. A good newsroom gossip session could derail the best journalists on deadline.

  Regardless of the volume of my headphones, I could still hear someone talking about why she was going gluten-free, someone else on the phone “…not a story we would ever cover under any circumstances,” and another person screaming across the newsroom about a Tweet from our competitor regarding a parking deck collapse.

  O

  I closed my laptop, coiled up my headphones and grabbed my purse, and decided it was time to pay Maria Lopez another visit. This time I intended to speak with her. I had no idea what I was going to say, but I believed she was the key to unraveling this entire mess. Maybe her relationship with Tanner was innocent, and maybe Suzanne was paranoid.

  O

  When I pulled up to the restaurant, it was closed. There was a sign on a white piece of paper handwritten in Sharpie, that said, Closed due to a funeral. I decided to leave my business card for Maria, with a note on the back asking her to call me. I realized this was risky. She would wonder why a local television reporter was paying her a visit. But she would also be curious, and that might be just enough to prompt her to call me like so many people had done over the years after finding my business card stuck in their doors with no explanation. I learned early on that the less I said in my note, the better the chance people would call me because they just couldn’t help themselves; they had to know why I was at their door.

  I sat there for a few minutes in front of the building, in my car, waiting to see if someone might come to the door and retrieve the card. Kojak told me there was an apartment in the back, behind the restaurant, where some of the family members lived. Through the thin venetian blinds, I could see a faint light coming from somewhere beyond the cash register.

  While I waited, I decided to rummage through my mail on the passenger seat of my car, untouched for three days. My constant need to triage in between the fire drills that had become my life meant the mail was a low priority. I paid most of my bills online, and no one wrote letters anymore. It was basically all junk mail. There was the usual assortment of catalogs—Adam’s fault, as he was a champion shopper who signed up for every store credit card just to get discounts and coupons. There were also several bills that I would pay online later, a reminder for a dental appointment for the twins, and a long white envelope with my address written in big block letters in blue ink.

  Every time I got a letter from Roger, I threw it in a big box at the back of my closet, with all the other letters he had sent me over the years. I never opened one of them. Just seeing his handwriting on the envelope gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The return address was unmistakable—Penn Grove State Correctional Institution in Inverness, Pennsylvania. A maximum-security prison in the middle of the nowhere. He had moved around over the years, like most inmates, but spent most of his time at Penn Grove. I imagined that was because he was always getting into trouble—making shanks out of toothbrushes, smoking pot smuggled into the prison, talking back to the correctional officers, sexual activity with other inmates. You name it, Roger did it. All I had to do was look at his list of infractions on the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections’ website to see his latest transgressions. Roger’s list made it even easier for me to hate him, and gave me one more reason not to read his letters.

  Even though we lived in New Jersey, the crime had taken place at my mother’s parents’ farmhouse house in Pennsylvania. We were visiting them at the time, or maybe we were running away from Roger. I wasn’t told exactly why we were there. In a way, it was good that it happened there, because many of the gory details never made it to my small New Jersey town. Sure, there was gossip. People whispered when I came into the grocery store with my paternal grandmother, Belle, who raised me back in the town where I had once shared a house with my parents.

  My mom’s parents had been too old and dealing with too many health problems at the time to take on a three-year-old. My maternal grandfather, Bubby, had lung cancer, and my maternal grandmother, Nana, had diabetes. Despite Roger’s conviction, my grandparents loved and trusted Belle, who was a widow with a healthy bank account and the energy to handle a small child.

  Back in New Jersey with Belle, people thought I didn’t notice them talking about me when she let go of my hand to let me peruse the candy aisle while she browsed in the produce section at the grocery store. Their voices were low, hushed, and conspiratorial. I heard them all right, but I tried to ignore them.

  “That’s her,” they would say. “That’s the little girl whose father killed her mother. Awful, just awful. Poor thing.”

  By the time I was about ten, the whispers had subsided. There were plenty of other things to gossip about—the choir director and the minister getting caught having sex in the baptismal tub; Grizzly Hutchins, who owned a popular local country bar, dressing as a woman at an Atlantic City casino; the high school secretary, Dobie Benson, embezzling $27,000 from the cafeteria and buying herself an inground pool. The long list trumped an old murder in Pennsylvania.

  Roger had been locked up close to thirty-four years now and had exhausted every legal remedy possible that could get him released. A few years prior, a group of law students at a university in Philadelphia agreed to look at his case and see if there was anything left to appeal. Nothing had come of it. I imagined eager, over-worked students sitting on the floor of a conference room with Roger’s files spread across the floor, poring over every detail as they drank coffee and debated the evidence. I also imagined their thrill and then disappointment when they visited with him in prison and discovered he wasn’t the monster they had pictured at all, but an ordinary old white man who had aged drastically in prison.

  I knew this because I occasionally looked up his identification picture on the state prison website. It was retaken annually, and if you could have lined up his photos side-by-side, you would see a dramatic change in his face between years ten and seventeen. In my opinion, that’s when he lost hope,
gave up and got old.

  I had visited Roger when I was a little girl. It was an arrangement the family court had worked out with Belle. She would take me to see Roger once every three or four months. I remembered we would sit on uncomfortable orange plastic chairs in a loud, drafty room. I would sit across from Roger, and he would hold my hand. Belle would always slip something to him beneath the table in a plastic bag, that he would then in turn hand to me on top of the table as if he had gotten me a gift. It was always something small, a trinket—candy, a tiny stuffed animal, a miniature slinky, a colorful bouncy ball, a mini-kaleidoscope. I knew Belle had brought the gift for me, but I always tried to pretend I was surprised and thankful. This made Roger happy, and at that time I was still interested in making him happy.

  I didn’t really know why Roger was in prison. I just knew he wasn’t coming home for a long time. Belle didn’t tell me why he was there, and I was afraid to ask. Somewhere deep down inside, I think I probably knew it had something to do with what happened to my mother, but I never went as far as imagining that he had hurt her. I told myself she fell and that’s how she died, but that Roger got in trouble for not calling the ambulance right away. I had another scenario where Roger left the door unlocked, thus endangering her, and that a burglar must have slipped in and killed her while I was sleeping. I went back and forth between the different versions of the story, never casting Roger as a murderer.

  Thankfully, life with my grandmother was good. I felt safe in the small extra bedroom at her cozy ranch house. She wasn’t much of a cook, but because it was just the two of us, we ate out a lot. She let me eat whatever I wanted to. I was picky, so when we did eat at home, she gave me all my favorite white foods—mashed potatoes, apple sauce, bananas, and cheese. Most importantly, Belle never judged me and she supported me completely, which allowed me to grow into a confident young woman, something that seemed unlikely given my past.