Ride Away Home

by William Wells

  Shuffling along in handcuffs and ankle shackles, he led a team of FBI agents and Wisconsin State Patrol officers to the site. Vernon Douglas was there, too. When Hope’s body was found, it was transported to the Dane County Medical Examiner’s Office and identified by dental records on file with the police department. Hope had a wisdom tooth extracted by a Madison dentist, who forwarded a copy of her record to the police after he learned about her disappearance. Vernon Douglas added the record to Hope’s file.

  When I didn’t answer Vernon’s calls to my house or cell phone, and did not return voicemail messages, and Douglas could not otherwise locate me, having learned from my law firm that I was no longer employed there, he called Pete Dye, whom he’d gotten to know during the investigation.

  When Pete told me that Cutler had confessed to Hope’s murder, I asked for the details.

  “I’ll tell you if you insist,” Pete responded, “but please don’t.”

  Pete is a good man, so I didn’t. He later provided one final report to me about Slater Babcock. He sold his bar and left Key West for parts unknown. I do regret what he’s been through, being a suspect in a murder case, and then that boat ride with Edward and me. I thought about calling him to apologize, but I delayed that call until Pete reported that he was gone.

  Because of all the news coverage, Slater must know about Lyle Cutler, and Hope, and the other girls. Maybe he left because he was bored with Key West. But I wouldn’t blame him if he wanted to make certain that Edward Hollingsworth could never find him again, even though it’s been proven that he’s an innocent man—or at least innocent of the murder of my daughter. Maybe, wherever he is, he dreams about swimming with sharks.

  22

  At eight o’clock on a chilly April Saturday morning, under a cloudless sky, I’m sitting on a patio chair in the backyard of our Edina house, wearing one of my lawyer uniforms: a navy blue pinstriped suit, white shirt, red tie, and black tasseled loafers. Birds are chirping their morning songs. Water droplets on the lawn glisten in the sunshine.

  Jenna comes out of the house, looking great in a black silk suit, white blouse, black heels, and a pearl necklace and earrings. She is carrying two steaming mugs of coffee. She hands one to me and sits in the other chair.

  “We’ll get through today,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  “Really, we will, Jack.”

  “I know …”

  And, at that moment, with Jenna beside me, I do know that we will.

  THREE DAYS after arriving home, I went to The Sanctuary and told Jenna about Hope. I’d spoken by phone to her doctor first, and he told me that, in his opinion, Jenna could handle the news, and was ready to go home, as long as she made an appointment with a psychiatrist in Minneapolis he recommended, and continued her course of medication, modified as appropriate over time. All that was necessary was for Jenna to decide she was ready to leave The Sanctuary, he said.

  We sat on a wooden bench beside a large pond as I told her what had happened to our daughter. We hugged, and cried together. Then Jenna told me a story.

  A couple weeks before my visit, she was sitting on this same wooden bench when she was startled by a voice behind her: “Hi, Jenna, mind if I join you?”

  She turned to see another patient, Gerald Manville, standing there. He was wearing pajamas and a robe, with bare feet, and was unshaven. She’d never seen him like that before; he had always been well-dressed and clean-shaven.

  “Please do, Gerald,” she replied. “This is such a peaceful spot.”

  Gerald was a man about her age, Jenna told me, who was a professor of art history at Dartmouth, and a painter. I noticed that Jenna spoke of him in the past tense. She didn’t know why he was at The Sanctuary. Patients never talked to one another about their particular maladies. It was considered to be too sensitive a subject, and, she said, impolite.

  She didn’t know if he was married, or if he was straight or gay; she felt she might be stereotyping him because he is, or was, an artist. He was tall, and thin as a fence post, with an angular, off-kilter face that suggested a Picasso painting. He was intelligent and charming.

  Once, he invited her to his room to see his paintings. She reflexively said a polite no, not knowing if it was art or sex he had in mind, and he never asked again, so she didn’t know how good a painter he was, or if the résumé he’d recounted to her was real. Maybe he was a housepainter. Didn’t matter, she liked him.

  Gerald took a dinner roll out of the pocket of his robe and began tossing crumbs toward a squirrel that was sitting on its haunches, watching them.

  “So, Jenna,” he said, “another day in the cuckoo’s nest.”

  Then he tossed the rest of the roll to the squirrel, stood up, sighed, and walked into the lake.

  “By the time I was able to alert the staff, it was too late,” Jenna told me. “Back in my room, I looked into the bathroom mirror, and said, ‘I am not like that. I will not be like that.’ ”

  And at that moment, Jenna said as we sat by the pond, she knew she could go home soon. She was thinking about just showing up to surprise me when I called to say I was coming for her.

  “YOU KNOW, I’ve been thinking about Edward Hollingsworth,” Jenna says as we sit together on our patio. I told her all about Edward on the flight home from The Sanctuary, and, during our first days at home, about everything else that happened in Key West, and during my trip down there.

  “Maybe he was Hemingway’s ghost,” she says as we sit in the backyard with our coffee. “Or maybe a guardian angel sent to help you, taking that particular human shape because it was Key West.”

  “I like to think that he was one of those, and not just some delusional Looney Tunes,” I say. “He helped me more than I can say.”

  “Do you remember that old song we liked?” Jenna says. “About how Oz never gave anything to the Tin Man he didn’t already have?” She squeezes my hand. “That guy didn’t teach you anything about being a man you didn’t already know. I wonder where he is now.”

  I look up at the window of Hope’s room, as if expecting to see my daughter’s smiling face through the glass.

  “Before Pete Dye and I drove to Miami, I stopped at the marina to say good-bye. His boat was gone. The dock master said he paid his bill that morning and left. He told me Edward shows up every year or so, stays awhile, then just disappears. He gave me a note from him, handwritten on stationery from the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. It said that if I ever wanted to get in touch with him, just put a note in a bottle and drop it into any body of water that flows to the sea, and he’ll get it.”

  “I love that,” Jenna says. “And I believe it.”

  Three deer, a doe and two spotted fawns, wander into our yard and pause.

  “Look at that,” Jenna says. “A family.”

  SO DID I accomplish anything by riding from Edina to Key West on a motorcycle? More accurately, on two motorcycles and in a rental car? I’ve concluded that, even though fate had already dictated the result of my hunt for my daughter’s killer, I’m glad I did make the trip because I learned some valuable things I didn’t know, after fifty-two years on the planet:

  When overcome by self-doubt, and feeling lost, it’s important that you do something, even if you discover later that it wasn’t exactly the right thing.

  Motorcycles are fun, but there is a trade-off between the exhilaration of the ride, and the possibility that you could, at any moment, be killed or injured. So the best way to enjoy it is to achieve a state of denial.

  Never be tempted to own a bed-and-breakfast, unless you’re married to a woman like Marissa Kirkland—and, even then, don’t.

  Student life at the University of Wisconsin, as at all schools, renews itself each fall with a new crop of students; past tragedies do not live on in the collective consciousness. True about life in general.

  Do not pick up hitchhikers, especially pretty young girls.

  Not all motorcycle gangs are what they appear.

  Savannah
is a lovely city, worth another visit, if only for the food at Mama Sally’s.

  Daytona Beach during Bike Week is not worth another visit.

  They mean it when they say that the professional drivers section in a truck-stop restaurant is for professional drivers only.

  On the road, you can encounter random acts of kindness, as well as sudden violence, same as off the road.

  The bad part about being fired from Hartfield, Miller, Simon & Swensen is not my former partners’ lack of appreciation for all the hours of my life I gave to the firm. It is that I took those hours from my family.

  People mainly do not change, only their circumstances do.

  Travel for purposes of self-renewal should be fully deductible.

  You can forget, for varying intervals of time, about most any problem you might have. But when your child dies, you never forget that, even for a moment.

  And sometimes, to get home, you have to ride away from home.

  THE SERVICE for Hope is at First Lutheran Church in Edina, the Reverend Lars Johansen presiding. Jenna and I attended Sunday services at First Lutheran just often enough to maintain our status as “social Lutherans,” meaning that we came on Advent Sunday, Christmas Eve, Easter, and one other Sunday every month or so.

  I’ve always considered church membership analogous to belonging to the right clubs in terms of business networking. But now I understand that, for many people, being part of a congregation comforts them and helps them get through hard times.

  In attendance today are friends and family, many of whom have come from out of town, as well as Pete Dye, Vernon Douglas, all of my former law partners who were available, whom I welcome warmly and with gratitude, and, representing the Boston chapter of the Devil’s Disciples, Harold Whittaker and Langdon Lamont. The other remaining Disciples had commitments they couldn’t break, but sent their condolences, and generous donations to a charity we had named in lieu of flowers, a scholarship fund at the University of Wisconsin endowed in our daughter’s name. Hank and Lauren Whitby are among the contingent of friends—Hank, the neighbor whose manly approach to life I’ve always admired. As I greeted him and thanked him for coming, he gave me a very firm handshake and said, “You’re a good man, Jack. I greatly admire how you handled all this.” That was nice. It was as if he were pinning a medal on my chest.

  Hope is here at the church, too, resting in a cherry wood casket set upon a rolling metal bier in front of the altar. The casket is closed of course, our poor sweet baby, her lovely face never to be looked upon again in this world. Sunlight streaming through a stained glass window illuminates a display of photographs of Hope showing her growing from infancy until she is nineteen years old, forever.

  Jenna and I do get through it: Reverend Johansen’s remarks about our family, the soaring choir music, words of remembrance from me, loving comments from Jenna, tearful readings of scriptures by Hope’s friends.

  On the way here, Jenna mentioned that maybe we’d like to start attending church regularly. I said yes, I think that would be nice. After all, I didn’t say, my prayer back in Key West has been answered. The Tanner family is back together again.

  AT CRYSTAL Lake Cemetery, Hope Tanner is interred in a grave located between two others; I’ve just purchased all three. An old live oak tree stands nearby. I wonder if a squirrel family lives in the tree. It should be raining, I think. I want lightning, rain, and thunder. A raging of the heavens. The day is too nice for this.

  The graveside service is unspeakably hard, as it must be when, in a fracturing of nature’s plan, parents lay a child to rest. I realize, sitting with Jenna in the front row of folding chairs, that this place, and not Key West, is the true end of my journey.

  I won’t say any more about it than that. If you haven’t been through such a horrible thing, I wouldn’t want you to suffer vicariously. If, God forbid, you have, I wouldn’t want you to relive it.

  When the service is finished, and all we mourners are walking toward our cars, on the way to our house for food and drink, I’m surprised to find that there is enough left of me to survive.

  Just enough. I’m running on fumes.

  Jenna seems to be holding up pretty well through all of this, though I don’t for the life of me know how. I’ve heard religious people say that God never gives you more suffering than you can bear. Jenna and I are going to find out if that’s true.

  23

  A perfect August morning in Edina. A moving van is pulling away from our Maitland Avenue house, with all our possessions, the accumulation of a family’s lifetime, so far, packed inside, as Jenna and I watch from the front porch, holding hands.

  I’ve gotten a job on the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School, my alma mater, to teach a course in tax law. The dean’s office had sent e-mails about the position to all graduates practicing tax law in the private and public sectors. I was one of thirty applicants, but the only one to have been editor of the law review. Aided by a strong recommendation from the managing partner at Hartfield, Miller, and perhaps, I suspect, also by knowledge about my family’s history, I was hired.

  At Jenna’s suggestion, I am keeping my hair longer than usual, but shorter than it was when I got home from Key West, and have kept the beard, now neatly trimmed. She said I look “more professorial” that way.

  Jenna has been doing well. We do not have “closure.” I can’t even comprehend what that word might mean to us. Jenna’s doctor in Minneapolis has recommended a colleague in Ann Arbor. A blessed if fragile optimism has returned to our lives, optimism that Jenna and I can find peace, and even a growing measure of contentment, as we soldier on through the coming years.

  Maybe that’s all anyone can hope for. Maybe that’s enough.

  It’s hard for Jenna and me to leave the home where we raised Hope, and have had so many good times, and treasured memories, but my unemployment and Jenna’s hospital bills have put a serious strain upon our finances, and it will be good to get a paycheck again. I’d always thought about someday leaving the daily grind of corporate law practice to teach, so I’m excited to begin my new job; academia will be my refuge.

  We’ve promised friends and neighbors we will return to visit. We told that to Hope, too, at the cemetery, early this morning. And someday, we told our daughter, we will come back to stay with her, forever.

  Of course, Hope will always be with us, wherever we are. When I got the law school job, Jenna and I flew to Detroit and drove a rental car, another Ford Taurus, to Ann Arbor. After three days of looking at houses with a real estate agent, a pleasant woman in her fifties named Harriett, we found a smaller version of our Edina house on a quiet street within walking distance of the law school.

  We knew before we went inside that it was the one for us. It is a three-bedroom, four-bath, white colonial, twenty years newer than our Edina house, with “great curb appeal and a highly desirable location for resale,” Harriett had said. It was owned by a university history professor and his wife; he got a job as department chair at the University of Pennsylvania. Open floor plan; remodeled kitchen with granite countertops and center island, and gas appliances; finished basement; attached two-and-a-half-car garage (room for a motorcycle, Jenna noted); a big backyard with mature trees, flower beds, and a white wooden arbor with flowering vines; walls of bookcases; and a U of M “Go Blue!” toilet seat in the first-floor powder room. All the right stuff for our new life.

  During our first tour of the house, we were up on the second floor, which has a spacious master suite, and two other bedrooms. Harriett led us through the master suite (remodeled master bath, his and hers closets) and then into the first of the other bedrooms, which, she said, was the larger of the two.

  “This one will be the guest room,” Jenna said. We followed Harriett back into the hallway and to the doorway of the third bedroom.

  “This one is smaller,” she said as she entered the room. “You could use it as another guest bedroom, or as a study. It has a nice view of that big oak tree
in the backyard, where a squirrel family lives.”

  Jenna had looked at me, smiled, put her arm through mine, and we headed for the stairway, leaving Harriett the realtor all alone in Hope’s room.

  THE DAY before we moved out of our Edina house, Jenna found me in the basement, unplugging the electric water heater. She was carrying a piece of paper from a yellow legal pad. She smiled and handed it to me. On it, she’d written, “Thank you for helping our family, Edward. We are all right now. If you get this note, please let us know that you are, too. Love, Jack and Jenna Tanner.” She had listed our new Ann Arbor address and my cell phone number.

  I knew what Jenna wanted to do with her note. She followed me upstairs and I located an empty wine bottle in the kitchen trash basket, the kind with a screw top. I rolled up the note, put it inside the bottle, and screwed on the top. Then we went into the garage, got into our car, drove to downtown Minneapolis, and turned onto a concrete bridge over the Mississippi River connecting the mainland with Nicollet Island.

  I pulled over and put on the emergency flashers. It was midafternoon, and there was no traffic on the bridge because there is not much to do on Nicollet Island. We got out and went to the railing. Jenna, who was holding the bottle, looked at me, the wind blowing her hair, and dropped it down into the river. It disappeared beneath the surface, then bobbed up and swirled around, trapped in an eddy. After a moment, the current took it and carried it downstream. Jenna and I stood there at the railing, my arm around her shoulder, and watched until it disappeared around a bend. Then we got back into our car and drove home.

  The Mississippi originates in Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota and flows 2,350 miles south through the center of the continent to the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, I didn’t expect that Edward Hollingsworth, if that is his real name, would ever notice the glint of sunlight on glass while trolling for billfish out in the Gulf Stream. But I like to think that he would not have to find that bottle with Jenna’s note in it to know that the Tanner family really will be all right now.