by James Renner
Swanton is home to a surviving tribe of Abenaki Indians, part of the Algonquin people. A group of Abenaki known as the St. Francis–Sokoki band tried to organize a tribal council here but have not yet been formally recognized by the federal government. There are not many Abenaki left. In the early 1900s, the State of Vermont forcibly sterilized members of their community and terminated the pregnancies of 3,400 Abenaki women. Some would call that genocide. This happened in America, less than a hundred years ago.
Oh, and there’s a monster in the lake. Locals call it Champ, or Champie. The Abenaki knew it as Tatoskok. Some believe the animal is a living dinosaur—a plesiosaur, to be exact.
The Abenaki believe our universe is a dream and that words have souls.
This is where Kathleen ended up, living out of a run-down trailer with a man named Harold St. Francis, a descendant of the Abenaki chief. One night in 2011, St. Francis fought with Kathleen and the cops were called. The police who responded were from St. Albans, the nearest sizable community. During the search of their trailer, officers found marijuana plants growing in plastic buckets. They arrested both of them. St. Francis was charged with domestic violence. Kathleen got pinched for cultivation and violation of “pre-trial conditions of release,” which meant she had a separate criminal case pending at the time.
She was busted again, a year later, this time for driving drunk on a suspended license. Kathleen’s blood-alcohol level at the time of her arrest was .352. That is the highest BAC I’ve ever heard of. Anything over a .3 carries the risk of death from alcohol poisoning. At that level, you’ve gone beyond the point of memory blackout. You will lose control of your bladder whether you like it or not. And you may just stop breathing altogether. A woman Kathleen’s size would have to drink ten beers in less than an hour to get that drunk.
The only person I know who drank like that was my grandfather. He used to come home after work and polish off a twelve-pack, one after the other, until it was all gone. It kept his conscience quiet.
As surprised as I was at the depth of her problems, it fit with the stories I had heard. A national television producer once told me that Kathleen was “blackout drunk” when they interviewed her. A cop in Hanson said she and her mother were alcoholics and the rest of the family were “heavy drinkers.”
Remember that “fearful symmetry” stuff? Well, here was a doozy. The other woman who disappeared in 2004, Brianna Maitland, worked as a waitress in St. Albans. Brianna had been mixed up with the local drug scene when she vanished. And here was Kathleen, mixed up in the St. Albans drug scene, too.
FORTY-THREE
The Zaps
I stopped taking my meds at the beginning of February. I didn’t flush the remaining pills down the toilet, nothing dramatic like that. I had been on Cymbalta for three and a half years and it was time to come off it and see if my body had learned to produce the correct amount of serotonin it needs to regulate my mood. “It’s like priming a pump,” my psychiatrist, an older Indian man, explained to me. “If we take you off slowly, your body will adjust. It will begin producing the chemicals you need to be well-balanced and happy again.” I had already stepped down from sixty milligrams to thirty. And at the beginning of February, I stopped completely.
I understood that I would experience withdrawal. I understood that on an abstract level. I prepared myself for some physical discomfort, but I wasn’t really worried.
The first few days after quitting, I experienced unfamiliar clarity. I was suddenly hyperaware of the moment, of the passing of time, of my thoughts and emotions. It was like coming awake after a surgery. I began to have vivid, frightening nightmares. I dreamt I drove to my grandfather’s house and shot him with the gun he keeps under his bed. I had the kind of dreams that are so terrible you wake up thinking they’re real and that your life has changed for the worst and then you remember it was only a dream and you thank God for that.
About three days in, the zaps started.
The best way I can describe the zaps is that it feels like your soul keeps slipping out of your body, the way a bum vertebra can slip out of alignment with your spine. It felt like an unhinging. Except, this was in my head. And when I say it happened in my head I don’t mean that I was imagining it. I mean, physically, this was happening under my skull. It was like someone was reaching into my brain and shocking my frontal lobe with a 9-volt battery.
This started when I was in the car, and it seemed to be connected to the use of my peripheral vision. Whenever I looked at something out of the corner of my eye—ZAP! I thought I might be having a stroke on Route 8, southbound. It was unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as what came next: the crying. The uncontrollable crying.
Commercials are the fucking worst. There was this one where a kid brings his father a box of Cheerios and explains that he should eat this cereal because he wants his dad to be around for a long, long time and Cheerios will help his heart. Yeah. Like a baby, I cried. Songs on the radio: “Fooling Yourself,” by Styx. “Blackbird.” Anything by the fucking Eagles. Oh, but I loved it. I loved the cries. For years, I had never felt so emotional, so out of control of my feelings. It felt good to cry. It felt good to feel. But it was also scary. Like drinking a cold beer at the end of a hot day after being sober for three years.
Speaking of drinking, I was drinking more. At the time, it didn’t register. But in hindsight, I see how I replaced the Cymbalta with booze. I drank every night. Beer, at first. Miller Lite. Yuengling. Quickly, though, I switched to liquor. I was partial to Bulleit Rye. I kept a bottle of vodka in the freezer. After Julie fell asleep on the couch I would get drunk and stream Doctor Who.
About two weeks in, the last of the Cymbalta filtered out of my system and I had a panic attack. I knew, even while it was happening, that this was the last of the withdrawals, my subconscious mind’s last attempt to get me to feed it the meds again. It was like the breaker waves around a deserted island, keeping the castaway trapped, the last barrier to the free, empty sea. I sent Julie to her parents’ with the kids overnight. I felt dangerous. I went to a movie and sobbed in a dark theater, then went home and drank myself into oblivion. In the morning, my head pulsed with a brown hangover and I felt better.
I was ready to be a good husband and father again. Except that’s not how things worked out.
FORTY-FOUR
Silver Linings
It’s hard to reconcile my life, how it got so strange while I was deep into the Maura Murray case and going off psychotropic drugs. But here’s a for instance: The day that Bradley Cooper was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in Silver Linings Playbook, people from his company, along with a screenwriter and a veteran team of producers, walked into Warner Bros. and pitched my novel, The Man from Primrose Lane. Deals were made.
It felt like a deus ex machina, like whoever was in charge of the story of my life had gotten lazy and written in a foolish happy ending. It reminded me of that moment in Return of the King where Frodo and Sam are about to burn to a crisp on Mount Doom and there’s nothing they can do and no one around to save them and then all of the sudden Gandalf flies in on the back of some eagle and saves the day. That’s a deus ex machina. It’s the writer stepping in and resolving something the characters can’t resolve for themselves.
Success really fucks with me. I never trust it. It makes me paranoid. When my book was purchased, I went into a depression for a month. Why? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it has something to do with proving my worth, that if someone thinks I have a modicum of talent, I now have to prove it to them by doing it again. Except, deep inside, I know I’m just a parlor magician, a hack writer who pulled the wool over their eyes just long enough to get a little money out of them. When the Warner Bros. deal happened and my agent explained to me that I would be getting a half-million dollars the day they started principal photography, the first thing I did was picture myself jumping off the Y-Bridge. Let me die for chrissakes before they figure out they wasted all that money.
I
was failing as a dad, too. This was becoming obvious.
Casey had been tossed out of his anchor school and was now enrolled at a school for the “behaviorally challenged.” More and more often, he was spending time in the “support room.” The support room is a section of the school set up like a jail pod: two padded rooms that open into a common area with a bench. The rooms have locks. Now, I can feel some parents cringing. Jail cells in public schools? But we’re talking inner-city Akron. And this is their behavioral school. The kids are here because they are a danger to other students. In a typical K-12 setting, a kid acts the way these kids do, they’d be sent to juvie. I think most parents would prefer to send their kids to the support room for ten minutes instead of juvie jail for a night. There’s a cop on duty at all times, to protect the teachers.
That being said, every time I heard Casey was in the support room, I’d get angry. Angry at his teachers for putting him in there and not being able to deal with a goddamn kindergartener, angry with Casey for not acclimating to school, to life.
Time-outs didn’t work anymore. There was nothing left. So we went back to spanking.
I should have known how he’d react; it’s what I did, after all. When I spanked Casey, he found that calm place I had discovered. That calmness on the other side of rage. I would spank him and then he’d smile. He’d fucking smile at me and say, “That didn’t hurt,” like he was a young Giles Corey.
We fed off each other’s madness, two mirrors facing each other, an endless loop of anger. Each day he got worse and so did I. How far could we push each other to get some kind of reaction? Never mind that he was five and I was thirty-five. I couldn’t let him win. I couldn’t give him that control.
One night at the end of February, he threw water in my face and I spanked him. “That didn’t hurt,” he said, smiling. So I spanked him, harder. And he cried. And a bit of my heart broke.
I went back on the Cymbalta and never spanked my kid again. Fuck it. I’d rather I spoil him more and have him end up in juvie because I wasn’t hard enough on him as a kid than risk hurting him. As my highs and lows were cut off by the drugs again, Casey started doing better at school. He stopped fighting with us. My calmness was infecting him, just as his rage had infected me.
I am the potential cancer in my son’s genetic code. I am a decent man. But I could have gone the other way. If my mother had not shown me kindness, I could have been really dangerous. I feel it in my bones. And let’s not beat around the bush: These mysteries I write about, they serve a very specific purpose, don’t they? They fulfill an obsessive need to understand violence, a compulsion to hunt. I hunt the bad guys. But, if things had gone just a bit differently …
I have to make sure Casey becomes a decent man. And if pills help, so what?
Sometimes a deus ex machina is a pill.
J. R. R. Tolkien didn’t care that some critics viewed his eagles as bad writing. He knew enough about the world, the violent world of wars and murder, to know that there is always hope. He even had a word for it. Here’s how he explained it:
“I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears. And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth; your whole nature, chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back.”
FORTY-FIVE
Confrontations
Julie Murray is a spook, but she was easier to find than Kathleen. After graduating from West Point, Maura’s older sister got a job at Booz Allen, a defense contractor recently in the news for having employed Edward Snowden. The NSA contracted with Booz Allen for a series of clandestine jobs involving the mass surveillance of American citizens. Snowden blew the whistle, alerting the general public to this Orwellian invasion of privacy, and has been on the run ever since. By 2013, Julie Murray was working as an executive officer for the Department of Defense. I found her living out of a modest apartment not far from Booz Allen’s headquarters, near D.C.
This was near the end of March. I had decided to return to New England to interview Maura’s close friends and family, the ones who never returned my messages. Many of them had gone to great lengths to hide their home addresses. But my good friend Mike Lewis, who runs Confidential Investigative Services, one of Cleveland’s top private eye agencies, tracked them down for me. Julie was first on my list.
Her apartment was in a historic three-story with a state-of-the-art intercom system. As I arrived, an older woman who lived in the complex invited me in. I climbed the stairs to Julie’s apartment. I knocked. Heavy footsteps walked to the door but the door did not open. I listened. A television played softly in the background. Then, from the other side of the door came a low growl, the sort of guttural growl only very large dogs can make. It sounded like a mastiff or something. Quickly, I walked back down to the lobby and sat on a bench. I figured I’d wait a bit to see if Julie or her boyfriend walked by. It was just after five on a Friday afternoon.
I didn’t have to wait long. The back door opened a half hour later and Julie came inside, followed by a tall, well-dressed black man.
“Julie?” I asked. “Julie Murray?”
“Yes?” She was immediately apprehensive and her companion stepped in front of her.
“I’m James Renner,” I said, extending my hand. “I’d like to ask you a couple questions about Maura.”
She shook my hand before the name really registered, then she pulled her hand back, quickly. “How did you get in?”
“A neighbor let me in.”
“Who?” the black man asked.
I shrugged.
“How did you find out where we live?” he asked. “We’re unlisted.”
God, his voice sounded familiar.
“I found it from your voter records.”
“Bullshit,” he said.
The man on the telephone! He sounded exactly like the man who had called me years ago, when I was just beginning to look into Maura’s disappearance, the guy who’d called me and said there was information that should be released. He had promised to get his girlfriend to call me, but I’d never heard from either of them again. Was it him?
“I just want to ask a couple questions,” I said. “I tried to contact you on Facebook. I left messages.”
“That was four years ago,” she said.
Jesus. Four years. “Was it really that long ago?”
She nodded.
“Julie, what was Fred doing in Amherst the weekend before Maura disappeared? He wasn’t really there to help Maura look for a car, was he? What was he doing there with four thousand dollars in cash?”
“Don’t,” the man said. “Don’t say anything.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“This is all going to end up on your blog,” Julie said.
“You need to leave,” the man said. “I’m going to go get my dogs if you don’t leave.”
“Why won’t you let her talk? You can see she wants to say something.”
“I’m an attorney,” he said.
“Good to know.” I turned back to Julie, who was now looking back and forth at us, as if she was waiting to see who would take the first swing.
“I can tell you exactly why my dad was there,” she said.
“Julie,” the man shouted. “Don’t say anything more. Don’t say another word to this man.”
“I told the police,” she offered. “I told the police everything. But I don’t think I could tell you. It’s an open investigation.”
“Help me out, Julie,” I said.
“Get out of here or I’m calling the police,” the man said.
“Okay, do that,” I said.
“I can tell you, finding my sister is still the number one priority,” Julie said. “That’s number one. Nothing else matters. None of that other stuff matters.”
“What other stuff?”
“I don’
t like the things you’ve written about my father.”
“Julie!” the man said.
“What things?”
“Was my father a hard-ass? Yes. Did he drive us hard? Yes. Is he the best father a girl could have?” She paused. Then said, “Yes.”
“Julie,” the man said. He put a hand on her back and directed her to the stairs.
“I’m calling the police,” he said.
* * *
My next stop was Sara Alfieri. Sara had hosted the dorm party the night Maura wrecked her father’s car. She had never returned my e-mails or calls. Sara keeps an unlisted number and lives in the greater Boston area, where she works as a staff accountant for TripAdvisor.
It was dark by the time I knocked on her door. Her response when I introduced myself was complete shock. I have never seen someone react so viscerally to a drop-in, and I’ve dropped in on serial killers. She blanched. “How did you find me?”
“What happened the night of the party, Sara?”
“I can’t talk about that!” she yelled. She slammed the door. I left my number, but she never called.
It was what I expected, but I am still confounded by the way Maura’s friends and family have shut out the media. This is a missing-persons case. Most families of a missing person would kill to have this kind of attention. Not the Murrays. Not Maura’s friends. At some point, you have to start asking, Why?
FORTY-SIX
“Drunk and Naked”
The next day, I popped in on two of Maura’s childhood friends, Liz Drewniak and Katie Jones. In both cases, their husbands came to the door and told me that the women didn’t have anything to say. They were nice enough about it. Liz, her husband told me, is trying to distance herself emotionally from Maura Murray’s disappearance and its aftermath. Katie had just returned from the hospital and was laid up in bed with the new baby. Months later, I received a brief e-mail from her: