I had expected an answer much like this. I knew most parents were not privy to their nearly-adult children’s thoughts and dreams. Parents were fed a small diet of palatable stories and ideas. I doubted that Ronald would have ever spilled his entire life to his parents. “Did he mention any particular friends that I could talk to? I was hoping to recreate the last few days of his life and see if I could find anything that might explain his disappearance.”
“You’ve met Sylvia. I’m sure you met the R, Trevor. He had two friends in the dorm.” She named the other two people who were on the list that Professor Wallace had given me, the two guys who had not yet called me back.
“Anyone else?” I asked, practically telling her that I had those particular pieces of information. I was a little nervous in divulging that fact, since she could theoretically influence the information which came from those sources.
She named two more boys from the dorm. “Most of these guys were interviewed by the police and provided no usable leads. You can try them yourself, but don’t expect too much.”
“What about Sylvia? Was there anything that I should have asked her that the police neglected?”
The woman shook her head. “No, she was a friend of Ronnie’s but he didn’t share much with anyone, especially a girl. I have never met the person that Ronnie talked to in-depth. I don’t know if there just wasn’t anyone, or if he or she just has never felt a need to say what he was thinking at the time of his disappearance. It might not change anything, but it would be nice to hear what he or she had to say.”
I noticed the gender neutral pronouns again and wondered if she thought the same thing about her son. I wasn’t going to ask her about it though.
“What about faculty? Any of his professors that he was close to?” I felt like I was grasping at straws at this point, and I dearly hoped that Fisher’s mother would not see through my efforts.
“He was close to the wrestling coach, but he wasn’t wrestling in the summer and his eligibility had run out. So there wasn’t much reason for him to talk to the coach.”
I had a sickening feeling in my stomach. Something she had said struck home with me, and I knew I had some very fertile ground to dig up in the near future.
“When do you want the materials back?” I asked, trying to change the topic so that I would not give myself away. “I could probably have them back to you in a week or so.”
She waved a hand. “They’re thirty plus years old. If I wanted them, I wouldn’t have given them to you. Just call Sylvia when you’re done with them, and we’ll arrange to pick them up.”
I picked up the box and waited. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” I asked, thinking of what she’d told me.
“Yes,” she said as she turned on her heel. “Find the son of a bitch who took my son.”
“Do you think he’s still alive?”
“If you’re asking about the fact that he was declared dead a decade ago, that was my ex-husband’s doing. He and I split, and he wanted a way to get back at me. So he did it through Ronnie. He petitioned the court to declare him dead. He collected the life insurance money from Ronnie and enjoyed himself with it.”
I noticed that she still hadn’t answered my question. She’d only complained about the actions of others. She had told me that Ronnie kept his thoughts to himself, but I was seeing that he’d learned it from his parents. I thought about pushing her to learn more, but I was alone in an alley with the woman and had no desire to push her too far. I thanked her for the box and carried it back to the truck, stopping several times to catch my breath. I had to give it to Mrs. Fisher; she was still quite spry if she could haul these materials around town.
I opened the box when I got home. The contents consisted of three types of materials. The first was Fisher’s day planner, which I set aside for later. I’d heard other people suggest that a timeline of the events would be the most helpful thing. I wasn’t sure about that, since none of the other people had found Fisher using that technique. Still, I wanted to chart Fisher’s last week and then make some decisions on what had likely happened to him.
The second batch of materials was his books from that summer. They were all related to his business major, so the contents were all various aspects of the business world. He’d been taking a business law class from Professor Wallace during that last term, so I found and opened that book first.
The book had cracking hinges and a layer of dust on it. I blew away the dust and carefully opened the pages. The book was remarkably similar to one I used when I took a law class from Wallace. I knew that the impact of previous precedence on law was unlikely to change, but I’d had to learn newer cases as well.
The book was barely touched. Fisher, or someone else if he’d purchased it used, had highlighted parts of one chapter and a few lines of another. I was fascinated by the study habits of another student. I rarely got to glimpse into the book of my cadre at school, so this felt slightly intrusive. I flipped through the rest of the book but the pages were pristine.
I wondered more about the type of student Fisher had been. He’d been active in sports, which had likely impinged upon his study time and group work. He would have not had time to dive deep into the books.
I had received a transcript of Fisher’s grades from Professor Wallace. I had thought the document’s inclusion in the file to be more than a little intrusive, and I wasn’t sure of its legality either. However, the grades had been average, but not stellar by any means. Did all of this mean that he was not going to find a job once school was finished?
I found the two books from his classes during the first part of the summer session. They were covered in highlighted text. I wasn’t sure what had changed between the two terms but during the law class, Fisher had become a lackadaisical student. I had seen students suffer from senioritis, but I didn’t think Professor Wallace’s class was the place to get lax.
I started going through his notebooks and folders. Two of the folders were completely blank. I stopped to think about what that meant. The shorthand version was that no one had actually taken the time to go through these writings before. The empty books had sat here for years, and in all that time, no officer or family member had checked to see if there was a clue in the notebooks in regard to his disappearance.
Of course, I knew it was highly unlikely that Fisher would have left detailed notes to himself about the disappearance for others to find. If he had deliberately disappeared, he wouldn’t be dumb enough to jeopardize his escape by leaving a map pointing to himself.
Even so, I still had a tingle in my fingers when I opened the book. The first one was only telling in that many pages of the spiral bound notebook had been ripped out, leaving the white confetti trapped inside the wire. I wondered what had become of so many pages. Probably half of the notebook had disappeared, meaning that 100 pages of paper had been used on something.
Sadly, he had probably just used them to make paper footballs or origami swans. I knew the chances of finding something in the box were slim, but I was in the mood to analyze each thing that I’d found.
For my purposes, the paper could have been used for notes of some sort. Notes to a friend about his plans, or notes to a possible lover about their secret relationship. These pages could represent some detail that I had not found out yet about him.
Fortunately, his mother had packed pencils, and I found one that still had a fairly sharp tip on it after 30 years. I’d seen in an old movie where you could color over the paper beneath a note and bring up part of the text, since the words had been impressed on the paper below. What would my generation do now that we used email, texts, and other social media to communicate? These old-fashioned methods would be useless.
Since the case was closed, there was no chance of me destroying evidence in an investigation, so I began slowly coloring over the middle of the page.
A few lines of text came up as I did. I colored the rest of the page, but large gaps of text were not visible.
> It read:
Sweetheart,
I can’t wait to see……. after tonight….
Professor Wallace………….legal case……
won’t be long now…….
Ronnie
. The case would have been ripped wide open, if he’d only used a person’s real name instead of an endearment. I couldn’t fix that, but it frustrated me to be so close to some answers, only to have more questions arise.
Presumably the first sentence was that he could not wait to see her, or him. The mention of tonight was chilling. It was the first solid clue that Ronnie had something planned. Of course, there was no way to determine when that note had been written, but of course, I wanted it to be a clear clue to a premeditated disappearance.
The professor’s name made me wonder again how much he knew. It was hard to conceive that a faculty member would be mentioned in a sweetheart note, but it was here. Presumably the legal case dealt with the class Ronnie was taking, but since I didn’t know which case he was referring to, I couldn’t make many inferences based on a fragment.
However, overall the note had enough holes in it that I couldn’t piece together any complete sentences after that. Mostly the note was suggestive, but it would never hold up in a court of law. I had more questions that I needed answers for.
Yet looking at the notebook again, I knew that Fisher had been using this notebook for notes to a sweetheart. Presumably the recipient had kept the notes or knew enough about them that they should have been given to the police when the initial investigation was going on. The recipient had deliberately held back these notes from the police for some reason.
If their plan had been to run away together, then why had no other person been declared missing? That meant that Fisher had left by himself. I would have to ask the other people if anyone had seemed especially broken up about the disappearance. That might help me find out who else had been involved.
So I had found out information that added more questions to the list, but had answered nothing. Fisher had been dating someone in the summer, since the notebooks were with the ones that had been used over the summer.
After the exciting discovery with the first notebook, I took my time and leafed through the rest of the spiral-bound materials. In two were detailed notes about the classes that Fisher had taken in the previous term. Just like last time, the notebook for the business law class with Professor Wallace was nearly empty.
He’d written down a few docket numbers or codes that resembled docket numbers. It had been too long since I had taken business law, so I texted Professor Wallace, asking him to look up what cases Fisher had thought it imperative to write down.
I went back to the notebooks, but there was nothing else in them that even looked marginally suspicious. They were straightforward notes regarding business classes. I understood why Wallace would want a former business major to investigate the disappearance. Having had many of the same classes, I was aware of the work involved and the types of notes and books that should have been around his dorm room.
I went back to the books again, remembering what I’d seen. Fisher had barely used the highlighter on the business law book. Only a few quick lines of text had been marked. Yet if I remembered correctly, the RA and Professor Wallace had both indicated that the evening of the disappearance, an uncapped highlighter had been found between the pages of the textbook.
The statement didn’t fit with what I saw in the book. He should have been more than halfway done with the class, but the only highlighted materials were in the early pages of the book. He hadn’t marked anything the night he disappeared.
Someone had called Fisher’s room “a stage.” I had considered to be hyperbole, but what if it had not been ? What if Ronald had used the materials at hand to make it look like he would return at any minute? One excellent way to do that would be to leave a highlighter open in the book. He hadn’t used a highlighter this session for business law, but Fisher had likely doubted that anyone would notice that.
Instead they would focus on the fact that he’d left the highlighter uncapped, which would dry out in a matter of a few hours. The whole effect had been done for its dramatic effect and not as a certainty that this was what happened.
Now I was getting excited. Of course this was not sufficient evidence to convince the police or a jury—I wasn’t even sure the note and the unhighlighted text would persuade Detective Danvers, but it might be enough for me to build on so that I could have a complete theory of what happened that night.
Now that I’d exhausted all the notebooks, I went on to the daily planner. I looked at the months leading up to Fisher’s disappearance. For an undergraduate, he had been a fairly type-A personality. He’d kept a detailed list of the things he had to do each day. Prior to the summer session, those days had been filled with wrestling, meetings for the dorm, and work groups. He had reduced the names involved to initials.
Despite the obvious help of knowing his routines, the calendar for the school year did little. I could definitely see the difference during the summer terms. He had the classes listed on each page. The first met every day of the week at 9:00 a.m., and the other at 3:00 p.m. I cringed thinking of how the entire day was taken up by the two classes. No wonder he’d been more nose to the grindstone during the first summer session.
As summer sprinted along, the classes switched for the second session. Fisher was down to one class, another early one, which meant he had the entire day free after that first class. He was done by 11:00 a.m. and he had noted different activities for each day of the week. He’d gone running, hiking, and more.
I came to the last day of his life, and the page stared back at me. The notation on the date was clear. He was to meet someone named EG on that date at the library to “study.”
Yet it was unlikely that Fisher had really gone to study. The textbook for the business law class was on his desk. It seemed unlikely that he had gone for a study session without the book he’d been reading all term. I grabbed the leather-bound folder that Wallace had given me about the disappearance and scanned through the names. One of the names listed in the book was Edwin Geier. I would have to try calling him again, since the planner suggested that they were studying.
What had the entry been for then? Had it been a hoax or a red herring of some sort? If the entry had been to make it look like one thing had been happening, what indeed had Fisher been doing? If the police had talked to the same people I was talking to, I was sure that they would have asked for the whereabouts of each witness. Geier certainly would have mentioned the detail that he’d been studying with Fisher.
Ronnie had marked the following day as a test day for the business law class, and I made a note to call Professor Wallace and ask him if there had really been an assessment of some sort that day. If there had been, I’d be more inclined to read the entry and believe it. If the test was a faked entry too, then I’d wonder why the elaborate ruse had been perpetrated. I did remember that Wallace had indicated that he’d missed turning in a paper, but this said “test” and did not mention the paper. It would be an odd coincidence to have both on the same day.
I decided to waste no time, and I called Professor Wallace. He answered on the second ring. “Maeve, how goes it?”
I explained that I was reviewing Fisher’s date planner and had come across a single entry to study at the library with an “EG” and had wanted to know more.
“No, we had a paper due that day. It was one of the things that made me concerned. Ron had been so close to completing the class. Why would he miss an important paper when he only had a matter of two to three weeks left in school? It seemed absurd to even think it.”
I had wondered about that. Would he have failed that class without the paper? Would his grades just languish in an incomplete status?
As if he’d read my mind, Wallace said, “You have a fixed period of time to complete a class after it ends. If the grade shows up as incomplete, then the student has six months to c
omplete the classwork and have the grade modified. Otherwise, it becomes a failing grade.”
“Could he have passed the class without that paper?”
Wallace cleared his throat. “Well, he could have without that paper, but he couldn’t have if he missed that assignment and everything that followed. If that makes sense. One grade wouldn’t hurt his grade too much, but missing every grade from that point out would have been too much. He received an incomplete for that class. The time to make it up had long since passed, and in fact, the degree had to be completed within five years of the final class taken.”
So that answered my questions. If Fisher had opted to leave that evening and not return, he’d be giving up on his college degree. If he had left that evening, it would be because whatever drove him couldn’t wait for three more weeks of schooling.
That was the part that baffled me most. Fisher’s motive to leave in a hurry suggested a strain or a pressure that could not be avoided immediately. However, I hadn’t seen any signs of any such strains in his life. The date planner and the notebooks suggested quite the opposite, a lifestyle that was winding down in favor of a new life that would come with the diploma.
“What about EG?” I asked again, noticing that no one really wanted to talk about Ron’s social life.
“As I’m sure you noticed, there’s an Edwin who is listed in the names of people in the dorm. I would guess that was who he was referencing.”
“Was Edwin Geier taking your class?” I asked.
“No, if my memory serves, Geier was in the teacher education program. So I’m not sure what they would be studying together. Fisher had one class, mine. I’m not sure what Geier was taking, but it wasn’t my class. I’m not sure what to tell you.”
“One of the witnesses said that Fisher was involved with a faculty member. Do you know anything about that?” I asked, wanting to cover all the loose ends at this point. However, I was aware that I was putting a large amount of faith in this man’s word: faith that he was telling the truth, faith that he’d created an analysis of the food trucks’ hours.
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