by Julie Kramer
“She’s so right,” I said.
I often use a similar tactic to get reluctant interviewees to open up. And how could I argue that Madeline should keep secrets from her mother but share them with me?
So I decided to keep my current destination secret from her. The last thing I needed was Mrs. Post contacting Mrs. Lefevre and shutting her down before I even reached the front door.
“It sounds like you and your mother don’t necessarily have to agree on everything, as long as you’re upfront about it.” I was testing to see if Madeline was still on board with my investigation into her fiancé’s disappearance.
“Absolutely, Riley,” she said. “I love her dearly, but if it was up to Mother I’d still be living at home.”
That didn’t sound like much of a life to me. After all, I’d met Mother. And while I didn’t need the mother of the bride’s cooperation for my story, the bride herself was essential.
“So we’re still cool then, right, Madeline?”
“Right. I’ve thought about this a lot over the last couple of days, Riley, and whatever reason Mark vanished, knowing can’t be worse than not knowing.”
That philosophy certainly made sense then. But at that moment, I had no clue how this story might unfold. So when I assured Madeline that her decision was sound and promised to tell her the truth, no matter what I discovered, I sincerely believed it was the best course.
nudged Malik awake as I pulled in front of Jean Lefevre’s small-town-cute floral shop, painted a variety of pastel hues. We left the camera gear inside the van so as not to spook her. Mrs. Lefevre bore _ no physical resemblance to her frizzy-haired missing son. With pink cheeks and white hair, everything about her was adorable.
I loosened her up by placing an order for a spring bouquet to be sent to Shep’s K9 partner, who was still in the hospital. Rarely can you ingratiate yourself with two sources in two stories in one swoop.
Mark hadn’t lived at home for years, but as his mom explained while expertly arranging tulips, daffodils, and other early blooms in a glass vase, they had never been out of touch for more than a few weeks.
“He was a good boy,” she said. I immediately noted she used the past tense. “You’re speaking like you think he’s dead,” I pointed out. “I do think he’s dead.”
No other theory made sense to her. Long past the point of worrying about embarrassing her son, she’d gone to the police a couple of weeks after the wedding fiasco, filed a missing person report, and gotten the runaround.
“They told me adults are entitled to privacy and big boys don’t need to check in with mommy if they want to take off.”
I must have smiled at her characterization of the police response because she felt compelled to defend it.
“Basically, that’s what they said,” she insisted as she tied a blue lace ribbon around the neck of the vase. “I tried calling the media, even your station, but nobody cared.”
I didn’t doubt her. Missing men don’t trigger immediate searches unless they’re vulnerable adults or there’s evidence of foul play. Neither existed in Mark’s case. And frankly, past experience tells cops that when men go missing, they’re often in Vegas.
I asked whether Mark might have taken his comedy act on the road. Maybe tested his talent on the Strip.
She shook her head. Only death would have kept him from his wedding. And besides, if he had an act going somewhere, he’d have called her to come and watch.
“He always said a friendly audience can spread laughter like the plague.”
She’d given the police a picture of him and a description of his Jeep. They told her they’d put out a license plate alert, so if the vehicle was stopped, the officer on the scene could make inquiries. If Mark was still missing after a month, they’d enter his name in a national register of missing persons. She called each month to check, but the police never had anything new to report. And she doubted they were doing any actual investigating.
“What did you think of him wanting to be a comedian?” I asked.
“I didn’t have a lot of patience for his dream,” she admitted.
Much of his life, she had to go around apologizing to people and telling them he didn’t mean it. Or make him go around apologizing to people and telling them he didn’t mean it. The problem was, in most cases, Mark did mean it. Reducing a target to tears seemed almost as fulfilling as garnering a belly laugh. Like the time the lunchroom cook cried after he climbed on a cafeteria table and read a list of top-ten Secrets About Hot Lunches.
While his early start seemed to indicate an attack comedian in the making, as he matured, his humor became less cruel and more sophisticated. But he could still crush a mother’s feelings.
Mrs. Lefevre stuck a card in the flowers and wrapped them in yellow tissue paper while explaining that her son had been a bright student, but dropped out of college after a year because he claimed it didn’t offer what he needed. He also wanted nothing more to do with the flower shop because he said girls would think he was gay. He could tell that remark hurt her, so he claimed to be joking. But that was another problem with Mark, it was hard to tell when he was serious and when he was joking.
What’s a mother to do with an aging, aspiring comic?
Then Mark met Madeline and she believed in his talent and he called her his muse and she asked him to marry her.
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “She proposed to Mark?” That scenario was very different from Madeline’s.
“Yes, that’s what he told me. He seemed elated, even relieved. Like he had wanted to pop the question, but didn’t quite dare.”
“And you were happy for him?”
She paused while wrapping plastic over the floral arrangement. I enjoyed watching her work and breathing the fragrant air inside her shop.
“Well, it was all very sudden and their worlds were quite different,” she said, “but maybe opposites do attract.”
She told us she needed to deliver these flowers and another bouquet to an assisted-living center on her way home after she closed up. I asked if we could follow behind her and stop in at her house and shoot some photographs of Mark. If she said yes, I planned on asking if we could also videotape an interview.
As I helped her carry one of the vases into the lobby of the assisted-living center, I asked about her son’s fiancée. She said she was fond of the girl, but didn’t really feel she knew her all that well.
Did Madeline love Mark?
“Desperately,” she said as we set the flowers on the front counter.
Desperately. I pondered the implications of that word as we walked back outside.
“Did Mark love Madeline?”
“I’m sure he did.” That sounded less definitive.
“You don’t sound so sure,” I responded.
“Mark loved opportunities.” She paused in front of her car as she searched her purse for the keys. “If an opportunity presented itself, he’d grab it and figure out the consequences later.”
That candid observation, from his mother no less, made me ponder Mark’s character and wonder if the consequences of marriage had only just occurred to him hours before the wedding.
Malik and I followed her car until she pulled into the driveway of a small white rambler with black shutters. Not surprisingly, her front yard was colored with crocuses and other spring blooms.
Somehow wedding talk turned to the mother of the bride and I got an earful of how snooty Mark’s mom considered Madeline’s mom. Her pet peeve: Vivian Post couldn’t be bothered to remember Jean Lefevre’s name.
“Whenever we met, I always had to remind her who I was,” she said. “Also she kept checking to make sure I knew to wear light gray, not dark, for the ceremony.”
She shrugged like whatever, and got out some photo albums for me to page through while she made coffee. I already had pictures of Mark and Madeline together, but needed some of him solo. I found one showing him swinging a golf club. In another he wore a high-school graduation cap and
gown. In both cases, his forehead was covered so I couldn’t see whether his scar was recent or old. Most of the album was filled with boring shots of visiting relatives sitting on couches or at the table trying to eat while some family shutterbug insisted on using up the end of a roll of film no matter who was still chewing.
In one of the more recent ones, Mark had his arm around a goth girl who certainly wasn’t Madeline. Black hair, pale face, uncertain smile. But Mark beamed at the camera.
Mrs. Lefevre identified her as Mark’s old girlfriend, and bingo, now I had a name and face for the other woman. Sigourney Nelson. Mrs. Lefevre even had a phone number.
I didn’t want to flat-out accuse her son of being a heel, so I casually inquired how serious things had been with Sigourney.
“Actually,” she explained, “I had expected them to get married.”
“Really,” I said. Now we were getting somewhere. Had Sigourney presented an opportunity to be grabbed? “Do you think there’s any chance he ran off with her?”
“I don’t think so. She was very grouchy when I called a few days later to ask if she’d seen Mark. She didn’t seem to believe me when I said he was gone. I left another message the following week, but she never returned my call.”
During much of our conversation, Mrs. Lefevre sounded as hardy as a perennial, but Malik and I soon learned she was actually soft as a pansy. Maybe it was because we had just looked at Mark’s baby pictures. Maybe it was because someone was finally taking her son’s disappearance seriously. Maybe it was because she had something to feel guilty about. Whatever the reason, when Malik brought the gear inside we discovered that, unlike the bride, the mother of the groom was not too tough to cry on camera.
“He would not go months without contacting me, his mama.”
We used the natural light from the window so she wouldn’t be distracted by too much television equipment and so we could get started while she was still emotional.
“I need to find him. Dead or alive. I need to find him.” I paused to admire her sound bite and replay it in my mind. Definitely a keeper.
“Do you think he might have killed himself?” The question bordered on insensitive, but still had to be asked.
“No, he had everything to live for. He was getting married. If he killed himself, where’s his body?”
Her point was valid. Suicides typically want to be found. That’s why so many do their dying deed in a familiar place like at home or in a garage, or a public place like a high bridge or tall building. Yet some suicides do go off into a wooded area for their final moments and aren’t found until months or years later when a hunter stumbles across their bones.
“Besides,” she said, holding up a gold cross dangling from a chain around her neck, “suicide is a sin.”
News organizations typically don’t cover suicides, unless the deceased is a celebrity like Kurt Cobain or takes others with him before turning the gun on himself like the Virginia Tech shooter. I did not want Mark to be a suicide or it would mean I did a whole lot of work for nothing.
“Was he involved in anything that might have caused him some trouble?” I continued. “Drugs perhaps?”
That was a firm no. But mamas might be the last to know if their little boys are using or dealing.
Then I thought of Mark’s scar and recalled another missing person case from the year before. A Minnesota man, gone for two weeks, found sleeping in a hail-damaged pickup at a Wisconsin truck stop. He had no idea who he was or how he got there. Months earlier, according to his family, he’d slipped in a bathtub, hit his head, and began to suffer periodic bouts of amnesia.
“When did Mark get his scar?” I asked. “Could his memory have been affected by a head injury?”
The question made his mother fidget, but she debunked my amnesia theory by telling me Mark got the scar in a childhood accident and never appeared to have any lasting effects.
I had another question that I knew would make her even more uncomfortable, which was why I saved it for last.
I asked her why she waited so long before going to the police.
She mumbled something about following the advice of the Post family.
“But this was your only son.”
“I know.” A tear dripped down her check. She made no move to wipe it. “But everyone said I would just embarrass Mark more.”
I didn’t have any trouble believing that Mrs. Post pushed to keep things quiet, though I figured her true motive was to avoid embarrassing her daughter, not her daughter’s fiancé. But right now, my reporter’s instinct told me that Mrs. Lefevre, if not lying, was definitely holding something back. I’d spent enough time with her in her flower shop that I had a good baseline on her normal behavior. Right now, her voice was high, her gaze evasive and she was tapping the floor nervously with her foot.
I repeated my original question. “Why did you wait so long before calling the police, Mrs. Lefevre?”
No answer. More tears.
“Time is everything in a missing person case, Mrs. Lefevre. Why did you wait so long?”
I stayed silent. Mrs. Lefevre hung her head like a wilted orchid. Finally she looked up and told me she didn’t go to the police right away because she had thousands of dollars in unpaid parking tickets.
ou were kind of hard on her,” Malik observed on the ride back. “At least she went to the police. That’s more than bridezilla did.” “I pushed her because I felt there was something to push for,” I said. “I still think there’s more she’s holding back.”
“We all have stuff we hold back.” He was punchy because I was making him drive while I made notes about our meeting.
“You too, Malik? You holding back on me?” My cameraman had seemed a little distant the past couple of days.
He didn’t answer as we passed the WELCOME TO MINNESOTA sign on the freeway. I didn’t say anything, either, because over the years I’ve learned that sometimes the best way to get a person to talk is to keep my own mouth shut.
We were approaching downtown St. Paul when he told me that he was disappointed I was suddenly so gung ho on the missing groom and didn’t seem to care much anymore about investigating meth.
“Meth?” I said. “I care plenty. It’s Noreen who put the kibosh on that project.”
“But if you really cared, Riley you wouldn’t care what she thought. You’d do it anyway. Like with the wedding dress.”
“I guess I didn’t know you cared so much about the meth problem, Malik.” He started paying extra-close attention to the traffic just then. “Do you want to tell me why?”
He didn’t look like he wanted to, but finally, while keeping his eyes straight ahead on the car in front of us, he started to speak softly.
“My sister was an addict.”
“Your sister? Which one?” I recalled him having three. No brothers, though.
“Hafsa. The youngest. She put our parents through hell.”
I didn’t have to ask for details. I’d covered addicts and their families enough to know what he meant. Crystal meth is the most addictive, most accessible drug on the planet and can turn good kids into trash. “You said she was an addict. Is she recovered now?”
“She’s dead.”
Now I was the quiet one. Fatal meth overdoses are rare. But addiction can lead into a dangerous world of violence, prostitution, suicide.
“She crashed her car while high,” he said.
“I’m so sorry.”
Sometimes “sorry” is all I can say. I was surprised that Malik had kept his pain to himself. The reporter-photographer dynamic can be the closest of all TV news relationships. We spend so much time together in a van, we see the best and the worst in each other and develop an us versus them alliance. One reporter I know calls her photographer the Husband She Doesn’t Sleep With.
“I’m so sorry.” I repeated my regret because saying it once didn’t seem enough. Twice didn’t do the job either. “I’m so very sorry.”
“Happened a year ago,” Malik
said. “I didn’t feel like talking. But lately, when you made noise about doing a meth investigation, I began thinking maybe that would help me get some perspective.”
“It would,” I agreed. “I’ll put it on my Stories Noreen Doesn’t Know About list and keep plugging away. We’ll find something to hang it on, Malik. I promise.”
For the first time since we began this conversation he took his eyes off the road, looked at me, and nodded. Once again, we had an us versus them alliance.
Then he went back to concentrating on the drive and I went back to making notes about our meeting with Mark’s mom. One detail I circled was the discrepancy over who proposed to who. I didn’t have enough information to confront Madeline. Yet. And if I pushed too hard, too soon, I might push her away.
Remarkably, that didn’t happen with Jean Lefevre, even though I bullied her to tears during the interview. I stopped writing and thought back to an hour earlier, on the other side of the river, while we were packing up the gear in the back of the van and she came outside.
I’d thanked her again and assured her I’d keep her posted on anything we might find about her missing son. I expected she had followed us to ask that we not air her tape or that we never set foot on her property again. Instead, she was apparently one of those people who feel freed by a good cry, and asked if we’d like to return another day and see any of Mark’s things.
Malik and I looked at each other. “What kind of things?” I asked.
She explained that Mark had one month left on his lease when he disappeared. The apartment came furnished. When the rent went unpaid, the landlord packed everything in boxes and put them in storage. She’d paid a considerable fee to retrieve the items. Now everything her son owned was stored in her garage. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to sort through the boxes.
All she could imagine were the memories; all I could imagine were the clues.