The Last Good Day of the Year

by Jessica Warman

  Maybe he finally realizes how upset I’m getting. He breaks away from my glare, looking at the floor and slumping like someone who’s blurted out something they immediately regret, but I bet he’s more relieved to have said it than anything.

  “Thanks, Remy. Why don’t you leave me alone, then?”

  He laughs. “Because you’re in my playhouse! Listen, Sam, what happened was hard for us, too. I know it was worse for you guys,” he adds quickly. “I know it was way, way worse for you, worse than we could ever imagine. I’m not saying anything different. But it’s not like we weren’t there that night.”

  “I know.”

  “And it’s not like your mom even has time to hang out with my mom. She’s always busy with Hannah. And you said she’s happy, so everything is okay. Right?”

  “I didn’t say she was happy.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. I didn’t answer you yet. But I will now. She’s not happy, Remy. She’ll never be happy. But at least now she doesn’t sleep for twenty hours a day. Now she doesn’t have to use prescription eyedrops because her eyes are so dried out from crying—crying every day for so many years that it’s starting to permanently affect her vision.”

  “Does Hannah know about Turtle?”

  “She’s only four, Remy.”

  “Does she know, Sam?”

  I pretend to be absorbed in a photo of Remy’s mom and Grandma Bitty together. Maybe I’m enjoying these pictures so much because we don’t have many old ones on display in my house. Before Hannah was born, my mom kept pictures of Turtle all over the place. Now they’re in a box in our garage somewhere. I can understand why she did it. When they were around the house, I went out of my way in order to not see Turtle’s face, until the day my mom finally packed them all away.

  “Look here,” I tell him. “See the locket your grandma’s wearing? It’s this one, isn’t it?” I hold up my necklace for him to see.

  He glances at it, disinterested, and then squints at the picture. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Do you think your mom will mind if I keep it? I haven’t asked her yet.”

  “She won’t mind. My grandma probably got the necklace at a yard sale. She loved buying junk.”

  “It’s not junk. It looks like real silver.”

  “You can keep it. My mom will neither notice nor care.”

  “Are you sure?” I hold it up by the long chain and watch the locket twinkle as it twists in the breeze.

  “Of course I’m sure. My grandma used to drive her crazy. She never wants to see most of the garbage down there again.”

  “It’s going to take me forever to finish.”

  “So? Do you have anything better to do with your time?” He smirks.

  “Thanks,” I say flatly.

  “I’m sorry. But I don’t get it: Why did you really come back?” he presses. “It would have been so much easier for you to stay in Virginia for one more year. Finish high school, go to college if you want … When I get out of here, I’m never coming back. Not for anything.”

  “I already told you, I couldn’t stay in Virginia. It wouldn’t have worked out.”

  “Because of that boy? What’s his name?”

  “Noah. But he’s not the reason.”

  “Then who is?”

  “Kate O’Neill.”

  This time, Remy is the one who winces. How could anyone not?

  “Yeah. That Kate O’Neill.”

  From the earliest stages of the trial, Steven made little effort to give the jurors a good impression of himself. He showed almost no emotion and kept his head down most of the time, avoiding eye contact, sketching on a legal pad. He’d shown talent for and interest in art since childhood, and had gotten quite good at portraiture over the years. Throughout the nine-day trial, he filled almost an entire sheet of paper with detailed drawings of Gretchen’s face. Sheriff Jeff Bates remembers seeing the pictures for the first time: “It was little stuff that you barely noticed until you took a close look. For instance, in one of them her earrings aren’t hearts as they seem but two-headed snakes eating through her earlobes. Or her eyebrows are crawling with centipedes. Her necklace is a noose of knotted rope; that kind of thing. My first thought from the moment I saw them was how much they reminded me of those Garbage Pail Kids. It was before I knew about the Garbage Pail card they found in his room, the Tabitha one. When I saw it in court later on, I just about threw up. I mean, maybe it’s a coincidence, but wow, kid. You sure know how to dig your own grave.”

  Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, p. 111

  Chapter Twelve

  January 1996

  Virginia

  Little Kate O’Neill was supposed to be in school the day a pair of teenagers found her body in the woods more than a hundred miles from where she’d gone missing. It happened like this: Kate was at church with her family on December 24 for the Christmas pageant. She’d been cast as one of the three wise men. She was sitting near the stage with the rest of her Sunday school class, waiting for services to end so the pageant could begin.

  She kept nudging her mother—who was also the Sunday school teacher—and complaining that she was too cold in her short-sleeved costume. Her mom told her to deal with it, but Kate continued to bug her, until her mom finally passed her the keys to the family minivan and sent her outside to get a sweater from the backseat. It was nineteen steps from the church doors to the parking lot and the O’Neills’ Dodge Caravan. She never got the sweater.

  Kate’s mother didn’t even notice that her daughter hadn’t returned until the pageant had already begun and she realized there were only two wise men lined up in the wings.

  Before their only child’s body was discovered, Kate’s parents went on television to beg for her life. They talked about the Christmas presents waiting for her at home, still wrapped and sitting under the tree. They said she was a sweet little girl who loved horses and ice-skating. She had a hamster named Midge. She was excited for the church carnival coming up in a few months because it fell on her birthday that year, so it was almost as if she were getting her own personal birthday festival. She wanted funnel cake instead of a regular birthday cake, they said; it was her favorite treat, and she only got the chance to eat it a few times each year.

  It might seem odd to some people, but it can help to share those kinds of little details about a missing person. In theory, it’s harder to hurt someone if you know them and recognize their humanity, if even only a little bit. Sometimes it works. Not this time.

  After confirmation came that the body the teenagers discovered was Kate’s, the press managed to leak two especially horrid details: her long red hair was gone, shaved all the way down to the scalp; and, much, much worse, her autopsy revealed her stomach to be full of undigested funnel cake.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Summer 1996

  Police don’t have any clue who killed Kate O’Neill, but at least they found her body. At least her family could lay her to rest with some semblance of dignity, which is probably more than Turtle will ever have.

  But our graves don’t last forever. Did you know that? After we die, our bones only belong to us for another hundred years; after that, the ground and everything within is available to the highest bidder. In today’s case, that bidder is a man named Francis Cane, owner and CEO of Cane Industries. He builds malls, and he believes the town of Erie, Pennsylvania, is long overdue for his services.

  The plot of land that Mr. Cane has in mind for his mall is mostly forest. The only structure still standing on the acreage is an abandoned Episcopal church. The land surrounding the church is all cemetery, but it hasn’t been an active burial ground since the early 1900s; it’s not as if anybody will have to deal with the thought of their dear aunt Margaret getting dug up after only a few months or years in the ground. Besides, nobody in their right mind would want that; it’s a recipe for a horror movie, or at least for an unpleasant experience for a few unfortunate bulldozer operators.

  Still, the loc
al historical society was not pleased with Mr. Cane’s plan to disturb the eternal slumber of so many souls. They filed a lawsuit against Cane Industries, only to learn that it is, in fact, perfectly legal to dig up a cemetery once its inhabitants have been dead for at least one hundred years. That’s all we get, people: one hundred years, and then our remains can be exhumed in order to provide the living with easier access to a Spencer’s Gifts.

  Even though what Cane Industries plans to do is perfectly legal, the public consensus is that it is, at the least, in poor taste—or so the plaintiffs claimed. The parties agreed to a compromise: instead of digging everything (and everyone) up, Tasmanian Devil–style, Mr. Cane and his people agreed to be a little more meticulous about the whole process and carefully excavate each grave and then transplant it to a separate parcel of land twenty miles south, essentially creating a new cemetery from all the old-as-dirt corpses. To sweeten the deal, Mr. Cane sponsored the new cemetery all by himself. As a result, the people of Erie get their mall (with a food court and a movie theater!), and their ancestors will continue to rest in peace—save for a few brief moments’ transit via air-conditioned tractor-trailers to their new eternal resting spots—for at least the next hundred years. Everybody wins.

  Everybody, that is, but a man named Chester William Stark. Mr. Stark (known aliases include Charlie Steems, Bill Steems, and Charlie Starker; he clearly lacks creativity) has been in prison for the past twelve years, serving a life sentence for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a sixteen-year-old girl who disappeared while she was walking home from tennis practice on a sunny spring day back in 1978. Her name was Jenna Moses. She wanted to become a veterinarian, but now that will never happen, because Chester/Charlie/Bill decided it was more important for him to kill her a week before her seventeenth birthday, two weeks before she would have attended her junior prom, ten years before she might have become somebody’s wife and (eventually) mother and grandmother. Chester Stark decided to say “Fuck it” to those possibilities because he has trouble controlling his impulses. So there you have it.

  Anyway, for years there was suspicion that this same gentleman was responsible for the disappearance of twelve-year-old Bethany Taylor, who vanished in June 1980. She was at the drive-in with her family to see The Empire Strikes Back when Bethany went by herself, in the dark, to use one of the Porta-Potties at the edge of the parking lot. She never came back. Several witnesses remembered seeing her talking to a man who seemed to match Chester’s description, but it was hard to be sure without enough light. Her body was never recovered. She’d run away from home once before. Because of this, police were slow to take her disappearance seriously—even though in the previous instance she’d only run to her friend’s house a few blocks away from home, and she was gone for only a few hours before she felt guilty enough to call her parents to let them know she was okay. Regardless, the incident was on her record, and Chester was undoubtedly long gone once the search for Bethany really heated up by the end of the weekend. And this is where the careful relocation of the Erie Episcopal cemetery becomes relevant: as the workers dig new holes for all the displaced coffins, one of them notices a suspicious-looking assortment of bones among the contents of a loaded backhoe shovel. Because he’s a good guy, the backhoe operator halts operations and insists that his foreman call the local police. Upon closer inspection, it is determined that the bones in question are indeed those of a human, most likely an adolescent female. A search through the national database of missing persons for teenage girls from the past twenty years whose remains were never recovered reveals over seven hundred potential candidates. That seems like a lot, doesn’t it? Police think so, too, so they narrow their search parameters: they focus on unsolved crimes within a two-hundred-fifty-mile radius of the discovery, which brings the number of possibilities down to sixty-seven, which still seems like an awfully shitty too-high number to me.

  Meanwhile, Chester Stark claims to have developed a close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ since his incarceration. This relationship, he claims, has prompted him to do an enormous amount of soul searching. He realizes that Jesus, who we all know was firmly in the “don’t rape and murder anyone” camp, wouldn’t want Bethany’s parents to go another day without knowing for certain what happened to their pretty daughter, a gifted ballerina who practiced her dancing for an hour and a half every morning before school, even when she didn’t feel like it (you might say she had exceptional impulse control for such a young person). When Chester’s attorney alerted him to the discovery at the cemetery, Chester decided to save everyone some time and further narrowed the search parameters. It was Bethany’s body, he admitted. If Chester hadn’t murdered her, she would have turned twenty-eight last month.

  At the local support group for families of murdered children—another unfortunate thing that exists—the recent discovery of Bethany Taylor’s remains is very big news. Her mother is here tonight, along with Bethany’s brother, Noah, who is nineteen. Bethany’s dad died a few years ago; unfortunately for him, Chester Stark’s relationship with Christ didn’t develop soon enough for Bethany’s dad to learn where his little girl’s body had been dumped.

  My parents and I (Hannah is at home with Gretchen, who only attended one meeting, years ago; she stayed in the bathroom almost the whole time, and has shown zero interest in returning) are among the twenty or so members of this ultra-exclusive club, which meets in a church basement in Pittsburgh once a month. People come from miles around to attend, and it’s a fairly tight-knit group regardless of the distance anybody travels; it’s not like these kinds of organizations are set up on every street corner. After we moved, we still showed up a few times a year, although our attendance made a sharp decline after Hannah was born. Sometimes we shared the drive with the Taylors, who live twenty minutes from our old house in Virginia. This is the first meeting we’ve been to in nine months, and in that time, the group has gained a handful of additional members. I don’t recognize any of the new people (although they all have the same look: faces either blank with unnatural, forced and/or medicated calm, or frozen with grief if they haven’t yet given in to the allure of prescription sedatives), but they sure as hell recognize my family, and my parents in particular. Out of all the dead children who are mourned at these meetings, Turtle had the highest profile, the most media coverage. For a few months in the winter of 1986, she was America’s angel. They were holding candlelight vigils all the way over in California.

  Sheila Keller is the unofficial leader of our chapter, which she founded more than a decade ago. Her son William was sixteen when a mugger shot him in the face. He’d been out walking his dog. He didn’t even have a wallet with him; he traded his life for less than two dollars in pocket change. The Kellers are African American, and William’s murder got far less attention than it should have because he wasn’t a pretty little white girl. Sheila jokingly refers to my family as the RWPs: the Rich White People. We aren’t rich by anybody’s standards—completely the opposite, actually—but I can see why we’ve earned the distinction in Sheila’s mind. When my sister was kidnapped, it was front-page national news for weeks, from the night it happened until Steven’s sentencing months later. When William died, he got two sentences on page sixteen of the local paper. That’s it. Meanwhile, his murder is still unsolved. It’s the kind of injustice so heinous that you would almost have to ignore it unless you were face-to-face with his mother; the prejudice of the system is the kind of thing most people can’t stand to acknowledge, because they aren’t willing to accept what that says about the world we all live in.

  Sheila runs a small bakery in the city; she brings trays of homemade cookies and pastries to every meeting. Tonight everyone is nibbling small squares of lemon torte off Styrofoam plates. We sit in a circle of metal folding chairs. Sheila opens the meeting with the Serenity Prayer. In this group, nobody’s faith is lukewarm: people either cling to God or reject the possibility entirely. As we sit with our heads bowed, my mom and I stay silent while
my father and some of the other members recite the prayer with Sheila.

  Unlike at other meetings I’ve been to, Sheila doesn’t have to ask for volunteers to get the conversation started tonight. Everybody stares at the Taylors, anxious to hear how it feels to experience some supposed closure. We’re like a bunch of virgins hanging on every word while a friend describes how it feels to have sex. There might as well be a spotlight shining on their faces. Bethany’s mom, Darlene, is almost giddy with happiness. It might seem bizarre to anyone who hasn’t lived through something similar, but we all have at least some idea of how she feels. I’m sure I’m not the only person in the room who is trying to suppress some jealousy over the sense of closure she must be holding, and it’s clear she’s holding it as close to herself as she can, basking in the relief she thought would never come. Yet here it is, and she shares it with us, she says, to give us hope that anything can happen.

  “I’m sure you all remember when we went on The Judy Stone Show a few years ago,” Darlene says, and most people respond by trying not to roll their eyes. Judy Stone is a talk-show host whose most frequent guests include women who are unsure which of the men in their lives have fathered their children, as well as pretty much anybody who is willing to go on national television and take a lie detector test that could potentially reveal any number of unpleasant truths to the viewing public.

  Every Friday, Judy hosts a psychic who calls herself Mary Marie Boon, an overweight, wrinkled woman in her sixties who claims to be able to communicate with the dead as easily as you or I might pick up a phone and order pizza. She has written over a dozen books detailing her many supposed encounters with the “other side”; apparently, dead people have nothing better to do but stand around and wait for a chance to shoot the breeze with her. She talks often and in great detail about her experience as one of Cleopatra’s ladies-in-waiting in a former life. She is bright and charismatic; she is also a grotesque fraud. When Darlene appeared on the show and begged Ms. Boon to contact Bethany, Mary Marie told her she couldn’t do that, because Bethany wasn’t dead. “She’s okay, honey. There was a reason she left you that night; there was something going on in her life that you didn’t know about. But she’s out there, I promise, and she is most definitely alive. When she’s ready to let you into her life again, she will come to you.”