by E M Kaplan
[BUNNY ROGERS] Yes, well, I think other people have reached dead end after dead end and some have just plain given up. So I’m open to exploring other options now.
[SKIP RICHMOND] What kind of other options?
[BUNNY ROGERS] My sister brought me a psychic. My son, Brian, has some friends in the Army Corps of Engineers who want to do something with radar or sonar to look for underground heat signatures. I don’t understand the specifics. They seem to think she’s being held alive underground somewhere, like that bus full of kidnapped children.
[SKIP RICHMOND] Chowchilla?
[BUNNY ROGERS] Yes, that’s the one I mean. They were buried alive by some maniac.
[SKIP RICHMOND] Do you think Mary Clare is being held somewhere and that she’s alive?
[BUNNY ROGERS] Well, she could be. I mean, I hope to God she’s alive and coming home. But we haven’t received a ransom note or had any proof of her being alive. In the beginning, I couldn’t think of anything else but her being out there somewhere. That someone had taken her. But now, I just don’t know. If she’s alive, how could she be healthy and well after all these months? If she’s been alive this whole time… I just don’t know what to pray for anymore.
[SKIP RICHMOND] I’m so sorry. Do you need some tissues?
[BUNNY ROGERS] I have some, thank you. I come well-prepared. This is what my life is now, such as it is. Truly, no one can ever fathom what I have been through. To lose my best friend like this. It’s just completely turned my life upside down. I can never go back to the way it was.
[SKIP RICHMOND] I understand. I’m very sorry for you. Going back to that telephone call, the last time you spoke with your daughter, how did she seem?
[BUNNY ROGERS] The same as always. I didn’t sense anything unusual. I honestly thought I would be talking to her again a few hours later. We talked one or two times a day. Especially when she moved to Austin with Billy Blake.
[SKIP RICHMOND] So you were very close.
[BUNNY ROGERS] We were like sisters.
[SKIP RICHMOND] Uh-huh. And how many other children do you have? You mentioned a son earlier?
[BUNNY ROGERS] I have three boys and Mary Clare. So, as you can imagine, she was my heart and soul. I just don’t know what I’m going to do without her. She’ll never have my grandchildren. She’ll never be by my side as I get older and need her help. It’s just unfathomable sometimes. I have the boys, of course, but they go off and leave you. A daughter always stays.
[SKIP RICHMOND] Do you know of anyone who would want to harm her?
[BUNNY ROGERS] Not any of her brothers, if that’s what you’re implying.
[SKIP RICHMOND] No, of course not. But did she have any rivals at school, things of that nature?
[BUNNY ROGERS] Absolutely not. Everyone loved her.
[SKIP RICHMOND] But she competed in beauty pageants. Surely she had rivals?
[BUNNY ROGERS] She competed in pageants until she was a freshman in high school. And she was a very good, a very strong competitor. However, when she reached her sweet sixteen, we mutually agreed that she should concentrate on other things in her life, like her studies and charity projects. She was very active with the community and wanted to join the Junior League when she got old enough. But in terms of rivalries with other contestants, some of those girls had grown up with her on the beauty circuit. They were all very supportive of each other. I don’t know a single one of them who would have wished any harm come to her.
[SKIP RICHMOND] Uh-huh.
[BUNNY ROGERS] I don’t like what your tone is implying, Mr. Richmond.
[SKIP RICHMOND] I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.
[BUNNY ROGERS] You think I’m just another air-headed woman who bullied her air-headed daughter into doing fluff competitions where the girls are evil snakes and not serious about anything in their lives. Well, you’re very mistaken.
[SKIP RICHMOND] I can see I touched a nerve here. I certainly didn’t mean to give impression that I think anything of that nature.
[BUNNY ROGERS] I’m sure you didn’t.
[SKIP RICHMOND] I apologize. I absolutely did not. But just a few more questions, if you don’t mind. To help your daughter.
[BUNNY ROGERS] All right.
[SKIP RICHMOND] Did she have a good relationship with her father? With Mr. Rogers?
[BUNNY ROGERS] Pardon me?
[SKIP RICHMOND] Were Mary Clare and her father particularly close? I mean, in an entirely appropriate fashion.
[BUNNY ROGERS] That’s enough. I think we’re done here.
The interview ended there, with a thinly veiled accusation of molestation of Mary Clare by her father. Not very subtle, Skip. Though Josie wouldn’t guarantee she wouldn’t have done the same thing.
Chapter 17
An insulated beverage cup—hopefully not made from elephant poo—thunked down on the table in front of Josie next to her forgotten box of donuts. She was about to tell Skip she didn’t drink coffee when he told her it was tea.
“Wow. Your research is flawless,” she told him, taking the lid off the cup and reaching for the bottle of honey on the table next to them. She’d never been able to stomach coffee, though it might have been helpful to her socially. People were always getting together for coffee, meeting in cafés.
Coffee can be such an ice-breaker when you’re trying to coax the truth out of bad guys. If they like coffee. Scratch that. Liquor probably works better.
“Aha, a tea drinker. I was right! That’s what I like to call a ‘wild-ass guess,’” he said, his raspy voice cracking as he crowed in triumph. He gestured to the files, nearly splashing his own coffee over the edge of his cup. “So what’d you think of all that?”
“I was just reading your chat with Mommy Dearest.”
“Oh yeah. Wasn’t she a piece of work? Don’t let the cute, fluffy name fool you. She’s a force to be reckoned with. I think those diminutive female names are a Southern thing. They’re all Dixieland generals underneath their strings of pearls.” He took a massive gulp of his steaming hot coffee, and she wondered if his mouth was coated with scar tissue from previous burns. He didn’t even flinch. The inside of his mouth probably looked like the Elephant Man, thick-hided and malformed. If that was the case, he deserved to enjoy his piping-hot coffee. He’d darn well earned his superpower.
“What’s Bunny’s story? Any skeletons in her closet?”
“Oh, plenty. If you go back one generation, you find an aunt like that poor Rosemary Kennedy girl, institutionalized and lobotomized by the very family that was supposed to have loved her best.”
“Holy geeze.”
Josie had heard the story of the poor Kennedy girl, older sister to JFK and RFK, Eunice, and the others. She’d suffered a traumatic birth and had been developmentally delayed—but happy—her entire life. When she grew older, she became rebellious and more subject to fits of violence outside the norm of her family, hence the failed experimental lobotomy. By that standard, Josie would have been a vegetable in a padded room by age 24 as well.
“Yeah, it was Bunny’s mother’s older sister. Barbaric and tragic. She ended up dying of natural causes in a home outside of Houston. Why is it that these poor people always live long, long lives after they’ve been turned into mental third graders?”
Josie shuddered. “Do you know what the aunt’s diagnosis was that caused her family to do this to her?”
“I did read one account in some letters once, but it was just some weird general terms like ‘hysteria’ and other bull. Honestly, it could have been anything from schizophrenia to PMS back then and the treatment would have been the same. Dark ages of medicine, pretty much. In fact, Bunny went to nursing school. She dropped out to get married, but I think one of the reasons she chose it was her aunt.”
“Brrr. Nurse Ratched.”
“No kidding. It’s time for your sponge bath now, mister.” He made a mock motion of snapping on gloves.
“Was Bunny hiding other things when you talked with h
er?”
“Well, duh, of course she was. Everyone does. But about her daughter, I don’t think she knows where she is or what happened to her. That part was genuine.”
“Which is why you went after the father angle at the end there?”
“I may have hit that hammer a little too hard on that nail. But I was trying new directions, trying to be thorough.”
“In that case, did you find anything about the brothers?”
“In terms of molestation? Nothing ever came up. They seem like normal, prep-school frat boys. All married with kids at the time. Two lawyers and one some kind of local politician. All still in the Dallas area with their families, but from what I could find out, they only get together on the holidays. As for Bunny’s husband, he died in December of 1999 of some type of cancer. His obit didn’t specify what kind, which probably means testicular or prostate. Something unspeakable for a man. Maybe even breast cancer,” he speculated out loud.
“So, can you take me through the day that Mary Clare went missing? I imagine there was a timeline created along with establishing her husband’s alibi and things like that?”
“Sure, sure.” He pulled a spiral notebook out of the back of the file and flipped it open before perching some tortoiseshell drugstore granny reader glasses on the end of his nose. “Since Mary Clare’s last known interaction was with her mother at about 9:30 the morning of her disappearance, the events of the day before were more important to nail down. During the afternoon, she attended a planning committee meeting in honor of Ann Richards, who was about to step down as governor. It was down on 6th Street in their private dining room. Multiple witnesses interacted with her there until about 4:30 in the afternoon.”
“Do you know if she was acting normal that day? Not agitated or upset in any way?”
He flipped through his notes. “There was one thing. A woman named Yvonne Lugnar, who also knew Mary Clare from the pageant circuit when they were younger, incidentally, said that Mary Clare knocked over a drink at the meeting and swore a blue streak, shocking her. None of the other attendees that I tracked down mentioned anything out of the ordinary. One other saw the drink mishap but didn’t hear any cursing. Yvonne seemed to be hoping to get her name in the paper, however. As I recall, she spelled her name for me three times.”
Josie nodded. Though she couldn’t relate to fame hounds, she knew they existed. Several of them sent her weekly emails through her website’s contact form suggesting stories for her to cover, which she didn’t do as a rule, or asked her to write their biographies, which also wasn’t her thing.
“At about quarter to nine that night, call records from their home phone showed someone called Smiley’s restaurant and spoke to someone there for about ten minutes. Billy confirmed that his wife did call the restaurant to see when he was coming home. He often worked late into the night, ten to twelve hour days at Smiley’s, so he wouldn’t see her when he returned home. He says that was the case for that night as well. He got home late, saw her briefly in the morning before he returned to the restaurant, and that was the last time anyone saw her.”
Never good when the last person to see her alive was the spouse. At least, not good for him. Never mind the fact that about forty percent of all murdered women are killed by their partners. Not good for him either.
“And his alibi checks out?”
“Yep. The guy was and still is a workhorse. Constantly at his restaurant, with a good forty-minute drive between the house and the restaurant when there’s no traffic.” He snorted at that last part.
“And what about this tape?” She tapped the voicemail cassette with her finger.
“Just a standard outgoing message for an old voicemail machine. Not very exciting in terms of evidence. Just a little clip of her voice saying to leave a message at the beep.” He hemmed and hawed and pursed his lips as if mulling over the state of his soul’s eternal salvation. “In fact…you can have that, if you want.”
She blinked, wondering if she was supposed to want it.
“I mean, it’s something to hear Mary Clare’s actual voice. Just to put a bit of life into the person you’re reading about and looking at in pictures.” Still, he looked doubtful—tortured, in fact—about whether he really wanted to turn it over to her when she didn’t really think it was as valuable an artifact as his struggle seemed to merit. She wasn’t positive she wanted to take it. Taking his crummy old tape was akin to having a distant relative bequeath her a collection of troll dolls.
“Are you sure you want me to have it?” She knew she didn’t sound very grateful to have been selected for this honor, but he was making a gesture of camaraderie, of a partnership of sorts. She should accept it with gratitude.
“Yes,” he said at last with a touch more conviction, sliding it across the table to her. “I want you to have a little piece of her.”
She took the plastic little relic of the past and turned it over in her hand. She wished she had more time with the rest of his file, but at least the tape was something.
“Speaking of little pieces, how in the heck did you get all these receipts?” She fanned out the papers, sorting through them, an odd assortment of the minutiae of Mary Clare’s life, even some early glimpses into it. She had gone to a private school for girls, apparently, and had earned all As except for a C in Etiquette. Sounded like torture to Josie, too. All of a sudden, she felt a kinship with the missing woman. The file was more thorough than all of the scraps of Josie’s childhood lumped together in the shoebox at the bottom of her closet.
“That was almost twenty years ago. I was really into dumpster diving and stealing people’s trash just to get a story. The things I turned over in the name of research back then…Believe me, those days are over. Climbing in and out of garbage bins and lugging junk around. I got aches and pains in places I didn’t even know existed. Like the Lost Pines of arthritis.”
Josie hadn’t stooped to sifting through trash yet. She hoped she would never voluntarily dig through people’s curbside Heftys.
Never say never. As soon as you say it, “never” turns out to be tomorrow.
Chapter 18
“What about Mary Clare’s friends? Did you manage to track any of them down?”
“Let’s see. I already told you about that wily one, Yvonne, from the pageant circuit. But I don’t think they were truly friends. More like frenemies. It’s hard to take any of those ladies at face value. They’re always trained to put their best face forward, to show the best version of themselves even if it’s not the real version. I did find a couple of girls she knew from private school, but most of those friendships dropped off when she graduated and turned eighteen.”
Josie hadn’t kept any of her friends from high school either, but she’d only known most of them for a half-year. She didn’t think it was normal for a person to completely cut herself off from all her previous friendships unless there was some kind of abrupt rift.
“Was she well-liked in school or more of a loner?”
“From what I can tell based on class photos and yearbooks, she was one of the popular kids everyone likes to hate. Outgoing, even. Debate team. Dance. Newspaper editor, though I couldn’t find anything actually written by her. Always smiling in the photos. So, yeah, it doesn’t sit well that she didn’t keep in contact with her school friends. Makes you wonder if they were all secretly stabbing each other in the back, all the time smiling on the outside.”
“Too bad Facebook and Snapchat weren’t around back then. Or hateful text messages. Those would be really helpful right about now. We could probably dig up some dirt if we had something like that.”
Skip snorted. “Kids these days. Not very subtle or sneaky, especially when they think they are.”
Josie shuddered to think what her life would have been like if any of those things had been readily available while she was a kid and the dumb things she’d done that could have been recorded for all of posterity to see. When she’d graduated high school in 2004, she hadn’t even had
her own cell phone, or anyone who might have wanted to call her on one.
“What about Mary Clare’s college friends? Any of those around?”
“Other than Billy Blake, none pop up on the radar.”
“Do you think that’s weird?”
Skip swirled his coffee mug around once before taking a gulp. “You know, I thought about that. But she and Billy met right after she started college classes. Some couples, when they meet the love of their lives, tend to shut out the rest of world. They start staying home instead of going out. They rent a movie, get take out, and start living like their friends don’t exist. That could have been the case for these two.”
A powerful and exclusionary relationship? Josie was willing to give that theory some merit, though it wasn’t the case in her own personal life. She and Drew had Benjy and Susan…but not much else beyond them in terms of social life. That was Josie’s fault, however. She was pretty much asocial. Possibly antisocial. She’d probably be happy living off a dirt road fifty acres away from her nearest neighbor as long as she had a solid Internet connection.
Or perhaps a controlled and isolated existence. Had Mary Clare been subjected to an abusive relationship with a controlling husband?
#
“Tell me what you know about Billy,” Josie said.
Skip nodded, as if he approved of her train of thought. “Of course, he was always the main suspect. The spouse always is, but he had such a rock-solid alibi for the entire 72-hour period around the time she went missing that other than a murder-for-hire scenario, nothing ever stuck. No theories ever held water. He was at the restaurant during the time she last spoke to her mother. And she was missing by the time he got home, almost ten hours later.”
“What was the first sign that she was missing?”
“She had an appointment to get her hair done the next day, but she missed it and also didn’t pick up a butcher order she’d requested for that evening. Apparently Billy ended up getting it. Since he had a relationship with the meat market for the restaurant, they always got their home order from the same guy at a discount. Not like they needed a coupon at their income bracket, but isn’t it always the way it works?
