As the summer progressed, the two women and their children became good friends. Emily especially enjoyed her shopping expeditions with Nancy, and she found it amusing when Nancy repeatedly tried to sway her into loosening up her wardrobe by adding articles of clothing that were less conservative than the khakis and polo shirts she so loved.
When it was time to enroll their children in grade school, Emily chose Our Lady of Victory Elementary School, which was located on the corner of MacArthur Boulevard and Whitehaven Parkway, just up the street from Nancy’s house on Reservoir Road. Zeb and Isabelle would later join Emily’s children at the elementary school, which was run by Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church and attended by many of the children living in the neighborhood. The impressive house of worship featured an elaborately decorated arched wooden door, traditional New England–style steeple, and gracious stone-and-brick chapel. Perched atop a sloping hill, it boasted a breathtaking view of the reservoir. The adjacent parochial school had a more modern feel, with rows of rectangular-shaped windows adorned by colorful art projects and whimsical cutouts.
As Nancy’s friendship with Emily strengthened, she confided that she was very unhappy about her size-sixteen figure. When the two women first met, Nancy weighed more than 150 pounds. Her new status as an author of historical romances required that she participate in book tours to promote her works, and it upset her greatly to appear before her fans as a frumpy old housewife with the thick calves and heavy thighs she had been battling to conceal for much of her adult life. Nancy was relieved when Emily confessed that she, too, had been struggling with her weight, and agreed to embark on an exercise and diet program with her. In spite of their full figures, both women were incredibly vain and neither allowed anyone to take their pictures.
Emily stood five feet, nine inches and weighed nearly 170 pounds when they began their weight loss program. At five feet, four inches, Nancy was aware that the extra weight she carried made her appear thicker-set and stouter than her friend.
Together, the two women began a strict diet that included careful monitoring of their caloric intake. They also joined the prominent Watergate Sport and Health Club, which was located nearby in the infamous Watergate Hotel—the scene of President Richard Nixon’s ultimate downfall. The immaculate facility was located in the basement of the hotel and was equipped with a swimming pool, sauna, and gymnasium, and it offered its members a wide range of fitness classes including aerobics. Both Nancy and Emily became regulars at the health club, diligently weight-training in the state-of-the-art gym, and participating in as many aerobics classes as they could squeeze into their busy schedules.
Nancy’s efforts paid off, with the author handing Emily, who was now far along in a pregnancy, her collection of Laura Ashley size-sixteen dresses in 1996, announcing that she no longer needed them and joking that Emily could put them to use as maternity wear. Nancy had lost nearly thirty pounds, and had slimmed down to a perfect size six. She proudly showed off her hourglass figure with a new wardrobe of dresses that she wore cinched at the waist. The woman who had spent the last ten years in loose-fitting dresses was buying pretty white petticoat skirts and colorful crinkle shirts to wear with lace-up Victorian-style high-heeled boots. Her newfound confidence even prompted her to let down her thick locks of wavy dark hair and wear them in wild ringlets that hung down to the middle of her back.
Her fellow authors were stunned when Nancy appeared at an emergency meeting of the Washington Romance Writers in 1996 to discuss a lawsuit that had been filed against the group and its current president, Mary Kilchenstein, by one of its board members. In a show of support for her former collaborator, Nancy marched straight to the front of the room. As she addressed the crowd in her gentle, birdlike voice, members noticed that she appeared thin to the point of illness. Although slender, her face was sallow and drawn. But in spite of her fragile appearance, she was energetic in her delivery, urging members to rally behind the organization and against the person who was threatening it. An enthusiastic round of applause and warm embraces followed her speech. Many of the women had not seen Nancy in years. After she began publishing with Avon, she had become less active in the group. In fact, the last Harpers Ferry retreat that she had attended was the one organized by Ann Marie Winston in 1991. That weekend, she had led a Regency genre workshop for the membership, which had more than doubled since the group was founded in the mid-80s. And while for the most part Nancy was well liked, she could also be a snob, especially toward people whose backgrounds, in her mind, were decidedly déclassé.
She did not understand people from “small-town America” and her naïveté—or perhaps a streak of mean-spiritedness—may have been what prompted her to refer to them as “hillbillies” behind their backs. The distrust between Nancy and certain members of the group seemed to go both ways. More than a few authors were turned off by what they perceived to be her snooty, elitist attitude, and offended by her constant name-dropping. To many, Nancy’s ongoing friendship with society maven Patricia Duff—by then the wife of Revlon cosmetics billionaire Ronald Perelman—was of little interest to the women. But to others, word that Nancy was a close friend of Suzanne Martin Kent Cooke—wife of mogul John Kent Cooke—and that she and her children had attended her daughter Jacqueline’s first birthday party at the couple’s elegant, 4,400-square-foot townhouse made quite an impression.
Nancy’s naïve presumption that everybody she associated with shared her political sentiments also surprised people. On more than one occasion, she had offended friends when she launched into a heated political discussion or invited them to a Republican fundraiser, never imagining—or caring—that they might hold contrary views. Nancy’s husband was even stauncher in his politics. When Bill Clinton was elected to the White House in 1992, Jeremy locked himself in the bedroom, drew the curtains, and turned off all of the lights in silent protest. His loathing of the President’s liberal politics, and the fact that he had dodged the draft and did not serve his country in Vietnam, incited Jeremy to heckle him during a speech Clinton gave at the National Mall. With his young son perched on his shoulders, he shouted at the President, confident that Zeb’s presence would keep the Secret Servicemen at bay. Years later, Jeremy would return to the National Mall to take his own life.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Nancy arrived at a black-tie gala that was being hosted by one of Jeremy’s friends in the fall of 1997, everybody in the room turned to stare. The couple was among the one hundred guests Bill Ranger invited to Morton’s restaurant to celebrate his Commissioning as an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserves, an event he had waited for for twenty years. Dressed elegantly in a low-cut emerald-green gown bedecked with sequins that drew attention to her hourglass figure and sexy cleavage, Nancy was the hit of the affair.
The summer before, she had taken a friend’s advice and checked into the hospital for plastic surgery that included a lift of her breasts and buttocks, and correction of her sagging eyelids. The results had turned an attractive middle-aged mother into a stunning beauty who exuded more self-confidence than she had ever felt before.
Thirty years after her first debutante ball, Nancy was coming out again, this time as a forty-six-year-old knockout with a figure that rivaled those of women half her age. She wore her lengthy black hair in elegant ringlets, and expensive French cosmetics decorated her now-youthful face. When she glided across the roomful of partygoers, even Bill Ranger did not recognize her. It was not until he saw her grab onto Jeremy’s arm that he realized who she was. Even Jeremy, who was dapper in a stylish black tuxedo pinned with seven of the medals he had earned as a Marine, could not take his eyes off his wife.
But Nancy had all but lost interest in her husband of twenty years. She had grown weary of remaining faithful to a man whom she was certain had had more than one extra-marital affair. Jeremy’s routine of traveling for weeks, sometimes months at a time, his willingness to attend social events and parties without her, and his criticism about her weight and the
way she looked, had creaked in her a gnawing fear that he was seeing other women—a suspicion that she repeatedly shared with close friends. And while she could never confirm her suspicions of infidelity—she was fed up with trying to keep the household running and the bills paid while Jeremy was off jogging around the reservoir or playing a game of pick-up basketball at a neighborhood park. And she was tired of having to leave the answering machine on all the time to screen their calls for bill collectors and creditors.
For nearly two decades, she had endured endless criticisms about the way she kept the house, the weight she had put on as a result of her pregnancies, and the food that she served for dinner. It seemed that for as long as she could remember, everything she did was calculated not to upset her husband. She had held her tongue when he spent the rent money on extravagant toys for himself, or when he jaunted off to the Bahamas on a scuba trip when he should have been in his law office tending to his cases. And she’d grown tired of Jeremy’s quirkiness: his refusal to buy health insurance, his endless procrastination for billing clients, and his bizarre need to collect and save everything from handfuls of leaflets he grabbed on his way out of the bank to knick-knacks rescued from the neighbors’ trash. He could not part with anything—egg cartons, old phone books, even food—for fear he might need them someday. Even his refusal to redeem his frequent flier miles drove her crazy. And that he preferred to keep his money under his mattress rather than entrust it to a bank or financial institution. Nancy wanted to move to a bigger, more comfortable house with five bedrooms and a family room, but the deal never materialized because Jeremy refused to disclose to the landlord any information about his income or finances. On the near side of fifty, she no longer wanted to be living in a house that was in disrepair, with chipping paint, and old, unreliable appliances.
To make matters worse, Nancy had no quiet time to write. Jeremy’s home office meant that he was always underfoot, interrupting her time and again to ask for help while she was trying to crank out yet one more book at her computer.
Her children also had needs. Zeb and Isabelle were like every other boy and girl their age, and were constantly asking their mom and dad for one thing or another. Yet, somehow, Jeremy never seemed to have time for anything more than a carefree trip to the park, which forced Nancy to limit her writing time to the hours after the children had gone to sleep.
Nancy’s life had reached a turning point. Though her marriage was in tatters, her career was on an upward trajectory. The books that she wrote in the wee hours of the morning were generating critical acclaim from reviewers. The Washington Post Book World named Wild Irish Skies one the top five romances of 1997. She skillfully promoted her novels by going on book tours, organizing mass mailings using post cards of her book covers, and sending the owners of small specialty stores autographed posters depicting her latest book. She also networked through “Avon Ladies,” an online chat group of authors who shared the same publisher. For the first time in her life, she was feeling physically gorgeous and intellectually fulfilled, attracting attention in ways she never had before.
The dynamics of Nancy’s life at home with Jeremy were also changing. For years, she and Finny had enjoyed a special bond. As an only child for the first eleven years of his life, he was the closest to her of the three children. Nancy had always been able to count on Finny’s help around the house when Jeremy was out of town on business. Even more important, he served as an emotional buffer between his parents. But in high school, Finny left home to attend Episcopal High School, a boarding school across the Potomac in Alexandria, Virginia. He had been enrolled at the Landon School; a pricey all-boys’ school in Bethesda, Maryland, but his academic performance there disappointed his father, who had hoped that his son would gain entrance to a top-tier college and the U.S. Naval Academy. But an Ivy League education was not what Finny had in mind. He confided to his mother that when he completed his high school studies, he didn’t want to go right off to college.
Rather than getting upset with her son, Nancy went to work crafting what could best be described as a makeshift sabbatical for Finny. After countless phone calls, she arranged for her son to spend one year out west doing wildlife conservation work, something he had always dreamed about doing. His father even surprised Finny with a scuba diving trip to the Bahamas as a high school graduation gift.
With Finny away at boarding school, and then out west on his furlough, he was unavailable to pick up the slack for his father and the problems between Nancy and Jeremy grew more pronounced. Nancy had lost an important source of emotional strength with Finny’s departure and it didn’t help that he preferred spending weekends on the campus with his friends. When he returned home for winter break, he noticed that his mother was spending an enormous amount of time on the Internet and wracking up huge bills from America Online.
Finny was keenly aware that in addition to his private school tuition and the tuition of his brother and sister at parochial school, his parents were struggling to pay the household bills and make payments on the family cars. He watched his mother struggling to help make ends meet, staying up late and getting up early in the morning to meet her deadlines, and he noticed her increased irritability and hair-trigger temper. He couldn’t figure out if her bad mood was the result of the family’s financial problems, or, the thought crossed his mind, that she might be going through a “change of life.”
But one thing was certain: his father’s quirky behavior was bothering his mother more than it had in the past. After living for years with a man who was so set in his ways, and so inflexible in his views, it was clear that his mother was reaching her breaking point. Finny knew she was tired of the way his father intimidated and offended people with his brusque and confrontational behavior and that she had run out of patience with other shortcomings.
Nancy’s relationship with her own mother and brothers had fallen victim to her marriage to Jeremy, but unlike Finny, her younger children had no knowledge of the family’s history. Friends who knew Nancy in her younger years remembered that her self-esteem was low when she married her husband, and her feelings of self-worth had not improved during the course of their twenty-year union. Searching for love and acceptance, Nancy had even been spotted in 1998 at a fundraiser in Manhattan, where she gave the impression that she was desperately trying to capture all the male attention she could.
But Nancy found a new social outlet in online chat rooms and emails. She no longer had the time to present workshops to aspiring authors, but she had a satisfying substitute on the Web. Ever the innovator, she had created and was the administrator of her own Website at a time when others were still learning how to surf the World Wide Web and Internet. Through her own site, and through the Avon Ladies, she traded expertise with others in her field and offered career guidance to fledgling authors who paid her with free advice on Website design. She was determined to promote herself and her latest books online and found herself participating as a guest author in literary chat rooms and running contests that offered autographed first-edition copies of her novels as prizes. Her efforts were paying dividends. Old fans were finding her online and others were discovering her.
“All my fiction is inspired by real life,” Nancy acknowledged about herself on her Website. Adding: “Nancy will never cease to marvel at the wonder of working at home to spin tales of faraway places, forgotten times, heroic men and courageous, self-aware heroines.”
James Lemke, a truck driver from Chicago, Illinois, found Nancy in 1997 through an online search. Friends and relatives recount two different stories about how Nancy and Jim first met. Some say the two first started communicating in a poetry chat room. But author Mary Kilchenstein says that Nancy told her that Jim had been trying to find Mary Kirk, the author of A Phoenix Rising, a contemporary romance novel about a long-haul trucker. A friend had given him the book to read, and he had identified with the story’s hero. He decided he wanted to find more about the book’s author, so he punched in her name and found a li
nk to Nancy’s Website. Because Nancy had collaborated with Mary Kilchenstein on two books that were published under the name Mary Alice Kirk, her Website popped up in Lemke’s search. Flattered by his interest in the novel, Nancy struck a conversation with the young man who dubbed himself the “poet king.”
Not until later did she reveal that she was not the author of the book that he so admired, but rather her friend Mary Kilchenstein, who had published subsequent novels under the pseudonym Mary Kirk. The revelation did not stop the correspondence between Nancy and her new Internet friend. The two began emailing each other on a regular basis. At first, their conversation centered on Nancy’s career as a writer, and Jim’s aspirations as a poet. As the weeks passed, however, she began reading and critiquing his poems and short stories. Twenty-six years old and recently divorced, Jim was eager to pursue a writing career and Nancy was happy to oblige. Helping aspiring writers was something she had done for years.
Nancy’s coaching proved fruitful and Jim’s poetry showed signs of improvement. The stream of emails also provided the truck driver with a glimpse into Nancy’s personal life, and her relationship with her husband. Nancy portrayed Jeremy as “controlling,” and told her online friend that she was frightened of him.
The paunchy young truck driver had recently moved back home to Chicago to live with his mother, also named Nancy. After his divorce from Jennifer Dietrich, who was three years his senior, he left their condominium on West Touhy Avenue in Niles, Illinois, and, despairing over his failed marriage, had sought comfort and companionship online. During the months that he stayed with his mom in her apartment on North Monitor Avenue, he talked often about his budding electronic relationship with the famous romance author and described how she had helped to improve his children’s poetry and short stories.
Fatal Romance: A True Story of Obsession and Murder Page 16
