“Now that’s just terrific, Billy. Just terrific. You’re a beacon of light for all people living with challenges. But the thing is, Billy, you’ve also got a terrific memory, don’t you?”
“So my mom used to say.”
“Well, let’s test that memory. Who pitched the second game for the Boston Red Sox during the 1986 World Series against the Mets?”
“Roger Clemens.”
“Sounds good to me. And who was the fourteenth president of the United States?”
“Franklin Pierce.”
“How about that, folks! Well, Billy, if you’ve got such a terrific memory, you’ll obviously be able to remember a conversation you overheard around thirty years ago . . . although you’re going to have to come clean with us, Billy. Did you actually hear this conversation by putting your ear to a closed door?”
Billy blushed and turned all shy.
“Well, as George Washington once said, ‘I cannot tell a lie,’” he said, laughing a little. “So yeah, I was listening behind a door when I heard—”
“Hang on there, Billy!” Julia said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Now, you knew Hannah Buchan when she lived in Pelham in 1973.”
“That’s right. I knew herself and Dr. Dan . . .”
“Her husband.”
“Yeah, her husband. Hannah and me, we were friends.”
“You liked her a lot.”
Another blush and giggle from Billy.
“A real lot. Guess I kind of had a crush on her.”
“So when this tall, dark stranger named Tobias Judson came to town while Hannah’s husband was elsewhere . . .”
“Didn’t like the fact that I saw ’em kissing one night.”
“Really? You saw them kissing?”
“Yeah, in the window of the apartment she was living in at the time.”
“And you didn’t like that?”
“I didn’t like it one bit.”
“Did you see them kissing again?”
“No, but the next night I went back to the street in front of the apartment and looked up at the window and I could see the two of ’em arguing.”
“The two people here with you tonight?”
“There wasn’t no one else in that apartment.”
“So when you saw them arguing, what did you do?”
“Well, there was a back entrance to the apartment up a flight of stairs. And I climbed ’em real slow and real quiet and stood outside the back door, and I could hear everything that was being said.”
“And what, Billy, was being said?”
“I heard the man . . .”
“Tobias Judson?”
“Yeah, him,” he said, pointing to Judson. “I heard him say, ‘You better drive me to Canada or I’ll tell your husband.’ And then I heard Hannah say, ‘I can’t drive you, it’s against the law.’ And then he said, ‘If the FBI shows up here, I’ll tell ’em you were my accomplice.’ And then she said, ‘Go on, tell the FBI.’ And then he said, ‘You want ’em to take your little boy from you? ’Cause that’s what’s gonna happen after I tell ’em you were my accomplice.’ And then she started crying and stuff, pleading for him to let her alone, telling him that her little boy was the most important thing in her life, that she couldn’t bear to be away from him. And he said, ‘Then you better drive me to Canada, or . . .’”
“I cannot believe this crap,” Judson thundered.
“Crap’s a bad word,” Billy said.
“You expect the American public to believe these lies,” Judson said.
“Ain’t no lies,” Billy said. “It’s the truth. I was there. I heard you say . . .”
“Jose, this is outrageous . . .” Judson said.
“Sounds pretty plausible to me,” Julia said. “Is that how you remember the conversation went, Hannah?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, I said, “It’s exactly how I remembered it. Billy really does have one fantastic memory.”
“Hey, thanks, Hannah!” Billy said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Judson yelled. “Can’t you see they’ve gotten together beforehand to get their story right?”
“I ain’t seen Hannah since 1974,” Billy said, all indignant. “And you really shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain . . .”
“How can you accept the word of a man with a mental defect?” Judson yelled.
“That’s not fair!” Billy said, turning all red. “I ain’t no retard. I’m just different, that’s all. But I know how to tell the truth, Jose. And I’m telling the truth right now.”
“And we believe you, Billy. We truly believe you. So there it is, folks—another wrong righted on The Jose Julia Show! But don’t go away, there’s so much more to come after this!”
Lights down. Judson was on his feet, ripping his microphone from his lapel.
“If you think there’s an iota of a chance that this show will be aired . . .”
“Hey, I’m really quaking in my shoes,” Julia said. “But if you want to take us on, be my guest. We’ve got a platoon of lawyers who will take great pleasure in bankrupting your lying ass. Thanks for coming on the show, Toby.”
Judson stormed off.
Julia turned to Billy and said, “You did great.”
“You think so?”
“Better than great. And you also got your friend here out of a lot of trouble.”
“You’re not mad at me, are you, Hannah?”
“Of course not.”
“Even though I told everybody about what happened after you made me swear . . .”
“It’s okay, Billy.”
Jackie came and escorted us both offstage. When I went to shake Julia’s hand, he gave it a brief squeeze and returned to studying his notes for the next guest. To him, I was now history.
Thirty minutes later, I was in the back of a Lincoln Town Car with Margy and Billy—while Rita sat shotgun next to the driver. Billy was staying at the same hotel as me, and I volunteered to look after him tonight in the city and also show him some of the sights before his flight back to Maine tomorrow evening. Up ahead, the Manhattan skyline came into view. It looked incandescent.
“Wow, is that a thing of beauty or what?” Billy said.
“We like it,” Margy said drily.
“Never been on an airplane before,” he said. “Never been out of Maine much, ’cept to New Hampshire and once to Fenway Park when I was in school. Can’t thank you enough, Hannah.”
“Don’t thank me, Billy. Thank Detective Leary. He was the one who searched you out, didn’t he?”
“Sure did.”
He started to blush again, his eyes flickering fast. He asked, “Hey, you’re not angry that I was standing at the back door, listening all the time while you and that guy . . . ?”
“No, I’m not angry,” I said.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Like, you know, I didn’t quote you and Judson one hundred percent exactly, but I did give everyone the gist of what was said, didn’t I?”
Margy came in here. “Kid, you saved our ass.”
He smiled one of his big goofy smiles, then asked, “So we’re still friends, Hannah?”
“Yes, Billy, we’re still friends.”
TWENTY
THE CALL CAME around ten in the evening. It was a few days before Thanksgiving. I was at home. I had just booked my flight to Paris and was compiling a checklist of things to do before I vanished in just three weeks’ time. As I wrote item after item—shaking my head at the thought that I was the sort of person who needed to compile lists—the phone jumped into life. I reached for it.
“Hannah, it’s Patrick Leary.”
It had been around five months since I’d spoken to Detective Leary. He’d called me a few days after my appearance on The Jose Julia Show to see how I was doing. At the time, I was still in around three different minds about him—still embarrassed at that pass I made at him; still attracted to him; still wanting him to pull out a miracle and find
Lizzie. When he complimented me for getting so angry on the program, I said: “I thought I’d nearly blown it.”
“Nah, the anger worked, because everyone could see that it was a righteous anger, and completely justified.”
A righteous anger. Once a Jesuit . . .
“It was Billy who saved my skin. Thank you for finding him.”
“All part of the service.”
He then changed the subject by telling me that he was getting engaged—to a schoolteacher he’d been seeing for over a year. He said this in a matter-of-fact way, as if he was reporting the fact that it was raining outside his office in Brookline. I answered in a matter-of-fact way, “How nice for you . . . I hope you’re very happy.” What else was there to say? A drunken fumble on a Boston street corner didn’t exactly rank up there in the pantheon of mortal sins. I was suddenly no longer embarrassed. Rather, I was disappointed . . . and seized yet again by the loneliness that seemed to catch me unawares all the time now.
There was little else to talk about. He said he was following up a couple of new leads on Lizzie’s disappearance, but the trail had gone cold. And they’d just done yet another “interview” with McQueen over the weekend, and he was as certain as he could be that the guy was innocent. “Like I said at the start of all this—he’s a dirtbag, but not a homicidal one.”
“So it’s either suicide or alien abduction?” I said.
“Or she could be living somewhere under a new identity,” he said. “It’s a big country, it’s not a hard place to vanish in. Anyway, if anything new happens on the case, you’ll be the first to know.”
And now, all these months later, “Hannah, it’s Patrick Leary. Am I getting you at a bad time?”
“No, it’s fine. But if you’re calling me at this hour . . .”
“Yeah, something has come up. And as I promised you’d be the first to know . . .”
“Good news?”
“No.”
A long silence.
“Is Lizzie dead?” I finally asked.
“We don’t know that yet. But a body was fished out of the Charles yesterday. A woman in her late twenties, according to the forensic boys. Preliminary analysis of the body hints that she’s been in the water for over seven months.”
“I see,” I said tonelessly.
“So far, there’s absolutely nothing conclusive, and our database of missing persons in the Boston area has turned up at least thirty women around Lizzie’s age. A quick question, though: did she wear any jewelry?”
“A diamond cross that she bought herself.”
“Worn as a necklace?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I hate to tell you this, but the woman they recovered was also wearing a diamond necklace.”
I swallowed hard.
“They’ll be doing DNA tests tomorrow, along with the autopsy. What would be useful is if you could come down here and maybe look at the cross and also check out some of the scraps of clothing that still remain.”
“Okay.”
“You up to anything tomorrow?”
“No, my days are pretty free right now.”
“Would you like me to call your husband or will you do that yourself?”
“Would you mind calling him?”
“No problem.”
Thirty minutes later, as I was sitting in an armchair, staring into the fire, still trying to take in the information that Leary had just imparted to me, the phone rang again. I picked it up and found myself talking to my ex-husband for the first time in five months.
Actually, we had spoken once before this—in Greg Tolland’s office, late in July, when Dan arrived accompanied by his lawyer to discuss details of our divorce. The meeting had been Greg’s suggestion—a straightforward discussion of who would get what—with most of the details worked out by our respective lawyers beforehand. There was little to go over—just the inking of a separation agreement. I was being handed ownership of the house, Dan would keep the stock portfolio and all other significant investments. There was to be no alimony—my insistence . . . I didn’t need to be supported—but it was agreed that the interest of a trust we set up together in the early eighties would provide me an income. There was a little dickering on fine details, but it was, in principle, a fifty-fifty split, and one in which neither side emerged financially diminished.
Dan’s lawyer didn’t make much in the way of small talk. Greg Tolland, on the other hand, was being his usual outgoing “groovy” self—but he also turned out to be a stickler for detail, insisting on certain changes of language in the separation agreement and protecting my flank when it came to any liability owing to Dan’s practice—he’d discovered that our house had been put up as collateral for Dan’s mandatory malpractice insurance.
During the conference in Greg’s office, Dan and I sat on opposite sides of a conference table, avoiding each other’s eyes. When he first walked into the office, we exchanged nods and a nervous hello. When the conference ended—after we had both signed the separation agreement—he extended his hand. I hesitated, but then took it. There was a quick good-bye, and he was gone. Thirty years of marriage, and all we could now manage was a nervous hello/good-bye.
I didn’t hear from him afterward. Nor did I track his comings and goings around town, any more than I asked after Alice. Though Portland was small, it was still possible to have a private life there, especially if, like me, you didn’t show your face much around town.
So when I heard his voice on the other end of the line, I felt an instant tension . . . and sadness.
“Hannah, it’s me,” he said.
“Hi, there,” I said.
“Is this a bad moment?”
“Did the detective call you?”
“He did.”
“I think we need to prepare for the worst,” I said.
“Are you going down to Boston tomorrow?” he asked.
“He wants me to identify her necklace . . . and maybe some clothes.”
“Yeah, he wants me to look at them too.”
“No need . . .”
“No, I want to go. In fact, I was going to suggest that we drive down together.”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“But it seems silly to take two cars. I could pick you up at eight, we’d be there easily by ten, and we could maybe have lunch afterward.”
This threw me. I tried not to show it. “I don’t think so, Dan. And I really don’t think there’s much need for you to be there. Still, if you are planning to be there, then I’ll see you in Leary’s office tomorrow at noon. Bye.”
And I quickly hung up the phone.
I felt terrible afterward. Cursing myself for being so abrupt and dismissive. Still, in the months since he had left, I had hardened toward Dan. Whereas in the initial weeks after his shocked departure I might have been open to negotiation, now a sense of anger, mixed with desperate dejection, had colored my view of him. Especially as he didn’t even pay me the simple courtesy of calling me after the revelations on The Jose Julia Show.
Not that there was a flash flood of calls in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast. But certain people did phone. Like my ex-boss Carl Andrews, who informed me that he was convening an immediate emergency meeting of the school board of governors and putting forward a motion that I be reinstated with back pay, and that I also be issued a formal apology on behalf of the school. “It’s an apology I plan to make public in a press release to all state and regional papers,” he said, then added, “I am not going to try to soft-pedal things and say I believed you all along, Hannah. Still, you know how uncomfortable I was about the prospect of losing you from the start—and, if you will come back, I will be hugely grateful. So too will your students . . . not that they’ll ever show it.”
The board resolution was passed nine–zero the next night. I received a nice check covering my back pay, was reinstated on full salary, and was sent a very eloquent letter of apology which, true to his word, Andrews got reprinted in The Por
tland Press Herald. The adjoining story—“School Reinstates Teacher Fired Over Book Allegations”—got play everywhere. So too did the news that, on the basis of the disclosures made on television, the U.S. Department of Justice had decided that I had no case to answer regarding the flight from justice by one Tobias Judson in 1973.
Mr. Judson, on the other hand, suddenly had many cases to answer everywhere. In the wake of the interview, he was attacked in many quarters for lying in print. Frank Carty—a columnist with The New York Times—used the case as an example of “a general Bush-era refusal to acknowledge that, in most human situations, there is no right or wrong person . . . there are just two competing versions of the truth. The fact, however, that so many conservative pundits and religious fellow travelers took Tobias Judson’s story as the gospel truth—when, as it turns out, he wasn’t simply embellishing the truth but also flat-out lying—shows a fundamental lack of critical discernment, and a belief that, so long as someone professes their Christian faith, they must be telling the truth. To all the Chuck Canns and Ross Wallaces of the world—who vilified a quiet, unassuming Maine schoolteacher, immediately presuming her guilt on the basis of the word of an ideological colleague—you owe Ms. Buchan, at the very least, an apology.”
No such apologies were forthcoming, though I did drop Frank Carty a thank-you card. The American Association of Handicapped Persons, on the other hand, demanded an apology from Tobias Judson for the comments he made on Billy’s disability during the interview. Judson issued one by press release around the same time as he returned to Chicago to discover that his show had been dropped from the local talk-radio station. “We may not approve of Mrs. Buchan’s moral choices during the 1970s,” the radio station said in their press release—which Rita scored for me—“but we also will not tolerate the maligning of an innocent party by one of our presenters, which is why Mr. Judson is no longer working for this station.” Judson ate humble pie—and even went on NPR’s Morning Edition to say that he got it all very wrong and was genuinely sorry for the pain he inflicted on me—and for his comments on “people with challenges,” which he “profoundly regretted.” But his publishers were still forced to withdraw his book from all shops after Greg Tolland threatened a $100 million defamation of character suit against them. I told Greg he was insane to be demanding such a sum. “Hey, let me scare those right-wing clowns,” he said. But I just wanted it over. So when the publishers offered a one-off $300,000 payment to cover all damages—on the legal understanding that I would not pursue them for additional restitution—I accepted their offer on the spot. Tolland could have insisted on fifty percent of this fee—as we had agreed to this sort of split in the event any damages came my way. Instead, he just took ten percent, leaving me $270,000. I used it to set up the Elizabeth Buchan Travel Bursary, to be administered by the University of Maine and to provide a sum of money every year to a worthy undergraduate who wanted to study abroad but didn’t have the financial wherewithal for the trip. Thanks to Rita, this gift to the state—and the fact that it was funded by the damages I received for being smeared—also received wide coverage, especially in New England, where The Boston Globe wrote an editorial praising me for my generosity and forgiveness, and saying that many people in Maine owed me an apology.
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