Somebody I Used to Know

by David Bell

  “How’re you doing, Mr. Hansen?” he asked.

  “Good. How are you?”

  He sat down next to me on the park bench. “Not bad.”

  Our surreal conversation made me feel like we were in a spy movie, and I wanted to look around for enemy agents. But my new friend seemed unconcerned with such things. He bent down and scratched Riley’s ears. Then he straightened up and crossed his leg, left ankle on right knee.

  “How do you know Gina?” I asked.

  “She and I . . . well, we’re friends.”

  There seemed to be more to it. “Friends? Did you meet through Eastland?”

  “We’re good friends,” he said, almost mumbling the words.

  Suddenly I saw the light. I’d had the feeling lately there was someone new in Gina’s life, someone besides her babysitters and her Zumba instructor. I studied the man in profile. His face was unlined, his hair full and neatly combed. I could imagine his blue eyes scanning the ocean waves while his yacht skimmed across the water.

  He probably spent time with Andrew. More time than I did. I had no doubt he’d seen Andrew’s latest trick football play.

  He held out his hand, and we shook. “Dale Somners.”

  “Nick Hansen. But I guess you already knew that.”

  “Gina told me you’re a good guy,” he said. “She wanted me to help you.”

  “I’ll have to thank her,” I said. “It can be a tough trick to get your ex-wife to speak highly of you.”

  “She told me you needed to know something, and she also assured me that you could be discreet. It’s not like these are the nuclear codes, but it wouldn’t look good to find out that just anyone could call and get access to our records.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I don’t want to make trouble for you or put you in an awkward position.”

  “Thanks. So what did you want to know?” Dale asked.

  “I guess Gina told you the name of the student I was interested in,” I said.

  Dale nodded.

  “I just wanted to know if her records said anything about why she decided to leave school that year. 1993.”

  “I checked for you,” Dale said. “The file mentioned financial difficulties at home. That’s what she told her advisor.”

  “That’s what she told me back then,” I said, somewhat to myself.

  “A friend of yours?” he asked.

  “She was,” I said. “A very good friend.”

  “It’s a shame,” he said.

  I figured he meant the fire. “Thanks.”

  He looked over at me, his face puzzled. “For what?”

  “I’m sorry. What’s a shame?” I asked.

  “That she dropped out,” he said. “Withdrew. She came from an Eastland family. That’s what they call them down in the admissions and development offices. Eastland families. Legacies. Your friend’s parents went to school at Eastland, and so did she.”

  “I remember that,” I said. “If I recall correctly, her parents met here as well.”

  “Exactly,” Dale said. “We push that tradition hard. Meet your mate here; send your kids here . . .”

  “Kiss on the Kissing Bridge at midnight; spend the rest of your life together.”

  “You remember,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I did it once.”

  “With . . . Marissa?” Dale asked, treading lightly.

  “Yeah.”

  “I see. Gina mentioned that your friend died shortly after she withdrew from school,” Dale said. “The file just says she’s deceased, but it didn’t give any details. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thanks.”

  I wanted to tell him we didn’t need to bond, and he was welcome to step into my place in Gina’s life. Be her husband, be the new stepfather to her son. It happened, and like two grown men, we could just shake hands and move on, pretending that none of it bothered us.

  “Did you know Marissa’s sister?” Dale asked.

  “Jade?”

  “I think that was the name,” he said. “I took a quick look at her file as well.”

  “Marissa did have a sister named Jade. She was three years younger, still in high school when we were at Eastland.”

  “And she was supposed to come to school here, too? Right?” he asked.

  “Jade? Yes, she was. I remember now that you mention it,” I said. “I know she came to visit and applied, and that meant a lot to their father. He used to say he bled Eastland blue. It would have been his dream to have both his girls go to school here. But it was fall when Marissa died, too early for a high school kid to know if she was getting in or not. I figured once Marissa died here, Jade and her family wanted nothing to do with the place. Too many bad memories. They moved out of state right after the funeral.”

  Dale leaned in closer. He acted like he didn’t want Riley to hear what he was about to say. “She did know her admission status in the fall. The sister. Jade. She learned it early.”

  “How?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Presidential Scholarships at Eastland?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I clearly didn’t get one.”

  “It’s a full ride,” Dale said, “and I mean full ride. Room, board, tuition. Even books. They use them to lure the best in-state students to Eastland. And they use them preemptively, meaning they hand them out in the fall before the best students are hearing from more prestigious schools. It makes sense, right? Eastland can’t compete with Kenyon or Oberlin or DePauw, so they start handing out the big money up front.”

  “Sure.”

  “Guess who got one of those offers in the fall of 1993?” Dale asked.

  “Jade?”

  Dale nodded. “And she accepted it. She was planning to go to Eastland in the fall of ninety-four just like her parents and her sister. But then she called the admissions office in October and informed them she wouldn’t be coming, that she didn’t need the scholarship or the offer of admission or the spot in the dorm. None of it. She walked away and left all that on the table.”

  “She called and told them this in October of ninety-three?” I asked.

  Dale nodded. “Why turn that down if your family is having financial trouble? No other school was going to offer that sweet of a deal. She was a legacy and her sister was here.”

  “That’s a lot to pass up,” I said, “but would she want to walk by the spot where her sister died every day? Would she want to be reminded of that?”

  “No, I guess she wouldn’t,” Dale said.

  But he seemed to be holding another card, something he was just waiting for the right moment to lay down in front of me.

  “What?” I asked. “There’s more?”

  “She made that call, the one in which she turned down a full ride and everything else, the day before her sister died.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I wanted to talk to Laurel and tell her what I’d learned from Dale Somners, but she still wasn’t answering her phone. She may have been off somewhere, forcing a minimum-wage clerk to confess to skimming from the till, so I left her another message.

  Then I found myself with little to do. No work for the day, just me and my dog. Hammond Park and the area around campus had made me feel nostalgic, and I didn’t like feeling that way. It hurt too much. Even though I lived in the same town where I had attended college, I avoided the campus as much as possible. Too many memories. Places I’d walked with Marissa. Places we’d made out, places we’d laughed. The parking lot we used to go to in her SUV when our roommates were around and we needed—wanted—to have sex.

  And the memories weren’t just of Marissa. It was everything. The passing of time, the unfulfilled dreams, a swirling vortex of nostalgia and regret that could swallow me if I let it.

  Could I have ever imagined I would end up where I was? A midd
le-aged divorced guy, living alone? A murder suspect?

  Riley and I wandered the winding paths through campus. Students streamed by at the change of class, looking so young, so happy, so much like babies I would have sworn they weren’t any older than Andrew. They laughed. They shoved one another playfully. Boys and girls held hands. Some of them stopped to scratch Riley’s ears. He loved it. I wondered what they thought of me, the guy gripping the leash. Did they think I was a professor? A parent? Did they assume I was an alum strolling down memory lane?

  So much had changed on campus. New buildings. New landscaping. But familiar places remained. Parker Hall, where I took most of my philosophy classes, the building where I first met Laurel. Culpepper Hall, where I lived freshman year. I’d learned recently, from an alumni newsletter or someplace, that Culpepper had gone coed in the previous five years. I felt certain it made living there more pleasant.

  And then I was on the far side of campus, where the university gave way to single-family houses and small apartment buildings, all of them taken over by students. Someone, maybe Laurel, had told me that six or seven years after the fire a new house was erected on the old lot, and students lived there as well. I wondered if anyone knew what had happened there on a distant fall night. Did the students exchange ghost stories about the fire? Did they claim to hear the muffled screams of four young women in the middle of the night?

  College campuses were full of such lore. Culpepper Hall had a ghost story, one that said the fourth floor was haunted by a young man who committed suicide in his room in the 1940s. We used to share the story around Halloween, or during finals week when everyone was tired and on edge, joking about the poor sap who found college so stressful that he fashioned a noose out of a bedsheet and stepped into his closet. We laughed because we were young, but also because we were afraid. The laughter held off our own mortality—while we made fun of someone else’s, someone we never knew.

  Did anyone currently on campus even know Marissa’s story?

  I felt certain a few old-timers did. Administrators who were still around. Some professors who never retired. But after twenty years, as Nate said, life goes on.

  I hadn’t been down that street since the year Marissa died. And I didn’t intend to go that day.

  I’d never seen the new house, the new students coming and going through its doors, free as birds, unaware perhaps of what had happened on that very ground. I went back to the rubble-filled lot almost every day for a month after the fire, and then I had to tell myself no more. No more. Time to move on. Time to let the wound heal instead of picking at it.

  Wasn’t it time I took that advice again? Was that all I was doing with my visits to retired cops and sneaky administrators—trying to keep something alive that had died twenty years ago?

  “Let’s go, Riley,” I said, giving his leash a gentle tug.

  He was more than ready to leave.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The evening paper carried details about Emily’s funeral, and while I ate my reheated Chinese food, I studied them like there was going to be an exam. The viewing would be held the next night at a funeral home in Richmond, Kentucky, where Emily grew up. Then a Catholic mass the following morning, with the burial in the family plot.

  I checked my phone, trying not to dribble soy sauce on the screen. Richmond was about three hours away. I could easily go down for the viewing, stay overnight for the mass and burial, and be back the next day.

  Marissa’s funeral had passed in a blur. A group of us traveled to Hanfort to attend. I remembered seeing Marissa’s mother, Joan, at the back of the church. She gave me a long hug and invited me to sit near the family at the front, so I did.

  The coffin was closed, of course. It will sound morbid, but even back then I wondered what they had managed to find of her. Of any of them. Some charred bones. Some scraps of clothing. Did they bother to put them in a coffin and go through the charade that something meaningful was inside?

  The priest eulogized Marissa. He talked of knowing her since she was a child, her kindness, her energy, her passion for travel and photography. I agreed with all of it, even though it didn’t seem that personal. I wanted to stand up and say something, but I wasn’t invited to do so. And I knew even then I wouldn’t have been able to hold things together. I tried to speak at my father’s funeral when I was thirty-five and couldn’t get a coherent word out. No way I could have done that for Marissa when I was twenty.

  Marissa’s father, Brent, a man I never knew well despite the fact that I dated his daughter for two years, stared straight ahead during the service, his face stoic. Jade looked a lot like her dad, not just physically but in her demeanor as well. Her hair was darker, like her dad’s, not the bright red color that Marissa and Joan shared. She was shorter than Marissa, more solidly and athletically built, although they were clearly sisters. Jade always seemed quieter and more reserved, and at the funeral she barely shed a tear. But Joan turned around to me during the post-Communion meditation and placed her hand on my arm.

  “She really loved you, Nick.”

  “I know,” I said. “I loved her too.”

  “I wish this had all been different,” Joan said. “I really do.”

  She seemed to want to say more, but chose not to.

  Did anything more need to be said?

  Couldn’t those words sum up so much of our lives?

  I wish this had all been different.

  * * *

  Laurel finally called and told me she was on her way to my apartment. When she arrived, she looked a little tired, and I asked if she needed to be at home with her family.

  “They’re fine,” she said. “I’ll get there soon enough. And I’m sorry I didn’t call you back earlier. I was on the road all day.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “But you said in your message you had something to tell me?”

  We sat on the couch with Riley at Laurel’s feet. He acted like I never paid attention to him, reveling in her ear scratching and head rubbing.

  While I told her all about my meeting with Dale Somners, she continued to stroke Riley’s back. She listened to the information about Marissa’s withdrawal from school, the claim of financial hardship, and then Jade’s turning down the full ride before her sister died. Her face remained as hard to read as an ancient rune.

  “That’s the weird part for me,” I said. “I’d get it if she didn’t want to come to school here, if the memories were too intense after Marissa died. I’d get that completely. Hell, I thought about transferring when Marissa died. I walked past Blakemoor Street today when I was on campus. Do you know I haven’t been back there in years?”

  “Really?”

  “I can’t do it,” I said. “I went there every day when it was just smoldering rubble. I guess everybody on campus did at some point.”

  “People were curious.”

  “Ghoulishly so,” I said, trying not to sound like a complete prude. “And it makes sense when something like that happens. But I haven’t been back since that first year. I haven’t seen the new house they put up. I thought I could do it today, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go down there.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said.

  “Isn’t that avoidance or something? Don’t I need closure?” I held my hands up and made air quotes when I said the word “closure.”

  “Overrated,” Laurel said. “And unnecessary. It suggests there’s some magic way to get over something, like you get to a certain point and your feelings are wrapped up in a pretty box with a pretty bow. Life isn’t like that. If you don’t want to walk down that street, don’t do it. You’re a free man.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But you’re right about something,” she said. “It is weird that she would withdraw before Marissa died. If you were going to college, and you had that sweet offer, wouldn’t you hold on to it for a while
? Wouldn’t you wait and see if anyone else offered you something and then play the other schools off each other?” She rubbed her hands together. “That’s what I’d do.”

  “Maybe they forced her to make a decision,” I said. “Maybe they said, ‘Let us know by the end of October or the offer goes away.’”

  “Maybe,” Laurel said, but she sounded unconvinced. “But they wanted her. She was a legacy or whatever this Dale guy called it.” Laurel lifted her hand from Riley and scooted forward on the couch. She pulled out her phone. “Which brings me to my next question. What do you remember about Marissa’s parents? Anything?”

  “I knew them kind of well,” I said, trying not to overstate things. “We dated for a two years, and I went to their house half a dozen times. Some of the visits in the summer and over Christmas break were pretty long. They were nice people. Her dad was pretty reserved, almost uptight. Her mom was straight out of central casting, a real June Cleaver type. Warm, inviting, efficient. She always greeted me with a hug and sent me away with one. I liked her a lot.”

  “Do you know where they are now?” Laurel asked.

  “They moved after Marissa died. Colorado, I heard. But really I have no idea where they are.”

  “That’s interesting,” Laurel said. “Because nobody else knows where they are either.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I sat there for a few silent moments, trying to contemplate what Laurel was telling me.

  “What do you mean nobody knows where they are?” I asked.

  “I was away for most of the day, like I said. But before I left, I gave a little task to my assistant. I gave her the names of Marissa’s parents. We’ve been looking into all of this stuff, but wouldn’t it be easy just to go right to the source? If we talked to them, we’d be able to find out if this kid, Emily Russell, is related to them. We don’t want to bother Emily’s parents, of course. They’re devastated. But maybe Marissa’s parents could shed some light.”