by James Renner
I’ve always had better luck getting a source to talk if I showed up at their home. If they can see me, see how bumbling and affable I can be, they usually end up talking, even if they’ve told me no over the phone. But everyone connected to Maura’s case lived hundreds of miles away. Well, almost everyone. Maura’s boyfriend, Billy Rausch, was from Marengo, Ohio, a workaday town between Mansfield and Columbus, a ninety-minute drive down Route 71 from my house.
So I went to Marengo and found Billy’s childhood home, a ranch sitting on a small lot. I parked my car and walked around back, where a sliding glass door looked into a cluttered living room. Billy’s mother, Sharon, appeared in a long robe.
Sharon has reddish hair and sharp features and comes across as highly intelligent. Her love for Maura was apparent in the news clips I’d seen on YouTube. She had cared for the young woman from Mass who’d stolen her son’s heart, and had opened up her home to her.
“I’m James Renner,” I said. “I’m writing the book about Maura?”
Sharon nodded. “I know,” she said.
“Sorry to drop in like this, but would you have some time to talk about her?”
“Well, I’m a little under the weather right now,” she said.
Now that she mentioned it, Sharon looked tired. Worn out. But not sick. Maura’s disappearance had been seven years ago. Was she still carrying that tragedy around inside her, like a bad cold?
“Maybe when you’re feeling better, you could call me and we could set up a time to meet.”
“Sure,” she said.
I left my number and my book on Amy Mihaljevic’s case.
* * *
“I have to drive to New Hampshire,” I said to my wife one night when we were lounging on the couch at the end of the day. Julie rolled her eyes at me.
“The anniversary of Maura’s disappearance is next week,” I said. “I want to be there to see who drives by the scene of the accident. For the book.”
“I hate these stories. You always have to find some dead girl. It’s so codependent.”
“No one knows if she’s dead,” I said. “And she isn’t a girl. She’s grown up. There’s no dead kids in this one.”
“That you know of.”
“So…”
“So, what?” said Julie. “If you have to go, go. But I won’t be happy about it.”
“Thank you.”
“Just don’t do anything dangerous. Or stupid.”
A week later I was driving drunk down Wild Ammonoosuc Road, lost in its dark turns.
EIGHT
Last Shift at Melville
Karen Mayotte was the first person to notice that something was wrong with Maura Murray. Until I tracked Karen down through social media, she had never been interviewed about the night Maura broke down at work. We met up at Finders Pub in West Boylston, Massachusetts, two days before the seventh anniversary of Maura’s disappearance.
The best word I can use to describe Karen is “bubbly.” She’s the sort of person who says things like “Holy moly” a lot. She’s energetic like a kid but maternal at the same time. In fact, she has four children and was working as a first-grade teacher when we met. Back in 2004, Karen was the shift supervisor for the UMass residence hall security staff. At night, she patrolled the campus, checking to make sure doors were locked, alarms were set, and that each dorm had a security guard posted in the lobby. During the day, she studied the Holocaust and worked with Sudanese refugees.
Though I protested, she bought me a Sam Adams and some fried clams and I ate while she talked. I got the impression Karen was very happy that someone was finally listening, that she’d been waiting to share this story.
“Maura worked at Melville Hall,” Karen explained. “She worked the security desk, checking IDs.” Melville is located in the Southwest quadrant of UMass, an area with a reputation for being the craziest quad to work. When the Sox play, things can get out of hand down there. Underage drinking, drugs, vandalism.
At UMass, Maura was a bit of a loner, said Karen. Sometimes, she’d see Maura eating lunch alone. It was hard to get Maura to open up. When she saw Maura reading a book about hiking the White Mountains titled Not Without Peril, Karen told her that she’d been there as a kid. “I lied. I’d never been there. But I wanted to get her talking. She told me about her favorite trails around Mount Washington.”
Karen checked in with her lead supervisor around 10:30 the night of Maura’s breakdown. “He said, ‘Something’s up with Maura. Just so you know.’ She had been crying. I went to see what was up.”
When Karen arrived at Melville, Maura was staring into space. “I don’t know how to explain it. She was just zoned out. No reaction at all. She was unresponsive.”
Maura had a cell phone on the desk, which was against regulations, but Karen let it slide.
“I pretended to look at the write-in sheet and kind of watched her out of the corner of my eye,” said Karen. “Then she said two words, ‘My sister.’ It was very uncomfortable. I watched two people come in. One was a boy. She didn’t even ask for his ID. She was catatonic, I think. Sobbing slightly, and staring at the door.”
Karen stepped outside and called her boss, Nathaniel Whitmer. She told him that Maura was in rough shape. Whitmer told Karen to send her home. So Karen packed up Maura’s stuff. She signed her out in the log because Maura couldn’t do it herself. They walked the short distance to Kennedy Hall together.
“I asked her if she wanted me to bring her some Dunkins,” said Karen. But Maura didn’t want donuts or coffee. “She said something about nursing in the morning. She wanted to go to sleep.” Karen was so concerned, she suggested to Maura that she check herself into the hospital, get some mental help.
“I said, ‘Maura, do you have someone to talk to?’ She said, ‘I have a roommate.’” That was a lie, Karen learned later. Maura’s room was a single.
When they arrived at Kennedy, Karen hugged Maura and kissed her on the cheek. She watched Maura walk upstairs.
The next morning, there was a snowstorm and classes were canceled. “I thought, That’s cool for her. She can get some rest.”
Four days later, Karen got a call from UMass police. They told her Maura was missing, that her car had been found abandoned in the White Mountains. Karen went to the police station and filled out a report. She never heard back from the detectives.
“I don’t know what was wrong with her,” said Karen. “Was she suicidal? Why else would she go up there?”
NINE
The Zoo
Three Indians—Umpanchla, Quonquont, and Chickwalopp—“sold” Amherst to a white guy, in 1658, for some wampum. The area is a picturesque slice of New England, nestled between the Connecticut River and Quabbin Reservoir, patches of wood full of hickory and black cherry and red oak. This bit of land inspired some of America’s finest writers: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Robert Francis. It wasn’t called Amherst, though, until it was incorporated in 1759 and named for a famous (read: infamous) British officer of the French and Indian War. It was Jeffrey Amherst’s idea to give smallpox-infected blankets to Chief Pontiac’s army during the siege of Fort Pitt. The disease decimated the Indian tribe. Some have suggested renaming the town.
There are two institutions of higher learning here: Amherst College, a private liberal arts school with about 1,800 students, and UMass, the largest public university in New England, with around 27,000 enrolled each year. Should history ultimately regard Maura Murray’s disappearance as nothing but a clever hoax, UMass may finally surpass Amherst College in hoodwinking chicanery. Until that time, the honor goes to the smaller school, which, to this day, is the curator of the corpse of the Feejee Mermaid, the skeleton of a half-fish/half-human monstrosity that toured with P. T. Barnum’s circus. Visitors can see the remains at Amherst’s art museum.
UMass, though. It isn’t a campus—it’s a goddamn city. The university’s W.E.B. Du Bois Library, at twenty-six stories, is the second-tallest library in the world. Its sports teams co
mpete with the best in the country and its departments roll out Fulbright Scholars like a nerd assembly line. Amherst pubs have launched the careers of crooners for The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., and They Might Be Giants. But churning out this volume of students who find success comes with a dark side. ABC News once dubbed UMass the most violent campus in the country. The townies refer to it as ZooMass. Or, simply, the Zoo.
I arrived at the Zoo on February 8, and the campus was a cold, sleeping city of concrete, brick, and glass. I parked my car at a meter and made my way to a large, ugly structure that looked like some communist-era Moscow public works project, or maybe an outdated computer cartridge set on its side. The Murray D. Lincoln Campus Center is a hub for students and also a hotel. In the basement is a morgue. But not the kind for dead bodies. This morgue is for newspapers, specifically the bound archives of the Zoo’s student paper, The Daily Collegian. I made my way downstairs, past a sign that read: FREE BRUINS T-SHIRT WITH BLOOD DONATION!
I found a faculty adviser who escorted me to a nook with a threadbare couch. The large hardback books of old newsprint were scattered atop the coffee table and the file cabinets that lined the wall. I dug around until I found the archives from the spring of 2004.
The first on-campus article about Maura’s disappearance didn’t appear until February 17. It ran under the headline: NURSING STUDENT MISSING FOR DAYS. Student reporters had spoken to the dean of nursing and put a time on that final e-mail from Maura. It was sent at 1:24 P.M. on February 9. The e-mail stated that she was heading home for the week due to “a death in the family.”
The Collegian ran a lengthy update on the search for Maura the following semester, which included a brief interview with Laurie, Maura’s mother. Older sister Kathleen was also interviewed, and the reporter asked about that disturbing phone call the night of Maura’s breakdown: “It was just a phone call. It made no difference to me,” said Kathleen. “It was just Maura calling me. That was that. I told her about my day and quarreling with my fiancé. I don’t know what I could have done to upset her. Seriously, I think she just wanted to get out of work.”
I jotted down the names of the sources mentioned in the articles and then walked around campus a bit. The Zoo is quiet in the winter, but you can feel the mass of students packed inside the dorms, like great batteries of potential energy. I dropped by Melville. When Maura worked there, it was an all-female dorm. Just behind it was John F. Kennedy Tower, where Maura had lived, a bleak concrete rectangle, imposing.
I felt like a creep, hanging around the women’s dorms, so I returned to the car and drove out to the liquor store where Maura had stopped on her way out of Amherst. The management had changed over the years. The new owners knew nothing about the disappearance. I bought some wine, a Coke, and a few sample bottles of Jameson Irish Whiskey, the kind they serve you on cross-country flights. I got some lunch, cruised around town, and waited until 4:30, about the latest Maura could have left Amherst the day she disappeared, according to the accepted time line. Then I drove for Haverhill, New Hampshire.
I re-created Maura’s journey into the North Country. When I crossed the border into New Hampshire, I unscrewed the top of a Jameson bottle and emptied it into a half-can of Coke, started drinking, and began to look for the exit that would take me into Haverhill and the part of the Matrix that held Maura’s secret.
TEN
Hacking the Universe
There’s this theory that our universe is nothing but a computer simulation. The idea is that we all exist inside a mostly pointless video game programmed by some higher life-form. You might be surprised to learn that this is a very old idea. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, in 1641, René Descartes proposed that the observable world might be a great trick orchestrated by an “evil demon.” And Descartes’s argument was inspired by Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” written nearly twenty-five hundred years ago. Today, the notion of a giant computer simulation is very much in vogue in the world of theoretical physics. And here’s the scary part: It looks like it really might be true.
Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, explained to The New York Times in 2007 that soon, humanity will develop computers that are fast enough and big enough to run a simulation of the entire history of the universe, a copy of our own reality. They’ll use it to study the cosmos, from the Big Bang to the Heat Death of Everything. Eventually, there will be thousands, millions of these simulated versions of reality.
Still with me? Good, ’cause here’s where it gets weird. Supposing all this is possible (and tech geeks promise the computing power will be achieved by the middle of this century), then we would be stupid to assume that the reality in which we live is the “original” world that spawned the first simulations. Mathematically, it is far more probable that our world, too, is nothing but one of these computer programs. “My gut feeling,” Bostrom told the Times, “and it’s nothing more than that, is that there’s a twenty percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”
One aspect our universe clearly shares with video games is the strange way quarks behave when they’re not being watched. Quarks are the building blocks of the universe—the tiniest bits, the “pixels,” of our reality. Scientists discovered some time ago that quarks exist as a probability wave until someone looks at them and they collapse into matter that can be quantified.
How does any of this relate to Maura Murray? I’m getting there.
As any respectable nerd knows, there are codes that will let you cheat the video game. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start will get you unlimited free lives in Contra. If we are living in a simulation, can we fuck with it? Are there cheat codes?
I’m reminded of the Super Mario Bros. games. In Super Mario Bros. 2, you could walk through a door to enter Sub-Space and then when you came back, the level had reset itself. The Shy Guy you had just killed would be back, as if nothing had happened. If you repeat a certain action within some games, the program gets confused and replays the original scene.
My buddy Charles Moore has this creepy story he tells at dinner parties. He was a professional runner for some time and used to jog from one side of Cleveland to the other. One morning, he took a different route and encountered a young boy dressed in outdated clothes. The kid was dressed as if he were a newsie from 1920 or something. Well, the kid stopped, looked at him, and then disappeared. Some hear that story and think, Ghost. But if the universe is a simulation, maybe what Charles saw was a glitch. Maybe he’d reenacted some specific movement and a scene from long ago had been triggered to replay in front of him.
I wanted to trigger a glitch. I would re-create Maura’s journey into New Hampshire in as much detail as I could manage. Ostensibly, I did this so that I could observe the things she saw and report on the particulars she experienced the night she disappeared. But on some level, I was entertaining the notion that I might be able to hack the simulation, if such a thing existed. That maybe by going through the same motions that Maura did, I might trip up the part of the code that knows what happened to her. Would I see Maura’s “ghost”? Would I see the shadow of her killer offer her a ride?
I drank because Maura drank. The Jameson snuck up on me like it always does. My old editor introduced me to the stuff. Smooth. Woody. Mix it with Coke to stay awake. Sip it to sleep. I drank enough to get tipsy. How drunk was Maura when she got off 91 at Wells River and drove east? They’d found an open box of wine, a bunch of liquor, and a soda bottle that reeked of booze in her wrecked car. Most likely, Maura was tipsier than I was, but I didn’t want to push it. I still needed to observe.
It was twilight when I passed through the town of Woodsville, the last bit of red sun sneaking down the other side of the Presidentials. It’s one of those logging towns along the Connecticut River, the kind with a row of wooden storefronts on Main Street. In the 1800s, John Woods owned the mill and much of the town’s economy revolved around his loggers’ favorite vices: drinkin’ and fuckin’. Tod
ay, Woodsville feels empty. The saloons and whorehouses have become restaurants and stationery stores. But there’s this feeling like something’s happening in town, that it’s just a year or two away from becoming that secret summer spot for rich New Yorkers.
After passing the new Wal-Mart, I found Route 112 immediately on my right. Here, in the beginning, the road is called Wild Ammonoosuc, then it becomes Lost River Road, and finally it’s the Kancamagus Highway, named for a fearless leader of the Pennacook Indians, who tried to broker peace with the white folk (spoiler alert: It didn’t work out well). The road is two lanes of blacktop, twisty along the mountain valley where the Ammonoosuc River trails beside the northern shoulder. It was dark, real dark, by the time I got there. I checked the clock: 6:49. That was strange. I had left Amherst as late as the police figured Maura could have departed, but I had arrived here about forty minutes before the time of her accident, which was reported to police dispatch at 7:27.
That was too much missing time for a simple gas station refill. Maura must have taken a break somewhere along the way. Had she gone to a restaurant for dinner? Had she stopped to meet someone?
When I said that Wild Ammonoosuc Road was “twisty,” I was underplaying it a bit. The road bends along the natural swoop of the river and it’s a bitch to drive at night if you are unfamiliar with its pattern. There are no streetlights. The only illumination comes from isolated homes along the way: squat cabins, dilapidated trailers, low ranches obscured by snow.
I was looking for a “weathered barn.” In the newspaper accounts of Maura’s accident, the turn where she slid off the road is marked by a weathered barn. There’s a giant blue ribbon tied to a tree near the crash site. I drove slow.
