The First Time I Died

by Joanne Macgregor

  “How’d you find me?” I asked as we walked slowly away from the bay, putting yards and minutes between me and those images. And the disorienting sense that I was in someone else’s body.

  Or that he was in mine.

  19

  NOW

  Tuesday December 19, 2017

  “I was on Pond Road and saw your empty car,” Ryan said, tucking his hand under my elbow as we climbed the stairs by the pier. “Figured I should check on you. When I couldn’t find you, I followed your tracks in the snow.”

  “You can’t seem to stop helping me,” I said.

  “You can’t seem to stay away from icy water. What’s with you and that pond?”

  Good question.

  The parking lot of the Tuppenny Tavern was filled with SUVs topped with skis and snowboards; the bar was clearly a favorite with the après ski crowd. Ryan held the door open for me, and I entered first, welcoming the enveloping hug of the warmth inside. I found us a small table in a quiet corner, while Ryan went to order our drinks at the bar.

  “Extra, extra hot,” I called after him.

  The interior of the Tuppenny looked like a fresh and clean version of a decorator’s idea of a Ye Olde Tudor Inn. Logs crackled and sizzled in a vast stone fireplace, and red velvet cushions topped spindle-legged stools at the bar counter. I’d bet that the paintings of fox hunts and the blackened beams crisscrossing the ceiling above were fake, but the polished brass railings and old saddles hanging on the far wall looked real enough, and the scrubbed wood floor may well have been from another century. I eyed the laminated menu lying on the table, half expecting to see offerings like steak and kidney pie or blood pudding, but there were only the usual burgers, steaks and pizza.

  Ryan returned and put my Irish coffee and his chilled longneck down on the table.

  “The bartender gave us these on the house, because you saved the Cooper kid.” He sat down opposite me and asked, “Feeling better?”

  “I’m fine.” I was no longer trembling, but I still felt shaken. And as tired as if I’d just run a marathon. I rubbed my temples with my knuckles, trying to massage away the pain behind my eyes, and felt grit under my fingers.

  “You’ve got sand …”

  Ryan brushed my right cheek, sending grains sprinkling onto the table, then leaned forward and studied me intently for several long moments with slate-gray eyes. My mother was right about one thing — he was attractive.

  “Your eyes,” he said. “I don’t think they used to be different colors.”

  “It’s a recent development.”

  “It’s … uncanny.”

  I broke contact with his gaze, took a sip of the whiskey-laced coffee and frowned.

  “Not hot enough?”

  For once, it was. But I found myself not enjoying the taste.

  “May I?” I reached for his beer.

  “Be my guest.”

  I swallowed half the bottle before pausing to catch a breath and give a satisfied sigh. I only just curbed my urge to burp.

  Ryan grinned. He lifted the cup of coffee, clinked it against my bottle, and took a small sip. Making a not-half-bad kind of expression, he resumed his unsettling perusal of me. “And no lingering problems after your dip in the pond the other day?”

  I downed most of the rest of the beer and signaled a waitress to bring me another before I spoke. “I saw your appeal for information in The Bugle, in that commemorative piece about Colby Beaumont. Did anything come in?”

  “Nope.” He sipped his coffee, checked his top lip for cream. “Not that we really expected anything. That case is as cold as Plover Pond.”

  “You never discovered anything more, never got any tips that could help solve it?”

  “Not a peep. And we looked, believe me. Especially with Vanessa Beaumont breathing down our necks.”

  “She kept your feet to the fire?”

  “Yeah, especially in the first few years. She still calls every sixteenth of December to check if there’s been any progress. But the case file is this thick” — he held his thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart — “and full of nothing.”

  The waitress delivered my beer. I waited until she left before asking Ryan, “Bottom line?”

  “Colby Beaumont, age eighteen, died by drowning after having sustained a serious assault at the hands of a person or persons unknown—”

  “Persons,” I said. More than one.

  “That was never established. According to the Medical Examiner’s report, it could have been done by one person.”

  I gestured for him to continue.

  “And occurring at a location unknown.”

  “At the pond,” I said. “In that little bay.”

  It wasn’t a question, but he replied as if it was. “Probably, yeah, given that’s the part of the pond where he was found, and the medical examiner concluded the assault occurred shortly before death. Plus, forensics found a tooth there — one of his.”

  Noticing the wince I tried to hide by taking a swallow of beer, Ryan said, “Let’s talk about something else. You don’t want to hear this.”

  “I do,” I said fiercely.

  “Okay, then. Following the beating, Colby either made his way into the pond where he drowned, or he was taken there and drowned by the said person or persons unknown. His body was recovered three days later, and the responsible party has never been identified.”

  I’d lost another Band-Aid in my pondside incident, and now I picked at the label on my beer bottle with what remained of the exposed nail. “Did you have any suspects?”

  “Back then? Sure. Well, ‘suspects’ may be overstating it. We interviewed some persons of interest, but nothing ever panned out into anything solid. Over the years it just got older and colder.”

  “Who?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Who were these people of interest? And what made you interview them?”

  “We did a thorough job. They either lacked motive, or opportunity, or both.”

  “Who?” I pressed.

  He swallowed the last of his coffee, looked into the bottom of the mug as if reading tea leaves, and then said, “We looked at the Dillon boy.”

  I leaned forward at this unexpected information. “Pete Dillon? Why?”

  “There was some gossip at the time about Colby and Dillon’s girlfriend, Judy Burns.”

  “Well, Colby and Judy were an item for a while, but they’d been over for” — I did a rapid calculation — “around eight months by the time he died.”

  “You were dating him at the time.”

  “I was,” I confirmed, ignoring the ache that always accompanied that thought. “And Judy had been dating Pete for a while already.”

  “Yeah, so no motive,” Ryan said. “Unless …”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless Colby was seeing her again, on the side? She denied it when we questioned her, but people lie, so maybe—”

  “No,” I said flatly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I would have known.” Wouldn’t I?

  “Every couple has its secrets, and its problems.”

  I nodded, conceding the point. We’d had at least one big one, but it hadn’t been Judy Burns.

  “Colby wasn’t a cheater.”

  “You ever think maybe you idealized him?”

  I returned my attention to the beer label, repeatedly digging the edge of a nail into it all the way around, leaving a scalloped border.

  “We tend to do that, with the dead — idealize them, I mean,” Ryan continued. “If we go by statistics, then even if Colby hadn’t been killed, chances are that the two of you wouldn’t still be together for a happily ever after.”

  I’ve never considered that, never wanted to. For me, Colby was frozen in time, and he’d always been perfect. Would we eventually have drifted apart, started fighting about flaws in each other, gone our separate ways? I couldn’t imagine it. But then again, I couldn’t imagine Colby as a thirty-year-old with
maybe a beer paunch and receding hairline like Pete’s, snoring in the bed beside me, while I yelled at the kids to shut off their lights and go to sleep already, resentfully contemplating that other life, the one outside of Pitchford, that I’d never explored because I’d been fool enough to marry the first guy I’d slept with.

  What do you say, Colby, I thought, would we have stayed in love?

  Always, forever — the words blossomed in my head, so clear and intense that I startled, knocking over and spilling the remains of my beer.

  Oblivious to my inner crazy, Ryan merely tossed a paper napkin on the puddle. “Anyway, he had an alibi.”

  “What? Who did?”

  “Pete Dillon. Judy Burns said he was with her all night.”

  “Oh. So, who else was a suspect? Sorry, ‘person of interest.’”

  “I’m going to need another drink to admit to this one. You want one?”

  “Better not. I need to drive home, and you never know when a cop might be watching.”

  “Hah,” he laughed, signaling to the waitress to bring him a beer. “Well, one of our crazier suspects was Michelle Armstrong.”

  I gaped. “Jessica’s mother? Why?”

  “At first we interviewed her routinely as one of Colby’s circle of contacts. He’d been working for her at the town clerk’s office.”

  “That’s right, he had a summer job there.”

  “And afterward he worked there most Saturdays.”

  I nodded. “I remember.”

  “Did he ever tell you much about it?”

  “Not really. I got the sense he didn’t much like her — Mrs. Armstrong. But we didn’t discuss it in detail.”

  An image flashed into my mind right then — a big golden cat. A mountain lion?

  “See? I told you every couple has secrets,” Ryan said, grinning again. He had a dimple — just the one — in his right cheek.

  The waitress arrived then, deposited a longneck on the table in front of Ryan with a flirty smile and a flash of cleavage, and then collected my empty bottle. I snatched it back off her tray.

  “Not finished,” I told her, and resumed my attack on the damp label. “What are you trying to say about Michelle Armstrong?” I asked Ryan.

  “During the course of our interviews with her and the other staff, we discovered that she was rather fond of your boy, Colby.”

  I let my confusion show on my face.

  “Bit of a cougar, is our town clerk,” Ryan said.

  “A cougar!” Not a mountain lion.

  “Yup. MILFy Michelle, they called her. I guess even back then Doc Armstrong didn’t have the wherewithal to service her engine.”

  “Are you saying that she and Colby … that they …? No way!”

  “Nah. I think maybe she came on to him, though. According to staff, they had a shouting match in her office the day before he died. She said he quit, but maybe she fired him.”

  Why hadn’t Colby told me that?

  “So, she was under suspicion because he didn’t … welcome her advances?” It sounded like a flimsy motive to me.

  Ryan shook his head. “I told you, it wasn’t a serious hypothesis. Clearly she couldn’t have given him that beating.”

  “She might have hired a couple of thugs,” I said crossly, Jessica’s mother at an all-time low in my estimation.

  “We questioned her thoroughly, but nothing.”

  “She had an alibi?” I asked.

  “Not really. She said she was home with her husband, but that he was sleeping. Probably passed out.” Ryan tilted a thumb to his mouth, as though hitting the bottle hard. “But it was a flimsy motive. If MILFy Michelle went around murdering all the young men who didn’t return her favors, this town would be short a score or more of men.”

  “She put the moves on you, too!” I said, amused.

  “Oh, yeah. If it wears pants, she wants in ‘em.”

  It had always been a bit of a joke around town how friendly Jessica’s mother had been to young men, but I’d never suspected she’d come on to teenagers. On to Colby.

  I tore the wet label off the beer bottle. Irritated that it hadn’t come off in one piece, I grabbed a knife from the canteen of flatware on the table and scraped at the narrow strip left adhering to a line of glue.

  “Who else?”

  “Why do you want me to tell you about who we already know didn’t do it?”

  “Humor me, okay?”

  Ryan took a long swallow of his beer. “Chief Turner questioned Colby’s family — you always have to. And, of course, I knew them personally. They seemed a normal-enough bunch. No abuse or anything like that, no motive to kill their son. And his parents were absolutely devastated by the loss. Still are, I reckon.”

  “Yeah, I saw his mother and younger sister today.”

  “Cassie? How’s she doing?”

  “I think she’s dying.”

  Ryan blew a long sigh. “That family has suffered more than any family should have to.”

  I pushed the bottle, now satisfyingly clear of any remnants of label, away from me. “So, did you identify anyone else who may have wanted to assault and murder him?”

  “Nope. We couldn’t find anyone apart from the Dillon boy and Michelle Armstrong who had a bad word to say about him. He was a good kid.”

  “Yeah.” I cleared my throat, trying to dislodge the frog stuck there, and signaled for another beer.

  “Chief Turner figured it for a robbery gone wrong, because Colby’s wallet, laptop and cell phone were missing, but it turned out he hadn’t taken his wallet with him — we found it in a drawer in his bedroom when we searched there a couple of days later. We never did find the cellphone, though, or his laptop.”

  For an instant, I considered telling Ryan that the phone was, right at that moment, in my handbag, but I held my tongue. I planned to hand it over to Ryan — of course I did — but I wanted to check it out myself first. No doubt once the police had it, I wouldn’t see it again.

  The waitress brought my beer and placed a bowl of peanuts close to Ryan. He immediately scooped up a small handful and tossed them into his mouth.

  I wrinkled my nose in disgust. “You really shouldn’t eat those. Don’t you know that studies have shown they’re full of urine and bacteria from all the unwashed hands dipping in and out?”

  “I like to keep my immune system primed and fit by inoculating it with germs regularly.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not. I said, “If Turner thought it was a botched robbery, what was your theory?”

  “Did you know that there was a serial killer operating in New England at the time?”

  I tucked my chin back in surprise.

  “It took us a while to link the deaths, to see the pattern, because he used different M.O.’s — stabbings, slitting the vic’s throat — plus, he killed in different towns across a few states. In Vermont at Montpelier and Manchester, and in Concord and Meredith in New Hampshire. There was even one in Maine, if I remember right. Eventually some special unit at the FBI got on it and connected the dots. Based on the location of where the victims’ bodies were found, they did some geographical profiling and predicted the unsub probably lived in Vermont.”

  “The ‘unsub’?”

  “Unknown subject — the suspect. Back then, I thought Colby might have been one of the killer’s victims.”

  “Did the FBI do a profile of the suspect?”

  “It was very vague and generic — they invariably are. A load of crap often as not.”

  I looked at him, waiting.

  “White male or males — they said it was most likely a single operator but couldn’t one hundred percent exclude a pair — probably between twenty-five and forty-five, but with a margin of error of ten years on either side. See? Vague. It could have applied to most of the men in this town, including me.”

  Including my father, I realized, and those of my friends — they would all have been in that age range.

  “Oh, and probably em
ployed in his own business, with a reason to travel around a lot — like maybe a trucker or sales rep,” Ryan added.

  “If the victims were all murdered in different places and in different ways, what made the FBI think the deaths were connected?”

  “They were all beaten badly before being killed. And they were all young men around Colby’s age. The victims were gay, so we figured it was either some homophobic freak taking out what he saw as deviants, or that the killer himself was gay. That he picked up these boys and then got his kicks killing them.”

  “Colby wasn’t gay,” I pointed out.

  “No, but he sure was pretty. Say the perp was out cruising that night. He sees Colby strolling along alone, thinks maybe he’s looking to be picked up, so he stops and offers a ride. A storm was coming in, remember? The temperature was dropping fast. Maybe Colby accepts the offer, thinking that’s all it is, and then when things turn sexual, he refuses. The perp feels rejected and enraged, and beats him unconscious.”

  I remember that darkness blossoming across my — no, Colby’s — field of vision.

  “And then dragged him into the water and drowned him, or Colby could’ve crawled there himself in his confusion,” Ryan said. “That’s what I thought at the time, anyway.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, I think it’s unlikely it was the serial killer. His M.O. was to beat his victims, then kill using a knife, so why would he drown this one? Besides, an assault like I described would’ve happened in his car. And it’s a long way between the side of the road and the pond — too far, I reckon, to carry the deadweight of an unconscious eighteen-year-old male. We checked, once the snow had melted, and found no drag marks from the road to the water. Anyway, it’s all moot,” Ryan continued. “At the time, I sent all the details through to the FBI, and they ruled out the possibility of it belonging to their serial killer case.”

  I took a sip of beer. “Did they ever solve those murders, find the murderer?”

  “No, but that’s not unusual. Often, serial killers don’t have a clear motive for killing this particular person, rather than someone else like him. The victim is just there, at the wrong place and wrong time — the type of victim might be carefully chosen, but the specific identity of the victim is often random. That makes it hard to trace a connection between victim and killer.”