Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 12



I have to admit, Gregor annoyed me before I’d even met him.

“Gregor? Like the bug in the Kafka story?” I’d asked Gretchen when she first told me about him.

“Yeah,” she’d said. “But he’s nothing like that guy, really.”

That was true, I’d soon learn when I met him. I had to admit he was very attractive, but for his creative facial hair. He almost always wore a scarf with his dark, pec-hugging T-shirts—more often than not, a cowboy kerchief, which seemed to me pretty contrived, but with her later-in-life attraction to things country . . . who knows? Maybe Gretchen found it charming.

And I didn’t care for his light red goatee. He looked like a leprechaun—a young, narrow-faced, hipster leprechaun.

Now, as he led me into his and Gretchen’s chilly, high-ceilinged apartment, he seemed just a sad leprechaun. He wasn’t wearing a scarf of any kind—only jeans and a loose green T-shirt that said THE JESUS LIZARD on it. His feet were bare, and he kept placing one foot over the other and curling his toes, as if he were self-conscious about them.

“How’re you holding up?” I asked, handing him the laptop that Nathan had sent me.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m trying to get a new place fast. Because it’s hard to be in here.”

“I can imagine. Did you two have a lease?”

“Yeah, but they’re letting me break it. They understand.”

Gregor led me to a spacious room with two desks—one slim and black, one heavy and oak. The black one had on it two neat stacks of magazines and had a clock over it that had the word NOW at each of the twelve hours instead of numbers. The wooden desk was dusty, scattered with paper clips. Over it was a framed poster of a mallard floating in brown, rippling water.

“We shared this office space, Gretchen and I,” Gregor explained.

“Let me guess,” I said, pointing to the second desk. “That one was Gretchen’s.”

“Yeah. Her parents didn’t ask for the duck poster back.”

Gregor paused while he hooked a couple of cords from the small drive on his desk to the Mac I’d given him.

“It’s not any easier since the Waterses took Gretchen’s stuff away. It’s even more depressing. Like there’s this big empty hole where she was.” He pushed his leather chair toward me and gestured for me to sit in it. “I’m sorry. How are you doing?”

“Not so great. Reality’s setting in, I think. It feels worse now than it did a couple of weeks ago.”

He nodded, then glanced at my belly, as if that factored in somehow. I swiveled away from him slightly.

“Yeah,” he said, looking away again. He glanced at the computer. “Um. Uh-oh. It says this is gonna take six hours.”

“Oh, really?” I said.

“Oh, shit. I had no idea. I’ve never had to use the Time Capsule before. I don’t know why I thought it would just be, like, zip-zap.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I can kill time around here for a few hours. There are some things I’ve been meaning to shop for—I noticed you have the big mall down by the exit. Is there any kind of a baby store there?”

“Uh . . . yeah.” Gregor hoisted himself onto his desk, pulled up one leg, and grabbed his toes. “I’m not sure. But it’s a pretty big-ass mall.”

I felt silly for asking him this. Of course he didn’t know. But I wondered if he regularly used terms like big-ass, and if Gretchen liked it.

“And maybe . . . I mean, I don’t know what you had planned for today, but maybe you and I could get out of here for a little bit, grab coffee or lunch or something. I thought maybe we could chat about Gretchen’s project some. I bet you know more about it than her family does.”

“Yeah, prolly,” Gregor said, picking at his pinkie toe. “Sure, that’d be a good idea. You hungry for lunch now?”

He glanced at my belly again.

“No,” I said. “Is it even eleven o’clock yet? But if you want to talk now, how about coffee?”

Gregor let go of his foot. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s do that.”



I allowed Gregor to drive, and he chose a tiny coffee place with dim lighting, holey couches, and creaky wooden tables covered in African fabrics.

“Gretchen wrote here sometimes,” Gregor told me as we waited in line. “But never for long. An hour, maybe two. She told me it was hard for her to concentrate in one place. She’d try coffee shops, she’d try the library, she’d try home. She’d even write at McDonald’s sometimes. She could never settle into one place to write.”

“Maybe that came from her experience with Tammyland,” I suggested. “Since with that, she was always writing from a different place. At a Dairy Queen over a sundae, over a piece of key lime pie at a folksy diner, or whatever.”

“That was more about the food than surroundings, though. She thought it would be cute to make it look like she was stuffing her face on southern food or road food the whole time. But half the time she was writing in her hotel room and just making up where it was written.”

“She told you that?”

“Yeah.” Gregor shrugged. “This time around, I think it had to do more with the fact that she was really having some kind of writer’s block.”

A similarly goateed guy behind the counter gave Gregor a nod of recognition before taking our orders: Gregor’s cappuccino and my chai. Coffee still made my stomach turn, unfortunately.

At our table with our drinks, I prompted Gregor.

“So . . . you were saying. Writer’s block. Gretchen was having a little trouble?”

“Um . . . yeah.” Gregor dumped three raw sugar packets into his cappuccino. “You know, she wouldn’t just switch places she’d write. She’d switch notebooks. I don’t know how many notebooks the Waterses gave you, but it must’ve been a lot.”

“Yeah. Piles and piles of them.”

“I think the idea was that she kept starting over.” Gregor stirred his cappuccino and then licked the little spoon before tucking it carefully next to his cup. “A new notebook was, like, symbolic. Or she’d try a more fun or more expensive notebook with a cool cover, to get her spirits up. Or she’d have a new idea while she was in a grocery store. Buy a cheap notebook there, go to the nearest Starbucks, write there for a while. So there were notebooks everywhere. She started to lose track of what she’d written where. One time she tore apart the whole apartment looking for some piece she’d written about Willie Nelson. When she finally found it, she was like . . . ‘Oh . . . it’s not as brilliant as I remember it.’ And just tossed it aside.”

I smiled a little. The process reminded me of watching Gretchen in the final hours of writing a paper in college.

“I don’t know how much of the drafts and stuff you’ve read, what you’ve seen in her notebooks or whatever so far . . .”

“Well, I’ve gotten that she was playing around with another country music book. This time with the focus more on the male musicians, right?” I asked. “Or at least, that was the original idea.”

“Sort of,” Gregor said, putting his cappuccino to his lips and waiting for me to continue.

“And that she was getting a little more personal this time. There was more about her family’s past.”

Gregor put down his cup and scratched at his leprechaun beard. “So you know all about Shelly, I guess?”

“Yeah. She didn’t ever keep that a secret. Didn’t talk about it much, but it wasn’t a secret. And I’ve read enough to know she was writing a bit about Shelly.”

“Shelly and . . . what happened to her,” Gregor added. “And who her biological father was. Did you catch on to that?”

“Yes. I read a little bit to that effect, and her agent confirmed it.”

“I think the idea with that is that it would fit with the male musician theme. And she was feeling pressure from her publisher to write something that felt like a companion volume to Tammyland. Seriously, I don’t think she had any daddy issues before she started on this thing. She had her dad. Mr. Waters, I mean. She didn’t care about whichever of the punks Shelly knew in high school happened to sire her.”

I shrugged. “That’s the impression she always gave to me, but it was hard to ever really know what was going on in Gretchen’s head. Maybe when she started to research the book, she started to care. Sounds like it.”

“Maybe. But in the end, I think she was writing mostly about Frank. You know . . . the guy who killed Shelly. The boyfriend?”

“Right,” I said. “Now, what was his last name?”

“Oh, man . . . I actually don’t remember. She usually just called him Frank. But I’m sure his name is all over Gretchen’s manuscripts. It should be pretty easy to find.”

“Is he still in jail?” I asked.

Gregor looked surprised at the question. “No, Jamie. Gretchen never told you? He never went to jail.”

“How could that be?”

“Well, the story is that he was partying all night that night, came home in the morning, and found her beaten and bleeding to death. Everyone thinks he made that up, of course. That he beat her up. But just because everyone thought it doesn’t mean it stood up in court. The case against him was weak, I guess. There were some odd circumstances that morning. The defense used them to their advantage.”

“Jesus,” I said. My heart sank a little deeper for Gretchen. Why hadn’t she ever told me this? How was it that Mr. Lucky Charms here knew it and I didn’t?

“There was something that really bothered her, that she learned about the morning her mother died. Her mother apparently said something as she was dying, to one of the medics or something, that implicated Frank. But it wasn’t enough to convict. The last time we really discussed it, that’s what she talked about.”

Gregor paused for a moment, picking at his lower lip. “Her attitude about Frank was different than with the paternity stuff. It was almost like she found the paternity issue . . . I don’t know, amusing, almost. But not the Frank stuff. Obviously. Not that.”

“There wasn’t a chance this Frank guy was her father?” I put my chai down. It was getting a little cold, which made it taste kind of sickening sweet. “Could that have been what disturbed her so much?”

“Uh . . . no.” Gregor shook his head. “It was pretty clear Shelly didn’t know Frank till Gretchen was five or six or so. She met him when they both worked at the factory.”

“What factory is that?”

“Emerson has a dog-food factory.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, I don’t think Frank even grew up in Emerson. I’m pretty sure he moved there later, for the factory work. Gretchen never talked like he was even a possibility.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s good to hear.”

“After a while she kept saying to me that she’d figured out that the real story wasn’t about who her father was. The real story was about Frank and what happened that morning with Shelly.”

“The real story . . . meaning . . . what she truly wanted to write about?”

“Write about and research, yeah,” Gregor explained. “I mean, maybe that’s just what she told herself. Cuz the whole father thing was becoming too close or too weird or something.”

“So was she gonna somehow write about George Jones and Willie Nelson and those guys along with her mother’s death?” I asked.

“Yeah, I don’t know how well that theme held up as she got deeper into researching her mother’s death. But researching that became her main focus. Kind of an obsession, maybe. For one thing, she was spending all of her time up there in Emerson. But there were other little things. Like, she bought this digital voice recorder. She showed it to me. She said she was starting to use it when she interviewed people. She was convinced she was going to catch someone in a lie, catch someone giving themselves away. And she’d have proof.”

An uneasy feeling came over me as I thought of the casual P.S. in Gretchen’s final e-mail to me: In your days as a reporter, did you start to develop any skill for telling who is lying to you?

“Catch someone . . . meaning Frank, I assume? Or someone connected to him?”

Gregor shrugged. “I guess. By then, she was getting kind of short with me in general. I’d stopped asking a lot of questions.”

“Where’s the voice recorder now?”

“I don’t know. I assume her family took it with everything else. If you want to listen to what she got, you ought to ask her brother if he’s seen it.”

“Yeah . . . I guess I should.”

It seemed to me that if Nathan had it, and had any inkling that it was part of Gretchen’s project, he’d have given it to me. Maybe, I thought with a start, it was in Gretchen’s purse—the purse she’d supposedly had at the reading and the 7-Eleven but not when they found her.

“Did she play you anything she recorded?” I asked. “Tell you what she got people to say?”

Gregor shook his head. “Not really. She talked to me about it less and less in the last month or so. We were . . . having trouble. She was spending days, sometimes whole weeks, up there in New Hampshire with her aunt Dorothy. I almost got the feeling she was avoiding me.”

Gregor hesitated, glanced at me, gulped the dregs of his cappuccino, and then glanced at me again.

“And I think she was talking to Jeremy more.”

“Jeremy?” I repeated.

“Yeah. I don’t mean like getting back together. Like, I think she liked talking to him more than me. About the book. About what was on her mind. Like he was smarter. Older. Maybe . . . knew her better, really.”

“What makes you say that? Did you hear them talking?”

“Well, he called the house once or twice. And sometimes I’d hear her talking to someone quietly in the office, with the door closed. I’m not sure it was always him, but once I heard her address him by name. And I heard her saying once, ‘Well, this book is going to be very different.’ I’d hear her mention Shelly, and Frank . . . but I didn’t mean to imply they were getting back together. Nothing like that. It was just a sign to me that she didn’t feel close to me anymore—that she felt more like talking to him. She was tired of me.”

“And you?” I asked. “How did you feel?”

“Me? No, I didn’t get tired of her. It was like . . . she just woke up one day and decided I was too young, too naive for her. That she’d kind of run out of things to talk to me about.”

Gregor shrugged. “You know, sometimes it seemed like she wasn’t actually writing much. I know she was behind on her deadline. But I felt like the book was getting to her, and I’d say so. She didn’t like that.”

“Getting to her? How’s that?”

“Well, it seemed like . . . going backward for her, somehow. Instead of coming up with, you know, a new topic, she was going into this old personal stuff that she’d supposedly put to bed a long time ago. I thought it was making her . . . unhealthy. She was in Emerson all the time. And that was her prerogative . . . whatever. I don’t know what she was doing up there. But when she’d come back, she’d sit at her computer for hours, drinking wine while she wrote or . . . whatever she was doing. She’d stay up late. She wasn’t eating much. It was like this project was driving her crazy. Spending so much time in that . . . space. Her mother’s death. Shelly’s death, I mean. And when I tried to talk to her about it . . . to at least say, ‘Hey, maybe you need a break from this,’ she’d gently push me away. Like, ‘Whatevs, Gregor. You don’t have anything like this in your life. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”

“Would she say that?”

“No. But that was just . . . what it felt like.”

“Right,” I said. “I see.”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “In general, I had thought she was losing her way a little. Wasn’t really taking care of herself. And the fall. It was a shock, but part of me knew she’d been sort of . . . out of it lately. It could have been a little alcohol. Or just distraction. I dunno. I should have told her she should be taking better care . . .”

Gregor trailed off. I put my hand out on the table—not to touch him, but still as a gesture of support. I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d disliked about him the first time I’d met him. He was a little on the dopey side, but a nice guy in general.

“Gregor, no one ever really told Gretchen what to do. That’s not how it worked with her. She would’ve listened to you quietly and politely thanked you for your concern, and then gone ahead and continued whatever she was doing.”

Gregor nodded. He stared into his empty coffee cup for a moment, then leveled his eyes at me. They were a nondistinct green gray, gentle to the point of drooping. I wondered still what Gretchen had seen in them.

“Yeah,” Gregor admitted. “Yeah, I know.”