Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 17



84 Durham Road

Emerson, New Hampshire

“Shelly had a tired face for her age,” says Laurie Wiley, Shelly’s neighbor at the time of her death.

Shelly had moved back to the Durham Road neighborhood in 1983 (renting the house from an old family friend of the Brewers, as her mother had since moved to a small apartment). Laurie—who was relatively new to the neighborhood herself at the time—had heard some unflattering things about Shelly before she moved in, but found none of those things to be true. Shelly had clearly made some mistakes in her youth and had suffered as a result of them.

Laurie felt bad for Shelly—she could imagine it was hard for her working at the factory, and then the pharmacy, while all of her old friends in town were getting their first real jobs, planning their weddings, starting their real lives. But Shelly was clearly trying—woke up early for work every day, kept her yard up nice, even made a couple of attempts at being neighborly. She helped Laurie catch her runaway beagle once. She also befriended Laurie’s teenage niece, Rachel, who was often babysitting Laurie’s two-year-old son during the hours Shelly was home from work. Shelly and Rachel would sometimes take walks together, with Shelly helping with the unruly beagle. Laurie admits that Rachel actually talked to Shelly more than she or her husband ever did.

“Shelly really loved Carington,” Laurie informs me, and I have to suppress a smile at the late hound dog’s name.

Laurie was not in the room when Shelly spoke her last words. She was not, in fact, in the room for more than about thirty seconds that morning. She only got a glimpse of Shelly and then left the house, because the scene shocked her and she had a tendency to pass out at the sight of blood. She seems uncomfortable saying much about it to me—but yes, Frank Grippo knocked on her door that morning, and yes, she was one of the people who called 911. Frank called and she called.

Laurie was never sure about that Frank Grippo—from the very beginning. He moved in quickly after Shelly’s last boyfriend, Winston Roland, moved out. He was a little gruff, but he seemed helpful to Shelly. He did lots of yard work, took the garbage to the dump every week, even seemed to cook for Shelly quite often, according to Rachel.

When Laurie would run into him, however, she found his manner unsettling.

“Something was always sarcastic about it. He could pass you gardening in your yard and say, ‘Nice tulips,’ in a way that was so . . . so snide, sort of, you weren’t sure if you should thank him or spit at him.”

And he seemed to drink a lot on weekends, but that was really none of her business.

“I did wonder how it was for you the weekends you were visiting, but it appeared that Shelly managed.”

Worrisome, however, was that Laurie and her husband, Nelson, both heard Shelly and Frank fighting fairly frequently, especially in the weeks just before Shelly’s murder. She says she doesn’t know what they were fighting about, although she heard Frank once say, “I know what you’re up too, you little bitch,” which alarmed her.

“It was really nasty, really bitter. I worried about her. Although—she always fought back. I heard her reply, ‘No you don’t, you stupid a*shole.’ ”

She says at that point she did wonder if it was really the best idea for her young and impressionable niece to spend much time with Shelly.

“Rachel even said to me once, ‘I don’t know if that Frank guy is very nice to Shelly.’ That kind of made me wonder—what she was taking in. And then when Shelly was killed, my God. We were all in shock, but Rachel was so young.”

Laurie takes in a breath after she says this, realizing it is an error to say this to me. Her teenage niece was young. But I was younger.

“I’m sorry,” she says.