Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 36



Nathan’s message showed up on my cell while I was at work the following evening.

“Jamie. Please call me,” was all he said on the voice mail.

I noticed it during my break and called him right back—thinking he wanted confirmation that the FedEx package had been delivered.

“I’ve been calling a few people.” Nathan sounded drained. “A few people I didn’t want to hear this on the news. It’s hit a couple of news stations. Not where you are, probably, but . . . Jamie, they found Gretchen’s purse.”

My heart jumped. “Where?”

“In Youngs Lake in Emerson.”

“Emerson? There’s a lake there?”

“A little one, yeah. Near the state park.”

“Were the police diving for evidence, or something?”

“No. Not at all. Little kids fish there all the time. Some girl was with her dad and caught Gretchen’s purse. It seemed empty at first, but they found an expired credit card in one of the inside pockets. The dad recognized her name from the local papers and turned it in.”

“So . . . what does this mean?”

“Well, they don’t think Gretchen put it there, that’s for sure.”

I took a breath. “Oh my God, Nathan. I’m so sorry. How’s your mom holding up?”

“About the same. It doesn’t change much for her. We already knew Gretchen’s death might not have been an accident.”

I had more questions, but didn’t want to make this any harder for Nathan.

“Thank you for calling me,” I said.

When we’d hung up, I went back to my desk and did a few searches on news stories with Gretchen’s name in them in the last forty-eight hours. Sure enough, a posting from a New Hampshire news station had a brief story about it. The author Gretchen Waters, who’d died falling down some stone steps in Willingham, was presumed to have died an accidental death.

Now the discovery of her purse in an Emerson lake was causing police to suspect foul play. Her money, credit cards, and ID were gone from her wallet, but police had been able to identify it as hers because of a loose, expired credit card zipped into an inside pocket of the purse. Her boyfriend Gregor Bachman also confirmed that the purse resembled Gretchen’s.

Police weren’t releasing many new details, but said that an investigation of some “unusual circumstances” of Gretchen’s fall had already been quietly under way before the purse discovery: Her head injuries had suggested a backward fall. There were hairs on her sweater that didn’t match her own (likely from someone at the reading or anyone else she’d encountered recently, but still being given “a closer look” by police). And there was bruising on her arm, with a laceration possibly made by fingernails—suggesting Gretchen had been grabbed and thrown. The details were essentially the same as what Gretchen’s mother had told me, with only a few new specifics.

The article mentioned that Gretchen’s family was originally from Emerson, and that she’d been in Emerson a great deal recently, researching her next book. It also mentioned that Gretchen was the daughter of the 1985 murder victim Shelly Brewer.

I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. So Gretchen’s purse was found in Emerson, when she’d died forty miles away in Willingham. That was quite a coincidence. It was unlikely that a random mugger would end up in Emerson in order to chuck her purse into Youngs Lake. Almost certainly her killer had been from Emerson or its vicinity. Likely someone she’d spoken to in recent weeks.

P.S. Also, in your days as a reporter, did you start to develop any skill for telling who is lying to you?

Remembering Gretchen’s last e-mail to me, I wanted to scream. I got up and ran to the bathroom. There, I stared at the stall door, saying to myself over and over: Who was lying to you, Gretchen? I had a feeling she’d figured it out herself. And that that was the somebody who pushed her.

I stayed there for about twenty minutes, figuring no one would call a pregnant woman on a lengthy bathroom break. When the question finally grew stale in my head, I returned to my desk. My break had ended a while ago, and now I had a seventeen-inch story I had to reduce to fifteen inches. I glanced at the reporter’s name. Someone not particularly diva. Good. I did the edit within fifteen minutes, then went back online to find more stories about Gretchen. I was waiting for one of the reporters to turn in his story about school budget cuts.

There was one article about Gretchen from her hometown in Connecticut, in which Nathan was quoted as saying that the family was saddened, but hoped that the finding of the purse would bring them closer to the answers about Gretchen’s death. In another, the Willingham librarian who’d hosted Gretchen’s event was quoted as saying how shocked she was.

Her name was Ruth Rowan—she’d been quoted in earlier articles about Gretchen’s death. I scribbled her name down, then searched the library’s Web site for her e-mail address.

My e-mail dinged: the school budget article had arrived.