Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 49



Gretchen was right that Kevin Conley’s eyes were “soulful.” There was a wounded quality to them, intensified by the thin appearance of the rest of his face. He had a dark stubble that didn’t appear in Gretchen’s description, but his royal-blue shirt had a slight sheen that reminded me of her characterization of his clothing as “pimpy.”

We met in front of a downtown Emerson diner. He’d recognized me right away (“I’ll probably be the only five-foot pregnant lady there,” I’d told him on the phone ahead of time).

“I’m glad to see you,” he said, his urchin face breaking into a wide smile.

“Thanks,” I said. “Me, too.”

Looking around at the diner’s wood paneling and crusty brown griddle, I asked, “Did Gretchen like this restaurant? Seems like the kind of place that would’ve appealed to her.”

“We came here together once,” Kevin admitted. “She wasn’t impressed. She thought the grilled cheese was soggy.”

“I’ll be sure not to order that, then.”

“If you don’t want real food right now,” Kevin suggested, pointing at a small chalkboard listing pie varieties, “the pie’s good. I mean, if you’re not a fancy person.”

“I’m not a fancy person. But I’ll probably get soup.” I didn’t say so, of course, but I was still worried about Charlie Bucket’s temple of sugar. Still, I glanced over at the pie options. Sweet Jesus, I thought. Tollhouse pie.

After we ordered (I strained not to order the pie), Kevin asked me if I’d finished reading Gretchen’s manuscript yet. I admitted I had not—that it was in pieces, and it would be a while before I felt confident that I’d read everything.

“I’ll be curious,” he said, “if she wrote about this one particular conversation we had. About the day Shelly died.”

He studied me with his big gray eyes. I’d never known Gretchen to be into the vulnerable type before, but maybe after Jeremy she’d wanted to try something entirely new.

“Well, all I’ve seen is that first one,” I explained. “Where she interviewed you. Before you started hanging out together. Is that what you mean?”

“Uh. No. Maybe once we started to become friends, she didn’t feel it was appropriate to write stuff down that I said, like it was just part of the story. But there was one thing I said that probably needed to be part of the story.”

“Okay,” I said.

“No idea what I’m talking about? You haven’t seen anything she wrote that gives you a hint?”

“No,” I said, trying to keep the agitation out of my voice.

“After we went to see Frank, it was different between us . . . after we talked in that McDonald’s lot.”

Our waitress came and plunked down our drinks wordlessly. I waited for her to slip away before replying.

“Because?” I asked, picking up my water glass.

“Well.” Kevin scrunched down his straw wrapper, making it into a tiny, tight accordion. “Because I saw that she didn’t come here to prove anything. It wasn’t about getting Frank or avenging Shelly. See, she didn’t have a lot of preconceived ideas about Frank. I’d have assumed she would. Because of who she was. But she told me, that day and other days, that she had trouble thinking of him how she was ‘supposed’ to.”

I watched as Kevin took a bit of iced tea out of his glass with his straw and squirted it onto the wrapper. It popped into a light brown worm, writhing on the table.

“How was she supposed to think of him?” I asked.

“You know . . . as pure evil. As the man who killed her mother. But she said . . . maybe it was because they kept the manner of Shelly’s death from her for so long . . . she was never quite able to believe it. When everyone else in her family did, she always had trouble with it. She thought Frank was a loser. But she didn’t think he seemed like a killer.”

“But she was only seven when she knew him.”

Kevin shrugged. “That’s just how she felt, I guess.”

“And did she feel differently when she showed up at his house?”

“No. Not at all. That’s the thing. And that’s not what I expected. I’d expected her to go there because she wanted to spit in his face. But that wasn’t how it was for her at all. I realized then that she wanted to go primarily to get a good look at him, to confirm or contradict her feeling.”

Kevin captured a bit of iced tea in his straw and squirted it into his mouth. Watching all of this, I started to wonder how much, as a parent, I was going to focus on table manners.

“And that changed your opinion of her, I guess?”

“Not of her. I already knew I liked her by then. If she hated Frank and wanted to see him fry, I would’ve understood.”

Kevin shook his head. “No, it wasn’t about liking her or not liking her. I’d already decided about that. I think I was already hopeless pretty quickly in that respect.”

“And was she?” I asked.

“Oh. Um . . . no. Hopeless, no. But willing to give me a chance.”

We were both silent for a moment.

“But that’s not what I meant to get at. Talking about the conversation in the McDonald’s parking lot. I was meaning to tell you about something I told Gretchen after that. That I wasn’t sure she’d written about or not.”

“Okay,” I said. “Did you want to tell me, then?”

“Yes. I . . . uh . . . . told her a little more about the day Shelly died. How that afternoon Judy came to our house and sat in our living room and cried hysterically and told my mother what happened. It was like being in a movie, that day. I mean, I didn’t say that to Gretchen because I know how tacky that would’ve sounded to her.”

“She would’ve understood if you said that. She didn’t mind if people were tacky, as long as they came by it honestly.”

Kevin grunted. “Ha. Yeah. I’m sure you’re right about that. But anyway, nothing like that ever happened here. It didn’t feel real. I think in my little early adolescent brain, I expected Columbo to show up.”

“When did people start asking you what you saw?”

“Not till the next day. But of course, I started thinking about it before that. I started thinking about it ten minutes after Judy showed up. I could tell by what she was saying that they’d start asking me soon. I stayed up late that night, wondering what they were going to ask me. Because of course, I hadn’t heard any screams or seen any blood or guts. I was expecting they’d ask me about stuff like that, and I wouldn’t have an answer.”

Kevin bobbed his straw up and down in his iced tea. “And the next day, Judy came and talked to me. Before the police ever got to me. And she asked me first the question about the cars. She told me that her friend Diane, the lady who jogs every day around the same time I delivered the papers . . . she told me she’d seen Frank’s big gray car there next to Shelly’s. And she wanted to know if I had, too.

“But I didn’t answer right away. And that seemed to upset Judy—that I had to take some time to stop and think about it. Because the thing is, when there was enough room in someone’s driveway, I’d usually ride my bike right up it to get closer to the doorstep and toss the paper, and not even get off my bike. We weren’t really supposed to do that—the yard toss. But I did it when I could get close enough without stopping. That was my system. I tried to be conscientious. If I missed big-time, I’d stop and redeliver it.”

“So whether there were one or two cars in the driveway was actually something you would remember.”

“Yes. Not for days and days, of course, since I’d be likely to mix the days up. But I might remember for a day or two.”

“And could you remember for sure this time?”

“I thought so. I was pretty sure.”

I waited for him to continue. Charlie Bucket kicked with anticipation.

“But Judy told me how sure that lady Diane was. And she was sure of the opposite. The opposite of what I remembered.”

“You remembered his car not being there?”

“Yeah. That’s what I remembered.” Kevin lowered his voice so much I had to lean forward to hear him. “One car. But that other lady was so sure. And Judy was so sure she was sure. And Judy was so sad and so clearly wanted me to be sure of the same thing . . . I thought . . . I must have it wrong. No, there were two cars there that day. The red one and the gray one.”

“What time did you deliver the paper?”

“My alarm always went off at six thirty. I always set out around six forty-five. That’s why I was sure it had to be about seven.”

“You even testified, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I don’t think anyone put too much stock in what I said . . . obviously. But yeah, I did. By then I was so deep in . . . I knew that I was doing the right thing. The way everyone was so sure . . . it just put that car there for me, in my head. Easy.”

“Not so much that you remembered it differently, though? If you can say it that way now. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you must have always known that you . . .”

“Yeah. You’re right. Somewhere, I always did.”

The waitress brought my chicken soup and Kevin’s hamburger. He stared at his food for a moment while I slurped down several spoonfuls.

“Did you tell anyone?” I asked. “I mean, before Gretchen?”

“No. It’s not like anyone asked about it again, after the trial was over. It was like . . . a little sore spot I always had . . . that I didn’t think about unless someone pressed on it somehow. And that was rare.”

“Till Gretchen came along.”

“Right. And when she did, I couldn’t help thinking . . . thank God that guy didn’t go to jail . . . at least, on my word. And I didn’t know if that was the right thought for me to have, because maybe he did it, but Gretchen opened it all up for me . . . I was so ashamed of myself . . . even though I was a kid, I should’ve known better . . . but I was so grateful Gretchen came along and asked. Grateful to tell someone . . . and not just anyone . . . but someone it mattered for.”

I opened my package of saltines. “And what did Gretchen say?”

Kevin sighed. “She wasn’t as surprised as I thought she’d be. She wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I knew it.’ But there was no shock at the confession.”

“What’d she say, though?”

“The first thing she said was, ‘I’m glad you told me.’ ”

Kevin finally picked up his burger and took a big bite.

“And then later?” I asked.

“We never talked about it too much later, after the initial conversation. But it felt very much . . . there. Between us.”

“In a bad way?”

“No. Not in an especially good way either. Just . . . there.”

I nodded. Gretchen had an unusual gift for allowing uncomfortable realities to simply exist in her presence without acknowledgment, to silently work themselves out. Until recently, perhaps.

“I haven’t seen anything she wrote about it,” I told him. “I’ve still got quite a few of her notebooks to read, and there might be something hidden on her computer I haven’t seen yet. But I don’t know if it’s there.”

“I wonder if it meant all that much to her. If it changed anything about how she was going to write about it.”

Kevin tried picking up his burger again, but a pickle and some ketchup drips leaked out. He grabbed a napkin and mopped his plate self-consciously.

“I’m sure she meant to write about it eventually,” I said. “It seems to me she got so caught up in the research, she’d stopped writing.”

“If you and her family decided to publish her story . . . would you put this in?” Kevin asked.

Kevin watched me carefully for a moment. He seemed to be looking at my stomach. I looked down and saw that an ample scattering of saltine crumbs had settled there.

“Well . . . ” I said, wiping them away. “Do you think Gretchen felt this was an important part of the story?”

“I think so,” Kevin said, mushing his napkin into a moist little ball. “Yeah. But I think she wasn’t sure where it fit.”

I put down my soup spoon. I liked to think he was wrong. Gretchen had figured out where it fit. She just kept it to herself and didn’t write it down.

“I guess I’ll have to figure that out,” I said, “before I can answer your question.”

“Right,” Kevin said, and picked up his hamburger again.