Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 50



After I got back to the hotel, I debated for a while before calling Judy. I didn’t want to offend her, but I wanted to see if Kevin’s memory of how he’d come to be a witness was, in her view, accurate.

Judy didn’t sound surprised to hear from me, and said she’d be happy to talk to me for a few minutes.

“I’m not sure if Gretchen would’ve asked you about this,” I said. “But I’m getting from her notes that you were actually the one who first spoke to the paperboy, Kevin Conley, about what he’d seen in Shelly’s driveway the morning of her death.”

“Yes,” Judy replied. “That’s correct.”

I asked her if that topic naturally came up in conversation, or if she had gone to Kevin specifically to ask what he’d seen.

“The second,” Judy admitted. “Maybe that sounds like I was overstepping my bounds. Remember, though, that Diane knew she saw Frank’s car there early that morning. That was a good start. But what good would that do on its own? One account of a good friend of the victim? That wasn’t going to be enough. Not even close to enough.

“So, yes, I put my head to who else would’ve seen what she saw. And Kevin was one of the people who came to mind. I didn’t want the police to overlook anyone. Even a kid.”

“But you went and talked to him first,” I said. “And by the time you were done with him, he was saying he saw what Diane saw.”

“I only asked him what he saw.” Judy’s tone was stiff now. “Did Gretchen have the impression something else happened?”

I hesitated. “Um . . . Well, did you know that Gretchen was spending time with Kevin Conley in the weeks before she died?”

Judy took in a breath.

“No . . . You mean she interviewed him?”

“Well. Yes. And they started . . . dating, I guess, would be the word for it.”

“I didn’t know he was still around.”

“Yeah. He works as a special ed aide in Plantsville.”

“Oh.” Judy was quiet for a moment. “Did he say something that concerned Gretchen?”

“Well . . . let’s just say he was twelve when it happened, and he maybe wasn’t as confident of what he saw as he’d like to be now.”

“Well. I’ve certainly never heard that. If that’s how he felt, what took him so long to say so?”

“Maybe it was simply a matter of someone asking,” I suggested.

Judy paused, then sighed. “Maybe it was a matter of someone writing a book asking. Maybe he wanted to please Gretchen? Give her something to write about?”

“It’s possible,” I admitted. “I’m not making a judgment. I just thought I would get your take.”

“Well. My take is that I loved Shelly and I did what I could for her case. I knew it was Frank, and I needed to do something. It was like Diane was at least doing something—some small thing. I was really Shelly’s best friend, and I needed to help, too.”

This was the first I’d heard of this—of Judy being Shelly’s “best” friend. I wondered how accurate this label was.

“Jamie, you’ve got to realize. There were some things Shelly said to me a week or two before she died . . . that when I thought about it later . . . made me think that things were worse between her and Frank than I realized.”

“Can you tell me what they were?”

“Yes. I spoke to Gretchen about it several times . . . I don’t know if she wrote about it. Maybe you’re already familiar . . .”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, it was just me and her one night. Having a bite to eat. That was rare in those days, with her working so hard, and dealing with Frank, and spending so much time with Melanie. And Gretchen every other weekend. And I was working and planning a wedding, so I was pretty involved in those things. But I remember very well that Shelly made a point for us to have dinner together one night.

“And she was talking about making some changes in her life. Granted, she was always talking about making changes in her life around then. Some of them happened and some of them didn’t. That’s how it was with Shelly. This time, at first, I thought she was talking about Gretchen. About getting Gretchen back. But then I realized she was talking about something else.

“She told me some things were going to change for her in the next couple of weeks, and she didn’t want me to think any less of her. She said I might be surprised by some of the choices she made.

“The thing that I remembered so well later was how she looked straight at me and said that she’d regretted how she’d let men treat her in her life. That she let men hurt her. And she was ready to take a stand about that. Maybe she’d never felt worthy of that before. ‘And maybe I still don’t,’ she said. And it’s painful to remember her saying that, even now. She said she could maybe take a stand if she was doing it for someone besides herself.

“I assumed she was talking about Gretchen. That normally she might tolerate how Frank treated her, but for the sake of being a good role model for Gretchen—or maybe for the sake of getting her back—she was going to leave Frank. That’s what I figured she was trying to say. And she talked about how it was important to her, now, to expose a person who hurt her. That she spent a lot of her life being ashamed of it when someone hurt her, and that’s what always kept her from letting the shame fall where it really belonged. Listening to her say this stuff, I wasn’t certain she believed it. But it seemed like she wanted to.

“The part about not wanting me to think less of her . . . I assumed that at some point soon I was going to hear that he’d been hitting her. That she was too ashamed to tell me straight out. Yet, anyway.”

“And you didn’t make her talk about it directly?” I asked.

“Well . . . no. She already seemed to be in a lot of turmoil. And resolved. I encouraged her resolve. I said, ‘Listen, Shelly, whatever you have to do . . . of course I’ll support you.’ And she seemed satisfied and relieved to have the conversation end there. Of course, I shouldn’t have been satisfied. If I’d known how serious it was, I would have said a lot more.”

“Did she talk to anyone about it directly that you know of?”

“Yes, actually. Diane.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I don’t know how much Gretchen talked to her about it, or how much Diane would’ve wanted to say. But around the same time Shelly talked to me, she had a similar conversation with Diane. But she talked straighter, apparently. She actually came out and told Diane about the hitting.”

“Okay,” I said. Although I wasn’t sure I could totally trust her, I had a wave of sympathy for Judy. I thought about Gretchen, and how she’d never told me what happened between her and Jeremy. Probably Judy had wondered, all these years, why Shelly had talked frankly to Diane but not to her.

“I think Diane struggles not to feel guilty about that,” Judy said with a sigh. “She’s confirmed it, but doesn’t like to talk a great deal about it. I don’t know if she ever discussed it with Gretchen. She probably wouldn’t have unless Gretchen knew to ask.”

“Did she testify about it in court?”

“Yeah. She did. But since hers was the only account . . . and she didn’t witness it firsthand or have many details . . . it didn’t have a great deal of impact. Disappointingly, the prosecutor never stressed the pattern of domestic abuse as much as he should’ve. I suppose he just didn’t have enough concrete evidence. No previous hospital visits, no eyewitnesses to anything but yelling and screaming.”

Judy sighed again. Then there was a silence so long I thought we might have been disconnected.

“Hello?”

“Hello. I’m still here,” Judy said. “You know, Jamie . . . If you find out who killed Gretchen, won’t you do everything you can to make sure that person rots in hell?”

“I . . . think so.”

“If it happens, you will. Maybe you or Kevin Conley or someone else thinks I didn’t play fair. Well, Frank Grippo certainly had not played fair either. Frank killed my friend and then let his lawyer call her a slut and an addict and a bad mother in court for everyone to hear. So am I going to feel guilty that I tried to help her side a little bit? No. I’m not. And if you see Kevin again, you should tell him he shouldn’t feel guilty either.”

Judy was silent for a moment more.

“Now. Did you have anything else you wanted to discuss with me?”

“Um. No. Thanks for your honesty.”

“Of course,” Judy snapped. “Good-bye, Jamie.”

I decided, for the time being, not to make too much of Judy’s tone. She had a point—if someone questioned my loyalty to Gretchen, or my efforts to find answers about her death, I might start sounding the same way.

Her revelations about Shelly reminded me of a piece in one of Gretchen’s notebooks that I’d read early on. I rummaged through the ones I had in the motel room—I’d brought about half of them—to find it. It was called “Bedtime Story.” It started with a story about a picture Gretchen had drawn for Shelly and ended rather incongruously with this:



Shelly decided to have a serious talk with me. She said she wanted to tell me that she’d made a decision about something. And I might hear people talking about it, and that it might upset me or my mom. But that she wanted me to know that she loved me, no matter what happened.

My first reaction was that she didn’t really like the crow so much, after all, but was just trying to be nice, knowing that a serious conversation was coming.

Shelly continued. She said that the most important thing she wanted me to remember was that if someone was ever hurting you, it was important to do something about it right away. To either hit back or tell someone who would help you. Whatever you decided to do, the important thing was to do something right away. Not wait and see if it would happen again. That was what she wanted me to remember from this.

I told her that no one was hurting me. And she said that that was good, she was glad. It didn’t seem to me we understood each other, about her plans or about my crow. The conversation ended there, as Shelly suggested we make ourselves a little lunch.



That evening, though, I felt I understood a little better. There was a knock on the door, and my heart sank. Frank, I thought. He’d been completely absent this visit, allowing Shelly to focus all of her attention on me.

When Shelly opened the door, I heard her say, “My kid’s here. She’s asleep.”

She let the person in anyway, and as they started to talk, I was relieved to hear it was a woman. This wasn’t unusual. Shelly’s friends seemed to know my bedtime—occasionally they’d come and visit with her after I was in bed. And I continued to busy myself fashioning my stuffed monkey into funny contortions, as I sometimes did when I couldn’t sleep.

Then Shelly said something that made me sit up straight in my bed. She said, “It’s more complicated than money. I don’t really want money. And all the money in the world wouldn’t even get me Gretchen back, anyway.”

Get Gretchen back?! So it was true. Someday Shelly might bring me back here and be my mother. I couldn’t imagine it. Would she start pretending to care about my dittos, my 100s? Would she let me take ballet? Did the Emerson school cafeteria have chicken nuggets?

The TV was burbling loudly, so I couldn’t hear everything. Eventually, though, I heard the other lady say something loud enough for me to hear. Something like: “If you think you would hold up in a fight against him, you’re wrong, Shelly.”

This scared me. She was probably talking about Frank now. I could figure out that much, because I knew how much Shelly and Frank fought. She was warning Shelly about Frank. It seemed to me a lot of people didn’t really like Frank: me, Nantie Linda, Aunt Dorothy, Grandma, the neighbors.

And yes, it was a relief to know that others knew what I knew. That Shelly and Frank fought. It was not a relief to hear someone else sound like they were worried Shelly should be afraid of him—like I was.

It seemed to me, after a few minutes, that Shelly and her guest were getting angry at each other.

Shelly said, “If he doesn’t stop, I’ll go to the police.”

“You think the police will believe you?” her friend asked. And she told Shelly she should be careful.

I supposed, if Judy’s words were accurate, that this conversation had probably been between Shelly and Diane—because Diane, it seemed, was the only one with whom Shelly had ever discussed Frank’s violence directly. And what was this thing about money? What did money have to do with it? Could Shelly perhaps have stood to lose money somehow in leaving Frank? I wondered if Gretchen had ever figured out if this friend was indeed Diane—and if she’d ever asked her about that night.

I tried Diane’s number but got no answer. Then I wrote her an e-mail, asking her if we could chat again before I left town.