Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 53



The man who answered the door had to be Bruce. He was tall, with superlong limbs—like an awkwardly drawn stick figure. His hair was fluffy, black with white streaks, and his skin was indeed quite dark. He reminded me of the covers of my mother’s old Neil Diamond albums.

“Hello?” he greeted me.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m here on behalf of Gretchen Waters’s family. I’m wondering if you have a few minutes to chat.”

Bruce slouched against his door and stared at me. It was nine o’clock on Sunday morning. I had figured that was early enough for him to be up, but unlikely to have gone anywhere yet.

“My name is Jamie Madden,” I said. “And I’m Gretchen’s literary executor.”

“Oh.” Bruce looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh, I see. Did she have a number of unpublished manuscripts stashed away?”

“Just . . . uh . . . one. But I’m in the process of reading through all of her material and verifying it with some of her sources.”

“And I’m . . . one of her sources?” Bruce smiled a little, as if I’d said something amusing.

“Yeah.”

Bruce stepped out onto his porch and gave me a once-over. Reflexively, I took a step back.

“Did you hear they found her purse in Youngs Lake?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Very unsettling.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“What’s your name again?”

“Jamie.”

“Don’t you want to sit down?” Bruce opened his door to me.

“I’m okay, for now. I was thinking of asking if you’d be willing to talk to me at that Dunkin’ Donuts, over there on the Main Street. I don’t want to impose, but I think there are some things I need to clarify before going forward with her book.”

Bruce looked perplexed again. “Dunkin’ Donuts?”

“Just . . . uh . . . a neutral place. I don’t want to impose, but I want to talk to you.”

“Dunkin’ Donuts is neutral?” Bruce gave a reptilian smile.

I didn’t reply. His dark features and Gretchen’s declaration of her mysterious paternity notwithstanding, I almost sensed a bit of Gretchen in his general weirdness.

“I’m happy to talk to you,” Bruce said. He stared at my middle for a moment, then looked up to meet my gaze. “But are you sure you should be doing this now?”

“Excuse me?” I said, irritated. Where are those “None of Your Business” cards when you need them?

“I mean . . . I mean . . . they found her purse. In Emerson. That means it likely wasn’t an accident, what happened to her.”

“Yes, I know what it means.”

“I’ll talk to you. Sure. I hope, however, that you’ll be careful who else you try to talk to.”

“If you meet me at the doughnut shop,” I said, “maybe you can tell me what you mean.”



Bruce drank his hot coffee in tiny, careful sips.

“I do hope you’re being cautious,” he said, before I’d had a chance to ask him anything. “Who you’re choosing to interview right now. If I were you, I might hold off on this until the police have a better handle on the Gretchen situation.”

“Do you think there is someone in particular I should be afraid of?”

“Probably. Unfortunately, I don’t know who that would be.”

“But you think someone around here might have killed Gretchen?”

Bruce took a big bite of his chocolate-frosted doughnut with rainbow sprinkles—a doughnut selection I’d found incongruously creepy.

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?” he said softly, after he’d swallowed.

“Any guesses?” I asked, trying to sip my tea casually.

“I don’t know enough about the situation to have a guess. All I know is that Gretchen suddenly showed up in Emerson—and here—asking all kinds of sensitive questions, and a month or two later she’s dead, with her purse thrown in the lake.”

I shuddered at this, but hoped he didn’t see it.

Bruce paused. “Showed up asking questions. Like you’re doing now.”

I wasn’t in the mood for any more scolding—in fact, his attempt at it made me feel particularly bold.

“Were you by any chance at Gretchen’s reading the night she died?” I asked.

“Yes.” Bruce crinkled his forehead and pressed a few stray sprinkles onto his fingertips, then slipped them between his lips. “I’ve spoken to the police about that.”

“You have?”

“Of course. As soon as I heard what happened, I went and spoke to them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much to offer them, in terms of what I saw. I left right after the program.”

“Was anyone else you knew from Emerson there?”

“No. I didn’t recognize anyone. The police know all of this. I was surprised at being the only one, since her reading was announced in the Emerson paper.”

“A reading so far away?”

“Yes. They had a feature about her being local . . . or sort of local. And it mentioned her reading. That paper is often hard up for stories, you know.”

“Why were you there?” I asked.

Bruce opened his coffee and blew on it before answering.

“Gretchen piqued my curiosity. Frankly, it was nice to see a child of a good friend, all grown up. So much like Shelly, in some little ways. For the most part, though, so different. And I liked her, when I met her. When I saw she was doing a reading not too far from my job, I wanted to go give a little support. And I was curious about her writing. Plus, as an academic, I know what it’s like to give a talk and wonder if anyone will show up.”

This guy’s smoothness was really irritating me.

“Do you think maybe you were curious about her because she might be your daughter?” I asked.

Bruce winced with surprise, then smiled. The many little lines around his mouth folded in gently. “No.”

“And you’re sure of that?”

“You know, she was a lovely young woman, and I admired her forwardness. I went to her reading as an old friend of her mother’s. But no. She wasn’t my daughter. Shelly was always certain of that. As was I.”

“It didn’t sound like Shelly was sure.”

Bruce was silent. I couldn’t decipher the expression on his face: The left side of his lip curled, his right eyebrow arched. Was it anger? Embarrassment? Deception? I remembered Gretchen’s question about not being able to tell who was lying, and realized I had no skills in that area. All I could think to do was keep throwing him curveballs.

“Gretchen stole your mail, you know. She stole several pieces of your mail to get your saliva and do DNA tests.”

Bruce’s coffee cup wobbled in his hand. “What?”

“A mortgage payment, a Rolling Stone subscription . . . one other piece, I think. Right out of your mailbox. And sent them to a genetics lab.”

Bruce put down his coffee cup and folded his arms. “Is that right?”

“Yes.”

Bruce nodded. “She was certainly an interesting girl. You must miss her.”

This wasn’t the response I was expecting.

“And the results were negative,” Bruce said quietly.

“I don’t know because . . . uh . . . she didn’t write about it and she didn’t . . .”

I looked down at my sticky hands. I’d been nervously breaking my glazed doughnuts into little bits.

Bruce handed me a napkin, then bit his lip.

“I assume they were negative,” he said, “because I know they were negative. I loved Shelly as a friend. But I was never with Shelly.”

I stared at him. He seemed to be blushing a little.

“It’s true,” he said.

It took me a moment to recover my voice.

“Why didn’t you tell Gretchen that?” I asked.

Bruce rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, thinking. “It’s complicated. It’s not what Shelly would have wanted.”

“I’m sorry. That sounds ridiculous. Shelly would have wanted you to string Gretchen along, thinking you might be her biological father?”

“No. Shelly wouldn’t have wanted Gretchen to ever ask the question. She didn’t want anyone to ever ask. But most of all, Gretchen, I’m sure.”

“And how do you know this?” I asked.

“Because Shelly was my friend. She told me. When we were just young kids. When she got pregnant, we were just friends. But I think I was the first person she told. She was afraid of what would happen. And she was afraid of people finding out who was responsible. Later, mostly for Gretchen’s sake. She clearly wanted people to think the field of possibilities was so open, it wasn’t worth finding out the answer.”

“And you were okay with being one of the possibilities? For all of this time?”

“For Shelly, yes. She was my friend. She’d been through a lot.”

Bruce’s fluffy hair fell forward as he looked mournfully into his coffee.

“Then why are you telling me this now?” I asked, after a moment.

“Because Shelly’s dead. And Gretchen’s dead. And I’d rather not see you dead as well.”

I dropped the doughnut bit in my hand. The bluntness of his words startled me.

“I’m just afraid,” he hurried to say, “that Gretchen may have asked the wrong person the wrong questions.”

“The wrong person? Who would that be?”

“I don’t know,” Bruce said, frowning.

“Which was the wrong question? Who killed Shelly, or who was her father? Or something else?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

Bruce gazed at the last bite of his sprinkle doughnut wearily.

“But you might know the answer to the second question, sounds like.”

“No.” Bruce shook his head. “I don’t. But yes, I know a little bit about Gretchen’s father. I just don’t know his name.”

“What does that mean?”

Bruce ignored the question and took another sip of his coffee. “Who made you Gretchen’s ‘literary executor,’ anyway?”

He used air quotes when he said “literary executor.”

“Her mother. I mean, Linda. Shelly’s sister.”

“Yes. Of course I know who you mean. Have you told her everything you’ve found in your research so far?”

“No.”

“Do you plan to?”

“I don’t know. It depends on what comes out.”

“Well, Jamie. I don’t know who Gretchen’s father was, but I always knew it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Keith. Shelly told me that it wasn’t Keith. It was someone older than her. Someone who’d . . . taken advantage of her situation.”

He paused, and I waited for more. I put my hand on my stomach. The artificial hazelnut smell of this place was suddenly making me sick.

“When Shelly was very young, she never had a chance. She told me all about it one night. I’ll never forget. We went to a movie and I parked my car behind the dog-food warehouse, hoping to get to ‘neck’ as they called it then. Of course we talked instead. It was clear that night that was all we were ever going to do, she and I.

“And then that prom night. All night together, far away from Emerson. She’d planned it all along. She needed to tell someone. And she knew I would keep her secret. She was right. I always have. But there’s no sense in it, now.”

Bruce glanced around the doughnut shop. There were only a few other customers in the place, most of them of the white-haired variety. None of them was sitting very close to us or paying us much attention.

“It started when she was thirteen years old. Thirteen. She told me that much. It was a family friend, someone older. That’s all I could get out of her. She was confused. Her own father had just died. It went on for years. She finally put an end to it when Gretchen came. But by then, it had already done so much damage to her life. It was tragic.”

“Gretchen . . . I think Gretchen figured it out before she died. Who it was.”

“Really? What makes you think so?”

I hesitated. “Just . . . some things she wrote. But didn’t you worry about what it was doing to Shelly? Couldn’t you have told someone?”

“My loyalty was to her, and she didn’t want me to. And I was young, too. By the time she told me, it was over. She resolved never to be alone with him again. And she was old enough to make sure that happened.”

“Who do you think it was?”

“Her parents . . . her family . . . had a lot of friends. It could have been anyone.”

“You didn’t try to guess?”

Bruce shook his head. “She never let me. She didn’t want to have that conversation. And I won’t guess now either. I’m sorry.”

“What about other girls? What if he did something like this to other young girls?”

“Shelly told me that if she ever suspected anything like that, she would say something. But at the time, no. She wasn’t ready to say anything for herself.”

“Seems unlikely she’d have known what he was up to when she was off drinking herself to death for years after that.”

“Are you going to hold that against her? That she was too troubled herself then to save anyone else?”

I was silent for a moment. Gretchen was right. Bruce did seem to have a great deal of loyalty to Shelly.

“No,” I said.

We were both silent.

“It must have been someone pretty terrible,” I said, “for her not to want Gretchen to find out.”

“Anyone who would do that to a grieving thirteen-year-old girl would have to be pretty terrible,” Bruce said.

“Yeah. But you know, I think Gretchen could’ve handled it. If you told her.”

Bruce’s puffy hair waved gently as he bobbed his head from side to side a few times, considering this. “Hmm. Perhaps. I had that sense. I was thinking about it. On the other hand, I’d made a promise.”