The time had come to abandon the World Wide Web and do some legwork. I started with the people next door to Wade Lawlor’s childhood home, a run-down ranch whose current occupants were a few decades behind on painting and weeding. No one was home on one side, but on the other, a neighbor, now in her eighties, could tell me what she’d been barbecuing for dinner when her youngest son had raced home from a pickup baseball game with the news. After getting what I could from her, I tracked down the woman who’d been the high school librarian, who told me how the kids had put up a photomontage in Magda’s memory when school started that year.
I spoke with the mother of Magda’s boyfriend. Jackie Beringer was working in her garden, when I stopped by. She didn’t question why I was coming around to ask about the old murder: it had loomed so large in the lives of the people in Tampier Lake Township that everyone I talked to assumed the whole world knew and cared about Magda Lawlor’s death.
“Oh, her death hit Link—Lincoln, my boy—so hard, it scarred him for years. He joined the Army, but after that he couldn’t settle down. He finally married three years ago, a nice enough lady, but they live down in Texas and I don’t know if they’ll ever have kids, it’s as if seeing Maggie—that’s what we all called her, not Magda—get killed made him think it was too dangerous to bring a child into this world.”
“He saw her get killed?” I asked.
“Oh, just a way of talking, miss. Link went to work that day at noon; he had a summer job in his uncle’s box factory out by Wheaton, working the one-to-eight shift.
“The police went into all that at the time, could he have killed Maggie himself, but it was a small factory, everyone knew he’d been there all afternoon. We knew they had to ask those questions, but that was hard, too, for me and for Link’s dad—he passed three years ago—the cops come and talk to your boy, and you’re mad and righteous in standing up for him, but there’s a little splinter of doubt that buries itself in your mind, wondering if your own son could have done such a cruel thing.”
“It must have been hard on the Lawlors,” I said. “Did you know them well?”
Her mouth pursed into a tight “o.” “The dad, he took off when the kids were little. That was before we moved here, so we never met him. As for the mom, if Virginia Lawlor was ever sober after ten in the morning, I never saw it. Maggie pretty much raised Wade. Even when he got to be a teenager himself, he was still as close to her as when he’d been a little boy. She’d be so proud, if she’d lived, to see what he made of himself.”
Lincoln’s mother shook her head sadly. “Maggie was a beauty, but she was a sad lonely girl, living with Virginia, doing all the housework and raising Wade. That’s what drew my boy to her. He felt she needed someone watching over her. Link used to say she’d make him bring Wade along when they went out sometimes because she hated to leave him home alone with Virginia. You can imagine how hard it hit Wade when she was killed.”
“I guess Wade was a different kind of person than his sister—she doesn’t sound like someone who’d have been comfortable in the kind of big public role he’s taken on.”
Jackie agreed heartily. “But it’s good that he can bring his message to the country. We don’t need any more liberals going to Washington messing in our business, and Wade is doing an important job, making sure people know what this Sophy Duran-goo is really like.”
I dug my nails into my palms to keep the anger out of my voice. “The person who killed her, Tommy Glover . . .” I let my voice trail away.
“That was another sad story in the neighborhood,” Jackie Beringer said. “He just was mentally—I don’t know what word we’re supposed to use now. But he could never learn his alphabet. He’d try to say it, and he’d get up to the letter ‘g,’ and then he’d forget. He’d be so upset, some days he cried. Back then, this was still like a little country town and folks looked out for him. He used to follow Maggie around some, but no one ever thought he meant any harm by it. He’d follow a dog for a day, or sometimes ride with the local volunteer fire crew or the sheriff’s deputies—we were all so surprised when he killed Maggie, but the deputies said likely Tommy saw my Link kissing Maggie and got all excited and confused. His ma, she begged and pleaded, she said he never could have hurt a soul. But he was twenty or something like it, big guy, it was obvious he was plenty big and strong enough to kill a little bit of a thing like Maggie.”
“Someone saw him do it?” I asked.