Before He Finds Her (2 page)

(Writing this, I feel nauseated all over again. Apparently it’s possible to feel ill on top of already being critically ill.)

I don’t believe the case will ever be solved. Scratch that. As far as I’m concerned, the case was solved long ago: Ramsey committed two murders and fled. So what I mean is, I don’t believe there will ever be sufficient answers that might get to the heart of what happened, and why. Nor do I believe that Ramsey’s whereabouts, assuming he’s still alive, will ever be known—especially now that Detective Esposito, who worked the case diligently and always had the good grace to return my phone calls, has retired to South Carolina, where the weather is better and the golf plentiful. He has earned his retirement, and I suspect he’s making the most of it. Unlike the bitter and lonely protagonists of many detective novels, Danny always planned to spend his golden years on the fairways with his lovely wife, Susan. He knows better than to waste his time on a sad, frustrating, and hopelessly cold case.

It really is the strangest case.

If there was a motive, no one could ever uncover it. The family had no history of violence. Ramsey was, as far as anyone knew, a devoted husband and father. His run-ins with the law were long behind him. There isn’t even a satisfactory explanation for the party that preceded the murders. Most news reports claim it was to celebrate Ramsey’s 35th birthday, but that wasn’t for another week. Others claim it was simply a block party—but the neighborhood never had one before, and the Millers apparently footed the whole bill. Was the party yet another part of Ramsey’s elaborate plot? And then there’s the mysterious fact of Ramsey’s big rig, which he inexplicably sold the Friday before the murders. The truck was his livelihood. Why would he sell it?

Some in the community hold on to the hope that after Allison’s murder, the little girl was kidnapped by her father and spared. That maybe she’s still alive somewhere. I understand why people would choose to believe that, preferring to avoid thinking the unthinkable. But I’ve never believed in fantasies and refuse to start now. The man who just murdered his wife did not then motor out to sea to go stargazing with his young daughter before disappearing with her. It didn’t happen that way.

The unthinkable is what happened.

Can I prove it? Not without the little girl’s body, which is never going to be found. You can’t dredge an ocean. But everything about this case has felt like dredging an ocean. Violent as it was, the crime was small-town. Ramsey Miller was no mastermind. Why did he do it? How did he vanish? The not-knowing has kept me awake for more nights than I care to recall. Only recently have I begun to admit to myself that the absence of proof is, in this case, a permanent condition—or at least a condition that will outlive me.

It helps to remind myself that supplying proof is the problem for a district attorney or maybe a newspaperman, and I haven’t been a newspaperman for years. I’m simply a blogger and an old man who, approaching his own big sleep, feels done with all the hedging and the caveats and deigns to tell the plain truth.

So here it is: 15 years ago on this day there was a party, two murders, and a boat ride. Other than that, I know not one damn thing and never will.

My doctors are demanding that I rest, not type. I need to focus on my health, but they’re asking me the sort of questions that lead me to conclude that “my health” is a euphemism for “my death.” Which means that the time has come for me to close the laptop and bequeath my white whale to some younger, cleverer sea captain.

Bon Voyage,

Arthur Goodale

P.S. Please forgive me for disabling the “comments” feature on this particular post. Should these be my last written words, I’d prefer they not be followed by off-topic political sniping.

Posted by Old Man with Typewriter at 9/22/2006 2:23 PM | Comments are disabled.

2

September 22, 2006

Melanie Denison—for that was her name now—had ruined breakfast.

Otherwise, it was an ideal fall morning. There was no better time of year in Fredonia, West Virginia, everything still growing and sweet smelling, one last push before the first hard frost.

Her uncle Wayne stood by the window overlooking the backyard garden, where tomatoes and peppers clung to worn stalks. “You know I love you,” he said, turning to face her, “but what you’re doing...”

Most mornings, one of them would say grace and then they would eat together as a family. Then Melanie would clean the dishes, Kendra would shower and dress for work, and Wayne would go outside to weed or cut the grass or spray dirt off the trailer’s vinyl siding with his power washer—anything to be outdoors for a few minutes before driving to the Lube & More in Monroeville to work underneath cars for eight hours.

“You really don’t have to worry,” Melanie said. “I’m being careful.”

“I don’t doubt that, honey,” he said. “But you have to see it’s still dangerous.”

Maybe. But the fact was, she was nearly eighteen. And the family’s rules, in place for so long, were becoming harder than ever to abide.

You go straight to school. When school is done, you come straight home.

In high school, she could understand. But last Tuesday she’d stayed on campus at the community college to get lunch with some fellow freshmen. A couple of days later, she’d driven alone to the JC Penney in Reynoldsville to find jeans that fit her better. She actually had to convince herself that these weren’t major transgressions.

“It’s just that a
newspaper
, of all things,” her aunt said.

Melanie didn’t like keeping secrets from them. She had told them about joining the staff of the college paper as a way of testing the waters: see how they react, then decide what else they could know.

Well, they were flunking the test royally. Melanie set the glasses of juice on the table and asked her aunt, “What do you mean, ‘of all things’?”

But she knew. She was a seasoned pro at imagining how her father might find her even after all these years.

Her aunt and uncle? Also pros.

“Does the paper have a website?” Uncle Wayne asked.

“I don’t think so,” Melanie said—though of course it did.

“Still,” he said, “your picture could end up on the Internet.”

It all sounded so paranoid, it was easy to forget that her aunt and uncle hadn’t chosen to live like this, hidden away in a remote hamlet in West Virginia. But the U.S. Marshals had determined that this was best place for them all to “relocate,” which meant to hide. Which was why, at seventeen, Melanie had never been to a city, had never stayed in a hotel or traveled farther than Glendale for its music and hot-air ballooning festival. She’d never ridden in an airplane or seen the ocean. Never met a famous person. She had hiked in the Allegheny Mountains but had never eaten sushi or a fresh bagel. She had twice seen tornados funneling in the distance but had never attended a dance or a football game.

Whenever she felt herself becoming too critical of her aunt and uncle, she would wait until she was alone in the house, open her uncle’s desk drawer, and read through the horrible letters from the U.S. Marshal’s office that he kept hidden there—letters she’d first come across innocently enough years earlier while rummaging for a pencil. The letters were horrible because they were uniformly brief, never more than a paragraph or two, and because they said nothing. Or, rather, they said the same thing again and again, which was the same as saying nothing. Ramsey Miller continued to elude the authorities; the authorities continued to fear for Melanie’s safety. The letters were horrible, too, because they were crisp and clean and on nice paper (she pictured a tidy but bustling office where the employees joked with one another and talked about football games and their plans for the weekend), and they were horrible because of their consistently optimistic tone, despite there never being any real cause for optimism. She would return the letters to the manila file in the bottom desk drawer and remind herself not to depend on some hero in a police uniform ever coming to their rescue. Not after fifteen years. No, the only heroes were her aunt and uncle and the sacrifices they had made to keep her safe. But that didn’t make it easy.

At least they were okay to be around. In winter, they played board games. They played cards. In spring, Melanie helped Wayne turn over the soil and plant the seedlings. Kendra bought cheap paperbacks from the CVS, and at sunup the two of them would carry their juice or coffee and whatever books they were reading out back, where they’d sit in adjacent chaise lounges, their privacy protected by the high hedges that surrounded their property, and by the woods beyond. Maybe once a month, as a treat, they ate at Lucky’s Grill—always a weeknight at 4:30 p.m., when the place was mostly empty.

Her aunt homeschooled her through the eleventh grade, at which point Kendra admitted that she’d reached her limit as a teacher. So, frightened but excited by the idea of being away from 9 Notress Pass for seven hours each day, the next fall Melanie stepped onto the groaning yellow school bus each morning and afternoon, sitting either alone or next to Rudy, an autistic boy who pressed his nose against the window and said nothing. She didn’t join any extracurricular activities. Didn’t attend games. She went to school, ate alone in the cafeteria, and came home.

Still, that uneventful high school year had been a morsel of freedom, and now she found herself wanting more. After all, she couldn’t stay shut inside the trailer forever, could she? If she were to die of natural causes at the age of ninety-five, having never seen or done a single thing, what kind of victory would that be?

Many of Melanie’s high school classmates were bound for West Virginia University. They wore Mountaineer T-shirts and talked about how “we” were doing in various sports, as if they were already gone. Melanie made one weak attempt to convince her aunt and uncle that being one of 25,000 students would make her inconspicuous. She let herself fantasize a little about living in a dorm, going to football games, meeting boys. Making friends.

That TV show
Friends
had been on her whole life, it seemed, and she was always amazed by the smugness with which those six New Yorkers lazed in a coffee shop and took their banter-filled friendships and their freedom totally for granted. She let herself wonder if maybe college would be like that.

But college to her aunt and uncle meant student directories, ID cards, a wide-open campus where anyone could find her, follow her, do terrible things. In the end, they compromised. She could attend—part time—Mountain Community College, twenty miles up the road. She’d live at home and take a course or two at a time. Wayne would find her a used car and teach her to drive it. To help pay her way, she’d look for part-time work somewhere in Fredonia.

She accepted their best and only offer. If she couldn’t be a Mountaineer, then she would be a Fighting Soybean.

“I don’t understand your sudden interest in journalism, anyway,” Wayne said, pulling himself away from the window. He uncapped a can of Folgers and spooned heaping tablespoons of grounds into the filter. He poured water into the machine and turned it on.

“It isn’t sudden,” she said. “I just think it’s interesting.”

“Well, sure it’s
interesting
—but I still say it’s a risk.”

“Oh, everything’s a risk, Uncle Wayne.” She was suddenly queasy from the smell.

“That’s right,” Kendra said. “Everything is.” She came over to Melanie and took her hand. “Baby, what’s going on?”

“See? Exactly—I’m not a baby. And you both still think I am.”

“You could never become a journalist,” her uncle said. “You know that, right? Not until he’s caught.”

“He’ll never get caught, and you know it.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

“
Melanie.
” Kendra could always convey sympathy and admonishment in a single word.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Wayne.” Melanie sighed. “It’s just that I’m an adult. If I want to take a risk, it’s really my decision.” But that sounded ungrateful. “Come on, it isn’t that big a risk when you think about it. And anyway, Ramsey Miller could be in Antarctica right now. He could be dead.”

“He isn’t dead, Mel.”

“Yeah, but he could be.”

Uncle Wayne shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

She was about to keep arguing over her father’s hypothetical demise, ask how Wayne could be so positive he was still a threat, when suddenly her neck hairs tingled and she had her answer. She was sure of it.

There was a new letter. One that actually said something.

But she couldn’t ask about it, since she wasn’t supposed to know about the letters in the first place. And worst of all, as of about a year ago, Wayne no longer kept them in his desk.

The dripping coffee smelled so rancid that Melanie wanted to flee the house for air—except even the trees smelled sour to her these days. Feeling less confident, she said, “It’s just a stupid college newspaper that probably nobody ever reads anyway. I don’t see why you have to freak out.” But she knew it was easy for her to talk a big game about taking risks when she had others devoting their own lives to her survival.

Her aunt and uncle glanced at each other. “Honey,” Wayne said gently, “I love you dearly. But if you honestly think we’re just freaking out for the heck of it, it only proves you need to think it through some more.”

Underneath the table lay a rust-colored rug. She could make out the discolored blotch where as a flu-ridden child she’d vomited. She remembered that illness more than any other, lying on the sofa and watching game shows and soap operas for a week. Sipping ginger ale, nibbling on Saltines, throwing up into a trash can. Her aunt laying cool rags on her forehead, holding her, taking her temperature. Being there for her. Always being there.

Outside, the change of seasons caused migrating birds to sit invisibly in trees and caw at obscene decibels. Soon the leaves would change. But nothing ever changed inside these walls. Her aunt and uncle had furnished the hastily rented trailer with only two criteria: expediency and thrift—hence the Goodwill furniture, Walmart bookshelves, discount rug remnants. They assumed that their time here would be temporary. Once their initial panic had melted into a lasting, dull fear, they saw no reason (and had no money) to furnish the place a second time.