Miss Me When I'm Gone (19 page)

“But her life was so different from Shelly’s.”

“I know. I tried to argue that point. And that she and I had so much more history than just those two bad nights, but . . . that was that for Gretchen.” Jeremy shrugged. “I think that whole thing always weighed more on her than she was ever willing to say.”

I watched as the cat hopped up on a garbage barrel, looked at his owners as they crept toward him, lifted his paw, and licked the fur between his toes.

“Now, we didn’t talk much after the divorce.”

“Right. I know.”

“Except when she was in the middle of this new book. We had coffee a few times. Because there was something she was writing about that she wanted me to know about.”

“Which was?”

The young woman snatched at the cat’s tail, then scooped him into her arms. She marched haughtily to her door and slammed it behind her. The guy followed her, opening the door for himself and slamming it as she had.

“She said that she wasn’t sure how she was going to do it in a way that was fair to both of us. But she found herself wanting to write about what really happened between her and me.”

“Why now?” I turned back to Jeremy. “Why all of the sudden, after skipping over it so nicely in the first book?”

“That’s what I wanted to know. At first I accused her of just wanting to sell books. She said it wasn’t about that at all. She said she’d learned some things about Shelly that made her reconsider certain feelings she’d had about her own life.”

“Did she explain what that meant?”

“Well. Yeah. She said she’d found out, she was pretty sure, that she was wrong about some of the choices that Shelly had made. Namely, that she didn’t think Shelly’s death had anything to do with her choice of men. That it was never about that guy Frank. Never about her choice to stay with him.”

“Meaning that she didn’t think he did it?”

“Right. So that made her feel better about Shelly. Relieved, in one sense. And she said that made her want to write about herself. The influence Shelly’s memory had had on her own choices. Her own relationships. And she wanted to be more honest about that in this next book.”

“Did you give her permission to do so?”

Jeremy bit his lip and gazed into the shrubs behind me. “She didn’t need my permission.”

“I know. But did you give it your approval?”

“I told her I’d think about it. In all honesty, I was hoping she’d change her mind. Gretchen was a pretty private person. I had a feeling that even if she wrote that stuff down for herself, she’d eventually edit it out for publication.”

“So you wanted to see what she’d actually written, because you were afraid I’d just go ahead and publish it as is, and never speak to you about it?”

“I just needed to see what was there. What I needed to be prepared for. And how I was going to talk to you.”

“Gretchen hasn’t even been gone a month. All things considered, you couldn’t wait a little while longer?”

“It kept me up at night, knowing it was out there. This thing that I’d done. Out there when Gretchen wasn’t anymore.”

Charlie Bucket jabbed me at that very moment. I put my hand on my side and rubbed away the soreness. His strikes seemed bony and sharp lately. I was starting to feel like I was housing one of those boxing nun puppets they sell in novelty stores.

“People make mistakes,” Jeremy said, maybe mistaking my distracted silence for anger. “People can change.”

“I’m aware of that,” I told him, pressing my fingers gently against a second jab. “Do you think you’re one of those people?”

“I’d like to think so. But I guess I shouldn’t expect you to believe me.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because your loyalty lies with Gretchen.”

“It sounds like Gretchen still had some faith in you, if she’d sit you down and tell you her plans to write about what happened. And expect you to be perfectly civil about it. Which you were.”

Jeremy was silent, fiddling with his drawstring again.

“So you don’t know who broke into my house, then?” I asked. “You know anything about that?”

Jeremy took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “No.”

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t know what I believed about him anymore. Or about him and Gretchen. But I was pretty sure I believed his answer to my question.

“Someone broke into your house and stole Gretchen’s things?”

“Just a couple of notebooks. And two laptops, but not the one with Gretchen’s files on it, because I had that one with me. But I think that was the intention. They just didn’t find the rest of the stuff. They stole some other things, but I think that might have been to hide what they were really looking for.”

Jeremy put his glasses back on. “Do you know how serious this is, Jamie?”

“Of course I do.”

“If someone went to that extreme to get their hands on something Gretchen wrote, they probably have something a lot worse to hide than I did. Something Gretchen knew.”

“I know, Jeremy.”

Jeremy stared at me through the finger smudges on his lenses. “Should I be worried about you?”

I gazed back at those smudges and smiled a little. His glasses were never clean in college. I tried to remember how young the rest of his face used to look back then, when we were all twenty-one. But couldn’t quite.

“No,” I answered. “I don’t think you should.”

Chapter 35

“Stand by Your Man”

I’m not sure if every Tammy Wynette fan should be required to come to the defense of that single song, or even to like it in particular. The song, like so many of her hits, was mostly written by her producer, Billy Sherrill. And there is so much more to Tammy than this song—which isn’t a particular favorite of mine—that I find discussions of it rather boring. Still, I suppose my liberal background requires I address it before I proceed any further on this trip, before I sing Tammy’s praises along with those of Dolly and Loretta.

Admittedly, before I started listening to more country music, this was my uninformed view of Tammy Wynette: a country-western Phyllis Schlafly in sequins. All I knew of her was that she sang that particular song.

Since then, I’ve watched the same early television performance of “Stand by Your Man” countless times. In it, Tammy is wearing a red-sequined dress that’s all wrong for her figure. Her hair is an absurdly high helmet of whorled light blond. In this Opry appearance, she is clearly a very nervous performer—you can see it in all of the videos from early in her career. She barely moves her body as she sings. Her face looks stiff, almost pained. She rolls her eyes back slightly between lines, as if trying to remember the words. She looks like a kid in a spelling bee, just trying to get it right. I have immediate sympathy for her—for her discomfort, for the care she puts into the song. And for most of the song, the meaning of the words dissolve in this sympathy. I like her regardless of whether she or I believe in standing by our men, on traditional principle or otherwise.

I also feel bad that her signature song happened to come out at the height of women’s lib. Later, similar songs of hers might have been more defiance than coincidence. But with “Stand by Your Man”—there she was, still a struggling mother of three, her career still new and fragile, trying to take her one shot at stardom, trying to get her song perfect, when these northeastern intellectual types come flying out of nowhere (at least, nowhere Tammy knew or understood) and pick on her, her dream, and her developing act.

People often point out that Tammy was simply singing about values with which she was raised. Aside from that, in the context of country music history, it seems odd that feminists singled out Tammy. Sure, the song seems to command an attitude that is offensive to feminism, but country music is full of songs about people who stick with their mates (male or female) even though their behavior confuses them, depresses them, drives them crazy (“You Win Again,” “[I’m Not Your] Steppin’ Stone,” “You Can Always Come Back”). Tammy was singing about something her fellow country musicians—male and female—had sung about hundreds of times before. It was just the particular wording and timing (and the skill with which she sang it) of “Stand by Your Man” that got it noticed.

As for Tammy’s sad, sad delivery, it is, again, a part of the tradition of a genre of music that has always stressed that love can be painful and depressing and motivates men and women to do unhealthy and irrational things. No one’s ever begrudged her onetime partner George Jones his unrelentingly pathetic hits: “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (really, just listen to it), “When the Grass Grows over Me,” “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me.” You don’t have to like the genre, but it doesn’t make sense to isolate one artist and song for being pathetic. And a woman is, I believe, allowed to be just as pitiful in love as a man.

To be fair, though, Tammy did have a few subsequent songs that cross the line for me. After feminists exploded at “Stand by Your Man,” Tammy and her producer seemed to enjoy thumbing their noses at them, producing “Singing My Song,” “Run, Woman, Run,” and the ridiculous “Don’t Liberate Me (Love Me),” which thankfully never went up the charts. (Also good for a laugh is the embarrassing “Good Lovin’ [Makes It Right],” although frankly I don’t think all of the advice in that one is entirely off the mark.)

So while I don’t think the reaction to “Stand by Your Man” was fair, I can see how some of Tammy’s subsequent music and fake-eyelash-batting persona would have chafed at feminists of the day. Truly, I am grateful for the feminists who came before me—the very ones who found Tammy’s music offensive. And I am grateful for Tammy, her voice and her heart. Thankfully, I was not alive in 1968 and therefore do not have to choose between the two.

And by the way, if we are to accept that gender and sexuality is a spectrum, I believe we have to accept that some people are going to fall on the traditional side of it. Oddly, I think it can be harder for someone of my generation and background to accept a woman who dresses and acts in the bleached-blond feminine tradition of Tammy Wynette than a man who does the same for a gay pride parade. But how is that fair? Hasn’t the point always been freedom of choice in one’s lifestyle, one’s relationships?

This is a freedom that Tammy actually exercised—at least, for much of her life. Everyone who knows the basic facts of her life knows she wasn’t into standing by a man at all costs. She married her first husband rashly, despite the protests and disapproval of her family. She left him even though she had two kids, one on the way, and no job—because she realized she didn’t love him and she wanted more for herself—in particular, a shot at being a singer, which he didn’t support. She left number two for George Jones. She left George Jones because, although she loved him, seven years of his drunken high jinks had taken a toll. Marriage number four was a three-week farce. Husband number five was the only one she stood by, though he surely didn’t deserve it. But that’s another story, too long and sad and perplexing for this piece on a song she sang before she’d even met him.

In the end, more than standing by her man, I think Tammy stood by her song. She insisted that “Stand by Your Man” was “just a pretty love song,” and despite growing tired of having to defend it, she clearly drew great joy from its popularity. Her autobiography was titled
Stand by Your Man.
The doorbell of her mansion played the tune. She sang the hell out of that song and loved the hell out of the success that it brought her. Whatever she was personally, professionally, this was a woman who knew what she wanted, worked her ass off for it, and refused to apologize for it when she got it.

Does she really need any more defense than that?

—
Tammyland

Chapter 36

Nathan’s message showed up on my cell while I was at work the following evening.

“Jamie. Please call me,” was all he said on the voice mail.

I noticed it during my break and called him right back—thinking he wanted confirmation that the FedEx package had been delivered.

“I’ve been calling a few people.” Nathan sounded drained. “A few people I didn’t want to hear this on the news. It’s hit a couple of news stations. Not where you are, probably, but . . . Jamie, they found Gretchen’s purse.”

My heart jumped. “Where?”

“In Youngs Lake in Emerson.”

“Emerson? There’s a lake there?”

“A little one, yeah. Near the state park.”

“Were the police diving for evidence, or something?”

“No. Not at all. Little kids fish there all the time. Some girl was with her dad and caught Gretchen’s purse. It seemed empty at first, but they found an expired credit card in one of the inside pockets. The dad recognized her name from the local papers and turned it in.”

“So . . . what does this mean?”

“Well, they don’t think Gretchen put it there, that’s for sure.”

I took a breath. “Oh my God, Nathan. I’m so sorry. How’s your mom holding up?”

“About the same. It doesn’t change much for her. We already knew Gretchen’s death might not have been an accident.”

I had more questions, but didn’t want to make this any harder for Nathan.

“Thank you for calling me,” I said.

When we’d hung up, I went back to my desk and did a few searches on news stories with Gretchen’s name in them in the last forty-eight hours. Sure enough, a posting from a New Hampshire news station had a brief story about it. The author Gretchen Waters, who’d died falling down some stone steps in Willingham, was presumed to have died an accidental death.

Now the discovery of her purse in an Emerson lake was causing police to suspect foul play. Her money, credit cards, and ID were gone from her wallet, but police had been able to identify it as hers because of a loose, expired credit card zipped into an inside pocket of the purse. Her boyfriend Gregor Bachman also confirmed that the purse resembled Gretchen’s.

Police weren’t releasing many new details, but said that an investigation of some “unusual circumstances” of Gretchen’s fall had already been quietly under way before the purse discovery: Her head injuries had suggested a backward fall. There were hairs on her sweater that didn’t match her own (likely from someone at the reading or anyone else she’d encountered recently, but still being given “a closer look” by police). And there was bruising on her arm, with a laceration possibly made by fingernails—suggesting Gretchen had been grabbed and thrown. The details were essentially the same as what Gretchen’s mother had told me, with only a few new specifics.

The article mentioned that Gretchen’s family was originally from Emerson, and that she’d been in Emerson a great deal recently, researching her next book. It also mentioned that Gretchen was the daughter of the 1985 murder victim Shelly Brewer.

I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. So Gretchen’s purse was found in Emerson, when she’d died forty miles away in Willingham. That was quite a coincidence. It was unlikely that a random mugger would end up in Emerson in order to chuck her purse into Youngs Lake. Almost certainly her killer had been from Emerson or its vicinity. Likely someone she’d spoken to in recent weeks.

P.S. Also, in your days as a reporter, did you start to develop any skill for telling who is lying to you?

Remembering Gretchen’s last e-mail to me, I wanted to scream. I got up and ran to the bathroom. There, I stared at the stall door, saying to myself over and over:
Who was lying to you, Gretchen?
I had a feeling she’d figured it out herself. And that that was the somebody who pushed her.

I stayed there for about twenty minutes, figuring no one would call a pregnant woman on a lengthy bathroom break. When the question finally grew stale in my head, I returned to my desk. My break had ended a while ago, and now I had a seventeen-inch story I had to reduce to fifteen inches. I glanced at the reporter’s name. Someone not particularly diva. Good. I did the edit within fifteen minutes, then went back online to find more stories about Gretchen. I was waiting for one of the reporters to turn in his story about school budget cuts.

There was one article about Gretchen from her hometown in Connecticut, in which Nathan was quoted as saying that the family was saddened, but hoped that the finding of the purse would bring them closer to the answers about Gretchen’s death. In another, the Willingham librarian who’d hosted Gretchen’s event was quoted as saying how shocked she was.

Her name was Ruth Rowan—she’d been quoted in earlier articles about Gretchen’s death. I scribbled her name down, then searched the library’s Web site for her e-mail address.

My e-mail dinged: the school budget article had arrived.