Read The Last Good Day of the Year Online
Authors: Jessica Warman
The Last Good Day of the Year (24 page)
After hearing so many terrible stories at all the support group meetings I've attended over the years, after all the quiet afternoons
and late nights spent alone with my imagination, in which those stories came to life and played out over and over again, no matter how hard I tried to block them outâit's hard to feel much of anything for this faceless stranger. It's the absence of emotion that frightens me more than anything. A girl at the bottom of some stairsâthere are much worse things. A girl who
lives
! Other girls should be so lucky.
And this girl in particularâthis girl who slept with Noah deserves all the pain in the world.
I can't mean that, can I?
“But she survived, Noah. Right? She recovered. At least she still has the rest of her life to live.”
“She was in the hospital for, like, three weeks. I couldn't go visit her. That isn't true, actually; I
could
have gone, but I didn't want to. When she was finally released, she didn't come back to school. Her parents came and got all her stuff. She wouldn't go back to campus, not even for that.”
“So what happened to her? Where did she go?”
“I have no idea.” He turns the Rubik's Cube in his hand, staring at each side for a few seconds. “I can never solve more than one color. I know there has to be a way, but it seems impossible. So you know what I do sometimes, when I want to impress someone? I work on it for a little bit, until I've got one side all done. I act as if it's so easy, and then I pretend to lose interest in solving the rest. Like it's so simple for me that I can't be bothered to finish.”
“Here,” I say, taking it from his hand, “I'll show you how.” He watches as I peel each colored sticker from its square, being
careful not to tear any of them as I line them up along the edge of the table, until the yellow stickers are the only ones remaining on the cube. Then I rearrange the stickers in order by filling in one side at a time, from red to blue to orange to green to white.
“You know that's not how it's supposed to be done,” Noah says.
“I know. But nobody can tell the difference, can they? Not if they didn't see me.”
“But that's cheating, Samantha.” He smiles. “I know you're not that kind of girl.”
“I'm just trying to help you.”
He grabs my hand. “Do you think it was my fault?”
“Yes.”
“She hates me. Her family hates me. All her friends hate me. When they found out why she was walking home alone, they told everyone. People I don't even
know
have told me they hate me, and you're holding my hand. If I try to kiss you, I think you'll let me. Why would you do that? What's the matter with us, Sam?”
I've never bothered asking myself that question until now. “Maybe we're bad people. Or maybe we've just done terrible things.”
“I've done terrible things. You haven't.”
“Yes, I have.”
“Nothing as bad as what I did to Laura.”
“No, Noah.” I lean forward and kiss him on the mouth. Just once. Then I move my lips close to his ear. The words sound like a whisper and feel like a howl: “What I did was so much worse.”
Â
In January 1986, there were nine convicted sex offenders on the Indiana County registry. Police were able to verify alibis for all but two of them. Darren Shepherd, age thirty-three, was on probation after serving thirteen months of a five-year prison sentence for pleading no contest to indecent sexual assault on a minor. His victim was his girlfriend's thirteen-year-old daughter. Darren couldn't prove he was home all night on New Year's Eve, but police ruled him out based on his looks alone. Darren was six and a half feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds. He was also African American.
But the other man, Brett King, matched Steven's physical traits more closely. Like Steven, King was white and stood around five feet nine inches tall. Steven weighed one hundred forty-three pounds; King weighed one hundred fifty. He'd worked as a custodian at Mother of Sorrows Elementary School from 1978 until the spring of 1984, when a female third grader told the school nurse that King had snuck up on her in an empty classroom after recess one day. Before she had a chance to leave the room, he exposed himself to her. While King was in jail awaiting trial, three more students came forward with similar stories. He made parole after serving ninety days of a thirteen-month sentence and moved into a studio apartment above a bar in Shelocta called the Golden Pheasant, owned by his sister, Marcia.
King told police he'd been home alone all night on New Year's Eve, but Marcia was the only person who
remembered seeing him that evening: “He came down around maybe 11:30. It wasn't too long before midnight. I saw him dropping quarters into the cigarette machine near the bathrooms.”
King was forbidden to enter the bar during business hours. Too many locals knew what he'd done; Marcia was afraid she'd lose customers if anybody knew her brother was living above the bar.
“I saw him for only a minute from the back, but I know my own brother. He didn't stick around. He got his smokes and went back upstairs.”
Turtle Myers had attended morning preschool at Mother of Sorrows on Tuesdays and Thursdays starting in September 1983. King claimed he didn't remember her.
Marcia didn't think her brother was capable of planning a crime. “They tested his IQ in prison. He's dumb as a box of rocks,” she told me. King's IQ was tested twice in his adult life. He scored a 99 on his assessment in 1983. But on the earlier test, which he took in 1970 as part of a failed attempt to join the military, his score was 118, which is considered average. Nineteen points is a significant difference. It's not impossible that King intentionally did poorly on the test he took in prison, hoping it would make him seem more sympathetic.
And there's more: at around three in the morning on January 1, 1986, Jenny Hicks called the Indiana County emergency line to report a disoriented customer at the all-night diner where she worked as a waitress. She told
the dispatcher that a man with blood on his face and clothing had stumbled inside and gone straight to the bathroom. “He left a few minutes ago, and now there's blood all over the sink and floor.”
Jenny locked the bathroom door and waited for the police to respond. When nobody had shown up by five o'clock, which was the end of her shift, Jenny cleaned the bathroom and went home. Could that man have been Brett King? We'll probably never know. Jenny doesn't think so; she told me the man in her restaurant that night was definitely not Brett King
or
Steven Handley.
Police didn't follow up on her 9-1-1 call for another twelve hours. “I guess they had their hands full that day. They didn't even go to the restaurant right awayâthey came to my house. I asked the cop if he thought they'd test the bathroom for things like blood and fingerprints. He said it wouldn't matter since I'd already cleaned everything up with bleach.
“He said the guy was probably a drunk who'd been in a fight. I didn't understand how he could be so certain. I mean, the man I saw didn't have a bloody nose or a split lip. He didn't look like he'd been in a fistfight. He looked like he'd just murdered someone. That's the first thought that popped into my head, the minute I saw him: it looks like he just finished killing someone.”
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
, pp. 183â84
Spring 1996
Davis Gordon is the keynote speaker at this year's Mid-Atlantic Conference of True Crime Writers and Investigative Journalists. When Noah and I finally reach the convention center, I have to buy a pass for the conference just to get inside the building. The pass costs me forty dollars, which is more money than I have in my wallet; I have to dig through Noah's car to come up with the last dollar in change.
Since he doesn't have a pass, Noah has to wait outside. I stand in line for almost an hour until I'm finally face-to-face with Davis.
“Samantha.” He glances at a woman dressed all in black standing nearby. Maybe she's his publicist. She raises her eyebrows, and he tries to alert her to my presence without me noticing by tilting his head ever so slightly in my direction.
“I'm not going to make a scene, if that's what you're worried
about.” I look behind me, where there's still a long line of people waiting for Davis to sign their copies of his book. “I doubt your followers would tolerate it.”
“Have you been calling my house?” he asks.
“
No
.” I pause. “Maybe.”
“It's okay. I'd be happy to talk. But why did you keep hanging up?”
“I don't know.”
“Is there something in particular on your mind?”
“Yes. No.” I'm too nervous to think straight.
Davis considers me standing in front of him, obviously hurting and confused. Until the book came out, I had liked him so much. I can tell he wants to help me, but now that I'm here, it's clear this isn't the right time or place.
“I can't talk to you right now, Samantha. Can you wait until after the signing?” He looks at his watch. “I'll be done in an hour. We can get lunch. How does that sound?”
The woman in black appears at his side. “Everything okay here?” she says brightly, smiling at me with intense, unblinking eyes.
“Everything's fine,” he tells her, not taking his eyes off me.
“Good.” She looks down at my hands and sees that I'm not holding a book. “Did you want to have something signed?”
“No.” I can't believe we came all this way, and he's telling me to leave.
“We need to keep the line moving.”
“I can't stay for lunch. I have to go home,” I say. I pause. “My parents don't know I'm here.”
“I won't tell them. Are you sure you can't wait, though?”
“Yes, I'm sure.”
“You can call me whenever you want, Sam.” He smiles. “Don't hang up next time.”
“Thanks.”
I'm about to walk away, feeling defeated and ridiculous, when he reaches for a stack of bookmarks printed with the cover image from
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
. “I can still give you an autograph.”
“That's okay,” I say, looking at the woman still hovering behind him, giving me a dirty look for holding up the line.
“Wait, Sam.” He grabs my wrist and stares at me. “You really should take one.”
I wait for him to scribble something on the blank side of the bookmark. When he's finished, he slides it picture side up across the table. I shove the bookmark into my purse and walk away without reading it. As soon as I'm out of the room, I duck into the first bathroom I see.
There's no autographâjust a message written in Davis's messy handwriting:
Ask Gretchen about Frank Yarrow
.
Â
“We were fighting because I'd said hello to a guy I knew at Ruby Tuesday's, Dan Shaffer. He was the manager there. I hadn't seen him in ages. We were in the high school marching band together. You get close to everyone in marching band, because you spend so much time together. Even though I graduated a few years ago, it would have been weird if I
hadn't
said anything to him.
“Levi was screaming at me in the car, and Tara was crying in the backseat, and it had started to rain. It was one of those quick, heavy summer storms. We were on the two-lane road that goes past the golf course. It was something like ninety degrees that day. When Levi pulled over and kicked me out, all I could think about was getting Tara from her car seat so he wouldn't drive away with her. I didn't think about my flip-flops on the floor of the front seat, or how they'd just put down a new layer of asphalt on the road. Then Levi drove away, and the rain had stopped, and I was holding Tara in my arms and crying. The soles of my feet were already getting blistered.
“Stevenâpeople always called him Stevie back in high schoolâI knew him from band, too. He was in the concert band, not the marching band like me, but we all practiced together sometimes. I knew all about his accident at the prom, and what happened at Penn State, and how he was supposedly damaged goods. It was a big deal at the time; I was only a sophomore, so I wasn't at the prom that year, but everyone had heard about it. Stevie was one of those guys everyone liked: jocks, band
geeks ⦠So when he pulled off to the side of the road and told us to get in his truck, I didn't think twice about it. He looked the same as I remembered him from high school.
“I
was
terrified that Levi would come back and see us with him and think I had ⦠Well, it's hard to say what Levi might have thought. I told Stevie to get us out of there. I was shaking. Tara was crying. Her diaper needed to be changed, but I'd left my bag in Levi's car. So Stevie stopped at Kroger for diapers and wipes on the way to my parents' house. He dropped us off, and that was it. I didn't see him after that, not until his face was all over the news.
“I wasn't afraid of him. Neither was Tara. She was only a toddler, but kids have a way of knowing when they shouldn't trust someone. I feel so stupid now when I think about getting into his truck like that, but don't you think I would have sensed it if he'd been planning to hurt us? I can tell when a person isn't ⦠He didn't seem any different to me. All the stories I'd heard about Stevie and how much his accident screwed him up in the head didn't describe the man who drove us home that day. He didn't give me the same feeling I got around Levi. What else was I supposed to do, walk until my feet bled? We could have been hit by a car, or gotten heatstroke. Stevie was my angel that day.”
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
, pp. 300â302