The Last Good Day of the Year (8 page)

 

January 1986

The way our lives unraveled over the next year made for a captivating story for those whose curiosity outweighed their grief, from our neighbors to the local news audience, and eventually the rest of the country. Prior to that day, our town had little experience with major crimes; aside from some garden-variety domestic violence and a handful of drug users who sometimes required legal attention, the worst thing that had happened was the 1979 suicide of Marvin Gill, a sixteen-year-old boy who'd hung himself from a beam in his attic one night after a Boy Scout meeting. (Whenever they drove past the Gill residence after Marvin's death, my parents would wonder out loud how his parents could possibly stand to keep living in the same house.)

Our town had twelve police officers, none of whom had any experience with kidnappings. Ego was never an issue in the
investigation; state police were called in immediately and given full control. They divided Shelocta into a grid and organized the citizens to conduct shoulder-to-shoulder searches of every square inch. Teams worked in shifts to scour the town for sixteen hours each day. Everybody wanted to help: anonymous casseroles showed up on our doorstep with such regularity that most of them ended up in the trash. A tip line received dozens of calls each day, none of which yielded any valuable information. Housewives distributed thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate to the searchers, who persisted in spite of single-digit temperatures and a growing tremble of doubt that Turtle would be found alive, if at all. Throughout all of this, Steven was in a jail cell less than six blocks from my house.

Two weeks into the new year, an overnight storm dropped fourteen inches of fresh snow on Shelocta in less than eight hours. Police called off their official search. If Turtle was anywhere outdoors, she wasn't alive.

I slept with my parents most nights for years afterward, either between them in their bed or on the floor beside it. Long after they'd both swallowed their last sedatives of the day and gone to sleep, I stayed awake with my eyes closed and kept track of their breathing, constantly reassuring myself that there was nobody in the room but the three of us. My brain replayed the same nightmare every time I slept deeply enough for dreams: Remy and I were building a snowman in the woods behind our houses when I looked down
to see Turtle's face staring up at me, her mouth wide open and frozen in a permanent scream beneath a sheet of ice.

In Davis Gordon's book, he uses the word “colored” to describe how my life, in particular, was changed. He talks a lot about the coloring of my worldview, my sense of security and vulnerability. All I can ever picture is a large, shadowy villain hovering above me, wielding a handful of crayons. It's funny how much we rely on euphemisms to soften the blow of an ugly truth. When my parents spoke about things like “bringing Turtle home,” what they meant was bringing her
body
home, but nobody would dare say it that way. Even today, we still do it. There's an expression in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.” It didn't take long for my parents to realize that we were entertainment for plenty of people, a status that made the most horrific details of Turtle's case the most sought after. Steven's parents had it worse in the press, but there were still plenty of stories that stung. “Parents of Missing Toddler Were Intoxicated, High on Night of Disappearance.” “Tabitha Myers: Could She Have Been Saved?”

Davis seemed different from the other reporters. More than anything, he claimed he wanted to help us find closure. That word gets thrown around a lot in situations like ours, and usually people don't understand how impossible it can seem in the thick of all the pain. As if what happened that night is a book we've all been reading together, and one day we'll come to the last page and finally be able to put it down forever. But that would mean our lives
follow a predictable narrative that is required to make sense somehow in the end, which is so clearly not the case.

Davis meant more to my dad than he did to anyone else in our family. My father had always been the kind of person who preferred calm to chaos. After Steven went to prison and my family moved away, it seemed as though even the smallest ripple in his thoughts could set off days of emotional agony. He talked about the past with Davis, and how the smallest decision could change a person's whole future for better or worse without any rhyme or reason. But if you can't figure out the moment when something starts to happen, how can you determine when it ends?

My mother had no patience for my father's meandering thoughts. She followed a different path. It led her through fields of marijuana to mountains of Valium and Xanax, where a river of codeine flowed into a lake of Everclear. By then she was chewing whole pills into dust—sometimes three or four at a time—between her teeth instead of swallowing them with water.

Davis was willing to listen to my father's miserable philosophizing all day, if he thought it would help. He seemed to truly care about us. When he told us all he wanted was to help us find some peace, we believed him. Why shouldn't we have done so? He'd devoted his career to solving other people's mysteries. His first book had followed his own modern-day investigation into his aunt Carolyn's 1966 murder, which he eventually solved. “I made a promise to my mother before she died,” he told us, “that I would find the person who killed her sister, and that's what I did.” And he showed us a picture of his aunt. She was a pretty girl, barely eighteen years
old when her naked body floated to the surface of Keystone Lake on a summer morning during the Age of Aquarius, ruining one unlucky fisherman's day.

My family was living in Virginia by the time Davis took an interest in us. He traveled back and forth between there and Shelocta throughout the spring and summer of 1988. He interviewed everyone who knew anything about the case and followed up on every tip the original investigators had dismissed as irrelevant, scrutinizing them for any hint that might lead to my sister's body. My mother kept a picture of his aunt Carolyn on our fridge, and sometimes I'd catch her staring at the dead woman whose face had become hope personified for us, as though she were a benevolent force from beyond guiding us toward the closure we'd heard so much about but never experienced.

Davis spent hour after hour at our home, where he looked through photo albums with my mother and listened as she described every detail of my sister's interrupted life. His fingers touched the blanket that had swaddled Turtle as a newborn at the hospital; they felt the blunt ends of the lock of hair my mother had saved from Turtle's first haircut. My father kept in frequent touch with Davis long after he finished his research and returned to his home in New York to start writing the book. His wife sent us a Christmas card that year, and Davis watched Super Bowl XXIV at our house. He even bought me a pogo stick for my tenth birthday.

But it turned out he'd spent plenty of time talking to Steven and his parents, too. We knew that, of course, but we had no idea
that he'd reached out to them with a promise similar to the one he made us. Maybe he liked them more. Maybe Helen Handley makes a better lasagna than my mom. Maybe she and her husband guaranteed Davis a lifetime of free dry cleaning. Or maybe he's just an asshole. From the moment his book hit the shelves six years ago, Davis has spent every penny of the profits on a new defense team for Steven.

In
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
, Davis uses words like “mercy” and “compassion” and “forgiveness” when he discusses the broader issues of crime and punishment and the many failures of the American justice system. My father read the book before anyone else in our family. He stopped talking for a few weeks after he got to the end. I don't mean that he was quieter than normal—I mean he stopped talking altogether. He began staying home from work for days on end to smoke weed in our basement and sort through boxes of his old baseball cards. He lost job after job for not showing up, failing a random drug test, or giving everyone he encountered the creeps by refusing to make eye contact with a single one of his coworkers for months.

My mother didn't read the book at all. She changed our phone number and donated my pogo stick to Goodwill, but she left the picture of Davis's aunt Carolyn on our fridge. It stayed up for almost a year, finally disappearing a few weeks before Hannah was born.

The book was an instant bestseller. Because of it, there are plenty of people who have some level of doubt about what happened to Turtle that night. Theories range from the unlikely to the impossible to the insane. People—especially those who aren't fully
informed—came up with some impressively creative scenarios. An unlikely one: the idea that Steven didn't act alone, and that Turtle is still alive out there somewhere. I can't tell you how many times I've imagined it: one day the phone rings, and the voice on the line informs us that my sister has been living for a decade in another state, happy and well cared for by some individual (or individuals) who only wanted a daughter to love. Now that her true identity has been realized, she is swiftly returned to her rightful home and family. Ten years of misery evaporate in a moment as she falls into our arms, looking exactly the way we've pictured her all these years. That night, we all sit around the kitchen table and eat hot dogs and coleslaw, Turtle's favorite meal. Our family lives happily ever after. Roll credits.

Impossible: despite having a motive and opportunity—and despite the fact that both Remy and I clearly identified him as the man we'd seen carrying Turtle away—Steven Handley was wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit.

Insane: the idea that one of my or Remy's parents might have been involved, or even me and Remy ourselves.

The truth is not nearly so exciting or complicated. No matter what happened to Turtle that night, it's delusional to hope that she might still be alive. Even finding her grave—if she has a proper one somewhere—seems like too much to wish for most days. There have been countless tips and theories that have provided my parents with grains of hope over the years, but none of them have blossomed into anything but disappointment, each letdown another tiny death for us to grieve.

The biggest comfort at this point is also the most gruesome: though none of us ever says it out loud, we all understand that our only real wish is for Turtle to be long dead. Let her spend eternity oblivious to the ugliness that seeped into every empty space she left behind.