Before He Finds Her

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for Katie

It was the truths that made the people grotesques... It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood
.

—Sherwood Anderson,
Winesburg, Ohio

It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).

—
R.E.M.

Part 1

1

My White Whale, Set Free

September 22, 2006 * by Arthur Goodale * in Uncategorized

Three weeks since my last entry, and I don’t know if I’ll be writing again any time soon. So please forgive me for today’s lack of brevity.

Anyone who’s followed this blog for any amount of time knows the premium I place on honesty and candor. So here’s my disclosure: I’m writing today from a hospital bed in the critical care unit at Monmouth Regional Hospital. Last Sunday—all day, apparently—I was suffering from congestive heart failure. But who knew? Look, I’m a smoker and always have been. (Readers of this blog know all about my
failed attempts to quit
). For years, decades, I’ve awaited the numb left arm, tightening in the chest, those unambiguous precursors to a fast demise, or at least a stagger to the telephone before collapsing, maybe bringing down the living room curtains on top of me. Something dramatic. But mild back pain?

I had spent most of that day bent over the garden, pulling weeds and tying a few droopy tomato vines to their stakes in the hopes of keeping my plants productive until the first hard frost. Why wouldn’t my back be aching? In the past, my cure was always three Advil and a couple of James Bond flicks on the TV while I lounged on the recliner. So that’s how I treated my symptoms this time—with international intrigue and soothing British accents. And a couple of vodka martinis.

When Tuesday afternoon rolled around and the pain was no better, I called my doc. He said come in. I came in. Now I’m here in the hospital, where I’m told I might not leave.

Maybe if I had swallowed a couple of aspirin instead of those Advil, the attending cardiologist tells me. Maybe if I had driven straight to the hospital or dialed 911 instead of waiting two days. But why would I have done any of those things? That’s not what you do when you’re an old fool with a back sore from overdoing it in the vegetable garden. You don’t dial 911. You watch television. You take a nap.

Who will pick my last tomatoes?

I’ll stop being macabre. You deserve better than that. And there
are
some of you—both here in New Jersey and beyond. Last month this blog had 2,300 views, about 75 per day. I can hardly imagine 75 people being interested in my musings, but you’re real, my readers, and apparently you’re from all across the country and as far away as Vietnam and Australia. I’m constantly amazed. Such a contrast from my newspaper days, with its ceaseless and frantic scramble to increase paid circulation—that is, before we became a free paper in order to focus on ad revenue, and before we gave
that
scheme up and
sold out to Kingswood Holdings, Inc.

So, my 75 loyal followers, please know that I’m deeply grateful to you for reading my postings these past three years and for sticking with me through my frequent meanderings and digressions. Despite my abiding respect for the strict conventions of newspaper writing, I’ve come to derive deep satisfaction and enjoyment from maintaining this blog, where word limits don’t matter, where impartiality is besides the point, and where I may freely indulge in conjecture, parentheticals, and serial commas.

For obvious reasons, I hope this won’t be my last post. But if it is, it is. I’m 81, a ripe age by any measure. I suppose that no age ever feels old enough, but with my daily cigarettes (a habit I picked up almost
seventy
years ago) and, with the exception of my own tomatoes, the takeout-menu-diet of a lifelong bachelor, I know I’m lucky to have made it this far. I don’t regret never marrying or having children. If I had met the right woman and passed up the opportunity to spend my life with her, I’d feel different. Maybe it was the long hours on the job, or maybe it was my comically long nose. Regardless of the cause of my lived-alone life, the fortuitous effect is that my departure, when it happens, will be met with the sadness of quite a few, but the genuine grief of none.

Was I married to my work? This cliché might be true. If so, I ask that you don’t pity the relationship. It was a strong marriage. I have loved being a newspaperman—publisher and editor and, above all, reporter. I can recall no better feeling than those moments when I was in thrall to a story that finally snapped together—the facts, and my particular way of telling them. Better than striking oil, I tell you.

What a shame that this time-honored industry is rapidly vanishing and becoming overrun by ideologues and illiterates. Our democracy requires better. But this is a problem for younger minds than mine to solve.

The title of today’s post alludes, of course, to the unattainable object of Captain Ahab’s obsession. This morning, a young male nurse entered my hospital room to check my vitals and the wounds in my chest and leg. (I had bypass graft surgery on Wednesday morning.) I asked this nurse what day it was, and he said, Friday, September 22. I told him that today was the fifteen-year anniversary of the Miller killings.

“The what?” he asked.

I was taken aback, though I shouldn’t have been. The young man would have been a child when the murders took place. Still, Silver Bay is a peaceful town, even today, and the crime had been a major story in the news for weeks. I told him so.

“I guess maybe it sounds a little familiar,” he said, having the sense to be kind to his loony, dying patients.

Faithful readers of this blog know that the Miller case is my white whale. In all the years I have lived in this town, there have been only five homicides. One man dialed 911 himself within hours and turned himself in. Three times, the men (they were all men) were booked within a couple of weeks and pled guilty to lighten their sentences. Ramsey Miller is the only accused who got away.

I lived—live—just one neighborhood away from where the Millers once did, and I was on the scene that morning only minutes after hearing the blaring of the first-response vehicles. I drove my car the few blocks to Blossom Drive and witnessed the aftermath of a terrible event, one that I’ve never fully been able to get past.

It shook us all. A couple of days after, I remember ordering my cup of coffee and plate of eggs at the Good Times Diner, same as every morning, and the waitress (Tracy Strickland, who always wore a “kiss my bass” pin on her waitress uniform) sat in the booth across from me, placed her elbows on the table, cupped her head in her hands, and wept. She was about Allison’s age. I didn’t pry. But you see, Silver Bay is a small community, and Allison Miller was the sort of woman you couldn’t help admiring, and Meg was a girl just shy of three who deserved to grow up.

A couple of months earlier, while shopping in the Pathmark one afternoon, I happened to find myself in the same aisle as Allison and Meg. Allison, pushing a full shopping cart, was following her daughter, who was running in my direction and calling out the colors of the floor tiles. Finding herself beside me, Meg tugged the leg of my slacks, and commanded: “Pick me up!”

I hadn’t held a small child for many years, maybe even decades—not since my niece and nephew were small.

“Up!” the girl repeated.

“You’d better do it,” her mother said.

I lifted the girl—she was amazingly light—and for thirty seconds, maybe a minute, I held her, breathing in the smell of baby shampoo, while her mother hastily pulled items from the shelf and placed them into her cart. Meg seemed content to be held, watching her mother.

“Thank you, Arthur,” Allison said, taking back her daughter and flashing a smile.

We had introduced ourselves not long before, while waiting together at the dentist’s office. I hadn’t expected Allison to remember my name or who I was, and now I didn’t know what to say. Despite the countless interviews I’ve conducted, I’ve never been much good at small talk—especially with someone who was, even when harried in the supermarket, a knockout. So I nodded, maybe mumbled something. She coaxed her daughter back to sitting in the shopping cart and rounded the end of the aisle. I finished my shopping and paid. When I went outside, Allison was loading bags into her car. Meg was in the cart, kicking her legs. I considered strolling over and saying something neighborly. But it was late afternoon, and the sun was making this pretty image of the two of them—mother and daughter—and I decided not to ruin the tableau.

I never saw either of them again.

From time to time, when it seemed appropriate, I have posted pertinent
public documents
about the case, notable
media coverage
, and my own musings (
here
,
here
,
here
, and
here
, and less articulately in perhaps a dozen other posts). If you are a new reader of this blog (unfortunate timing, if so), here is a brief summary:

On Sunday afternoon and evening of September 22, 1991, the Miller family hosted an outdoor block party. As many as fifty people were in attendance over the course of several hours. The party ended around 9 p.m. Sometime later that night, after the guests were gone, an inebriated Ramsey brutally murdered his wife, Allison. (I won’t rehash those details; the curious can read about it
here
.) The next day, authorities found her body in the backyard and began a search for Ramsey and their young daughter. Two witnesses placed Ramsey at the Silver Bay Boatyard the night before, around 10 p.m., and one of them saw him board his motorboat carrying a bundle the size and shape of a small child. Neither Ramsey nor Meg was ever seen again. The boat was never found. The prevailing theory—the correct one, in my view—is that Ramsey took the boat out to sea and threw his daughter overboard, either alive or already dead.

Because of the condition of Allison Miller’s body when it was found, the time of death can only be estimated, and some experts disagree on which came first, the murder or the boat ride. The order matters when trying to create a chain of causality. Had Ramsey planned to commit both murders? Or did one horrible deed make the other, after it was committed, seem unavoidable?