Byron's Lane (18 page)

I was temporarily left there alone while the deputy went off to collect Mary Rose Fillmore. I fetched a folding chair, pulled it up to the conference table and uncomfortably dropped myself onto its cold metal seat. I extended my arms out over the old oak table in front of me and watched the fingers on my hands shake. I couldn’t make them stop. Everything around, about, and inside of me was out of control.

The deputy returned a few minutes later with Fillmore in tow. She looked at me straightaway, giving no notice to anything else in the room. Her puffy face blushed, and then erupted into an ear-to-ear grin that turned her expression from astonishment into glib satisfaction. “Well, what do you know? The gang’s all here. How are you doing, Tom?”

My knees were suddenly weak as I tried to stand. My mouth was open wider than it should have been. I had lied to the sheriff about knowing this woman. I’d lied to him because I wanted a chance to confront my friend’s killer so I could learn more about the conspiracy to assassinate Jonathan Adams.

Pulling the handcuffed woman along with him, the police officer retrieved a folding chair for her to sit on and dragged it to the other side of the table. As the jailer handcuffed Fillmore’s wrist to the top of one of the table’s legs and released his hold on her, my mind raced, trying desperately to associate the name Mary Rose Fillmore with a person from my past. Her frozen smile and cold stare easily deflected my darting eyes as I searched her face for clues.

Before leaving us, the jailer announced he’d be just outside if I needed anything. He said I could let him know when he looked into the room through the window on the door, which he announced to both of us that he would do every minute or two. He told me to knock on the door or signal him when I was finished. Then he turned and walked out of the room, into the hallway, closing the door behind him.

I was suddenly alone with a woman who knew who I was, but who was a mystery to me. I was experiencing my first tsunami of gut-wrenching emotions that would batter me the next half hour as I struggled to catch my breath and keep my head above everything happening around me.

Mary Rose Fillmore, if that was really her name, looked older than me. She was dressed in faded blue jeans, white socks, and muddy black tennis shoes. An oversized gray sweatshirt that had GAP written on it in big black letters, worn sloppily over a bigger white T-shirt that spilled out the bottom of the sweatshirt, suggested she was overweight. Her short brown-and-reddish hair, gray streaked, needed combing. Black-framed eyeglasses dominated her face. They were the same outdated style frequently featured in the high school yearbook I had found in Adams’s bookcase.

The only thing I knew about this person was that it was she who had repeatedly called Adams’s house. Engulfed in anger and profound remorse, I wished to God that Adams had answered one of her telephone calls, signaling that he was home, on Thursday. I would have been there when she rang the front doorbell. Adams would still be alive. Maybe I could have prevented the whole thing from happening. My thoughts fast-forwarded to the shooting incident the Monday before. She surely knew who had done that, too. I was certain of these two things, but nothing else.

“You don’t recognize me, do you, Tom?” She paused. “Neither did Jonathan.”

Her expression turned from an unsavory smile to a combination of hate and disappointment.

“When you were supposed to know me—when you never acknowledged me, even once—I was Mary Rose Vukovich. For three years in high school my locker was next to yours. Here’s the giveaway, Tom. Here’s the big clue. When we were sophomores, I drove the drivers’ education car into the school building. Jonathan’s macho basketball coach was afraid to ride with me the rest of the semester. They had to hire somebody else to teach me how to drive.”

I didn’t need to be reminded about the day the drivers’ education car crashed into the mechanical drawing and wood shop. I knew who she was when she said that her family name was Vukovich. I was dazed and confused. I tried with all my might to keep my feelings and emotions pushed inside. I sought in vain to determine a motive for Adams’s murder that could somehow involve Mary Rose Vukovich.

Mary Rose was a rare breed in Maplewood. She was a native. Her father operated a Sunoco gas station in the middle of town when we moved there. He kept the gas station open longer than he should have by fixing old cars in its two cramped service bays. I never saw anyone buy gas at the place. I remember stopping there once to put air in my bicycle tires. After I was finished, her father made me pay a dime for using his air pump. I was afraid of what he would have done to me if I hadn’t had fifty cents’ worth of change in my pocket. He was a mean-looking, intimidating man.

As the space around the dilapidating gas station slowly filled up with cars her father couldn’t fix or sell, a newly incorporated Maplewood city council persuaded the Sun Oil Company to raze the building in which he worked. It had become an eyesore. The council decided that the property was better suited to be a parking lot for the Methodist church and funeral home that bracketed

Sam Vukovich’s struggling business. Sun Oil built a new, shiny, white-tile and blue- and gold-trimmed service station half a mile away. Mary Rose’s father was left without a job and the responsibility to remove fifteen junk cars from the property in thirty days. He faced a thousand-dollar fine if he didn’t remove the vehicles. When he refused to pay, he did jail time.

Mary Rose Vukovich’s father ended up working at Maplewood Lanes, a bowling alley that sprang forth from fill dirt piled behind the shopping center. He cleaned and distributed multi-colored bowling shoes that had their sizes marked in large numbers on the backs of them. He fixed the pin-spotting machines when they broke. Once in a while, he helped tend the bar.

For reasons I was never able to understand, but never protested, Maplewood natives—kids like Mary Rose, whose unfortunate accident was to not have been born somewhere else—were ostracized from the cliques that formed and reformed, like mud puddles in May, among our school’s burgeoning student body. Our sheer numbers, and the housing developments in which we lived, had overrun them, their families, and the places where they worked—businesses that proudly bore their names, small commercial enterprises that had operated with modest success for many years before we descended upon them. Franchise stores and fast-food chains closely followed us into Maplewood, quickly and ruthlessly driving their struggling shops and restaurants out of business. The experience caused bitterness among almost all the adults in Maplewood who listed the town as their place of birth. Parents often passed their vitriol on to their children.

But Mary Rose Vukovich was undeterred by the legions of us who constantly rebuffed her. Where Adams loathed rejection, Mary Rose was energized by it. She was always trying to fit in somewhere, anywhere, wanting to befriend someone, anyone. The frequency with which she was ignored drove the intensity of her effort. All the focus of her attention had to do was acknowledge any one of a hundred gestures of friendship she made. No one did.

Our meeting in the basement of a courthouse in Minnesota was the first time I’d ever paid attention to her. By the end of our session I realized her relentless, painful quest for acceptance had been a desperate attempt to be pertinent—not perverse, as we had gossiped about.

Mary Rose and I and six of our classmates shared a locker bay in a dark hallway in the bowels of the old high school building, underneath the glaring stares of her forgotten relatives who graduated in senior classes so small that their pictures hanging on the wall were oval portraits of individuals, not hordes of teenagers crowded onto gym bleachers. She’d always try to approach us in the hallway when our paths crossed. When we saw her coming, we’d feign involvement in a deep conversation with the people beside us. When she snuck up behind us, we’d say hello and pretend we were late for an important appointment.

I was violently shaken from all these memories when she dropped another clue, which shed blinding light as to why we were renewing acquaintance at this particular place and time.

“I’m Victor Pavletich’s granddaughter. Did you know that?”

She had dropped the weight of heaven and hell on me. My body contorted. I pushed hard against the back of my chair. I was incapable of masking my feelings. The revelation drove rationality up my throat and out my gaping mouth in a silent scream. In some karmic way, I had been an accomplice in my best friend’s death.

The farmer’s granddaughter stared at her hands calmly folded on the table. She continued coldly and matter-of-factly. “God came to me and showed me where Jonathan Adams—my grandfather’s killer—had tried to hide from us.” As Mary Rose spoke, I was as close to assuming a fetal position as someone can get sitting upright in a metal folding chair. Her words drifted in and out of my ears.

“Your friend spoke at a convention at the place where I was working in Indianapolis two weeks ago. I recognized him when we passed in the hall. He looked at me, but he never saw me. But I knew who he was. I followed him back here.” Her eyes darted about the room as she spoke. They focused on my startled face. “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever done.”

After a few seconds’ pause she went on. “My grandparents always talked about how it was the responsibility of every Serbian family to protect each other. Nobody else would. You had to depend on your family. Blood is thicker than water, they said. When someone in your family is harmed, the family has to hit back. No bad act can go unpunished. I’ve done my duty.”

Her words, dripping in my best friend’s blood, chilled me. I know she saw me shiver.

Tradition and history—Adams romanticized them. He often lamented their loss among us rootless souls born and raised in America. Tradition and history stalked him from Ohio to Indiana to Minnesota. Tradition and history killed him. I was jolted to my core. Guilt was overtaken by an equally irrational sense that absolutely nothing could ever have been done to stop it.

How did she know that we were in the woods when her grandfather died? Why did Adams have to be the one to pay for what the four of us did—or didn’t do? In my shaken state, I was becoming convinced that something much bigger than me had brought this down upon Adams. I couldn’t lie to this woman and tell her that we hadn’t been there that day. Lying wouldn’t bring Jonathan Adams back from the dead. I was small and insignificant, bobbing helplessly in an ocean of karma that had already drowned him.

Mary Rose felt no guilt for what she had done. She hadn’t exactly told me yet, in so many words, that she had killed Adams. That indicated to me the inconsequence of the act in her twisted mind. For Mary Rose, the most important aspect of what she had wrought was that she had done what her family and her traditions expected of her. Somewhere in heaven they were looking down at her, smiling and nodding approvingly. In the process, she also laid claim to her fifteen minutes of fame. She was involved in the assassination of a politician—a famous person. For the first time in her life people would be paying attention to her. Whatever happened from that point was of no real concern to her. Her life had been a steady, persistent ache since we moved to Maplewood. The pain was gone now.

As she continued to talk, my questions began to be answered.

Mary Rose told me that everyone touched by Victor Pavletich’s death, including the police, knew the day he died that Adams, Wright, Kearney, and I had witnessed his heart attack and done nothing to help save him. She and her family were sure that we had caused it. Margaret Fillmore, her future and former mother-in-law, lived on Shelley Drive and had seen the four of us run out of the woods that day, an hour before Mary Rose’s grandmother found her husband unconscious at the edge of his cornfield.

At the family’s insistence, a police officer was assigned to follow up on Margaret Fillmore’s report. The Maplewood Police Department’s first and last stop was Greg Kearney’s house. His father, the mayor, persuaded the officer and police chief who knocked on his door that it was impossible to prove that his son and his friends caused the old man’s heart attack. At worst, we were guilty of trespassing and not being good Samaritans. If the Pavletich family wanted to pursue it, Kearney’s father was prepared to ask tough questions in a very public way about whether protecting property from juvenile trespassers justified shooting a shotgun at them. These were All-American boys doing what all American boys our age do. The man was eighty-three years old and had died of natural causes.

Mary Rose presumed that Jonathan Adams was the one most responsible for her grandfather’s death. Her grandfather wouldn’t have had his heart attack if we hadn’t surprised him Even if he did, he wouldn’t have died if we had helped him. She figured it was Adams who told us to run away. After all, he was a leader. Everything Adams did and accomplished before and since showed that leadership was his most prominent characteristic. So he was responsible. “Everybody in high school knew that when something had to be done, Jonathan Adams was always in the middle of it,” she said.

She stopped talking and yanked at the handcuffs that bound her to her seat. The act confirmed that the lock on the cuffs had engaged itself. She quickly lost her expression of defiance. She was enjoying her dominance of our conversation. “I guess I took your breath away.”

I had had all I could take that interminable day. I caught the deputy’s eye as he glanced in the small window in the room’s only door; he’d looked in when he heard the table scrape against the tile floor. I told Mary Rose that I wanted to talk to her more the next day. I asked her if I could. Her dead eyes showed signs of life. She finally had a date with a Maplewood High classmate.

“Of course you can, Tom. I look forward to it. I’m not going anyplace. I’ll be here.” She laughed at her joke as the deputy un-cuffed her from the table, turned her around, and led her back to her jail cell. I didn’t react to her laugh. She looked over her shoulder at me as they disappeared through the doorway.

Alone in the room, I held my arms out over the table.