Somebody I Used to Know (22 page)

“Yes.”

“We can talk to him soon,” she said.

“Now,” I said. “We’re going now.” I grabbed my keys.

“You need to hear what I have to say first.” Laurel took my empty glass to the bathroom, refilled it, and brought it back, handing it to me. “Relax.”

“How can I?”

I gulped that glass of water too, and Laurel sat, in the same chair Roger Kirby had sat in just minutes before. Nervous energy kept me standing.

“What does it mean, Laurel?” I asked as she calmly took out her notebook and phone. “He was there with her the night she died. And you say they seemed involved. That’s the word you used.
Involved
. She had an affair with Roger Kirby, right? That’s why he doesn’t want me asking questions.”

“These are all maybes,” she said, looking up, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.

“He was with her the night she died. Right before she died. He must know what was going on.” I walked around the room in a circle, my breathing almost normal by that point. “Let’s go find him.”

But Laurel showed no signs of budging. She had her notebook out, reading something in it with her brow furrowed. “Do you know a guy named Blake Brown?”

“No,” I said. “Should I? Wait. Blake Brown. You mean Marissa’s ex-boyfriend? I never met him, but she talked about him.”

“Let me tell you about him.”

“We have to do this now?”

“It’s relevant. Listen.” She studied the notebook a little bit longer. “What did Marissa ever tell you about him?”

“Too much. She lost her virginity to him. They dated for over a year, I guess, junior and senior year of high school. When they broke up, when
she
broke up with
him
, he went a little nutty. He started coming over to their house without calling. Sending flowers and gifts to try to win her back.” I stretched my memory back through the fog of my young man’s jealousy. “She told me that once, after they broke up, he even came over in the middle of the night and threw pebbles at her window. Apparently, he used to do that when they wanted to sneak out and fool around. But that time he stood in the yard and begged her to take him back. He said he couldn’t live without her, that if she didn’t get back together with him, he’d hurt himself.”

“Did he?”

“I don’t think so. Her family told the police. Or maybe a shrink at school. I thought it all blew over. She still had pictures of him in her dorm room freshman year.”

“I remember that. He was a
really
good-looking guy.”

“Thanks.”

“I just mean he looked normal. Not like a stalker or a nutcase.”

“Can you tell that easily?”

“With some people, yes, you can.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “Now I know where they came from.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The flowers,” I said. “I went to the cemetery today, while I was waiting for you. There were flowers on Marissa’s grave, fresh flowers. Her favorite kind, too. Lily of the valley.
He
put them there. Roger Kirby. He knows her favorite flower and still visits her grave.” I wanted to throw my water glass against the wall, to shatter it into a million pieces. “And then he came over here and tried to throw me off the trail.”

“I need you to listen to what I have to say, Nick.”

“What does it matter?” I asked. “Did you really find something important?”

“I did,” she said, trying to focus me. “Just listen. Kirby isn’t going anywhere. He’s been in this town for seventy years. We know where he works. I went to the library first today. I looked through the microfilm from the local paper for the dates around Marissa’s death. You know, a month or so before. A few weeks after. It’s a small-town paper, so it wasn’t hard to wade through. I was just looking for anything that stood out as unusual. Anything.”

“And?”

“People always say small towns are safe places where not much happens. That’s just not true. Even a town like Hanfort had a lot going on twenty years ago. A couple of drug busts. A homicide—a brother shooting his sister over control of the TV remote. A hit-and-run accident that killed a little kid. Driver didn’t stop. Miscellaneous assaults and fights. The works.”

“Small towns have their problems too,” I said.

“They sure do,” she said. “But none of those problems had anything about Marissa.”

She reached out and placed her hand on a small stack of papers to her right. It looked like she was guarding them from a strong wind.

“What’s that stuff?” I asked.

“I didn’t know if I was going to show them to you. Or if you’d want to see them. But they’re news articles about Marissa’s death, as well as the other things going on in the town at that time. I printed them off for you, but if you don’t want to look, I can get rid of them. Maybe it’s a bad idea.”

“No,” I said, truly curious. “I’ll look at them. Later.”

Laurel nodded. “Maybe you’ll want to be alone.”

“Was there anything else you uncovered?” I asked.

“Not really.” She tapped her finger on the tabletop. “Except they didn’t solve this hit-and-run. At least not in the couple of weeks after the accident that I looked at.”

“What could that have to do with Marissa?”

“I don’t know. And they probably solved it later. The cops I talked to didn’t remember the case. But there was a witness back then. An elderly woman saw the whole thing happen. She said it was a dark-haired man driving the car that hit the child.”

“There you go. You said you learned something, so what happened with the cops when you talked to them?” I asked. “I trust we’re getting to the part about Blake Whatshisface. Meanwhile, Kirby is going on with his life, and we’re just sitting here.”

Laurel ignored my complaining. “The police couldn’t find any problems with Marissa or anyone in her family,” she said. “They all have clean records. No busts, no run-ins or arrests. Not even a parking ticket. They’re as clean as the Cleavers. They almost seemed too good to be true. You know how teenagers drive, and you mean to tell me she never got a ticket? Never? Nothing?”

“It’s a small town. Her dad was prominent. Maybe she talked her way out of tickets.”

“Do you think the Marissa we knew would do that?” Laurel asked.

“Probably not,” I said. “She’d probably tell the cop off.”

“Exactly.”

Someone started a vacuum cleaner in the hallway, the sound of the small motor rising and receding as the cleaning person pushed the device up and down the carpet.

“There was an officer at the station, a guy named Rich Cotton. His daughter went to high school with Marissa. Her name was Stacey or Macy, something like that. Anyway he told me about the ex-boyfriend and all the bullshit when they broke up. So we’re all sitting around, the cops and me, just talking and going over everything, and I told them all about Emily and how she looks like Marissa and how she had your address in her pocket.”

“What did they say?” I asked.

“They’re stumped. But Officer Cotton talked more about Blake and what a weirdo he was growing up. Apparently, he had his share of trouble when he was a kid. Busting windows, harassing animals. Then he kind of straightened out by the time he was a teenager. No real problems there, until he broke up with Marissa. Then he got a little weird again.”

“Why did they tell you all of this?” I asked.

“I told you. The chief down in Eastland is buddies with the chief up here. He called for me. Cops and former cops stick together.”

“How did they remember all this stuff about Blake?” I asked.

“They looked up his record,” she said, as though it was the simplest thing in the world. “This Officer Cotton seemed to recall that Blake went off to college in Indiana or someplace like that. And he was wondering what ever became of him. Did he stay on the straight and narrow? Or did he get in trouble again? So just for kicks they looked him up in the system, the nationwide system.”

Laurel wore a smug look, the one that said she knew something else, but she wasn’t just going to hand it over to me without getting asked first. It was like the encore of a great concert. She wasn’t going to go on unless I cheered.

“I’m guessing you found something out about him,” I said.

“He kept his nose clean in college,” she said, “but a couple of years after graduation, he found himself in a bit of trouble.”

“A bit?” I asked. “What did he do, shoplift stuff?”

“He tried to kill his ex-girlfriend,” she said.

“You’re kidding.” That news itself was disturbing enough, but then I thought about Marissa existing in close proximity to someone capable of such violence. I still held the glass, and I wanted to throw it again. “So he’s in prison now?” I asked.

“Down in Florida. He won’t be out for another five years or so.”

“Good.” But Laurel still wore a knowing look on her face. “Do I want to know how he tried to kill her?” I asked.

Laurel paused a moment before she said, “Arson. He tried to burn her house down, Nick. With her inside it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

T
he glass in my hands had become warm and sticky from sweat, covered with a web of my fingerprints. I didn’t know what else to do, so I tapped the bottom of the glass against my open palm. My hands started to shake, and my legs felt like worn-out elastic bands.

“That’s ghastly,” I said, using a word I don’t think I’d ever used before in my life.

“The woman escaped, thank God. A neighbor saw the flames and pounded on the door. It was lucky. She had a little smoke inhalation, but she recovered. And the police caught him and put him away.”

I sat and folded my hands together on the tabletop, hoping to steady them. Hoping to steady my entire being, inside and out. Many times I’d thought of the horror of that night. The smoke rising, the flames spreading. Did Marissa even wake up? A part of me hoped for mercy, that somehow she was overcome in her sleep and never knew what killed her. But I doubted it was true. They must have known. They must have scrambled for doors and windows, desperate and terrified, facing their own mortality. Nate’s description of the 911 call had made that fact clear.

And it might have been an act of homicide, perpetrated by a jilted ex-boyfriend.

“Okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, “that might explain the fire. But it doesn’t explain everything else. What was Marissa doing with Roger Kirby that night?”

Laurel started to speak and then stopped. Then she went ahead, saying, “Marissa came home the weekend before she died, didn’t she? We all knew that. If Blake was in Hanfort, or if he knew about the relationship with Roger, then maybe that drove him to a final desperate act. Maybe he tried to get Marissa back that weekend or sometime before, knowing she was involved with Roger. You know how small towns are. Everybody knows everything. It wouldn’t be hard for a guy to know what his ex-girlfriend is doing.”

“She never mentioned trouble with Blake to me,” I said, my voice lower, distant to my own ears. “I would have—” I stopped myself. Would I have known? Would I have known any of it?

“She had secrets, Nick.”

“Why didn’t the cops put this together sooner?” I asked.

“This attempted murder, the arson, happened years after Marissa died. And Blake did this in another state, Florida. There was no real reason to make the connection. I’m sure the Florida authorities checked Blake out, but the fire that killed Marissa was ruled an accident. They wouldn’t have connected the dots.”

“But they are now?” I asked.

“They can ask Blake about it,” Laurel said. “If he wants to confess, you have a closed case. But all the physical evidence from the fire that killed Marissa is gone. They bulldozed that site and put a new house up.”

“And Blake has to know that,” I said. “Why would he confess to a crime all these years later if they don’t have anything on him?”

“People surprise us,” Laurel said. “A lot of guys find Jesus in prison. He may have done some soul-searching and wants to get it all off his chest.”

“What are the odds of that?” I asked.

“Slim. Not none, but pretty damn slim.”

My mind moved forward, past Blake Brown and on to the other things that had been consuming me for the past couple of weeks. “None of this explains Emily Russell, does it? Why did she show up looking for me? Why does she look so much like Marissa?”

Laurel gave me a sympathetic look. “I agree—we don’t know anything about that girl and your address. We may never know.”

“But the woman at the funeral, the charity that helps with adoptions, the locked room at the Minors’ house. The flowers on the grave . . .”

I couldn’t sustain the energy to keep listing the details. I knew what Laurel was thinking, and I mostly agreed with her.

So what about those things? They weren’t proof of anything. I remembered my high school science classes. Occam’s razor. The most likely explanation was that Marissa was having a relationship with an older married man, leading her to break up with me. Her ex-boyfriend, who had a history of erratic and violent behavior, killed her, just as he tried to kill another woman later in his life.

Case closed.

Who was Emily Russell and what did she want? Laurel was right. We might not ever know, at least not until her murder was solved.
If
it was ever solved.

“I would like to have my own chat with Roger Kirby,” Laurel said. “He’s probably not going to talk to you again, but I thought maybe I could swing by his office and see if I can catch him. Maybe I can pick up on something.”

“That he was fucking my ex-girlfriend? That he took advantage of a young girl, a family friend?”

“I get the feeling you might want to be alone for a little while and process this.” Laurel looked at her watch. “It’s getting late. We’re here for the night. We can hang out in wild and crazy Hanfort for the evening.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

I gave Laurel Roger Kirby’s office address and phone number. Before she left the room, she patted me on the shoulder. “The truth hurts—I know.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” I said. “It’s excruciating.”

CHAPTER FORTY

L
eft alone, I picked up the pages Laurel had printed at the library. I remembered well the news coverage from the campus paper in the wake of the fire, the maudlin and sentimental images and words. Lots of shots of students crying and hugging other students. The obligatory photo of the makeshift shrine at the site of the fire. Cards, candles, teddy bears. I wondered then how many of those people knew Marissa or any of the other dead students and how many of them just wanted to be in the middle of something, some drama or overheated display of emotion.