Somebody I Used to Know (25 page)

“It’s about Marissa,” I said. “This guy, Charles Blevins, he was reported missing from the OSU campus almost a week after Marissa died.”

“So?” she said. “Columbus is a big city.”

“He was reported missing a week after Marissa died, but his roommate hadn’t seen him since Saturday. The
day
Marissa died.”

“Nick, please.” She sounded more awake, more agitated. “Let this go.”

I pressed on. “According to the information on the website, his roommate said Charles was supposed to be going to Eastland that weekend. He had friends there. He was going to party at Eastland. What if he went there that weekend and somehow ended up back at Marissa’s house? And if he was killed in the fire that weekend . . . well, it could mean . . .”

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Finally, I said, “Gina, just do this for me.”

“I get it, Nick. I do.” I heard rustling around on her end of the line. “You loved her. You don’t want to let go.”

“It’s not just that. It’s the cop we talked to. He said they didn’t positively identify two of the bodies in the fire. What if Marissa wasn’t in there?”

“Then where would she have gone?” Gina asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.” I floundered around, trying to find the right words. “But things aren’t adding up.”

She let out a long sigh. I practically felt her breath through the phone. It was that much of a sigh. Then she said, “Hold on a minute. I’ll tell you what I know.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

I
expected more excitement from Laurel when I told her what I’d learned. Maybe it was the early hour—I called her at six thirty a.m. and clearly woke her up—or maybe she was just fatigued by the embers of false hope I kept fanning, but she almost sounded disappointed when I told her about Charles Blevins.

Someone muttered in the background on her end of the line.

“Tell Tony I’m sorry if I woke him,” I said. “I thought you guys would be up.”

“We were about to be.”

“Sorry.”

“But that’s interesting, Nick,” she said. “Really interesting.”

But I knew what she was saying. She was saying,
This sounds like more bullshit. Let it go.

“This guy was supposed to go to Eastland that very weekend, the very day of the fire. What if he’d gone there and . . .”

“And what?” she asked. “How did he end up in Marissa’s house? Did he know her? Or did he know one of her roommates?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t say it, but I was thinking:
Apparently I have no idea who or what Marissa knew. Or who she was involved with
. “He’s not familiar to me. Not the name and not his face. But he didn’t have to know them. Maybe he came to Eastland to party, and he ended up hooking up with one of Marissa’s roommates. That’s plausible. He could have just gone home with one of them, and then he was there when Blake set the fire. He killed Charles and Marissa’s three roommates, but not Marissa.”

“Or maybe he died with the four of them,” she said, her voice a dash of cold water. “You heard Nate. Maybe there were, pardon the expression,
five
sets of remains in there, and they only thought there were four. That’s as logical as anything else.”

“Okay. Maybe.” Suddenly I felt a little deflated. “But what if Marissa wasn’t there at all?”

“That’s the key question, isn’t it, Nick? The real question.”

“What do you mean?”

Laurel said something to one of her kids. “Ask Dad to do it. Ask him.” Then she came back on, sounding a little harried. “Let’s say everything you think is true. Say Marissa didn’t die in the fire that night. She’s still alive somewhere despite all evidence to the contrary: the grave, the obituaries, the arsonist ex-boyfriend. Say she really is alive and has been for twenty years. Isn’t it obvious she doesn’t want to see you? You’ve been living in the same town for the last twenty years. Hell, you live ten minutes from the dorm where you lived when you met her. Fifteen minutes from the spot where she allegedly died. And not once in all that time has she tried to talk to you. Not once has she sent a card or a note or a Facebook message. And the last thing she did was break up with you. Why would you want to see someone who feels that way about you?”

If Laurel had punched me in the chest, I wouldn’t have felt the force of her words any more powerfully. I took a step back where I was standing in the kitchen and lowered myself into a chair.

I didn’t know what to say. I waited for my breath to come back. “How long have you been thinking this?”

“Jesus, Nick, I’m sorry. I’m not judging you. I’m just asking you . . . what is it all for? What do you hope to gain? Is it worth it?”

I had to answer her honestly. “I don’t know. I’ve told myself all these years she couldn’t have meant to break up with me, that we loved each other.”

“I know. But she did. She
did
break up with you. Roger Kirby was an older man, and maybe he took advantage of her. Maybe that’s obvious. Even a smart girl like Marissa could get taken in by a family friend. If she had lived, who knows what would have happened with you guys. You probably would have gotten back together and been fine.”

“But we didn’t,” I said.

“You didn’t.”

“The fire ended all that,” I said.

“It did,” she said. “A sick man’s actions put an end to all of that.”

I tapped my foot against the floor. “Yeah.”

“Do you want me to look into this Charles Blevins guy a little bit?” she asked. “I’m sure his family would be happy to have the tip.”

“What could they do about it?” I asked.

“Only one thing I can think of. They could try to exhume whatever remains they found in the fire and test the DNA. They couldn’t do it back then, but they can do it now. It’s really upsetting to families, though. They don’t like to think of their loved ones being dug up years later for something that might just be a hunch. But you said he has a sister. She could give permission and provide a DNA sample to match.”

“There’s no one to give permission on behalf of Marissa. Her parents are gone. Her sister . . . I guess you haven’t been able to find any real lead about her.”

“No, we haven’t. They can get a court order without a family member, but would a judge do it for something this tenuous? It’s unlikely. After all this time and so little evidence . . .”

“Right.”

“I’m sorry, Nick,” she said, and I could tell she meant it.

“No,” I said. “Thanks for being honest. Maybe I needed that.”

“We all do sometimes.”

“I’ll have to train Riley to talk to me the way you just did,” I said. “Then I won’t call you so early in the morning.”

“I’m curious, though,” she said. “This guy was reported missing after the fire?”

“A few days. He had the habit of going off and partying on weekends. His roommate was away as well, so it took a few days for anyone to really notice he was gone. When his parents tried to track him down, they found out no one had seen him for a week. They don’t even know for sure that he came to Eastland that weekend. Just that he said he was going to. I guess that makes the case weaker. No one has any idea what happened to him. He wasn’t in trouble with anybody, and there’s no evidence of foul play, but they haven’t seen or heard from him in twenty years.”

“I think I’m going to go hug my kids,” Laurel said.

“Hug them for me, too.”

“They miss you,” she said. “You’re the best Wii bowler they’ve ever met.”

“I’ll put that on my résumé,” I said.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

“I’m okay. Really. I didn’t tell you, but I’m going to get to start seeing Andrew again. So that’s good.”

“Excellent. He’s a good little man to concentrate on.”

“He is. Thanks, Laurel.” Then before I hung up I put words to what I had been feeling for days. “You’re a good friend, Laurel.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

I
made contact with Charles Blevins’s family the next day.

It might have been the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.

I sent an e-mail through the website, trying to sound as normal as possible and stick to the facts as I knew them. I assumed they probably received their fair share of crazy and insulting comments, so I simply told them about the fire that occurred the same weekend Charles disappeared, and I added that two of the bodies were positively identified and two were not. I concluded by saying, “You might want to have the authorities look into this.”

I heard back right away. The website was run by Charles’s sister, Allison, and she wanted to speak to me in person. She said her family had been haunted by her brother’s disappearance for the past twenty years, and if I really knew something, then she wanted to hear about it. Straight from my mouth. And even though she lived in Columbus, a full hour away, she offered to drive to Eastland to meet with me as soon as possible.

“Please,” she wrote. “My family needs this.”

How could I say no?

We agreed to meet the next day.

*   *   *

We met at a Starbucks out by the mall. It was a rainy night, and I shook water from my coat when I stepped into the warmth of the café and the comforting smell of coffee and pastries. Allison looked to be a few years older than me. She was heavy and carried a large canvas bag as a purse. Her clothes were nice, her hair neat, with not a strand out of place. The smile she offered when she saw me seemed to require a great deal of effort on her part.

We shook hands, and then I ordered a coffee from the bored college kid at the counter. Allison already had hot tea in front of her. When I sat, she told me about her day, how she worked part-time in a hospital and didn’t think she’d get away on time to make the drive to Eastland. She was divorced with grown children, so she said she didn’t need to rush home.

After her honest introduction, I felt I had to offer something personal, so I said, “I’m divorced too.”

“It’s hard,” she said.

“It is.”

Then she came to the point. She asked me how I put together the information I had sent her. In my e-mail and on the phone, I had purposely remained vague about my interest in Charles’s story. My own story didn’t really matter much to the Blevins family.

But I told Allison because she seemed to want to know, and she looked to be a sympathetic listener. And as I told her and absorbed her kind looks, I understood we were members of the same fraternity: We’d both lost someone, and neither one of us was exactly sure what had happened. If I was right about Charles, then Allison and I would see a change in our fortunes. She would receive the answers she’d spent years in search of, and I would realize I didn’t know any of the things about Marissa’s death I’d always thought I knew. I tried to remind myself of Laurel’s words from the other night:

Why would you want to see someone who feels that way about you?

Why indeed?

Allison listened as I briefly shared my history with Marissa, the fire, and then all the events of the past few weeks. Emily Russell. Roger Kirby. Blake Brown. And now Charles Blevins. It seemed like a broad, complicated web that had ensnared all of us, and I still wasn’t sure if the threads hung together, or if we were like passengers on a bus—a random group of people bounced around by similar circumstances. Soon, very soon, the ride was going to stop, and we were all going to step off and get back to our lives.

When I was finished, Allison didn’t pat my arm or provide any easy or false sympathy. I gave her a lot of credit for that. She’d probably been on the receiving end of her fair share of arm pats over the past twenty years.

“Wow,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Wow.”

“My mother always wanted to know where Charles was before she died. When she was in hospice, I think she believed Charles was going to open the door and come in, kneel by her bedside, and say, ‘Mom, I’m here.’ But of course he never did.”

“A friend of mine recently told me closure is overrated.”

“I might agree,” Allison said. “More likely, I would just say closure can be darn near impossible to find. Even when we think we have it, it eludes us. Right?”

I knew what she meant. For twenty years I’d thought I knew what happened to Marissa: She’d died in that fire. She was gone, a jumble of charred bones and flesh in the ground in Hanfort. But then certain things had opened the door again. Emily. Emily’s adoption. Loretta’s story about Joan’s behavior. But those things didn’t reopen an old wound. Those things simply told me that the original wound had never healed. Neither Allison nor I had fully come to grips with our losses.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Do you really want to know if Charles died in that fire?”

Allison sipped her tea before answering. A group of teenagers at another table started laughing, their voices rising together so that for just a moment it was too loud to speak. When they quieted down, Allison said, “I don’t
really
want to know. If I find out the truth, then it’s the death of hope. And hope has been the fuel running my life most of the last twenty years. I have my kids, of course. But the hope that I’d see Charles again, that’s been the biggest thing. I don’t know what I’d use to fill that hole. I guess I’d have to find something else, wouldn’t I?”

“I adopted a dog when I got divorced,” I said.

“Dogs help,” she said. “I have two.”

“I guess I’m facing the death of hope as well.”

“How so?” she asked.

“I always clung to the fantasy that Marissa and I would be together if she had lived.” I swallowed my coffee. It needed more sugar, but I didn’t want to get up. The rain spit against the darkened windows. “I thought the only thing keeping us from being together was a horrible accident. Now I have to face the notion she might be choosing to stay away from me, that there was someone else back then, and she has no interest in me even now.”

“It’s not easy, is it?” she asked. “I’ve lived with all of this a long time.”

“Are you going to take this to the police?” I asked. “If you didn’t, then I guess neither one of us would have our hopes shattered. You could believe your brother is still alive, and I could believe the love of my life is really dead.” I smiled as I said it, letting her know I understood how pathetic my wish was. “We’d all be happy, right?”