Author’s Note
You can leave home, but home never leaves you. So naturally when I wanted to write a ghost story “The River Shall Bear Them Away” had to be set in Union, Massachusetts, which is a smudgy copy of Taunton, Massachusetts, where I was born and grew up. The derelict mills on Union’s River Street, the smell of the Liberty River, its mists, and its rushing gray-green current have their real-life counterparts. Also I attended a real-world desert wedding in Arizona—and though I don’t recall meeting Marie Dwyer or Frank Guernsey there, I suspect that they were seated somewhere behind me. As for Frank and the rest of the ghosts, I believe in them all. Don’t you?
“The River Shall Bear Them Away” is included in my first short story collection, A Cold Day in August: Thirteen Tales of Criminality Most Foul, which is available on Amazon as a Kindle edition and a paperback edition. If you read and enjoy this story, I hope you’ll share it with family and friends, and perhaps even go on to read the other tales that comprise A Cold Day in August.
The River Shall Bear Them Away
A Short Story by Thomas Gregg
People would ask why I abandoned southern California for Union, of all places. My answer touched on the standard Los Angeles themes: the hideous traffic, the horrific cost of living, the big-city stress. I could hardly have told them what really happened: that one day I left work early and arrived home to find my husband in bed with his lover. Such a cliché, right? But with a twist, for the lover was a man. A young man. A man, in fact, much younger than my thirty-six-year-old husband.
“Oh, my God,” I said from the bedroom doorway, “Please tell me that he’s eighteen, at least.”
“I happen to be twenty-two,” the lover snarked.
My husband was sitting up in bed with the sheet held to his chin. “Sweetheart,” he stammered, “This isn’t the way it looks…”
Even the lover laughed at that.
Well, of course my cheating hubby was scorned and reviled by all my friends and of course, they were generous with support and sympathy. But after days and weeks of support and sympathy, I got fed up with it. And did my friends take a certain sly, malicious satisfaction in my discomfiture? Did they seem rather too eager to pass on the latest four-one-one regarding David’s new life? Was it possible my friends thought it funny that David had cheated on me with another man? Did they secretly sympathize with him: the poor repressed closeted gay martyr, condemned to a sexually barren marriage with a mere woman? And if so, how could I complain? This was California, remember. Even to hint that what he’d done was rather heinous would have gotten me branded as a homophobe—right?
I know, I know — I was probably being paranoid. But when I finally divorced the bastard, my friends—my so-called friends, as I thought of them by then — seemed to intimate that I’d done him a favor. And the absolute last straw landed on my aching back when the news broke that David and his young paramour had set a date for their wedding. I turned off my cell phone and deactivated my Facebook account before my so-called friends had a chance to pile on. And that very day, I began prospecting for jobs in places far from L.A.—Bismarck, North Dakota; Jasper, Indiana; Union, Massachusetts.
On the upside, such as it was, I’d also become fed up with the advertising industry, and the job I eventually landed in Union freed me from the soul-crushing drudgery of writing copy in praise of organic dog food and feminine hygiene products. Union State University Press needed an assistant editor and the senior editor, Olivia Trent, thought that with my background in advertising, I’d be a good fit.
“The job’s not too exciting,” she remarked with a smile that lit up her plain, fortysomething face, “And to be honest, the pay’s only so-so. But the benefits are good and it’s steady. Secure.”
“That sounds great to me,” I told her—though at the time, I had my doubts. But at least the job would get me out of California, so I decided to take the plunge.
But the job—and Union too—turned out to be all right. Though people in Massachusetts complained constantly about the cost of living, Union was cheap by comparison with L.A. And quieter. And old in a way that southern California could never be. The town had been founded in 1671 and many of its houses dated from colonial times. On Union Common, where once the militia had mustered and drilled, were memorials honoring the dead of every American war. On River Street stood a row of derelict old factory buildings, the satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution, long since abandoned. Over on Broadway was Low Town, where the mill workers had lived in the small brick houses that lined its narrow cobblestoned streets. When the community college morphed into Union State University, those houses were bought up, rehabbed and rented out as student housing. Now Low Town was the place to go when you were in the mood for a raucous Saturday night.
For a southern California girl, the pageant of the New England seasons was a revelation. It was delicious to walk in the woods west of Low Town on an October afternoon, kicking through the fallen leaves, breathing in the chilly air with its occasional tang of wood smoke. The small house I rented had an actual working fireplace and with some trepidation, I tried it out. Well, let me tell you: There are few pleasures comparable to curling up in a deep armchair by the fire with a book and a glass of wine, while a winter wind blows snow against the window.
As the months passed, I made friends, assembled a social life and generally settled in. Gradually, as I acclimated myself to the region’s cultural peculiarities — the definition of coffee, regular, the cult of the Red Sox—I felt that I was becoming a real, honest-to-clam chowder New Englander. I mentioned this to Olivia Trent, who happened to be a descendant of one of Union’s five founding families, and she smiled politely.
There was only one thing that I didn’t particularly like about Union: the Liberty River.
The river flowed from north to south, bisecting Low Town, flanking the derelict mills on River Street, dividing the old core of the town from the newer subdivisions that radiated north from Locust Road. The river’s smell—green, damp, unwholesome—was inescapable in Low Town, as were the morning mists that rose from the river to steal along its streets and alleys. People who lived in Low Town claimed that after a while, you stopped noticing the smell and I suppose that was true, but whenever I went down there, the first scent of the river made my nostrils flare.
The University was north of Low Town and its eastern environs abutted the river. This part of the campus was nicely landscaped, with a paved biking and walking path laid out along the riverbank. The University Press offices weren’t far away and some of my coworkers were in the habit of taking a lunchtime stroll along the river. I joined them a few times but for some reason I found the view disturbing. The river’s swift-flowing gray-green current seemed curiously alive, aware, and there was something false about the sparkle of those waters on a sunny spring or summer day. The river’s true character, I thought, only revealed itself under the dead frozen sky of deep winter.
Eventually, I began to take my lunchtime walk on the Quad instead.
There were strange and sinister stories connected with the Liberty River. During King Philip’s War, a small settlement north of Union was attacked and pillaged by an Indian war party. The mutilated bodies of its inhabitants, some thirty in number, were thrown into the river and carried south. This gruesome sight was said to have alerted people in Union, so that the war party was repulsed when it descended on the town several hours later. Strange and sometimes terrible things seemed to happen in and around the river: murders, fatal boating accidents, drowned children, disappearances. About the time I arrived in town, the decomposed remains of a woman were found in one of the abandoned warehouses on River Street. She was identified as an assistant district attorney who’d gone missing two years earlier. Police theorized that she’d been kidnapped and murdered by some vengeful felon she’d sent to prison. No arrest was ever made.
Living as I did in a semi-rural neighborhood west of Low Town, I wasn’t overly troubled by the Liberty River’s smell or its morning mists. But there was no ignoring the river; getting around in Union entailed crossing and recrossing it daily. Every time I drove over the Warner Street Bridge, I was uncomfortably aware of the swiftly flowing, dull green waters below. And it was from the Warner Street Bridge that I saw the young girl jump.
The detective’s name was Will Connor, and as we took seats in my living room, I recalled Olivia Trent saying that her nephew Will was a Union police officer.
“That’s right,” he said when I mentioned it, “So you know Ollie?”
“I work with her.”
“Oh, sure. You’re the new assistant editor.” He smiled. “Should have guessed from the accent.”
We chatted a bit more, then he took out his notebook and flipped it open. “Okay, Ms. Dwyer. Now if you could describe what you saw…”
I’d already described it to the patrol officer who’d responded to the scene and now I repeated it for Detective Connor’s benefit: Having plans after work to meet a friend downtown, instead of heading home on Broadway I’d driven down River Street and turned right onto King Philip Avenue.
“Okay, and what time was that?”
Probably it was a few minutes after five and though the sky was mostly cloudy there was still plenty of light. The girl was on the opposite side of the bridge, walking toward me. Then she stopped suddenly and I slowed down, thinking that she meant to cross to the other side. But instead, she briefly turned her face in my direction, then climbed the rail, balanced there for a moment, and disappeared.
“Right. And can you describe her?”
Everything had happened so quickly—I got only a brief glimpse of her before she jumped. The girl was young, no more than seventeen or eighteen, I thought, with long brown hair framing an oval face. She’d been wearing a dress — a print dress, pink and white — and carrying a small white handbag.
“A pink and white dress, you say?”
In retrospect it was odd. The dress was sleeveless, full skirted, and it seemed too summery for a breezy October afternoon.
“And when she jumped…?”
I hit the brakes and the vehicle behind me crunched into my rear bumper. I opened my car door, jumped out and raced across to the spot where the young girl went over the rail. But the river bore no sign of her and a moment later the driver of the decrepit old panel truck that had plowed into me was standing by my side asking What the Christless hell did you think you were doing, lady?
“Well,” said Detective Connor, tapping the notebook with his pen. “Well. I have to tell you Ms. Dwyer that—”
“Please, why don’t you call me Marie?” I gave him a smile—one of those smiles for he was really kind of cute—and added, “Olivia’s told me all about you.”
This was not strictly true, but I found myself attracted to this small-town detective even if he probably was a few years younger than me.
“Okay, it’s Marie,” he replied after a moment, “And I’m Will.”
And that’s how things got going between Will Connor and me. We met for dinner the following evening and one thing led to another and…but the point is not that he and I became an item but that because we did become an item, he told me some things that maybe he wouldn’t have mentioned at all if we’d never progressed beyond the cop and witness stage.
“I have to be honest,” he said, stretching out under the covers of my bed. “I’d have called bullshit on you, except that you just moved here from La-La Land.”
“That’s California, please.” I poked a finger in his ribs. “And I’ve been living in Union for almost three years now. But what do you mean, you’d have called bullshit on me?”
“Well,” he said and paused, “it’s actually a little weird…but the thing is, you were claiming to have seen a ghost…”
Her name was Bethany Andros and she’d jumped from the Warner Street Bridge on a summer’s day in 1978, shortly after discovering that she was pregnant by her boyfriend. Bethany had just turned sixteen and would have been a junior if she’d lived long enough to return to high school.
Will told me this with an abashed smile, protesting several times that it must have been some crazy coincidence. But his description of Bethany was a near-perfect fit for the girl I’d seen. He had the details at his fingertips because his uncle, also a Union police officer, had responded to the scene of her suicide.
“Uncle Ron was a rookie patrol officer back then,” Will said, “He questioned most of the witnesses, also made the notification to the girl’s parents. It was his first death notification, you know, so the whole thing kind of stuck in his memory. When I joined the force, he took me out for a beer and told me the story.”
“But you really don’t think…? I didn’t complete the question because I could tell from the expression on his face that I didn’t need to.
“No, no.” Will shook his head and laughed, “You didn’t see a ghost, Marie. Like I said, it was just a crazy coincidence.”
But his laugh seemed forced. It seemed false. And the girl I’d seen was never identified, nor was her body recovered.
That was the first ghost I encountered in Union. And though I never saw the shade of Bethany Andros again, I did see others.
A couple of months after the incident on the Warner Street Bridge, I was driving past the abandoned mill buildings on River Street. It was December 21, the solstice, late afternoon, and the light was fast fading from the sky. And I thought I saw—it was just a glimpse—a figure, possibly a woman, standing in the weedy, deserted parking lot of a derelict warehouse, fingers hooked in the sagging chain-link fence, watching me pass. This time I didn’t hit the brakes. And when I looked in the rear-view mirror there was nothing there. What I’d seen might have been an errant shadow, an old newspaper caught in the fence, a product of the imagination.
But I didn’t really believe that.
These…manifestations…persisted for perhaps a month. In Low Town, a young man wearing what looked like a military uniform, walking along the narrow sidewalk, carrying a baseball bat. A little boy on the riverbank, staring out over the water. A small group of people, dark smudges under the dusky sky, hurrying across a stubbled cornfield on the south side of town.
Some instinct warned me not to mention these further sightings to Will and I was relieved when they stopped. Months passed and eventually I filed the whole thing away under Crazy Coincidences, telling myself that Will had probably been right about that. Even in Union, I chided myself, even along the banks of the Liberty River, there were no such things as ghosts.
But then I saw another ghost, far from Union, in the desert outside Phoenix, Arizona, where I was attending an outdoor wedding.
Jodi and I had been best friends in college and L.A. being not too far from Phoenix, we saw one another fairly often after graduation. So when I got her wedding invitation, I decided to burn some vacation days. The wedding was scheduled for a Saturday in early May; I flew out on the preceding Thursday. We all got plastered at Jodi’s bachelorette party that evening and I suffered with a hangover the following day, but by Saturday I was feeling fine.
The wedding was to take place in a state park outside Phoenix. There was a pavilion to provide shade for the ceremony, which was good because even for Arizona it was a hot day. I took a seat in the last row of the folding chairs that had been set out for guests and relaxed, letting my mind wander back to our college years, smiling over the memory of those wild times. We’d had some adventures back then, Jodi and I. But she taught high school science now, had just earned her master’s, and the guy she was marrying was a fellow teacher. He seemed nice enough but having been betrayed and humiliated by the seemingly nice guy I’d married, I couldn’t help feeling suspicious of Mark. Jodi looked beautiful, though, as every bride must, long-limbed and auburn-haired, and everybody was smiling and—
—there was a man sitting by himself, two rows in front of me, dressed in a suit, dark blue with pinstripes, reading a newspaper.
It was the suit that made me frown. Who wears a dark blue pinstriped suit on a hot day in the Arizona desert? Then I saw that on the empty chair beside him rested a fedora such as men used to wear back in the day, gray with a black band.
The newspaper rattled as the man turned the page.
Conversation buzzed as guests took their places under the pavilion, but it seemed to come from far away. There was something disturbing about the man in the suit with the newspaper, something that recalled the woman in the deserted parking lot on River Street, peering through the chain-link fence…the guy I’d seen on the sidewalk in Low Town, wearing a uniform and carrying a baseball bat…the little boy on the riverbank…and despite the heat of the day, I shivered.
The newspaper rattled again as the man folded it neatly and laid it next to his hat. There were empty chairs all around us, which for some reason no one had occupied. He sat very still and I found myself entertaining a terrible thought: that he wasn’t breathing. Whereupon the man turned in his seat to look at me.
He seemed a very ordinary man: smooth-faced, pale, with light brown hair, perhaps forty years old. There was a reassuring mildness about him. But then he said: “I had to do it, you know,” and it was as if his throat was full of gravel.
He had nondescript brown eyes; they regarded me calmly. His expression was expectant, awaiting my response.
“Do what?” I whispered, “What?”
“I had to do what I did,” he said again, nodding toward the newspaper. “So did he.”
“What?” I whispered, shivering in the desert heat. The people surrounding us paid no attention to our conversation.
“We had to do what we did.” The man looked past me, over the desert beyond the pavilion. “What I did. What he did.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The river carried her away. The desert swallowed him up.”
I turned away from him then, and closed my eyes, because his mild expression, I thought, was the harbinger of some vile, unspeakable revelation—
“Excuse me, young lady, are you all right?”
I opened my eyes to find standing by my chair a man of perhaps sixty with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, dressed in khakis, a blue oxford shirt open at the neck, and a blue blazer. He was smiling down at me, a bit uncertainly.
But the man in the dark blue pinstriped suit was gone.
“Oh, yes,” I replied, putting on a smile. “It’s just the heat, I suppose. I should drink more water…”
“You sit right there,” he said, “I’ll get you some.”
And he did, and I drank it and felt very much better, and Jodi’s wedding went off without a hitch. But later at the reception, my good friend took me aside to ask if there was anything wrong. And I replied that everything was fine, a touch of desert sun was all, not mentioning the man in the dark blue pinstriped suit who’d spoken to me…and left his newspaper behind…
The newspaper was the Union Ledger for Friday, May 14, 1965, and it was obvious which story the ghost in the dark blue pinstriped suit had wanted me to read. It was right there on the front page. A woman named Charity Guernsey had disappeared. When she failed to return from a visit to her sister in Fall River, her husband Frank called the police. An intensive search was underway; Police departments throughout New England and New York were on the lookout for the missing woman.
But as I later discovered from a perusal of subsequent issues of the Ledger, Charity Guernsey was never seen again. Her husband Frank was questioned several times but never arrested. He admitted to detectives that his business—he was Union’s largest plumbing contractor—was virtually bankrupt and that he and his wife had been arguing about finances. Charity came from money, her late parents had left her close to a million, and assuming she was dead, Frank stood to inherit it. His secretary, a young woman not yet thirty named Shelia Perry, had quit her job two months earlier and left Union. There were rumors of an affair, of a murderous conspiracy. But Shelia was traced to her home town of Ithaca, New York, to which she’d returned to care for her ailing mother. When questioned, she adamantly denied being romantically involved with her former boss and swore she knew nothing about his wife’s disappearance.
“Sure,” Will said when I asked him about the case. “Charity Guernesy. That was a bad business, all right. My Uncle Ron knew the lead detective—a guy named Parker Travis. How did you hear about it, though?”
“Someone at work mentioned it.”
“Huh.” Will frowned. “People in Union have long memories, I suppose…”
“What happened to the husband?”
“Well, that was a funny thing.” Will shook his head, smiling. “Frank Guernesy had to wait five years — that’s how long it takes in Massachusetts—until Charity could be declared legally dead, but he got her money in the end. Then a year later, he married his former secretary and they moved to Florida. That got people talking. Old Parker Travis went to his grave believing that it was Frank who did for Charity, probably with Shelia’s help. Never could prove it, though. Anyhow, Frank died in the late Eighties and Shelia’s still down in Florida, I think…”
The temptation to come clean with Will was strong. Lying in bed with him that evening, sharing the warmth of our bodies, I thought what a relief it would be just to tell him what I’d seen and heard that day in the desert. Show him the newspaper. Admit to him what I could scarcely admit to myself: that I was frightened.
Oh, so very badly frightened.
But no more ghosts haunted me that summer, and once more I filed the memories away. At work, at dinner with Will, walking through the woods west of Low Town that October or sitting by my fireplace, I could almost persuade myself that Frank Guernsey had been a figment of my sun-struck imagination, a mirage of the desert heat. I ought to have drunk more water that day…
But then I would remember the Friday, May 14, 1965 edition of the Ledger, as fresh as the day it was printed, tucked away in a deep corner of the top shelf in my bedroom closet. And I shivered.
On Thanksgiving Day, Will asked me to marry him and when I didn’t answer right away, he frowned.
“What?” I asked.
“Look, Marie, if you want to say no—”
“Why would I want to say no?” We were sitting side by side before my fireplace, sipping wine. “The answer is yes, Detective Connor—yes.”
“It was the expression on your face,” he said, still frowning, “I thought…”
“You caught me by surprise, that’s all.” Which was a lie—I’d known for days that he was working up to a proposal.
“Did I?” Will smiled, then rolled his eyes. “Christ. But I totally forgot.” He fumbled in his pockets for a moment, finally producing a small box. “When you propose to a beautiful woman, you’re supposed to present the ring.”
He opened the box and handed it to me. I looked down at the ring. Tears rose in my eyes.
“Do you like it?” he asked. “Is it all right?”
“Oh, it is…” I whispered. But with the box in my hand, I understood what Will had seen on my face when he asked me to marry him: the realization that by committing to him, I’d be committing to Union. Where there were ghosts.
Will and I married in the spring and soon afterwards I got a call from one of my old, unlamented so-called California friends.
“Jodi gave me your number. Honestly it’s so ironic,” she said, clearly relishing the tale she was carrying to me. “I mean, after what he did to you, Marie…”
“What’s so ironic, Denise? What’s going on?”
“David’s husband ran out on him, Marie!” Even down the phone, the glee in her voice was patent. “Poof! Left a text message saying that he’d met someone else and they were moving to Mexico, if you can believe it!”
Clearly, Denise expected me to share her delight. But instead of inspiring schadenfreude, her news only made me sad. I knew how it felt, after all.
“Well, that’s too bad,” I said.
“What goes around comes around, Marie. Oh, and hey, congratulations! Jodi told me you got married again…”
After terminating the call, I made myself some tea and settled into my armchair before the fireplace. Poor David, I thought. But it seemed too neat, too tidy, all wrapped up in a bow like the climax of some Netflix Original movie. “What goes around doesn’t usually come around,” I whispered.
The Boston rocker in the opposite corner creaked. Very carefully, I set my mug down and turned to look.
Frank Guernsey, nattily attired in his suit, fedora in his lap, was rocking back and forth. His mild gaze fell on me, and he nodded.
“You see?” he said in the gravelly voice I remembered from Arizona. “You understand now, don’t you?”
“Go away,” I whispered as goosebumps roughened my skin. “Please go away, Mr. Guernsey.”
“Call me Frank,” he said, “And you’re Marie. And we have business.”
“What business?” I asked.
He told me.
Will was working late; I waited up for him. He found me sitting at the kitchen table with my hands clasped around a mug of tea gone cold.
“You okay, sweetie?” He frowned, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost—”
I came around a few minutes later to find myself laid out on the living room sofa with Will kneeling by my side, holding my hand.
“You kind of lost it there,” he said. “Spilled your tea. You scared me a little, Marie…”
“I’m all right. Really I am.” I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them and sat up—making sure not to glance toward the Boston rocker in the opposite corner. “But I have to tell you something, Will, and you’re going to think—“
“Later,” he said, squeezing my hand, “Give yourself some time. “Then I’ll open a bottle of wine and we can talk.”
I closed my eyes again, willing myself to relax. Will busied himself in the kitchen; after a few minutes I heard the pop of a cork, a ringing of glasses. He came back into the living room, handed me a wineglass and sat down on the sofa.
“So what gives?” He took a careful sip of his wine. “What the hell is going on, Marie?”
Something in his voice made me afraid for him—for us. I had to tell him—there was no way around it—but how would Will react?
“Before I tell you…there’s a large manila envelope on the shelf in the back of the bedroom closet.” I put my hand on his. “Can you please go and get it?”
Will asked no questions; he nodded and did as I asked. A couple of minutes later he was back on the sofa, puzzling over the newspaper that lay in his lap.
“What—?” he began, then stopped.
“Look at the date.”
“Friday, May 14, 1965,” he read.
“Now tell me, Will. Does this look like a newspaper that was printed almost fifty years ago?”
“No. No, it doesn’t.” He turned to look at me, his expression troubled. “Where did you get it?”
And so I told my husband about the ghosts—the ones who followed Bethany Andros—and about Frank Guernsey.
Will heard me out, saying nothing until the tale was told. Then he took up the newspaper, paged through it, returned to the front page, sighed.
“So Frank did it after all.” He permitted himself a small, mirthless laugh. “Old Parker Travis was right all along. Well, Uncle Ron always said that Parker was a damn good cop.”
He looked around for his wineglass, found it, took a long drink.
“So you believe me?” Tears rose in my eyes. “Truly you do? Even though it’s…?”
“Batshit crazy,” he finished for me, “But yeah, I suppose I do.” He held up the newspaper. “Can’t argue with this, not really. Oh, I suppose I could construct a theory of the case where you had the May 14, 1965 edition of the Ledger reprinted to run some convoluted scam. Sure, anything’s possible. But you’re not running a scam, Marie, are you?”
“No,” I said, “No, I’m not.”
“And who would run this kind of scam on you—a scam featuring Frank fucking Guernsey? Why? What for?” Will shook his head. “So all right. You saw and spoke to a ghost—or something. Who told you certain things that can’t be ignored. And they can’t be finessed. Because Hell, Marie, I’m a cop.”
“You’re also my husband,” I said.
“God damn it, Marie!” He stood up abruptly, glared down at me. “I’m a cop. A sworn law enforcement officer. I can’t do it the way you want. I can’t.”
“You have a vow registered with me as well,” I reminded him quietly.
Will sat back down. Realizing that he still had the wineglass in his hand, he put it aside with a grimace.
And eventually, my husband the cop agreed to be reasonable and do things my way. I didn’t ask how Will went about planting the anonymous tip that led the LAPD to investigate David’s claim that his spouse had vamoosed to Mexico with some lover. And it didn’t take them long to discover that Jason wasn’t in Mexico at all. As the shade of Frank Guernsey had told me, he lay in a shallow grave scraped out of the Mojave Desert, some thirty miles south of Las Vegas. He’d been beaten to death with the crowbar that was found buried with his body.
They questioned me, of course, an LAPD detective making the trip to Union. We talked over coffee in the kitchen, Will busying himself elsewhere around the house. Knowing that he was there, just out of sight, steadied my nerves. The detective, a tall and rather edgy black woman, fortysomething with bitten nails, used a tablet to record her notes.
“So you hadn’t seen him…” she paused and frowned.
“Since the divorce,” I nodded, “That’s right.”
“And you were last in California…”
“I’ve never been back since moving here.”
“Okay,” she said after a moment, “You were in Arizona, though. Phoenix. Last May.”
“For a friend’s wedding, yes.”
“And you didn’t see or speak to your ex-husband at that time.” She had a way of framing her questions as declaratory statements.
“No.”
Will had advised me to keep my answers as brief as possible. The detective met my eyes for a moment, then looked down at her tablet.
“I’m sorry that I can’t be much help,” I added eventually.
“So you said when we spoke by phone.” The detective—her name was Monica Prentiss—sighed. “Well, we have to cover the bases, you know. I mean, in a case like this.”
“Is there something you’re not telling me? There is, isn’t there?”
“There is,” she nodded, “And I’m not supposed to tell you, really. But…”
“Would you like more coffee?”
“Thank you.”
I poured coffee for us both, watched while Detective Prentiss added a teaspoon of sugar and a dollop of half-and-half to hers, sitting patiently with my hands folded on the table. Outside, Will started up the lawnmower.
“No,” Detective Prentiss said after sampling her coffee, “I’m not supposed to tell you, Ms. Dwyer, because, to be frank, there’s a suspicion that the anonymous tip we received—”
“Came from me.”
“Yes.” She gave me an edgy smile. “Though there’s nothing to connect you to Jason Aleman’s murder.”
“But?” I smiled in turn. “There’s a but in there somewhere, yes?”
“There is.” Detective Prentiss looked past me, through the kitchen window. “We suspect—well, at this stage we’re pretty confident—that there were others.”
And she went on to tell me about the several young gay men who’d disappeared without trace in the L.A. area while David and I were living our married life.
‘We’ve already connected a couple of them to your ex-husband,” she said. “So the thinking is at this point that…”
She shrugged.
“Oh, my God.” I whispered.
“I’m afraid it’s going to be a big story,” Detective Prentiss went on. “You should be prepared for that.”
“I didn’t know.” Tears stung my eyes. “How the fuck could I not know?”
“It happens more often that you might think.” She lifted her coffee mug and took a careful sip. “And if you’re lying about it, we’ll find out. But you’re not lying, Ms. Dwyer, are you?
“No.”
“No, I don’t believe that you are.” She made some quick notes on her tablet and closed it. “But there’s going to be more questions. And media attention, of course. You should be prepared for that.”
“Of course. And thank you for telling me.”
“You didn’t hear it from me,” Detective Prentiss replied as she pushed back from the table. “Thanks for your cooperation, Ms. Dwyer. And for the coffee. I’ll probably be in touch again.”
I saw her to the door, then returned to the kitchen, sat down and drank some coffee. It tasted like toasted water, as bitter on my tongue as the bitterness that clutched at my heart.
“Oh, Frank…” I whispered. “Frank, you son of a bitch…”
Eventually, David was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. Even by the standards of jaded, dystopian L.A. it was a sensational story and of course my ex-husband obtained a catchy serial-killer nickname. As Detective Prentiss had forecast, I came in for my share of official and media attention but with David’s conviction and the passage of time, all that faded away—leaving me to deal with the residue, like the sludgy mess that remains when floodwaters recede.
“Prentiss was right,” Will said when I confessed to him my feelings of shame and guilt. “It happens, Marie. These fucking guys, they’re good at making themselves look normal…”
My husband’s hard-headed cop attitude, his refusal to buy into the perverse mythos of the serial killer, helped me regain my footing. To Will, David was just another lame-ass perp. “They think they’re smart,” he said, “Smarter than the cops, smarter than everybody. And that’s why they go down. Sooner or later, those assholes go down. Because they’re never as smart as they think they are, Marie.”
“So even without…?
“Sure, even without Frank Guernsey.”
“Speaking of whom…”
“No.” Will shook his head. “We’re going to leave that one alone, Marie. It’s the last century’s news, everybody connected with it has been dead for years now. There’s no point in stirring up those ashes.”
He was not strictly correct about that, for Shelia Guernsey, an old, old woman, lingered on in a Florida nursing home. What, if anything, Shelia knew about the death of Frank’s first wife was beyond retrieval though, for her mind was gone.
But as Frank confessed to me, he did murder Charity—shot her through the heart with a .32-caliber pistol, then spent a horrible night in the basement of his plumbing supply business, dismembering the body. He disposed of the pieces one or two at a time, casting them into the Liberty River, which bore them away—eventually, I suppose, to the sea.
And charged with the responsibility for closing the book on Frank Guernsey’s crime, I decided to do likewise. One autumn afternoon when Will was on shift, I took the Friday, May 16, 1965 issue of the Union Ledger—still disturbingly fresh—into the back yard and burned it. There was no breath of wind that afternoon and I knelt beside the small pile of ashes for a long time, considering whether I should just scatter them with a kick. But instead, I gathered them into a ziplock bag and two days later, after work, I took a stroll along the campus river walk. There was a spot where the walkway dipped close to the water and there I gave the ashes to the river: an offering that must have satisfied the ghosts of Union, for they trouble me no longer.