Free The Last Good Day of the Year by Jessica Warman

the Myers girl, people would hardly look at them. It wasn’t more than two or three months before the business went under. Helen would sitthere all day by the register without seeing a single customer. Jack told me they were eating supper one Sunday when a condom that someone had filled up like a balloon with shit came flying at the window and exploded all over the place. They didn’t deserve all the hate people shoveled onto them—as people, you know? They weren’t bad people. It broke my heart to see things end that way for them. Back in high school, we thought Jack would walk on the moon someday, and Helen would be pretty forever. You know what I mean? It seemed that if something so awful could happen to Jack and Helen, then probably we were all fucked.
    So if you’re asking do I think it happened the way they say, what do you expect me to tell you? Yes, I think he killed that little girl. Otherwise he’s just the unluckiest bastard who ever lived. But nobody can figure out what he could have done with her after. She’s not in his house, I know, because we tore that place apart from top to bottom. I hated to do it, but it’s my job, and here’s how decent Jack and Helen are: they let us into the house and didn’t say a word the whole time, because they knew we didn’t have a choice in the matter, and afterward I shook Jack’s hand and said I was sorry but what else could I do, and he said it’s okay, Tom, I know, but Stevie didn’t hurt her.
    Even so, I don’t know that he should have been tried for murder. Not without a body. I’m not saying I think she’s alive, but shouldn’t the court have to prove it? Youget a miracle every now and then—remember that girl in Canada who’d been missing for twenty years? Didn’t they find her a mile from home, locked up in someone’s wine cellar? All I’m saying is, it happens.
    I’m still friends with Jack and Helen. I’m a Christian, and I’m not going to abandon them in their hour of need. I don’t blame them for not believing Stevie could have done anything to that little girl. Would you want to believe it about
your
child? He’s their only kid; that’s what parents are supposed to do. People want to look at Stevie and think,
Oh, they all must be monsters, the whole damn family
. They’re not. They just got a bad egg.
    Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
, pp. 66–67

Chapter Eight
    January 1986
    The way our lives unraveled over the next year made for a captivating story for those whose curiosity outweighed their grief, from our neighbors to the local news audience, and eventually the rest of the country. Prior to that day, our town had little experience with major crimes; aside from some garden-variety domestic violence and a handful of drug users who sometimes required legal attention, the worst thing that had happened was the 1979 suicide of Marvin Gill, a sixteen-year-old boy who’d hung himself from a beam in his attic one night after a Boy Scout meeting. (Whenever they drove past the Gill residence after Marvin’s death, my parents would wonder out loud how his parents could possibly stand to keep living in the same house.)
    Our town had twelve police officers, none of whom had any experience with kidnappings. Ego was never an issue in theinvestigation; state police were called in immediately and given full control. They divided Shelocta into a grid and organized the citizens to conduct shoulder-to-shoulder searches of every square inch. Teams worked in shifts to scour the town for sixteen hours each day. Everybody wanted to help: anonymous casseroles showed up on our doorstep with such regularity that most of them ended up in the trash. A tip line received dozens of calls each day, none of which yielded any valuable information. Housewives distributed thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate to the searchers, who persisted in spite of single-digit