Free The Last Good Day of the Year by Jessica Warman Page B

mysteries. His first book had followed his own modern-day investigation into his aunt Carolyn’s 1966 murder, which he eventually solved. “I made a promise to my mother before she died,” he told us, “that I would find the person who killed her sister, and that’s what I did.” And he showed us a picture of his aunt. She was a pretty girl, barely eighteen yearsold when her naked body floated to the surface of Keystone Lake on a summer morning during the Age of Aquarius, ruining one unlucky fisherman’s day.
    My family was living in Virginia by the time Davis took an interest in us. He traveled back and forth between there and Shelocta throughout the spring and summer of 1988. He interviewed everyone who knew anything about the case and followed up on every tip the original investigators had dismissed as irrelevant, scrutinizing them for any hint that might lead to my sister’s body. My mother kept a picture of his aunt Carolyn on our fridge, and sometimes I’d catch her staring at the dead woman whose face had become hope personified for us, as though she were a benevolent force from beyond guiding us toward the closure we’d heard so much about but never experienced.
    Davis spent hour after hour at our home, where he looked through photo albums with my mother and listened as she described every detail of my sister’s interrupted life. His fingers touched the blanket that had swaddled Turtle as a newborn at the hospital; they felt the blunt ends of the lock of hair my mother had saved from Turtle’s first haircut. My father kept in frequent touch with Davis long after he finished his research and returned to his home in New York to start writing the book. His wife sent us a Christmas card that year, and Davis watched Super Bowl XXIV at our house. He even bought me a pogo stick for my tenth birthday.
    But it turned out he’d spent plenty of time talking to Steven and his parents, too. We knew that, of course, but we had no ideathat he’d reached out to them with a promise similar to the one he made us. Maybe he liked them more. Maybe Helen Handley makes a better lasagna than my mom. Maybe she and her husband guaranteed Davis a lifetime of free dry cleaning. Or maybe he’s just an asshole. From the moment his book hit the shelves six years ago, Davis has spent every penny of the profits on a new defense team for Steven.
    In
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt
, Davis uses words like “mercy” and “compassion” and “forgiveness” when he discusses the broader issues of crime and punishment and the many failures of the American justice system. My father read the book before anyone else in our family. He stopped talking for a few weeks after he got to the end. I don’t mean that he was quieter than normal—I mean he stopped talking altogether. He began staying home from work for days on end to smoke weed in our basement and sort through boxes of his old baseball cards. He lost job after job for not showing up, failing a random drug test, or giving everyone he encountered the creeps by refusing to make eye contact with a single one of his coworkers for months.
    My mother didn’t read the book at all. She changed our phone number and donated my pogo stick to Goodwill, but she left the picture of Davis’s aunt Carolyn on our fridge. It stayed up for almost a year, finally disappearing a few weeks before Hannah was born.
    The book was an instant bestseller. Because of it, there are plenty of people who have some level of doubt about what happened to Turtle that night. Theories range from the unlikely to the impossible to the insane. People—especially those who aren’t fullyinformed—came up with some impressively creative scenarios. An unlikely one: the idea that Steven didn’t act alone, and that Turtle is still alive out there somewhere. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve imagined it: one day the phone rings,