Free A Brilliant Death by Robin Yocum

was eighteen and had just graduated from high school and was working at Melba’s Taffy & Ice Cream Shoppe on the strip in Virginia Beach. Frank was twenty-one, a few days from his twenty-second birthday, and in the company of a half-dozen of his Navy buddies, drinking away a three-day pass, when he tapped on the window to get Amanda’s attention.
    She didn’t look up. “I can’t talk,” she said. “I’m working.” He tapped again, and this time she looked. He smiled and waved her over to the window. “Do you want something?”
    “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve seen on the strip all night,” he said.
    “I’m not allowed to give you free ice cream,” she said.
    He smiled and asked, “Is your phone number free?”
    Drunken sailors on leave asked for her phone number at least a dozen times a week, and her response was always the same: “We don’t have a phone at the house, but if you’d like to call my dad at work, Vice Admiral Virdon, he can get me a message.”
    This usually sent them scrambling. Frank said, “If that’s what it takes to get a date, I’ll call him.”
    That night, she wrote in her diary that she had met “a man from Ohio named Francis Martino Baron and he was absolutely charming.”
    “Big Frank? Charming?” I interjected.
    Travis said, “Not just charming, but ‘absolutely charming.’ She must have had some sort of youthful character flaw.”
    Frank’s hitch in the Navy ended the March after he flirted with Amanda in the ice cream shop. They were married in a simple ceremony in Virginia Beach and had a small reception in the backyard of the family home. Her parents liked Frank and were happy for their daughter. She wrote, “Frank bought me the most beautiful ring I have ever seen. It is a marquis-cut diamond with a crescent of rubies around one side of the stone. It is simply gorgeous, and I was mad at him for spending so much money on a ring, but I love it! Frank has promised me that when we have saved enough money we can move to the country and raise horses. My life is a dream come true. Mrs. Francis Martino Baron. I love the sound of it. Frank is going to take care of me forever.”
    Unfortunately, “forever” turned out to be about eighteen months, the best Travis could tell. By the time they had been married two years, the tone of the diary entries had turned from dreamy to nightmarish. The one true Francis Baron had surfaced, and he was considerably less charming than the version she had met at Melba’s Taffy & Ice Cream Shoppe. Travis said he didn’t want to reveal everything he had read, which he described as “nauseating,” but Frank had apparently knocked her around, punched her several times, and each time apologized and promised that it would never happen again. But it always did. One of the letters from her dad revealed that he knew Frank had hit her, and he volunteered to drive to Brilliant and move her back home.
    “I wonder why she didn’t go,” I said.
    “Who knows? She wasn’t much older than us, and she was already married. She was probably still living this fairy-tale dream—figured she could change him or something.” He flipped through the pages of his spiral notebook. “Listen to this: ‘I went to see Dr. Adams this morning. I’m pregnant. I am so excited. I stopped on the way home and bought material so I could start making a baby quilt. I told Frank, and it saddens me to write that he wasn’t very happy about my pregnancy.’” Travis looked up from the book, grinned, and said, “And almost fifteen years later, he’s still isn’t happy about it.”
    Travis flipped to another page, where I could see he had made a list. He said, “Here are some of the things I learned. She taught first grade Sunday school at the Church of Christ. She volunteered two afternoons a week at the library. She liked oatmeal-raisin cookies and hot apple cider. Her favorite color was blue, but green was a close second. She was a cheerleader and her