The Last Good Day of the Year by Jessica Warman

Author:Jessica Warman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, p. 136

Chapter Fifteen

Summer 1996

The first time my parents’ lawyer called to tell us that my sister’s body might have been found was eight weeks after she disappeared. It was March 1, 1986. By then, every day bled into the next like an endless waking nightmare for my family, especially for my mom. I remember prescription pill bottles taking up a whole shelf in the bathroom closet. My mother may not have been able to pull herself together enough to do laundry or cook dinner, but she always managed to go to the pharmacy or the liquor store.

By early March, Steven was in jail on charges of aggravated kidnapping and second-degree murder, which struck some people as odd, since there was no hard proof that my sister was dead. My parents hadn’t given me any inkling of that as a possibility, not yet. They were still holding out hope that Steven had stashed Turtle away somewhere—maybe at a friend’s house—and that she was alive and unharmed. Because I was seven years old and had never known anyone who died, death was still more a vague idea than an inevitability; it was something that happened to old people, something—so I’d been told—that I wouldn’t have to worry about for a very long time.

Back then I still believed in God. Every morning when I got up, and every night before I went to sleep, I prayed for him to send my sister home. I tried to be as clear as possible about my request: Please let Turtle come home. I don’t remember ever asking for my parents to stop being sad or for Gretchen to stop acting crazy; I knew getting Turtle back would solve all of my family’s other problems.

Imagine Point Pleasant way back in 1986, when the neighborhood was still new enough that even our row of cheap, cookie-cutter town houses had some sheen to it. When Channel 4 News anchorwoman Stacy Middleman stood in our driveway to film a segment on Turtle’s kidnapping, she described us as living in “a quiet family neighborhood in a small community.” She spoke to my parents a few times, her film crew lugging its gear into our living room and taking all afternoon to set up, while Stacy and my mom sat at our kitchen table and looked through the carefully assembled photo albums that documented my sister’s brief, interrupted life. Imagine me peeking around the corner to get a glimpse of the celebrity who was drinking tea with my mother. (Until Turtle’s kidnapping, my mom had been a dedicated coffee junkie, but now her stomach was too weak to handle anything stronger than green tea.) I wanted to ask for Stacy’s autograph, but I was too shy.

We got used to seeing news vans parked outside our house. I guess they felt it made a better story if they filmed their segments at the scene of the crime. They all seemed like nice people who didn’t want to interfere too

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