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Marya
Marya
“He was always like that then. Generous, kind, patient. We all loved him, but whereas he cared for me and Matthias and the others greatly, he loved only Nancy. Anyway, it was June of 1952. Michael would have been in his late twenties by then, and Nancy, she would have been . . . well, yes, it was just three or four days before her fourteenth birthday. I remember now. We had a party pla
Gaines had watched her talking the entire time. The more she spoke, the more alive she appeared to become. As if to recount this terrible tragedy had somehow reminded her of not only her own mortality, but also her own aliveness. There was something truly captivating about the woman, as if something inside her was alight and yet hidden behind the shadows of the past. Past experience had buried who she was, and in speaking of these things, perhaps some small avenue of escape had become visible.
“And Michael?” Gaines asked.
“He withdrew to a degree, just as he had after his return from the war. We still spent time together, and he was still as much in love with Nancy as he’d ever been, but something had changed. It wasn’t even identifiable. It wasn’t something you could put your finger on. He wasn’t crazy. He didn’t act crazy. Nothing like that. It was like there was only seventy-five percent of him there, whereas before there had been a hundred. And then, after Nancy’s disappearance two years later . . . well, that’s when he really started to display signs of the lonely, crazy man he became. After that, I hardly ever saw him. I didn’t want to see him. When I did see him, he spoke about how he was a curse on everyone around him, about how he had made a pact with the devil, about how his own life had been spared twice, but that the price he now had to pay was the sacrifice of the one person he truly loved. It was too much to listen to him. It overwhelmed you. It was scary, terrifying, you know? It was obsessive.”
“And he stopped seeing you and Matthias completely after Nancy’s disappearance?”
“As best he could. He told me that he didn’t dare spend time with us. That if we stayed together, then we would go the same way as his friends in Guadalcanal, the same way as the people he worked with in Picayune, the same as Nancy. He believed that he was protecting us by becoming reclusive, by never seeing us, by staying away.”
“And you were all with her the night she disappeared, right?”
Marya
“So what happened that night?”
“Nothing happened, Sheriff. Nothing at all. It was the same as so many other times that we had been together. It was a summer evening, August, 1954. We were in the field. We had the old record player from Matthias’s house. Catherine had left much earlier, and then when Matthias went back to get the record player, he took Eugene and Della with him. Then there was just the four of us in the field at the end of Five Mile Road near the trees, and we played music and we danced. And then Michael and Nancy went into the trees, and she never came out again.”
“And the police?”
Marya
“What did Michael tell them?”
“That they had gone into the trees together, that it was dark, that they had gotten separated but that he could still hear her singing. And then it went quiet, and he couldn’t hear her anymore. He went looking, and he called out for her. He got no answer, and he thought that maybe she was just hiding from him, that she would suddenly jump out from behind a tree to scare him, but she never did. Then he came out to the field again, and I was there with Matthias, and Michael figured she would be with us. She wasn’t, and so Michael and Matthias sent me home, and they went into the trees again to look for her, and after about an hour, they still hadn’t found her and they went to the Sheriff’s Office.”
“And when Michael and Matthias went back into the trees, did they search together, or did they split up?”
Marya
“And Don Bicklow figured she was a runaway, and that was the end of it, right?”
“Seemed so, but now we know different. Now we know that Michael found her body, and then he did what he did . . .”
“We think that Michael found her body,” Gaines said. “We ca
Marya