Chapter 13

A Split Personality

It was the early days of the new year, 1985, and being outside was like being in deep freeze. Julie Slocum and her new boyfriend, Kreg Brager, couldn’t take it anymore. They had been working on Julie’s car, which was parked at the curb in front of the apartment. But they decided that the minor repair could wait. It was too damn cold.

“Want some hot tea?” she asked, not waiting for his answer as she continued. “Let’s go in.”

Kreg moved into the living room and parked his chilled bones in front of the TV. Julie headed for the kitchen, where she swished out the tea kettle and filled it with cold water. She could hear the muffled wamp-wamp of a TV commercial as she ran her fingers across the stack of teabags, debating which it would be—orange pekoe or something light, the jasmine. Or chamomile. Between her momentary pauses of thought, she could tell that Kreg had tuned into something, because he had turned up the volume. The teakettle creaked quietly as the hot electric burner did its work, and Julie’s delightful presence of mind was suddenly interrupted. Her ears caught the broadcast. It was a Crimestoppers Report, one of the ones put out by the sheriff’s department. This one was about the Jane Doe whose body had been found on Christmas Eve—only two weeks before—just below Bonner Dam.

A creepy feeling seized her as she focused her attention directly on what the announcer was saying.

“White female. Five-five to five-eight. One hundred twenty-five to one hundred-forty pounds. Hair appears to have been permed and dyed auburn. This victim had pierced ears. Anyone who has …”

Julie didn’t need to hear any more. She stood rigid, her eyes fixed on the screen, holding a bag of orange pekoe tea in hand. Then she turned to Kreg.

“God, that’s that girl,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s that girl, Robin. Robin,” she said to herself, the words coming in a whispering shudder.

“Yeah, I think it might be,” Kreg said. “You’re right.”

As much as she loved Wayne, whose artwork still graced the walls of her living room even now that she had a boyfriend, she was not ready to believe the words that had just come out of her own mouth.

“Something weird’s going on, man.”

“Yeah, I know,” a disbelieving Kreg chimed in.

“I’m gonna call Crimestoppers. This is too weird. It can’t be.”

As she dialed the number, there came a rising whistle in the kitchen, and she waved at Kreg to get the kettle. Crimestoppers was a local nonprofit tip line supported by a citizens group that also pays rewards for information that leads to the closing of a case. Crimestoppers calls are directly patched into the Missoula city police or the county sheriff’s office, depending on the jurisdiction of a case, and the caller speaks directly to a detective.

When the voice came on the line, Julie suddenly became reticent as she was asked for her name. The decision to call Crimestoppers had been made almost without thinking. After a pause, she did give her name to the detective. But she wasn’t going to mention Wayne. She didn’t want to tell the detective anything about Wayne. After all, she wasn’t sure. Maybe her mind was playing tricks.

Shadow boxing around some of the questions the detective asked her, she threw back a lot of questions at him. Exactly how tall was the girl? Was she really heavy set? But she didn’t get any answers. It was clear that only a set amount of facts about the girl who Captain Weatherman called Debbie Deer Creek were cleared for release. To Julie, it seemed that the detective on the line was being evasive, not helpful. Maybe he was trying to tell her it wasn’t who she thought it might be, and tiring of the apparent lack of response to her call, she let it go. Actually, she thought to herself as she hung up, it was a relief.

“Great,” she told Kreg. “Boy, am I glad. It’s a load off my mind. It’s not Wayne.”

Julie’s mind then flashed back to the last time she had seen the girl named Robin. It was her birthday. There was a party right here in her new apartment. It had only been three months ago. And she remembered how Wayne avoided her after that, and it still bothered her, because they were supposed to be best friends, buddies who shared everything. In the long blink of an eye that Julie Slocum, Wayne’s friend for six years, even suspected that the Jane Doe on the Crimestoppers report was Robin, and that Wayne had something to do with it, the air in the room seemed to have thinned, lost its oxygen. Was it a vision, a synthesis of all the information that she carried around with her on this particular January day, locked into focus by a television report? Or was her mind playing tricks?

Kreg had shared her suspicion at first, but he didn’t know Wayne as well as she did, and he had met Robin only once, at the party in late September. At the time, Julie didn’t want to admit to it, but she knew that her friend and cohort Wayne was two people, a split personality who carried on his relationships with friends as if nothing could be more transparent than the Wayne they knew and loved. But Julie knew some things about Wayne that most people didn’t. Wayne had confided these things to her.

“Whenever he would stay out too late and his dad would be gone, and it would be later than his mother thought he should be out, she wouldn’t confront him face to face. She’d catch him when he was trying to sneak into the house and she’d bonk him with a baseball bat. Here he’s a grown-up person, had been in the Navy. That was her way of disciplining a young man that was tougher than she was. She cracked the whip, and George was none too easy on him.”

It was what Wayne didn’t say about his father that bothered Julie. She observed a perverse obsession on Wayne’s part to please his father.

“Snapping to. There was something there that you wanted to ask about it, but you’re afraid to. It was too much. Especially here he was about thirty years old and he was still doing it.

“I thought his dad ruined his social life. Wayne didn’t have a whole lot of friends. He was real serious about his job. And when he did get out to a party he had such a good time.

“It irritated me at times. I think his dad was much too hard on him. When he would come back into town, man, Wayne would drop everything. He’d leave parties. He’d be home with his dad.”

The tea had brewed. It was time to snuggle up with Kreg in the warm living room of her apartment. She had done the right thing. She had called, and even though she had been sure that the Jane Doe and Robin were one and the same, she wasn’t sure anymore.