Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Lynnwood, Washington
SERGEANT MASON REMEMBERED THE WOMAN from the day before.
When he had first walked into Marie’s apartment, she had been sitting on the sofa with Marie. She had been one of the first people Marie called for help. She had gone with Marie to the hospital.
Now, a day later, she was sitting with him—in her cozy single-story home on a curvy street with tall evergreens all around—saying she wondered if Marie had made all this up.
Mason’s tipster wasn’t some alienated friend, whispering to police, nor some ex, nursing a grudge. This was Marie’s foster mother.
When she had called Mason earlier today, Peggy identified herself by name but told the detective she wanted to be treated anonymously. She didn’t want what she had to say to get back to Marie. Mason, accustomed as he was to the clandestine world of drug investigations, found that request familiar enough and agreed to protect Peggy’s identity. He would keep her name out of his report about the telephone call—and for this conversation, the one in person, he would make no record at all.
They talked in Peggy’s living room. Peggy chose her words with care. She did not say: Marie is lying. She couldn’t say that. She didn’t know that. What Peggy offered was a suspicion, a sense that something was off.
Peggy’s skepticism didn’t spring from any one source. The roots were deep and tangled, intertwining what she knew about Marie from helping to raise her, what she had seen the day before, and what she had heard from someone else close to Marie.
Peggy had a master’s degree in mental health counseling. She had earlier been a foster-care case manager and now worked at a homeless shelter as a children’s advocate. In years to come she would work in the schools as an assistant for special-education students. She kept at home a copy of the DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a massive compendium published by the American Psychiatric Association that classifies disorders and is used by clinicians and others. She believed Marie could be found in those hundreds of pages—that her troubled past had given rise to some personality disorder manifesting in shallow relationships and an attraction to drama. “And it’s understandable. Her history—that’s probably how she had to get attention her whole life,” Peggy says. Histrionic personality disorder perhaps? Peggy couldn’t say for sure. But some moments made her wonder.
A few days before she had reported being raped, Marie had gone on a picnic with Peggy, Peggy’s boyfriend, and the teenage sisters who were now Peggy’s foster kids. “And it was a lot of drama,” Peggy says. “She was trying to get a lot of attention from me, I felt.” Peggy thought maybe Marie was competing, jealous of the new foster kids. And she worried that Marie couldn’t see how she was coming across. “There was some guy that was watching her because she was being so outrageously flaunty-flirty. And I tried to have a conversation with her about toning it down a little bit because, ‘You’re drawing a lot of attention to yourself right now,’ I told her. ‘First of all, it’s really obnoxious. And second of all, there’s a guy over here watching you and you don’t know what…’ ”
Yesterday, when Marie called and said she’d been attacked, Peggy had been torn. She needed to take it seriously. She knew that. And she did—rushing to Marie’s apartment, getting there the same time as the first officers. But on the way over she wrestled with another thought. “There was just another part of me that said—part of her MO is to be really, really outrageous, and to say things that make people react. That’s just part of her personality.” Even the phone call—the way Marie sounded—contributed to Peggy’s speculation. “Her voice was like this little tiny voice, and I couldn’t really tell. It didn’t sound real to me. It sounded like there was something…it sounded like a lot of drama, too, in some ways. It was like, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”
At the apartment, Peggy found Marie on the floor, crying. “But it was so strange because I sat down next to her, and she was telling me what happened, and I got this—I’m a big Law & Order fan, and I just got this really weird feeling. It was like, I felt like she was telling me the script of a Law & Order story.” Part of it was what Marie was saying. Why would a rapist use a shoelace to tie her up? That seemed bizarre. Is a shoelace even strong enough to hold someone? Why didn’t he bring rope or cuffs? And part of it was how Marie was saying it: “She was detached. Detached. Emotionally detached from what she was saying.”
When Marie said the rapist took photos, that also gave Peggy pause. Suspicion turned to supposition. She wondered if Marie had gotten into trouble somehow. Maybe she had let someone take graphic pictures of her—and now those pictures were going to appear on the Internet, so this was a way for Marie to cover up.
Peggy felt horrible about her skepticism. She didn’t want to believe that Marie was lying. But whatever her doubts, she had sensed while in Marie’s apartment—watching the police work, watching people console Marie—that she was alone in harboring them.
Later she had learned that wasn’t so.
FOR SHANNON—MARIE’S other parental figure, the fun mom in Marie’s extended foster family—doubt set in from the moment she heard the news.
“I remember exactly,” Shannon says. “I was standing on my balcony and she called and said, ‘I’ve been raped.’ It was very flat, no emotion.”
Marie had called Shannon on Monday, after leaving the hospital. Shannon asked if she was okay, and Marie said yes, she was going to spend the night at a friend’s—and that was pretty much it. When Shannon’s husband got home, Shannon told him about Marie’s call. She also said she didn’t know if she believed Marie. “There’s something about how she said it that made me question whether or not she’d actually been raped. It was the tone of her voice. There was no emotion. It was like she was telling me she made a sandwich. ‘I just made myself a chicken sandwich.’ ”
Shannon knew Marie to be emotional. She knew her to cry. This stoicism wasn’t in character.
And for Shannon, there was another, more personal reason to doubt Marie.
Shannon didn’t have to imagine being in Marie’s place. She had been there, or at least in a place very much like it. “I was sexually abused as a child,” Shannon says. “And sexually assaulted as an adult.” In both instances, when she had told someone—nine years afterward, in the case of the child abuse—Shannon was anything but stoic. “I was hysterical. And emotional. And crying. Yeah. Shamed.” Shannon and Marie were so much alike. How could Marie be so different now?
Before Peggy called Mason on Tuesday, Shannon and Peggy had talked on the phone—either the night before or the morning of. They were two parents, comparing notes. Peggy told Shannon that not long before Marie reported the rape, she and Marie had argued. Marie had a bike at Peggy’s place. She wanted to come over to pick it up, but Peggy said no, she wanted some downtime, and that set Marie off. Peggy told Shannon she didn’t want to think this, but maybe, for Marie, this rape story was a way to get the attention she was wanting before.
I don’t know what the hell is going on, Peggy told Shannon. I can’t tell…
Peggy, you’re not the only one who doesn’t believe her, Shannon said.
The two pondered how Marie seemed to be telling everybody about this horrific thing that had happened—calling one friend after another, saying, I’ve been raped. Some friends she called had been less than supportive in the past—mean, even. She wasn’t treating this as private and personal. She wasn’t being selective in sharing. Neither Peggy nor Shannon had known Marie to be a liar—to exaggerate, sure, to want attention, sure—but now, both knew they weren’t alone in wondering if Marie had made this up.
Shannon’s doubts reinforced Peggy’s. Peggy’s doubts reinforced Shannon’s.
Shannon’s misgivings escalated on Tuesday, the same day Peggy was calling the police. Marie and Nattlie, her upstairs neighbor, were assigned new apartments to protect them should the rapist return. Shannon went to Marie’s to help her pack for the move. In the kitchen, when Shannon walked in, Marie didn’t meet her gaze. “That seemed very strange,” Shannon says. “We would always hug and she would look you right in the eye.” In the bedroom Marie seemed casual, with nothing to suggest she had been raped there the morning before. “She went about her business like nothing had happened.” Some friends of Marie’s came over, along with her case manager from Project Ladder, and the group ventured outside. “She was kind of flirting with the guy that ran the program that she was in. She was on the grass, rolling around and giggling and laughing. It was just such strange behavior.”
Shannon spent the whole day with Marie, noting all these things that seemed off. The kicker came that evening, when the two went shopping. Marie needed new bedding, because the police had taken hers as evidence. They went to the store where Marie had gotten her old sheets and bedspread—the ones that had been on her bed when she said she’d been raped—and Marie became furious when she couldn’t find the same set. It was the only time the entire day that Shannon saw Marie get mad—and to Shannon, it made no sense.
Why would you want to have those same sheets to remind you? Shannon asked Marie.
Because I like them, Marie said.
Shannon was so thrown by Marie’s behavior that she tried to call a crisis center to get a better understanding of how someone might react to being raped. She found a number online, but no one answered.
SITTING IN PEGGY’S home that Tuesday, Mason was in effect listening to the doubts of both of Marie’s foster moms. To Mason, Peggy seemed sincere. Forthright. She expressed concern for Marie, but felt there was information she should pass along. She shared her take on Marie’s personality. She shared her speculation about the graphic photographs.
As Marie’s last foster mom, Peggy figured to know Marie well. So did the folks at Project Ladder, the program nurturing her to independence. One of the program’s managers had mentioned to Mason that before Marie reported being raped, she had been asking to change apartments. The manager didn’t come out and say: I think she’s lying. I think she made this story up to get her way. Mason didn’t even note the manager’s aside in a report, suggesting how little it meant to him at the time. But he tucked it away. And now he tacked it on to Peggy’s suspicions. Apart, neither was worth much. Together, they took on weight.
When Mason left Peggy’s home, he didn’t know if Marie was lying. But for him the question had now been planted.
“It was a question that needed answering,” he says.
ON WEDNESDAY, MARIE returned to the Lynnwood police station and handed Mason her written statement. She had filled in each of the form’s twenty-four lines, writing about four hundred words in total about the rape and what she had done afterward.
“After he left I grabbed my phone (which was right next to my head) with my mouth and I tried to call Jordan back.”
Jordan didn’t answer, Marie wrote. So she called her foster mom.
“I got off the phone with her and tried to untie myself. I tried a kitchen knife but it didn’t work so I found scissors and did it.”
This sequence caught Mason’s eye. It didn’t match what Marie had told him before. At the station two days earlier, when she had come in after being examined at the hospital, Marie had said that she cut the laces off first—then tried calling Jordan, then called Peggy. Her written statement switched the order, saying she was still bound when she started using the phone.
Mason made a mental note of the inconsistency. He asked Marie a few questions—about her relationship with Jordan (ex-boyfriend, now good friend, Marie said), about the gloves the rapist was wearing (latex, I think, Marie said)—then thanked her for coming in, and said he would be in touch as the investigation continued.
ON THURSDAY MORNING, Mason interviewed Jordan at his home. This was August 14, three days after the report of rape.
Jordan told Mason about his relationship with Marie. They were no longer dating, but they were still good friends. He saw her at church study groups once or twice a week. They spoke daily on the phone. They talked about all kinds of things. There was nothing out of the ordinary about their late-night conversation before the attack, Jordan told the detective.
Mason asked if Marie had tried calling Jordan Monday morning—after the attack—but been unable to reach him. Jordan checked his cell phone. There it was, confirmation: a missed call from Marie at 7:43. That tracked: Marie tried Jordan at 7:43, then called Peggy, then called her neighbor. Her neighbor came down and called police at 7:55.
Mason asked if Marie had told Jordan about what happened that morning. Jordan said Marie told him that she had dialed his number using her toes, because she was still tied up. The detective would later note this in his report. If Marie’s Monday account was Version 1 (cut laces, then called), and her Wednesday account Version 2 (called, then cut laces), this was like a Version 2(A): called, then cut, but with a new detail about dialing with her toes.
At no point in this interview did Jordan say he thought Marie was lying about being raped. At no point did Mason even ask.
ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, Mason called Marie, to ask if they could meet. He said he could come and pick her up, to take her to the police station.
“Am I in trouble?” Marie asked the detective.
MASON DIDN’T GO alone to pick up Marie. He went with Jerry Rittgarn, his fellow detective.
Mason told Rittgarn he no longer believed Marie. He told him about Marie’s question: Am I in trouble? In Mason’s experience, when someone asked if they were in trouble, they almost always were. Mason also gave other reasons for his conclusion, although Rittgarn’s report on their conversation would be maddeningly imprecise: “He told me that, based on subsequent interviews and inconsistencies with [Marie], her foster mother and her friend Jordan, who she had talked with on the phone prior to the report, he believed and others believed that [Marie] had made up the story.”
The investigation’s focus now shifted. This afternoon Mason and Rittgarn would not be interviewing Marie as a victim. They would be interrogating her as a suspect.
For more than a half century, a particular approach to interrogation has dominated police work in the United States. Like the rape kit, this investigative tool traces to Chicago—and to a cop, John E. Reid, who became renowned for eliciting confessions without force. Reid aimed to extract admissions through words, tells, and expressions of sympathy, rather than with club and electrical wires. He became so identified with this ability that he left the Chicago police force and began training other officers in what became known as the Reid Technique.
In 1962, Reid laid out the fundamentals of his technique for the masses by coauthoring a book, Criminal Interrogation and Confessions. From that point forward, his method began gaining followers at a rapid clip, with hundreds of thousands of investigators attending training seminars “across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, South America, and Asia,” according to Reid Technique literature. The technique “became a kind of powerful folk wisdom, internalized by generations of police officers,” a Wired magazine article noted, adding: “Despite its scientific pose, it has almost no science to back it up.” Mason and Rittgarn had both received the training, Mason in 1994 while a police officer in Oregon. Mason’s instructor, Louis Senese, had taught the technique for decades; during the three-day course he emphasized a tenet of questioning anyone believed to be lying: “Never allow them to give you denials. The key is to shut them up.”
A police interview is non-accusatory. It is an act of gathering information. An interrogation is accusatory. It is an act of persuasion. “An interrogation is conducted only when the investigator is reasonably certain of the suspect’s guilt,” according to Essentials of the Reid Technique: Criminal Interrogation and Confessions.
With the Reid Technique, interrogators use provocative questions and are taught to gauge the response. A favorite prompt is: What kind of punishment do you think the person who did this should get? The dodgier the answer—Well, it depends—the more likely the guilt. The questioner’s tools can include trickery or deceit. A detective might claim that a witness said something he really didn’t (He says he saw you do it), or that the physical evidence shows something it really doesn’t (We found your prints on the gun). An innocent person, the assumption goes, will not take the bait. Questioners learn to evaluate verbal behavior. A definitive response? Credible. A qualified response with waffle words like “generally” and “typically”? Not so credible. Staccato is good: I / DID / NOT / DO / IT. Mumbling is bad—that is, suggestive of lying.
The Reid Technique also attaches great value to interpreting body language. Questioners evaluate feet, posture, and eye contact. “Deceptive suspects generally do not look directly at the investigator; they look down at the floor, over to the side, or up at the ceiling as if to beseech some divine guidance when answering questions,” Essentials of the Reid Technique says. If a suspect’s hands go to his face—say, to cover his mouth—that, too, can signal deception: “In this case, the subject, literally, is speaking through his fingers, as if his hand could grab, out of thin air, incriminating words the subject might utter.”
Detectives, once convinced of a suspect’s guilt, learn to close, much like any salesman. If a suspect starts to deny guilt, the interrogator heads it off—with hand held up, in the universal “stop” gesture, or with head turned away, to suggest disinterest. “The more often a guilty suspect denies involvement in a crime, the less likely it is that he will tell the truth,” Essentials of the Reid Technique says. Then the interrogator offers the suspect some face-saving out—Man, with how little they pay you, who could blame you for pocketing a little extra?—that minimizes moral culpability. As for legal ramifications of confessing, detectives are trained to avoid discussing that: “It is psychologically improper to mention any consequences or possible negative effects that a suspect may experience if he decides to tell the truth.”
And when a suspect confesses? The detectives get it in writing.
MASON AND RITTGARN found Marie outside her apartment, sitting on the grass. It was late afternoon. They picked her up, took her to the station, and escorted her to a conference room.
From what Mason wrote up later, he wasted little time confronting Marie, telling her there were inconsistencies between her statements and accounts from other witnesses. Marie did not immediately push back, at least not in the way the detectives expected from someone telling the truth. She did not “take a stand and demand that she had been raped,” Rittgarn later wrote. Marie told the detectives she wasn’t aware of any inconsistencies. She went through the story again—only this time, in a way both detectives found telling, saying she believed the rape had happened instead of swearing it.
Tearfully, Marie described her past—the abuse, the instability—and the isolation she now felt being on her own.
From what Marie would remember later, the interrogation’s turning point came when the police said two people doubted her.
Peggy doesn’t believe your story, the detectives told Marie.
Jordan doesn’t believe you either, they said.
For Marie, both names came as a shock. She didn’t know what to think.
Why did Jordan say that? she asked.
But all she got was a cagey response: I don’t know. You tell me.
Rittgarn told Marie that her story and the evidence didn’t match. He told her the rape kit didn’t support her story. He said he believed she had made the story up—a spur-of-the-moment thing, not something planned out. From what Rittgarn could tell, Marie seemed to be agreeing with him. So he asked her: Is there really a rapist running around that the police should be looking for?
Marie, her voice soft, her eyes down, said no.
“Based on her answers and body language it was apparent that [Marie] was lying about the rape,” Rittgarn later wrote.
Without reading Marie her Miranda rights—her right to an attorney, her right to remain silent—the detectives asked her to write out the true story, admitting she had lied, admitting, in effect, that she had committed a crime. She agreed, so they left her alone for a few minutes. On the form, she filled in her name, address, and Social Security number. Then she wrote:
I was talking to Jordan on the phone that night about his day and just about anything. After I got off the phone with him, I started thinking about all things I was stressed out and I also was scared living on my own. When I went to sleep I dreamed that someone broke in and raped me.
When the detectives returned, they saw that Marie’s statement described the rape as a dream, not a lie.
Why didn’t you write that you made the story up? Rittgarn asked.
Marie, crying, said she believed the rape really happened.
We already went over this, Rittgarn told her. You already said there’s no rapist out there we should be looking for.
Marie pounded the table and said she was “pretty positive” the rape happened.
Mason didn’t know what to make of that. Hammered fist. Qualified response. Two different signals entirely.
Pretty positive or actually positive? Rittgarn asked Marie.
Maybe the rape happened and I blacked it out, Marie said.
What do you think should happen to someone who would lie about something like this? Rittgarn asked Marie.
I should get counseling, Marie said.
Mason returned to the evidence. He told Marie that her description of calling Jordan was different from what Jordan had reported. Marie, hands on her face, looked down. Then “her eyes darted back and forth as if she was thinking of a response,” Rittgarn later wrote.
The detectives doubled back to what she had said before—about being anxious, about being lonely—and, eventually, Marie appeared to relax. She stopped crying. She even laughed a little. She apologized—and agreed to write another statement, leaving no doubt her story was a lie.
I have had a lot of stressful things going on and I wanted to hang out with someone and no one was able to so I made up this story and didn’t expect it to go as far as it did….It turned into this big thing…I don’t know why I couldn’t have done something different. This was never meant to happen.
This statement satisfied the detectives. “Based on our interview with [Marie] and the inconsistencies found by Sgt. Mason in some of the statements we were confident that [Marie] was now telling us the truth that she had not been raped,” Rittgarn later wrote.
To Marie, it seemed the questioning had lasted for hours. She did what she always did when she was under stress. She flipped the switch, as she called it, suppressing the feelings she didn’t know what to do with. Before she confessed to making up the story, she couldn’t look the two detectives, the two men, in the eye. Afterward, she could. Afterward, she smiled. She went into the bathroom and cleaned up. Flipping the switch was a relief—and would let her leave.
As for Mason, he now had a written recantation, signed and witnessed. He figured this case was closed.
ON FRIDAY, MARIE, shaken, called her case manager at Project Ladder. She told Wayne that she had spoken with police the day before—and the police didn’t believe her, they didn’t believe she had been raped. She didn’t want to go into any more detail on the phone, preferring to talk in person. But she said she wanted a lawyer.
After they finished talking, Wayne called Jana, a Project Ladder supervisor. Jana advised him to call Sergeant Mason.
So that’s what Wayne did. He called the sergeant, who told Wayne that the evidence didn’t support Marie’s story. He told Wayne that Marie had signed a written statement, admitting she’d made the whole thing up.
Wayne shared this with Jana, and suggested she call Mason herself. So she did. Afterward, Jana told Wayne to let Marie stay the weekend with her friends. They would deal with this on Monday.
After her confrontation with the police, Marie also called two other people, to find out what was going on.
You don’t believe me? she asked Jordan.
What are you talking about? Jordan answered. What the hell are you talking about? Of course I believe you.
That’s not what the detective said.
Of course I believe you. You know that.
When Marie called Peggy, she got a different answer. Peggy said yes, she had doubts about Marie’s story. Peggy said that when Marie called her on the morning she reported being attacked, Marie’s first words weren’t “I’ve just been raped.” Her first words were “I’ve just been robbed.” Marie didn’t remember saying that. But her purse had been dumped out on the floor. Marie supposed she might have said something about her learner’s permit or wallet. Peggy also brought up the fight over the bike, and how Marie had gotten mad when Peggy wanted quiet time. Maybe this story was a way of striking back.
To Marie, that was hard to hear. She thinks I made up a story of being raped because of that?
ON MONDAY, AUGUST 18, Jana and Wayne met with Marie in her new apartment, across the street from her old place. It had now been one week since Marie reported being raped.
Jana related what Sergeant Mason had told them about Marie taking her story back. Marie told Jana she had been under duress. The police had kept her in the station for so long, she signed the statement just to get out of there.
So should the police really be looking for a rapist? Jana asked.
Yes, Marie said.
Then you need to tell the police that, Jana told her.
Wayne didn’t believe Marie—and would say as much later, in his case notes. Having heard the police’s depiction of the evidence, Wayne was now convinced Marie had not been attacked. He told her that if she lied to police about being raped, she would be making a false statement. That would be a crime, grounds for kicking her out of Project Ladder. She would lose her housing.
But Marie didn’t back down. So the three set out for Marie to recant her recantation—to tell detectives she had been telling the truth the first time.
At the police station they learned Mason was out for the day. But Rittgarn was there. Rittgarn wanted a second detective in the room, so he hunted up Sergeant Rodney Cohnheim and asked him to sit in. Cohnheim supervised the Crimes Against Persons detectives. He had been out of town, at a training seminar in Dallas, when Marie had reported being raped. Rittgarn briefed Cohnheim about the case and Marie’s recantation four days before. Then they brought Marie to an upstairs conference room while Jana and Wayne stayed downstairs.
Marie told Rittgarn she had been attacked, that she wasn’t making the rapist up. She began to cry, saying she kept having a vision of him on top of her.
Rittgarn wasn’t moved. Later, when recounting Marie’s words in a written report, he would put the word “him” in quotation marks.
Rittgarn said they had already gone over this. Marie had already admitted to wanting not to be alone. She had already admitted to lying. She had already admitted to staging the evidence.
I want to take a lie-detector test, Marie said.
If you take a polygraph and fail it, I will book you into jail, Rittgarn told her.
The threat rocked Marie. Reeling, she pulled back. She said maybe she’d been hypnotized into believing she had been raped.
For Rittgarn, this was too much. He would write in his report: “This is the fourth ridiculous story” Marie had come up with: she was raped, she blacked it out, she dreamt it, she was hypnotized. He told Marie that if the police hooked her up to a polygraph, they wouldn’t ask: Did you dream it? Did you black it out? Were you hypnotized? The question would be: Were you raped? And if she answered with a lie, Rittgarn told her, he would not only book her into jail, he would recommend that Project Ladder pull her housing assistance.
This time, Marie backed down.
She said she had lied.
The police took her down the stairs. Wayne and Jana were waiting for her.
So, one said.
Were you raped?
LATER THAT WEEK, the state Crime Victims Compensation Program wrote the Lynnwood Police Department to ask for information about Marie’s case. The letter requested the offense report, follow-up reports, and anything else that might help determine if Marie was eligible for coverage. “The goal of the Crime Victims Compensation Program is to prevent further hardship and suffering by providing benefits to eligible victims of crime as quickly as possible,” the letter said. The program covered everything from mental health counseling to medical expenses and lost wages.
On August 25—two weeks after Marie reported being attacked—the Lynnwood police called the program’s law enforcement records coordinator and told her to never mind. This was a case of false reporting, the police said. Marie was not a rape victim. She was a woman who lied about being raped.
FOR MARIE, THESE two weeks had been a spiral. Before she recanted she had quit her job at Costco, unable to stand there, looking at people, lost in her head. She had tried. She’d worked a day or two, offering up free food samples to shoppers. But then she’d walked out, gone home, said she wouldn’t be back.
After she recanted, her losses mounted. The normal life she wanted—the freedom from the rules dividing adolescents from adults—faded from reach. Project Ladder gave her a 9:00 p.m. curfew and doubled the number of times she had to meet with staff.
Jordan sat with Marie on her porch and heard the phone calls coming in from Marie’s friends and old classmates. With every ring she cried harder. She knew why they were calling. They were calling to say they didn’t believe her and couldn’t understand why she did what she had done.
When the police announced that Marie had taken her story back, Marie’s best friend from high school—the friend who had taught her photography, the friend who had touched up that picture of Marie emerging from the surf—created a web page about Marie and how she had lied about being raped. The police hadn’t named Marie. But Marie’s friend did. She even posted a picture of Marie, copied from Marie’s Myspace page. When Marie saw the web page, she lost it, trashing her apartment. She alerted Peggy, and the two went to the friend’s house.
Why did you do that? Marie demanded to know.
I don’t know why I did it, the friend told Marie.
The friend took the web page down, then and there. But Marie left as mad as she had come. The least she wanted was a straight answer, not some I don’t know why I did it. “After that we were no longer friends,” Marie says. “Your friend doesn’t do that to somebody.”
For Marie, there seemed no end to the fallout. Most painful, perhaps, was an edict she received from Shannon. Shannon’s home had long provided Marie with an escape or respite. Marie and Shannon would walk in the woods or drift on the water, then, at day’s end, crash at Shannon’s. Now, fearful he could become the target of a wrongful accusation, Shannon’s husband decided it would be best if Marie no longer spent the night. If she could make up one story, what would keep her from making up another? “When you become a foster parent, you’re open to that,” Shannon says.
It fell to Shannon to break the news: Marie could come over, but not sleep over. Saying it crushed Shannon. Hearing it crushed Marie.
Before August was out, Marie received a letter in the mail.
When she opened it, she realized her spiral wasn’t finished. With all she had lost, she now stood to lose more.