“I MEAN HE DIDN’T SAY he did it, but that whole conversation in the car going down over the mountains was pretty damn close to it, you know?” Stephen said, still on the call with me. “If it hadn’t been for that wild night’s drive through the mountains, I wouldn’t have thought twice about anything.”
I was struck by how much Stephen’s story matched, beat for beat, Don Mitchell’s. None of it—the incense, the rug, the yelling—had ever appeared in any newspaper articles. And to the best of my knowledge, Don Mitchell and Stephen Loring had never spoken.
Stephen also told me that Lee had been called back to Cambridge from Monte Alto in 1969 in order to take a lie detector test. Lee had told Stephen that he’d failed it “spectacularly,” but police explained away his poor performance as an unreliable reading on a jittery drunk. Loring imagined how that might have happened: “His heartbeat must be going a million miles an hour. They can’t establish the baseline. ‘What’s your name?’ Bleep. Lie. ‘What color is the room?’ ‘Blue.’ A lie.” Lee had also told Stephen that Harvard had him “lawyered up to the gills.” If true, this would mean that Lee was someone worth protecting even if he was a misfit of the department.
* * *
A few months later, I went down to DC to meet Stephen in person for the first time. We sat on mesh chairs outside the café in the National Gallery’s sculpture garden, down the street from the Smithsonian museum where he still worked for Bill Fitzhugh. He made sure I got the chair that hadn’t been soaked in that morning’s rain. He was in a trench coat and had a face like Tom Brokaw’s that made you trust him instantly.
We talked outside for over three hours together. The sky was metal gray and kept threatening to crack open again, but for late October, it was unseasonably warm.
Our conversation kept getting interrupted by Stephen standing up to help passersby. A woman in a wheelchair struggled to open the café’s door. Stephen was up, pulling the door, and extending his arm to keep it open. Leaving enough space for the chair meant shoving himself against the glass of the revolving door. “You’re so nice!” the woman’s friend said.
Another time, he noticed that someone had dropped her clutch in the revolving door. He picked it up and went inside the restaurant. I watched the scene through the glass. He tapped a little girl on the shoulder, and he held out a white-clasped purse with flowers. She was so startled that, for a moment, she didn’t recognize it as hers. He came back through the push door. “I’m not usually this much of a good Samaritan,” he said.
“I don’t believe you for a second.”
He joked that he had slipped them all five bucks before I arrived.
We talked about Anne. I told him that I had met with Alice, to make him feel more at ease talking about her. We discussed how fragile Alice was, and how their mother had been the same way. “After Annie disappeared, I went over a couple of times. To console them, I guess. I think it meant a lot to them. But I couldn’t take it. Her mother was just—you listen to Alice talk about her mother after Anne, and it just sounds like she couldn’t go on.”
“What was Anne like temperamentally compared to them?”
“You’re like Anne,” he said.
It was the first time anyone had told me what I secretly so wanted to be true. After all these years of researching Jane, I had long ago accepted that our boundaries had dissolved, at least in my mind. But when Anne had started to creep in the edges, too—hadn’t I, long before hearing Anne’s name, dreamed of running off to Yellowknife; or imagined rafting to Alaska, eating salmon and frozen cranberries for breakfast?—I discounted the uniqueness of the experience. I was attracted to writing about characters like Jane and Anne precisely because I also was drawn to remote landscapes and romantic adventures. That we all happened to be about the same age and brunette and predisposed to writing in our diaries seemed insufficient evidence of what felt fundamental. I attributed the depth of my feelings to the natural process for a biographer. Breathing life into someone on the page was an act of both resurrection and transubstantiation: I wrote them by learning about them, then by holding them inside me, then by feeling for them. By the end, I’d become their host, so of course I would forget where they ended, and I started.
But for Stephen to feel the same thing was an entirely different matter.
“No, really,” he said, seeing that I was reluctant to let myself believe him. He said that Alice must have seen it, too, which was why she opened up to me. “You have an Annie aspect both physically and I think…” He trailed off and changed the subject slightly.