In the small town of Ludington, Vermont, I quickly found the motel where I’d reserved a room. The desk clerk, a stout, grandmotherly-looking woman dressed as if for church, greeted me with a concerned look. I hadn’t set down my overnight case when she snatched a pink While You Were Out message pad from the countertop and tore off the top sheet.
“The caller said it was urgent,” she explained.
I glanced down. Roberta, hardly someone prone to panic, had left the message at 7 a.m. I’d only been gone overnight. What the hell could have happened?
Puffing as though she were climbing a steep incline, my hostess led the way down an interior corridor and ushered me into a small, generic-looking room. I glanced around. No phone.
“You may use the office telephone, Mr. Arnett,” she said. “My name, by the way, is Maisie Longworth.”
I thanked her, followed her back to the office, and dialed Roberta’s number at work. Voice mail. I left a message, saying I’d gotten her message, then left an identical message on her home answering machine. Ms. Longworth looked disappointed. Apparently, she’d tagged along to my room and back hoping to learn of a juicy disaster. Nice try, lady. I shrugged and said I’d call again later.
I had had more luck finding Julie McAndrews than persuading the sheriff to pay for my trip. In fact, he’d said, all out-of-town travel was banned for the moment, and he didn’t think much of this angle anyway. But he let me take a couple of days off to do it.
Maybe he had to be a bean counter, what with the owners watching the bottom line, but his refusal was presented with considerable relish, not apologetically. Well, he’ll pay up, I told myself. And if not, there were ways to settle with him. Bloated expense forms for the next few months is what came to mind. He’d know what I was doing if I started totting up expensive lunches all of a sudden -- I rarely took a lunch hour -- and he’d sign those expense reports because he knew damn well I wasn’t about to underwrite this trip with no payback..
The brown paint was peeling on the imposing but fast-fading old apartment building where McAndrews lived. Jutting out on a corner just above a shallow creek, it resembled a bulky ship stuck in a harbor.
Hardly the picturesque, tourist-beckoning Vermont; even in the summer, Ludington was a hardscrabble town without ski areas or transplanted New Yorkers. The mill had left years back; so had the workers. Those still there, it appeared, were mostly the old and the very young, as in some village in the west of Ireland not long ago. You could tell right away that Julie McAndrews did not fit in at all, if her voice and phone manner were any indication. Ludington was only a refuge because it was her hometown, I guessed.
I arrived a little late, in mid-afternoon. I found her apartment on the second floor at the end of a dark hallway. A musty old-hotel smell permeated the place. Coming from a sterile, cookie-cutter Florida housing arrangement, I liked the odor and feel of McAndrews’ building. Taped to her door, a note said: “I’m at work. Down the street. Astor Place restaurant.”
She had said something on the phone, in our second conversation, about working in a small new restaurant run by three women. “Come there for lunch if you like. I’ll tell the others who you are -- they all have pesky ex-husbands. Don’t want you to be mistaken for one of those.” Julie had bumped into one of the women in a supermarket shortly after returning to Vermont, she’d said. She was a high school classmate who, apologizing for sounding “too ’60s,” said she and two friends had opened “a collectivist restaurant,” and could use a non-partner to wait the half-dozen tables put in as an afterthought. They had planned the new venture as a counter and take-out lunch place, basically. No frills. No yuppie pandering. There weren’t many yuppies in Ludington, anyway.
I walked to the Astor Place, a tiny refurbished white clapboard cottage. A perky redhead with a nice smile asked for my order. One of the owners, I figured. The place was too small to need two waitresses.
“Is Julie McAndrews around?”
“You must be the reporter from Florida.”
“Yes, that’s right,” I said, surprised that she apparently knew my business.
She leaned over the counter. “Look, at the risk of sounding like a buttinsky, please be nice to her -- I mean, don’t scare her with too many questions. She’s traumatized as it is.”
“I have to ask questions, but I know what you mean. I’ve been worried about her myself. I’m here to help, not make things worse for her.”
“Okay, good.” She smiled, apparently satisfied. “You sound like an understanding person. Would you like something? Tea? We have a nice lemon tart.”
“Tea would be good. How’s business?”
She reached under the counter and placed a basket of assorted teabags in front of me, poured hot water from a glass carafe into a mug. “Too soon to say. Hope we’re the start of a Ludington revival. Wouldn’t that be a trip?”
I started to wish her luck when a thin young woman with long brown hair, an angelic face, and intense green eyes emerged from the back. She was so fragile and vulnerable looking that I almost hoped she wasn’t Julie McAndrews. I’d had my doubts about this trip, about whether I should be in Vermont pursuing a frightened witness in a case the cops could not solve, and now I was confronted with a woman whose disconcerting fragility made me even more concerned about her than I had been from a distance. I reminded myself that she’d called, that she’d sought me out.
“You’re Mr. Arnett?” Her voice, high-pitched, girlish, went with her appearance.
“Jake. How are you, Julie? Sorry I’m late.”
“No problem. We can talk here if you like. The women pretty much know what happened. I talked to them about it after I spoke to you. I had to talk to someone.”
I felt a little uncomfortable interviewing her in the restaurant even if the others already knew. But we were a long haul from West Palm -- the Madigan case meant nothing up here. We sat down at the table closest to the door and the friendly redhead brought over my mug and tea basket.
I asked the obvious question: “Julie, how are you adjusting? “Okay. The women here treat me well. Some days I’m actually glad to be back in Ludington.”
“And the nights?”
“I wake up thinking about what happened. About those poor women. Then I just lie there and cry. Part of it is I feel so helpless. Down in Florida I was fearful, thinking somehow they would find me. Up here I’m scared but in a different way -- not so much for my own safety, but scared of the fact that those two women could be murdered right where I was, and nobody’s caught, nobody’s punished. It makes you feel you don’t have control over anything, that you’re a victim in a way, even when it’s the other women who are dead. As I said, I’ve talked to the women here, and they understand what I mean -- they say women are experts at being victims.”
It occurred to me that Julie McAndrews was a more thoughtful person than I’d given her credit for. In a mildly sexist way (though more an anti-Florida reflex), I’d figured her to be attractive and perhaps well-spoken, but basically an airhead -- a party girl for whom the party had ended.
“Well,” I said, “maybe it would be a good idea if you just told me what happened, from the beginning. The police have been so vague about what you saw or heard -- I need to get it from you.”
“Yes, of course. I think I should warn you that I wouldn’t make a good witness or source or whatever in terms of what I saw. The police know that. I don’t want you to think…”
“No problem, Julie. Just tell me what happened. You don’t have to embellish it, you don’t have to evaluate its significance. That’s what the cops do.”
“I know, that’s what they said. But…” She trailed off, and took a deep breath.
“I’d gone to bed about 11:30, after the news and the hurricane update. I got up about 1:30 to go to the bathroom, but I’m still not sure if I was awakened by the voices outside. Anyway, when I got up that’s what I heard -- loud voices that sounded like a man and a woman arguing. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the woman’s voice was louder, more persistent. In retrospect, I think it had a desperate quality, like she was pleading.
“I went to the bathroom. Still half-asleep when I came out, I remember wishing the voices would stop. But when they didn’t I went to the living room window and pulled the curtain aside just a little. My apartment had a good view of the parking area in front of the complex where I thought the voices had come from. When I looked out, though, there was no one immediately in front of the complex. I very cautiously opened the front door, just a crack, so I could see Diane Madigan’s apartment across the way. We were both on the same level and…I’m sorry, have you been there?”
“Yes, I was there once.”
“Good, then I don’t have to explain the layout. Anyway, I saw her door was open, and I think one person had just entered and another, immediately behind, was going in. I saw the back of the individual going in, a man more than likely. Fairly tall. See, that area isn’t lit up at night, so all I saw was this figure in the darkness going through the door.
“And that was it. I went back to bed thinking Carolyn Madigan had come back from a date to stay at her mother’s apartment, and maybe had an argument with her boyfriend. She’d been to Diane’s place late before. So I tried to go back to sleep. As I drifted off, I heard what I thought was a brief piercing scream, followed quickly by three popping sounds.
And after that I heard a door slam and in a few seconds an engine started up, then another one. The first was loud, like a motorcycle; the second, a car engine. They drove away and it was quiet again.
“But you didn’t call the cops.”
“It’s hard to explain that. You have to understand I’d been half-asleep, maybe completely asleep. I thought it might have been a dream. When I realized it wasn’t, I wasn’t sure what I’d heard. You know how it is when you hear things outside -- sometimes you don’t know where the sound comes from. In this case I was pretty certain the first noises came from in front of the complex, but I wasn’t absolutely sure of that even.
“It crossed my mind that maybe I should call the police, but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. What if I called and they came and banged on the Madigans’ door and woke them up and it turned out the sounds had nothing to do with them? And you know the other thing? I was already jumpy from anticipating the hurricane. I went to bed thinking, ohmygod, I’m going to have to worry about that all weekend -- where it would hit, whether we’d be evacuated, where I’d have to go, all that stuff you go through with one on the way. So I figured maybe the storm jitters had caused me to overreact to what I’d heard. I lay awake for, oh, about fifteen minutes, and then went to sleep again.”
“How did you finally learn what happened?”
“I rose fairly early and automatically turned on the television to check on the hurricane. Then I went shopping for the usual weekend stuff plus hurricane supplies -- candles, canned goods, bottled water, you know, the standard things they tell you to get.”
“Right. I’ve made that run myself a few times.”
“And when I got back, maybe around 10:30, the police were there. They’d already found the bodies. I almost fainted when they told me. I didn’t know what to do, what to say or not say. I called my sister in Queens -- I have no relatives in Florida -- and told her what I’d heard and seen. She said, ‘Julie, you have to talk to the police. You just have to.’ So I waited a while and called and they came to my place and took a lot of notes. And…you know the rest.”
“Yes. Well, there’s not that much to know, without hearing it from you. The police were okay?”
“Yes, they tried to reassure me but I was so scared they had a patrol car sit out there for two or three nights afterwards. After the hurricane hit, the officer came to my door and said he had to respond to some storm-related calls and they didn’t have the manpower to bring somebody else over. But he did come back after a couple of hours.”
I told her what Detective Carpenter said about the hurricane slowing their investigation.
“For all I know someone else might have heard something too,” she said. “Or seen someone. But everybody was in such a state over the hurricane -- you just react differently to things when a storm’s approaching. It’s all you can do to focus on that.”
“You think there were two people at the Madigan apartment?”
“It seems logical -- because I heard what sounded like a motorcycle, and then a car. They started so close together, and it sounded like right in the same place, so I assumed there had to be two. I think the police believe someone else was already in the apartment with Diane when Carolyn got there. And from what I’ve told them, they think maybe there was a second person, with Carolyn. Of course we’ve talked about that. I believe it’s possible this second one surprised her when she arrived at Diane’s place -- in other words, he wasn’t with her on a date or anything; he just knew about what time she’d get there.”
“And, as you said, the first guy was probably already in there with Diane?”
“Maybe. And maybe he was sitting in his car waiting for Carolyn to come home.”
“Why wouldn’t he just wait in the apartment, if his buddy was there?”
“I don’t know, it’s just a theory. But the police told me they think the first guy knew Diane and the second didn’t. And they were afraid Diane would freak out if the first guy let the second one in. So he waited outside.”
“But what do the cops think they were after? Did they intend to rape Carolyn? Were they druggies? Had one of them bought drugs from the other? Where did Diane know the first guy from?”
I stopped myself. “Sorry, Julie, too many questions.”
“I’m sorry too. I don’t have many answers. I don’t think the cops do either. All they can do is theorize at this point. And they don’t have much to go on. I wish I could tell them more. I wish I could tell you more.”
I thought: the sound of the motorcycle is enough, for my purposes. And the fact there may have been two people at the scene. Carpenter had mentioned this, but not in any conclusive way. Learning those two things from Julie McAndrews had made my trip to Vermont worthwhile. I thanked her for talking with me, for going through the pain of revelation once more, and told her I would speak with her again before I left. To learn a little more about her. Basically, all I knew was she had worked an office job near her West Palm apartment, was in her twenties, and apparently didn’t have a boyfriend at the time of the murders. I wanted to go over parts of her story again, briefly, without being too intrusive. For all her fragility, she had held up well. I still felt protective toward her; it was hard not to.
But I didn’t see or talk to Julie again in Vermont. I decided I should return to West Palm. Another night in Ludington wasn’t really necessary, especially if there was some kind of emergency back in Florida. Or worse: what if something had happened to my son? I hadn’t focused on that scary notion before.
When I went back to the motel, a different, less friendly desk clerk handed me another message slip. I figured it was Roberta again. Even the meddlesome sheriff wouldn’t compulsively bother me on this kind of story, once I’d set out to do it. He’d wait for me to call him, when and if I had something.
I was right. The telephone operator’s scrawl said: “Roberta called again. Said she’ll be at home. Please call.”