CHAPTER SEVEN
1968
By the time he thought to chase after her, she had disappeared into the darkness.
He figured she was going back to her dorm, but even in the stomach-churning distress following her departure, he knew that he would only make things worse if he went there. He could imagine begging the girl at the front desk to call Annie’s room. She probably would know the whole story and would laugh about it as soon as he left. Maybe she would call and then tell him that Miss Lineberger did not wish to see him.
He got back into the Valiant and just sat there, unable to go forward or backward for a few minutes. Years later, he would remember the pain as somehow being worse than what he felt when his mother left. He knew, from the vantage point of thirty years old or forty or fifty, that he had been ridiculously self-absorbed, but he couldn’t be nineteen again and change the past.
He had gotten a senior in his dorm to buy a fifth of cheap bourbon, part of the festivities of the weekend that was now reduced to smoldering ruins. He felt the need to do something big, something self-destructive enough to commemorate what he saw as the end of all happiness.
He took the cap off the bottle and threw it out the window. He didn’t bother to go by the motel where he’d reserved a room for the weekend, choosing instead to head back to Chapel Hill.
He didn’t exactly try to kill himself on the way back, but he took the twenty- and twenty-five-miles-per-hour curves along the steep river valleys as fast as he could. A couple of times, he could feel the car slipping. If he’d been given a lie-detector test, drunk as he was by then, he would have admitted he didn’t really want to die. He just wanted to feel like he wanted to die.
By the time he got back to his campus, somehow avoiding both death and the state police, the fifth was two-thirds empty. Grayson Melvin, whose drinking up to that point had been confined mostly to beer, opened the car door at the first major intersection leading back into his college town, and threw up, managing to spew a fair amount of the regurgitated Jim Beam and last night’s dinner on himself and the car.
He had no desire to return to his dorm on a Friday night when everyone but the no-date losers was out on the town. He thought there would be some nobility in spending the rest of the evening alone in his car, nursing his hurt feelings. He drove to the back of one of the football stadium parking lots and tried to choke down the rest of the bourbon.
SATURDAY MORNING, the sun woke him. He was lying sprawled across the front seat, the bottle on his chest. The smell of puke was overwhelming, and he had never been so sore. The disaster of the night before came back to him. As soon as he had given up all hope that it was only a bad dream, he cried and beat his head on the steering wheel.
He went to the coffee shop on the main drag next to the campus and found that, despite his grief and the fact that he was still drunk, he was ravenous. He ordered eggs, ham, hash browns, and pancakes and devoured them all.
And then, walking down the street to his car, he stopped and threw up again.
He went back to his dorm room. His roommate was gone for the weekend, which he counted as the only blessing he’d received lately.
He fell into bed and didn’t wake up until after dark.
GRAY WOULD call the number he’d memorized in Chatham three times over the weekend from the pay phone down the hall in his dorm. Each time, he was told that Annie Lineberger wasn’t in her room.
The third time, after nine on Sunday night, he got her roommate.
The girl seemed confused and a little embarrassed. Her name was Susan Vanhoy. Gray had met her on several occasions and liked her well enough. This time, though, she sounded different.
“I, uh, I don’t know. I thought she was with you. Weren’t you all supposed to go off somewhere?”
Gray put it as simply as he could.
“I think we broke up.”
“Oh. Yeah, I kinda knew that was coming.”
Gray asked her how long she knew it was coming.
“We really shouldn’t be talking about that,” Susan Vanhoy said. “But, well, I thought she was going to stay here. I just got back in, and I don’t see any sign she’s been here. She said she had a date Satur— … Shit. Oops. Sorry.”
Gray figured he should have hung up then. Things, which he didn’t think could get worse, just did. He supposed that Annie Lineberger, in anticipation of being rid of him at last, had previously lined up her entertainment for the rest of the weekend. He felt sick. He imagined Annie would come stumbling up to her dorm sometime before Sunday night curfew with the well-sated Winston on her arm, having decided to spend Saturday night at whatever the hell place Winston lived in Charlottesville, exchanging fluids with the bastard, maybe having a laugh or two about the poor lovesick sap she’d just dumped.
After a long, awkward silence, Susan said, “I’ll tell her you called, when she shows up.”
“Don’t.”
When Gray’s own roommate came rolling in, half drunk, after eleven, he asked how the weekend “fuckfest” went. Gray told him it was just great. He wasn’t ready yet to deal with I-told-you-sos.
He went out drinking with some of the other guys on his floor and got almost as drunk on beer as he had on bourbon two nights before.
MONDAY WAS a blur. Gray went to two of his classes, including French II, for which he saw no use and which he was in danger of flunking after attending only half the classes that semester so far. The class was at eight in the morning. Gray only went because he couldn’t sleep. The intoxicating spring morning, with the sun and the honeysuckle mocking him, only made things worse. He didn’t realize, until the girl next to him told him as he was leaving, that he’d left his sunglasses on for the entire hour in the dark classroom.
He went by the student newspaper to see if there were any assignments for him. Corrina Corrina asked him if he was OK as he walked by her desk.
“You look like you’ve been rode hard and hung up wet,” she said.
He just shook his head.
Buddy Weeks assigned him to cover a lacrosse match on Tuesday. Gray nodded his head. The only sport that he knew less about than wrestling was lacrosse.
He was determined never to make a call to that number in Chatham again.
He didn’t have long to resist temptation. Before he could call Chatham, Chatham called him.
He was summoned to the pay phone by a boy, two doors down.
“Some chick from Chatham wants your body,” the boy said, smirking.
Gray, thinking it was Annie, maybe calling to say she’d had second thoughts, was prepared to be magnanimous. Deep down, though, he knew his jealousy probably would spoil any hopes he had of seizing the high ground in whatever relationship they might still have. Eschewing the advice of the sage upperclassman, he realized that, for better or worse, he did give a shit.
But it wasn’t Annie.
“Gray,” Susan Vanhoy said, “she’s not here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s missing. She didn’t come back last night at all, and she didn’t come back today. They’re looking for her.”
The roommate told him that the boy from U.Va. had come to pick her up on Saturday afternoon. According to the girl at the front desk, nobody answered when she called Annie and Susan’s room.
“She said the guy sat around for an hour or so, but she just never showed up.”
Her parents had been notified, Susan said, and they were on their way up from Monroe.
“They’ve called the cops too. I think they’re going to want to talk to you too.”
“What about?”
“What do you think? About when was the last time you saw her? About whether you all had a fight or anything?”
Gray told her that he and Annie had parted on good terms, which was something of a lie, but he supposed that, considering that he had just been dumped by the love of his young life, the terms could have been much worse.
There was something a little hard, almost accusatory, in Susan’s voice.
“She told me, when she told me you all were going to break up, that she thought you’d take it hard.”
Gray said he supposed he didn’t take it any harder than anyone else would have under the circumstances. Susan didn’t say anything, for a few seconds.
“Anyhow,” she said at last, “you ought to expect to be hearing from somebody sometime soon.”
Before she hung up, though, Gray said, “Wait a minute. What about the guy from Charlottesville? Winston what’s-his-name?”
“Keppler. Winston Keppler. The girl who was on the desk said he never got past the lobby, and that Annie never came down, that nobody answered the phone in our room. I don’t think there’s going to be much reason to question Winston Keppler, do you?”
Gray was getting a very bad feeling about it all. The temperature in Susan’s voice seemed to be dropping by the second.
“My God,” he said, the seriousness of it hitting him, “do you think something happened to her? I mean, should I come up there?”
“No,” she said, a little too quickly. “Definitely do not come up here. And, yes, I am afraid something’s happened to her. Aren’t you?”
Gray knew only one other thing to say.
“I loved her.”
Susan jumped on the past tense. She sounded almost hysterical.
“You say it like you know she’s gone or something.”
“No. Jesus, Susan …”
“I’ve got to get off here,” she said, and she hung up before Gray could say anything else.
HE SKIPPED his earliest Tuesday class but went to the one at eleven. He hadn’t mentioned anything about Annie’s disappearance until after Susan’s call the night before, when he told his roommate.
“Man, you mean she’s been kidnapped or something?”
Gray vaguely remembered shrugging his shoulders and refusing to talk about it anymore. And on Tuesday morning, when the roommate quizzed him again about what he’d said the night before, he told the boy to fuck off.
Coming back from that eleven o’clock class, he was less than surprised to see that his resident adviser was standing with two men sporting crewcuts and wearing police uniforms.
He heard the RA say, “There he is.” The two men moved toward him as if they thought he was going to run. The RA shook his head and went back inside the dorm.
“We’ve got a few questions,” the older one said. The younger one nodded. He looked at Gray’s hair, which wasn’t that long yet but was heading in that direction as the sixties began to finally encroach in North Carolina. He looked as if he’d like to give him a buzz cut or just simply kick his college-boy ass.
The one who was speaking was from Byrd County, where Chatham College was located. The other one was local.
“This is about Annie, right?” Gray said. The two cops exchanged glances.
“We wonder if you’d come with us. We just want to ask you a few questions,” the one from Byrd County said.
Gray figured they meant to go to the Chapel Hill police station. He was in the back of the cruiser with the doors locked before he realized that they were going to Chatham.
When Gray said he wanted to go back, the one from Chapel Hill, along for the ride, told him to “shut the fuck up” and reminded him that he had agreed to answer “a few questions.”
They got him in a small room with no ventilation, and they tag-teamed him. Miranda rights were still a fairly new proposition, usually honored more or less in the breach where Gray lived. He thinks he might have asked for a lawyer at some point, but when he got a court-appointed one later, he couldn’t really be sure, and both the good cop and the bad one swore he had asked for no such thing.
Gray went over his story half a dozen times, and every time he changed some small, meaningless detail, it was duly noted.
“You mean nobody saw you from Friday, when you claim you and Annie Lineberger parted company, until Saturday morning?” the bad cop said. He was about six foot four and looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. He had bad breath, and he was fond of leaning forward, getting in Gray’s face and slamming the table between them for emphasis when his answers didn’t suit him. “Not one soul? That’s pretty damn convenient, don’t you think?”
Gray explained again how he had driven back to Chapel Hill but was too upset to go back to his dorm.
The cop smirked.
“I guess you were,” he said. “I’d be upset, too, if I’d just killed my girlfriend because she dumped me.”
Every time Gray denied it, the cop would slam his fist on the table and tell him to stop lying. Then the good cop, the same one who lured him to Chatham, would come in and tell the other one to chill out.
Then the good cop would start telling him how it was understandable. The girl probably insulted him. They’d had a few drinks. He probably hadn’t meant to do her any harm.
And Gray would deny it again. Why, he asked them, would he have phoned asking for her three times if he’d known she was missing?
“Maybe to cover your butt?”
And the good cop would sigh and tell him that they were just trying to get the story straight, and that they were all sure that Gray hadn’t meant any harm to the girl. It was just an accident. If he just came clean, they were sure they could clear it all up and get him back to Chapel Hill.
“Just tell us where she is, son,” the man said, almost tenderly.
Then, when Gray stuck by his story, the good cop would sigh again and send the bad cop back in to bang on the table some more.
Gray was frighteningly close on a couple of occasions to giving the police what they wanted. But he stayed with his story. He had been upset when she left him and had driven back to Chapel Hill, where he slept in his car on Friday night, then went back to his dorm on Saturday, after eating breakfast and throwing up. He hadn’t seen Annie Lineberger after she walked away from his car.
They had nothing on him but the cocksure belief that he did it. They sent him back to Chapel Hill with the warning that he was being watched, and that he had better not be taking any trips anytime soon.
“We’re definitely going to be seeing you again real soon,” the bad cop told him. “And I guaran-damn-tee you ain’t going to be happy to see us.”
By the time the Chapel Hill cop dropped him off half a mile from his dorm, it was after ten p.m. He told Gray that it was only a matter of time.
“Soon as they find the body, it’s gonna be too late to tell the truth.”
They tore the Valiant apart and left it for him to do most of the putting back together. All they found of Annie Lineberger was some of her hair on the front passenger’s seat and in the spacious back seat, plus an earring that Gray said belonged to her.
The DA for Chatham at the time made sure that the press was apprised that a UNC student was the prime suspect in the disappearance of a Chatham College girl. Somebody leaked his name to the papers, and by Wednesday morning, Gray Melvin was infamous. The case hit all the hot buttons for selling papers. Beautiful college girl from a well-heeled family missing after dumping her loser boyfriend from the fancy, too-liberal, big state university.
Gray called his father, whose reaction was mostly to be angry at him for “getting yourself in this shit storm in the first place. What the hell are you doing up there anyhow?”
More disturbing to Gray was the realization that his father did not have his back.
“If you did something,” he told his son after Gray had related his story for the second time, “you better come clean, boy.”
Gray fought back tears as he had this most intimate of conversations on a pay phone that was overheard, he was sure, by a dozen or more dorm mates. He told his father he had nothing to confess.
“Well,” Jimmy Melvin said, “I sure hope so.”
There was no mention of his father coming up to Chapel Hill to lend moral support, or of Gray coming back home.
Gray thought about returning to East Geddie, but he didn’t think that he would fare any better there than he did at school, where he could at least try to salvage his semester, and where at least some of his fellow students seemed to believe him.
It was Corrine Manzi who told him he had to get a lawyer “right damn now.” Corrina Corrina would never seem to waver in her belief that he was innocent. When she offered to let him write, in his own words, what happened for the school paper, he turned her down though. He felt unable to make himself any more naked to the world than he already was.
The attorney he got, through the university’s legal services, was better than no lawyer at all, but to Gray he seemed more interested in protecting the university than he was in looking out for Gray.
They hauled him back up to Chatham twice more that week. The university’s lawyer’s most memorable suggestion was that Gray might want to take some time off from school “to get things sorted out.” Gray had the distinct impression that his school would be happier if he wasn’t walking around the campus anymore. The attorney didn’t seem to be interested in hearing his nonpaying client’s claims of innocence.
Gray didn’t drop out, though, still clinging to the hope that it would all get sorted out, that everyone would shake his hand and tell him how sorry they were for the misunderstanding.
Gray finally told the cops in Byrd County, this time on the record, that he wanted a “real” attorney, one that he felt was looking out for his best interests. They appointed one, a guy just out of one of the state’s lesser law schools. The new lawyer seemed mostly interested in getting Gray to confess, “so we can get your sentence reduced, well, as much as we can.”
“Does it matter,” Gray asked, “that I didn’t do it?”
“Well,” the lawyer said, looking at his watch, “they don’t see it that way.”
Gray is amazed now, thinking back, that he was able to hold his own against men who seemed hell-bent on getting him to confess. But he didn’t break. And, after a week, they sent him back to Chapel Hill with no set date to return.
“Just be damn sure you stay around, and you let us know where you’re at,” the district attorney told him. “When we find her, and if it’s a body we find, we will be coming for you like the wrath of God.”
The university’s attorney might have given Gray good advice. A semester already headed for ruin crashed and burned in the distracted aftermath of Annie’s disappearance. When he wasn’t being taken back to Byrd County for more questioning, he was in no shape to study for final exams. He managed to pass four of his five courses, two of them by the skin of his teeth.
He stopped by the student newspaper on the day of his last final. Corrina Corrina was there, trying to finish one more editorial before she left for her post-graduate internship. She had managed to land one at the Washington Post, which she felt was a step or two above Pittsburgh.
He hadn’t written anything for the paper in the previous two weeks, in a futile attempt to devote what focus he had left to his studies. Besides it was weird. People avoided him. Strangers would stop and stare as he walked by. He felt everyone was talking about him. Buddy Weeks avoided looking at him when Gray asked him if he had any more assignments. He was seen, he believed, as either a murderer awaiting his inevitable fate or, in the best light, a fuckup who had managed to bring dishonor on himself and his school.
Every newspaper in the state and a few from outside it had given the story major play, although the furor had temporarily died down after several days when neither a live Annie Lineberger nor a dead one showed up.
“Man,” his roommate told him as they said their good-byes, “I knew that girl was trouble.”
Gray had lined up a summer job, before his world got shaken up like a kid’s snow globe. The previous fall, a boy in his dorm had persuaded him to join him in rushing a couple of the fraternities. Gray decided not to join, mostly because he couldn’t afford it.
One seemingly good thing did come out of his rushing though. An older boy in a fraternity was recruiting freshmen to sell “great books.” A company would send him and other young men (they were all young men) to some state far away, where they would spend the summer convincing middle-class-or-lower parents that their kids’ pursuit of the American Dream would be greatly enhanced by those volumes. It was door-to-door sales, and Gray, on a whim, said yes. He wasn’t very good at talking to strangers, and he thought this might help. Plus, the fraternity boy who recruited him said he made $8,000 the previous summer.
Even though Gray was by then persona non grata on fraternity row, the great books purveyor had no qualms. A week after he left Chapel Hill, he would be headed, in his reassembled Valiant, for a town in Wisconsin that he’d never heard of.
He told his lawyer in Byrd County where he would be for the summer. The lawyer didn’t think it was such a good idea, but with no charges filed against Gray, he said he guessed he was free to go.
So Grayson Melvin, after a brief and tense visit with his father and his tearful sister, headed north. He thought maybe if he drove far enough, he could go somewhere where nobody knew his name.