“What do you wish people new to the case understood about Deirdre?”
He gave me a pained look. After a moment he said, seemingly at a tangent, “You know what I miss? Her laugh. She was very funny. She could take a story about anything, about missing the bus or losing a ticket, and by the end of it, you’d be holding your sides, laughing. And she used to sing. In the car. In the kitchen. All the time. But she couldn’t carry a tune to save her life.” His mouth curved reminiscently.
I smiled sympathetically, waited.
“She was spunky. Feisty. She was a fighter. That’s what I wish people understood. That girl had the heart of a champion. She wouldn’t have walked into the woods and just…gone to sleep forever. She wouldn’t have mixed pills and booze and killed herself in some motel either. That wasn’t Deirdre. Why would she? She had her whole life ahead of her. She was excited about the future. She wasn’tborna victim. Maybe she died at the hands of a scumbag, but that wasn’t her destiny.”
“Destiny’s an interesting word.”
“She was the last person in the world something like this should have happened to.”
Of course every victim’s family and friends felt exactly the same. I didn’t try to answer. “Do you think she was going to end the relationship with Tommy Aldrich?”
Pat hesitated. “They loved each other. She loved his family, and they loved her like a daughter. They paid for her cell phone. They paid for her Auto Club Membership. But Deedee and Tommy were going in different directions. I don’t think they were ready to end it. Tommy wasn’t ready to end it. But I feel like Deirdre knew they weren’t going to be together forever after all.”
That confirmed my thoughts. Not a dramatic blowup, but a slow, reluctant letting go. “Was there anyone else? Could she have been on her way to meet someone?”
Pat’s gaze moved from me to a distance only he could see. “I’ve had almost twenty years to think about it. I don’t believe there was. She had a fling with her coach, but that’s all it was. It makes sense to me that she was going away to clear her head. Make her mind up about a few things.”
“One of those things being Tommy?”
“Sure. But that wouldn’t have been the only thing. It wouldn’t necessarily have been the biggest decision she had to make.”
“What would have been the biggest decision? Do you think she was, um, carrying a baby?”
Pat’s “No” was unhesitating, even scornful. “She was a smart girl. It wasn’t her first rodeo. No, but maybe she was having second thoughts about teaching.”
“Aboutteaching?” That was not what I was expecting.
“Maybe. She was studying chemical engineering at West Point. We were all surprised when she switched to education. Now I wonder if she was having second thoughts. I’m not sure she belonged in a classroom. She wasn’t one of those girls in a rush to marry and have kids. Teaching might not have been challenging enough for her.”
I forbore taking offense at the idea that teaching wasn’t challenging enough for anyone.
“As far as the tandem driver theory—”
He burst out, “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. And that includes the space aliens grabbing her.”
“Okay. Well.”
“Who do these numbskulls imagine was the mysterious tandem driver who refused to come forward?”
“If the tandem driver was the person who harmed her…”
Pat made a sound of disgust. “The men in her life, not that there were so many,allhad alibis. Maybe the internet thinks it’s an episode ofColumbo, but everybody’s alibi was checked and rechecked. The cops didn’t do enough, but they didthatmuch.”
“It could have been a friend from UMass. A former roommate? A teammate?”
“And this former roommate teammate killed her?Why?It makes no sense. She wasn’t the kind of girl other girls want to kill.”
I kept my mouth firmly shut.
Pat kept talking, “And I don’t believe a car hit her. She’d have been paying attention and watching the road. I don’t believe the bus driver carried her off to parts unknown. Either the dogs got it wrong and she went into one of those houses along that road, or she climbed into the wrong car. My guess is she was trying to put distance between herself and the scene of the accident, so I think she got into the wrong car.”
“Would she get into a stranger’s car?”
His look was chiding. “She was at West Point for a year and a half. She had training in hand-to-hand combat. She worked as a security guard on campus. She wasn’t a-a commando, but she knew how to handle herself. Deirdre liked people, and she was confident. Yes, she’d have gotten into a stranger’s car. Especially if it was driven by a woman or someone her own age.”
* * * * *
