Fritz led Lorna and T.J. through a white louvered door onto a screened-in porch that overlooked the backyard. “Sit,” he instructed. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
Lorna and T.J. took the chairs on either side of the door, leaving Fritz to sit on the sofa.
“You really outdid yourself this year,” Lorna noted, looking out the back screen to the lush gardens beyond. “The colors are just wonderful.”
“Everything came up as planned. That doesn’t always happen. And of course, my mother always took great pride in her roses. I try to keep them going in her memory.” He looked from Lorna to T.J., then said, “But you didn’t come to talk about gardening.”
“You’re right. We came to talk to you about Jason Eagan,” T.J. told him.
“Right. You’d be Lorna’s private eye, then.” He nodded knowingly. “What is it you want to know?”
“Just your recollections of the night Melinda disappeared. Your name is on the list of people interviewed, though the notes on that interview and several others appear to be missing.”
“Probably because I didn’t tell them much of anything. I had nothing important to say.” Fritz shrugged. “We were over at Matt Conrad’s, just hanging out in the backyard.”
“Matt’s house was that big white clapboard one on Callen Road, the first house past our fence,” Lorna explained to T.J. “It’s the only house between our farm and the house the Eagans lived in at the time.”
“Right. We used to all hang out there a lot because Matt’s parents both worked and we usually had the house to ourselves till seven o’clock or so, when they got home from work, then we’d all leave.”
“Tell us about the night Melinda Eagan disappeared,” T.J. prompted.
“Matt and I were in his backyard, then Jason stopped by. He said he was on his way to get his sister but he’d stop by after. He was back in maybe five, seven minutes. It hadn’t taken him very long.”
“Did you see his sister?” T.J. asked.
“No, I didn’t. Matt and I were sitting on the stump of a tree that had been cut down, smoking cigarettes Matt had swiped from his mother’s purse before she left for work that morning. Our backs were to the field. As I said, Jason joined us a few minutes later. He had a bag with some of his sister’s birthday cake, and we polished that off. Then, maybe after he’d been there for ten or fifteen minutes, we heard Jason’s mother calling him from their house. He handed me the cigarette he’d just lit and took off like a bat out of hell.” Fritz glanced at Lorna and added, “Mrs. Eagan had quite a temper. When she told Jason to jump, he jumped.”
“So he went home, and you stayed there for how much longer?”
“Maybe another fifteen, twenty minutes after that. Then my brother, Mike, came by to get me home for dinner, and Dustin stopped over. But before we could leave, Jason came back and asked if any of us had seen Melinda. We hadn’t, but we all started looking for her.”
“How did you go about doing that?”
“We just all went through the field, calling her. I went down to the pond, thinking maybe she was there, then back through the orchard. Everyone pretty much fanned out.”
“Were you able to keep track of where everyone else was?” T.J. asked.
“Nah,” Fritz replied. “Most of the corn had been cut by then, but in spots it was still maybe knee high or a little better. And of course the field is hilly, so you didn’t have a good straight-on view of where anyone else was. And by then it was getting dark. You couldn’t see much of anything.”
“So if someone had been hiding there, you could have missed him,” Lorna said.
“It’s possible, but we covered that field pretty well. And then after awhile, the police came, and they covered it, too. If anyone had been hiding back there, I think they would have been seen by someone.” He stopped for a minute, then added, “I seem to recall your mother and father were there, helping us search.”
“That’s right,” she said, nodding.
“There wasn’t a sign of that kid. Later, after we’d been through the field for what seemed like about the tenth time, the police went in to talk to Mrs. Eagan. We gave our statements-pretty much what I just told you-then we went home. It was all anyone talked about for the next couple of months, though. Melinda Eagan disappearing like that, then Jason…” Fritz glanced at Lorna. “You might have been too young to remember, but I’ll never forget the sense of panic that went through the school back then. That anything like that could happen around here was inconceivable.”
“Did Jason ever talk about his sister?” T.J. asked.
“Not really. Oh, he liked to give her and her friends a hard time. Creep them out, harass them a little, nothing that would really hurt them. I had the feeling he really did like his sister, but he never would have shown it. It wouldn’t have been cool, you know?”
“Creep them out, how?”
“Just do things to scare them a little. One time, I remember, he caught a couple of little garter snakes and put them in her room to scare her and that other girl she was friends with, the one from Arnold?” Fritz looked at Lorna.
“Danielle Porter,” she supplied.
“Right. Danielle.” He nodded.
“How about the night Jason disappeared?” T.J. looked at his notes. “Which most likely was the night he was murdered.”
“Again, we were all together. We met up at Matt’s, then we went to Dustin’s, and he drove us to White Marsh Park. He was sixteen that year, had his license.”
“How old were you?” T.J. asked.
“I was sixteen,” Fritz told him. “Jason was fourteen, but he looked older.”
“So did Mike,” Lorna recalled.
“True. He’d turned fourteen at the end of the summer, but he was always a big kid. He shot past me when he was twelve. He got the genes from our dad’s side of the family, I guess,” Fritz said. “Anyway, Matt, Jason, and I walked out to Dustin’s. His parents were out for the night, and he’d managed to score a couple of six-packs, I guess one of the older guys picked it up for us. I honestly don’t remember who we got it from. We took it out to White Marsh Park and drank it. Talked about stuff. Girls, of course. Matt had just been kicked off the soccer team for arguing with his homeroom teacher, so we had to talk about the injustice of that for a while. Later, Dustin drove me home, then Matt, and he was going to drop Jason off last, on his way back to his house. And that’s what he said he did.”
“Your brother wasn’t with you that night?”
“No, I don’t remember what he was doing that night.” Fritz glanced at Lorna, then asked, “What’s that little grin all about?”
“I was just wondering how you managed to sneak in half-drunk in the wee hours of the morning.”
“Oh.” He laughed. “My mother visited her sister in Rehoboth once a month. That was her weekend at Aunt Kitty’s.”
“How did you find out about Jason disappearing?” T.J. asked.