Nancy Kelley had transformed completely. Her shoulders were hunched, her hands clasped in her lap, her head bowed, and her eyes downcast.
“It was more than that,” she said-so quietly, he wondered if the recorder had picked it up. Instinctively, he moved it closer to her.
“Tell me about it,” he urged.
She looked up almost shyly, her age-creased face suddenly etched with anguish. “Why do you want to know?”
Joe took a stab at correctly interpreting her body language. “I want to see if I can help her. I think she’s in trouble. Did you know her well?”
She nodded without comment, and admitted, “She was one of my roommates.”
“In Montpelier?” he asked, amazed by his good luck.
“Yes.”
“This is great news. We’ve been searching all over for her, hoping she was okay. Have you heard from her?”
She looked up at him as if responding to an electrical shock. “Me? Why would she call me?”
Joe tilted his head ambiguously. “I don’t know. Why not? You were friends once. It’s not that strange.”
Her ready denial spoke of her rising anxiety. “No. I haven’t spoken to her in over half a century.”
“Ever since she was committed?” he pursued.
“I knew nothing about that,” Kelley said with a catch to her voice. “Last I saw her, she’d been heartbroken, but she was happy.”
“In my experience,” Joe quickly followed up, “it takes someone else to break your heart.”
A silence stretched between them, and Joe realized that Kelley was quietly crying, her tears striking the backs of her hands, which remained unmoving in her lap, still tightly interlinked.
“Tell me, Nancy,” he urged her. “What happened?”
“She got pregnant,” was the answer.
“Do you know by whom?” he asked after another long silence.
He could see only the top of her gray head as she said, “No. She never said. And then she went away.”
“Did she have the baby?”
“I don’t know.”
Joe thought for a couple of seconds. “But you were roommates,” he commented. “You must have known who she was dating at the time. Girls talk about that kind of thing, don’t they?”
Her crying worsened, to the point where she began wiping her eyes and nose on her sleeve. Joe looked around, saw where Sam had placed a napkin on the counter behind him, beside an empty coffee cup, and brought it to Kelley, kneeling beside her chair in the process.
He rubbed her frail shoulder as she put the napkin to use. “Tell me what happened,” he repeated.
“She was raped,” she whispered.
“Who did it?” he asked.
Her whole body shuddered. “She said there were too many to know.”
Her weeping was uncontrollable by now. Under normal circumstances, given her age and the fact that he had nothing on her legally, Joe would have suggested bringing the conversation to an end.
But he wasn’t so inclined. The absence of Carolyn Barber had been gnawing at him since he’d found her single footprint in Irene’s muddy track. He’d had a foreboding then, similar to discovering that a small child had wandered off into a life-threatening environment. The complete absence of Carolyn Barber ever since had seemed proof of her demise, and hearing what Kelley had just told him only drove the sensation home-along with the dread that her end had not come accidentally. Now he had to consider that her killer might have been after her for a very long time.
Of course, he was sure of none of it, except that the only lead he’d found was sitting beside him right now.
He continued to rub Kelley’s shoulder as he asked, “She was raped by several men at once?”
She nodded silently, still sobbing.
“How do you know this?”
“She told me.”
“When did it happen?”
She didn’t answer at first.
“Back when you two were going to those parties?”
She nodded again.
“When you met Jerry,” he suggested more than asked.
She doubled over in response, as her crying turned to keening and her body began to shake.
Relentless, he rose behind her and began massaging her shoulders, murmuring, “It’s okay, Nancy, get it out. It’s been tearing at you for decades. Get it out. It’s okay.”
She finally calmed enough that he returned to her side, kneeling again, and said, “Tell me about you and Jerry and the parties, Nancy. And Carolyn.”
Taking a deep breath, she straightened slightly, her face damp and her clothes stained with tears. “You were right,” she said. “They were a regular thing, and Carolyn and I and some other girls were there a lot. It was new and fun and exciting. These were the most important people we knew. We ate well and drank like fish and even made some money, which meant something in those days.” She faced him pleadingly to add, “And Jerry and I really did fall in love. That was real.”
“I’m sure it was,” Joe soothed her. “Look at how long you stayed together.”
“Right,” she said. “That’s right.”
“So, what happened to Carolyn?”
“I don’t know, exactly. It was a big night. A crazy night. A major bill had gone through or something. It’s been too many years, and so much was happening back then. But everybody showed up-lobbyists and legislators and staffers. You name it, they were there. There was a river of alcohol and girls we didn’t even know…” She paused before finishing, “Things got carried away, even for us.”
“Do you have any idea what happened?” Joe asked.
“No,” she said. “We got separated. I only found her afterwards, in one of the bedrooms-this was at a hotel outside town. It’s gone now. She was a wreck, only partly conscious, her clothes were a mess-what there were of them. She didn’t remember much of anything.”
“What did you do?”
“Put her back together as best I could and took her home. Two months later, she told me she was pregnant.”
“Did she know who the father was?”
“No. She said she passed out entirely during the rape at one point. She had no idea how many there’d been.”
Joe moved to sit on the edge of the table, still within reach. “I need to ask you some more questions, Nancy, as you can guess. But can I get you a glass of water or something before we continue? Or would you like to take a small break-maybe visit the ladies’ room?”
Nancy dabbed at her eyes one last time with the damp napkin and sat straight up. “No. I’m fine. It’s hard, but I’d like to get it finished with, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” he said. “I want to ask you about what happened afterwards, but before we move on, I need to go over a couple of things about these parties.”
She took a deep sigh. “All right.”
“You made it sound like they happened all the time-or at least frequently. But surely what happened to Carolyn wasn’t part of the norm, was it? Word would’ve leaked out.”
“There were two types of party,” she explained. “I should have gone into that. I was too upset. I’m sorry. There were the regular ones-with drinking and dancing and maybe a little hanky-panky between consenting adults-they happened often, mostly on weekends, involved all sorts of people, and weren’t really organized.”
She stopped to concentrate. “And then there was another type,” she continued, “that involved a special bunch of men. I heard them call themselves the Catamount Cavaliers once, although when I brought it up, I was told to keep my mouth shut, or else. I’d come across a pin-like something you’d wear on your lapel-that had a gold CC mounted on it. Very fancy. And I asked what it was for.”
“Who did you ask?” Joe wanted to know.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s long dead, and I only knew him by his first name anyhow. He told me they were like the Hellfire Club, of Ben Franklin’s day, when he lived in England for a while. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about, but I knew it had to do with sex. And that it was super secretive. I was told in no uncertain terms never to say a word about any of it, and I never did-until now.”