And Never Let Her Go (2 page)

Kathleen moved next to the single bedroom. Annie's bed was all white, with a comforter of white-on-white puffed hearts and ruffly white pillow shams. But it wasn't made the way she usually made it. Maybe it was her imagination, but it looked to Kathleen as if two fists had yanked the comforter up and then pushed it flat, leaving two indentations.

The little television set that Kathleen's husband, Patrick Hosey, had given Annie one Christmas sat in its usual spot on the radiator underneath the bedroom window. There was a new air conditioner there, too, and it was turned on. That was why there was such a chill in the apartment on this hot summer night.

Annie's jewelry boxes were lined up on top of the radiator, as always. Her blouses and dresses hung in the closet from hangers that were all pointing the same direction. Most of her shoes were in their original boxes, where she always kept them, but some of the boxes were scattered on the floor now—as if she had been in a hurry to
change her shoes and intended to put things back together when she got home.

Anne Marie was the first to admit she was a compulsive neat freak. Her friends teased her and called her Anal Annie when she went through her little rituals. She arranged her CDs alphabetically, stacked her pennies so that Lincoln's profile faced the same way, and made her bed even as she was crawling out of it. She actually folded her soiled laundry, rather than just tossing it in the hamper. Kathleen always smiled at that; her sister did her laundry at Kathleen's house every Wednesday night, and usually had dinner there, too.

The U.S. Open T-shirt Annie had worn when Kathleen saw her last on Wednesday night now lay on the top of the clothes hamper. And there was a long floral-patterned Laura Ashley summer dress folded on a small settee rather than being placed with the rest of the laundry. A small thing, but very unusual for Annie. Kathleen recognized the dress; it was new and one that Anne Marie had bought to wear to the Point-to-Point amateur steeplechase with Mike Scanlan on May 6.

The red oblong box on the floor looked familiar, too. It was from Talbot's, one of the Wilmington area's better women's shops. It hadn't been opened. Kathleen slid the ribbons free, opened the box, and saw that the Talbot's seal still held the layers of tissue inside together. But she knew what the taupe garment beneath was; it was an expensive pantsuit, the same suit she had talked Annie out of buying a week earlier because it cost far too much for her budget. They'd had a little argument about that. When had she gone back to buy it?

There were five people in Anne Marie's apartment: Kathleen, Mike, her friends Jill Morrison and Ginny Columbus, and Ginny's mother, Virginia. They respected Annie's privacy, but they had to look around for some clue to where she might have gone, even as they knew it was an intrusion.

Annie didn't own much, and the furniture she did have was secondhand or the kind of inexpensive stuff that had to be assembled after purchase, but the way she had decorated her place was her and it was charming. There were photographs: family pictures with her brothers and sister one Easter, a candid shot of Anne Marie and Mike taken at her surprise birthday party at Kathleen's in January, and on the wall a picture of their mother, also named Kathleen. There were Annie's scruffy old stuffed animals wearing women's rights buttons, a motley collection of knickknacks that pleased her.

Anne Marie always kept her kitchen almost antiseptically clean. But this was the source of the miasma in her apartment; the whole
room smelled of rotting food. The counter was littered with fruit and vegetables long since grown overripe and mushy. The strawberries were brown and had a sickly sweet odor; mushrooms dank as a swamp added to the stench. A garbage can with its plastic liner pulled up was next to the kitchen table, and it, too, was full of decaying food.

Mike shook his head. He knew that Anne Marie hated to keep any garbage in her apartment; when he picked her up for a date, she invariably carried a neat bag of garbage to put in the cans outside. There was no way she would have left her kitchen in this condition.

Looking into the refrigerator, Kathleen found two doggie bags of leftovers from a Philadelphia restaurant, Panorama. The food inside wasn't spoiled, but it looked dry, as if it had been there for a few days at least. Anne Marie wouldn't have left all this food out on the counter. She wouldn't even have kept restaurant food in her refrigerator so long. Kathleen looked at Mike questioningly. Had he and Anne Marie been to this restaurant? He read her mind and shook his head slightly.

Oddly, there were other things on the kitchen counter: prescription medications, sample size, arranged like a row of dominoes; pouches of Rice-A-Roni; pretzels. They hadn't been opened, but they hadn't been put neatly in the cupboards, either.

Perhaps most frightening of all, Anne Marie's purse was there in the kitchen, along with her wallet and all of her credit cards. There was about $40 in bills in the wallet. The day-runner that she used to keep track of all her appointments was also there, but her keys weren't. She kept her house and car keys on a ring attached to a leather pouch that held a little canister of Mace.

There was some unknown component in this puzzle that they couldn't grasp, some missing piece. They questioned one another and themselves, looking for some clue that would reveal Anne Marie's whereabouts. As time went on, their theories grew more outlandish and improbable, anything to make it seem that she was safe. It didn't matter if she had decided to step out of her everyday life without telling them. It didn't even matter if she had run away with no plan to come home again. The only thing that mattered was that they needed to hear from her, because the most terrible emotional anguish known to humans is not knowing.

Surrounded by her things, all the funky, sentimental, humorous, silly possessions that made this apartment so special to Anne Marie, this first real home of her own, it seemed to the people who waited there that at any moment the door downstairs would open and they
would hear her voice calling up to them. Their Annie had a lovely pansy-eyed face, but her voice could carry a mile when she chose to shout. She could make people laugh with that voice, a beautiful woman who could bellow like a fishwife and then giggle.

Every creak of the old semidetached house made them hope it was her hand opening the door, her feet on the steps. They felt her essence around them wherever they turned. Annie was the most alive person they knew. And still, the more they willed her to come home, the farther away she seemed to be.

For everything they found that seemed normal and safe, they discovered something else that was totally atypical of Anne Marie. The disorder alone would be anathema to her. Above all else, this told them she was gone. The fact that Anne Marie's green 1995 Volkswagen Jetta was parked in its usual spot across the street frightened them, too. That meant she wasn't off on some errand of her own; she had to be with someone else. But who?

As if there might be some clue there, Kathleen looked to see what CD was in Annie's player. It was one of her sister's favorite singers—Shawn Colvin. Annie loved Shawn's strong, sweet Irish voice and the songs she wrote and performed. She had programmed the CD to play the track with the song “Get Out of the House.”

Many of Shawn Colvin's songs spoke to Anne Marie; her lyrics were poems full of longing, lost love, the fear of danger and a need to be at home and safe again. But Anne Marie wasn't home.

At the moment when time becomes important it is relentless and unforgiving, and with each passing moment the fear and apprehension of Anne Marie's family and friends grew more palpable. It was not possible that Annie should have left of her own volition, that she could have gone away without telling any of these people who loved her.

Anne Marie and Mike should have been with Robert and Susan right now, maybe having coffee after dinner, maybe saying good-bye and getting ready to drive back to Wilmington. But instead, Mike was here, as worried as the rest of them. Kathleen knew that Annie was in love with Mike; she would have returned his calls. She would have called all of them back. Annie hadn't returned any of her calls since Thursday afternoon.

K
ATHLEEN
couldn't wait any longer to take action. On Sunday, June 30, 1996, at approximately 12:15
A.M.
, with the full support of her brother Robert and of Michael Scanlan, the man Anne Marie had
only just begun to love, she called again to report to the Wilmington Police Department that Anne Marie Fahey was missing. “I called the police,” she said. “The Wilmington city police. I waited for what felt like an eternity, and they didn't come, so I called Ed Freel.”

The Freels were almost like family to the Faheys. Ed Freel was the Secretary of State for Governor Carper. Kathleen called him at O'Friel's Pub, an Irish tavern owned and operated by the family. “I told him what was going on, and within a couple of minutes, there were two state policemen here.”

Once it was official it seemed all the more terrible.

W
HILE
they had waited for Anne Marie, for the police, for some word, five of the people who meant the most to Anne Marie forced themselves to believe that she was OK, or even if she wasn't completely OK, that she was alive somewhere. And then they caught their breaths and took back even the thought that she wasn't alive. Annie was too vibrant and beautiful not to be somewhere out there. It was just that they had somehow lost touch with her.

Only those who have suddenly lost their connection to someone they love—not lost to death, simply lost—can begin to understand the agony of this vigil. Anne Marie Fahey was a young woman blessed with fair beauty as natural as a rose. She was the survivor of adversities that would have beaten a lesser woman, and yet still full of hope and, most of all, love. And now, in the first week of the summer that promised to be her happiest, she was inexplicably missing. This was the emptiest and most agonizing conclusion that her family and friends could come to.

And for Kathleen, one of two sisters among the six Fahey siblings, there were questions that returned to haunt her. She had spent the time as she waited for the police looking around the apartment to see if there was a note, maybe something Annie had jotted down in her day-runner, some clue to where she might be. The little blocks in her sister's calendar were mostly filled, but with prosaic notations—birthdays Annie wanted to remember, monthly notations of the anniversary of the day she'd met Mike, baby showers, lunches, some dinner dates. There was nothing there that looked even slightly ominous.

But Kathleen was soon almost as shocked as she was worried. She had found a number of notes and cards in Anne Marie's drawers, and they weren't all from Mike Scanlan. Annie was a sentimental pack rat, and she had saved all manner of sentimental mementos from Mike—ticket stubs from
Tosca
at the Grand Opera House, the
Russian ballet, the Luther Vandross concert—and even souvenirs from the pope's visit to Baltimore. Those were all in the top drawer of her bedroom dresser.

But in the top drawer of a hutch in Annie's living room, Kathleen had found an envelope that read
Anne Marie Fahey,
and beneath that,
Personal and Confidential.
Kathleen opened the envelope and inside was a long and complicated letter from a man who clearly knew her sister very well indeed, a man who appeared to know all of them and seemed intimately acquainted with their family relationships and plans. Scanning the pages was almost like reading a foreign language; this person knew about them and yet he was someone Kathleen barely knew, and not someone she could ever picture in her younger sister's life.

And yet he must be. The first letter ended, “All I want to do is make you happy and be with you. I love you.”

That letter wasn't signed, but it didn't really have to be; all the letters and notes in the envelope were written on the letterhead of the law firm of Saul, Ewing, Remick and Saul—
FROM THE DESK OF THOMAS J. CAPANO
.

Thomas Capano. Kathleen's thoughts flashed back to the previous fall; her friend Bud Freel, who was a Wilmington city councilman, had mentioned something to her about Tom Capano and Anne Marie. He'd heard a rumor that they were dating. It was so preposterous then—and now—that Kathleen had looked at Bud dumb-founded. She had dismissed it from her mind so quickly that there was no time for a solid memory to form. Anne Marie had never talked about Capano to her family. How could she be involved with him and not mention it, when they were all so close? They had banded together when they were only children, the six of them against the world. It was impossible to believe that Annie might have held back such an important secret from her sister and her brothers.

Kathleen had casually asked Annie about Tom Capano, and she had laughed and said they were just friends—that he sometimes stopped by the governor's office on business. That had been enough for Kathleen; she had almost forgotten about their conversation. No, Capano was the last person in the world anyone would have connected to her sister in any significant way.

Kathleen didn't really know Tom Capano well, but she knew him. Everyone in Wilmington, probably everyone in Delaware, did. The whole Capano family was legendary, and Tom was a political power-hitter, wealthy, older, and married. Kathleen had met him
sometime in the early eighties when she worked as a waitress and bartender at O'Friel's, through Bud Freel, whom she used to date. Kathleen hadn't seen Tom Capano for a year, and that was at the closing of Bud's other place: Buddy's Bar.

She stared at the letters in her hand. They seemed to suggest that Annie hadn't told her the whole truth about a hidden place in her life. Kathleen knew she had to tell Mike about the letters and notes from Tom Capano. But, first, they had to talk to the police. They had to do everything they could to try to find Annie. Perhaps then, they could sort out the secrets of her life.