“Owenton”

Whenever Mary Jean Watts and her husband Curtis visited her hometown of Owenton, Kentucky, their first stop upon arriving was always the Dairy Queen on Route 22. It wasn’t just the reward of ice cream at the end of a lengthy drive that spurred this shared ritual; rather, when Mary Jean’s alcoholic mother was still alive, the DQ was their final oasis of calm before driving the final mile or so through town, and into the dysfunction of the Zimmerman family.

This was 2007, however. Katie Zimmerman had been dead for ten years, and as Mary Jean and Curtis caught each other’s eye over a couple of waffle bowl sundaes, it was hard for them to keep a straight face. On this July afternoon, they would only be visiting Mary Jean’s younger sister Lynette, and there wasn’t much for them to discuss in advance of this stopover. You had to kind of know Lynette…

Lynette had lived her entire life in the Zimmerman house, and she now lived there alone. Her second husband was apparently gone for good, and her youngest son had finally moved out in order to move in with some girl over in Frankfort. Mary Jean had herself moved out of that house when she was eighteen, returning about once a year for nearly forty years now.

Owenton seemed unchanged, as always. There were some newer cars and trucks squeezing through the narrow, winding streets, but the stores, the buildings, and especially the churches, were essentially unchanged from Mary Jean’s childhood. The Dairy Queen was comparatively new, but to the Watts’ best recollection, it had been in place now for fifteen or twenty years.

Lynette must have heard the chug of the diesel engine, because as Curtis eased the oversized camper into the Zimmerman driveway, she appeared from around the side of the house, her hands on her hips, smiling crookedly and waving. “You two brought the sunshine up here with you, didn’t you,” she called out.

Lynette was nearly eight years younger than Mary Jean, which made her not quite fifty. She was plump, short enough to be better described as stout. Her hair was grey and bobbed, and she wore bifocals with oversized rounded women’s frames.

She prattled on about the warm summer weather as Curtis and Mary Jean followed her around the side of the house to the back patio. They declined her offer of something to drink; they’d just stopped at the Dairy Queen.

“Will you be spending the night?” Lynette asked.

“We’re on our way to South Bend,” Mary Jean said.

“Oh,” Lynette said, frowning. “What’s in South Bend?” she asked.

“Well,” Mary Jean said, “There’s a case I worked on about twenty years ago that seems to have reopened recently.”

Lynette frowned. “I thought you quit the F.B.I.,” she said.

Retired, Mary Jean thought, not quit. “I did,” she said. “This is just sort of a voluntary thing.” Her Kentucky accent had suddenly returned; the word thing had sounded more like thang.

“What is it?” Lynette asked.

Where to start. Mary Jean weighed her narrative options.

There was always her chance beachside encounter down in Florida with Lisa Suarez, a former St. Joseph County assistant prosecutor who was responsible for digging up the major breakthrough in the case.

There was also Alice Harding, a girl who vanished up in Toledo back in 1985, ultimately prompting the F.B.I. to sift through case files of dead Jane Does.

And there was Indiana Jane herself, an unidentified dead woman named after the state in which she was found. Mary Jean once thought it likely that Indiana Jane was Alice Harding, until Alice’s dental records wound up matching that of a dead girl who washed ashore in Waterville, Ohio. Thus Indiana Jane’s identity remained, at the time, unknown.

“You two missed the Owen County Fair last week,” Lynette told them.

Curtis nudged his wife. “Tell her about Gabriela,” he said.

“Who?” Lynette asked.

“Gabriela de los Santos,” Curtis said. “She disappeared with her little son down in Texas back in, like, 1984. Your sister here helped to clear up the mystery of what happened to her.”

“How?” Lynette asked. “Who was this?”

Mary Jean sighed. “There was an unidentified woman who was found murdered up near South Bend about twenty years ago, in the woods.”

“How was she killed?” Lynette asked.

“She was shot,” Mary Jean said. Raped too, she thought, then shot in the back of the head while lying face down in the dirt. Mary Jean elected to leave that part out. “I worked on a missing person case back when I was stationed in Toledo, and we did some work on several Jane Does,” she told her sister.

“Anyway,” Curtis said, “we ran into this prosecutor down on Marcos Island last year—”

“Former prosecutor,” Mary Jean said.

“—Who knew about this unidentified woman. Lisa Suarez. In fact, there was this jackass who died in jail a couple of years ago, a serial killer, and this Lisa Suarez was so convinced that he killed this girl, that when he died she paid out of her own pocket to have a hair that was found on this girl’s body compared with his DNA.”

Curtis was…sort of getting the story straight. There was a hair; there was a suspect. Lisa Suarez had indeed spearheaded the effort to try to tie his DNA to Indiana Jane’s, but she hadn’t financed the test, and the lab was unable to find a match anyway.

“Anyway,” Mary Jean said gently, “Lisa Suarez went back and poured over all of the databases and managed to discover that in 1985 a woman in Houston named Gabriela de los Santos went missing. With her year-old son.”

“Because,” Curtis told Lynette, “your sister tipped her off to some F.B.I. labwork that Lisa didn’t know about.”

“It wasn’t labwork—” Mary Jean started to say.

“What was she,” Lynette interjected, “an illegal alien or something?”

Was she? Mary Jean didn’t know, and wasn’t in the mood to have this conversation with her sister.

“Nettie,” Curtis said, “nobody thought the dead girl in Indiana was Hispanic. They thought she was white. That’s why they never cross-checked the body with any lists of missing persons that Gabriela was on.”

Lynette frowned. “So, who killed her?”

“We don’t know,” Mary Jean said. “Lisa Suarez has a pretty good idea, but she can’t prove it, so the fact is, we don’t know.”

“I hate that,” Lynette said. “Like in a movie where you don’t find out who the murderer is? I hate that.”

Mary Jean smirked at her little sister. Her life had been touched by enough violence to where she wasn’t entertained by staged portrayals of it. “Anyway,” she said, “Gabriela’s baby is still missing. The father, who was the chief suspect in her disappearance for twenty years, is demanding to know what happened to his son. That’s why we’re going to South Bend. He wants to dig up the crime scene to see if we can’t find his baby.”

“And you’re going to help?”

“It’s unfinished business,” Mary Jean snapped.

A week earlier, before leaving Florida, the Watts’ had gotten together with Dorena, Mary Jean’s older sister, and her husband at their ritzy beachfront house down in Naples. Mary Jean had spent the better part of the evening sharing with them the whole story of Indiana Jane, of Alice Harding and of Lisa Suarez. And of Gabriela de los Santos.

After the sun had set, a sudden, violent storm had moved up the coast, churning the Gulf and temporarily knocking out the electricity. The four of them had sat silently in the dark dining room, listening to the wind howl outside, and it was though Gabriela de los Santos had finally been given back her voice, as though the world could at last comprehend her fury over the horror and degradation of her death.

And Lynette could only sit there dumbly and ask if she’d been an illegal alien or not.

Curtis changed the subject. He asked Lynette about the county fair, and she proceeded to tell them about how the Harrod girl had won the Miss Owen County pageant, about the big 95th birthday party next week for Mrs. Hall, and how part of Old Sparta Road had to be closed after the shoulder collapsed, and how some people were saying the same thing might happen on parts of Route 22.

Mary Jean sat quietly, looking out at the Kentucky hills, thinking about unfinished business. Moving out of Owenton to go to college at the age of eighteen, and going on to become a twenty-five year F.B.I. agent, had only made Mary Jean an anomaly here in her birthplace. Every time she returned here, she felt as though she would never be fully welcomed back, and this only caused regrets that were almost self-destructive in their irrationality—should she actually lament the fact that she had gone out in the world and accomplished something?

Sensing his wife’s sudden, quiet unease, Curtis had stood up and glanced theatrically at his watch. They needed to get to South Bend if they wanted to keep their motel reservation, he told Lynette.

After promising to stop back in Owenton on their drive back to Florida, Curtis scolded his wife as he backed the camper out onto 127. “You know,” he said, “she’s not your mother. You need to stop treating her as though she’s turned into your mother or something.”

“I know,” Mary Jean said absently, waving goodbye to Lynette. Her little sister was in front of the garage, waving with one hand and talking to somebody on a cell phone with the other. “I don’t know why it bugs me,” she said.

“Why she bugs you?”

“Not her,” Mary Jean said. She sighed. “Just all this unfinished business.”

As they stopped at the red light at Seminary Street on their way out of town, Mary Jean looked over towards the center of downtown Owenton. Forty-four years ago, her father had been murdered in one of the buildings across from the courthouse square; forty-four years later, the man who killed him was still alive and still behind bars for the crime. Unfinished business.

It pained Mary Jean to realize that sometimes, forty-four years later, she could go entire days without the memory of her father ever entering her mind, but of course today she was back in Owenton, and there it was.