Page 74 of The Girl in the Mist

The door had just clicked into place when I said it, and for a second I don’t know if Mike heard me. I’m about to knock and try the whole process again when I hear the chain lock being disengaged and the door opens.

“How do you know that name?” he asks.

“Can I come in and talk to you?”

He steps back and I go inside. Neither of us sit.

“Why are you asking about Casey Conner?” he asks.

“Jacob Merriweather, the son of Reginald Merriweather, is being accused of the murders at Camp Hollow,” I tell him. “He’s been researching his father’s crimes with plans on writing a book. I went to talk to him about what he knows and he told me more about Mary Ellen. When you told me that your sister died in the massacre in 1964, you were talking abouther.”

Mike crosses his arms over his chest, his jaw twitching and his eyes darting back and forth as he fights to maintain control of his emotions.

“Yes,” he finally says. “Mary Ellen Conner was my oldersister.”

“Only she wasn’t, was she? That’s what she told people. And it’s what her mother and father told people. But that’s not actually true.” Mike won’t say anything and I push a little further. “It took making a few phone calls, but I found a birth certificate for Casey Glen Conner, born April 14, 1961 at two forty-five in the morning. It was registered in Garnet, Georgia. His mother is listed as Gemma Conner and his father is listed as Frank Conner. Mary Ellen’s parents. Then I found a birth announcement from the April 1961 Cherry Hill Gazette, announcing the birth of Casey Glen Conner athome.”

Mike walks across the room and sits down on the couch. I follow his lead, wanting to give him as much time and space as he needs to take what I know must be painful, confusing thoughts and turn them into words he’s capable of speaking out loud.

“Mary Ellen Conner was my birth mother. She found out she was pregnant when she was 14 years old, right after coming back from summer camp. My parents knew they had to come up with a plan for what they were going to do. They couldn’t allow their fourteen-year-old daughter to be pregnant and have anybody know. It would have been an unimaginable source of shame and embarrassment. They also liked her boyfriend Brad very much, thinking he was the perfect well-bred guy for her. They had only met the summer before, but they were already imagining them getting married. They couldn’t let himknow.

“So they contacted Cornelia’s. At that time, that was the type of place nobody wanted to talk about, but just about everybody knew existed. Maybe not that one exactly, but that there were places like that. And most people probably knew at least one family who had used their services. They just never spoke about it. So, the Conners reached out to the home for unwed mothers and arranged for Mary Ellen to go there. They came up with a story about how she had been accepted into a very exclusive program for school and would be gone through the fall and spring.

“The plan was for her to go to the home, give birth, have the baby adopted, and then spend the next few weeks at her aunt’s house near Atlanta to get her body back into shape and get her mind over the whole situation. But Mary Ellen wanted me so much. She already loved me. In the letter she wrote me explaining all of this, she said from the moment she found out about me, she felt like my mother and wanted to have me close to her. It made her so happy to think about me. The thought of not being able to raise me, or at least be near me while I was growing up, was more painful than anything she’d ever experienced.

“She talked to her mother about it and managed to soften her heart. Mary Ellen’s birth father had died when she was young, and by the time Frank came into the picture, she was already well into school age. Frank loved her and her brother as his own, even giving them his last name, but he and Gemma wanted another baby very much. He wanted to know what it was like to raise a child from birth. They decided her baby would be theirs.

“Gemma had always been a larger woman and wasn’t known for being extremely social, so faking her pregnancy wasn’t difficult. Especially then. People didn’t talk about pregnancy then the way they do now. Keep in mind it wasn’t that long before this that Lucy and Ricky weren’t allowed to say she was pregnant, only ‘expecting,’ and it would still be a couple of years before the word ‘pregnant’ was even heard on TV. Often women never even announced their pregnancies. They would go the entire time without saying anything about it, even if it was very obvious, and then announce the birthafterward.”

“Because as we all know, taking the approach of not saying anything about a situation automatically makes it so much better,” I say. I think for a second. “Can I get you anything? A drink? I could make you sometea?”

I realize I’m assuming here that a man in his early twenties living alone has tea and a teapot readily available in his kitchen, but there are far strangerthings.

“Actually, if you could brew some coffee, that would be reallyamazing.”

“I’ll go look for it. I’ll be right back.”

He’s staring at his hands as I walk out of the living room, lost deep in his thoughts. A few minutes by himself will be good for him. When I come back with coffee, he’s sitting back, looking at the picture of himself and his fatherfishing.

“Thank you,” he says, accepting hiscoffee.

“Okay, goahead.”

“They brought Mary Ellen to Georgia and got her settled into the home. Then they came back here to Cherry Hill and Gemma simply took to her bed, according to everyone who knew them. She didn’t work, obviously, and with no children at home to care for or bring anywhere, there was no reason she needed to leave the house. They told people she wasn’t doing well and that she couldn’t accept visitors. They found out that Mary Ellen was further along in her pregnancy than they thought, so the ruse had to be escalated a bit,” he continues. “At Christmas, Frank made a production of purchasing a few baby items and having them wrapped as gifts for Gemma. He didn’t say anything about it, but he didn’t need to. There were plenty of women around town who noticed and would be happy to spread thenews.”

“At least some things never change,” I remark. “They can’t talk about pregnancy, but only if it’s in polite conversation. If it’s impolite gossip, that’s perfectly fairgame.”

“Something like that. But that’s what they wanted. They wanted people to start saying things like, Gemma must be experiencing a very difficult pregnancy, and they haven’t talked about it, but they are feeling optimistic. She made a strategic appearance at the midnight service at church Christmas Eve, heavily bundled up and appearing to rely on Frank to help her. I remember hearing stories about that when I was little. How brave everyone thought she was for having so much faith and wanting so much to go to church to celebrate the birth of Christ that she would put her own health at so much risk.

“It put her in the perfect position of no one daring to question her. They were able to visit Mary Ellen at Cornelia’s early the next year. Mary Ellen wrote about how the women there kept asking if the Conners were sure they didn’t want to put the baby up for adoption. They had many families available who would be happy to take it at birth and they would never have to worry about the sham again. They could just put this whole thing behind them and move forward with their lives. She wrote that she was worried her parents would change their minds and decide that was the right thing to do.

“But they didn’t. And come April, I was born. She named me Casey and spent a couple of days with me before handing me over to her parents to bring me home. She went to her aunt’s house and wrote to me every day until June when they came to get her and bring her home. Everyone in town had been thrilled for Frank and Gemma. They celebrated the miracle baby they welcomed, and when Mary Ellen came home, everyone gushed about how excited she must be to have a littlebrother.

“She didn’t flinch. She couldn’t. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t let on that I was actually her son. So she dedicated herself to being the very best big sister she could be. She took care of me as much as she possibly could. I have memories of her. Not many. But enough to remember how much she loved me. How much fun we had together. When she left for camp that summer, I didn’t want her to go. I didn’t remember her being gone the summer before because I was too young, and I was upset at the thought of not seeing her for weeks. But Frank and Gemma, my parents, reassured me and said everything was going to be fine. We’d see her soon. Of course, I never saw her again.

“I didn’t know at the time that they were starting to get suspicious about my parentage. I don’t look anything like Brad. They asked Mary Ellen about it and she refused to give them an answer. She said she didn’t want to talk about that anymore. Things were the way they should be. Frank was my father, and that was all anybody needed to know. But it was bothering them. I believe that, before she even left for camp, was when they started to turn against me. By then, Gemma had actually given birth to a baby of their own. It changed how they looked atme.

“After she disappeared, things went bad pretty fast. At first, they were worried about her and thought she had been murdered just like all the other victims. They just needed to find her. But then after they didn’t, they got swept up in this idea that she hadn’t been murdered. She had just gone of her own volition. That whoever my biological father was, she ran away with him. And it happened that I was showing features that reminded them of a man in town named Carson Benoit. He was married and was seen as extremely strange because his wife worked while he stayed at home. He was a writer, but people didn’t know that. All they knew was that he was home all the time and liked to take walks at night. There were rumors that he’d been arrested in another town for peeping and stealing women’s underthings.

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