I knew Stella had stood in the very same spot two days earlier. I drove straight there from Pittsburgh—I watched our bench from the woods again that year. Detective Fogel had been there too, but she didn’t see me.
A year would pass before I would track down Lester Woolford in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He had been cremated, so only ashes remained. His urn held a prime location in Whispering Meadows Cemetery in the top right corner of a building I later learned was called a columbarium. There was a fountain out front. I spent two nights sleeping behind that building—no need for my tent; August nights in Wisconsin were warm. The bottle of Wild Turkey I had on hand made them warmer.
Woolford dropped out of Penn State in the spring of 1979, then disappeared for nearly seven years. At one point, his parents issued a reward and filed a missing person’s report, but from what I could find in the local papers, that didn’t turn up much of anything. Since he was an adult, the police weren’t looking too hard, and the only people chasing the reward were in Green Bay, far from where his body was found in Knoxville on August 8, 1986—about the same time the body of Eura Kapp was discovered in Pittsburgh, burned but not burned.
On the night of August 7, 1986, Lester Woolford checked into room 226 of the Knoxville Motor Lodge off Interstate 275. According to the police report, he was alone and paid for two nights in cash. They think he started cutting himself around two in the afternoon but couldn’t really be sure. He continued cutting himself late into the night, possibly until first light. Housekeeping didn’t find him until the morning of August 9 on account of the Do Not Disturb sign he placed on his door. The scalpel was still in his right hand. He piled the items he removed from his body neatly to his left. His face was unrecognizable by the time his body finally gave up to shock and loss of blood in those wee hours. The ID in Woolford’s wallet was fake. He had matching credit cards, too. The police matched his dental records, though, and in early September, his body was released to his parents, who felt it would be best to have him cremated.
On August 8, 1996, national news picked up the story of a man burned to death in Chicago. I fueled up the Jeep and arrived there a day later. Surely Stella again. White coats everywhere, too. I didn’t stay long.
Last year, I held up in a South Philadelphia hostel for the better part of a month before making the drive to Pittsburgh on August 8. Detective Fogel wasn’t in the cemetery. Neither was Stella, for that matter. I sat upon our bench until a little after midnight, then I drove back to Philly. I had been attempting to find Cammie Brotherton—she stayed at this same hostel for the summer of 1978, twenty years before me, after dropping out of Penn State. Remarkably, the manager remembered her but had no idea where she went next.
1997 was also the year I turned twenty-one, and the bartender at the Irish Rooster two doors down from the hostel was quick with refills of Guinness and kind enough to throw in a few extra shots with those I bought. I nearly stayed when the television above the bar ran the story about a man’s body found burned in New Hampshire. I even ordered another beer. When I went to pay for it, Stella’s letter fell from my pocket, and I changed my mind. I said I’d be back, but on the way out the door, I saw a white trench coat hanging on the coatrack.
I had not gone back.
In those years, I often dreamt of Stella. A longing to hold the one thing I never could.
“Move, kid. Don’t make me arrest you.”
The Bryant Park police was still staring down at me, and I scrambled to my feet before he could kick me again. An empty bottle of Jameson dropped from my coat and thudded down into the grass. Before he could say something, I bent, picked it up, and shuffled over to the nearest trash can. My legs were wobbly, and I was a little light-headed. I hadn’t eaten anything since since breakfast yesterday, and that had only been a greasy egg McMuffin.
“I want you out of my park.”
“Your park?” Phlegm caught in my throat, and