Laura Lee Matlock.”
She leaned back, a sort of instinctual recoil. “Laura Lee.”
“You remember her.”
She glanced from me to Rafe and back. “Yes, of course. We don’t have that many murders around here. I went to the funeral. But there was no talk about a serial killer back then.”
“She was the first,” Rafe said. “It took a couple more victims for anyone to see the pattern.”
“Was there any talk at the time?” I wanted to know. “Anything anyone was saying that might pertain?”
Aunt Regina didn’t answer immediately, and I added, “The sheriff is pulling the old records, of course, and sharing them with the TBI and FBI and Chief Grimaldi. But I was wondering whether you remembered anything that wouldn’t be in the official reports.”
Aunt Regina leaned back, and her eyes—dark like Catherine’s and Dad’s—grew unfocused. “She was working at the truck stop down by the interstate. Picking up extra cash because her husband was in prison. Can’t remember what he did to land himself there… got drunk and in a fight, maybe.”
I exchanged a glance with Rafe, who’d landed himself in prison after getting in a fight, too. His lips twitched, but he didn’t say anything, just nodded to Aunt Regina. Pay attention, Savannah.
“Her kids were with her mama,” Aunt Regina said. “She had two, I think. An older girl and a baby boy. They’d be in their teens or early twenties now.”
They would, and I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought about them.
But they were too young to be involved in this, and probably wouldn’t be able to remember much about what had happened. Nor would anyone have shared many of the details, I imagined, with the victim’s young children.
“Frankie got out of prison, but the kids stayed with the Drimmels. He hung around for a while, and then disappeared. Not sure whether he moved away, or something happened to him. I know he went to prison at least a couple more times.”
I nodded. There was nothing there that Grimaldi and Millie Ruth Durbin hadn’t already told me. “Can you remember a Latin teacher at Columbia High whose name was Jurgensson? That would have been a decade and a half earlier, probably.”
“A Latin teacher?” She thought about it. “Can’t say that I do. Why?”
“He lost his job for sexual misconduct,” Rafe said, and Aunt Regina’s eyes widened.
“Of course. Why didn’t you say so?”
I had my mouth open to tell her that I had said so, but she barreled right over me. “It was a very big deal when it happened. That kind of thing was less common twenty-five or thirty years ago, or maybe we just didn’t hear about it as much.”
Maybe not. “But you remember it?”
“Of course,” Aunt Regina said. “I just didn’t remember the man’s name. But everyone knew that a teacher from the high school had been let go for improper attentions toward a student.”
Improper attentions… “Do you know which student?”
“Not Laura Lee Drimmel,” Aunt Regina said, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”
No? “Are you sure?”
“As sure as I can be,” Aunt Regina said.
“So you know who it was?”
She shook her head. “But I know it wasn’t Laura Lee.”
“How?” If she didn’t know who the student was, how could she know definitively that it hadn’t been Laura Lee?
“Because it was one of the boys,” Aunt Regina said. And added, when I just sat there with my mouth open, “This was about a decade into the AIDS epidemic. Gay relationships weren’t as accepted as they are now.”
No. And it’s not like they’re always accepted now, either. Legally, yes. Legally, a gay couple can get married as easily as a straight couple these days. But there are plenty of people who still aren’t OK with it in practice.
Besides, statutory rape is still statutory rape, whether the victim is male or female.
“One of the boys,” I said.
Aunt Regina nodded. “There was a lot of talk, and a lot of concern about a lot of things. Whether the teacher had AIDS and had given it to the boy. Whether the teacher would be arrested. Whether the teacher had turned the boy gay. Whether anyone could turn someone else gay.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” I said. Next to me, Rafe made a soft sound of amusement.
“I know, Savannah,” Aunt Regina said. “I’m just telling you what was being said. And why I’m sure this was a boy, and not Laura Lee Drimmel.”
Yes, it sounded like we could be reasonably sure about that. “But you don’t know who it was.”
She shook her head.