Chapter 1 #2
I started at Mari’s house and drove up the long, winding lane looking for signs of life. The houses here are modest but set atop large plots of land with plenty of privacy. When I reached the end of the drive, I came to a quaint green cottage with white shutters and flower beds in the front yard.
At the door there was no answer.
I waited in my car thirty minutes, forty-five. When I got sick of turning the engine on and off for warmth, I pulled away to regroup.
I drove past the house where Ryan grew up, long since sold for more money than it was likely worth. It’s a two-story colonial on an acreage, facade now modernized with slapdash board-and-batten and startling black shutters and trim.
I personally found Mari’s house much cozier.
The wide oak tree in the front yard is referenced lyrically in Ryan’s first album, in “Honeywine”: I loved you deep and tall just like the oak in my front yard / You left me alone and hollow with your crooked, wooden heart; and visually in her final music video, where a gnarled papier-maché representation looms over Ryan as she plucks her banjo on an ornate stage.
The final part of the video, in fact, was filmed right there in Hamilton.
I was just wondering whether I should check the grocery store for Mari when my phone buzzed in my pocket.
When I lifted it to answer, I was surprised to see her name on the screen.
“Mari?” I answered.
“It looks like you’re in town,” she said. Her voice wasn’t exactly friendly, but it at least wasn’t as hostile as I’d expected.
“I am,” I said. “I just stopped by your house, actually.”
“I’m well aware.” She let out a long sigh. “You still want to talk?”
Below, along with our other key witnesses, I present Mari’s story in her own words.
Mari Stevens
No, I don’t know what happened to Ryan. That’s the first thing I want to say, so I’m saying it. I changed my mind about talking to you because . . . I don’t know. I just miss her.
I think what you’re doing is a cheap cash grab, if you do in fact want me to be completely honest. I don’t want to say that I’ve given up hope, but I don’t know how much good any of this is going to do.
I mean, it’s been a year. What’s the rule—the first forty-eight hours in a missing persons case are the most important, and after that, the chances of finding them diminish exponentially?
By the time anyone realized Ryan was missing after the VMAs, like missing missing, it had been longer than that.
Maybe I decided to talk to you because . . . I still feel like that’s my fault.
I was with her that night, yes. Ryan was supposed to ride with the rest of our group to the after-party, but she told us to go ahead because she wanted to stop back at the hotel and work out some lyrics that were in her head.
That wasn’t unusual—she would run off at all hours of the day and night, try stuff out, record something that she’d been working over.
I figured she probably got some ideas from everything surrounding the awards show.
So I let her go, and I went on with my night .
. . I should have known something was wrong.
Picked up on signs. Trusted my gut. She was . . . off, in a way.
But I didn’t act fast enough. I—
I don’t know. It’s hard to talk about. I haven’t talked to anyone but the police, really.
You must know that. It’s a big part of the reason I moved back here, to get away from it all.
I never liked LA in the first place. Plus, it eventually became apparent that I was out of a job, running Ryan’s marketing team and having nothing to market.
And I’m not going to say that the cost of living is much cheaper here, but what with buying my parents’ house at a discount and investing my savings from Ryan’s tours, I’m pretty comfortable.
I do the marketing for North Shore Music Theatre now. It’s nice.
But . . . it’s easier to miss her here. Or to feel like that whole whirlwind was a bizarre dream, and now I’m back where I started.
Some days it feels like I could just walk down the road to her house like I used to—I’m sure you know how close it is.
You probably already drove over there. Did you see what they did to it?
It used to be this beautiful brick, with lanterns by the front door .
. . Yes, they put that shitty plywood right over the brick.
Anyway.
Ryan and I met at the tiny elementary school in Hamilton.
She was the new kid in fourth grade, since her parents had just moved into town.
I remember seeing her in front of the class, all twiggy with this curly red hair up in a thick ponytail.
I thought to myself, These girls are going to eat her alive.
I’d had some trouble with my classmates, see.
Kids can be really cruel. I don’t even remember how the bullying started, but there was a group of girls who would pick up on the dumbest, most insignificant things—the ones that just happened to be the very thing you were most insecure about.
Like, I have a birthmark on the back of my neck. No big deal, right?
But for whatever reason, this little clique decides it doesn’t like me, so one day when I was wearing my hair up, one of them shouted, “Look at Mari’s neck! Gross! Is that dirt?”
“It’s just a birthmark,” I said.
“It looks like dirt,” said another one. “You look like Pigpen from Charlie Brown.”
It wasn’t an insult that was even very clever or creative. But dammit, they called me Pigpen from that point forward, and it bothered me so much that I wore my hair down every single day, even in gym class, even when it was ninety degrees in our classroom with no air-conditioning in August.
So you can imagine the kind of treatment I thought Ryan would get.
And I feel horrible admitting this—I already admitted it to her long ago, and she forgave me, so I can say it here.
But I was irritated when she sat next to me at lunch that day.
I thought, Oh great, she’s just going to make it worse for both of us.
Because that’s how it worked, right? The law of the jungle and all.
And sure enough, those girls walked by and immediately said something like “Look, Pigpen’s got a new friend!”
“Pigpen and Pinky!”
I saw Ryan hesitating with a half smile, trying to work out what was going on. I could feel my face going red in that way I hate—I’ve always wished I could control it, but in any stressful situation, I look like a beet.
“I love Pigpen,” she said, giving me a meaningful glance. “I read him in the comics—he’s so cute! But who’s Pinky?”
“Pinky, like from Pinky and the Brain?” one of the girls said, like she was talking to someone impossibly stupid. “You look like that skinny lab rat.”
“Oh!” Ryan said brightly. “I haven’t seen it. Is it a good show?”
The lead girl made a face. “Everybody’s seen it. Do you live in a hobo shack or something?”
Like I said—not clever.
Ryan just shrugged. “I don’t watch a lot of TV.”
The girl smirked at her. “That’s pretty weird.”
I was feeling a lot of secondhand embarrassment by that point, but Ryan gave her a wide, genuine smile. “I know, right?” she said. “I’ll have to watch it and tell you what I think!”
The girl frowned. “Whatever.”
The group gave up and walked away, hardly giving a backward glance; Ryan watched them go.
“You really don’t know Pinky and the Brain?” I had asked, still being kind of snotty. It was a weird mix of emotions—irritation that she had brought this on us, surprise by how she’d handled it, and relief that the attention hadn’t been on me.
Ryan turned back and looked me right in the eyes. “Duh, I know Pinky and the Brain,” she said in a much different, more down-to-earth voice than the bubbly one she’d been using before. “What I didn’t know is how many assholes there would be at this school.”
I stared at her. Even in the years afterward, I barely heard her swear. I think she picked a very choice moment to employ asshole, to show me who she really was.
And then I burst out laughing.
She did too. And from that point forward, we were best friends.
Apart from the little shits at school, we had a good childhood; sometimes there’s this perception that the best art comes from people who have suffered in life, but Ryan and I were happy kids.
We rode our bikes to school, swam at Ipswich, had sleepovers, and made friendship bracelets.
She was always humming, coming up with little melodies even back then.
She would write out poems and songs in this little pocket notebook that she carried with her everywhere.
It was packed with these wrinkled, dog-eared pages that were almost illegible with pencil and pen scribblings that, to be honest, were so, so angsty back then.
An all-American green-eyed girl with that wild hair I always envied, who came from a comfortable background and caught fish off the Walnut Road bridge in the summer—what did she have to be angsty about?
But Ryan was very into Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and her mother was born and raised in Kentucky, where she lived until she moved to New York for school.
So Ryan was introduced early on to all that bluegrass music.
I swear, the first thing she downloaded when she got an MP3 player was “House of the Rising Sun” by Doc Watson.
I don’t think she knew what it meant—I mean, I hope she didn’t, at that age—but she was raised on those old folk songs.
It resulted in her being this strange, sort of ethereal kid.
Walking around in her own world, listening to these mournful songs in her headphones, all wrapped up in her notebook.
She was tall and lanky, even back then, and it made her stick out in groups.
Ryan didn’t have many friends, and neither did I—we leaned on each other—but that didn’t mean she was shy.