17
“Died with the others?” Stevie said.
“In the accident,” Loretta said. “Blue was with the commune up on the hill. God, it was a terrible accident. You’re saying
Blue’s been alive this whole time? Oh . . . I have to sit down . . .”
Loretta sounded a bit out of breath from this news.
“I’m sorry to do this to you,” Stevie said, “but I . . . I’m her neighbor. Here. In New York. And we’re, you know, a few of
us on the floor are trying to find out all we can. Could you tell me about this commune? This accident? It would be really
helpful.”
“Oh. Sure. Of course. Hold on . . .” Stevie heard a loud meow.
“Sorry, I had to put my cat on my lap. Sampson knows when I need him and he just came running. Of course. It’s just such a shock.
It was 1976 when this happened. September.
It was harvest season. We were busy. I remember it was a good year for our tomatoes.
I was part of a group of people running an organic food co-op in Ellenville, and this group—seven or eight people, all girls except for one, we usually only ever saw the girls—moved into an old summerhouse on the mountainside.
They’d come down every once in a while and buy food, and then Blue arrived.
She baked this astonishing bread. We’d take it and sell it and in return they got food for free.
It was fantastic. It brought in business.
The only thing was . . . well, we called them a commune, but . . .”
A plate of lemon ricotta pancakes appeared on the table in front of Stevie. She blindly tore off a piece of one and ate it
as she listened.
“But . . . it was a strange scene up there. It was the seventies, so there were a lot of strange scenes, but this one stood
out and made us uncomfortable.”
“Uncomfortable how?” Stevie asked, trying to keep her voice conversational.
“Those girls always came down to town on foot even though they had a van, and they almost never wore shoes. We were all hippies, but those roads were hot in the summer. The guy didn’t come into the store that often, but when he did, the girls all kind of trailed him.
Talking to you now, I’m remembering this more, why I didn’t like it .
. . They were in one time, and one of the girls reached for something.
I think it was a soda. We used to sell natural sodas, made with juice.
And she was thirsty and wanted one. When she reached for it, the guy grabbed her wrist and held it, hard, and for too long.
I remember watching, and he saw me watching and smiled and let go.
Bad vibes. He always made me nervous. The Manson Family had only happened a few years before at that point—all those girls and Charlie Manson.
Murdering all those people. I didn’t like to see situations with just one guy who seemed to have control over girls like that. ”
A picture was emerging, and it was not as happy as the one on the calendar.
“On the day it happened,” Loretta went on, “Blue and Star came down to buy some groceries.”
“Star?”
“Oh, she was called Star. I found out later her real name was Melissa.”
“Melissa Long?”
“Yes,” Loretta said. “Did Helen mention her?”
“Sort of,” Stevie said. “What happened that day?”
“Well, something was weird. They needed a lot of change for the phone, and they were both twitchy. Something was off. The
next morning, we got word that there had been an accident. A green van had gone off the road. The roads up here can be treacherous.
Lots of curves and edges. There was one that has much better guardrails now. At the time it only had a low one. They went
out in their van one morning and went right off the side. The van was obliterated—there was a huge fire. There may have been
a canister of gas in there, that’s what the police thought.”
A text from Janelle blooped through the call:
In a cab! Heading your way!
“They couldn’t identify the bodies,” Loretta said, “but enough pieces of the van came off as it went down for them to figure out the make and model. The local police had seen the van around and knew where they lived, so they went up to the house and found it empty and the van gone. Just as this was going on, a man pulled up to the store and asked if we knew his sister, Melissa. He said she’d just called him and asked him to drive up from Virginia to get her, and he’d been driving all night.
We had to tell him about the accident. The whole thing was horrific. ”
“Melissa,” Stevie said carefully. “You thought she died in the crash?”
“I assumed so. We never knew how many of them were really up there, and then they were all gone. And I’d just seen Blue and
Star, so . . .”
Stevie eyed the printout about Melissa’s remains being found in the woods. If Loretta didn’t know about that, maybe this wasn’t
the time to tell her.
“I’m just glad she made it,” Loretta said. “She got away from that guy. There was something wrong up there at that house.”
“Do you know anything about him? His name? I think that would really help, if we knew who that guy was.”
“Oh, his name . . .” Loretta sighed. “You know, I can’t remember. I knew it. Let me call some of the others who were there
at the co-op. Someone will remember. Oh, I’m so glad. So glad Blue got out of there.”