And Never Let Her Go (3 page)

I
T
was sometime after midnight that first night when Colonel Alan Ellingsworth, the superintendent of the Delaware State Police, was notified that one of Governor Carper's secretaries had apparently vanished. Ellingsworth phoned Lieutenant Mark Daniels at home and asked him to respond to 1718 Washington Street to assist the Wilmington Police Department in whatever capacity might be needed.

Daniels was a nineteen-year veteran of the Delaware State Police and was currently the administrative lieutenant in their Criminal Investigative Division in New Castle County. He and DSP officer Steven Montague joined Wilmington detective Robert Donovan at Anne Marie Fahey's apartment.

It was apparent that the missing woman's sister and her friends were terribly worried. Some people vanish on a whim, but this didn't sound like that kind of a disappearance. The investigators listened carefully as Kathleen Fahey-Hosey, Mike Scanlan, Jill Morrison, and the Columbuses reviewed their last contact with Anne Marie. What it came down to was that no one had actually seen or talked to her since Thursday afternoon.

Jill and Ginny said that Anne Marie had worked in the governor's office from 7:30
A.M.
to 4:30
P.M.
“She had an appointment with her psychiatrist at five,” Jill explained. “And she was going to take Friday off.”

Jill recalled that Anne Marie had been in good spirits, and was looking forward to Friday. She was going to have a day all to herself, be babied with a pedicure and a manicure, and then take a book to Valley Garden Park and just relax.

If Anne Marie had special plans for Thursday night, none of the witnesses knew about them. Lieutenant Daniels asked if anyone had listened to the messages on Anne Marie's phone.

Jill told him that she and Anne Marie both had Bell Atlantic's
“Answer Call” on their phones that recorded incoming messages. When Kathleen had picked up Annie's phone, she heard a steady beep-beep-beep, and Jill said that meant there were waiting messages.

“I know her code,” Jill said. Daniels nodded, and Jill punched in Anne Marie's code so the detectives could listen to incoming messages. Maybe the answer lay there, although it seemed an intrusion, once more, into her privacy—the privacy that meant so much to her.

The outgoing message was so familiar to most of the people in the room. Now, hearing Anne Marie's voice with her lilting greeting made their hearts skip a beat. They listened, wanting to find answers but afraid of what they might hear.

The first four messages had come in before they lost touch with her. The others only confirmed how long she had been gone. They had begun on Thursday night, June 27, 1996.

R
ECORDER
: Fifth saved message.

M
ICHAEL
S
CANLAN
: Hey, Annie, remember me? I'm going to a little cookout thing for our interns. I'll be home around nine. Give me a holler. I'll talk to you when I get home. Thanks. Bye.

R
ECORDER
: Sixth saved message.

M
ICHAEL
S
CANLAN
: Hey, Annie, it's almost nine-thirty and a couple of us are headed out to Kid Shelleen's on the way home. I wanted to know if you wanted to step over and join us. I will call you before we head over there and see if you are back.

R
ECORDER
: Seventh saved message.

M
ICHAEL
S
CANLAN
: Hey, Annie, we're headed over to Kid Shelleen's right now and it's about a quarter to ten, so if you could stop by, that would be awesome. If not, I'll talk to you later. Bye.

R
ECORDER
: Eighth saved message.

M
ICHAEL
S
CANLAN
: Hi, Annie, this is Mike calling. It's around two-fifteen
[Friday].
Give me a call. . . . Let me know what you're up to? See ya.

R
ECORDER
: Ninth saved message.

E
ILEEN
W
ILLIAMS
: Hi, Annie. It's Ei. I was just calling. It's Friday around three-thirty. I was calling to see what you were doing tonight. I thought maybe we could get together. Give me a call? Bye.

R
ECORDER
: Tenth saved message.

J
ILL
M
ORRISON
: Hey, girl, give me a call when you get in? I'm at work right now at three after eleven
[Saturday morning].
I'll probably be here until one, and then I'll be home afterward. I need to ask you a question. Thanks. Bye.

R
ECORDER
: Eleventh saved message.

M
ICHAEL
S
CANLAN
: Hey, Annie. It's Mike. It's Saturday morning. Give me a call. Bye.

R
ECORDER
: Twelfth saved message.

K
ATHLEEN
F
AHEY
-H
OSEY
: Hi, Anne. It's Kathleen. Four o'clock on Saturday. When you come back from Robert and Susan's tonight, please bring the boys' sneakers? I forgot to bring them home today and poor Brendan has no shoes. But hold on. Kevin wants to say Hi. Say Hi—

K
EVIN
H
OSEY
[small voice]:
Bye. Love you.

R
ECORDER
: Thirteenth saved message.

S
USAN
F
AHEY
: Annie, it's me. Calling to talk to you about tonight, but if I missed you, I will just talk to you when you guys come up. It's five o'clock. Five after five. Bye.

R
ECORDER
: Fourteenth saved message.

Click [hang up].

R
ECORDER
: Fifteenth saved message.

G
INNY
C
OLUMBUS
: Hey, Annie. It's me. I need to talk to you. Please call me as soon as you get this message.
[Gives her number]
Thanks. Bye.

R
ECORDER
: Sixteenth saved message.

S
USAN
F
AHEY
: Annie, it's Saturday at eleven
P.M.
Give us a call. Bye.

The last call had been only two-and-a-half hours ago. And none of the messages needed explaining to the group listening. “Anne Marie would have called back,” Jill said. “She always listened to her messages immediately, and she always called you back.”

Pain has an element of blank—
It cannot recollect
When it began—or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself—
Its infinite realms contain
Its past—enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

E
MILY
D
ICKINSON

W
ILMINGTON RESIDENTS
like to say that everyone who lives there is connected by only
three
degrees of separation, and it's true. If everyone in town doesn't actually know everyone else, they are at least related by marriage, employment, or coincidence. It would seem that keeping a secret in Wilmington would be akin to whispering it to a tabloid reporter, and yet deep and complicated clandestine relationships
have
survived Wilmington's sharpest eyes.

Perhaps because they know one another so well, Wilmingtonians can be initially standoffish to strangers, who don't fit into their grapevine of interconnected relationships. To truly belong, one has to be born and bred in Delaware and stay there until, as the natives say, “Mealey's carries you out.” For many neighborhoods, Mealey's is the funeral parlor of choice.

The city's motto is carved into a sign on Delaware Avenue:
WELCOME TO WILMINGTON
,
A PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY
, a slogan that is either wildly ambiguous or optimistic. Wilmington is burnished with its patina of history, rife with somebodies who have made names for themselves.

Wilmington is almost as old as America itself, the largest city in a state so small that it has only three counties, a state 110 miles long and not much more than thirty-five miles across at its widest point. Delaware's land area is 1,982 square miles (compared to Montana's
145,556). But Delaware was the very
first
state to enter the Union—on December 7, 1787—and it was a well-established region by then. It is an insular and even provincial state, fiercely proud. It always has been.

Delaware is a melting pot of cultures and origins, which is fitting for the first state. Sailing under the Dutch flag, Henry Hudson discovered Delaware in 1609, but the Swedes took over, at least temporarily, in 1638. England laid claim to Delaware three decades later and transferred its three counties to William Penn in 1682. Delaware fought as a separate state in the Revolutionary War, and although it was a slave state, it never seceded from the Union in the Civil War. There is, of course, a powerful French influence that permeates the state. In 1802, Eleuthère Irénée du Pont built a little gunpowder mill close by the shores of the Brandywine Creek, planting the first seed of a chemical industrial empire that would define Delaware ever after, bringing it prosperity and security.

Wilmington is a beautiful city, suspended between early-day history and the year 2000. It has block after block of row houses, most of them painted brick, with colorfully contrasting doors. Large private homes are built of brick or stone and wood, with wide porches, and the somewhat narrow streets are shadowy tunnels between grand old trees. The trees and bushes and houses—and even some mammoth rocks—have all been there so long that a feeling of permanence pervades everything.

Situated on Interstate 95 between the metropolises of Philadelphia and Baltimore, Wilmington has the sense of a city far larger than it really is; its population never topped a hundred thousand, and the race riots in 1968 blunted its growth when the national guard occupied the city for nine months. Since then, the population has steadily but inexorably dropped, to under seventy thousand today. The land in Wilmington is divided into both neighborhoods and areas that are almost towns in themselves. There is Brandywine Hundred, Mill Creek Hundred, Christiana Hundred; some say the names come from Revolutionary War days and signify that the regions could be counted on to muster a hundred men to fight. Other natives say it is only a geographical boundary.

Although Dover is the state's capital, Wilmington is its heart and blood supply, laced with waterways—the Delaware River, the Brandywine Creek, the Christina River, and the Red Clay Creek—and dotted with swaths of parkland. Brandywine Creek even divides the strata of society in Wilmington, with everything
west
of the
creek north of Wilmington considered far more desirable. This is the Chateau Country where the du Ponts have their estates.

Cemeteries older than memory, with antiquated tombstones, rest where the city has grown around them. Professional offices are located in skyscrapers and in two-hundred-year-old one-story buildings, juxtaposed in the same block.

Wilmington
looks
like a major city. The magnificent Hotel du Pont, called simply “the hotel” by natives, takes up an entire block and challenges any hotel in America for elegance. The wind roars between narrow canyons created by the soaring downtown buildings that have sprung up in the last quarter century, and patriot Caesar Rodney rides forever atop his faithful horse in the square named for him in front of the grand hotel, while horseless and carless residents wait for buses beneath Rodney Square's flowering trees. Across another street, the Daniel Herrmann Courthouse fills its own block. In the late nineties, three major criminal proceedings would draw so many spectators, reporters, and photographers that even that huge courthouse would be crammed to its marble walls.

D
ESPITE
the early Dutch, Swedish, and English settlers, Delaware today has as much Irish and Italian ethnicity as anything else. The tremendous success of the du Ponts opened doors to immigrants looking for a better life, and boom followed boom. The du Ponts (who have since capitalized the
D:
DuPont for the company) kept their workers from feeling the recessions that hit other parts of America. None of their employees had to worry about health care. Until the late 1970s they also owned both of the state's daily newspapers—the
Evening Journal
and the
Morning News.
They founded the Delaware Trust Company and the Wilmington Trust Company, and they controlled high society. It was a cradle-to-grave security blanket. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. was known as “the company,” and few Delawareans minded that almost everything stemmed from that source or that the du Ponts controlled where they stood on the economic or social ladder. Membership in the Wilmington Country Club came only with a tap on the shoulder from the company. It remains the most exclusive club in Delaware, and members are held to certain uncompromising standards. One commercial enterprise that came close to DuPont was Bancroft Mills.

Downtown Wilmington was the center of the world for business and shopping, before shopping malls and suburban sprawl took over and left even the grand old Wanamaker's department store an empty shell. After the Second World War, Wilmington changed,
along with the rest of the country; cities all over America did. And some families would bloom while others faded.

T
HE
Irish and the Italians contributed greatly to the abundant traditions that make Wilmington such a remarkably alive city, full of celebration and mourning, passion and rumor. The annual St. Anthony's festival in June attracts almost everyone in the city; there they eat meatball sandwiches, sausage and greens, drink beer and wine, listen to music, and catch up with old friends. It is a festival where they can go every year and know they will find people they have lost touch with.

The Friends of Ireland St. Patrick's Day dinner is another big draw, although it's considerably more sedate. In the fifties, Lucy and Walter Brady and their friends wanted to change the stereotyped image of the Irish as mill hands and blue-collar workers who spent St. Patrick's Day sitting in bars and getting drunk. The Bradys initiated the grand St. Patrick's Day dinner, an opulent feast in the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel du Pont. The local Catholic and Episcopal bishops, along with the governor of Delaware, the mayor of Wilmington, and every other important political figure, were present. Dancers from the McAleer School of Irish Dance entertained a crowd dressed in their finest.