Page 41 of Dead Man's Hollow
“Appreciate it.”
“The reason I asked about Michelle is she used to tell me she felt guilty about lying to the police.”
“Did she, though? Lie?” Chris pressed him. “We strategically withheld information.”
Rich nods along to this, and some of the other guys join him.
But Brett snorts. “To Michelle, that’s lying. I had to keep reminding her that my cousin would be in hot water, too, because Stacey’s the one who spread the word about the party at Allderdice.”
Rich drains his beer and crumples the can. He tosses it across the room and hits the recycling bin dead on. “You think Michelle’s the one who talked?”
Brett grimaces, then shrugs. “Yeah, maybe.”
“If she did, Lynn had her back,” Andy says. “Those two are still really tight. And Lynn works for that law firm. Probably thinks she’s Erin Brockovich.”
“What are we gonna do about it?” Frank wants to know. “If that podcaster comes around asking questions, I mean?”
“We do what we’ve been doing for the past thirty years—keep our mouths shut,” Rich tells him.
“Yeah, okay. But what if the girls keep talking?”
“I’ll go see Michelle,” Brett volunteers. “I’ll tell her I wanted to warn her that Maisy Farley knows about the fight with Allderdice and remind her we all agreed to keep that a secret. I’ll be able to tell by her reaction if she’s the one who snitched.”
Rich pushes out his lower lip while he considers this idea—Amy calls it his concentration pout. After a minute, he shakes his head. “It’d be better if it came from one of the other girls, not you.” He gives Andy a meaningful look. “Talk to your wife, would you? Have Rachel keep the others in line.”
“You got it,” Andy says.
Rich has had just about enough of this conversation. He turns the music back on, full volume, and pushes back his chair. “I’m getting another beer, and then let’s play some cards already. Anybody else need a brewski?”
This group of guys has had Rich’s back for thirty years. They won’t let him down now, not after all this time. He tells himself this as he crosses the man cave to the fridge in the corner. Over the years, he’s told himself some version of this more times than he can count. And he’s always been right. This time, though, he’s not sure he believes it.
ChapterTwenty-Two
Transcript of “The Farley Files Podcast Season Two:
Dead Man’s Hollow—The Disappearance of Heather Ryan”
Episode 2: The Pink Pager
Kristy Ryan Kaminski, the youngest of the four Ryan sisters is, in appearance and temperament, the outlier. While Diana and Amy are tall, talkative brunettes, Kristy is a slight, fair-haired woman who listens more than she speaks. From photographs and her sisters’ stories, it seems Heather Ryan resembled her two older sisters. The three oldest Ryan girls inherited their mother’s personality and their father’s coloring and height; Kristy, the reverse.
Eight years younger than Heather, quiet Kristy was the observant one in the Ryan household. She watched and filed away everything her older sisters did and said, especially Heather. By all accounts, young Kristy might’ve been as quiet as a lamb, but she never missed a trick.
Kristy, a systems engineer who constructs crossword puzzles in her free time, lives with her husband, Nick, and their two young sons, Jay and Theo, in a neighborhood just minutes away from the development where her sister Amy lives. The Kaminski family’s schedule is packed with extracurricular activities for the boys and, like any home where both parents work full time, time is tight. She agreed to talk with me at her home while her kids were at baseball practice with their father.
MAISY: Did you listen to Diana’s interview last week, Kristy?
KRISTY: Of course.
MAISY: She said it was almost as though you grew up as an only child because of the difference in age between you and your three older sisters. Was that your experience?
KRISTY: I think that’s right. There was a big gap between us. Diana’s twelve years older than me, and Amy’s a decade older. They were more like aunts than sisters. And then, after Heather disappeared and our mom was so depressed, Diana really became a second mother to me and to Amy, but especially me. So I think the way she characterized it is fair. We weren’t close. I loved them and still do. But we didn’t have much in common, and we had very different family life experiences. We’re closer now, though.
MAISY: But despite the eight years between you and Heather, you knew things about her Diana and Amy didn’t.
KRISTY: Are you talking about the pager?
When I first met with the Ryan sisters to discuss diving into Heather’s disappearance during this season of the podcast, Kristy mentioned that Heather had a pager. This fact was not known to either of her older sisters, both of whom were surprised to learn that Heather had, in defiance of family rules, rented a pager.
