Authorities examined the bridge and searched the river but McGammon’s body was never found. Police recovered the rope on which they found traces of his DNA but weeks later, after several young women came forward with accusations of rape and abuse, any sympathy for his assumed unfortunate death was leveled. The Central University music department even took down the memorial plaque they had placed outside of his former office. To this day he is still a Missing Person.
I graduated from college four years later, Aaron the year before. I opened my own piano studio, still playing gigs and benefits. Aaron went to graduate school and eventually took over the head trumpet position at Central University.
Although Aaron and I spoke briefly about McGammon after his disappearance, and Aaron finally understood what I had seen in the ravine (a disturbed man doing disturbing things to someone), I never told him about Vicki, Tatum, or Highbridge. I felt that it would have been too much. He would never fully understand.
I didn’t go back to counseling, but during my years in college I would often visit Dr. Lane. He retired after my senior year. Last thing that I heard, he was growing older and greyer with his wife in a bungalow off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Reagan dropped out her senior year when she got an opportunity to audition for an Off Broadway show in New York. She was cast as part of the company and a year later, when the lead actress broke her leg, moved into the lead role. Aaron, Grant, and I went to see her one weekend. She was perfect.
Grant continued to model, locally and, finally, in Los Angeles where he moved two years after graduation. I didn’t have much contact with him after that, though Reagan made sure to keep in touch with him. Five years after he moved out west, word came back that he had contracted HIV. He died a year later. Reagan came home for the funeral, as did Vicki. She was plump and happy, married with twin boys. We all wept, together and privately, for weeks. Reagan never seemed to get over losing our friend. Vicki and I never spoke of the Highbridge incident.
Three months after Grant's death, I was sitting in a hair parlor when I flipped open a magazine to a Guess clothing ad. There was Grant, dressed to the nines, smiling back at me. Standing next to him, tall and gorgeous, head thrown back and laughing, was Stephania. I tore the page out of the magazine, much to the dismay of the salon host, and mailed it to Reagan the next day.
Life went on, soulbreaking at times, amazingly beautiful at others.
After the bridge, I never saw or heard from Tatum again. I tried to look her up, but came up with nothing. It was if she was an apparition that never really existed. I'm sure she wanted it that way.
On September 25, when I was 44 years old, I had cytoreductive surgery to remove the cancer from my ovaries. It was successful. A year later, Aaron and I adopted an 11-year old boy named Lee.
Now as I sit here, reading over the secret story I started two years ago, I feel nothing but grateful.
I survived, just as we all try to do. Sometimes survival is ugly. Sometimes we do things that it takes years to forgive ourselves for. Perhaps we never forgive ourselves. But in the meantime, life goes on.
But along the way, if we can comfort those who are hurting, if we can save others so that they themselves can share that love, then we have been a success.
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If you loved “Silent Key,” don’t miss “Awakening: Book One of The Thin” by Erin Leland Tuttle.
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Elcie Lee can't go back to sleep, can't go back to who she was and what she did not know before that night in the old village hotel. Perhaps she called these manifestations through The Thin in a moment of desperation. Or maybe they have been waiting for her to come along. All she knows is that she is in a race to find out who or what they are -- indeed who or what she herself may be. Pursued by sinister beings, both human and otherwise, if Elcie does not uncover the secrets of her own past in time, she will be the next to disappear.
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