Hattie felt the blood rushing to her cheeks. “I don’t know…”
“I swear.”
“Okay,” Hattie said, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly. “My sophomore year, my parents broke up, and there was a scandal. My mother moved down to Florida, but I wanted to stay in Savannah. So I moved in with my friend Cass’s family. It was an incredibly painful time for me.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I had kind of a rough time of it. Some girls that I thought were my friends, not Cass, but some others—they just turned their backs on me. And Mrs. Ragan got what I was going through. I’d stop by her classroom after school, while she was grading papers, and we’d talk. A couple times, we walked over to the 7-Eleven—the one on Drayton Street—and we bought Cokes and sat in the square and talked.”
“And that helped?”
Hattie nodded. “She told me everybody goes through bad stuff. Every family has secrets—ugly secrets. And she told me it wasn’t my fault. Here’s the thing she said to me that I’ve never forgotten. ‘Don’t look over your shoulder. The past is past. Just try to get through it, and give yourself some grace.’”
Molly tapped her pen thoughtfully. “I wonder what kind of secrets Lanier had?”
“I wonder now too. At the time, I was too self-involved to ask. I guess I thought she was so cool, she must have her own life all figured out.”
Molly nodded and wrote something in her notebook. “Did she talk to you girls about her personal life?”
“She had a picture of her husband and her little girl on her desk. She’d tell us cute stories about the stuff Emma said.”
“What about her husband? The football coach. Did she talk about him a lot?”
Hattie smoothed the plans out with her hands. “Sometimes. I’m guessing you’ve heard those old stories about her having a secret boyfriend? There were all kinds of rumors back then—that she’d run away with another man, that Coach was having an affair and she found out so he killed her and tossed her body in the marsh. You wouldn’t believe all the gruesome stories repressed Catholic schoolgirls came up with.”
“Sure I would. I went to an all-girls parochial school in Baltimore, and then to college at Holy Cross.” Molly chewed on the cap of her pen for a moment. “I practically lettered in sexual repression. Let me ask you this. Did you ever hear any rumors that Lanier was having an affair with a high school kid?”
“What?” Hattie’s hand shot out and knocked over a half-full Styrofoam cup of coffee, spilling the tepid liquid onto the plans. She grabbed a painter’s rag and began mopping up the mess. “Where’d you hear something like that?”
“I did a piece for the paper about the tenth anniversary of the disappearance, back in 2015, which prompted an anonymous call from a woman who claimed that at the time she vanished, Lanier was sleeping with the woman’s high school boyfriend—who was on Frank’s football team.”
“Oh my God,” Hattie said. “That’s just … so gross. I mean, yeah, I guess it was believable that she could have been sleeping with another man—but a high school kid? No. I never got that cougar vibe from Mrs. Ragan. No. Definitely not. Yuck.”
Molly laughed. “Now you really do sound like a Catholic schoolgirl. But stop and think about it for a minute. Lanier Ragan was only twenty-five. If she was having an affair with a high school kid, it wouldn’t have been that big an age difference. Maybe only six or seven years, if the guy was a senior. I’ve done my research. Frank Ragan was ten years older than Lanier. They met and started dating while she was a junior at Ole Miss and he was an athletic trainer.”
“I never knew that,” Hattie admitted. “Back in the day, we all thought he was incredibly hot. They were so cute together.”
“And he was married when they met,” Molly said. “He and Lanier got married the week after she graduated from Ole Miss.”
“So much for Mr. and Mrs. All America,” Hattie said with a sigh. “I don’t know why, but this makes me so incredibly sad all over again.”
“It might not be true,” Molly cautioned. “The caller wouldn’t give me her name, or the boyfriend’s name. I made some cautious inquiries at the time, but nothing ever came of it, which is why I dropped it. But now…”
“Hattie?” Lisa popped her head into the kitchen doorway. “We need you in makeup.”