Because You Loved Me. M. William Phelps
Nicole was concerned, Billy filled a void. He showered her with a love she had never received from her father. Besides what Jeanne had given Nicole, it was the first time the child felt unconditional love. Every teenager, at some point, goes through a “no one understands me” stage. For Nicole, Billy happened to walk into her life at a time when she was experiencing that uncertainty of adolescence.
But in the reality of the situation, what Billy and Nicole had wasn’t love at all. In truth, during the fifteen months they had dated, they had seen each other in person only four or five times. Here they were, driving around Nashua now on the evening before Billy was to return home, wondering how they were going to get along without each other.
“What are we going to do?” Nicole asked Billy at some point.
Billy just looked at her.
“What?” Nicole wondered.
“You know,” Billy said.
Among other options, they had discussed running away. Vermont maybe. Niagara Falls, in upstate New York. Anywhere but Nashua.
“I don’t know, Billy.”
Chris McGowan wasn’t thinking about anything in particular as he drove home from work on the evening of August 6. It was another Wednesday night in Nashua. Pizza with Jeanne and the kids sounded great. Maybe some television afterward. Then perhaps a board game and walk under the stars before retiring to bed.
The simple life. How Chris loved it—and with Jeanne by his side, the ideal woman in so many ways, he felt what he and Jeanne shared could only grow as time passed. This situation with Billy and Nicole, the one that seemed to be consuming Jeanne over the past few months, escalating only recently, was going to resolve itself. Chris was sure of it. Teen love. Everybody went through it. Even Nicole’s stepsister, twenty-four-year-old Amybeth Kasinskas, viewed Billy (whom she had never met) and Nicole’s love affair in general as nothing more than one of dozens Nicole was going to have throughout her teenage years.
“She told me that she had a boyfriend,” Amybeth later told a local reporter, “I didn’t think too much of it because she’s a teenager, and teenagers have new boyfriends every two weeks.” Moreover, like everyone else, Amybeth adored her stepmother, adding that Jeanne was “a very compassionate person. She always reached out to anybody, no matter what. She took care of her kids…[and] worked herself to the bone.”
“Jeannie was, how can I say it, she was everything to a lot of people,” added Chris. “She lived to help other people. She made so many people happy.”
Somewhere near 5:30 P.M., Chris pulled into his driveway and parked. All he needed to do was run in, rummage through his mail, check his e-mail, throw an overnight bag together and head out to Jeanne’s. For the next two hours, Chris was going to be alone, no one to verify (or back up) his whereabouts.
In a certain commendable way, one could say Chris McGowan had lived a rather private life up until the day he met Jeanne Dominico. Chris never married. Until Jeanne walked into his life, he embodied the term “bachelor” at a time when the word seemed to be one more forgotten piece of 1970s nostalgia. Cupid hadn’t hit Chris. Jeanne had been a blessing, yes. But Chris admitted his love life up until the day he met Jeanne was plagued by shortcomings, lies and the unpredictable, which hardened his awareness and trust of the opposite sex.
During the mid-1980s, shortly after Chris returned to Nashua following some years in New Jersey working for his uncle, he met a woman who seemed to be, as he later described, “the one.” She was outgoing, pretty, quiet, but at the same time a little reserved, which Chris wrote off as shyness. He said he knew she had an ex-husband and two children, and that the state had taken her children from her, but he never pushed the issue. They had been dating for years. He figured he knew everything there was to know about the woman, and if there was something, in his words, “big” she needed to discuss, she would have told him by that point in their relationship.
On New Year’s Eve, four years to the day they had started dating, the woman began talking about her life before she met Chris. At first, Chris felt as if she was opening up. He viewed the talk as intimacy. A few days before, he had gone out and spent “upwards of two thousand dollars on jewelry and gifts” for the woman to “celebrate [their] relationship,” he said.
“It was not like we were gonna get married,” recalled Chris, “but we were headed in that direction.”
The gifts were a celebration of his love for the woman. But he also wanted to nudge her into understanding that he was serious about the relationship. He was showing affection, admiration. Diamonds, he knew, were a way to accomplish that task.
After Chris gave the woman the gifts, she turned to him and said, “This is so nice of you, Chris. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He felt good about being able to make her happy.
“Listen,” she said, “there’s something I need to tell you….”
Chris was puzzled. “What’s up?”
“Well, you know I have two sons, right?”
“Yeah…and—”
“Well, to be honest, I also have a daughter as well.”
Chris sat back. Now he was entirely confused. “I expected at that moment her daughter to walk in the door or something. It was so strange.” He felt he was being set up in some way, like there was this enormous family secret he had been part of but had not known, and the woman was finally letting him in on it.
“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” said Chris. “What are you talking about?”
“My ex-husband and I,” she said, “we kind of spent some time in prison.”
You’ve got to be kidding me. “You ‘kind of’ spent some time in prison?” asked Chris. “For what?”
“Manslaughter.”
“You waited four years and you tell me this now?” Chris said as he got up and walked toward the door. “You’re incredible.”
With one hand on the doorknob, Chris stared at the woman.
“Do you still want to go out?” she asked.
Chris put his head in hands. Then, “It’s gonna take some time for me to decipher this.”
With that, he left her apartment and never saw the woman again.
CHAPTER 6
After freshening up, Chris grabbed some clean clothes and packed them into a bag. According to what he later said, it was pushing 7:00 P.M. by that point, so he decided to telephone Jeanne to see if there was something she needed. (Chris McGowan’s telephone records later backed up the time of the call.)
Six rings later, Chris hung up the telephone. She’s probably putting the dog out or taking him for a walk.
It wasn’t unlike Jeanne not to answer her telephone. Jeanne wasn’t one to sit still; she favored doing things constantly to keep herself busy, as opposed to hanging around the house waiting for the kids to come home. Stay busy, Jeanne always said. Stay active. Stay focused. “Healthy heart, healthy mind.”
Jeanne’s only son, Drew, was at a friend’s house. According to a note left on the kitchen counter, Billy and Nicole were at Leda Lanes, a local bowling alley, playing pool. “Jeanne, don’t 4 get!!…We will probably also go to Bruster’s (an ice cream shop about a quarter mile from Jeanne’s house) (Nicole’s idea)…,” Billy wrote, signing the note for the both of them.
As a postscript to the brief note, Billy said if Jeanne needed to find the two of them, she should call his cell phone. He thanked Jeanne “4 the ice cream” in the freezer and signed, “Love, Billy & Nicole. PS: Have Chris come over for a Pictionary rematch.”
Like Billy and Nicole’s absence from the house, the note wasn’t out of the ordinary. Nicole was good about telling