Tomorrow Never Came
A story about a small-town murder and its aftermath.
Sometimes it was a certain smell, a slant of light, that brought her back to Wells, Wyoming on June 10, 2000, the day before her best friend, Victoria Hayes, disappeared. At any one time, Wells never contained more than 2,000 souls. These souls did simple jobs like farmhand, cashier, truck driver, mail carrier. It would have been a fantasy for Trollope, obsessed as he was with rural mail routes. He could have driven from one end of Wells to the other in less than ten minutes, talked to every person.
It was the sort of community where everyone greeted one another by name. There was a main drag, actually called Main Street, on which there was a grocery store, a post office, a police station, a diner, and a theater with a neon marquee. The houses were small, with neatly kept yards, on wide streets lined with cottonwoods. Beyond the last street, where Victoria used to live, the town abruptly stopped and became fields. Wide, empty fields of fescue and orchardgrass. And beyond, the shadowy blue Bighorn Mountains.
“Tell me about Paul,” said Molly McBride, turning on her electronic recorder. She was a reporter from New York City who’d called up Sarah Thun, Victoria’s best friend, wanting to do a podcast on the murder. Sarah immediately distrusted Molly, with her pointy high heels and slightly patronizing voice, but she was so heartened that someone was interested in Victoria’s story that she’d agreed to the interview.
Paul. Molly was referring to Paul Edward Sherman, Victoria’s killer. Nobody ever called him Paul; he was always Eddie. But Sarah didn’t want to talk about Eddie right now. What nobody ever wanted to talk about was the victim. So Sarah talked about her. A real person who’d once had a real life.
Her best friend never liked to be called “Tori” or “Vicky.” Always Victoria, whose name stood out in a sea of Susans and Jennys. At sixteen, she was barely five feet tall and weighed 90 pounds. The sort of girl who’d be at the top of the cheerleading pyramid, had she been into that sort of thing.
Sarah and Victoria had known each other since they were in kindergarten and had been inseparable ever since. In high school, they’d sunbathed on the football field, reading Hemingway and Tolstoy and de Maupassant, pretending they were in France or Russia — anywhere but Wells, Wyoming.
Victoria was smart, smarter than Sarah, but she didn’t put the kind of effort Sarah did into her schoolwork. Though she always talked about going off to college and putting Wells in her rearview mirror, she never truly believed she’d get out. It was the sort of inertia that permeated the entire town. In the words of their English teacher, So much space but nowhere to go.
On her mother’s side, Victoria was a fourth-generation Wellsian. She didn’t know her father, just as her two younger brothers didn’t know their fathers either. They lived in a house on the edge of town with their grandmother. Sarah hated going to that house. The grandmother was one of those old Presbyterian ladies you couldn’t be yourself around. And the house itself reminded her of an antique store, with Depression-era appliances and furniture. Now, Sarah imagined, it was more of a museum, Victoria’s room restored to the state it was in before the police had torn it apart, then never disturbed again.
Though Sarah often didn’t admit it, she’d been jealous of Victoria. Her friend wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she had the look of someone who belonged in a different time and place. Lots of boys were interested in her, mostly because she didn’t care very much about them. She didn’t “go steady” with anyone; rather, she engaged in a series of flirtations, cutting class and sneaking off to make out with them under the bleachers. Because Victoria told her everything, Sarah knew she was still a virgin.
And then there was Eddie. So different from the greaser-type guys Victoria normally went for. Eddie Sherman was a cowboy. Six-foot-three, slender as a pole, with a shiny belt buckle and boots he cleaned daily to keep them looking brand-new. He wasn’t from around here, you could tell by his Oklahoma twang. It wasn’t exactly clear what had brought him to Wells, or how he was employed; some said he managed a ranch, others said he sold farm equipment. There was an edge about him, which Victoria was drawn to, the way he sometimes seemed to be in love with her, while other times he couldn’t have cared less. Unlike the cowboys they were used to, Eddie could quote literature, was often seen carrying a tattered copy of The Grapes of Wrath. Victoria thought he was sensitive and misunderstood. But Sarah saw him differently; she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was that bothered her. “Creepy” is how she described him to Molly McBride. “Like, what did a 21-year-old guy want with a 16-year-old girl?”
The more time Victoria spent with Eddie, the less time she spent with Sarah. Her friend filled her diary — its cover a reproduction of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring — with fantasies about him, trying on his name like a summer dress: Victoria Lynne Sherman. When Sarah pictured that diary, she was never able to see it as anything other than State’s Exhibit #81, in a clear baggie.
Paul Edward Sherman. Victoria’s killer. “Isn’t it strange,” Sarah told Molly, “the way we say that? As if the killer belongs to the victim.”
Molly nodded, making an annotation in her notebook. “He’s the only thing she owns now.” Sarah imagined her reciting that line in the podcast, how critics would praise it as some kind of groundbreaking insight.
Had she been alive today, Victoria Hayes would have been 36 years old. Perhaps she would have been married with a family of her own. Or perhaps she would have a PhD, be a professor of comparative literature. Who knew? When someone dies young, their life is all possibility, open questions.
It occurred to Sarah that Victoria would never hold a smartphone in her hands. Had no idea that Bill Clinton was no longer president. Or that the Twin Towers had fallen. For Victoria Hayes, the world ended on June 11, 2000.
Molly put down her pen, leaned over the table conspiratorially. “What do you know about the other murders?”
Sarah frowned. “What other murders?”
The look on Molly’s face was one of genuine surprise. “You didn’t know? Victoria wasn’t Paul’s first victim. At least, that’s our theory.” She reached into her purse and pulled out her tablet and turned it toward Sarah. Autopsy photos. Where had she gotten these? Had she raided some evidence room?
Sarah leaned forward to look at them, the pallid skin, the lividity marks where the blood had settled after death. She felt the bile rise in her throat. Molly pointed. “Monica Elaine Freer, Pawhuska, Oklahoma, age 17, December 2, 1996.” That meant Eddie had killed when he was still a teenager himself, the same age as the victim. “Brittany Lee Byrnes, Galveston, Texas, age 18, March 14, 1999.” There were two others. The marks on their necks, the lividity patterns, were exactly like Victoria’s. All had been raped and strangled. There was a fifth body found in an abandoned silver mine. Molly didn’t have a picture of that one, her body was so decomposed they’d had to identify her from dental records.
And there Sarah was again, in Wells, on the day of Victoria’s disappearance. Her friend didn’t show up for school that day, which was extremely unusual for her. Victoria had missed school only one day in the entire time Sarah had known her, the day she’d had her wisdom teeth out.
In those days, no one had cell phones, so during her lunch period, Sarah called the house. No one answered, also highly unusual. The grandmother always answered, even if it was just to huff and put Victoria on the phone. For a moment, she worried that the whole family had disappeared, like on Unsolved Mysteries. But no, they were at the police station making a missing person’s report. Sarah remembered the sleepless nights when everyone went out looking for her, Mag-Lites in hand. Outwardly, Eddie appeared to be taking it as seriously as the rest of them, but she knew for him it was only a lark, something more interesting to do than clean his fingernails with a pocketknife.
Then the body was discovered buried in a pasture some hundred and fifty miles south of Wells; a rancher’s teenage son had called it in. People then began coming out of the woodwork, the guy who said he’d spotted Eddie’s truck on that route on the night in question. How quickly Eddie had lawyered up, proclaimed his innocence.
Sarah remembered being called in to the police station. The smell of stale coffee, fingerprint ink. Being questioned by Ted Norton, the father of her brother’s best friend Sam, as though she were a suspect. She was asked about dates, times, places. The last time she’d seen Victoria, the exact details of their conversation. The more Detective Norton asked her to clarify, the murkier the timeline became, until she could no longer trust her own memory.
The State came up with its own timeline anyway, its own map, Eddie’s locations demarcated with pushpins. She remembered the prosecutor, a fat man who kept repeating “rye-gor mortis.” And Eddie’s big-city attorney, the way she called him “Mr. Sherman,” as though he was someone who deserved respect. Yes, it was his semen in the victim’s body, the attorney argued. Yes, she was underage. At most he’d committed statutory rape, but that didn’t make him a murderer. His motive? None. He’d loved her.
Throughout the trial it was impossible to tell what he was thinking, he wore an absolute poker face. The only thing that gave him away were his dark eyes, how they took in every detail as he made copious notes on a legal pad. You could tell he loved the attention.
The jury deliberated for three days. He showed no reaction when the foreman read the guilty verdict.
He was now at the penitentiary in Rawlins, in a cell for 23 hours a day. Besides the residents of Wells, no one ever thought about State of Wyoming v. Paul Edward Sherman — that is, until Molly McBride got involved. She told Sarah he was now a jailhouse lawyer, the foremost expert on his own case. He was working on getting his conviction vacated, convincing the appellate court that he deserved a new trial.
It was then she knew that Molly’s interest in this case wasn’t Victoria; it was Eddie. That smile. She was like a girl with a crush, thinking she’d found the next Ted Bundy. On her tablet Molly showed her a recent photo of him. Some men got old and haggard-looking after they’d been convicted, but prison seemed to suit Eddie. At 41, he still seemed young. He was no longer the beanpole she remembered; he’d put on a good amount of weight and muscle. Molly said he was constantly speaking and writing, giving interviews, he even had an online following. It bothered Sarah that he was engaged in all this activity, still had a voice, while her friend had none.
“I’m going down to talk to Paul on Monday,” said Molly. Paul. No doubt they’d been corresponding, were already on a first-name basis.
There was no convincing Molly that her new friend was a piece of human garbage. She wanted to tell the reporter about the hell the Hayes family had been through. Victoria’s mother had attempted suicide with a bottle of Xanax. She’d lived, but was never the same. One of Victoria’s brothers had joined the Army; the other had left town. Rumor had it he was now in Coeur d’Alene, though no one had laid eyes on him in almost two decades.
The town itself also had never been the same. Wells suddenly seemed as large as a continent. No one trusted anyone anymore. Doors were now locked at night. There were no more lingering breakfasts in the diner; gone were the familiar smells of newspaper ink and dark roast. People got their coffee to go now. Relationships were brief, transactional.
Molly talked about all the evidence that hadn’t been DNA-tested. All the advances in forensic technology since 2000. “When Paul gets a new trial, will you testify?” she said.
When, not if. So confident he would prevail. Sarah didn’t know if she could face that man again in court. To look him in the eye, to point to him. To clarify, you are pointing at the defendant, Mr. Sherman. But she knew she had to. For Victoria.
“What about those other murders?” she said. Slick as he was, even if he were granted a new trial, there was no way he could talk himself out of those.
Molly smiled, clicking off the recorder. “We’ll save that for tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. Wasn’t that what Victoria had said to her on June 10 before going off to meet Eddie? I’ll see you tomorrow. And then it was a week. And then twenty years.
From the cafe on Main Street, she walked out to the cemetery on the other side of town. It wasn’t often she made the trip from Laramie up to Wells, and she felt guilty about it, but today she sat by her friend’s grave a long time. As she brushed away the long grass so she could see the stone, she remembered a line by Whitman, the beautiful uncut hair of graves. A lock of dark hair, streaked blonde in the style so popular in those days, falling into Victoria’s eyes.
“For two girls who wanted to see the world,” she whispered, “we didn’t get very far, did we?”
