Green River, Running Red Read online

“I’d meet her there to rescue her by going for walks with her for hours. She said some of the counselors had made fairly sleazy advances, but, of course, her self-esteem was so low that she thought it was something she had done that made them do that.” When the place was investigated for suspicion of sexual abuse and drugs, it was closed down.

  Bridget sometimes went to a kind of hobo jungle in an overgrown lot close to downtown Bellevue. Teens would gather there and live in their cars. She also hung out at a Bellevue bowling alley where aimless dropouts gathered.

  Bridget maintained a brittle, tough facade most of the time.

  “She had a fearless nihilistic quality that I really admired at the time,” Dave recalled. “Now, I see that we were both just scared of life and it wasn’t going very well for us. We were accepting failure as a given and then going from there. There is strength in facing the worst and not caring, because it couldn’t hurt you if you’ve been hurt enough already.”

  Bridget was far from morose or depressing to be around. “She was ‘up’ almost all the time, and she had a quick and clever way about her. She wasn’t afraid to speak plainly, so she was refreshingly ‘no B.S.’ ”

  But Dave realized there were things that could really hurt her. Bridget mentioned something to him once about having a baby, and he shot back, without really thinking, “Oh, you’d be an awful mother!” Her face crumpled as she answered, “That’s a terrible thing to say!” And she began to cry. It was the first and last time he saw her cry. He panicked when he remembered that she’d said she’d lost a baby, and apologized. She seemed so tough most of the time that he thought she had no nurturing qualities at all, and he was too young to realize how tender she was behind her mask.

  “Well, look at your own mother,” he countered. “She did a lousy job with you.” Bridget nodded and calmed down.

  “I never met a funnier girl—or one more in pain. Sometimes, when she would knock on my window at night, I would ask ‘Who is it?’ as if I didn’t know, and she would say ‘My mother’ in a funny voice. God, she was funny.”

  He didn’t know that she had had two mothers—her birth mother, and Patricia Meehan who had raised her lovingly.

  Dave heard Bridget call home once to ask if she could come by and take some things she needed from her old room, and was apparently told that she couldn’t.

  “I took the phone away from her,” Dave recalled. “I screamed at her mother that they were treating their daughter like shit and that they should be ashamed of themselves. She hung up on me.”

  There were several aspects of Bridget’s life that Dave was unaware of. The Meehans had become wary of having their two youngest children come to the house when they weren’t there. Bridget, and sometimes her brother Tim, would take things from their parents’ home to sell for cash: coins and other collectibles.

  “It was typical teen attitude, I think,” Bridget’s brother Dennis said. “They figured that anything in the house belonged to them.”

  One day, Bridget convinced Dave to go with her to her house when she knew no one would be there. They went to the neat home in a good neighborhood, and Bridget opened a window she knew would be unlocked, then she let Dave in through a side door. He saw that the house was tidy and the objets d’art were expensive. “But it all looked like it was unused. Bridget was really embarrassed by an old family picture and she took it off the wall so I couldn’t look at it, and replaced it when we left.”

  Dave had stayed in the living room/rec room while she gathered some of her clothes in her bedroom. She called him in to show it to him. “It looked like it hadn’t been changed a bit since she left, almost like a museum to their ‘ideal’ child, like someone might save if their child died. I really don’t know why they wouldn’t let her come home. I think she really wanted to.”

  Dave looked through Bridget’s albums and she was humiliated when he came across a few of the Doors’ records. She thought them “teeny-bopper” stuff. Her favorite recording artists were the Seattle group Heart, and the B-52s. She explained that it was because they were strong women doing creative work.

  “The Doors weren’t really doing music.” Bridget laughed. “They just thought they were.”

  Dave and Bridget bought Pink Floyd’s new tape, The Wall, which was what they identified with in 1980. Their love for music was, perhaps, their strongest bond. Bridget told him that she wanted to be a singer, and Dave realized that she had a lovely voice as she sang songs like Heart’s “Heart of Glass” and “Tugboat Annie,” or from B-52 albums. She talked about writing songs, but she never sang any for him. He would realize many years later that they were both “victims of rock,” with grand plans but no action to carry them out. It didn’t matter in their fantasy world.

  Dave would do almost anything to please Bridget. She once admired a plaster seagull anchored to an iron base behind a dentist’s building. “I twisted that seagull for about forty minutes until it came loose. The next day, we walked by that same spot hand in hand, laughing because two guys were out there scratching their heads and arguing about where the bird went. They didn’t even glance at us and we laughed openly about it and at them.”

  They often ran into teenagers that Bridget had known from Bellevue High School, and she told Dave afterward that she felt they looked down on her. She hadn’t fit into the social life there, where many students came from wealthy homes. “They’re just jerks,” she said.

  Dave had gone to Lake Sammamish High School, which was more laid-back, situated as it was near the newer, less posh neighborhoods. Later, his mother had sent him to private school—Icthus—on Mercer Island, one of the upper-class bastions among Seattle suburbs. But neither of them made him feel like an outcast as Bridget seemed to believe she was.

  Dave sensed that he was the most intelligent boyfriend she had had, and her intelligence matched his, but they were both broke and there was no way they could make a home together. “I may have painted a darker portrait of us than I should have,” he would say with the wisdom gained over two decades. “We were cynical and messed up, but our emphasis was on staying above it all. We were a bunch of people with great potential but low self-esteem. Bridget and I were perhaps the most extreme examples of that. We bonded.”

  Bridget worked that summer of 1980 as a maid at a Holiday Inn and then at a nursing home, making minimum wage. She had always been attracted to people who were down on their luck. Just as she had rescued stray animals when she was a girl, she now tried to save people in trouble. Toward the end of the summer, she got involved with a teen named Brian who had a huge hole in his leg because he’d fallen on a sprinkler while he was intoxicated. She looked after him and changed the bandages on his wound.

  “The guy was seriously messed up,” Dave said. “And I think she felt sorry for him. It lasted for about five days…. When I asked her about him afterward, she dismissed him with ‘He’s a dreamer. He’ll never get anywhere—all he does is talk.’ It hit a little close to home, and I knew what she was thinking. We were all dreamers.”

  Bridget was always too thin, and Dave fought gaining weight. She had either low blood sugar or diabetes—he can no longer remember which—but she loved candy and told him she had to eat it for health. “I remember isolated things about her,” he said. “That Paul Simon’s only movie, One Trick Pony, was her favorite movie, and blue was her favorite color.”

  As the summer waned, Bridget and Dave drifted apart. She snapped at him one day for being too negative about the future, and said she had no intention of hanging around in Bellevue for the “rest of her life.”

  “For once, I didn’t have an answer,” he said.

  They weren’t together any longer, but they kept in regular touch. Bridget dated other guys for a while, but not seriously. She lived for a time in a halfway house and told Dave she had a caseworker who couldn’t seem to help her. “She thinks my problems are unsolvable,” Bridget said. She found the halfway house “awful,” and told him in a disbelieving voice that she had met actu
al prostitutes for the first time in her life.

  “I just listened to her,” Dave said. “We were still both so messed up that getting regular jobs didn’t really occur to us. She felt there was no way she could do it anyway without having someplace to stay. She thought the hookers at the shelter were scary. She didn’t like their lingo or their humor.”

  Bridget seemed to be growing more desperate. She told Dave that she had encountered a man at Seattle Center who followed her. He thought she was a prostitute and propositioned her, and she had blurted, “Twenty bucks,” and he’d said “Okay.” But then he bought her a hamburger and they talked and she got scared and didn’t want to go through with it.

  “He took pity on her, and didn’t make her do anything, but I could see that she was at least getting acclimated to the idea. I made a sick joke that twenty bucks was too cheap and she should ask at least forty,” Dave recalled with regret.

  The chasm between them grew after Bridget came to his house one day when his new girlfriend was there. He knew he had mentioned the other young woman too many times. After the two girls actually met, he never saw Bridget again.

  “I introduced them and Bridget was polite, but I could see it shook her up. And then she left. I guess that as long as she didn’t actually meet this person, it was safer for us and our illusion of ‘twoness’ where there was just her and me against a backdrop of everything else.”

  Dave got heavier into drugs, and he was too involved with his own life and problems to keep very close track of Bridget. Sometimes a mutual friend would let him know what she was doing. He heard she was living in a motel on Aurora Avenue with someone named Ray. Before Dave knew it, almost two years had passed and he hadn’t really seen her. He was with someone else, writing songs and working at minimum wages.

  Although Bridget had told Dave that she wasn’t welcome at her parents’ house, that wasn’t really the way it was. She had been living at the Bellevue house she grew up in for three months in late 1981.

  Bridget was determined to get her GED and she, too, had gone to Renton’s continuation school. There, she had met the man named Ray. They made an oddly matched couple; she was much taller than Ray, a very small man, whose father was something of an entrepreneur in restaurants and clubs. She was pregnant, again, and due to have the baby between Christmas and New Year’s.

  She and her mother discussed what she should do. The Meehans weren’t impressed at all by Ray. He had punched Bridget while she was pregnant and broken her ribs. The couple often argued, split up, and went back together. His father was a nice man, but Ray was spoiled, unfaithful, and a drug user. Even so, Bridget said she didn’t want to give her baby up for adoption. But she could not come up with a plan for keeping it and supporting it.

  “What are you going to do with a baby?” her mother asked imploringly. “How can you take care if it?”

  At seventeen, Bridget hadn’t changed that much from the days when she hid cats in her room. “But I really want it,” she would answer.

  Dennis, who was home for Christmas vacation from college, remembered his sister then. It would be one of his final memories. For most of her pregnancy, she barely showed, but she was close to term in December and she was “very pregnant and awkward.” She had always been so slender, strong, and agile that it seemed strange to see her that way. He agreed with his parents and siblings that she was in no position to try to raise a newborn. Ray couldn’t be counted on.

  In the end, Bridget probably made the right choice, the unselfish choice, for her baby. She knew she couldn’t take care of herself, much less a baby. She decided she would give it up for adoption.

  On Christmas day, Bridget, her mother, and her brother, Dennis, went to Providence Hospital. Her family was with her as she gave birth to a baby boy, whom she named Steven. Dennis took pictures of Steven, and they memorized his face. They all loved the infant, but they had no other choice.

  Ray’s father paid the hospital bill at Providence. For her own reasons, Bridget chose to tell her friends that her baby had died right after being born. On New Year’s Eve, Dave received a phone call and he recognized Bridget’s voice instantly, even though he heard only a bone-chilling wail that became a high-pitched shriek or maybe hysterical laughter. And then she hung up.

  He would always believe that her call was a cry for help after her baby “died,” but he didn’t know where she was or how to reach her. Bridget was now at least two intermediaries removed from him, and he had heard she and the man she lived with were doing harder drugs.

  In actual fact, Bridget didn’t do drugs during her pregnancy, and it’s possible that she never used again. But she felt so empty after Steven was given up for adoption, and said she was going to move back with Ray despite all the discussions she had with her mother. In an unusual reversal of stances, it was Bridget who said that she “needed a man in her life,” and her mother, caught up in the new philosophy of Women’s Lib, who argued that Bridget was smart and strong and didn’t need to settle for any man who came along. She didn’t need Ray or anyone else. She had earned her GED and she could go to college and be whoever she wanted to be.

  But Bridget waffled, even though she stayed in her parents’ home until the end of January 1982, and they hoped that maybe she would remain with them until she really got on her feet. Tragically, she moved back with Ray in early February, and they continued their migrating lifestyle—from motel to motel.

  All of them missed the baby, even though they knew they had made the right decision. Dennis Meehan was reading a Seattle paper ten days after Steven was born and he came across an article about a foster family who had taken in dozens of children, even adopting children who were disabled. The mom held a baby in her lap, and he recognized Steven, who looked happy and healthy and safe.

  Dennis called his mother over and showed her the article, saying, “Look, Steven’s on his way—he’s okay!”

  Bridget conceived again within a month to six weeks. Again, it was Ray’s baby, and, again, she was living a lifestyle where she couldn’t care for a child. Still, she called home regularly.

  Bridget and Ray moved to Chehalis, Washington—eighty-two miles south of Seattle—to stay with a friend of Ray’s. Ray himself had no visible means of support.

  In May 1982, Mary Bridget Meehan turned eighteen. She was legally an adult, but she was still lost, no matter how many hands were held out trying to rescue her, and she carried within her another life that would need love and care. She visited a clinic in Chehalis for a pregnancy test on June 8, 1982. According to the doctor there, her baby was due on November 27. She never returned to the clinic, although she did reach out to a battered women’s shelter, where she complained that Ray was hitting her again.

  The couple moved back to Seattle, and Ray’s father, who owned a nightclub, paid for their lodging frequently. Once again Bridget was very pregnant and Ray’s father worried about her. She and Ray stayed at a motel on the highway and then at the Economy Inn, and finally at the Western Six. In some ways, she was the same Mary Bridget that she’d been as a little girl. She smuggled three cats and a dog into their room, hoping the manager wouldn’t find out.

  And now, in September, she had disappeared. Ray would not admit to Port of Seattle detective Jerry Alexander that Bridget was working as a prostitute, but Alexander found others who said she was. Sometimes she took her dog with her, walking along the highway near Larry’s Market, the gourmet supermarket. On the day she disappeared, Bridget had brought the dog back to the motel room she shared with Ray and left again. Ray said he had been working on the old car that belonged to Bridget, and he’d had his head in the engine compartment when she called “Good-bye” to him.

  Where she had gone after she walked away from the Western Six Motel, nobody knew. When Ray reported Bridget missing, even he was confused about how pregnant she was; he thought it was either seven or eight months. The task force detectives doubted many of his answers. They learned from people who knew the couple that he often
tried to persuade his friends to “get a girl to work the streets for you, too.”

  “Bridget seemed too sweet and too intelligent to get talked into that,” one man told Jerry Alexander, “but I can’t say for sure.”

  Her brother Dennis had difficulty believing that she would have been involved in prostitution so far into her pregnancy, but he could visualize her accepting a ride from a stranger. She liked to put on a tough veneer, but she still had her basic trust in the goodness of people.

  It was herself that she didn’t really like.

  Those who loved Bridget searched for her, but they didn’t find anyone who had seen her after that last day: September 15, 1982. Nor did the task force. Ray moved out of the motel, leaving Bridget’s cats behind. Animal Control picked them up. Ray threw away Bridget’s drawings and possessions, and stopped calling her parents. He found another girlfriend.

  WHEN DAVE, Bridget’s long-ago soul mate, was forty, he had a dream about her, an intense dream. In the dream, he and Alison, who had been with him for years, were living in a nice little farmhouse somewhere and Bridget and a guy who seemed “okay” came to visit at the farm and they had a nine-year-old boy and a dog with them.

  “We all visited and it was very pleasant, and then they had to leave. I walked them out a long drive, but something went wrong between me and her friend and we started yelling at each other. At the end of the dream, she had gotten the child out of there, and it was just me and him. I was going to go back in the house and get a gun—very strange because I’ve never owned one. I was very upset when the dream ended.”

  Awake, he had the unshakable impression that the woman in the dream really was Bridget and he was being visited by the part of her that still lived. She looked as she would have looked twenty years later.

  “I found myself thinking that I really needed to call her and ask how she’d been…and then I remembered.”

  Dave still felt Bridget’s presence and wondered how to tap into that. He turned on his computer and typed “Bridget Meehan Green River” into the search engine.