Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 2



BEST-SELLING AUTHOR DIES IN “SUSPICIOUS” FALL

Willingham, NH — Gretchen Waters, author of the popular memoir Tammyland, was found dead in the town center Tuesday night, after falling down concrete stairs near the Willingham Public Library parking lot.

Waters, 32, of Kingsley, Massachusetts, was in town giving a public reading at the library. An hour after she left the library, at around 10 P.M. according to police, her body was found at the bottom of a ten-foot-high cement stairway connecting the library parking lot to the Greenfield Shopping Plaza.

“Looking at the steepness of these steps, it appears that Ms. Waters lost her footing and fell. An autopsy will be performed next week, but we believe that she died of blunt head trauma sustained during a fall,” said Willingham police sergeant John Polaski, who is leading the investigation.

A state police detective unit has also been assisting with the investigation. They closed off the library parking lot yesterday and appeared to be taking measurements.

“This is a very unfortunate event, and we’re doing our best to piece together what happened,” Sergeant Polaski said. “We’re looking into the possibility that a second party may have been involved. However, I can’t go into further detail at this point.”

Witnesses saw Waters leave the library at around 9 P.M. But instead of getting into her car in the library parking lot, she walked down the concrete stairs to the nearby 7-Eleven store. After making a purchase, she must have fallen on the way back to her car, Sergeant Polaski said.

The death of a prominent author in the center of town has put many people on edge.

“It’s just devastating,” said Ruth Rowan, library events coordinator who arranged for Waters’s visit. “Just a terrible, terrible thing to have happened here. She was a lovely, articulate young woman and I can’t imagine how this is for her family.”

Waters’s nonfiction book Tammyland, published early last year, detailed her travels through the South, learning about the female country singers. She was busy working on her second book when she died, according to Rowan.

Waters’s family had been informed of her death, but could not be reached for comment yesterday.