Whatever Happened to Kelly Kilcher?

Part 3: She Saw Right Through Me

“Todd Radke is a chump.”

I’m standing in Daphne’s backyard talking to Sheila Petersen. She was a cocktail waitress at the Sterling Hotel back in the ‘90s with us. She dated Todd before he dated Kelly, and Arman after he dated Kelly. If you’ve ever worked in a hotel, you know that’s just the way it is. Everybody is somebody else’s sloppy seconds. Sheila and Arman dated on and off throughout the ‘90s and eventually got married when everyone else did. Arman hasn’t kept in touch with Kelly, but Sheila has some thoughts that she thinks might be useful.

“I’ve seen her without makeup,” Sheila says, taking a swig of her beer. “Homely as fuck. I’m talking backwoods ugly. Total fraud. Looked like a completely different person. She could be living right up there in Hartley right now and nobody would ever know.” She cackles at the thought and takes another swig of her Miller Lite.

“Tell me more about Todd. Why do you think he’s a chump?”

“Because he’s a chump!” Sheila laughs. “Kelly was never faithful, and he let her get away with it. That makes him a chump.”

“He never mentioned anything about that.”

“Of course he wouldn’t. Would you?”

“Probably not to you.” I smile.

“I feel for the guy. I really do.” Sheila pauses to light a cigarette. “But he needs to get over it. Kelly was bad news. Like, what did he even see in her? That dyed red hair and clown makeup? And my God, the gaudy jewelry. Her emerald cocktail ring looked like something a flapper would wear. It was bigger than one of those candy rings that kids suck on.”

I can tell that Sheila is only looking for an excuse to trash talk Kelly, so I politely raise my empty glass and head inside for a refill. Daphne’s husband is grilling chicken and she’s in the kitchen making a Caesar salad. The au gratin potatoes in the oven smell fantastic. As I pour a Guiness, Sheila ambushes me from behind.

“Is that a beer? She asks. “I figured you’d be getting some fruity little drink.”

I give her a tense smile. “It’s a Guiness.”

Daphne turns towards us and asks, “Did you guys figure out where Kelly was from? Vermont or New York?”

“Neither!” Sheila laughs sardonically. “That bitch was from northern Wisconsin. As podunk as they get. She was embarrassed to admit it, so she told people Massachusetts or wherever because she’s a highfalutin liar.”

Daphne puts the salad in the refrigerator and slams the door with more force than necessary. “Maybe we don’t say ‘bitch’ in my kitchen.” Daphne is good friends with Arman, but she can barely tolerate Sheila.

“Sor-ry,” Sheila says, raising her hands. “All I’m saying is that Kelly isn’t someone who’s worth finding. Honestly, I bet Kilcher isn’t even her real last name. I heard she had a quickie marriage when she was seventeen.”

“I heard that too,” Daphne notes. “Probably from you.”  

“Probably,” Sheila happily admits.

After dinner, while Daphne and her husband clean the kitchen, Sheila and I sit on the deck and watch the sunset. I lean back in my chair, still trying to shake the feeling that Todd was on to something, that Kelly didn’t just move to California and live happily ever after. I tell Sheila about Kelly’s car and how it disappeared without a trace.

“Can you think of a reason anybody would want to hurt her?” I ask. “A serious reason.”

“Honestly, no,” Sheila says.

“You said she wasn’t faithful to Todd. Do you know who she was fooling around with?”

“Mostly randos who were staying in the hotel. Remember how she did room service off and on, but was always disappearing for long periods so they stopped letting her do it?”

“She said she stopped because the tips were bad.”

“Well, if you spend half the night in one room, then yeah, the tips are going to be bad.”

“True.”

“I don’t know,” Sheila says. “She flirted with everybody. That’s just the way she was. That’s the way we all were back then.” After a tentative pause she asks, “How come you and Geoffrey never got together?”

“Geoffrey?” I stutter. “We were just friends. I had a girlfriend, remember?”

“Looked like more than that to me,” Sheila says, still trying to stir up trouble after all these years. An astute observation, though. I wouldn’t actually come out for another twenty-five years.

“Nope, just friends,” I reiterate.

It feels like the mirror image of a conversation I had with Kelly after work one night. We were having a drink at the college bar down the street, Prose & Pints. “I see the way you look at him,” she said to me, after a few drinks.

“We’re just friends.”

“He’d make a good first boyfriend.”

“I’m not gay,” I told her. I honestly didn’t think I was.

Kelly took a sip of her gin and tonic and smiled, her eyes soft with kindness. She could see the truth before I could see it myself—and that scared me.

“Reggie,” Sheila suddenly blurts out. “He had a reason to hurt Kelly.”

“The pantry chef?”

“He was a pervert,” she says, as if that explains everything. “Always talking about fucking his cats.”

“He was disgusting!” Daphne yells from the kitchen window.

“He was kidding,” I say.

“I’m not so sure,” Sheila insists. “And neither was Kelly. We’d be in the breakroom, and he’d be saying some disgusting shit. Kelly would get so mad.”

“I think that’s why he said that stuff. To rile her up.”

“Supposably she was an animal lover.” Sheila rolls her eyes. “She’d start rantin’ and ravin’ about animal cruelty and all that. I never had the heart to ask what the fuck she thinks they test all that makeup on. Like, how many animals died for her eyeliner?”

As we talk, Daphne sets a Bluetooth speaker on the deck and turns it to Mosaic on Sirius XM. Meanwhile, her husband and Arman get busy on a wood pile in the fire pit.

“She called the cops on Reggie.”

“Who told you that?”

“I overheard her talking to Josh Pennyworth.”

“Josh Pennyworth,” I say. “I forgot about that guy.” Josh worked room service and helped out with banquets on the weekends. He and Kelly were close. “Did they ever, you know…” I make an ‘O’ with one hand and drive my index finger through it.

Sheila smiles. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

I laugh. “Did you overhear anything else?”

“Isn’t that enough? They raided his apartment.”

“He wasn’t fucking his cats,” Arman says, fully aware of the absurdity. Arman and Daphne’s husband have a nice fire going now and we each grab an Adirondack chair and arrange ourselves around the pit. “But when Animal Control went to his apartment, they found stuff that violated his parole.”

“Ah,” I suddenly remember. “That’s why he went back to jail for a couple months.”

“Bingo,” Arman says.

“Bingo,” Sheila repeats, cracking open another Miller Lite.

“Not bingo,” Daphne frowns. “He was in jail all that summer.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure,” she says firmly. “I worked in human resources, remember? I had to go in the night before my wedding and process the paperwork.”

“Wait,” Sheila freezes, looking terrified. “So you know why I got fired?”

“Yup.”

Sheila looks at Arman, then stares into the fire. Slowly, she cracks open another beer. Whatever she’s thinking, she doesn’t say. I imagine their drive home won’t be fun.

We sit around the fire until well after midnight, until the last embers sputter out. Nothing more is said about Kelly. There’s nothing more to say. It all happened thirty years ago. Everybody’s lost touch. Memories have faded. I’m not a detective, but I do think it’s strange that she’s not on social media. And Todd’s story about her car is intriguing, but anything beyond that is pure speculation. This isn’t a movie, it’s real life. Some questions aren’t meant to be answered, and I have to be okay with that. Still, as the fire dies, I keep expecting someone to say her name one last time. Nobody does.

I might be the only one who still cares.

© Scott Thomas Henry, 2025. All rights reserved.