On the other hand, she and her brother Tim were often “partners in crime,” getting into things, breaking rules. Mary Bridget and her five-years-older sister were very different. Maeve almost always did the right thing, while Mary Bridget would balk and question why she had to obey.

It was when she hit puberty that her rebellious side made her question her parents’ rules and beliefs. She “discovered boys,” her mother recalled, “in junior high.”

She began to play hooky. Her parents would drive her to school and watch her go through the front door. What they didn’t see was Mary Bridget walking down the hall and out the back entrance. They found out later, from her report card, that she was often absent and close to failing a number of classes. Still, it was hard to be angry with her.

“She was always outgoing, and very dramatic,” her brother Dennis said. “She could work a room and get your attention. She could be very loud.”

Mary Bridget couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen when she met Jerry,* a guy even his friends called “a rat.” Bridget—she was Bridget now—was entranced with him, and her parents’ disapproval only made him more attractive. His father was a highly respected community leader, but Jerry hadn’t followed his example.

Bridget’s world revolved around Jerry, and her grades dropped even more dramatically because studying didn’t seem important if it meant she couldn’t be with him. The Meehans set a curfew for Bridget so she would be home at a reasonable time and study. It didn’t work. Bridget either didn’t come home on time or she snuck out of her window late at night to meet Jerry.

Hoping that tough love would make her realize that she was risking her education and her future over a boy who was nowhere near good enough for her, Bridget’s parents gave her an ultimatum. If she didn’t obey the family rules, she would have to leave. And they stuck to this decision. At fifteen, she found the door locked one night when she came home late.

Bridget acted as if she didn’t care, but she was shocked to learn that she couldn’t go home again. She loved her family, but she was stubborn, too. She had virtually no street smarts. She got frostbitten toes when she tried to sleep outside.

Soon, she moved in with Jerry, who was initially glad to have her there. But twice Bridget became pregnant, and that wasn’t anything Jerry had planned on.

Bridget Meehan wouldn’t even consider an abortion. She was a devout Catholic and she wanted the baby. She miscarried the first pregnancy spontaneously. She wasn’t sixteen yet when she conceived again. Bridget told Jerry that she would never kill this baby, and he kicked her out of his apartment. She either couldn’t or wouldn’t go home to her parents, who were shocked and saddened by her behavior.

Instead, Bridget moved from one friend’s house to another, but she miscarried her second baby, too. The loss of the babies was so traumatic for her that she could never really talk about it beyond saying that she had lost a baby. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she’d miscarried two. She felt that she had failed.

But Bridget Meehan had such an appealing personality and she usually fought down the sadness that gripped her. There were a number of young men who wanted to date her. She didn’t trust them. She had lost her center, and she had trouble believing in anyone. Still, she needed someone to talk to, someone who would listen to her and help her figure out where her life had teetered and slid down into an abyss.

One of the young men who loved her from a distance was named Andy. He lived with his mother in Enetai, one of the more desirable addresses in Bellevue. She agreed to let Bridget live with them in her house in the spring of either 1979 or 1980, but Bridget wasn’t intimate with Andy. She was too bruised emotionally. Andy accepted her terms; he was happy just to have her around. His best friend Dave was a constant visitor, and he, too, found Bridget a wonderful, if fragile, girl. She had a presence that drew people to her, a kind of glow and appreciation for life, even while she insisted that she had already accepted failure.

“The first time I met Bridget,” Dave recalled, “she came up real close to me and studied my face. Finally she announced, ‘You’re Irish.’ And I was, but I’d never thought much about it before.”

It was Dave who fell so totally in love with Bridget that he would have trouble talking about her more than two decades later, still angry that she had been put into a position where someone could hurt her, and frustrated that he could not save her. In an era where so many teenagers were lost and doing drugs, a lot of Bellevue parents were trying to rescue them. If their own children would not listen to them, they often reached out to other teens. It was commonplace for parents whose own teenagers railed against them to give shelter to kids from other families. They were all buying time, hoping that maturity would bring reconciliation.

Dave already had a girlfriend, and his mother had taken her in. After he met Bridget, he moved out of his own home to avoid a confrontation with either his girlfriend or his mother. He simply wanted to be with Bridget Meehan. “I became voluntarily homeless to spend more time with her,” he recalled. “I guess she really liked me, too, but she had been out of her house for some time when I met her and was already a little bit crazy from it.”

It was 1980, and Bridget still lived at Andy’s house, and Andy and Dave were best friends, and they both loved her. There could have been open hostility, but there wasn’t. She wasn’t interested in sex and she was particularly afraid that she might become pregnant again.

Mostly, Dave and Bridget boasted to each other that they could deal with their own demons if they just explored them enough. Bridget told him that she had never suffered from any physical or sexual abuse in her home, but she claimed to have felt emotionally lost because her parents had been cold and distant with her for as long as she could remember. In her version, she was suddenly asked to move out and her parents had refused to let her ask questions or to give her another chance.

Dave had been abused at home, but he found Bridget’s story “the saddest I’d ever heard.”

As dramatic as many teenage girls can be, Bridget outdid them. She was being very dramatic then. In truth, she was not as estranged from her family as she told Dave. She called home every week or so. Her parents loved her devotedly. If she had agreed to the house rules, she was welcome to come home. But, with Dave, and with Andy, Bridget insisted she could not go home again.

“We talked forever,” Dave remembered. “She really needed someone to talk to and I was in love with her, but there was reserve and distance on my part because she was so darn unstable and she theoretically knew I had a longer-term relationship still pending. I wanted to help her get her life together, which, in retrospect, seems ridiculous because I was a total mess myself.

“All of us smoked pot and took LSD occasionally,” Dave recalled of the spring and summer he spent with Bridget. “But Bridget and I used to take it and spend hours in hideous self-dissections, examining our inner workings, our worst fears, our problems. I suppose it was narcissistic…but we thought we spared ourselves nothing and sort of reveled in seeing ourselves in the worst possible light. We thought we were being honest.”

The marijuana made their hazy dreams for the future seem possible. They drifted through the spring and summer on the fantasy that they would move to Arizona with Andy in September, when he started college there, even though they knew that wasn’t going to happen. They had no money to travel, and Andy’s grade point average was too low to get into college.

“Andy’s parents finally laid it out for him only a few days before he was due to go to Arizona,” Dave said. “He ended up going to mechanics’ school and then joining the navy. The last I heard of him, he was married and living in California.”