Murder Plays House (30 page)

Alicia called herself Ana-Belle, and described herself as a television and film actress “whom you all would recognize immediately.” One long essay called “The Perils of Plump,” detailed her difficulties finding roles when her body size exceeded her goal weight. She did not list her credits, but she did make repeated references to actors, directors, and producers who had cast her because of her “perfect Ana body.” One of the names she mentioned was Charlie Hoynes.

Alicia’s, like the other sites, had links pages, inspirational photographs, diet tips, and 100-calorie-a-day food-plans. She also provided information for Mias, whom she described as “our bingeing sisters.” She encouraged them to end a binge with milk or ice cream, because those dairy products came up easily. She cautioned them to brush their teeth frequently, lest they lose the enamel on their teeth and their teeth themselves begin to loosen in the bone. She also warned against “busy-body dentists” who might recognize the warning signs of bulimia. She suggested that Mias try to find older dentists because they wouldn’t be as clued into the contemporary issues like eating disorders.

The most chilling section was a stark white page with a quotation at the top—“Scorn the Flesh and Love the Bone.” It was a step-by-step instruction manual for surviving a hospital stay without gaining weight. Alicia told the girls what to say to make the physicians believe they were making progress in therapy. She told them to resist at first, but slowly to pretend to be coming around. Alicia told the girls to thank the therapists and nurses, to cry frequently in group therapy sessions, to warn other girls against the dangers of
starvation. “The idea,” Alicia wrote, “is to snow them with your words and your tears, so they don’t even notice that you haven’t eaten anything.”

Alicia also gave specific information on how to plump up for weigh-ins. She suggested the girls drink large amounts of water, not so much as to make the nurses suspect they were bingeing on water, but enough to add pounds for the scale. She told the girls that in some cases their water consumption would be strictly monitored, and that some hospitals even turned off the sinks in bathrooms to prevent the girls from drinking to hide their weight loss. She suggested the toilet tanks. “That water is clean—it’s not from the toilet itself—and there’s enough water in your average tank to get you up to weight. Remember, even a few ounces will put the doctors on your side.”

Alicia provided specific fat-burning exercises the girls could do in their beds in the middle of the night. Finally, she exhorted them to help one another. “Send a hospitalized friend some laxatives,” she wrote. Unfortunately, she said, doctors had grown wise to the trick of sewing pills into the bodies of stuffed animals, but stick deodorant containers were a good place to smuggle pills.

There was more, much more, but by now I was too appalled to read on.

Alicia Felix was, quite clearly, the doyenne of the Pro-Ana universe. She was a role-model—a source of information and inspiration to these pathetic girls. She was, I could not help but feel, a monster, preying on their worst insecurities. Why had she done it? I wondered. What had it given her? Power? A sense of control? Or was she some kind of twisted altruist, wanting to share the skills she had acquired over a lifetime of anorexia?

I thought of Barbara Hoynes’s rage earlier in the day, at
her daughter’s funeral. How much angrier would she have been had she known exactly what Alicia was up to? Or perhaps she
had
known. Perhaps that was why she screamed at her ex-husband, blaming him and his girlfriends for their daughter’s death. Perhaps that’s what she had meant when she told me of Alicia’s pernicious influence on her daughter.

T
HE
next morning, when I opened the door to pick up the newspaper, I found a terrifying man on our front stoop. He was huge, well over six feet tall, with a shaved head, a smashed, prize-fighter’s nose, and a tattoo of a death’s head climbing up from his neck over his left cheek. I gasped, as did he. He looked as scared to see me as I was to see him. He was clutching a letter in his hand, and had obviously been about to drop it in the mail-slot in the door when I opened the door.

“Who are you?” I said.

He pushed the letter toward me, but I backed away from his hand.

“Take it,” he said, seeming to regain his composure. “Take it!”

“No,” I said, grabbing the door behind me. I tried to slam it, but he wrenched the door out of my hands. That’s when I screamed. Within seconds, Peter was tearing down the steps behind me.

“Take the letter!” the man said, just as Peter skidded to a stop next to me.

“Larry?” Peter said.

“Oh my God!” the scary guy said, staring at my husband. “Mr. Wyeth?”

“Call me Peter, please. What’s up Larry? What are you doing here?”

“You know this guy?” I said.

“Sure I do,” Peter said. “Larry played a corpse on the last Cannibal movie. Didn’t you, Larry?”

The man was smiling now. “I sure did. A one-legged corpse. I’m hoping to get a shot at a speaking part in the sequel.”

I raised my hands. “What’s going on here?”

“Oh man,” Larry groaned. “Look, I had no idea who you were. I mean, that you were Mr. Wyeth’s wife and all. I was just doing a favor for a friend. I wasn’t going to hurt you or anything. I was just supposed to drop this off.” He turned to Peter. “Swear to God, man. I wasn’t going to hurt your wife.”

I snatched the letter out of his hand and tore open the envelope. In magic marker, on a sheet of plain white paper, it said, “Keep quiet about Dakota Swain, or else.” I raised my eyes to those of the massive man standing in front of my door. “You have got to be kidding,” I said.

He blushed. “I’m sorry, man. Dakota just asked me to deliver it. I don’t even know what it says.”

“Okay, well. Consider it delivered.”

“You’re not mad?” he said to Peter.

My husband looked at me, and I shook my head.

“Don’t worry about it,” Peter replied.

“Cool,” Larry said. “Well, bye.”

“Bye.”

He took off down the steps and jumped into the cab of a pick-up truck that had been pulled up onto our front lawn, crushing the grass. He leaned his head out the window. “Dakota’s cool!” he called. “She’s just all freaked out because that kid died and all.”

I slammed the door shut and leaned against it.

“What the hell?” Peter asked.

I shook my head.

“Are you going to call the cops?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because Larry’s a real sweetheart.”

“Right.”

“He just looks scary.” Peter took my hand and began leading me up the steps. “Do you think it’s a real threat?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “She’s just terrified I’ll tell Hoynes about the pills, and then he won’t give her the part.”

“Maybe you should call the cops. I mean, you can’t be sure she’s not dangerous,” Peter said. Once burned, twice shy, but that’s another story.

“I’ll figure it out later. There’s something I need to do first, this morning.”

When Jews are mourning, we sit
shiva.
We sit in our homes, welcome guests, share food, and simply experience our grief for a period of seven days. I knew that Episcopalians had no similar formal ritual, but I was hoping that Barbara Hoynes would be home—I couldn’t imagine that a mother would go anywhere on the day after burying her daughter. Still, I didn’t expect to find Barbara Hoynes as I did, alone in her lavish home, wearing a bathrobe over her pajamas, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

“I’m so sorry.” I said when she answered the door. “I woke you.”

She leaned against the doorjamb. “Can I help you?” she mumbled in a voice thickened by sleep, or grief, or a combination of both.

I reminded her who I was.

She stared at me, wordlessly. Her hair was matted down on one side, caught in a single barrette that swung free as she shook her head.

“I’m so sorry to bother you, Ms. Hoynes, especially so soon after your daughter’s death. I know how you felt about Alicia. I know it’s asking a lot, but I hope you might consider talking to me, just for a few minutes.”

“What time is it?” the woman asked.

I looked at my watch. “11:15,” I said.

She shook her head. “I’ve been asleep for thirteen hours.”

My eyes widened, but I merely said, “Well, that’s to be expected, given everything.”

She sighed. “It’s to be expected given the three
Ambien
I took last night.”

I nodded sympathetically. “I would have done the same. The nights must be unbearable.”

She nodded. “They never end.” She leaned back in the doorway. “Come in,” she said, to my surprise.

She led me through the darkened rooms to the kitchen. She motioned to a chair, and then stood in the middle of the room, looking vaguely around her.

“Here,” I said. “You sit down. Can I make you a cup of coffee, or tea?”

She collapsed into the chair and nodded. “Coffee. Over there.” She pointed at a complicated piece of equipment that looked more like a flight simulator than an espresso machine. I did my best, trying to imitate the baristas from whom I bought coffee every day. I didn’t do too badly, until it came time to steam the milk.

“Don’t bother,” Barbara said, holding out her hand for the cup. I splashed some cold milk in mine and sat down next to her.

“When we spoke last time, you told me that Alicia was a bad influence on your daughter. Did Alicia Felix actively encourage Halley to become anorexic? Was that how she got the disease?”

Barbara took a careful sip of her coffee and then set the cup down on the table with a trembling hand. “I wish I could blame that on Alicia, but Halley has had an eating disorder for years. Since she was a little girl. Alicia didn’t make Halley anorexic. I did that all by myself.”

“No,” I murmured. “You can’t blame yourself.”

“Can’t I?” Barbara said, staring at her hands. “Halley was always a chubby little girl. The first time I had her on a diet was when she was two. I sent her to summer camps for overweight children from the time she was seven until she was twelve. Suddenly, she didn’t need them any more. She was thin. It took a couple of years before I realized that she wasn’t just healthy and slim; she was actually too thin. It took even longer for me to figure out that she was sick. So you see, as much as I wish I could, I can’t blame Alicia. I can only blame myself.”

I didn’t know what to say. Instead, I just patted her hand.

Finally, I said, “Halley spent a lot of time on those Pro-Ana websites, didn’t she?”

Barbara nodded, and then suddenly sobbed. She rubbed roughly at her eyes. “They all do. All those girls.
That
I blame on Alicia Felix. That I can lay squarely at her feet. She’s the one who got Halley started on those.” She beat her hands against the tabletop, and I jumped. “I was so stupid and naïve. At first I believed Halley when she told me that her father’s girlfriend was helping her, that she’d got her
involved in an online support group. I even got a DSL line so Halley could get online more quickly. I actually thought it was like some kind of group therapy. I was such an idiot.”

“How did you find out what the sites really were? Did you track Halley’s Internet usage?”

She shook her head. “I wish I had. But I was too trusting. It never occurred to me that anything like that whole Pro-Ana thing could even exist. I didn’t find out about it until it was too late, until Halley was so far into it that I couldn’t save her.” She was crying freely now, wiping at her nose and mouth with the back of her fist. I looked around the room and, not finding any tissues, reached for a dishtowel that was hanging from the handle of the oven I gave it to her, and she wiped away the mucus that was dripping from her nose.

“How did you find out what was really going on?” I asked.

“Alicia’s best friend, Dina Kromm. Her mother told me.”

“Dina? The girl who died?”

Barbara nodded. “After her death, Susan and Duane went through Dina’s computer. She’d bookmarked the Pro-Ana sites. They came to me and told me about them. They even showed them to me. That’s how we found out about Alicia.”

“They showed you her website?”

She blew her nose again. “They wanted me to join them on a campaign to get the sites shut down, or at least barred from the larger search engines. We were going through the sites, reading them. Alicia’s is anonymous, but there were the pictures. She hid her face, but I could tell from her body that she was one of Charlie’s girls. They all look the same. Massive breasts, blond hair. Skinny. And Alicia mentions Charlie’s noxious TV show on the site. I knew right away it had to be Alicia. Halley said that Alicia had led her to the
online support groups, and here was a site mentioning Charlie. It was too much of a coincidence. It had to be her.”

“Did you confront your husband with what you’d found out?”

“I tried to, but he refused to take my calls. He never would, that despicable creep. He always made me go through his lawyer when I wanted to talk to him.”

“Did you confront Halley about it?”

She nodded. “Right then, in front of Duane and Susan. I thought that given what happened to Dina, Halley would tell us the truth. And she did, in a way.”

“In a way?”

“I called her downstairs and showed her the site. I remember I was screaming. I asked her if
this
was what she meant by support groups. I asked her if this was her father’s girlfriend.”

“What did she say?”

Barbara knotted her hands together, her knuckles white against her chapped, red fingers. “She screamed right back at me. She gave me this ridiculous nonsense about anorexia being a life-choice not a disease. She said Alicia was her idol, that she was beautiful. That all the girls worshipped her. That . . . that . . .” her voice broke. She continued in a whisper. “She said she wished Alicia was her mother.”

I leaned across the table and put my arm around her. Her body shook with sobs.

We sat like that for a moment, and then she said, “I told Halley she couldn’t see Alicia anymore. I called Charlie’s lawyer; I called his office. But he wouldn’t speak to me. I was going to take him to court. I was going to get a restraining order against Alicia, and maybe even try to stop Halley’s unsupervised visitation with him. At least get rid of those overnights. Then Alicia was killed. And you know what? I
was happy. I really was. Because she could never hurt Halley again. It never occurred to me that it was already too late.”