The Church of Dead Girls (13 page)

J
ust as we are only aware of the surface parts of one another's minds, so are we only aware of the surface parts of one another's behavior. We see the polite part, the public part, and we can only speculate on what exists underneath. But usually if the surface part is conventional and well-mannered, we assume the rest to be also. Although what does that mean? How can we assume that a person's secret self is equally conventional and well-mannered? If the inoffensiveness of one's public self is created by fear, then it would seem possible that one's private self could be anything at all.

Not long ago a student showed me an article in
Rolling Stone
magazine and I happened to notice the classified ads in the back, where there were two pages of telephone numbers with 900 prefixes. These numbers were listed under the heading of “Phone Entertainment” and offered every sexual combination one could hope for. That the magazine advertised such numbers did not impress me so much as that over two hundred were available. “Eat Boots! Man on Man!” read one, “Experience the leatherline.” “Bisexual Housewives,” offered another. “Sweet Sorority Girls Live,” promised a third. It indicated that many people derived great pleasure from calling these 900 numbers. I myself have never called one—I wouldn't have the nerve. But neither have any of my acquaintances confessed to having called them, though I should think some must have.

I assume that many people who call these numbers conceal their partiality from their neighbors. Such conduct is an example of the hidden behavior to which I referred. I wouldn't call it immoral but it suggests a variety of unfulfilled desires within the society. Glancing at other magazines in addition to
Rolling Stone,
one finds many more numbers. How many people call them? Thousands? Over a million?

We tend to think of unfulfilled passions as pointing toward the abyss, and we fear that if we gave in to them they would demand increasingly horrible satisfactions. I am not sure that is true. But even I, who live a reclusive life, feel that if I were to submit to temptation it would be the beginning of a long slide to perdition.

Between my house and Franklin's is the white Victorian house belonging to Pete Daniels and his wife, Molly. We sometimes speak but we are not friends. But neither are we unfriendly. I keep an eye on their house when they go out of town and they do the same for me. That's simply small-town cordiality. They see me as a single, middle-aged biology teacher, somewhat fussy in his habits, who occasionally complains that their terrier leaves messes in his flower beds.

Pete Daniels is a successful electrician but I have never hired him. I don't want him inside my house for the main reason that he already knows too much about me, though he knows very little. Molly works at the Fays Drugs at our strip mall. As a result, if I needed to buy anything the least bit embarrassing—even sleeping pills or the occasional laxative—I didn't go to Fays but to Malloy's Pharmacy downtown. Donald Malloy was congenial and the fact that his brother is a doctor always made me think he knew a little more.

Pete and Molly have three children. The two older, Dennis and Jenny, are in their late twenties. Dennis is married and works with his father. Jenny married a piano tuner and settled in Oneonta. When the two children were nine and eleven, Molly had little Rosa, who was born blind. This was a great trial, but Rosa was bright and the one blessing about being born blind instead of going blind is that one accommodates to one's condition more successfully. And Pete and Molly wanted to do the right thing, so Rosa spent several years at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. Watertown, actually.

I had talked to Rosa. She was eighteen and meant to go to college next fall. Often she wore dark glasses because her blank eyes had a restless movement; her face wasn't fully under her control. She grimaced when she smiled, clenching her teeth, and she held her mouth open when she should close it. But she couldn't see herself; she had never had the benefit of a mirror.

I mention this because I have an admission that embarrasses me. Rosa's bedroom window on the second floor of her house was less than twenty feet from my own, or rather, what had been my bedroom window. In any case, I had often watched her undress and do other things as well. She would come back from taking her shower in the evening wearing an old brown robe and nothing else. She liked to sit down in an armchair facing the window. She would lean back, open the robe, and begin to touch herself. Perhaps I didn't watch her often, perhaps only a dozen times. Certainly it has been better since I moved my bedroom. Rosa's shades were usually open and she didn't expect that someone might be watching. After all, she shut her bedroom door.

Her behavior didn't excite me exactly. At first I found it repulsive and I had to make myself stay and watch, however odd that admission may seem. One might think I would turn away or even tell her mother that she should pull the shades. But I did neither, though, as I said, after some months I moved my bedroom. Of course I felt guilty to be watching but I overcame that guilt till watching became something of a narcotic and I would wait at my bedroom window for her to come upstairs. If I had found her actions sexually exciting, perhaps I would have been more disturbed, but it seemed it wasn't sexuality that I was watching; rather I was seeing into her deepest nature.

And then I thought: what if our positions were reversed? What if I were the one being observed? I, too, touch myself upon occasion, far more frequently when I was Rosa's age. And, though I am very private and it happens rarely, I have had sexual partners visit my house. What contortions are visible on my own face? Is my face, or my inner face, if I may call it that, any less expressive?

Often after watching Rosa at night, I would notice her the next day. Sometimes I saw her in the yard and spoke to her. I would search her face for the expressions of ecstasy she had exhibited the night before. But of course there was no trace. As for her thoughts, they were probably thoughts I have had as well. Rosa was a normal young woman. It was only the accident of her blindness that made her actions observable. In our daily activities we see the surface parts of one another's behavior and perhaps we speculate on what exists beneath. Don't we do this because we ask to what actions we might also be driven by our passions? If I could be assured of absolute secrecy, might I not, sometime, call a 900 number? But these aren't only sexual actions. All our emotions—love, hate, envy, greed, pride—have acceptable public levels, then other levels, private levels where they may move to excess. Haven't I felt envy? Haven't I taken excessive pride in my abilities? And when I am at a restaurant with friends and the waitress brings our meals, don't I look to see whose portion is larger?

Still, I have a sense of limit. At some point I tell myself I have had enough or I curb my appetite. I say no. Perdition, the abyss, loss of self-control—consider a person without a sense of limit. Isn't that what it is to be a monster, a creature whose pleasures and excesses have no restriction? We submit to what seems a small thing and soon it becomes huge, soon it owns us. Imagine such a person living among us leading an apparently conventional life. Who is anyone on the other side of a locked door, whether man or woman? Who is a person after the curtains have been drawn? What actions might occur there? Then imagine that we begin to see the person's footsteps, the effects of appetite, the scraps and bare bones of the terrible meal. How will this affect us? Couldn't it create a sense of permission that has its own consequences? As with Rosa Daniels, the more I watched the more fascinated I became, while being disgusted by my own fascination. Her pleasure became my pleasure. Even though I remained the observer, I craved to know every nuance of her conduct. Swiftly my sense of limit altered.

And in Aurelius as well, certain actions occurred that altered our sense of limit. Something awful happened and awful things were needed to stop it. That was the moral voice speaking, the superego. But wasn't there some pleasure that awful things were now permitted? I don't mean that normal people would naturally be led to wicked actions but perhaps the wickedness that they observed or imagined was taking place increased their own sense of permission, their sense of license. They could justify their actions by calling them reactions. They could do something terrible and call it punishment or revenge or retribution, but it was still terrible. Their inner temptations were transformed into overt behavior and they, too, came to share the characteristics of the monster. At least that was how it happened in my town.

S
haron Malloy had vanished, but for twenty-four hours after her disappearance people still expected she would turn up or telephone. Even that her abductor, if there was one, would call. But there was nothing. And with the passing days people's hope diminished.

Of course, by the next morning her picture and description had been sent all over the country. The picture showed her standing in front of a white garage door holding a baseball glove. Her chin was tilted up and she was grinning. She had a pert, oval face with braces on her teeth and they shone faintly behind her smile. She wore the blue sweater she had been wearing when she disappeared. Sharon's blond hair hung loose past her shoulders. Her knees were slightly bent and her feet apart. Her face was extremely pretty, with a look of expectation and eagerness that suggested she was not simply waiting for someone to toss her a ball but waiting for life itself. This gave her an expression of great innocence, as if she were passionately looking forward to whatever lay ahead. And what was ahead? No one knew, but that only made it worse.

Within a week Sharon's picture was seen everywhere: in store windows, post offices, banks, tacked to telephone poles, at the toll booths on the turnpike, taped to the back windows of cars. Many times a day one saw Sharon's pretty face with her expression of eagerness and expectation, and always there was the dichotomy between what she had expected and what she may have received. And didn't this lead people, myself included, to think about the unexpected turnings in our own lives? Sharon came to represent the betrayed promise—the promise that all of us had once felt—of what life seemed to offer and what it gave.

From the start the investigation proceeded on two levels: one in the world and one in Aurelius. Police departments all over the East began looking for Sharon. The state police, the FBI—each trooper and each agent carried her picture. NBC Nightly News ran a story and CNN gave ten minutes to it. Reporters and news teams arrived from hundreds of miles away. Sharon's family was in a state of shock and at first refused to talk to reporters, but Megan Kelly was interviewed fifty times. Joyce Bell spoke of her fear when Sharon didn't arrive at their house that afternoon. Sharon's teachers and friends were talked to, even Sadie. Many people developed little set speeches, though I am sure they didn't think of them as such, in which they said what a wonderful girl Sharon had been. Junior over at Junior's luncheonette, who barely knew her, said as much. In fact, many who professed friendship with Sharon had probably spoken to her only once or twice before her disappearance.

It is hard to discuss this without a touch of cynicism. Sharon's disappearance brought the chance of benign publicity to many people. Harry Martini, the principal of Knox Consolidated, appeared on Syracuse and Utica TV stations talking about the dangers of children's walking to and from school by themselves. And he described how Sharon was one of the bright stars of the ninth grade. Harry puffed himself up, looked forlorn, and wiped his eyes. I am sure he thought himself sincere, but I'm also sure that he barely recalled who Sharon was. She was a good student with a B average, but she had also been shy and didn't call attention to herself. Given the publicity and how people spoke about her, one would have thought she was the brightest and most popular student in the school.

That is not to say people were lying. They thought they were being truthful, but it was as if by linking themselves to her, by talking about her to the press or to the authorities, they were appropriating some of her importance: the importance of her disappearance. If I had spoken to Harry Martini about this, he would have been outraged. And when I questioned Ruth Henley—Sharon's English teacher—in the faculty lounge about how well she had actually known Sharon, she grew a trifle suspicious and said, rather unfairly, that I clearly regretted that Sharon hadn't been a student of mine as well.

I did not, in fact, regret that Sharon was never my student, though her older brothers, Frank and Allen Junior, had taken biology with me. But what struck me as unfortunate was the spotlight: that people hurried to announce a connection with her. Looking from my classroom window, I would see TV crews taking footage of the outside of the school. Or they would be in the halls or talking to students or teachers or administrators. Because of their lights and machinery, they were immediately noticeable. Even Herkimer Potter, a special-education student who has attended Knox Consolidated almost forever, got excused from class to tell a TV reporter from Albany that he once gave Sharon a stick of gum and she had thanked him.

I came to see it as a malignancy that so many people wanted the attention directed at them as well. It represented one of their secret passions. But when I spoke of this to Franklin, he shrugged it off.

“It makes a reporter's job easy. Ninety-nine percent of people are eager to talk.”

“They want to appear important,” I said.

“They want their lives acknowledged.”

“Harry Martini is looking for more than acknowledgment.”

“Acknowledged and authenticated,” said Franklin. “It proves they're alive.”

But I couldn't help thinking how people were showing aspects of themselves that were disagreeable.

The second level of the investigation, the local level, didn't attract as much attention. Although the town police were involved, especially Ryan Tavich, the inquiry was directed by the state police. The captain in charge was Raymond Percy. I didn't know him at the time, though Franklin and my cousin Chuck Hawley spoke well of him.
Percy
had a professionalism from which every trace of personality seemed removed. He lived in Norwich and had been promoted to captain only recently. He had served eight years in the army, mostly as a sergeant in the military police. He was tall, very fit, and dark-haired with a bit of gray. His long and very narrow nose reminded me of the blade of a hatchet. He wore dark suits and subdued neckties. Probably he was in his early forties. He showed no defects of character and was diligent, but he also displayed no emotion. I'm not sure what I would have preferred, though I would have liked an occasional curse or a smile. Really, I must seem inconsistent, complaining about some people's secret vices and that other people appear to have none.

To all appearances Raymond Percy wanted to be a machine—perhaps that was secret vice enough. His interior life was hidden, which only made me eager for evidence of interior life. Perhaps that was my own weakness: the desire to see what lay below the surface, the belief that Raymond Percy was a different man at four o'clock in the morning when he woke up and stared at the ceiling.

Ryan Tavich was often with him.

“But what's he like?” asked Franklin.

“Thorough.”

“Meaning what?”

“He generates a lot of paper, talks to a lot of people, requires a lot of reports.”

Franklin and Ryan were sitting at Franklin's kitchen table. It was early evening during the first week of the investigation and they both had a beer. They thought Sadie was up in her room doing her homework but she was perched on the stairs listening.

“Does he ever talk about football?” asked Franklin.

“He never talks about anything not connected with the case.”

“Ever see any food spots on his shirt?”

“Come on, what are you saying?”

“I want to know what he's like. How can I write about the guy if he's a block of wood?”

I once drove past his house. Norwich is a town of beautiful Victorian houses but Captain Percy lived in a new split-level on a corner lot, white with black plastic shutters. A fenced-in yard, no basketball hoop in the driveway, no bikes or toys lying in the grass, all the drapery closed. It was hard not to think of Captain Percy's house as resembling Captain Percy himself; and why shouldn't it have? I knew he had a wife and two teenage sons, but from the outside there was no evidence of them.

Ryan Tavich took a statement from Megan Kelly an hour after she had called the police. Captain Percy talked to her the next morning in City Hall. Mrs. Kelly's story about seeing Sharon through the front window, then not seeing her from the back was gone over repeatedly. Three to five minutes had passed between those two events. Mrs. Kelly readily admitted that a number of cars had driven by during that time, even though Adams Street was not heavily traveled, but the only car she remembered specifically was Houari Chihani's red Citroën.

Later that morning, Tuesday, September 19, Ryan and Captain Percy drove to Aurelius College to talk to Chihani. He was teaching his class in nineteenth-century European history and Captain Percy had him called from class. Ryan said later that he himself wouldn't have done this, that it seemed pointless to have Chihani gossiped about. Percy had a sergeant with him, as well as a driver. There was nothing discreet about their visit. Megan Kelly had already talked to people about having seen Chihani's Citroën and some expressed surprise that Chihani wasn't in jail already, that he hadn't been arrested the previous day.

The uniformed sergeant and a college secretary escorted Chihani from class. Ryan and Captain Percy saw him in an empty office in the administration building. Ryan said they could hear him quickly limping down the hall, the soft step, then the louder one. Chihani wore a black turtleneck under a gray sport coat and he wore his beret. He also carried a cane. He was not happy.

“I meet the students of that class twenty-six times in the semester. You have just disrupted one of those times. Now I will have to schedule another class.”

“Sit down,” said Captain Percy.

“I do not choose to sit down.”

“I'm asking you to sit down.”

“By what authority?”

Captain Percy explained who he was.

“None of that,” said Chihani, “can persuade me to sit down if I do not choose to sit down.”

And so Chihani stood, holding his cane flat against his right leg.

Captain Percy stood as well. In fact, all four men stood even though there were enough chairs. Chihani and Percy were both the same height, a little over six feet. Both were trim, but while Percy was muscular, Chihani was wiry and angular.

“You were seen yesterday,” said Percy, “driving out Adams shortly after three o'clock. Can you say where you were going?”

“Why is this necessary?”

“It is part of a current investigation.”

Chihani stared at the floor, seemingly unwilling to answer. Then he spoke: “I was driving to Henderson's Orchard, where I meant to buy apples, cider, and a jar of honey.” He had a contemptuous expression as if scornful that the police should be interested in his apple buying.

“As you left town did you see a girl riding a bicycle?”

“I saw no one.”

“You must have passed her,” said Ryan.

“I still saw no one.”

“You meant to buy apples,” said Percy. “Did you buy them?”

“On my way I discovered that I had not brought sufficient money and so I came home. I mean to go back this afternoon.”

“Did you come back to Aurelius on Adams?”

“I turned on Drake in order to go to the bank.”

“Did you get to the orchard, then turn around?” asked Ryan.

“I turned before I got there. Why is this important?”

“The girl was wearing a blue sweater and had a red book bag,” said Percy. “Her bike was blue and red.”

“I didn't see her.”

“Where is your car now?”

“It's parked in the faculty lot.”

“I'm afraid I'll have to take you downtown,” said Percy.

For the first time Chihani looked surprised. “Why should you do that?”

“The girl has disappeared.”

“Then I would like to call my lawyer,” said Chihani.

Percy had Chihani's Citroën towed to the state police barracks in Potterville. He had already obtained search warrants for both the car and Chihani's house.

At City' Hall Chihani said nothing that he hadn't said at the college. He had not seen the girl. He had turned around before getting to the orchard. His lawyer was a woman, Agnes Whitehead. She made it clear that her client had to be charged or released. While Chihani was in police headquarters his house was being searched by a state police lab crew. After delaying as long as possible, Percy released Chihani late in the afternoon. No sign of Sharon was found in his house. The state police kept his car for another day but they found nothing to indicate that Sharon Malloy had ever ridden in it.

“The trouble is,” Ryan told Franklin, “it's unlikely that Chihani could have removed all trace of her. There were traces of other people, even women, but not Sharon.”

“What women?” asked Franklin.

“IIR members. Harriet Malcomb, for instance, and Joany Rustoff.” They were again sitting at Franklin's kitchen table. From the other room came the sound of Sadie practicing scales on the piano.

“So Chihani presumably didn't clean up his car.”

“Right. Besides, it's impossible to clean selectively, to erase one person's traces and not another's.”

“Is there any evidence that Chihani ever talked to Sharon?”

“None.”

Franklin called in Sadie and asked if Sharon had ever talked about Houari Chihani.

“Who?” said Sadie. Practicing the piano was something that her father made her do and Sadie didn't mind being interrupted.

“He teaches at the college and drives a red Citroën.”

“That little red car? I've seen it but I didn't know who it belonged to. What kind of name does he have?”

“Algerian.”

“Was he born there?”

“I guess so,” said her father.

“That's a long way from Aurelius,” said Sadie.

Although Chihani had been released, he remained a potential suspect. State troopers and sheriff's deputies talked to people along Adams and Fletcher to learn if they had noticed him. Many remembered the red Citroën but they were not sure if they had seen it on that particular Monday afternoon.