The Church of Dead Girls (33 page)

On Wednesday afternoon Franklin and Paula were married by the town clerk in Potterville. Ryan went with them and acted as witness. All three had taken off work for an hour. Ryan skipped lunch. The clerk, Mitchell Friedman, kept making jokes about tying the knot and making an honest woman out of Paula, but Ryan said she and Franklin were as serious as if they'd been at a funeral. When it was over, Franklin kissed the bride and Ryan shook their hands. They drove back to Aurelius. When Sadie got home from school shortly after three o'clock, she found she had a new mother. She wasn't happy about it. Franklin and Paula spent about an hour bringing over some of Paula's things from her father's house, which would be put up for sale. Franklin didn't have much time, because the paper had to be at the printer's by five o'clock. There was a problem with Paula's dog, Fletcher, who didn't get along with Shadow. Some friends in the country took Fletcher until Franklin and Paula could decide what to do.

Franklin wrote a short article about their marriage. In fact, he must have written it before they were married. It only gave the basic details, although it identified Franklin as editor of the
Independent
(as if he needed identifying) and Paula as a psychological counselor in the dean's office at Aurelius College. People read the article and shook their heads. Many felt they already knew too much about the McNeal family. People wished Franklin well, of course, but I don't believe there were any celebrations.

T
he Malloys and Shillers never really became friends but during this time they were quite close. The very sadness, however, that brought them together also kept them apart. After all, each grieved for a different girl. But they were in constant contact with one another, each inquiring if the other had heard anything new. Ralph and Helen Shiller were not directly involved with the Friends but Ralph's brother Mike was there every day. Mike took a leave of absence from his job at the post office. A second brother, Albert, also gave some of his time to the Friends. And Helen Shiller had two brothers and a cousin who participated in the patrols.

Ralph and Helen Shiller tried to continue their lives but they lived in a state of near paralysis. They would move forward for a few minutes, then once more realize that their daughter was gone and be knocked down again. Luckily, Ralph had men who worked for him in his shop. The awful thing was not knowing anything, nor could they stop themselves from imagining the dreadful things that might have been done to their child. The oddity of the returned clothes and the fake hand made even the most gruesome scenario possible. Ralph began driving around town in his van, not going on calls or errands, just looking. One would see the van slowly pass by—a blue Ford with “Ralph Shiller, Electrician” printed on the side in white—and see Ralph's dark, sad face peering over the wheel.

As for Helen, she rarely left the house. Meg's brother Henry was in my biology class and he was often absent. There was no way I could grade him down for this. He had always been a happy boy, but now his face was immobile and he seemed incapable of paying attention. Other students spoke to him in whispers, but many preferred to leave him alone. The younger brother, Bobby, was in fourth grade and I know nothing about him, which doesn't keep me from wondering.

The Malloys were similarly afflicted. Dr. Malloy stopped going to the office entirely. He sat at home by himself or went down to the police station. Like Henry Shiller, his son Frank, a junior, missed a lot of school. Little Millie was in third grade. The doctor drove her to school and picked her up every day. He drove her to her friends' houses and waited outside while she played. He was obsessed by the fear that something might happen to her.

His wife, Catherine, would only go out to see the Leimbachs or the Shillers. They were all aware of being watched, of people's sympathy. They were glad for the kindness, but every time they saw someone looking at them sadly they were reminded of the reason for their grief and the disappearance rose up fresh before them. Dr. Malloy drove a maroon Chevrolet pickup. One day I noticed a gun rack across its rear window. The next time I saw it, several days later, there was a rifle. This was New York State in November. Hunting was popular. But I didn't think Dr. Malloy had the rifle because of deer hunting. He, too, would drive around town, slowly turning the corners, looking at different houses.

Often it was Paul Leimbach who directed the car patrols in Aurelius. Altogether there were twenty cars, no more than five were on the road at once. The precision that made Leimbach excel as an accountant was applied to the patrols. Each car had a sector. Each drove according to a certain pattern, then would abruptly change to another, as if that quick shift might surprise a prowler, someone with a diabolic interest in young girls.

I've known Paul Leimbach all my life, though not well. With his passion for baseball cards as a child and his passion for numbers as an adult, he seemed to wish to transform the world into data to be measured and weighed. He was without physical chaff, muscular and sinewy. Someone told me that he slept no more than four hours a night. He had a dark, attentive face and seemed to study his surroundings, poised motionless like a hawk in a dead tree. One could never imagine him being taken by surprise, yet his niece's disappearance took him by surprise. It was data that could be digested by none of his machinery.

Leimbach's own daughter, Jenny, was twelve and he had a terror that she was in danger. His wife, Martha, wanted to send Jenny out of town, but Leimbach refused. He felt it would be unfair to Dr. Malloy. Not that he saw himself as risking his daughter because Sharon had disappeared, but he felt—God knows how he verbalized this—that it would be unfair to have Jenny be too safe. On the other hand, he made sure that she was never alone. If he or Martha was not with her, then fifteen-year-old Mark, or Scott, a senior in high school, would be.

I expect Donald Malloy gave over forty hours a week to the Friends. Increasingly, Mildred Porter ran the pharmacy, though Donald would come in once or twice a day to fill prescriptions. He lived by himself on Dodge Street, though I gather he had a cat; his three-story house, though quite narrow, was on a large lot. For some years there had been some thought he would marry, but he never did. Having been divorced, perhaps he didn't want to try again. He had no children. For a while after moving to Aurelius he had dated several women. He had been thinner then and moved faster. He was the sort of man who looked as if he had played football in school and slowly the muscle had turned to fat. Not that he was grossly fat at the present time, but he was heavy. Perhaps he still dated occasionally, but I didn't know of it.

With Agnes Hilton and Dave Bauer, he visited many houses just as they had visited mine. They always tried to be friendly but there was no hiding the fact that whoever they were visiting was suspected in some way, if only in a tiny way. Donald held meetings at his house to develop possible scenarios as to what might have happened to the girls, and these meetings led to further visits. Of course, not all the visits were friendly, so some people came to fear Donald and worked to stay in his good graces.

Franklin had again tried to interview him for the paper during this time but with no success; or rather, Donald said he would be glad to answer any questions but he didn't want to be the special subject of an interview.

“I'm just a tool,” he kept saying. “My only purpose is to find those girls. I have no other work.”

“But you have a whole life to talk about.”

“Perhaps later, when this is over,” said Donald.

His passion to find the girls might have been remarkable had it not been just like his brother's passion or Leimbach's passion or Ralph or Mike Shiller's passion. I had known these people for years. Leimbach helped prepare my taxes. Dr. Malloy was my doctor when I needed one. Ralph Shiller had done electrical work on my house. I bought stamps from Mike Shiller and prescription drugs from Donald. They were some of the most obliging and friendly faces in Aurelius. Their children were my students and the students of my colleagues. Now the group of them had been set apart, as if a terrible mark had been put on their faces. In a way they had been moved outside our community to form their own dreadful community. The rest of us would see that mark and pray that it wouldn't fall on us.

“I'm just a tool,” Donald said. Who could blame him for wishing to shed his human side, the part that suffered? So what if he pushed his way into people's houses to ask questions? We felt sorry for him. And his very stoutness, the weight that he carried under his dark suits or his white pharmacist's jacket, seemed to be the physical shape of his grief, as if without his grief he would be quite thin.

Dr. Allen Malloy was often with Captain Percy and visited him at his house in Norwich. In their sense of duty and their wish to be considered dependable and honest, the two men resembled each other. Both had a rather stoical attitude. Both were florid with a calm exterior, their very redness seeming to testify to the violent activity within. And they had children more or less the same ages, so certainly Captain Percy could empathize with Dr. Malloy's loss.

According to Ryan, Percy's growing friendship with Dr. Malloy only exacerbated his guilt at not having found the person responsible for the disappearances. Percy would make long lists of possibilities, then discuss and investigate them. In this he resembled the Friends of Sharon Malloy, making a minuscule search of the possibilities, then exploring each. He even began to confide in Ryan, whom he had formerly disregarded, preferring instead his own colleagues.

But Percy felt uncomfortable with the Friends, or rather he disliked their attempts at police work. Though he was friendly with Dr. Malloy, he wasn't friendly with Leimbach and Donald. Percy disliked the patrols and he objected to Donald's questioning Aurelius residents. This wasn't professional rivalry. Percy believed that without the patrols whoever was responsible for the disappearances might be more willing to expose himself. And he felt that Donald's interviews merely put people on their guard.

For Captain Percy, everyone in Aurelius was a suspect, even Ryan, even Dr. Malloy. He disliked the hares running with the hounds. He recalled how Ryan had been removed from the inquiry into Janice's murder, and the fact that hands were continuing as a bloody motif wasn't lost on him. One thinks of any community as being crowded with secrets. Percy saw his job as peeling away the skin protecting those secrets, till at last he discovered the secret of the missing girls. In his computer files he had data on everyone in Aurelius—perhaps not the very old or very young, but I'm sure their names were listed. When Harry Martini was brought into the station confessing about his affair with a lady teacher in Utica, Captain Percy already knew about it. And I am sure he knew about my unfortunate period in New York City. He knew about the dark habits of all of us, or almost all of us.

It is dreadful not to be allowed to have secrets. Years ago I happened to uncover a nest of baby moles in the backyard and I watched them writhe miserably in the sunlight. We were like that. A private life is the buffer between the interior self and society. Percy wanted to strip the shell from everyone. One imagined him prying into bathrooms and into people's bedrooms at night. I knew nothing of Percy's political persuasion, but in his heart he was a totalitarian. He saw freedom as people's ability to hide and he wanted to eradicate that power. And of course he felt that information would be safe in his hands or in his computer files. Wasn't that a kind of ignorance? Because what is safety and where is it to be found?

For Captain Percy there existed not only the issue of the missing girls—certainly terrible in itself—but also the issue of someone's trying to hide from him. It would be wrong to say that the second, in Percy's mind, was worse than the first, but it was huge. Someone in Aurelius had taken the girls, someone whom Percy probably saw often. This person was taunting Percy by the return of the clothes. Indeed, it was hard for Percy not to reduce the matter to a struggle between himself and this unknown person whose purpose, seemingly, was to ridicule him. Percy had his superiors in the state police and they must have asked why the investigation was taking so long. No matter how much they trusted him, it was possible that he might need to be replaced. Percy knew that if he failed to find who had taken the girls, his career would be damaged. He took this personally. He felt that the person responsible for the disappearances was out to hurt him as well. He felt he was being played with.

Ryan had told Captain Percy about his conversation with Sheila Murphy and what she had said about Janice's “professional man.” And he had told him about Professor Carpenter, whose alibi for the time of the murder was being investigated.

“How'd you hit upon her?” Percy had asked. They were in an office in City Hall being used by his task force.

“All along I'd thought that Aaron had no reason for biting Sheila, that he'd done it out of perversity or because he was drunk. But what if he had a reason? Not a good reason but a reason. And once I realized that Aaron was trying to find who killed his mother, then it seemed his attack on Sheila was linked to Janice. She was always looking for ways to meet men. Sheila's friendship opened up a whole new bunch of guys to her.”

“But they wouldn't be professional men.”

“I'm sure Janice was using the term somewhat ironically. Was it how somebody referred to himself? Was it someone like a doctor or lawyer, or someone who lifted weights, or someone who really wasn't masculine but only seemed masculine?”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know. Janice's irony always had something mocking about it. For instance, it could be someone who appears to like women but really doesn't.”

Percy decided that Ryan should go back to Mrs. Porter. Ryan met her again in the reference room of Carnegie Library. She had refused to come till Ryan told her that in that case he would be forced to visit the pharmacy.

“I don't like this,” she said as she sat down across the table. “I feel you're taking advantage of a confidence.”

“This isn't about Aaron,” said Ryan, wondering if that was true. “I think you knew Janice better than you indicated. You were friends, weren't you?”

“Is this necessary?”

“I think it is.”

She looked into Ryan's face, then looked away. “I visited her house a few times, but I don't think I could say we were friends.” Around her neck Mrs. Porter wore a white silk scarf fastened with a cameo showing a woman's face in profile. She kept touching the cameo with her fingers as she spoke. “I was still married at that time. She knew about my relationship with Rolf. That it wasn't . . . satisfactory.” She paused.

“Did you meet men at her house?”

Mrs. Porter nodded. She looked back into Ryan's eyes, almost angrily.

“And did Aaron ask you about these men and if you knew any of the other men who went out with his mother?”

“I gave him five names. He seemed satisfied with that.”

“Were any of them what you might call professional men?”

Mrs. Porter raised her eyebrows. “There's you, of course. Janice had just broken up with you. And Henry Swazey, the lawyer. She liked him for a while.”

“She saw him after she saw me?”