by D. M. Pulley
Brother Bertram. She could see him holding the bleeding pig, ready to spill its guts while Wenger cut it through. She could see him holding a terrified girl. Ethel tried to picture the two men walking across the courtyard that night. It could’ve been him, she decided, but none of the little secrets hidden behind the walls of the Harmony Press explained the screams she’d heard coming up through the drain. She studied Mary Alice’s pleading eyes and decided there was nothing else the poor girl could tell her.
“Go back to your good reverend, Mary Alice. Tell ’em I wasn’t ready to answer God’s call just yet. You tried your best to convince me, but I’m in the grips of the devil or whatever it is you people say. Just stay away from Wenger, okay? Don’t let him lock you up.”
“Do you think he has something to do with the murder that detective was talking about?” The girl’s eyes swelled.
“I don’t know . . . If you get scared, go to the police. They’ll believe you. You’re not a drunk whore like me.”
“What are you going to do?”
Ethel opened her mouth to answer but was interrupted by the sight of Sister Frances storming up the street to where they were standing. “Sister Mary Alice! There you are. You left your post in the bindery unattended.”
“I’m sorry.” The girl bowed her head to prove it, then gave Ethel a pleading look. “Are you sure you won’t come back with me?”
Ethel shook her head. “Take care of yourself.”
Mary Alice pressed her lips into a worried smile that seemed to wish her well, then took off down the street at a steady trot back to her station in the Lord’s work. Sister Frances let her pass and turned to Ethel.
“Sister Hattie.” The old woman sized her up once again and gave her a prim nod. “I hope you were satisfied with your search of our facilities today?”
Ethel rolled her eyes and turned to go.
“I trust that we won’t have any further outbursts or inquiries from you then. I’m sorry you did not find your calling among the Harmony Mission, but God works in mysterious ways. I do hope we’ll see you in our Sunday school classes this summer.”
Ethel waved a hand at the old bat and headed up the street.
“It’s never too late to take Jesus into your heart, dear,” she called after her. “We are all sinners before the Lord until the day His mighty river washes away our earthly transgressions and lifts us up anew.” She sounded eager to see the flood.
A severed leg floated up through the murky waters of Ethel’s mind. The killer liked to throw the bodies in the water, she realized, a reverse baptism at the end of life. She glanced up at the half-burnt house, the one with a bleeding star on the door. The little girl might still be somewhere inside.
“You’ll be in my prayers, Hattie,” Sister Frances said before giving up.
Ethel muttered under her breath. “Thanks, sister. I’m gonna need it.”
75 SILVER SHIRTS RALLY DOWNTOWN
Last night, seventy-five men and a few women participated in a revival of activity here of the Silver Shirts, an American “constructive Christian” organization, by hearing the address by Ray Zachary of Asheville, N.C., speaker for the movement . . .
Chief targets of Zachary’s two-hour exhortation to his audience to “help return this Christian country to a Christian government” were President Roosevelt, Communism, which he linked with the Washington administration, and “international Jewish financiers.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 13, 1938, p. 3
CHAPTER 37
April 9, 1999
Glass jars of lead pellets and gray gunpowder lined the top shelf. The bottom shelf was empty, except for a large black leather binder. Kris pulled it out and slapped it down onto the steel counter next to the shell press. She glanced over at Jimmy and flipped the book open.
A yellowed newspaper clipping from the Wapakoneta Daily had been pasted to the first page. The headline hit Kris right in the gut—LOCAL WOMAN KILLED IN CAR CRASH. The large photograph splashed across the page showed a sedan upside down in a ditch. A cloud of smoke trailed up into the sky, and two firemen stood at the edge of the road. The date below the banner read June 18, 1985.
“That was my mom,” Kris whispered.
Jimmy didn’t say a word as his eyes skimmed the article.
Her father had underlined several phrases in blue ink. The engine fire burned for over an hour . . . identified by her husband, Alfred Wiley, age 40 . . . exact cause of accident is still under investigation . . . have not ruled out intoxication . . . pending completion of the autopsy.
Kris turned the page to find a second article published weeks later. It was much smaller than the first, without the flashy headline. In small print it read, Area Woman’s Death Alcohol Related. The only words underlined in the two inches of type were toxicology report. Her mother’s obituary had been pasted next to the article. It began with a smaller, grainier version of the portrait her father kept by his bed and the caption Rachael (Froehlich) Wiley.
The sound of Jimmy’s voice cut through the mildew and dust hanging under the quiet hum of the fluorescent light. “Is that your mom’s maiden name? Froehlich?”
Kris blinked the fog from her eyes. “Uh, yeah. It is.”
“I’m sorry . . . I mean, I’m sorry she died.”
“It was a long time ago.” It was true, but a heavy weight settled onto her shoulders with the revelation that her mother had been drunk. She turned the page to find half a newspaper page pasted sideways. It was an inside page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer dated April 8, 1980. An article had been circled in red ink, and her breath caught at the headline—MAN’S HEADLESS BODY FOUND NEAR TRACKS. Jimmy’s dreadlocks brushed her shoulder as he leaned in for a closer look.
Lakewood police are attempting to learn the identity of the body of a decapitated white man found next to the Conrail railroad tracks at 6:55 a.m. yesterday . . .
Kris’s eyes jumped between the lines. “You don’t think?”
“I know this case.” Jimmy tapped the paper. “It’s all over the discussion boards. Yeah. It could be them.”
They turned the page and then another. More clippings of headless bodies found in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Indiana followed. Some were marked with underlines, some were just circled.
HEADLESS TORSO FOUND
Barrington Hills, Ill. (AP)—The headless torso of a man—the fifth dismembered body found in 16 months in suburban Chicago—had lain in tall grass for about 24 hours before it was found, a police official said.
As they flipped through the stories, Kris began to count. There were more than twenty. She backed away from the book, letting Jimmy take over.
“I haven’t heard of half of these,” he mused. “Looks like your dad’s been at this for years. He must’ve really been on to something. Man, I wish I could talk to him . . .” His voice trailed off, probably out of respect for Kris, but she wasn’t listening.
All she could see was the faded photograph of her mother’s smoking car. She could hear the crunch of metal and smell the gasoline spilled over the ground. Her mother had been trapped inside as it burned. Her father had never told her the whole story. The car burning. Her being drunk when it happened.
She heard Jimmy’s voice through her muddy thoughts. “Does your pops have a computer?”
“What?”
“A computer? Does he have one?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe at work. Why?”
“You said the guy that went looking for your dad was a David Hohman, right?”
“Did I?” Kris couldn’t remember, but she must’ve. “Yeah, that was his name. Do you know him?”
“Not personally, but I’ve been thinking about it.” He paused as though he wanted to let it go at that, until she looked at him. “It’s just that there’s a guy on the discussion boards that goes by DHOH.”
She stared at him a beat. “Yeah. I know. I’ve seen him there too . . . Why didn’t you mention him before?”
“I don’t kno
w. You were upset.” Jimmy flipped open another page in the binder. MURDER VICTIM NOT YET IDENTIFIED, a headline screamed. “I don’t know this DHOH guy or anything. No one uses their real name online, but I was thinkin’ . . . that might’ve been how they met.”
“Yeah.” She narrowed her eyes at him. His murder room flashed in her mind along with nagging questions she wasn’t sure she wanted answered. How obsessed with the Torso Killer are you, Jimmy? Were you on the night Lowjack broadcast my dad’s police file? But she didn’t remember seeing a computer in his squatter’s lair. “Maybe. Do you, uh . . . go online a lot?”
“A bit.” He almost seemed sheepish. Maybe it was because she was glaring at him with accusation.
She looked up at the cobwebbed ceiling and reminded herself that Jimmy had been nothing but kind to her. “Who are these people?” she muttered to herself.
“Just people,” he answered. “A lot of them are looking for missing relatives. I mean . . . why did your dad collect all these articles?”
She just shook her head.
“Torsokillers.com is a pretty big group. There’s a few more out there—nottinghillkiller.com, coldcasework.com. DHOH posted on all of them. He claimed to be some sort of ex-cop, but that could be bullshit. He liked to give everybody his professional opinion on their missing persons. He was obsessed with the Torso Killer. Definitely a Cleveland guy.”
“And my dad met him online.” It made sense, she supposed. But the feeling she was missing something nagged at her.
“DHOH said he freelanced as a private investigator. Maybe your dad contacted him about all of this.” He tapped the scrapbook.
“Or maybe he suspected Hohman was the killer.” She turned the idea over in her mind again, looking for cracks. “Mel said the guy wasn’t friendly and he’d come looking for my dad right before he vanished.”
Jimmy nodded as if to say it wasn’t a totally crazy idea. “But there was more than one killer, Kris.”
Kris swallowed hard at the thought of her father alone in the woods with a murdering cult. She tried to clear it away with facts. “Someone’s been destroying the official records. Someone’s trying to cover something up. Maybe this DHOH is just covering his tracks. That David Hohman guy used to hang out at the county archives. They told me about him.”
“Maybe.” Jimmy studied her pale face in the flickering fluorescent light. He leafed through the clippings again. “The only one that doesn’t fit is the one about your mom. It was a car crash, not a murder. Any idea why he’d put that one in here?”
The memory of the car felt like cement in her chest. Its passenger door had been torn off. The paint was scraped off in metal stripes and blackened with soot. A tow truck pulled it out of a deep ditch by the side of an empty field. Kris watched it through the window of her father’s backseat. He’d left her alone in his truck. He was on his knees in the middle of the road. Somewhere in her distant memory, she could still smell the smoke.
“Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe he thought . . .” Jimmy’s voice faded as he looked at her. “Hey. You okay?”
She shook her head. After the accident, her father had never said a word about it. The tools and knives and bullets and cobwebs crowded in around her under the cold lights. Maybe it wasn’t an accident?
Jimmy gave her shoulder a squeeze. “I could tell you more if I could just get to a computer.”
“What the hell does a computer have to do with any of this?” She grabbed the metal counter to steady the room. “It was an accident! You saw the article. She was drunk! She got drunk and left me! I saw the wreck . . . Careless idiots die in car accidents every day! Not everything is about a psycho killer! For Christ’s sake . . .”
Jimmy softened his eyes and voice and cupped her ashen face. “I know that. But your dad put those articles about your mom in this book with the others. Don’t you think that means something?”
“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything!” She realized she was screaming and forced herself to breathe. After counting to five, she said in a lower voice, “So what are you saying? You think the whole car accident was some sort of elaborate cover-up? And that he talked to this David Hohman or DHOH or whatever the hell his name is about it?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. That’s why I need to get online. We need to find this DHOH guy and find out. I mean, it couldn’t hurt, right?”
“Why the hell would anybody kill my mom?” Kris demanded, no longer caring if she was loud. “She was just a mom!”
“Hey. Take it easy. C’mon. Let’s get out of here and talk.” Jimmy led her by the arm out of the workroom, through the mesh bags of duck decoys, and back toward the stairs. “Your mother’s maiden name was Froehlich, right?”
“Yeah, so?” She wrested her arm free and climbed the steps back up into the kitchen on her own.
“Isn’t that Jewish?”
“What?” Kris frowned at him, realizing where he was going with this line of questioning and not liking it one bit. “I don’t know. Maybe? Can you tell by a last name?”
“Yeah. Some people can. Green, Goldberg, Epstein—Jewish names can be just as easy to spot as Italian ones.”
“Okay. So?” She knew the answer before he said it.
“So maybe somebody didn’t like that. Your dad marrying a Jew.”
Her grandparents sat like sentries on folding chairs in the back of her mind. “You mean the Silver Shirts.”
“He had their weird gang sign tattooed on him, right?”
“No. Not really. It was more of a . . . scar.”
“Okay, so maybe some Silver Shirts or whoever gave it to him. Either way, they would’ve hated your mom, right?”
Kris pictured her father’s wide-open smile and the way he’d wrap an arm around her little shoulders during the ball games on TV. She shook her head. “But he wasn’t one of them. There’s no way.”
“You sure? People change, you know. He went to Vietnam, right?”
She nodded. “Airborne.”
“Right. Death from above . . .” Jimmy thought on it for a moment. “Maybe blowin’ people up changed him. War does some funny things to you, from what I’ve heard anyway. He talk about it much?”
“No.” Kris sank down onto her father’s ugly plaid couch and put her head in her hands. His shotgun still lay in pieces on the coffee table like he was getting ready for a hunting trip. She pictured him in the tattoo artist’s chair, trying to cover up his past with ink. “So he fell in love with my mom . . . who you think was Jewish . . . and then they killed her?”
“Who knows? But maybe that’s what he was afraid of. I mean, look at where he decided to live.” Jimmy motioned to the empty fields surrounding her dad’s house. “The Unabomber could live out here. It’s the perfect place to disappear.”
Kris had seen the tiny house and empty fields through Jimmy’s eyes the moment they had driven up. It looked like a redneck bunker—a bunker full of guns. Her father’s family never came to visit, and Ben was his only friend. The grandmother she remembered could barely look Kris in the eyes. Her un-blue eyes with her un-blond hair. Kris and her dad had been living on an island. “But who cares about being Jewish anymore? This is the ’90s. The Holocaust was like fifty years ago. The war is over.”
“You don’t go online much, do you?” Jimmy plunked down next to her and took her silence as his answer. “The war never ended. There are Nazis and lunatics all over this country. Literally thousands of people think the world is coming to an end in a couple of months. The big millennium and the prophecy of Nostradamus and all that. Y2K. Whatever you want to call it. Dozens of chat rooms are out there discussing the second coming of Christ. The end of days. People really believe this shit. These people really believe that the devil is out there walking among us. And some of them crackers think the devil is Jewish. And some think it’s black folks like me. Shit, some woman put her baby in the oven last week, sayin’ it was possessed. It’s a fucked up world out there.”
Kris held up a hand to stop the
stream of horrifying nonsense coming out of his mouth and tried to acknowledge the truth of what he was saying. These people are real. Nazis are real. I might even be related to some of them.
“Wait.” She wiped an escaped tear and forced herself to track back through their conversation. So many pieces were still missing, and everything that came out of his mouth seemed absurd. People didn’t get murdered. They died of heart attacks and in car accidents. Murder only happened to the not-quite-real people on the news. People from inner-city slums and foreign countries. “I don’t get it. I really don’t. I mean . . . if this David Hohman really wanted to find my dad—if they knew each other somehow—why would he give Mel at the diner a fake business card? How do we know he isn’t just some sick stalker?”
“I don’t. I never met the guy. DHOH is just an avatar. He could be anybody. Can I see the card?”
“It’s back at my place.”
Jimmy glanced up toward the kitchen. “It’s after ten. We can’t head back now . . . You still want to go to the morgue tomorrow?”
The photographs of severed arms and legs flipped through her mind in a broken filmstrip, stopping on the schematic diagram stitched with red dotted lines, separating the parts of the victim into cuts of meat. She’d never seen a dead body before. The closest thing had been the deer her father shot every winter. He’d hang the carcass from a rafter tie in the garage. She’d run past it into the house, not wanting to look at the body dangling there from its front hooves while her father peeled off its skin. Its guts would be hollowed out, leaving nothing but a wood stick holding open its ribcage, the white bones sticky with dried blood. A loud buzzing filled her ears. She shook her head and mouthed the words, I don’t know, not trusting her voice.
“You’re tired.” He wrapped an arm around her and rubbed her shoulder. “C’mon. Let’s get you to bed.”