The Unclaimed Victim

by D. M. Pulley

  “What the hell happened in here?” a voice boomed from the doorway.

  Kris dropped the picture on the floor. “Troy! You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

  “Jesus, Krit! What’d you do?” He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out of the room. “Do you have any respect at all? Your dad would be furious!”

  She wrenched her arm free and barked back, “Shut up, Troy! This has nothing to do with you. You know what? I don’t feel like catching up right now, okay? I appreciate you coming by, but I need you to leave.” She stormed to the front door and flung it open.

  “You don’t know what the hell you need!” He half laughed and slammed the door shut. “You’re in way over your head, and this tough-girl routine is total bullshit. I mean, you up and leave town after hearing your dad was killed. You leave him in the morgue to rot? What the hell’s the matter with you, Krit? Do you have any idea what you’re putting us all through with these games?”

  She gaped at him. “What I’m putting you through?”

  “This isn’t funny. Your dad is lying in a Goddamn freezer! How could you just leave him there?” He glared at her the way a father glares at a child who has just broken a lamp.

  “What the hell business is it of yours? He’s my father and you have nothing to do with it!” she shouted back. “Now get the hell out of my house!”

  “This isn’t your house. You moved out, remember?” He threw his hands up at the ceiling and paced the floor. After regaining his composure, he softened his voice, cupped her face in his hands. “Baby. Why won’t you let me help you? I know you’re hurting. You don’t have to go through this alone.”

  “Ugh. I can’t do this with you now. I can’t, Troy. I appreciate your concern, but we broke up. Remember? If you won’t leave, I will.” She pushed her way past him and into the kitchen. The spot on the counter where she’d left her car keys was bare. “Where are my keys?”

  “I can’t let you do this.” Troy walked up behind her, shaking his head. “I can’t let you run away from this again. You’re going down to the county morgue with me and getting this dealt with, and that’s final.”

  The fatherly bite in his voice sent a rage through her. “Back off, Troy!” Kris shouted even though he was right. She should go and sign Ben’s papers declaring her father dead. Murdered. She should make arrangements for a funeral. But the killer is still out there. “I’m fine! I’ll take care of it. Just give me back my keys.”

  “No. I’m going with you.” Troy folded his arms across his chest and put his giant body between her and the front door. “I owe it to Al to make sure this gets done right.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Troy! I’m not your girlfriend. I’m not your daughter, and I hate to break it to you, but Al’s not your father! Just give me my Goddamn keys!” Kris held out her hand.

  “Do you hear yourself? You’re not okay, Kris. You sound like you’ve lost your mind. I am not letting you out of my sight. I promised Al I’d look after you, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “What do you mean you ‘promised Al’? When?”

  He grinned, reveling in the fact that he knew something she didn’t. “When you were off messing up your life in Cleveland, that’s when. We saw each other all the time. Hunting trips. Fishing trips. Shit, I knew him a hell of a lot better than you did.” His eyes wandered down her body like he owned it. “Whether you like it or not, I’m the only family you’ve got left.”

  That was it.

  “You are not my family!” She shoved him hard with both hands. “I am not yours to keep! I don’t even like you!”

  She went to shove him again, but he grabbed her wrists. Holding her like a vise, he dragged her across the room, pushed her against the refrigerator, and smashed her lips with a kiss.

  “I know you didn’t mean all that. You’re just hurting, Kris. I’m hurting too. You just need something to get you through this.” He smothered any answer with his mouth. His enormous football player’s frame crushed against her. He kissed her neck. “I’m here. I’m here now. I love you.”

  “Stop . . . Troy . . . Get off of me!” She could barely get any words out with him pressed against her. She hit and scratched and tried to kick, but he had her pinned. He outweighed her by over a hundred pounds. His giant hands pulled up her shirt.

  “No!” she screamed and bit his ear hard enough to draw blood.

  “Ahh!” He stepped back, clutching the side of his head. Before she could even scream, he slapped her to the ground. “Dammit, Kris! See? See what you make me do?”

  As she struggled to gather her limbs, he scooped her up off the floor and cradled the flashing pain of her face in his hands. “Why? Why did you do that?”

  Kris pulled her feet back under her, balled up a fist, and cracked him square in the jaw. “Get your hands off me!”

  His head snapped back, and she grabbed the side of the counter. The knife block was just a foot away. She reached for it, but his hand wrenched her shoulder around. The room spun with it until all she could see was him.

  “Why are you doing this to us?” He blinked the murder out of his eyes and wrapped his anaconda arms around her. “You need to just settle down and think about this, baby. We’re meant to be together. He promised me we’d be together.”

  The ratchet of a shotgun somewhere behind them sent a jolt up Troy’s back.

  “Hands up, motherfucker!” a voice barked. It was Jimmy.

  Kris went limp. Thank God.

  Troy pushed her into the wall, then pinned her with his back as he turned to face the gun. “Hey. Take it easy, friend. What, ah . . . what can I do for you?”

  “You can let her go, OJ.”

  Kris shoved the off-balance football hero away from her and squirmed out from the wall.

  Jimmy glanced at her throbbing cheek. “You okay?”

  She nodded, knowing full well she wasn’t.

  “Kris. You know this guy?” Troy shot her with his eyes and grabbed her arm, yanking her back.

  A shotgun blast splintered the ceiling. Kris hit the floor with a yelp.

  “Step. The. Fuck. Off!” Jimmy’s eyes flashed rage. For a fleeting second, he looked like a crazed killer. Kris shrank from him in disbelief.

  “Okay, man. Okay.” Troy put up his shaking hands, his face freezing into a cringe.

  Jimmy nudged Kris with his foot, not taking his hands off the gun. “Let’s go.”

  She wobbled to her feet, cheeks flushed with adrenaline and terror. The sight of Troy shitting his pants at gunpoint was cold comfort. “Troy!”

  He winced at her.

  “Give me my fucking keys!”

  DERELICTS WORRY AS CITY PLANS TO BURN SHANTYTOWN

  They were getting ready at noon today to set fire to a little village at the foot of Commercial Hill, just about 10 minutes’ walk from the Terminal Tower. And in cells at Central Police Station were 38 men, most of them unwashed, unshaved and red-eyed from too much cheap whisky, to whom the fire will represent real tragedy.

  —Cleveland Press, August 18, 1938, p. 1

  CHAPTER 40

  April 8, 1938

  A dark red star marked the broken back door where Ethel had emerged naked the night before—one crooked square shifted on top of another, a circle of triangles around a crooked center.

  Ethel waded through the overgrown grass past broken fencing, discarded burlap bags, and a bent bicycle wheel. The yards on either side were well kept and trimmed as if to compensate for the abandoned eyesore between them.

  The windows above the shameful yard were mostly boarded along the first floor. The second-floor window sash hung open from a broken frame. Faded wood siding had been scorched black along one side, no doubt an attempt to pay off the mortgage with arson the year the market crashed.

  The neighbors’ curtains were drawn on every window facing the half-burnt house. The backyards were all empty. Ethel took in a breath and opened the splintered back door.

  The kitchen and living room looked much the
way she’d left them the night before. The hard soles of her shoes clapped slowly across the floor as she picked her way through piles of wadded newspapers and torn clothes to the staircase leading up to the second floor. Light leaked in through the staggered boards nailed across the windows, casting slashing stripes onto the walls. The smell of rotting food and stale sweat steeped the air. A dark black stain splattered over the floorboards of what was once a living room. Blood?

  “Hello?” she whispered up from the foot of the stairs. “Johnnie?”

  There was no answer.

  She climbed the stairs one at a time, not fully trusting the wood as it creaked and groaned under her weight. A cool breeze whistled in through the open window as she reached the top. The landing opened into what would have been a child’s bedroom. The flowered wallpaper now curled up at the edges. A small collection of cast-off dolls scattered about the floor. One was missing an arm. One was missing both legs. A ceramic head without a body sat on the floor as though buried in the sand. A thin crack ran down her porcelain face. Ethel’s first thought at seeing the sad toys was Johnnie. But the girl was nowhere to be seen. A headless doll sat under the window.

  Outside the broken glass, the sun had dropped lower in the sky. The five-story brick wall of the Harmony Mission loomed darkly on the other side of the fence. The windows along the top of the factory were all empty.

  Ethel opened the small closet to see two dresses hanging from hooks. They looked about the right size to fit a nine-year-old. Another door sat closed on the other side of the stair landing facing the front of the house. Holding her breath, she swung it open.

  A foul vapor of whiskey and vomit hit her face in the wake of the door. Holding her hand up to her nose, she squinted into the dark room. Boards covered the window. A humongous heap of old rags sat in the middle of the room. It was breathing.

  Ethel backed out of the doorway and down the stairs. The enormous person passed out above her grunted and thumped the ceiling as she scrambled through the living room to the back door. She stopped at the basement stairs. “Johnnie?” she called down into the dark, no longer bothering to whisper, knowing the drunk upstairs was too far gone to catch her.

  She waited long enough to hear another thump and a groan somewhere upstairs and headed out the door. The overgrown backyard ended in an alley running past the Harmony Mission building. Ethel gauged the twenty-foot distance between the factory and the house where she’d emerged the night before. Somewhere below her feet sat an underground tomb full of bones. Brother Wenger could be down there now, looking for her. If she was going to stop the sick bastard before he found another victim to dump in the river, she needed a plan.

  “I’m no hero,” she whispered to herself. “What the hell am I gonna do about it?” She wasn’t a cop or even a reliable witness. She was nothing but a busted whore. Sister Frances had let her go with the detective watching, but she doubted she’d be so lucky the next time. She hugged herself, knowing she’d be better off just catching out on a train. She could head to Chicago behind One-Armed Willie and—

  A flicker of movement caught the corner of her eye. A shadow darted between the houses a half block away on the other side of the gutter they called Thurman Avenue. Tiny one-floor cottages dotted the narrow brick street. The overcrowded houses sat between boarded-up arson attempts and scrub brush lawns littered with broken toys, but nothing was moving.

  Ethel almost turned away, but a black mark on one of the little houses stopped her from across the street. It was another star. Someone had nailed a board across the door, telling her the house had been condemned. The partially covered star looked eerily like the one on the door behind her. She crept up the alley toward it.

  Thurman Avenue sat empty. It stretched down past the Harmony Mission building, and Ethel glanced furtively up at the loading dock before crossing the narrow brick road to the marked house. The yards sat empty as she slipped between two cottages, out of view of the street. The back door of the condemned house hung half-open.

  “Johnnie?” she called softly through the open door. She stepped inside and called again. “Johnnie? You there?”

  The boards nailed over the front windows blocked out most of the light. The kitchen had been stripped clean of even the curtains. Dust and dead flies littered the windowsills. A dark brown water stain spread out over the middle of the floor. Above it, a meat hook had been drilled through the ceiling. It reminded her of Wenger’s pig hanging from its hooves. Ethel’s eyes drifted from the giant metal hook to the stain on the floor.

  A floorboard creaked behind her. Ethel spun to see a small dark-skinned girl with a mat of black hair standing sullen in the doorway. She jumped a little despite herself. “Oh. Hi.” Ethel forced a smile. “Johnnie?”

  The girl didn’t answer. She shrank from the door as though she were about to run.

  “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. Do you remember me? You helped me find my way out of . . . that dark place?”

  The girl gave the slightest nod.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What, uh . . . what happened here?” Ethel asked and pointed to the hook in the ceiling.

  Johnnie just stared.

  “Did you . . . did you see what happened?”

  The girl nodded.

  Ethel swallowed, picturing the pig spilling its insides out on the ground. “Something bad? Did the bad people come and . . . did they hurt someone?”

  Johnnie shrank further into the corner, avoiding eye contact.

  “Did you live here?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s okay. You can tell me about it. I won’t get mad. I won’t tell anyone. You found this house empty, right? Were you staying here all by yourself?”

  She shook her head again and whispered, “My mom.”

  “Your mom was with you?” Ethel nodded to encourage the girl to keep talking while a rotten feeling crawled into her gut. Johnnie’s mother clearly wasn’t with her anymore. She glanced up at the meat hook. “Did somebody find you here?”

  Johnnie just stared at the stain on the floor. Then Ethel remembered what she’d said in the dark. I don’t let people see me.

  “They found your mom? Did they find her here and think she was alone?” The stain spread out over the floor to the bottoms of Ethel’s feet, and her stomach sank like a stone. Only one black woman had been killed by the Butcher, and that woman had been her friend. She shook her head, searching for another explanation, but couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Was your mama’s name Rose? Rose Wallace?”

  Johnnie’s startled eyes were her answer.

  “I knew her.” Ethel hung her head. “I’m so sorry, Johnnie . . . We’ve been looking for you ever since she disappeared.” Her eyes circled the house and then scanned the street. They were on the wrong side of the river in a decidedly white part of town. “What the hell were the two of you doin’ out here?”

  Johnnie just stared at the floor, mute.

  “Was she tryin’ to find work?” Ethel crouched down to the little girl’s level. “Was she runnin’ from someone?”

  “She heard ’em talkin’,” Johnnie whispered.

  “What’d she hear?”

  “She heard ’em talkin’ ’bout the dead bodies down in the Run.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “They said it was too dangerous leavin’ the hands and the heads. She heard them fightin’ over how best to do it. One wanted to keep the heads.”

  “Did she say who?”

  Johnnie just shook her head. “They was white men.”

  “Did she tell anybody?”

  The girl nodded. “She talked to a policeman. He said we was in danger. He tol’ us to hide here and wait.”

  Ethel sucked in a breath and looked back up at the hook in the ceiling. The cop had sent them right into a trap. “What was his name? Merylo or Martin? Either of those sound familiar?”

  Johnnie shook her head.
“Kessler.”

  “Did he come back here? Did he come here with the bad people?”

  “I don’t know. They had no faces. They just hung her . . .” The girl gazed at the hook in the ceiling with the empty eyes of a corpse.

  Ethel touched the cheek of the poor little thing. “You shouldn’t be in here, you know. We should find a better place for you.”

  She turned her dead brown eyes to Ethel and asked, “Where?”

  “Do you have a grandma? Or an aunt? Or anybody nearby?” Rose had a husband once, but Ethel had never met him. If she remembered right, the husband didn’t have much to do with this last baby.

  The girl shook her head.

  “Well, shit. I dunno.” Ethel had nothing. No home. No education. No prospects. No faith in the prison-style orphanages. “Tell you what. You help me figure this thing out, and I’ll . . . I’ll help you figure out where to go. Deal?”

  The girl just stared with those empty eyes.

  “Okay. How many of them were there? Do you know?”

  Johnnie shook her head. “Down in the dead place, lots of voices be talkin’. They say prayers and talk to demons . . . sometimes they light them on fire.”

  Ethel winced. Down in the dead place. The caverns under the Harmony Mission reeked of sewage and something worse—the smell of burning hair. She could feel Wenger straddling her naked body and pressing his Bible to her forehead. Would he have taken a match to me?

  Johnnie gazed blankly at the spot on the floor. “When they was done, they took her away.”

  “Where did they take her?”

  “They packed her up like food. In grain sacks. They rolled a barrel down the street like it was cider.”

  Ethel swallowed hard and looked up at the hook, seeing Brothers Bertram and Wenger bleeding her like a pig. “Where did they go?”