The Savage Kind

by John Copenhaver

  “Was Judy circled?” I said, thinking of the gray ghost. I’ve never seen Bogdan, so he could be the man who followed us from Somerset’s. Of course, Judy would have recognized him. Unless he’d changed in some way.

  “No, she wasn’t. I’m sure of that.”

  “They have it wrong,” I said to Quincy. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but the yearbook is significant. It’s got his fingerprints on it. The dockmaster saw it when he was dumping his garbage.”

  “The dockmaster?”

  He stood. “Please, don’t tell anyone I told you.” A worry line creased his forehead. “I can trust you, can’t I? Like old times.” That’s when it occurred to me that I was the one with sway, not Judy and her bizarre manipulations. He remembered the adventurous little girl in me or perhaps his own daring spirit. When we were kids, we would sneak out of Sophie’s and go swimming in the river. We’d do things we were forbidden to do, like swing on vines across creek beds and crawl into caves. I was grateful he still trusted me. After all, he was taking a serious risk. So, I decided to trust him in return and said, “We didn’t tell you everything we discovered when we visited the Closses’.”

  “Okay?” he said, raising his dark eyebrows.

  “I don’t know if these things are important, but Cleve’s mother had a cabinet full of medications.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. “What kind?”

  “There were lots of sleeping pills and syrups, according to Judy.”

  “Did she mention any types? Veronal, perhaps?”

  “What’s Veronal?”

  “A barbiturate. A sleeping aid.”

  I stared at him, searching for a tell, the slightest twitch of a muscle, but he remained still. He’d been working on his poker face. “Is it poisonous?” I said.

  “It can be, in large doses.”

  “Was it what killed Cleve?”

  He smiled grimly. “No.”

  “What killed him then?”

  “Can’t say.”

  He was withdrawing. “Come on, Quincy.”

  “Really, I can’t,” he said, waving his hand and moving away. “The coroner is having trouble determining the cause of death.”

  “So, he wasn’t strangled like Jackie?”

  “I’m not saying.”

  “I told you something.”

  “Okay.” He gave me a wary look and rubbed his chin. “But you can’t tell this to anyone else, especially Judy.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Well, they think he drowned, but it’s hard to tell whether the water entered his lungs before or after death. It’s almost impossible to determine. Although there’s definitely river water in him, they also found traces of a cleaner, something like Bon Ami.”

  “Did he drown somewhere else?” I said.

  Quincy shrugged, and before I could ask another question, I heard Bonnie calling from the bottom of the stairs.

  As I think it over, it seems probable and impossible that Bogdan killed Cleve. Probable, because of the evidence: the mysterious word scrawled on Jackie and, I assume, on Cleve; his lack of an alibi; his creepy fascination with Shirley Temple; and now the yearbook. Impossible, because I know that there’s a connection between what I saw in Miss Martins’s apartment and Cleve’s murder. I can feel it in my gut. Of course, I don’t know what that connection is. Why would Bogdan lust after a grown woman if he had a fixation on young girls? Don’t psychos have a pattern, like Jack the Ripper? For that matter, why would he kill a seventeen-year-old boy? And why would he drown him somewhere else and then dump him in the river? Nothing is adding up.

  PHILIPPA, OCTOBER 31, 1948

  When I arrived at the Peabodys’ annual Halloween soirée, Edith answered the door in a long black gown and a black beaded beak-nosed mask. “Hello, my dear,” she said, “and who are you supposed to be?”

  I’d braided my hair into two loose pigtails and suited up in a blue gingham dress, baby blue socks that I dug out of the bottom of my dresser, and Mary Janes with glued-on red sequins. Mr. Fred was stuffed in a basket hanging from the crook of my arm. “Dorothy,” I said.

  “Oh!” Edith laughed, which surprised me. “I’m a Poe poem! Can you tell me which one?” Her eyes were warm and flashing with enthusiasm. I knew the answer but was too stunned by her amiability to blurt it out, so I stood there, mute.

  “ ‘The Raven,’ my dear,” she said with good-natured impatience. “Well, I suppose you’re looking for Judy. She’s upstairs dilly-dallying, of course.”

  I was woefully unprepared to navigate the party, but Judy had demanded that I come: “It’s always a goddamn nightmare,” she said. “It’s your sworn duty as my friend to run defense—or at least be a distraction.” As soon as I entered the front parlor, it was like stepping into another world. Draped with crepe streamers, the room was saturated with eerie candlelight. Here and there, hurricane lamps flickered and papier-mâché jack-o’-lanterns grinned and howled. A mixture of cinnamon and eau de toilette and linseed oil spiced the air, and all the wood surfaces were polished to a mirrorlike shine. The Peabodys had pushed the chairs against the walls, and on a round table in the center of the room, they had displayed an assortment of hors d’oeuvres, including a platter of caramel apples, nut-encrusted cheese balls, pumpkin–and–cream cheese petit fours, and an impressive crystal punchbowl containing fragrant cider. “Happy Halloween” in big block letters hung limply over the fireplace on the far wall.

  It was early, so there were only a few guests present: an ancient Lucifer with a red pitchfork, a scrawny Roman soldier in tin foil armor, and a fat skeleton. They chatted together in the far corner, each sipping punch from dainty glassware, like some sort of perverse triumvirate. The hired waiters drifted around the room in black tie, adjusting flowers and fluffing pillows. Nestled on a divan near me, a fairy, not much older than I am, flirted with a cowboy in a ten-gallon hat. She smiled at me and mouthed, “Dorothy” and “Cute.” I turned away, overwhelmed. It was all a little too absurd and macabre, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so I made a beeline for the stairs.

  When I knocked on Judy’s bedroom door, a black cat answered. “I hope you don’t have an allergic reaction,” she said, swatting me with her paw. She was wearing a tight black sweater, black slacks, and black velvet cat ears. Her lips were dark purple, her eye shadow a smoky smear.

  I pretended to sneeze. “I thought you hated cats.”

  “I love irony more than I hate cats.”

  “I promise not to drop a brick on you.”

  “Or a sandbag?”

  “Or a sandbag.”

  “Well, then I promise not to claw your eyes out.” She showed her claws. She had painted her fingernails black as well. “Let’s go downstairs and critique costumes. Loudly.”

  She grabbed my hand, and we descended into the thickening crowd. We skirted the fringes of the parlor, living room, and dining room. If anyone approached us, Judy hissed and swatted at them, committed to her costume. The guests laughed nervously or smiled politely and walked on, giving her a wide berth on their next pass through the room. After a while, we became aware of our unique vantage point: the partygoers’ costumes, which were meant to obscure their identities, or enhance their best qualities, or a combination of the two, unwittingly amplified their vulnerabilities and quirks.

  “Philippa, I ask you, why is Attila the Hun wearing socks?” Judy flung out in a full stage whisper.

  “Dear me.” I nodded. “Joan of Arc shouldn’t have cleavage.”

  “She should be burned at the stake for that costume.”

  “Coming as President Truman is a cop-out. That’s not a costume.”

  “That one over there. Is he in a prison outfit?”

  “No, he’s a Communist.”

  “And Lana Turner—she’s looking a little plump, don’t you think? Sometimes wishful thinking isn’t enough, dear.”

  “The one with the horse head and the elephant ears—what is he su
pposed to be? A Chimera?”

  “Bipartisan.”

  “Oh, it’s a donkey.”

  To us, they all became sycophants and neurotics, wannabes and never-could-bes. We were encased in a bubble, floating above them. We had their numbers.

  Eventually, Bart made an entrance as a Minuteman, musket in hand, brass buttons glowing, brown wig lopsided, and reeking of booze. Judy wouldn’t go near him, and Edith took his arm and guided him to a chair. While he sat sipping a cup of punch (spiked, no doubt), Edith darted around the parlor dipping in and out of conversation. Her favorite topic was Bogdan’s arrest. Like me, Judy thought the police had it all wrong, but Edith was delighted with the turn of events. She told guests, “At long last, they’re on the right track!” and “It only took another murder for them to wake up,” and “I don’t think they’d question him if they didn’t have hard evidence.” From behind sequined masks and fussy wigs and silly clown faces, the guests murmured about the inadequacies of the police and justice for Jackie. At one point, Judy leaned in and whispered, “I’d love to crack that punchbowl over Edith’s head.”

  Finally, we retreated upstairs, grabbing Roosevelt on our way. After depositing the dog on her bed, Judy went to her record collection, selected several LPs, and dropped one onto her player. As Chopin’s “Nocturne in E Minor” floated out from the speaker, she plucked off her cat ears and tossed them across the room. She curled up with Rosie and gave him a belly rub. I slung my basket and Mr. Fred to the side, flopped on the window seat, and pulled my legs under me, soothed by the warmth from the nearby radiator. My Dorothy outfit was too skimpy for this time of year.

  Scooping up Rosie and drawing her close, Judy looked at me, her eyes shiny and deep like polished marbles, and said, “There are things I remember that never happened to me.”

  “What?” It was a startling thing to say. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does, and it doesn’t.”

  A little exasperated, I said, “Is this a riddle?”

  She glared at me. “It’s my life.”

  “Okay,” I said, hugging my bare arms, “so explain it to me.”

  JUDY, OCTOBER 31, 1948

  As soon as I said it, I felt like a total fool: “There are things I remember that never happened to me.” Philippa gaped at me like I was as doped up as Elaine Closs. I wiped the wetness from my eyes. My thoughts were spreading in all directions like scampering mice: Why was I blurting this out now? Did I trust Philippa with it? It would feel so good to tell someone! Something in me—a tactical impulse—drew in all the scattering thoughts, and breathing out, I said, “I remember when Bart and Edith came to visit me at Crestwood for the first time.” I paused, taking in Philippa’s gingham jumper, her pigtails, and her makeshift ruby red slippers. The absurdity of her costume—of me divulging all this while she was dressed as goddamn Dorothy—calmed me. “I was on the floor, playing with a doll, and Edith kneeled and placed her hands on the sides of my shoulders and said, ‘My darling little girl. You’re perfect. It’s like you’re ours already.’ I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know I was being adopted. Her expression was odd but full of something. Love, maybe? I don’t know.” Philippa listened quietly, her eyes flickering, taking it all in without judgment. I was suddenly thankful for that, for her. “Within a few weeks,” I went on, “they had adopted me, and I was no longer Judy X. I was Judy Peabody. We went shopping, and I got more dresses than I ever imagined I’d own. They were frilly and hideous, but they were new, and they were mine. Edith told Bart they were ‘what Jackie liked’ and ‘wouldn’t she have looked the little princess in them.’ I wasn’t sure who Jackie was, but at the time, it seemed like a good thing.”

  “Okay,” Philippa said, adjusting her thin cotton dress over her knees, “but I don’t understand what this has to do with your misremembering things.”

  “I’m getting to it,” I said, a little prickly. Rosie slipped through my hands and leaped from the bed. “First, you have to understand what they did to me.”

  Laughter swelled from downstairs, cutting through the dreamy Chopin. “For a short time,” I said, hesitating, afraid to go on. I didn’t want her to think I was totally nuts. I had to go on. I’d committed to telling her. I wanted her to know. I flexed my jaw muscles, and blood swelled in my temples. “You see, after I was adopted, I…”

  “Yes?”

  “I-I began to believe I was Jackie.”

  Philippa didn’t move or speak, but her silvery eyes grew wide.

  “Edith began dressing me like Jackie and calling me Jackie and talking about things we’d done last year at Christmas time or during summer vacation at Cape May,” I said, forcing it out quickly. “She’d say something like, ‘Jackie, darling, do you remember the time we went to the Smithsonian and saw dinosaur bones?’ and then she’d order me to sit beside her, and we’d flip the pages of her photo album. She’d point to a picture of Jackie standing beside a triceratops and say, ‘There you are. What a cute little hat you have on!’ She even avoided calling me by name around her social circle, as if somehow, they wouldn’t notice I wasn’t Jackie. I was baffled at first. I mean, what the hell. But with time, I started to believe her. Maybe, it was me. Maybe I’d forgotten about the triceratops and the cute little hat. Eventually, I began to buy it: I was the girl in the photo. Of course, I was. Sure.”

  “Weren’t you furious?” Philippa said, leaning in, engrossed. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t run from the room screaming yet.

  “It was easier to believe it than fight it. I started rewriting my past, blotting out the old memories and replacing them with Jackie’s. Besides, she’d had a much better childhood. I even started to add on to her memories. Her face would light up when I would pick up a memory she’d laid down and develop it, expand it, find its core—‘Do you recall your sixth birthday picnic at Rock Creek Park?’ or ‘Oh, remember seeing The Wizard of Oz at the Uptown?’ ” Philippa glanced down at her costume, startled, it seemed, to remember she still had it on. “I’d feign recognition and say, ‘I sure do! That was so much fun! Remember the cake shaped like a music box with the little ballerina in its center? Remember the ruby slippers? Remember the Wicked Witch of the West?’ I could make up ridiculous things, just bullshit, and she was happy to play along. I’d watch as color would rise through her pasty face. It felt like I was giving her something, relieving her grief a bit. I guess I was trying to love her.”

  Philippa’s shoulders drooped and her braided ponytails slipped over her shoulders. “That’s so sad,” she said, and I could tell she meant it, but I could also tell she didn’t know what else to say. Jesus, what could you say?

  I went on: “Then Bart caught wind of it. Between his martinis and highballs, he ordered Edith to go for a rest cure and straighten herself out. While she was away, he tried to explain what had happened to Jackie. I was only eleven, so it took me a while to get it. What the hell did I know? The worst of it, though—” A big wet ball of emotion swelled up in me, and I breathed in, trying to keep it together. I wasn’t going to start blubbering. “I can’t remember who I was before all the fucking lies.”

  Philippa didn’t move; she just sat there, stroking one of her pigtails. I looked away, wiping the dampness from the corners of my eyes. Chopin wavered in the air between us, as if sprinkled there like shimmery black dust.

  Breaking the silence, she said, “What do you remember before being adopted?”

  I was glad to have a question to answer: “Crestwood, of course. Its sickly green walls. Its lawn. The boxwood hedges. Some faces, women’s faces. There was another place too…” I fell back against my pillows, wanting to sink deep into them, hoping they might muffle my mind. “I don’t remember things that happened. I don’t remember events. I have dreams, but I’m not sure what they mean. Some of them are too bizarre to be real—and then there’s the one about the cats.” My stomach cramped, and I folded over, grunting softly. The impossible smell of damp earth wafted into my nostrils, and a chill ran
head to toe. Goddamn cats. Jesus Christ.

  “Are you okay?” she said, uncurling her legs and sitting up.

  “Yes, yes,” I said, holding my arm out. “It’s just too many pumpkin–and–cream-cheese petit fours.” I stared at the molding on the ceiling, willing away the pain and the tears; it was becoming difficult to keep it all tamped down. “Fuck B and E,” I said, biting my lip. “Fuck Jackie, too.” I didn’t want Philippa to see me like that—so raw. But maybe she needed to. After all, we’re both jigsaw puzzles with missing pieces. My childhood is full of holes, and she never knew her mother. Maybe we need to see each other’s gaps. If we can identify their shapes, we’ll know what pieces to look for.

  Philippa stood, came to me, and bellyflopped across the end of the bed, her homemade ruby slippers scissoring the air above her, shedding sequins. “You know,” I said, feeling calmer, “I used to stand in front of the mirror and try to imagine what my parents were like. Did dear ol’ Dad give me his swarthy looks? Did Mother Dear give me her thin waist and long, tapered fingers? I imagined them being Italian aristocrats. Or Texas oil moguls. Or jet-set adventurers who hiked Mount Everest and paddled the Amazon.” I felt Philippa’s eyes on me, soaking it all in. “Or maybe they were just average. A milkman and a seamstress. A store clerk and a housekeeper. Or maybe they were the victims of a robbery gone wrong or a horrible accident—something tabloid-ready and gruesome: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Jack Nightingale, of the esteemed Earnshaw-Nightingales, died in a tragic hot air balloon crash. They plummeted two thousand feet into the Potomac and were never heard from again!’ ” I said in my best news announcer voice.

  Philippa stretched her hand across the bedspread. I reached back, feeling the tips of her fingers and the smooth polish on her fingernails, but I couldn’t meet her eyes. I feared her pity. It would crush me. I shoved those memories from my mind, withdrew my hand, and hugged a pillow to me. “I’m not going to let B and E get away with celebrating because they think they got their man,” I said, looking at her. She was clear-eyed and somber, no trace of pity. Thank God. “Bogdan didn’t kill Cleve. I know it.”