Dreams in the Key of Blue

by John Philpin

  Clanton’s prison psychiatrist, Susan Paynter, sent me a tape and transcript of a session with her client and asked for my opinion. The convicted killer described sadistic sexual abuse from the ages of eight to thirteen and offered the kind of detail that was verifiable.

  I had sent Ray Bolton a wish list: any available police photographs of Carl Clanton’s basement office and workshop; copies of inventory sheets listing materials removed from the Clanton residence. Bolton did not disappoint me, and I wrote to Dr. Paynter.

  “Police photos taken of the two basement rooms while the bodies were in situ,” I wrote, “show none of the items that Clanton describes. The police inventory log of items removed from the residence lists no bondage magazines, no photos of children in sexually provocative poses, and no leather straps or other bondage paraphernalia.”

  I listened to Paynter’s taped therapy session. The lack of emotion in Sydny Clanton’s voice struck me immediately. “I enjoyed the killing,” Clanton told Paynter. “There was this rush, a high that was better than any drug.”

  She recited dates and facts, recounted atrocities, and discussed her favorite music, all in the same flat tone of voice. She could have been reading a grocery list.

  Dissociated rage, I thought, a fury so overwhelming that Clanton split it off to its own compartment and self-medicated with any mind-altering substance she could find.

  “She killed eleven times,” Squires said. “She carried a leather pouch, and every time she killed, she placed a small stone in the pouch. She was keeping score. When a killer runs up those numbers, and loves what she’s doing, she can’t be dismissed as a thief.”

  At the end of class, Dawn Kramer approached me. “I heard about Mr. Weld,” she said. “I never took any of his classes, but I knew who he was. Sara Brenner went home. My parents want me to come home. I’ve been stalling them. Are the police close to arresting someone?”

  “Investigations take time,” I told her, wishing that I could say something reassuring.

  “People keep dying,” she said, shaking her head as she walked from the room.

  AS I GUIDED MY JEEP SOUTH ON I-95 THAT AFTERnoon, I felt like a Ragged Harbor-to-Portland commuter.

  My gut told me that I was driving in the right direction. I was also nearly certain that I was about to visit what Jasper had erroneously called a blast from my past.

  In the mid-sixties, sitting beside me in the sand at Race Point, Katrina Martin announced that she wanted to be a dancer. “Not ballet,” she said. “Cabaret.”

  She pushed herself up, twirled her way to the water’s edge, and stared at the dark, earlymorning sky as waves washed over her feet. Suddenly she turned and ran back to where I sat.

  “I want to be an actress,” she said. “I want to be Cleopatra and Cordelia, Arthur Miller’s Katie in A View from the Bridge, and Shaw’s Saint Joan, and all those Ibsen women.”

  I patted the sand and asked her to sit.

  “Shit,” she said, dropping to her knees. “The acid’s wearing off. I was going to play the Palladium next. There’s no point in praying to an empty sky.”

  She curled into fetal position, wrapped her arms around my waist, and said, “When I get married and have babies, one of them will be a girl. She’ll grow up to be just like Joanne Woodward or Bette Davis. New York and London theaters will chase after her.”

  Her voice faded to a whisper, and she slept.

  With the aid of Herb Jaworski’s directions, I had no trouble finding Bayberry Trailer Park. A single nail held a bullet-riddled, rusted Nehi sign dangling on a vegetable stand’s burned-out shell. Below the sign was a scrawled invitation to Bayberry Court.

  The “courtyard” consisted of hard-packed dirt and broken glass, and reeked of dog shit. Clumps of grass grew at the corners of a dozen trailers that appeared to have settled at odd angles into the earth.

  No one answered my knock at number three. I stepped away from the door, gazed through the louvered window and saw a TV’s blue glow in a darkened room. I was about to pound louder when a woman stepped from between trailers two and three and said, “She don’t answer when her soaps is on.”

  She was short, nearly toothless, and povertythin with sunken eyes. Her voice was husky and ragged from too many cigarettes over too many years. She pulled a frayed, knitted shawl around her shoulders. “Soaps is like going to church for her. You don’t want the Lord’s house to be a shithole like the one you live in. Some days Katrina don’t answer the door at all. Freaks me out ’cause I gotta use my key, go inside, and make sure she’s alive. Stinks in there. She don’t keep the place clean.”

  Wind whipped through the trailer park, stirred fallen leaves, and threatened with storm clouds rolling in from the east.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “A friend,” I said.

  She cocked her head to one side. Her expression said disbelief.

  “It was a long time ago,” I added.

  “Musta been.”

  “If she’s going to open the door…”

  “Cartoons come on at four. Like I said, even then she mightn’t open that door. Katrina don’t remember too good. Lot that she don’t want to remember. I don’t blame her.”

  “My name is Lucas Frank.”

  “I’m Ellie. You want coffee and talk while you wait? Or are you gonna bother waiting?”

  I imagined a dusty aluminum box with low ceilings and the odor of refuse, but Ellie’s trailer was clean and comfortable, complete with plasticlace placemats. With the exception of a proliferation of crucifixes and religious statuary, the place was not at all foreboding. Ellie had maintained the sheen of her dark, paneled walls and the polished metal molding’s luster.

  We sat at a small, laminated kitchen table and drank a respectable coffee. A radio played softly in another room.

  “I don’t watch the soaps. I listen to Imus when I wake up, maybe watch Oprah in the afternoon.”

  “I’m trying to learn what I can about Harper Dorman,” I said.

  “I’m glad the bastard’s dead,” Ellie snapped, staring hard into my eyes. “I seen on TV where somebody shot him. Should’ve done it a long time ago.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “I thought you were Katrina’s friend.”

  I nodded. “We were young.”

  “You with that cop that was here?”

  “Detective Jacobs. I know who she is.”

  She sipped her coffee and looked away. “I guess I don’t mind talking. Harper fixed outboards at a boatyard. Most Fridays he got a check, picked up his Jim Beam at the port, and was halfway through the bottle by the time he got home. He beat Katrina something awful. Around here, we don’t call the cops. More trouble than they’re worth. Besides, Katrina said not to. Couple of times I did anyway. Never told her, but I did. Just made matters worse. I feel bad about doing that.”

  Ellie wanted to talk. Bayberry Park was a relic, a decaying scrap heap of low-or no-rent hovels sinking into the back-filled tidal marsh where a developer dumped them in the 1950s. These days, young families mired in poverty sought subsidized housing in the city where they could walk to the make-work jobs the law required of the disenfranchised. The park’s last “new” tenant had arrived in 1986 and died in 1991.

  “Katrina and Harper had a child,” I said.

  “You mind if I smoke?”

  I shook my head.

  “So many people do these days,” she said, lighting an unfiltered, generic cigarette. “The state took Lily. Put her in an institution. She ran away when she was fifteen.”

  Ellie took a deep drag from her cigarette, then exhaled. “Harper beat on Lily, too,” she said, looking down at the table.

  That summer day at Steampot Pond, Katrina decided that the most amazing flower in the world sprouted from the earth beneath six feet of water, then surged its way to the surface with flamboyant white blossoms and broad green leaves. A water lily.

  “I think he did more than beat on that child, but Kat
rina never said. Whatever happened, he got away with it for years. The cops arrested him, but nothing came of it. She finally threw him out. Got a court order, not that it did much good. He still came around. That was a long time ago, mister. Katrina should’ve killed him back then. She didn’t kill him now, if that’s why you came here. She ain’t been out of the park in months.”

  I assured Ellie that Katrina-as-suspect had not entered my mind.

  She dragged on her cigarette and tapped the ash onto her saucer. “I remember when Harper killed the dog,” Ellie said. “The cops came that time, too. Some days he came home, and he had cookies and chocolate milk for Lily. That day, he came home and killed her dog. What’s a child supposed to make of that? He smeared the dog’s blood on the living room walls.”

  I pictured the sweeping arcs of blood on the walls above the two dead students’ beds. Before I could make sense of the image or formulate a question, Ellie spoke.

  “Harper always quoted Scripture. He grabbed his King James and banged on that Bible and banged on his chest, and told every woman within hearing that her duty was to God and her man. ‘God is first,’ he yelled, ‘but I ain’t far behind. Fix my supper.’ Somebody shoulda fed him that blessed dog.”

  “What exactly did he do to the dog, Ellie?”

  She looked at me as if I were a dunce. “He shot it. Is that what you mean?”

  Ellie stubbed out her cigarette. “Then he cut it open to get at the blood. Got his hands all covered with it and wiped the walls red. The place looked like a war went on. Lily spent that night with me. It was stay here or go to foster care, and I couldn’t let that child go through another nightmare on top of what she already saw. She sat at this table and drew pictures. I kept paper and colored pencils in the cabinet for when she visited. Lily was good at drawing. She was left-handed, and she kind of wrapped her arm around her pictures while she worked on them, like she was protecting them.”

  Left-handed arcs of blood—shit. My stomach threatened to erupt. Was this tortured kid our killer?

  Ellie demonstrated. “I couldn’t see what she made until she showed me. She drew people. When she finished each one, she took the red pencil and made slash marks across it. I asked her what she was doing. ‘I’m making them bleed,’ she said.”

  “Did Lily ever come back here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Last year there was a woman came around who’d be about the right age. She was tall and just so beautiful. If that was Lily, she turned herself into something special. Rich, too. That woman that was here, she was a princess.”

  “Did Katrina say it was her daughter?” I asked.

  “When she ain’t taking her pills, you can’t put stock in what comes out of her mouth.”

  I had a hundred questions, but could not organize my thoughts. I imagined Katrina and Lily in their separate struggles against an abusive drunk.

  “What was Lily like as a child?” I asked.

  “Strange,” Ellie said, sipping her coffee. “Lily was a smart kid, did real good in school, helped her mother. She cooked the meals, cleaned house, did the laundry. When she got time to herself, she did her homework, wrote in her diary, or she prowled the swamp behind the park. She’d come out of that swamp talking to herself. ‘Vanessa Stripe needs help taking care of the babies,’ she’d say. Or, ‘Billy Brown-spot is overweight.’ Don’t ask me. She walked by my kitchen window gabbin’ away to herself. There were times she’d come press her face against that window and stare in here, like it was someplace she’d rather be. The swamp’s where she buried Spike. That was her dog. She dragged him down there in a burlap sack, dug the hole all by herself. Maybe Spike’s who she was talking to.”

  Ellie paused, examined my face, then continued. “Times after Harper… did whatever it was he did to her, she’d come out and sit on the stoop. He’d passed out from his drinking by then. More than once I saw specks of blood on Lily’s arms. Her shirt stuck to her when the blood dried. She yanked on the sleeve and started the bleeding all over again. Harper carried a skinny, black-handled knife with a long blade. Those times she cut herself, Lily had that knife. She poked at her arms with it. I always cleaned her up and asked her if I could help her. She couldn’t hear me. Her eyes clouded, but she didn’t cry. I expected her to bust out sobbing. She never did.”

  Ellie cleared her throat and lit another cigarette. “Katrina’s a sick person. You got to work at it, but you can talk to her. She don’t always make sense, but you can get her to. With Lily, it was different. She was empty. Like there’d be an echo inside if you tapped on her. She was little then. As she got older, she got hard, real cold. They came to get her that time and found out fast that they didn’t bring enough people. Took five men to get her into that state van.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Maybe fourteen. She looked younger. She didn’t weigh but ninety pounds.”

  A kid, I thought. Five adults wrestled her down and slapped her into restraints.

  “What was it about the woman who arrived in the limo that made you think it was Lily?”

  “A lot of things,” Ellie said. “She visited Katrina, and that would be reason enough. Katrina don’t get visitors. None of us do. She had Lily’s bright yellow hair. When the sun hit her hair just right, it was like she glowed. She was the right age. Mostly it was her eyes. The one time I saw her without the sunglasses, those eyes weren’t Lily’s soft hazel eyes. They were Lily’s ice blue eyes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She flicked ash into the saucer. “At the end, back when I knew her, it was like there were different Lilys. She waved to me and smiled in the morning when she went by on her way to the school bus. I might go over in the evening to visit Katrina, and Lily looked at me like she didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t sure who she was. Her face was different. I swear her eyes weren’t the same color as morning. Probably the worst was when they were taking her out of here. She yelled. She didn’t want to go. She was going to kill everybody, she said. Not just the people who came to get her. Everybody. She meant it, mister.”

  Ellie shook her head. “That wasn’t Lily.”

  “Why did they take her?”

  She took a deep drag on her cigarette, sighed smoke into the air, and tapped her fingers on the table. “Harper fell asleep on the couch. Katrina was in the kitchen heating vegetable oil to make french fries. She turned her head for a second, and Lily had that pot of oil over Harper’s face, ready to pour. Katrina couldn’t get there in time. If you seen Harper’s picture in the paper, you seen the scars. More coffee?”

  “Please.”

  She poured. “The cops said Lily was out of control. They said she was crazy, so they put her away.”

  Ellie leaned back in her chair. “Lily sat rocking in a corner. Two guys came for her. She had Harper’s knife and she cut one of them. The boss cop called in the troops and they put Lily in a hospital. At first, she wrote to her mother a lot. After a few months, she didn’t write so much. No one notified Katrina when Lily escaped. The kid turned up at her door. Katrina was bad off. She didn’t know what to do, so she called the cops. Right after that, Lily Dorman disappeared.”

  THERE WAS LITTLE DOUBT IN MY MIND THAT THIS KATRINA MARTIN was the woman I’d known in Provincetown thirty years earlier. Katrina the cabaret dancer. Katrina the actress.

  I delayed my visit. I did not want to drop into her life after three decades and complicate her already distorted world with questions about her marriage and vague suspicions that her daughter figured in five murders. I would have to talk to her, but I wanted to know more than I did, and to be able to answer her questions while asking mine.

  I walked to the rear of the trailer park and found a path into a wetlands area crowded with cattails and sumac. It was the swamp that Lily had prowled as a child. An earthen dike veered away from the path and led into the middle of the bog.

  I didn’t expect to find anything. I wanted only to be in the place where Lily Dorman had spent time alone. It wa
s a private place, peaceful in a strange way, and haunting. A small, weathered, wooden cross, held together with roofing nails and pounded into the earth, marked Spike’s resting place.

  A red-tailed hawk circled in the slate-colored sky. Wind whispered through the cattails. A water snake slid from a branch, revealing telltale brownish spots on its belly. The snake wound its way across the water’s surface.

  I wondered if I had just met a descendant of Lily Dorman’s Billy Brown-spot.

  THE JEEP’S DIGITAL CLOCK READ 8:25 WHEN I PULLED into my driveway.

  I prowled through the house, grabbed a bottle of Shipyard, tuned the radio to a station that promised to play Eric Clapton’s “Rainbow Concert” without interruption, and curled onto the sofa with the copy of Lily Dorman’s psychological report that Norma Jacobs had sent via Jaworski.

  The timered light in the living room switched on. “Okay, so it’s eight-thirty,” I said.

  Hubert Penniweather, Ph.D., had evaluated Dorman when the state sought a custodial placement for her. Penniweather’s report was appended to Katrina Martin Dorman’s application for a permanent restraining order against her husband. The court document was a standard form. Someone had typed the relevant names, dates, and places; Katrina had written two sentences to justify her petition for relief from abuse.

  The psychologist’s summary included a brief history of Harper Dorman’s drinking and explosive behavior, and Katrina’s psychotic episodes and hospitalizations. The report also included excerpts from a police incident form:

  Minor subject (LD) poured hot cooking oil on her father. Subject refused to talk to officers; Mental Health Services notified. Subject attacked the two responding attendants, cutting both men with a stiletto-type knife. Subject stated homicidal intentions. Back-up officers and attendants (5) subdued subject, placed her in restraints, and transported her to in-patient.

  Ellie did not exaggerate. There were five adults on one kid.

  Penniweather reported that Lily had tested in the superior range of intelligence, next door to genius. Her achievement levels smacked the top of the chart; she read and comprehended at the college level. Not bad for a fourteen-year-old. Penniweather described her as a “bright, highly verbal child.”