by Megan Abbott
Holding his hand, she felt a panic all through.
Five seconds.
Five seconds she gave to thought. She could run for help and then, while they tended, flee. She could walk away knowing that Everett had tended himself many times after too much, much too much, had taken care of himself a dozen, perhaps a hundred times or more and always stood again. He knew what to do, he did. She knew he would want her to run. He would want her to save herself. She ran through this thought, but for five seconds only.
There were things she had done that she had never guessed she could do.
Things that had now seeped into her bones and changed her forever. Seeped into her bones and now she was sick from inside out. Diseased and lost.
But this, abandoning him, this thing was the thing she could never do. She was glad to know it about herself. There was something left.
“WHERE IS THE NEAREST HOSPITAL?” she asked the man at the newsstand, and he told her it was two blocks and she said, breathless, “Can you summon a policeman?” and he looked at her long and hard, and said he would.
It was while turning to run back to her husband that she saw her own photograph, in clinic garb, spread across three different early editions, hanging six sheets abroad the top of the stand. All the headlines shrieked in her ears:
BLOODY TRUNKS FOUND
IN LOS ANGELES HOTEL
Two Bodies Found Inside, Believed to Be Missing Girls
BLONDE SOUGHT:
SHE SHIPPED DEATH TRUNKS, POLICE SAY
Hotel Employee IDs Doctor’s Wife
She did not stop long enough to read further. She did not stop at all.
Tearing back to the garage, to Dr. Seeley, she gazed up at the phoenix wings towering over the center of the square and thought they might block out the sky entire.
Something in her lifted, something in her lifted and the weight, all the weight, it was gone. In her head, she heard strands of wavery ukulele and could see Ginny dancing, white arms curled about her like those arching wings, dancing and dancing and head tilted, smile hooking, and dancing and dancing…
THEY TOLD HER that her husband would be fine. They told her that he had consumed large quantities of morphine and she nodded, as if not knowing, and wondered what they must think of her that she might not know what caused the thousand thatch marks on the doctor’s legs and those arms with ribbons of scars cross-threaded like a corset.
Oh, Doctor…
The nerve in his cheek twitched, his eyes fluttered open, and he saw her there. She could see the recognition flood across his face and it was awful. She felt awful for him.
“Oh no, Marion…,” he said. “No. I was trying to find out…I thought I was saving…Marion, I did try so…I did try…I…” His face looked a hundred years old and his eyes filled.
Looking down at him, she rested her fingers on his chest. “Doctor, I am to blame. It is me. It is mine.”
Then, quietly, he said to her, “Leave now, Marion. I will repair it all. Flee now. Go to the train tracks.”
She shook her head.
“You must hurry,” he whispered. Then, looking down at his whittled arm, he said, “This is my sin to bear, but I love it so”—and then the faintest of pauses—“more than you, Marion. That is too terrible to say, but it does what love can’t. The world is so dark. But what the needle gives…I wonder if you could understand, Marion.”
And he looked at her with red-ringed eyes. “It adds to truth a dream.”
She saw the way he was, she saw it flickering there before her in an instant, but she shook it away, she had to shake it away. She told herself she did not understand and would not believe him.
She reached out to him, but he turned away and faced the wall. She could not get him to look her way again. She said his name a dozen times or more, but he was still.
Behind her, a doctor said that two policemen were waiting to see her. The patrolman who had brought them to the hospital had alerted them and would she see them now. He was sorry to rush her, but the detectives were quite insistent.
Standing beside Dr. Seeley’s bed, she touched her fingers to his warming flesh and said something quietly to him, and the words, the voice itself came from a place she did not know and she couldn’t even be sure what she’d said, other than it sounded like you, you, you, the last word in a song stuttering on the phonograph: you, you, you, you…
And the detectives did not wait for her, for when she turned around there they were.
THREE HOURS LATER, three hours of questions and Marion hardly managing a word, just repeating the same stories Joe Lanigan had rat-a-tat-tatted into her head and, with each repetition, the stories getting more jumbled, disjointed, a motion picture with the reels out of order.
Somewhere in her head, she wondered how they identified the bodies. She thought she heard them say something about a Los Angeles police detective matching Louise’s body to missing-person photostats and a nasty voice from somewhere in the dark shanks of her head sneered, You should’ve burned her face. You should’ve burned her face with acid or fire. My God, my God.
She gave them nothing, could not fix her head around anything.
They asked and asked and asked.
But her head was a dust bowl.
Somewhere in her, she was building armies to prepare herself, to fortify herself because she knew it was time. She was nearly ready, nearly ready to tell everything because she felt her guilt and shame more purely than ever and knew what must be done.
But her thoughts were scattered and she worried about Dr. Seeley and her words jumbled in her mouth and she could not hold on to them. She began to doubt the soundness of her own mind.
Joe Lanigan, did you even exist? Did you live to ravish me and then disappear into thin air but to stand behind doors, voice rattling through telephones, creeping under floors, whispering commands, puppet string twisted around your heavy hands as you lift your fingers and everyone dances, dances for you?
They spoke sternly, the edges in their voices sharpening. Even that nice Officer Morley, Detective Morley, grew impatient—he told her she knew more, and he was asking about packing slips and train tickets, and wasn’t it funny that a woman perfectly matching her description had taken that train herself to Los Angeles? Had left the Southern Pacific Station in Los Angeles with those trunks? Could she explain who this woman was if not she?
For a moment, the picture of Sheriff Healy, in full uniform and tin star, twirling Ginny around in the girls’ living room, stuttered into her head.
“Sheriff Healy, is he—”
“Don’t even bother,” said the long-necked one, Tolliver. “Don’t even bother. The sheriff knows all about you. Knows the kinds of things you girls had going on there. It went bad between you three, did it?” He zippered his fingers in the air, a perfect triangle.
Marion looked up at them and said nothing.
You must see that now that I will make sure my name is not brought into this, Joe Lanigan had said to her. I will not let it happen and it won’t happen because of what I am in this town. There are levers and switches and keys and I know which way they all go.
And they kept talking and talking, about witnesses at both train stations, at the soda fountain on Hussel Street, everywhere. She had been seen everywhere. Everyone saw her and identified her and there was no hiding. Even people who could not have seen her said they saw her. Lever, switch, key.
“It was you, Mrs. Seeley, wasn’t it?” said Morley. “It was you on that train and it was you who came to claim those trunks? And if you didn’t know what was in them, why did you tell the station agent that the trunks contained game meat? It was you, Mrs. Seeley, and you knew those trunks held the remains, the butchered remains, of your friends, did you not?”
…and finally
Did you murder those two girls, Mrs. Seeley?
And she stuttered and started and finally gathered herself, gathered herself and summoned Louise’s stalwart hauteur. She thought of Louise and she broug
ht Louise to herself and rose tall in her chair and said, keenly, “Do I look to you, do I look to you gentlemen like the kind of person who could murder two women and do the things you’ve said, that you keep saying, who could cut her girlfriends to pieces and pack them in boxes and perform untold horrors upon their bodies?”
They peered down at her, these two tall men looming and hanging over her.
“And I don’t think I will talk anymore. I don’t think I will. I can’t talk anymore now and I believe I will have a lawyer.”
She was placed in the holding cell.
JOE LANIGAN. Joe Lanigan. Would you really nail me to the cross?
I believe, Joe Lanigan, you would.
She sitting here behind a crossbar and what of Joe Lanigan, sprawling bedwise with his nurse-whore?
Prescription slips, tales of dirty deeds, broken-faced dope peddlers pointing shaking fingers—what did any of that matter? Who would believe her now? Who would believe this dirty thing, wasted and unclean, with drug-addicted husband, this dirty thing a monster in waiting? Who would believe her?
She would mount those gallows steps. She would.
BY THE TIME the detectives reclaimed her, not two hours later, she had toiled herself into some state.
“Where is my lawyer? Where is he?” she asked. She could not keep still. She could not stop her hands wringing. Her head was so full. Her head was so full she could scarce hold it up.
“You’re not under arrest, Mrs. Seeley,” Tolliver said, looming, it seemed, two feet higher than two hours before. “What would you need a lawyer for?”
“You’ll have your lawyer,” Morley said. “But right now, we’ll have some more answers first.”
She looked at Morley, and then at Tolliver. They had some bounce in them, some light in their eyes. They seemed more confident, sprightly. She felt they were circling in, circling in.
“I’d like to know where Mr. Joseph Lanigan is,” she blurted before any sense or thought could stop her. But why should it stop her? Wasn’t this the end of the line? Wasn’t it? Grab any rope, grab and hold on. “Have you brought him in for all these questions?”
“Why would we do that, Mrs. Seeley?” Morley said, looking over at Tolliver and back at her.
“He was friends with the girls, now, wasn’t he? He was friends and spent as many evenings with them as I. He’s there behind everyone you mention. He’s behind them all, lurking. He’s behind Mr. Worth who goes to the papers and says I had a fiery temper and the girls were prone to drinking and wild antics, and all these so-called witnesses and all this. He’s behind them all.”
She felt her face grow stiff. Had she gone too far for nothing? Had she only ensnared herself? She stopped. She put her hand to her mouth and bit it. She bit it like an animal and her skin broke fast and blood swelled across her lips, the salt tingling. She didn’t know what she was doing. She started to laugh and the sound of it was terrifying.
“Mrs. Seeley,” Morley said, face turning white. “Mrs. Seeley…”
They bent down toward her. The way they were looking at her, like they realized suddenly they had captured a tigress, a madwoman, right there before their eyes.
SHE SAT in the holding cell. It might have been many hours, she couldn’t be sure. She knew it was all over. She did.
There was a guard with a harelip and a rolling gait who kept coming in and talking to her. He told her there were reporters all the way from Los Angeles, even New York City, outside. He told her that they were trying to take pictures through the bar windows, had she seen them? He had made them stop, wasn’t she glad? He waved one of the daily papers in front of her and told her that the first four pages were all about her, and wasn’t that something. He said he wasn’t supposed to show her, but did she want a peek? The headlines flashed before her: “SUSPECTED MURDERESS’ DEATH TRUNKS HORRIFIED HOTEL STAFF” and “THE WEIRD ‘SISTERS’: Did Fatal Kiss Spark Blonde’s Jealous Rage?”
It is all over, Marion thought, and I am somehow glad. It is my time to speak. It is my time to lay my sins bare.
“I am ready,” she said. But before she knew it, her head wobbled and her chest turned to fire and she felt herself falling again.
THE POLICE DOCTOR was peering over her with his aluminum headlamp glaring like a magnificent third eye.
“I fainted,” Marion whispered. She who’d not fainted in her life now twice in three days.
“Correct,” the doctor said. His breath smelled of cloves. Marion thought of Christmas back in Michigan, of clove-spiked oranges dusted in cinnamon hanging on snow-pattered windows at school. Had Christmas passed this year? Why couldn’t she remember the mistletoe and the holly pricking her fingers?
He kept peering.
“I’m all right,” she said.
“Glad about that,” he said, “but why don’t you tell me now about the hole in your hand.”
Marion looked down at her bullet-torn palm, then back up at the doctor, who tilted his head, watching her closely.
“I’m not talking. I’m through talking,” she said, feeling peaceful, half dead. This was to be it. This was to be it and suddenly it felt so perfect. “The only talking I will do now is to confess. To confess all. I will bear the sins no longer. I will walk those gallows steps head held high.”
“Mighty strong words, miss,” he said, taking her hand in his and turning it over. “But I don’t guess you heard.”
“Heard?”
He took an alcohol-daubed swab to her hand and she cried out.
“About your husband,” he said. “I guess it’s to me to tell you.”
She felt all the sound go out of the world and then she screamed.
TWELVE HOURS PRIOR, bleary and still broken, Dr. Seeley had dressed and found a doctor’s coat, contriving to secure ten grains of morphine, and so taking, wandered out the hospital doors and hitched rides all the way to the big reservoir on the far northern edge of the city. The jump from the top of the concrete dam was more than two hundred feet and he was found by maintenance workers. The note he left on his hospital bed proclaimed:
To all who would listen:
Ten days ago, while in the farthest depths of Mazatlán, I began to have dark notions. Mad with narcotics abuse, I became consumed by a false belief that my wife had been untrue. I determined to leave my post, traveling all the way from Mexico with the idea of entrapping her. By the time I arrived, I was fevered and unsound. Not finding my wife at home, I proceeded shamelessly to Nurse Mercer’s home, knowing my wife spent many evenings there. Nurse Mercer and her friend, rightly sensing I was disordered, tried to calm me and assure me that my wife was not present. I now see they were protecting her. They saw my state and were shielding her. I became enraged. I do not know what possessed me, but for what has been done to my head from years of self-abuse. I was raving. The women were frightened and bid I leave. When I refused and attempted to force my way in, Nurse Mercer ran for a small pistol and begged me to retreat. I pushed through and I seized that gun and I shot them both dead. I shot them both dead. First, Miss Hoyt as she tried to stop me from harming her friend, and then Nurse Mercer too. I couldn’t stop myself. I am a fiend.
My wife is everything to me. I forced her to assist me. I operated on the bodies and packed them in those trunks and forced her to take them away. She is so sweet and lovely I knew she could move without suspicion. I compelled her and, out of fright, obedience and love, she helped me conceal my ghoulish deeds. I am ruined, torn through with shame, and I can go on no more.
It is the morphine. It is the morphine in the veins. That first time, that first time, back in ’26, I will never forget. Everything was as never before. Strange and beautiful. I felt, for one thrilling hour, I could do anything. It was the most wondrous hour of my life. I wish it had been my last.
The letter was all. When Marion read it, and she would only read it once, she wondered how long it would take her to understand the nature of her husband’s sacrifice.
Part of her wanted to confes
s everything and clear his name—this was the biggest part. But doing so would deny his ultimate gesture.
Part of her wanted to follow him.
Part of her could feel herself falling, feel the water filling her mouth, her chest. The peace in that.
But part of her, in the winnowing corners of her fevered head, felt very, very differently. Part of her could not stop herself from thinking, hot-teared: Dr. Seeley, you have taken something from me. I was ready. It was time. This was to be my redemption and now it is yours.
“MRS. SEELEY, we know you were trying to protect your husband. We know your motives were pure and selfless. And that will not be forgotten.”
That’s what they told her. Mr. Quint, her lawyer, took the reins fast and handled everything.
What could be more noble, what could be a greater act of love than Dr. Seeley’s keen sacrifice? On lower currents, she knew the answer: for him to have let her choose how to reckon with it, to have left it to her to choose. That would have been greater still. For she had been ready to face her crimes and, most of all, her sins. And now her chance, it was gone.
Privately, Mr. Quint did not believe his client to be of sound mind after her husband’s demise. He did not believe her ramblings about Mr. Joseph Lanigan—hell, he knew Joe Lanigan, had dinner with him at the lodge once a month and went hunting with him every November. What stories lovestruck ladies will tell. Alas…
Part Six
BLONDE WIFE OF BLOOD BUTCHER FREE TODAY
January 2, 1932
Mrs. Everett Seeley, the platinum-tressed widow of the bloody trunk murderer who took his own life seven months ago following his frenzy of terror, will be released today, after serving a six-month sentence for helping conceal her husband’s crimes. Mrs. Seeley confessed to “aiding and assisting” in the transport to Los Angeles of the bodies that the demon doctor hacked to pieces in his bloody rage.