by Tricia Dower
The devil’s as real as God even though you can’t see either of them. The devil can get into you and take over when you’re angry. Other times, too.
ROTELLA
What other times?
JUKES
When you have impure thoughts.
ROTELLA
You mean about sex?
JUKES
Yes.
ROTELLA
What do you do when you have impure thoughts, Buddy? JUKES Exercise, mostly.
ROTELLA
Yeah, you’ve got a muscular build. I’m impressed. What else?
JUKES
Just try to keep busy and show the devil he can’t own me. Stay away from places he likes. He’s supernatural but he can’t be in two places at once.
ROTELLA
Where’s the devil like to go, Buddy?
JUKES
Bars, card games, parks at night. I stay away from them.
ROTELLA
When you’re trying to avoid the devil, Buddy, do you sometimes head out in the car? You know, drive around to clear your thoughts?
JUKES
Yeah, sometimes, but I have to be careful because if the devil got in he’d start driving the car.
ROTELLA
Is it the devil that offers rides to people?
JUKES
Of course not. He doesn’t care about people who are tired or shouldn’t be out in the dark by themselves.
ROTELLA
Ever given a ride to a guy?
JUKES
No!
ROTELLA
No need to take offense. It was a reasonable question. Why not?
JUKES
They can take care of themselves. It’s not dangerous for them. They wouldn’t be scared enough.
ROTELLA
Scared enough for what? (Sound of door opening. Footsteps)
ROESCH
You’re free to go now, Buddy. Your wife posted bail, brought a lawyer with her. Somebody will notify you of your trial date. Show up, okay?
ROTELLA
I need more time, Artie. I think we’re making progress.
ROESCH Sorry, no can do.
ROTELLA
I haven’t shown him the last picture yet.
ROESCH
Well, that’s the way she goes.
FEW PEOPLE telephone Miranda. She recognizes Enzo’s voice right away.
“I know he had something to do with the missing girl, Evelyn Shore, if not the dead one, Barbara Pickens,” he tells her, recounting an interview the day before with a man he suspects of several crimes. “I was so close to gaining his confidence. And I would have if I’d conducted the whole interview. The other detective hit him too hard at the beginning and put him on his guard. Then we ran out of time before I could ask him how the devil gets into him or show him the dead girl’s morgue picture. Twenty puncture wounds that look like leeches, on her chest, shoulders and arms. Made with a double-edged knife. If they’ve got any soul at all, the morgue shots get to them.”
Enzo’s disembodied voice is youthful, energetic. His passion for his work helps Miranda turn her mind away from the stinging sensation on her arms and chest. She recalls the sharp pain she’d felt in her chest as soon as Doris said Bill Nolan had been shot. She doesn’t always need to enter an object to hear a victim speak to her.
“I wanted to ask if he was on medication,” Enzo says, “and if he could go back, what he would change. He’s twenty and set to be a father in two months, but he looked like a kid in that bare, intimidating room, all curved in on himself. If he’s done what I think he has, he’s evil, but I wanted to hug him, tell him he wasn’t alone. Is that crazy?”
“I don’t think so. I read somewhere that each of us is both killer and killed. Captive and captor, too,” she adds, thinking of James. “You saw yourself in him and felt compassion.”
“A dangerous trait for a cop,” he says. He tells her there’s been a promising development. A high-school student claims that this same man, this suspect, assaulted her in a wooded area that might be the one in which Barbara Pickens’s body was found. They brought the suspect in for a lineup and she picked him out with no hesitation. The girl is reluctant to testify in court; Enzo will keep working on her. If she backs out, they can always subpoena her.
Enzo hasn’t called just to share his day. The suspect’s wife’s name is Ladonna, he tells Miranda. How’s that for a coincidence? They need a statement from the wife, so he’s volunteered to take it. And he knows it’s an imposition, but if he can get something that belongs to the suspect, would Miranda be willing to tell him what she sees in it?
It’s been nearly a year since she entered that poor girl’s petticoat and sensed Bill Nolan’s presence in error. “I cannot,” she says. “I simply cannot.”
TWENTY - SEVEN
NOVEMBER 5, 1959. Buddy would be home soon. Tereza struggled to concentrate on cooking his oatmeal. Lately, following her own thoughts was like listening to a TV playing in another room where somebody kept changing the channels.
Buddy’s lawyer, Maury Sawicki, said the attempted kidnapping charge wouldn’t stick; Buddy’s only crime was caring too much about vulnerable girls. Tereza had looked up “vulnerable.” Defenseless. Like the baby inside her. Growing one was a big whoop. Somebody told Tereza unborn babies feel and hear everything their mothers do and sponge up their emotions. She had to stay cheerful and keep that—ha, ha, thanks, Buddy—bubble in the middle.
She was back to having breakfast ready when Buddy got home from night shift. They’d kept him on at the A&P but moved him to the Cranford store and put him on nights to keep him out of sight. Too many customers would’ve seen his face in the paper. Dearie was afraid they’d take back the red plastic coffee scoop imprinted “A&P 100 Years,” but they didn’t.
Tereza was having to learn the meaning of words like prosecute, indict and acquit. Maury said he might want her to testify at the assault trial about how Buddy had never hurt her. But if she went on the witness stand the prosecution could ask her anything, so Maury said to think about it. He didn’t want Dearie to testify for that reason. Didn’t want either of them saying much of anything to anybody before the trial. “You don’t know who might be a plant. They need a conviction for political reasons, and if they can railroad Buddy, they will.”
Tereza was supposed to trundle off to work as though her life hadn’t been thrown into a Mixmaster. She was supposed to say “No comment” to the reporters camped out across the street who shouted rude questions whenever she left the house, but she told them to get stuffed.
She glanced over at the 1960 calendar Dearie had bought and stuck on the fridge. Dearie had marked the dates like birthdays. January 12, Trial #1: attempted kidnapping. February 23, Trial #2: kidnapping, assault with a weapon and uttering death threats. March 23: grand jury.
If the grand jury said the cops had enough on Buddy to try him for Marilyn Shore’s still-missing sister, there’d be another date on the calendar. Buddy had taped a Bible verse next to it: “Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you in prison, that you may be tested … Be faithful to death, and I will give you the crown of life.” It made Tereza shiver.
She thought Maury was pulling her leg when he said Trial #2 was about Linda Wise. Buddy humping Linda? Never. He said he recalled asking those two girls if they wanted a ride but not Linda, even though she’d identified him in a lineup. Tereza told him she and Linda had lived on the same street once, but that didn’t ring any bells for him.
The door to the porch swung open and Buddy was in the kitchen, making Tereza jump. Somehow she’d missed the sound of his car in the drive and the garage door slamming shut.
She mustered a smile. “How was work?”
He grunted and scraped past her, his boots leaving black marks on the floor. She heard the bathroom door shut. He’d been sulky for the past week, ever since she’d given the cops a statement about his whereabouts the night Marilyn Shore’s sister disappeared. She and Maury
had sat in a room stinking of B.O. and cigarettes. A detective with a face that looked like somebody had taken an ice pick to it showed her a pair of baby blue skivvies and asked if they were hers. Maury hadn’t let her answer. He told her later that the cops might be trying to pin a stabbing murder as well as the Shore girl’s disappearance on Buddy.
“Why’d they think those skivvies could be mine?” she’d asked Maury. He said she should put them out of her mind.
She couldn’t. “Why’d they think they were mine?” she’d asked Buddy the next morning.
“I suppose because they found them in my car.”
“You suppose? How’d they get there?”
“I have no idea. My mind isn’t mine anymore. Pastor Scott says if you let your old self die and be reborn, you’ll be set free from the devil’s power. I don’t know how to do that.”
More devil talk. Tereza was sick of it. “Maybe you better get your mind looked at.”
That had seemed to piss him off.
The toilet flushed and he was back in the kitchen. “Dearie still sleeping?”
“Far as I know.”
With any luck Tereza would be out of the house before the old bat got up. Tereza loved Dearie, but lately she hated everything about her: her stupid soaps, the stupid funnies she read, the way she said “Hmm, hmm, good” about her own Sunday roasts. And she acted like nothing was wrong, hunching over the whirring sewing machine hour after hour, stitching enough flannel receiving blankets and sleepers for a herd of babies. Or sitting in the parlor, watching soaps, knitting tiny things. “I’m done worrying about things I can’t change,” she’d told Tereza. “You got an idea how to make these troubles go away, I’m all ears.”
Two days ago Tereza had blown a gasket at her for not getting help for Buddy when he was a kid, for letting him believe the devil lived in him.
“So you think he’s guilty,” Dearie had said.
“Well, something’s sure not right.”Tereza couldn’t let go of those blue skivvies. If Buddy had been screwing somebody else after all she put up with, she’d split, even though she couldn’t count on Miranda’s money anymore to get her someplace.
The day Buddy was arrested, Dearie had contacted Herman, who put them in touch with Maury—“Don’t worry about the fee, he owes me a favor.” Buddy was supposed to have been at the bail hearing the following morning but the cops kept him for an interview, something Maury raised a stink about. Tereza and Dearie showed up at the hearing with two thousand dollars borrowed from Herman and the eight thousand left of Miranda’s money. Dearie had pulled it out from behind the cinder block before Tereza could get to it. She said she’d known it was there from the time Tereza moved in. “I figured you stole it. Didn’t want nothing to do with it.”
Tereza was more cheesed off than embarrassed: all that worrying for nothing. “If you thought I was a crook, why didn’t you kick me out?”
“If you was on the street the cops might’ve found out about the money, found out you’d been here, put two and two together and got five. Buddy could’ve got in trouble.”
“Sometimes you can be a real yoyo, Dearie. What else you know you aren’t telling?”
“If I ain’t telling it’s because it ain’t your business.”
Buddy had shrugged and said “Everybody needs a secret” when Tereza confessed she’d hidden the money all that time.
When he was charged with assaulting Linda, his bail was jacked up to fifty thousand. Tereza broke down and cried then and apologized to the baby for making it sad. Dearie pledged the house as collateral and Herman loaned them the five-thousand-dollar bail bond fee. There wouldn’t be much of Miranda’s money left after paying him back.
Buddy pulled out a kitchen chair. She set his oatmeal in front of him.
“Where’s yours?”
“I ate already.” That was a lie. Lately, everything tasted like puke. Her due date was seven weeks away and she was losing weight, not gaining like she was supposed to. The doctor had ordered blood tests and tut-tutted over the deep shadows under her eyes. Tereza didn’t point out who she was; maybe he hadn’t connected her last name with the man in the news. He’d written her a prescription for milk shakes—a real comedian.
The detective who’d taken her statement asked if she was the Ladonna who placed the ad. She recognized him then as the man at the newspaper office she’d thought was a robber. Maury said she didn’t have to answer, but she wanted to meet Miranda. She told the detective only about the necklace, said she’d explain how she got it when she personally handed it over to Miranda. The detective asked her to describe it. A few days later he called to say he’d bring Miranda to a diner a few blocks from where Tereza worked. At eleven o’clock on November 5th.
That was today. Earlier this morning, she’d fished the tiny key out of her pocketbook and picked up the briefcase she hadn’t opened for four years. The lock had been sprung. The necklace was there but the black-handled knife was missing.
Tereza looked at Buddy spooning oatmeal into his mouth like nothing was wrong. She thought about how spectacular she’d been as Eunice in Streetcar, bringing Dearie to tears at the end when she said Stella had no choice but to assume that Blanche’s story about the rape was a lie and continue to live with Stanley.
For the baby’s sake she would keep the fear from bubbling into her throat.
MIRANDA HAS NOT BEEN in a diner before, something Enzo finds “astounding.” This one is on a loud street. She’s let Enzo persuade her to meet the wife of a man he suspects of murder, ostensibly to secure the return of a crude necklace. She knows he hopes for more. She wants to learn how the woman came by the necklace and what she knows about the altar.
Enzo scoops up menus at the front and leads Miranda to a booth with a brown vinyl seat and a red Formica-topped table mounted with a small jukebox. He sits opposite her, facing the door. “Got a favorite?”
“No.” She doesn’t follow popular music.
The diner isn’t busy but the air is congested with grease sizzle, cutlery clatter and the homey smells of coffee, tomato, onion and bacon.
Enzo drops a coin in a slot and presses a few buttons. Music starts right away, bouncy and plaintive at the same time. “I’ll sit over there when she gets here,” he says, nodding to an empty booth across from them. “She doesn’t look dangerous, but no point taking chances.”
“It’s a wonder I survive the days you’re not with me,” Miranda says.
He laughs. Stands. “Here she is.”
Miranda turns. Hurrying their way is a short, dark woman in a tan raincoat, clutching a purse to her chest. Her face is drawn, her black curls untamed and her eyes anxious. Something about her seems familiar.
Enzo introduces them and offers to buy them whatever they’d like to eat. The menu lists dozens of items Miranda has never tasted, but her eyes and mind are unable to focus. Something about Ladonna has shaken her: a darkness of spirit, an absence of healthy light. It’s early for lunch but she asks for a grilled cheese sandwich, what she makes for the children every Saturday.
“Just water for me,” Ladonna says, removing her coat. She’s bulging with unborn babe under a rust-colored maternity dress that gives her skin a sallow tinge. She slides bulkily into the seat Enzo vacated. He heads off to find a waitress.
“When’s the wee one arriving?” Miranda asks.
“Supposed to be Christmas Eve but the doctor says first babies are usually late.”
Ladonna’s arms are alarmingly thin—not even the kindling to start a fire, James would have said. The skin around her naked eyes is like smudged coal. She sets her bony elbows on the table, leans toward Miranda and says in a rush, “Can’t believe I’m finally seeing you again.”
“Again?”
“I was near your house the day the cops came and took you and your kid away.”
“When my father died.”
“Yeah. I didn’t know that then. Just saw you leave.”
“That’s when you found the necklace?”
“No. A couple months later.” Ladonna relates how she broke into Miranda’s and why. The runaway Doris told her about, the photograph in the newspaper. Ladonna’s mouth twitches between sentences, pitiful and appealing at the same time. Would Miranda have had the self-respect and courage to run away if James had beaten her? Would even she have known that was going too far? She briefly tells Ladonna about the orphanage and Doris, that Cian is in kindergarten and shows a talent for drawing.
“Kindergarten! Holy moly. Has it been that long? He was so puny.”
Miranda smiles at Ladonna’s directness. Cian was puny. He’s almost chubby now, so proud of his little square feet in their Buster Brown shoes, so unbothered by his misshapen head.
The waitress brings their order. Ladonna’s hand shakes as she gulps her water. Her fingernails are raggedly bitten down. Miranda would like to take her home and soothe her with lemon balm. “Did you bring the necklace?” she asks.
Ladonna pulls it from her pocketbook. Acorns and seashells that James said Eileen had gathered and strung on wool before Miranda was born. Twenty of each.
Miranda catches her breath, surprised at the sudden longing she has for her younger, undoubting self. “To think you’ve held onto this for me never knowing if we’d meet. Thank you.” She hesitates before saying, “You must have entered the basement.”
“Yeah. It was kind of creepy. What was all the stuff on that table?”
“Before I tell you, I must know: did you see a harp?”
“Yeah. I shoved it into a corner.”
Miranda nods. Until now, she believed that only she and James had seen the most secret part of their home. What a miracle someone else saw it too. It means she did not imagine it. She takes the necklace from Ladonna. An image of the altar knife rises up before her eyes. She’d forgotten it was missing. Did Ladonna shove that in a corner, too? She blinks the image away.