“Oh my God,” she said in amazement.
“Your God, what?” asked her daughter, a young woman named Eva Mitchell, who had taken Wanda shopping and was on the couch watching television.
Wanda passed the newspaper to her, saying, “Look at this paper, Eva. Look at this story about this man who killed his family back East. This man looks just like Bob Clark, I swear it. It’s Bob Clark.”
Eva took the paper and pretended to read, but she was more interested in a game show. “That’s crazy,” she told her mother, who had gotten up to peer out the window for another look. But Bob had already gone back inside his house.
Eva dropped the paper onto Wanda’s chair. “How can this man be any Bob Clark?” she said dismissively, returning her full attention to the television. “Don’t go on being a busybody, now.”
Wanda smiled, but her mind was racing. Being a busybody was exactly what she did best. With muggers lurking by the dumpsters after dark, busybody was fine with her. Society required busybodies, and Wanda was good at it.
Wanda read the article all the way through once again, this time very carefully, as her initial incredulity gave way into a nagging sense that she might be required to do something more than just remark on it. If this is a coincidence, it’s a whopper, she thought, evaluating the uncanny similarities. For starters, John List, the murderer, looked just like a younger version of Bob Clark. The description of John List fit Bob like a glove: polite, formal, distant. That could be a million other people, but the possibilities narrowed fast: List, like Bob, was an overtly religious man, a devout Lutheran who took active part in parish affairs and even taught Sunday school. Wanda knew about Bob’s recent fling at Sunday school. List was a pleasant, orderly man who usually wore a coat and tie even on casual occasions, a man with a twitchy little grin that never seemed to make it all the way to a smile.
Wanda shuddered when she read in the caption accompanying the FBI photo that John List had a mastoidectomy scar that ran from the base of his right ear right down to his shirt collar. Bob had exactly such a scar. It was an ugly old thing. You couldn’t miss it.
Furthermore, the ages seemed to dovetail, allowing for Wanda’s suspicion that Bob was a few years older than he claimed.
Just before dinnertime that afternoon, when Eva left to pick up her husband from work, Wanda was still silently fretting over the newspaper article that lay in her lap, with her cat now asleep on top of it. She didn’t even turn on the television news, as was her habit every night at six.
Around six-thirty, she heard Delores coming home next door. “Should I tell Delores about this craziness?” Wanda said in a high little singsong voice to the cat, which, uninterested, took the opportunity to drop to the floor and pad away. “Do you want this old lady to start trouble?” she called sweetly after the animal.
Trouble was the last thing Wanda wanted. And who would want to cause any more trouble for sweet, meek Delores, who had enough already? Or even poor old Bob? What right, Wanda considered, did she have to barge into Delores’s life with some goofy newspaper that seemed to accuse Bob of being a mass murderer? Why make things worse for anybody? Why meddle?
She sighed and read through the story one more time, looking for signs to tell her she was being silly. She looked and frowned, but they weren’t there. Wanda started to make a mental checklist with each clue that, uncanny physical resemblance aside, seemed to point right next door: The murderer was just over six feet tall, with horn-rimmed glasses, a receding hairline, brown eyes. Bob. Would be about sixty-one years old. That’s what she figured Bob was. With that long nasty scar behind his right ear. Bob. Deeply religious, Lutheran church. Bob. Sunday school teacher. Bob. Neat dresser. Bob. From Michigan. Bob told her that! Mirthless. Bob. Worked as an accountant. Bob! Went from job to job, spent beyond his means, seemed to have chronic money problems. Bob! Bob! Bob!
Wanda decided some things, such as the safety of Delores, someone she cared about deeply, were more important than friendship. She took the paper over and knocked on her neighbors’ back door.
Delores opened it a crack, then unhooked the security chain when she saw who it was.
“Is Bob home?” Wanda asked furtively, glancing around when Delores invited her in.
“No, he’s managed to find some night work at least, at H&R Block,” Delores said. “It’s income tax time, you know.”
Wanda sat down at the table, wishing she could light up a cigarette. Because Bob had asthma and disapproved of cigarettes for health reasons, there was no smoking in the Clark apartment. When Delores felt like a smoke, she had to go over to Wanda’s to sneak one.
“So what’s new with you, Wanda?” Delores asked pleasantly.
“I want you to read something for me, honey,” Wanda said. She pushed the newspaper, opened to the page with the article on John List, across the table.
“What’s this?”
“Delores, just read this for me.”
Delores fiddled with her glasses. With a thin, bewildered smile, she scanned the article, rushing through it for some indication of what Wanda was on about. Blinking, Delores looked up over her eyeglasses and asked, “What does it mean?”
Wanda took a deep breath. “Delores, honey. I’m sorry, honey, but isn’t that Bob?” She tapped her finger on the picture of John List. “Your husband, Bob?”
Delores toyed with the edge of her glasses and read a little bit more. “Gosh, Wanda,” she said in tone more quizzical than convinced.
“Read what he did,” Wanda said.
Delores giggled, but read some more. “Oh my gosh,” she muttered. “Isn’t that something?”
Wanda wondered if she was getting through. “Delores,” she said patiently, “I think this man is Bob. Bob Clark.”
Now she had Delores’s attention.
“Oh no, Wanda,” she protested. But then she relaxed and spoke to Wanda as if addressing a child who had just reported seeing monsters in the dark. “This isn’t Bob, Wanda,” she said. “You know my Bob. He’s a wonderful man. My Bob wouldn’t even hurt a flea. How could you think this awful man is my Bob?”
Wanda felt her face redden, but she pressed on. “Delores, why don’t you show this to Bob and see what he says? Just see, okay?”
“Well, I suppose I could, just for fun,” Delores said. “That man does look a little bit like him, but so do a lot of people. He might even enjoy it.” She made a face and said in a comic growl: “Mass-murderer Bob.”
Both women began laughing. Wanda felt a little foolish, but she was relieved to know her friend didn’t seem offended. Delores folded the paper back open to the front page, then creased it across the middle and lay it aside.
“Do you want some coffee?” she said, remembering her manners.
“Oh no, honey. You’re just back from work. Let me get out of here and let you get your dinner. You’re probably starved.” At the door, Wanda made one last try. “Well, you keep that thing and show it to him,” she suggested. “You are going to show it to Bob, then?”
“Sure.”
“Okay,” she said. “I didn’t mean any offense. I just thought you would find it awful interesting.”
“See you tomorrow?” Delores asked amiably.
She avoided Delores the next day, however. Now, after a fitful night’s sleep, Wanda felt plain foolish, an old Irish busybody running over half-cocked to her best friend’s house to say her husband was a murderer.
Preposterous.
But what if it was true?
This thought leaped back into Wanda’s mind the minute she laid eyes on Bob after church on Sunday. He was out back sweeping the last of autumn’s leaves into a neat little mound on the patio. He was still in his church clothes. He caught her staring at him through the window and waved clumsily.
That night, Wanda made up an excuse to go over for matches and took Delores aside while Bob was watching 60 Minutes in the living room.
“Did you show it to him?” she asked, making a deliberate attempt to soun
d amused.
“What? That newspaper article?”
“Yes, did he see it?” Both women noticed they were whispering.
“Oh, that,” Delores said, sounding unconcerned. “I threw it out, to tell you the truth. That man wasn’t anything like Bob. It wasn’t even worth showing him. I’m sorry—you didn’t want it back, did you?”
Of course not, Wanda assured her. And she meant it. Without the evidence nagging at her in black and white, she had decided to dismiss the whole thing as a weird coincidence, just the sort of thing you can expect to get, paying attention to anything written in some ridiculous newspaper that prints stories about space aliens in the Pentagon and men having seven-pound babies.
In fact, Wanda would have been quite content never to have to give the matter another moment’s thought.
But as things would turn out, this would not be the case.
Chapter Thirteen
During income tax season, Bob brought in a little extra money again in the first quarter of 1987, but that trailed off, as usual, after the fifteenth of April.
At the same time, problems mounted at the condominium complex. Owners were complaining that basic maintenance, provided for in their agreement with the company that managed the property, was going undone. Upkeep deteriorated in the kind of self-fulfilling prophesy that causes some owners, convinced they’ll never be able to recoup the price they paid, simply to walk away and let the bank have the property. Burglaries, unheard of when Delores had bought their place in 1981, became routine. Delores and Bob were distraught. They had begun to realize that, far from making a little profit on the place if they were to sell it, they would probably take a loss.
“All of a sudden, people were selling crack and everything here,” Wanda Flanery said. “My children started begging me to get out, but what could I do?”
Twelve of the old-timers, including the Clarks, got together to withhold their mortgage payments until improvements were forthcoming. In response, the management company hired an attorney to begin foreclosure proceedings.
So one day in November, it was with vast relief that Bob opened the mail to find a favorable response back from an employment agency in Richmond, Virginia, that had used the opportunity of Denver’s well-known economic troubles to take an ad in the local papers offering jobs at various Richmond firms. One of them was looking for a junior accountant.
Bob used some of the money saved in the mortgage strike to fly to Richmond for an interview. He was delighted to get the job at last. With income tax season coming up again, they wanted him to start right after the first of the year.
He said he’d be there. Delores would join him later.
At Christmas that year, there was at least a muted note of joy, as friends wished the Clarks well in the new life they were eagerly anticipating back East. Gary Morrison took the Clarks out to dinner just before Bob left, and bade farewell to a man he said he would always consider his friend.
Enthusiastic again at the prospect of another fresh beginning, Bob was especially pleased at the location. Richmond, the capital of the old Confederacy, had real allure for a history buff with a special interest in the Civil War. In the distant recesses of time, there were vaguely fond memories of a young lieutenant from the Midwest in 1950, wandering fascinated inside the old Southern White House of Jefferson Davis, staring in wonder at the Confederate flag that had snapped defiantly in the wind above the state capitol, marking the elegance of the Lost Cause from a point just below the U.S. flag itself.
And Richmond seemed vibrant, unlike Denver. The job didn’t pay a lot—$25,000 to start—but the firm, Maddrea, Joyner, Kirkham & Woody, seemed to be prospering in an area of the country where the economy was still growing, in metropolitan Richmond, the very model of an area that had moved beyond unwise dependence on one industry, tobacco, and diversified into banking, transportation, and technology. In Richmond, Bob was told, you can still think of a bright future.
Delores agreed to stay in Denver to sort out the condominium problems, and also to make arrangements with the civil service for a job transfer to a military facility in the Richmond area, preferably the Defense General Supply Depot just across the James River in Chesterfield County, southwest of downtown Richmond. By the late spring or summer, Bob figured, he and Delores would be well ensconced in a new life far from smog-ridden Denver.
Delores knew she would miss her church friends in Denver, but she wasn’t going to miss working at Fitzsimmons, where she wasn’t certain which she despised more, the job itself or her supervisor. And good riddance to the condominium. Besides, Delores’s mother and other relatives wouldn’t be far away, in Maryland. In fact, her mother, who was turning eighty, had volunteered to come out when the time came, help her pack for the movers, and then drive across the country with her daughter in Delores’s Toyota to provide company. Delores told friends she was actually looking forward to the adventure. Not the least of the enticements that lay at journey’s end, of course, was having a spouse who would have a job again.
Before Bob left, Paul Miller, the employment agency supervisor who had placed him in the new job, contacted a local realtor, Betty Garter Lane, and explained the situation. Betty, an aggressive saleswoman who also took a special pride in her ability to ease transients into new surroundings—“poor little lost chicks,” is what she called them—phoned Bob in Denver and was pleased to encounter a courtly gentleman who seemed to know what he wanted.
First, temporary lodging while he searched for a new home. No problem, Betty said. It was arranged for Bob to rent a room with kitchen privileges in the five-bedroom house of a friend, Wally Parsons, a Richmond-area business consultant who was eager to make new contacts and liked the idea of having an accountant on the premises, especially at income tax time.
From Denver, Bob wrote to Betty as soon as the initial arrangements were in place. “Thank you so much for your help in finding a suitable place to live when I arrive in Richmond,” he said in a letter dated January 11, 1988. “Now I’m really looking forward to moving.”
About a week later, entertaining the notion of a new beginning, with a future, at a firm that could one day be known as Maddrea, Joyner, Kirkham, Woody & Clark, Bob loaded some boxes of books, clothes, and other possessions into the used 1981 Ford Escort he had bought to replace the orange Volkswagen when he still worked at All Packaging. Bob went over his road maps one last time, kissed his wife goodbye and, with a symphony playing on his tape deck, set off across the country on what would happen to be the last leg of his long odyssey.
Right away, Bob felt at home in Richmond. He had always liked the South anyway. His housemate, Wally, a big, smooth-mannered, chain-smoking fifty-year-old with a ready smile, decided that his new tenant was a man of taste and refinement with an appreciation for what Wally called “the finer things in life.” Besides, Wally, a fellow history buff, soon realized that Bob was “the only man I ever met in Richmond who could give you a persuasive argument for the positions of either side in the War Between the States.”
So impressed was Bob with the reception he received in Richmond that he wrote back to Delores the first night he was there, urging her to expedite the condominium matter and join him as soon as possible, whether or not she was able to arrange a job transfer to a military facility in the Richmond area.
Betty, a dark-haired woman in her fifties, was proud not only of her business acumen, but also of her heritage as a certified, if somewhat disinherited, daughter of the old Richmond aristocracy. She had been a member of the crusty Richmond Club, the old-money country club, almost since birth, and she didn’t hesitate to point out that the current initiation fee—she hadn’t paid any such thing, of course, since she had been initiated as a little baby—was $25,000.
Betty resolved to do her utmost to help Bob and his wife settle comfortably and happily in Richmond.
But this was a resolve she would later come to regret.
She picked Bob up after work one night toward the end of Februa
ry, a couple of weeks after he started his job at the accounting firm, to go on the first of what would be many house-hunting expeditions.
“So how do you like it?” Betty asked when he got into her car, a Cadillac Seville, in the parking lot outside the firm, which was located in a suburban-like office complex across the street from a shopping mall.
“It’s a wonderful car, Betty,” Bob allowed, stroking the upholstery admiringly.
“Not the car. The job. How do you like the new job?”
“Oh. Oh, the job is fine. They seem like very fine people, intelligent people.”
Betty had already wondered why an older man with apparently excellent credentials in his field—the agency had told her he had an M.B.A. and someone had said something about his being a certified public accountant—was starting work as some junior accountant at a little accounting firm. But she decided it was none of her business. Probably he just didn’t care for the rat race at the better companies.
At first, as they cruised various sections of the city, Bob seemed eager to please and easy to accommodate. Betty decided that finding the perfect house would be a breeze. She soon learned otherwise, as one expedition ended and another was set.
The notebook and camera he carried with him on their forays should have been the tip-off. As days stretched into weeks of unsuccessful hunting, Bob took pictures of houses and made copious notes about houses for sale in every section of the sprawling metropolis. On his lunch hour, he would take the photos to a one-hour photo lab in the shopping mall to have them developed. Then, at night, he would send photos of the viable prospects, along with his own notes, back to Delores for her opinion. The tedious process threatened to become a full-time pursuit, but Betty had made a commitment. She decided she would go “above and beyond the call of duty” to fulfill it.
It wasn’t as if the Clarks had the financial wherewithal to be fussy. In fact, according to Bob, who became even more taciturn when the discussion came around to finances, there seemed to be only about $6,000 available immediately for a down payment, though he said he was managing to put aside some money from his salary, enough, probably, to cover closing costs when the time came.
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