The Church of Dead Girls

by Stephen Dobyns

  After another minute or so Mrs. Kelly went into her kitchen to fix herself a cup of tea. Her kitchen window was at the back of the house and also looked out on Adams, but it faced south rather than north. In the distance she could see the silo poking up by Frank Bell’s barn. She expected to see Sharon Malloy again on her bicycle, but the girl wasn’t there. Mrs. Kelly looked at her watch, then looked out the window again. She opened the kitchen door and went out on the back step.

  Mrs. Kelly was not a suspicious person, but ever since she had discovered Janice McNeal’s body nearly two years earlier she had come to every event expecting the worst. If she hadn’t found Janice’s body, she probably wouldn’t have thought twice about not seeing Sharon. But in Mrs. Kelly’s mind the world had grown craftier since Janice’s murder and more perilous. Mrs. Kelly thought how first she had seen Sharon and now she didn’t. But shouldn’t Sharon be there? Mrs. Kelly again looked at her watch, then raised herself up on her tiptoes on her back step to improve her view. She was sure only a few minutes had passed. She didn’t see how it was possible for Sharon to have reached the Bells’ already.

  Mrs. Kelly went back into her kitchen and as she waited for the teakettle to boil she thought about Sharon Malloy. If the girl had already reached the Bells’, then it indicated that she herself had lost all track of time, which was a possibility that worried her. She had an older cousin in Munnsville whose memory was gone and her own mother had grown forgetful toward the end. Mrs. Kelly prided herself on the sharpness of her mind and this apparent slippage caused concern. But she also thought about Janice McNeal, not in an ominous way but as an example of the unexpected. And perhaps Mrs. Kelly was also a little bored and the prospect of a puzzle enlivened the afternoon.

  After the kettle had begun to whistle and Mrs. Kelly poured the water across the tea bag in her cup, she went to the phone to call the Bells. Sylvia Bell often gave her a ride to mass and Mrs. Kelly had sometimes taken care of Joyce when the girl was younger. On the window ledge above the sink were a half dozen tomatoes that Sylvia had dropped off the day before.

  Joyce answered the phone.

  “Did Sharon get there?” asked Mrs. Kelly, feeling foolish.

  “Not yet,” said Joyce, “but I’m expecting her any moment. Do you want me to have her call you?”

  Mrs. Kelly experienced a chill. “I’d appreciate it,” she said. Then she hung up.

  Mrs. Kelly got her jacket and went out the back door. Walking to the corner, she turned south on Adams. It was windy and the afternoon had turned cold. Leaves blew across the road. Heavy clouds were moving down from Lake Ontario and there would be rain later. Mrs. Kelly tried to keep herself from having extravagant fears. She thought of her husband’s stroke and how she had found him in the backyard still holding a shovel. And she remembered Janice McNeal lying strangled in her living room and how her face had looked.

  After Mrs. Kelly had gone thirty yards, she saw something in the high grass at the side of the road: an unexpected bit of color. It was a red and blue bicycle. As she got closer, she saw it was Sharon’s bicycle. She poked at it with her foot. The chain had come off. Mrs. Kelly looked up the road toward the Bells’ but there was no sign of Sharon. Several cars passed. Mrs. Kelly picked up the bike and moved it a few feet; the wheels moved freely. She considered taking the bike back to her house, but then set it down on the ground. She turned and walked stiffly home, moving as quickly as she could.

  The fact that the chain had slipped off or had broken was one explanation why she hadn’t seen Sharon from the kitchen window, but why didn’t Sharon push the bike the rest of the way to the Bells’, which wasn’t far up the road? Perhaps a friend had stopped to give her a ride.

  Reaching her house, Mrs. Kelly called the Bells again. “Is Sharon there yet?” she asked.

  “No,” answered Joyce, “is anything wrong?”

  Mrs. Kelly thought about that. “I don’t know,” she said, then she hung up. She thought of the things that might be wrong. On her telephone was a decal giving the numbers of the fire department, the rescue squad, and the police. Mrs. Kelly picked up the phone and telephoned the police.

  —

  Ryan Tavich was not in the police station when Megan Kelly called. He was over at Jack Morris’s Ford dealership getting the brakes fixed on his Escort. The car was up on a lift and Hark Powers had the rear left wheel off. Hark Powers used his tools roughly, slamming the pneumatic drill up against the wheel and abruptly pulling the trigger so the rapid-fire whine filled the garage. When the whine stopped, Ryan realized that his beeper was beeping. It was just three-thirty. He went into the office to call the police station.

  “We got a call from Megan Kelly,” said Chuck Hawley. “She thinks something’s happened to Sharon Malloy, the doctor’s daughter.” He went on to explain about a bicycle and how Megan Kelly’s living room window faced north and the kitchen window faced south, but Ryan didn’t understand. Through the window of the office, he saw his Escort being lowered to the floor.

  “I’ll drive over and take a look,” he said.

  An hour later, having made sure that Sharon was not at the Bells’, had not returned home, and was not visiting one of half a dozen other friends, Ryan Tavich called the state police. He still felt that Sharon would turn up but he wanted extra help. It was a precaution, no more. When the dispatcher in Potterville radioed the alert to the troopers on duty, it was picked up by private scanners around the county, including the scanner of the office of the Aurelius Independent. Franklin Moore was not in the office. He had to cover a city council meeting that evening and he had taken the afternoon off. Frieda Kraus, the combined receptionist, office manager, and copy editor, called Franklin at home.

  Because of Sadie’s dislike of her father’s involvement with Paula, Franklin and Paula often met at Franklin’s house when Sadie was at school. That particular Monday afternoon, Sadie wasn’t supposed to be home until five-thirty—she said she was visiting a girlfriend. Paula had come over at two-thirty.

  Franklin and Paula were in bed.

  Shortly after four-thirty the phone rang. Franklin tried to ignore it. The phone was on a nightstand next to the pillow.

  Paula pulled away and sat up. “You’d better answer it.”

  Even before Franklin answered the phone, he knew it was Frieda Kraus. She was the only one who would let the phone ring twenty times. And she probably knew he was in bed with Paula. She probably even had a joke to make about it.

  Frieda’s voice was serious. “The police think something’s happened to Sharon Malloy. I thought you’d want to know.”

  At that moment the bedroom door opened and Sadie stood in the doorway. She held a volleyball and wore jeans and an oversized gray Hamilton sweatshirt. She stared at her father and Paula. “She had eyes like saucers,” Franklin told me. Paula pulled the sheet over her bare breasts.

  “I’ll get on it right away,” Franklin told Frieda. Then he hung up.

  Franklin looked at his daughter, who was staring at the clothes scattered on the floor. “I thought you weren’t going to be home till five-thirty,” said Franklin, trying to keep his voice relaxed.

  Sadie’s face was pale. Her long hair was in a single braid down her back. “Aaron was supposed to meet me after school,” she said, “but he never showed up.” Then her face wrinkled in anger. With both hands she raised the volleyball and threw it at her father. It hit the wall behind his head and bounced away.

  Part Two

  Fifteen

  Just as we are only aware of the surface parts of one another’s minds, so are we only aware of the surface parts of one another’s behavior. We see the polite part, the public part, and we can only speculate on what exists underneath. But usually if the surface part is conventional and well-mannered, we assume the rest to be also. Although what does that mean? How can we assume that a person’s secret self is equally conventional and well-mannered? If
the inoffensiveness of one’s public self is created by fear, then it would seem possible that one’s private self could be anything at all.

  Not long ago a student showed me an article in Rolling Stone magazine and I happened to notice the classified ads in the back, where there were two pages of telephone numbers with 900 prefixes. These numbers were listed under the heading of “Phone Entertainment” and offered every sexual combination one could hope for. That the magazine advertised such numbers did not impress me so much as that over two hundred were available. “Eat Boots! Man on Man!” read one, “Experience the leatherline.” “Bisexual Housewives,” offered another. “Sweet Sorority Girls Live,” promised a third. It indicated that many people derived great pleasure from calling these 900 numbers. I myself have never called one—I wouldn’t have the nerve. But neither have any of my acquaintances confessed to having called them, though I should think some must have.

  I assume that many people who call these numbers conceal their partiality from their neighbors. Such conduct is an example of the hidden behavior to which I referred. I wouldn’t call it immoral but it suggests a variety of unfulfilled desires within the society. Glancing at other magazines in addition to Rolling Stone, one finds many more numbers. How many people call them? Thousands? Over a million?

  We tend to think of unfulfilled passions as pointing toward the abyss, and we fear that if we gave in to them they would demand increasingly horrible satisfactions. I am not sure that is true. But even I, who live a reclusive life, feel that if I were to submit to temptation it would be the beginning of a long slide to perdition.

  Between my house and Franklin’s is the white Victorian house belonging to Pete Daniels and his wife, Molly. We sometimes speak but we are not friends. But neither are we unfriendly. I keep an eye on their house when they go out of town and they do the same for me. That’s simply small-town cordiality. They see me as a single, middle-aged biology teacher, somewhat fussy in his habits, who occasionally complains that their terrier leaves messes in his flower beds.

  Pete Daniels is a successful electrician but I have never hired him. I don’t want him inside my house for the main reason that he already knows too much about me, though he knows very little. Molly works at the Fays Drugs at our strip mall. As a result, if I needed to buy anything the least bit embarrassing—even sleeping pills or the occasional laxative—I didn’t go to Fays but to Malloy’s Pharmacy downtown. Donald Malloy was congenial and the fact that his brother is a doctor always made me think he knew a little more.

  Pete and Molly have three children. The two older, Dennis and Jenny, are in their late twenties. Dennis is married and works with his father. Jenny married a piano tuner and settled in Oneonta. When the two children were nine and eleven, Molly had little Rosa, who was born blind. This was a great trial, but Rosa was bright and the one blessing about being born blind instead of going blind is that one accommodates to one’s condition more successfully. And Pete and Molly wanted to do the right thing, so Rosa spent several years at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. Watertown, actually.

  I had talked to Rosa. She was eighteen and meant to go to college next fall. Often she wore dark glasses because her blank eyes had a restless movement; her face wasn’t fully under her control. She grimaced when she smiled, clenching her teeth, and she held her mouth open when she should close it. But she couldn’t see herself; she had never had the benefit of a mirror.

  I mention this because I have an admission that embarrasses me. Rosa’s bedroom window on the second floor of her house was less than twenty feet from my own, or rather, what had been my bedroom window. In any case, I had often watched her undress and do other things as well. She would come back from taking her shower in the evening wearing an old brown robe and nothing else. She liked to sit down in an armchair facing the window. She would lean back, open the robe, and begin to touch herself. Perhaps I didn’t watch her often, perhaps only a dozen times. Certainly it has been better since I moved my bedroom. Rosa’s shades were usually open and she didn’t expect that someone might be watching. After all, she shut her bedroom door.

  Her behavior didn’t excite me exactly. At first I found it repulsive and I had to make myself stay and watch, however odd that admission may seem. One might think I would turn away or even tell her mother that she should pull the shades. But I did neither, though, as I said, after some months I moved my bedroom. Of course I felt guilty to be watching but I overcame that guilt till watching became something of a narcotic and I would wait at my bedroom window for her to come upstairs. If I had found her actions sexually exciting, perhaps I would have been more disturbed, but it seemed it wasn’t sexuality that I was watching; rather I was seeing into her deepest nature.

  And then I thought: what if our positions were reversed? What if I were the one being observed? I, too, touch myself upon occasion, far more frequently when I was Rosa’s age. And, though I am very private and it happens rarely, I have had sexual partners visit my house. What contortions are visible on my own face? Is my face, or my inner face, if I may call it that, any less expressive?

  Often after watching Rosa at night, I would notice her the next day. Sometimes I saw her in the yard and spoke to her. I would search her face for the expressions of ecstasy she had exhibited the night before. But of course there was no trace. As for her thoughts, they were probably thoughts I have had as well. Rosa was a normal young woman. It was only the accident of her blindness that made her actions observable. In our daily activities we see the surface parts of one another’s behavior and perhaps we speculate on what exists beneath. Don’t we do this because we ask to what actions we might also be driven by our passions? If I could be assured of absolute secrecy, might I not, sometime, call a 900 number? But these aren’t only sexual actions. All our emotions—love, hate, envy, greed, pride—have acceptable public levels, then other levels, private levels where they may move to excess. Haven’t I felt envy? Haven’t I taken excessive pride in my abilities? And when I am at a restaurant with friends and the waitress brings our meals, don’t I look to see whose portion is larger?

  Still, I have a sense of limit. At some point I tell myself I have had enough or I curb my appetite. I say no. Perdition, the abyss, loss of self-control—consider a person without a sense of limit. Isn’t that what it is to be a monster, a creature whose pleasures and excesses have no restriction? We submit to what seems a small thing and soon it becomes huge, soon it owns us. Imagine such a person living among us leading an apparently conventional life. Who is anyone on the other side of a locked door, whether man or woman? Who is a person after the curtains have been drawn? What actions might occur there? Then imagine that we begin to see the person’s footsteps, the effects of appetite, the scraps and bare bones of the terrible meal. How will this affect us? Couldn’t it create a sense of permission that has its own consequences? As with Rosa Daniels, the more I watched the more fascinated I became, while being disgusted by my own fascination. Her pleasure became my pleasure. Even though I remained the observer, I craved to know every nuance of her conduct. Swiftly my sense of limit altered.

  And in Aurelius as well, certain actions occurred that altered our sense of limit. Something awful happened and awful things were needed to stop it. That was the moral voice speaking, the superego. But wasn’t there some pleasure that awful things were now permitted? I don’t mean that normal people would naturally be led to wicked actions but perhaps the wickedness that they observed or imagined was taking place increased their own sense of permission, their sense of license. They could justify their actions by calling them reactions. They could do something terrible and call it punishment or revenge or retribution, but it was still terrible. Their inner temptations were transformed into overt behavior and they, too, came to share the characteristics of the monster. At least that was how it happened in my town.

  Sixteen

  Sharon Malloy had vanished, but for twenty-four hours after her disap
pearance people still expected she would turn up or telephone. Even that her abductor, if there was one, would call. But there was nothing. And with the passing days people’s hope diminished.

  Of course, by the next morning her picture and description had been sent all over the country. The picture showed her standing in front of a white garage door holding a baseball glove. Her chin was tilted up and she was grinning. She had a pert, oval face with braces on her teeth and they shone faintly behind her smile. She wore the blue sweater she had been wearing when she disappeared. Sharon’s blond hair hung loose past her shoulders. Her knees were slightly bent and her feet apart. Her face was extremely pretty, with a look of expectation and eagerness that suggested she was not simply waiting for someone to toss her a ball but waiting for life itself. This gave her an expression of great innocence, as if she were passionately looking forward to whatever lay ahead. And what was ahead? No one knew, but that only made it worse.

  Within a week Sharon’s picture was seen everywhere: in store windows, post offices, banks, tacked to telephone poles, at the toll booths on the turnpike, taped to the back windows of cars. Many times a day one saw Sharon’s pretty face with her expression of eagerness and expectation, and always there was the dichotomy between what she had expected and what she may have received. And didn’t this lead people, myself included, to think about the unexpected turnings in our own lives? Sharon came to represent the betrayed promise—the promise that all of us had once felt—of what life seemed to offer and what it gave.

  From the start the investigation proceeded on two levels: one in the world and one in Aurelius. Police departments all over the East began looking for Sharon. The state police, the FBI—each trooper and each agent carried her picture. NBC Nightly News ran a story and CNN gave ten minutes to it. Reporters and news teams arrived from hundreds of miles away. Sharon’s family was in a state of shock and at first refused to talk to reporters, but Megan Kelly was interviewed fifty times. Joyce Bell spoke of her fear when Sharon didn’t arrive at their house that afternoon. Sharon’s teachers and friends were talked to, even Sadie. Many people developed little set speeches, though I am sure they didn’t think of them as such, in which they said what a wonderful girl Sharon had been. Junior over at Junior’s luncheonette, who barely knew her, said as much. In fact, many who professed friendship with Sharon had probably spoken to her only once or twice before her disappearance.