The Church of Dead Girls

by Stephen Dobyns

So Ryan took Aaron to City Hall and turned him over to Percy. He also told Percy about Aaron’s history and the IIR and let on that he suspected the group of the vandalism in the cemetery. Chuck Hawley, who happened to be looking into the vandalism, overheard their conversation.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that earlier?” asked Percy, more in surprise than anger.

  Ryan started to speak, then shrugged. Chuck told me afterward that Ryan became rather red in the face.

  Percy called the police in Troy and asked them to detain Oscar. He also had the other IIR members brought to City Hall. Then he and Ryan visited the college, where they talked to Chihani before driving him to the police station as well. All this was noticed. By noon most of the town knew that the members of IIR had been arrested. And it was all over the high school, though in a rather garbled version. It was said that Jesse and Shannon had tried to resist and were beaten up. Leon Stahl had suffered a kind of stroke. Jason Irving had tried to climb out his back window but had been caught. Harriet was found hiding in her closet. Joany Rustoff and Bob Jenks had been caught naked together and were taken downtown in their underwear. Barry had wept. None of this was true, though perhaps there was a germ of truth in each story. For instance, Barry told me that he’d been upset but he swore he hadn’t cried. It hardly mattered. These were the stories that circulated. It didn’t seem far-fetched that this Marxist group from the college had abducted Sharon. Hadn’t they already tried to blow up the high school?

  Few people were convinced the IIR was completely guilty but few believed its members completely innocent. They had clearly done something wrong—after all, they had been arrested. Then, later that day, we heard that vandalism charges had been brought against all the members of the IIR except for Leon Stahl, and people recalled the overturned tombstones in Homeland Cemetery. And those who had never suspected the IIR of the vandalism were surprised at themselves, or so they said, because didn’t it make perfect sense that the group had done it?

  Fear and ardent speculation make an unhealthy mixture. By the end of the school day, students were talking about satanism and witchcraft. I even heard Mrs. Hicks, the English teacher, speculating that Sharon might be the victim of human sacrifice. By then Sharon had been missing twenty-four hours. Many people still thought she would turn up, but the presence of reporters, police, and various strangers led to much conjecture. And there was this business of the IIR members’ being arrested. The fact that none of them had been charged with anything to do with Sharon didn’t matter. People had a vague idea of their history, a vague idea of events, and out of these vaguenesses they formed a narrative.

  In the faculty lounge Sandra Petoski, usually a sensible woman, speculated about Barry Sanders, saying she had always wondered if he wasn’t emotionally disturbed. Others jumped in with stories about Barry, and Aaron as well, till it seemed that Sharon’s disappearance had been bound to happen. And the school was only a microcosm of the town itself, because the same sort of speculation went on everywhere. Inquiries into the Right must be involved, it was argued, and the mastermind behind the group’s behavior was Chihani. And as for why Chihani would want the tombstones in the cemetery tipped over—well, wasn’t he a Moslem, wasn’t he a Communist? Even the fact that he drove that red car was held against him. I felt the police should have acted with more discretion, but they too were naive and in situations such as these they had only a rudimentary sense of cause and effect. They couldn’t foretell the effect of these events on our town.

  Tuesday afternoon the members of the IIR were taken to the courthouse in Potterville. They were pressured to admit their connection with Sharon’s disappearance, and the vandalism charges were a tool to make them talk. In the meantime, search warrants were obtained and their apartments were searched by the police.

  Barry was escorted into an office and made to wait. Soon two plainclothesmen entered and told him that he faced five years in jail because of the vandalism. Had narcotics been involved? Barry couldn’t remember any. He could think only of what his mother would say and how angry she’d be. Though he knew that Sharon was missing, he had no idea that his arrest was connected with that. One of the plainclothesmen told Barry that perhaps the vandalism charges would be dropped if he told what he knew about Sharon. Barry had known one of Sharon’s brothers, but he wasn’t sure he had ever seen Sharon, at least not recently.

  “What does the number 666 mean to you?” Barry was asked.

  Barry thought hard. Was it like 911 or had it been the number on his locker at school? “I don’t know,” he said. He sat very still and blinked his eyes.

  The plainclothesmen asked Barry how he’d spent the previous twenty-four hours and where he had been at three o’clock Monday afternoon. Barry had been at school and in the evening he had visited his mother. He had thought he might see Aaron in the evening but Aaron hadn’t been at home.

  “How do you know he wasn’t home?” asked the plainclothesman.

  “I called and there was no answer.”

  “And where do you think he was?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “And when did you last see Mr. Chihani?”

  “At the meeting on Friday night.” The two men alternated in asking their questions and it made Barry quite dizzy.

  “And what was discussed?”

  “Desai’s Marxian Economics. Mr. Chihani talked about it and we discussed it.” Barry hoped they wouldn’t ask him what it was about because he had only the vaguest idea.

  “Did anyone mention Sharon Malloy?”

  “Not that I recall. I’m sure no one did.”

  “Do you think she’s pretty?”

  “I can’t remember what she looks like.”

  “Do you like little girls?”

  “I guess so,” said Barry, who didn’t like little girls but was afraid of saying the wrong thing. “They’re all right, but I haven’t seen many since, well, since I was a little boy.”

  Ryan managed to separate Harriet from the others and talked to her in a small office. “I thought you weren’t going to tell anybody about Homeland,” she said. She had taken out her contacts and wore glasses with clear frames. Her black hair hung on either side of her face. She wore a Colgate sweatshirt that hid her figure. Ryan could see no trace of the breasts that had once amazed him. She looked about twelve and had a pimple on her chin. Ryan felt shocked that he had ever had sex with her.

  “It was bound to come out,” he said.

  “I’m going to tell them all that you fucked me.”

  Ryan found that he couldn’t look at her. “Do what you want,” he said.

  “You think I liked it, don’t you? I only did it because Aaron told me to do it. You’re a short old man.”

  “Aaron?” said Ryan, hardly registering her insult. “Why?”

  “Ask him if you want to know.”

  “I guess I’ll have to,” said Ryan, not looking at Harriet’s eyes but focusing on the pimple on her chin. And he wondered if he ever had sex with any woman except as an attempt to get Janice McNeal out of his head.

  None of the IIR members had anything to say about Sharon. Several, like Leon Stahl and Joany Rustoff, claimed not to know she was missing. Aaron said he had a vague memory of her, as did Barry, but the others said they didn’t know who she was. As to where they had been during the past twenty-four hours, most of their movements could be verified. They had had classes, they had gone downtown. They had stopped by Bud’s Tavern for a beer. Some had done one thing, some another, but each had a period of time for which he or she had no alibi.

  Leon was released and Ryan drove him back to Aurelius.

  “Boy, am I glad I stayed home that night,” Leon kept saying. “They wanted me to come to the cemetery, they kept asking me. This is the first time being fat has done me any good.”

  The others were charged with vandalism; all but Aaron were released on thei
r own recognizance. Aaron was kept in jail with bail set at $25,000. He called his half sister and she contacted her father’s lawyer, Henry Swazey, who would try to get Aaron released on Wednesday. The state police in Troy had investigated Oscar Herbst and said he couldn’t have abducted Sharon. He’d had a dentist appointment late Monday afternoon.

  Wednesday afternoon Franklin visited Aurelius College to talk to Houari Chihani, hoping to get something to put into the Independent for the following day. He found Chihani in his third-story office in Douglas Hall. There was no new information about Sharon, though the police had lots of leads. Most seemed bogus: people who thought they had seen Sharon in places as far away as Chicago. But the IIR was being talked about and people couldn’t get past the fact that Mrs. Kelly had seen Chihani’s red Citroën.

  Because Chihani had been questioned by the police and knew the IIR was under suspicion, he must have been wary of Franklin, but he didn’t show it.

  Franklin sat down on the other side of Chihani’s desk and took out his notepad. “Do you have any ideas about what might have happened to Sharon Malloy?”

  “None.” Chihani had thin lips that reminded Franklin of a flattened letter M set above a flattened letter W. They made Franklin think that Chihani was smiling slightly, but he wasn’t sure if that was true.

  “You can’t imagine why she might have been abducted?” asked Franklin, writing in his pad.

  “I can imagine dozens of reasons but they are no more than possibilities. We don’t even know she was abducted. She might have gone with the person willingly. Or perhaps there was no other person. Perhaps she went off by herself. At this moment she could be anywhere in the world.”

  “So you don’t think there was any wrongdoing?”

  “I am saying that as far as I know there is no automatic reason for assuming wrongdoing. She has been missing for two days. Of course wrongdoing is a strong possibility.”

  “She apparently disappeared from Adams Street near the town limits around three o’clock Monday afternoon. You were seen in the vicinity at that time. Is it possible you could have driven past Sharon without noticing her?”

  “It is possible. Many things were in my environment: trees, birds, houses, other cars, dogs. I remember none specifically.”

  Franklin wrote this down. “Let’s say she was abducted—what reasons can you give for that?”

  “Surely your question is too hypothetical.”

  “Then let me ask you, hypothetically, about rape. In some places it happens a lot; in some very little. Do you have any explanations for that?”

  Chihani put his elbows on the desk. “The rapist often feels a victim of societal emasculation. His victim is a pretext; she, or he, represents society. The rapist, feebly, is trying to show that he is not emasculated or he is striking a blow against his own victimization, for certainly he, too, is a victim. Sex rarely comes into it. The emasculated are seeking power, the weak and commodified are expressing their discontent. These are general reasons. There is also the rapist’s specific psychology to consider and we cannot know that unless we know the rapist.”

  “Do you think Sharon Malloy might have been raped?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you believe that the rapist is as much a victim as the person he rapes?”

  “He is surely a victim, but that isn’t to say he shouldn’t be punished. There are crimes which occur because a society is corrupt, crimes which are a reaction to that corruption. This is true of most crimes. The society can change itself to decrease those crimes or it can punish those whom it calls criminals. The rapist is as much a victim as the person he rapes, but in this society he is also breaking the law and so he will be punished.”

  “You think he shouldn’t be punished?”

  “I think the reasons why he rapes are more important than the rape itself. To put the rapist in jail doesn’t solve the problem of rape. It merely, temporarily, removes one rapist.”

  “What changes would decrease the incidence of rape?”

  “A society in which each member truly believed himself or herself the equal of every other member would have a much lower incidence of rape.”

  “But rape wouldn’t be eradicated completely?”

  “There may be causes for rape that are not political, but if rape has to do with power and powerlessness, then those are the illnesses that must be treated. One of the problems with this society is that it tries to deal with the causes by punishing the effects, by making the potential perpetrators afraid. There is no attempt to remove the causes themselves.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the system depends on power and powerlessness. We cannot cleanse crime until changes are made within the society.”

  Not all of this appeared in the Independent. Franklin edited it and moved sentences around. He felt he was being faithful to the original interview, but he also tried not to get Chihani in unnecessary trouble. For instance, he didn’t mention that Chihani had been in the vicinity when Sharon had vanished. But people knew this and one reason they read the interview was to see what Chihani would say about it.

  Franklin also left out Chihani’s theoretical explanations, feeling they would muddy the water. It might have been better not to have interviewed Chihani at all, but Franklin was afraid to have the paper appear timid.

  To the question about the abduction, Franklin had Chihani reply: “We don’t even know she was abducted. Perhaps she went with the person willingly. Perhaps she went off by herself. At this moment she could be anywhere in the world. There is no automatic reason for assuming any wrongdoing.”

  About rape Franklin had Chihani say, “Sex rarely comes into it. It’s a matter of power. But I think the reason why the man rapes is more important than the rape itself. The rapist is also a victim, but in this society he is breaking the law and will be punished. A society in which each member truly believed himself or herself the equal of every other member would have a much lower incidence of rape.”

  Aaron was released on bail Wednesday afternoon. The charge was vandalism stemming from the Homeland Cemetery incident. He still wouldn’t say anything, however, about his whereabouts on Monday afternoon and night. My cousin said that the police came close to charging Aaron with Sharon’s abduction, but that wasn’t true. There was no solid evidence that Sharon had been abducted and there was nothing to link Aaron to the incident. What Chuck meant was that the police wanted to charge Aaron. He had refused to answer their questions. He had refused to talk. The police wanted him to be guilty because they wanted to punish him. I am not saying this was true of Captain Percy and it wasn’t true of Ryan Tavich, but Aaron had made himself no friends.

  Where he had been on Monday continued to be a mystery, but Aaron’s impulses led him to exaggerate this mystery. He liked the fact that the police disliked him. Why else hadn’t he told the police where he had been? It struck me that even if Aaron had been off doing something perfectly innocent, he still might refuse to answer. Just as a joke, just because he was like that. What’s more, he had plenty of reasons to hurt us. His mother had been murdered and he had been mocked for being her son.

  Eighteen

  Up until now one group of people has been absent from this discussion: Sharon Malloy’s family. No matter how upset we were by Sharon’s disappearance, our feelings were a faint echo of those experienced by the Malloys. Indeed, it is hard to calculate another’s grief, which is an emotion without limit. I think of the grief I experienced after my mother’s death or after friends of mine died, some quite young and from AIDS. I try to extend that to imagine how Sharon’s family felt and I realize that I can only imagine a fraction of their grief.

  The Malloys moved to Aurelius from Rochester when Sharon was three. Dr. Allen Malloy’s sister, Martha, was married to a local accountant, Paul Leimbach, a highly admired man who probably did the tax returns for half the town. Dr. Malloy wanted t
o get out of the city. His house in Rochester had been broken into several times and he felt it would be better for his family to live in a safer environment. He chose Aurelius to be near his sister and brother-in-law. He bought a large white house and set himself up as a family practitioner. He and his wife, Catherine, had three children at that point: Sharon; Francis, or Frank, who was six; and Allen Junior, who was eight. The whole family attended Saint Mary’s Church. Two years after coming here, Catherine had another child, little Millie, five years younger than Sharon.

  Martha Leimbach also had four children, and the two families were quite close. Three years after the Malloys came to Aurelius, Dr. Malloy’s brother, Donald, the pharmacist, moved here from Buffalo. Donald Malloy was divorced. He worked for a while at Fays, then bought a small drugstore downtown, which he expanded to sell magazines, newspapers, and soft drinks out of a cooler, the usual odds and ends. I can’t believe he made much money, but having a brother who was a doctor certainly helped.

  The Malloys and Leimbachs spent a lot of time together. Though they had other friends—Roberta Fletcher, who was Dr. Malloy’s nurse, as well as Dr. Richards, who had an office in the same building over by the hospital—they seemed happiest with family. The Leimbachs’ children were constantly with Dr. Malloy’s children and the families had dinner together each Sunday after mass.

  When Ryan Tavich went over to see Mrs. Kelly on Monday afternoon, one of the first things he did was to have officers contact Sharon’s parents, as well as her aunt, Paul Leimbach, and Donald Malloy, to check if they had seen her. And clearly her siblings and cousins had to be found and asked the same question. Within an hour most had been located and none claimed to have seen Sharon. This was when Ryan called the state police. The family’s grief can be dated from that point.

  By six o’clock they had joined in the Malloys’ home—five children and five adults—to await the news. The oldest boys, John Leimbach and Allen Junior, were away at college and wouldn’t be called until the next day. My cousin, Chuck Hawley, was also with them, as well as Roberta Fletcher. Several neighbors sent over trays of sandwiches and potato salad, though no one ate much. But it surprised me how quickly people knew about the missing girl and how quickly they responded by seeing what they could do to help, even if it was no more than making a bowl of potato salad.