The Church of Dead Girls

by Stephen Dobyns

  More than fifty journalists were present from newspapers, TV, radio, magazines, and the wire services. The New York Times and the New York Post both had a reporter. Franklin managed to squeeze his way to the front. The floor was covered with cables from the TV crews. Franklin had expected to see the box itself but there was no sign of it. He felt glad about that. He thought of the blue sweater that Paula had given to Sadie as a peace token and how Sadie had given it to Sharon. Franklin hadn’t wanted to see the sweater again.

  Chief Schmidt began by making a formal statement to the effect that Sharon Malloy’s clothes had been found in a box outside the door of police headquarters at five-thirty that morning by a police sergeant. They had been identified by Sharon Malloy’s family and sent to the state police lab in Ithaca.

  “Is there any idea who put them there?” asked a reporter.

  “Not at this time.”

  “When were they put there?”

  “Sometime between three-thirty and five-thirty this morning,” said Chief Schmidt. “They were blocking the door and the last person using the door had left at three-thirty.”

  “Were there any bloodstains on the clothes?”

  “No.”

  “Were there any stains of any kind?”

  “The clothes had been washed, ironed, and folded. They appear to have been washed several times.”

  “So there might have been stains on the clothes which had been washed off.”

  “That’s possible,” said Chief Schmidt.

  “Was there a note or anything of that sort?”

  “Nothing,” said Percy.

  Dr. Malloy sat at the table looking down at its surface. It was a heavy oak table, as old as City Hall itself, and had a rich golden color. Someone lit a cigarette and Percy announced there would be no smoking. The TV lights and cameras were placed at the sides of the room. News photographers crept to the front to snap pictures of the chief of police and Dr. Malloy.

  “Was there anyone in police headquarters when the clothes were left outside?”

  “An officer was on duty.”

  “Did he hear anything?”

  “No,” said Chief Schmidt.

  “So whoever left the box might have come on foot?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “Does this mean the man who left it was a local person?”

  Captain Percy interrupted. “We have no evidence to suggest whether the box was left by a man or a woman.”

  “Then the person, man or woman, is a local person?”

  Captain Percy stood up and placed his hands on the table. “We’ve no evidence that the person responsible for Miss Malloy’s disappearance and the person who returned the box are the same.”

  “But isn’t it likely?”

  “We have no evidence to that effect.”

  “Do you think Sharon Malloy is still alive?”

  “We hope so,” said Chief Schmidt, “but we don’t know one way or the other.”

  “What was in the backpack?”

  “Sharon’s schoolbooks, notebooks, and school supplies.”

  “Will the return of the clothes change the nature of the investigation?”

  “How do you mean?” asked Chief Schmidt.

  “Doesn’t it raise the possibility that whoever did it is a local person?”

  Captain Percy spoke again, “We have never assumed one way or the other that if Miss Malloy was abducted it was either done by a local person or by someone from out of town.”

  “What do you mean ‘if she was abducted’?” asked a reporter.

  “We have no positive evidence that she was in fact abducted. We only know she is missing.”

  “Are you suggesting she returned the clothes herself?”

  Someone laughed in the back of the room and Captain Percy looked in that direction but his face betrayed no emotion.

  “I’m saying we don’t know one way or the other,” said Percy.

  “Has Sharon’s family heard from her or from anyone else in regard to her?”

  “No,” answered Chief Schmidt. Percy sat back down.

  “Do you think she might be dead?”

  “We have no evidence one way or another.”

  “Why do you think the clothes were returned?” asked Franklin.

  “We have no idea,” said Captain Percy.

  “Does it seem like a taunt?”

  “I can’t comment on that,” said Captain Percy. “We have no evidence one way or another.”

  “What effect does the return of the clothes have on Daniel Layman’s confession?”

  Chief Schmidt glanced over at Percy. “That investigation is ongoing and I am unable to comment upon it at this time.”

  “Did Layman say that he had removed the girl’s clothes?”

  “I can’t comment on that.”

  “Do you think someone returned the clothes,” asked Franklin, “as a way of indicating that Daniel Layman had no involvement in the matter?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you have an opinion?” asked someone from Channel 9. Several other reporters laughed.

  Captain Percy stood up again. “We are in the business of acquiring and trying to understand a body of information. We don’t know why someone returned the clothes. We don’t know if the person who did it had anything to do with the abduction or even if there was an abduction. We don’t know if the return of the clothes had anything to do with Daniel Layman one way or the other. We don’t know if this means it was a local crime or not.”

  Percy wasn’t being entirely truthful. When he heard about the return of the clothes, he began shifting assignments and put ten men back on the case. All day they had been questioning people who lived in the vicinity of City Hall to learn if they had seen anything. And the fact that Aaron McNeal lived only two blocks away was not ignored. Percy had acquired a search warrant that morning and lab men from Ithaca had gone over every inch of Aaron’s apartment. Aaron had not protested. He had taken a chair and laptop computer into the hall and continued his work as if the police hadn’t been there.

  “He looked right through us,” said Chuck Hawley. “It made me want to smack him.” Chuck had glanced over Aaron’s shoulder at the small monitor and had seen nothing but numbers. This had also bothered him. “It wasn’t even words,” he said.

  The activities of the members of the IIR and Houari Chihani the previous night had also been investigated. Percy wanted to get a search warrant to go through Chihani’s house, but Chief Schmidt felt it would be pointless. These talks took place in Schmidt’s office but they were overheard by Patty McClosky and others. By the time of the press conference, the nature of these talks, mostly in a garbled form, were known to dozens of people. The main point, not lost on anyone, was that Chihani and the IIR were still under suspicion.

  “The police searched Aaron McNeal’s apartment this morning,” said a reporter. “Was anything found to incriminate him?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” said Chief Schmidt.

  Chuck Hawley had said, “They were hoping they’d at least find some pot. Then they could use some muscle on him. But he was totally clean.”

  “So the members of the IIR are still suspects?”

  “It is mistaken to call them suspects,” said Schmidt. “At this point no one is a suspect and no one is not a suspect.”

  “Could Herbst have driven over from Troy with the clothes?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  Actually no evidence existed that Oscar had left his house.

  “What about the kid who went home to Kingston—could he have driven over?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  The reporter meant Jason Irving, who also had been home all night. But the IIR members who still lived in Aurelius didn’t have perfect ali
bis. Barry’s mother swore he had been home but the police didn’t take that as positive proof. As Chuck told me, “Any of those kids could have ducked out for five minutes and brought the box to City Hall. Even the fat one. I mean, who’s around then? You could have done it yourself.”

  “Would it be possible to wash all trace of blood out of the clothes?” asked a reporter.

  “I don’t believe so,” said Schmidt.

  “No, it would not,” said Percy.

  “So what conclusions do you draw from this?”

  “That there was no blood on the clothes,” said Percy.

  Someone laughed.

  “What about other bodily fluids?” asked a reporter. “Could all trace of sperm be removed from the clothes?”

  “There we’re on shakier ground,” said Schmidt.

  “You mean it could be?”

  “That’s what I’ve been told.”

  “So you’re saying that no trace of sperm was found on the clothes.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Was anything found on the clothes?”

  “Just the usual wear and tear.”

  “Were the clothes torn in anyway?”

  “No, I didn’t mean that.”

  “So if Sharon Malloy was killed, she was killed either in a way not to draw blood or she was killed while not wearing the clothes.”

  This was asked by a reporter from Utica. By this point the press conference had come down to the level of Twenty Questions and no one really thought about the flesh-and-blood Sharon Malloy anymore. Dr. Malloy neither spoke nor even looked up at the reporters. He held the edge of the table with both hands and sat slightly forward in his chair, not resting against the back. His brother, Donald, was at the rear of the room. His brother-in-law, Paul Leimbach, had arrived late and stood by the door. The room was hot from the TV lights. It was nearly four o’clock.

  “We have no knowledge of what happened to Sharon Malloy,” said Chief Schmidt.

  “So it is possible that she was raped?” asked a reporter.

  This was when Dr. Malloy blew up. “Don’t you realize you are talking about a child? A fourteen-year-old girl? Do you know how wonderful she is? Of course whoever stole her lives here. He lives right here in this town!”

  There was a jabber of reporters asking Dr. Malloy if he knew who it was. Photographers pushed to the front to take pictures. People got to their feet. Ryan put his arm around the doctor’s shoulder and tried to lead him away from the table and out the back door. Dr. Malloy had begun to weep and kept wiping his eyes brusquely with the back of his hand. His brother shoved through the crowd toward the front of the room.

  “How dare you ask if she’s been raped!” shouted Dr. Malloy.

  Chief Schmidt motioned to Ryan. “Get him out of here.”

  Donald Malloy reached the council table. “Sure it was someone in town,” he shouted. “Someone took her. Someone stole her! Someone’s got to be punished for it!”

  “Who is it?” people kept asking.

  Chief Schmidt found a gavel and he banged it on the table. “Unless you return to your seats, I’ll clear the room.”

  “We’ll find the person,” said Donald. “The Friends of Sharon Malloy is now offering $50,000 for any information as to Sharon’s whereabouts and $100,000 for her safe return.”

  This created more of a stir and more pictures were taken.

  Chuck Hawley took Donald’s arm and urged him to the back door. Ryan had already left with Dr. Malloy. Reporters kept shouting questions and Chief Schmidt kept hitting the table with his gavel. Franklin wrote furiously in his notebook. The only person who showed no expression, who looked like the very rock of Gibraltar, according to Chuck Hawley, was Captain Percy.

  When the room quieted down, Captain Percy spoke. “You know exactly what we know, which is little. We don’t know the nature of this crime. We don’t know that Sharon was abducted. All we know is that sometime between three-thirty and five-thirty this morning her clothes and backpack were returned to the police. The clothes had been cleaned, ironed, and folded. Her white leather Adidas tennis shoes had been polished. We don’t know who did this or if the same person had anything to do with Sharon’s being missing.”

  Again Captain Percy was not telling the whole truth. There were two other items in Sharon’s backpack, along with her school supplies. The first was a mannequin’s hand: a left hand, flesh-colored, with painted nails. Sharon’s parents and several of her friends, including Sadie, said they had never seen it before.

  The second item was a business-size envelope containing a single sheet of paper on which was a list of words constructed from letters cut out of a newspaper. The words were “CUNT,” “FILTH,” “FUCK,” “PUSSY,” “BITCH,” “DIRT,” “WHORE,” and half a dozen more in a single column. But the words had been changed, or perhaps edited. Black slashes had been drawn across some of the letters so that “CUNT” became “UNT,” “FILTH” became “LTH.” All the words had been altered and the black slashes had been drawn over and over, cutting so deep into the paper that the “D” in “DIRT,” for instance, was nearly obliterated. Only Captain Percy and Chief Schmidt knew about the contents of the envelope and they kept it to themselves. As for the mannequin’s hand, it was known to everyone in the office. Even Franklin knew about the hand, although Chief Schmidt asked him not to mention it. This hardly mattered. Within two days the presence of the hand in the backpack became general knowledge.

  Twenty-four

  Captain Percy’s assertion that the return of the clothing didn’t indicate that Sharon’s abductor was from Aurelius or from the surrounding area convinced no one. And the fact that Percy said there was no evidence that Sharon had been abducted also had no impact. The general consensus was that the clothes had been returned by Sharon’s abductor to taunt the police. People saw it as an act of bravado. And possibly the person objected to the idea of Daniel Layman in Somerset, Pennsylvania, claiming credit for something that he or she had done. I say he or she but everyone around here believed that the abductor was a man.

  These were ideas the police held as well, at least according to Ryan, but that didn’t mean Captain Percy could tell a roomful of journalists that he believed a local man was responsible for abducting Sharon Malloy. I’m sure the journalists had gone to the press conference expecting to learn something sensational. To a large degree they had been frustrated. The return of the clothing was sinister without being dramatic. Dr. Malloy’s outburst partly made up for their disappointment.

  That evening on TV thousands of people across the state, and perhaps the nation, saw Dr. Malloy jump up and shout, “Don’t you realize you are talking about a child? A fourteen-year-old girl? Do you know how wonderful she is? Of course whoever stole her lives here. He lives right here in this town!”

  After the press conference a number of editorials appeared in area papers asking whether the authorities were doing enough to find the abductor of Sharon Malloy. As a result, Captain Percy was instructed to put more officers on the case, giving him a total—a task force, they called themselves—of twenty-five.

  The increasing belief that the criminal lived among us put more pressure on the IIR. As long as people had believed that the criminal was someone from far away, Chihani and the other members of the group had been viewed with no more than suspicion. Possibly there was a link between the criminal and the IIR but even that was only argued by people like Hark Powers. Now it didn’t seem so far-fetched. And the news that Aaron’s apartment had been searched by the police was seen as evidence of his involvement. Chihani and the remaining IIR members were subjected to even greater scrutiny. Barry complained that people stared at him more than ever. “As if I stole something,” he said.

  Nor was the group being overly sensitive about its lack of popularity. Paula McNeal heard in the dean’s office that the school was consulting its lawyers to see if
it could legally suspend the members of the IIR before their trial for vandalism.

  Toward the end of the week the clothes were returned, Bob Jenks and Joany Rustoff dropped out of college and went back to their parents’ houses in Utica. A few days later they drove to Seattle, where Bob’s older brother worked for a software company. This left six members, as well as Chihani. I’m afraid that Bob and Joany’s departure made people even more suspicious of the others, as if their defection indicated the guilt of the entire group. Of course Bob and Joany let Captain Percy know what they were doing and how to reach them in a hurry.

  People seemed to feel that if someone in town was guilty, then it would be better for the guilty party to be a person nobody liked. Aaron already had a peculiar history among us. Barry was funny to look at. Leon was fat, itself proof of perversion. Jesse and Shannon showed their scorn for the status quo in their every gesture. Harriet had a cold beauty that led people to believe she thought herself better than everyone else. And then there was Houari Chihani and his Citroën.

  What many dreaded was that the guilty party might be someone whom nobody suspected, a so-called pillar of the community. For instance, what if Dr. Malloy had abducted and killed his own daughter? Or even Paul Leimbach—didn’t suspicion often fall on family members? For the crime to have been committed by someone who was respected gave the community itself an element of culpability. We hadn’t seen his wickedness. He’d lived among us as a friend. One cannot remove a pillar of the community without the whole community’s trembling. Far better to find an outsider whose idiosyncrasies already made him suspect.

  The return of Sharon’s clothing made Hark’s accusations more plausible. All along Hark had argued that the IIR was involved. Now here he was standing at the bar at Bud’s Tavern saying, “I told you so,” louder than ever. When it became known that a mannequin’s hand had been discovered in Sharon’s backpack, the very oddness of it gave Hark additional credibility. The fake hand made no sense. It was awful and meaningless. Hark said it was like Oscar’s false bombs or even Aaron’s senseless violence. So Hark found he had more listeners and his stock went up a little. And his cronies were eager to say how Hark had been right all along, because their stock went up too. It would be wrong to call them influential in any way, but they were aware of the increased notice they received.