“What’s that?” I asked.
Sadie hurried to see. “It’s Meg’s umbrella,” she said.
—
I was the one to call the police. And I am ashamed of my own foolish vanity that lets me think that, because Chuck Hawley was on duty, the police responded faster than they might otherwise have. It was the first time that I felt glad my cousin was a policeman, though I have never had any reason to regret it in the past. I told Chuck what had happened.
“Cripes,” he said. “Oh no.”
In less than five minutes Ryan Tavich was at Sadie’s house. Two more police cars arrived within minutes after that. Hillary Debois’s mother called Sadie to see if there was any news. More car doors slammed outside and there were running footsteps. Cold air blew through the open doorway.
“There’s no answer at Meg’s house,” said Joan Debois.
Sadie told her there was no sign of Meg.
“You mean she never got home? Oh, her poor mother.”
Soon off-duty policemen began to arrive. By eleven o’clock we had state police as well. Sadie’s cocker spaniel, Shadow, had to be put in the basement, where it barked and barked. The rain had turned completely to snow. Captain Percy arrived at eleven-thirty. His normally inexpressive face was especially rigid, as if cut from wood. I should have gone home, but Franklin was still out and I felt reluctant to leave Sadie, who was weeping. I also felt some of the excitement and wanted to stay. Though I don’t know why I should have been excited to hear Captain Percy call the barracks in Utica to ask that dogs be sent down as soon as possible. Men were clomping in and out and the phone kept ringing. More and more police cars were parked along the curb and I could see people gathering up and down the street.
After Captain Percy used the phone, Ryan made a surreptitious call to Franklin.
“You better get home right away,” Ryan said into the phone.
There was a pause, then Ryan said, “Sadie’s fine. It’s one of her friends.” He hung up.
Minutes later Franklin rushed into his house and found it full of policemen.
The police searched every inch between Sadie’s house and Meg Shiller’s. They woke up or interrupted everybody not only on our street but also on the blocks north and south of ours. No one had seen Meg Shiller. Earlier the streets had been full of kids. People had heard their voices, their shouts. It was Halloween. Indeed, if Meg Shiller had happened to cry out, who would have found it remarkable?
And the snow was a problem. Sadie showed Ryan the place where we had found the umbrella on Herb Gladstone’s front yard. His lawn went all the way back to Tyler Street. The police roused Herb but he hadn’t seen or heard anything. If someone had come through his yard and left tracks in the mud, by midnight those tracks were covered with snow. Although there was nothing to say that tracks existed.
I went home at midnight, feeling that with Franklin back I was not justified in staying.
Sadie was angry with her father. “You were with Paula, weren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
Franklin looked guilty. His light brown hair was messy and its disorder seemed evidence of his transgressions. One even expected to see lipstick on his cheek.
Reporters from Utica and Syracuse began to arrive around one o’clock, about the same time the dogs got here from the barracks in Utica. I was in bed trying to sleep and heard them barking. At two o’clock I got up to take a sleeping pill. There was still plenty of commotion in the street.
—
Meg was of the fourth generation of Shillers to live in Aurelius. Her great-grandfather had moved here shortly before World War I. He was the one who dropped the c from the family name—Schiller—hoping to anglicize it. His own father had been born in a small town in Bavaria in the 1870s. About fifteen years ago, a year or so before Meg was born, Ralph and Helen visited this town in Bavaria—I can’t remember its name—and said it was packed with Schillers. Ralph told many people in Aurelius he felt embarrassed that his grandfather had changed the family name and he was considering changing it back to Schiller. I don’t think anything came of this. But it must have been odd to discover a whole town of distant cousins and to visit a graveyard where one’s family went back hundreds of years.
Helen Shiller’s maiden name was also German: Kraus. But she had no knowledge of her family before her grandfather, a man whom I gather she didn’t like. Both Ralph and Helen grew up in Aurelius and I have known them all their lives. As an electrician Ralph had done work on my house. His father was an electrician as well, and when I first called Ralph with a problem it was because I knew that my mother had employed Ralph’s father. And as I mentioned, Helen taught second grade at Pickering Elementary School. They had three children: Bobby, who was nine; Meg, thirteen; and Henry, who was sixteen. Both Ralph and Helen had siblings in town and cousins, nieces, and nephews, so there were many Shillers in Aurelius, though perhaps not as many as in the town in Bavaria whose name I’ve forgotten. Foolishly perhaps, I think of Germans as blond, but the Shillers were dark and short and brown-eyed. They were a good family, serious and hardworking. One of those families who never have any scandal attached to their name.
I had Meg Shiller in general science in eighth grade, and while she wasn’t an A student, she was a solid B student. She was lively and good-natured and I could see why she would be such a good friend of Sadie’s. She loved horseback riding and kept her brown hair in a long ponytail, as if in solidarity with the horses. She spent most weekends working in a stable just south of town for the opportunity to ride for an hour or two. She was the sort of child—young lady, I should say—who made one feel the world was proceeding along on the right course: she was happy, successful, and contented. And now she was gone.
—
Ryan Tavich had no sleep that Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. There were many people to wake up and ask if they had noticed anything suspicious. Indeed, some remembered seeing Meg Shiller earlier in the evening dressed up as a hit-and-run victim. And some considered it prophetic that Meg had gone from door to door covered with blood and with her face all white and bandaged.
When people heard that Meg had disappeared, they began to telephone friends, neighbors, and relatives. A few of them got in their cars to drive slowly down Van Buren Street, past my house, and slowly along the route from Sadie’s house to Meg’s house. It was still snowing and the roads were slippery. Because of all the traffic, Captain Percy told Ryan to block off the streets around Meg’s house, which was perhaps a mistake because even more people dragged themselves out of bed to look at the barriers. I don’t know if there were actually any accidents but one kept hearing thirdhand that so-and-so had slid into a tree or smacked into the rear of someone else’s car.
In the middle of all this Ralph Shiller sat like a stone at his kitchen table while his wife, Helen, wept in the bedroom. Their station wagon, parked in the driveway, was slowly getting covered with snow. A police officer at the house took all the telephone calls and the two boys, Bobby and Henry, sat together on the couch in the living room, though Bobby had fallen asleep. Ralph Shiller’s younger brother, Mike, who worked for the post office, was also there. He kept asking Chuck Hawley, “Do you think she’ll turn up? Of course she’ll turn up. Right?” And Chuck would nod and try not to say anything.
They waited for the phone to ring or for someone to come and say their ordeal was over. All of them kept thinking of what might have happened, just as the Malloys had done, and each scenario was more awful than the one before it. And couldn’t there be a more benign scenario in which Meg would suddenly run through the door, happy and safe? But that was hardly likely.
Around five-thirty in the morning Ryan drove to Aaron’s apartment. He worried that he should have sent an officer to Aaron’s earlier, but assigning a man to find Aaron seemed the same as calling him a suspect. He also worried that too much time had elapsed and if Aaron had something to conceal he
would have successfully concealed it. But none of these worries turned out to matter because when Ryan got to the apartment he found that Aaron wasn’t there. The new snow told him, moreover, that Aaron hadn’t been home all night. There were brown stains on Aaron’s door. Sniffing, Ryan realized they were somebody’s idea of a Halloween prank. And he even thought that somebody might be Hark Powers.
Ryan knew that Aaron had several girlfriends but he didn’t know whom he was seeing at the moment. He wondered if girlfriend was still the right term. Indeed, Ryan feared that Aaron was not with any woman but was off on some darker purpose connected to Meg Shiller. And was this darker purpose linked to the IIR or something that Aaron was involved in by himself?
From Aaron’s, Ryan drove to Harriet Malcomb’s apartment. He knocked on the door but there was no answer. Next he drove to Jesse and Shannon’s. It seemed they weren’t home either. Because of the commotion surrounding Meg’s disappearance, Ryan had only the sketchiest memory that there had been some fuss earlier in the evening concerning Hark Powers. So when he drove to Leon Stahl’s apartment, he was not thinking of Hark at all. He was still trying to track down Aaron.
Leon was asleep and didn’t want to open the door until Ryan ordered him to and showed his identification. Leon wore striped baby-blue pajamas so big that Ryan was reminded of a tent. With the door open, Leon filled the whole frame. Around nine o’clock the previous evening Leon had called the police to complain about Hark, but nothing had happened. First Leon was indignant that the police hadn’t come hurrying over; now he was annoyed that Ryan had showed up at six in the morning.
“Couldn’t this have waited until later?” he said. “I have a chemistry quiz today.” There was a whine in his voice.
“I’m looking for Aaron,” said Ryan. “Have you seen him?”
“Of course not.”
“What about Shannon and Jesse?”
“I talked to them last night but I haven’t seen them either. Is this about Hark Powers?”
“Why should it be?”
So Leon explained how Hark and his friends had come to his apartment and tried to make him open the door. And he said that they had gone to Barry’s house as well.
When he left Leon’s apartment, Ryan drove over to Chihani’s house. It was still snowing. Though he remembered that somebody had mentioned Chihani earlier, Ryan couldn’t recall the context. But he figured that if Hark had visited the other IIR members he might also have paid a visit to Chihani.
Ryan pulled up in front of Chihani’s house just at the moment when Irving Powell was trying to drag his chocolate Lab away from Chihani’s corpse.
Ryan got out of his car.
“Bad dog,” Powell kept saying. “Bad dog.”
Ryan saw the smashed Citroën. He hurried toward Powell. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“There’s a man lying here in the snow,” said Powell. “His eyes are open.”
The chocolate Lab had a beret in its mouth and shook it back and forth. This distracted Ryan and it took him a moment to realize that the man in the snow was Houari Chihani and that he was dead.
Part Three
Twenty-nine
In any text there is both overt and covert material that accesses different cognitive levels within a reader. That is one of those statements highly regarded in the teachers’ conferences that I avoid. But I use it here to suggest that my own gayness will come as no surprise. Until now it has not been part of the story in the same way that I’m not part of the story. At the beginning I saw myself as only a pair of eyes. Even a window—yes, I was the window through which my story passed. Probably more than a hundred gay men live in Aurelius, ranging from the rather flighty, like Jaime Rose, to the serious—men who bear no resemblance to the clichéd idea of what a gay man should be. There is no meeting place or organization, no discussion group or social hour, but these men tend to know one another. A few are married, some have male companions, the majority are single since small towns like Aurelius tend to be unsympathetic to the gay experience. For that reason, most of these men are circumspect. Indeed, quite a few have left Aurelius, as I did myself, though I came back. I also know two local men who have died of AIDS as well as a young hemophiliac boy. And I know several others who have tested HIV-positive since this scourge has spread itself into even the smallest of localities.
I am also familiar with men who are comfortable with their gayness and celebrate it, though that has not been my experience, perhaps because I chose to return to a small town or perhaps because of my own disinclination to call attention to myself. I never talk about my homosexuality and, in truth, I have had few partners. I find the whole business rather depressing. Not that I wish to be heterosexual—a less attractive option—but human sexual experience seems designed to lead to humiliation. Celibacy for me has always stood forth as the unattainable ideal. I have no religious calling, but at times I have envied the scholar monk in his cell.
And the alternative to celibacy? The young men I find attractive are not attracted to me, meaning that my gay life is limited to men in their late thirties, forties, or even older. I have a friend in San Francisco who mentioned in a letter that the bars where men of my age congregate are called “wrinkle rooms.” One wrinkled man seeking to embrace another. Surely celibacy is better. But of course I have sexual yearnings and I feel temptation. I have never touched Barry Sanders, but there are times in the night when I have thought how pleasant it might be. Even Jaime Rose. I feel I run from degradation yet yearn to embrace it. But what is degradation? Isn’t it a definition that derives from the straight world? And I envy those gay men—are they really the majority?—who seem happy with their gayness.
In my years in Aurelius I have had lovers come to my house on only three occasions and I was nervous the entire time. Perhaps I am more cautious than most, but I have preferred to meet my friends in other places. Even when I am with them and engaged in sex, part of me yearns for celibacy. And I know this is wrong. I know I should accept my sexuality, but the thought of the mocking looks of my students fills me with horror. Of course, many suspect—after all, I am a single man—but they have no proof. Sadly, it is suspicion that is my subject here.
I doubt that any of the gay men in Aurelius felt fortunate because of the existence of Inquiries into the Right, but for anyone slightly out of the ordinary, the IIR served as a buffer. People have a need to believe that bad things are done by bad people. And what is bad? Isn’t this defined as anything outside the common good, which is further defined as whatever the majority see as good? Why must the villain wear a black hat? Because if he didn’t, how would we know he was the villain?
It was first thought that Sharon Malloy was abducted by someone outside of Aurelius. Once this became doubted, an increasing number of people looked toward Houari Chihani and Inquiries into the Right. The IIR preached the need for disorder, and here was the height of disorder. Chihani could also be placed at the scene of the disappearance. In addition, he was a foreigner with a peculiar look about him; he wore a beret and his skin was a little darker than average. Not everyone thought he was guilty, but it was felt to be convenient if he were guilty. When Meg Shiller disappeared, however, people began to look farther afield to whatever was aberrant or idiosyncratic.
I know this because I felt it myself. My unmarried condition made people suspicious. It was also known that Sadie visited me and that I knew her friends. Meg Shiller must have walked by my house moments before she vanished. Though I talked to the police, I was never treated as a suspect. The idea was absurd. But many people looked at me differently and I was talked about at school. It excited the students that the biology teacher might be a sex murderer. But others were looked at as well: gay men, gay women, the eccentric, the reclusive, the retarded. And I looked at my neighbors differently—these people who thought I might be guilty, had I believed them my friends? And I had known them all my life.
Bob
Moreno, the haberdasher on Main Street, had been little Bobby Moreno who sat in front of me from first through sixth grade. When he married, I went to his wedding. At least six of his seven children had been my students. And now he thought I might be a criminal. When I went into his shop to buy a few undershirts, he stared at me as if he had never seen me before.
It must be said that in the few days after Meg Shiller’s disappearance there was general hysteria. One member of the city council, George Rossi, wanted to pass a resolution calling upon the state police to search every house in town. Rossi said they could begin with his house right away. When other members protested, Rossi had the audacity to suggest they had something to hide. It wasn’t until some months later that he apologized.
Many people were questioned by the police as to their whereabouts on Halloween, including several gay men. Jaime Rose was taken to the police station and spent an hour with a state police sergeant. Though he was released, the fact that he had been questioned became generally known. I should say that in his entire life Jaime Rose had never even received a parking ticket. People put pressure on Cookie Evans to dismiss him, and eight women said they would stop patronizing Make Waves if Jaime kept working there. Cookie refused to be intimidated or to treat Jaime any differently. A few people admired Cookie for this, but there was no doubt that she lost customers.
Among the people who were questioned were Dr. Malloy and his brother, Donald, as well as their brother-in-law, Paul Leimbach. Even Ralph Shiller and his brother Mike were asked to account for their whereabouts at the time of Sharon Malloy’s disappearance the previous month. Of course, they all had satisfactory alibis.
I happened to run into my cousin at the bank and let him know that I found it excessive that the victims’ fathers should be harassed by the police.
The Church of Dead Girls Page 25