The Church of Dead Girls

by Stephen Dobyns

  He thought again about who had killed her. Given Janice’s appetite, it could have been anyone. The person didn’t have to live in Aurelius. He could live in Potterville, Norwich, even someplace else. Ryan didn’t believe she had been killed by a woman. She’d been killed by one of her lovers. Maybe he killed her out of jealousy. Ryan stopped himself. It didn’t need to be jealousy. It might have been one of many other reasons. But if Ryan himself had killed her—and he had felt like it after she told him she was sick to death of him—jealousy would have been his reason. He also thought of her missing hand and how a mannequin’s hand had been found in Sharon Malloy’s backpack. Would Meg’s clothes be returned as well? And would there be a hand?

  Ryan reached Jack Morris’s Ford dealership shortly after nine-thirty. He parked back by the garage and got out, leaving his Escort unlocked. Although he carried a pistol and handcuffs, he didn’t think of them. Shep McDonald was sweeping the snow off the new cars in the lot. From the garage came the sound of metal hitting metal and the occasional buzz of a power tool. Ryan walked toward the open double doors, trying not to step in the slush, even though his shoes were already wet from Chihani’s front yard. Several people stopped to look at him but they didn’t speak. They recognized him and by the way he looked they knew he hadn’t come to have his car fixed.

  Hark was working on the turbocharger of Pete Roberts’s blue ’92 Mustang, which had conked out the week before between Aurelius and Clinton. He was leaning over the front fender, which he had covered with a green pad to protect the finish. His back was to Ryan. As Ryan walked across the garage, several men lay down their tools to watch. No one knew about Chihani but they knew that Hark had been out with his friends the previous night and there must have been trouble because when Hark had showed up in the morning, hungover and sullen, he had a black eye.

  As the garage became silent, Hark realized something was wrong. He turned around. He was wearing blue coveralls with “Jack Morris Ford” written across the breast pocket. His dark blond hair hung loose, parted in the middle and covering his ears. His left cheek was swollen and discolored around the eye. He had a red bruise on his forehead.

  Hark didn’t say anything but his eyes got wider. He was holding a socket wrench in one hand and an orange cloth in the other. Ryan was still about twenty feet away. Hark abruptly dropped the wrench, which hit the concrete floor with a clang, and sprinted toward a door in the back.

  Later, in Bud’s Tavern, Jerry Golding said, “Old Ryan followed him but he didn’t run. Maybe he walked a little faster. He looked like a small locomotive. Purposeful.”

  Hark’s Ford pickup was parked in the back. When Ryan walked out the door into the lot, he saw Hark standing by the driver’s door, frantically going through the pockets of his coveralls. Then he stopped. His keys were in his regular clothes in his locker. Hark glanced back at Ryan. His shoulders sagged and he leaned forward against the cab of the pickup as Ryan approached.

  After a moment Hark tried to summon up some fierceness. He spun around and jabbed a thumb toward his face. “See what he did to me?” he shouted. “The fucking Arab!”

  Ryan didn’t say anything, just kept walking. A few men had come out of the garage. Hark’s face grew uncertain. He had his fists raised and he dropped them.

  “Chihani’s dead,” said Ryan when he was a few feet away.

  “You’re lying.”

  “You got him with the baseball bat.”

  Hark’s expression changed from defiance to surprise to fear. He pressed his hands to his chest. His hands were greasy and left black prints on his coveralls. He closed his eyes and hunched forward. A harsh honking noise came from his throat, like a motor that wouldn’t start.

  Ryan looked at him. When Ryan had moved to Aurelius in 1977, Hark had been six years old. Ryan remembered how Hark’s hair had been almost white at the time, not much darker than Barry Sanders’s. Ryan put an arm around Hark and patted his shoulder. They stood like that as about five men watched from the garage. Then Ryan led Hark across the parking lot to where his Escort was parked. Later, when he was asked why he hadn’t put handcuffs on Hark, Ryan said he had forgotten to, then he said he hadn’t wanted to embarrass him.

  —

  By the time Ryan got Hark back to police headquarters, Jeb Hendricks, Ernie Corelli, and Jimmy Feldman were giving their statements. They said it had been Hark’s idea to drive over to the Arab’s house. They themselves had wanted to return to Bud’s Tavern. Jeb said he’d tried to stop Hark when he attacked Chihani with the baseball bat. Ernie said he tried to stop Hark, too, but in fact he didn’t remember anything after they had gotten back from chasing Jesse and Shannon. Jimmy didn’t remember much either but he also had a black eye and he explained in detail how Chihani had attacked him almost for no reason. After all, he hadn’t been swinging any baseball bat. And he didn’t have any grudge against the Arab either. Live and let live was his motto.

  Hark gave a statement. It didn’t occur to him not to. He felt so defeated that even though his memory was foggy he didn’t see any point in hiding anything. He didn’t know why he had decided to bust up the Arab’s car. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He remembered swinging the bat and hitting the Arab; he knew he hadn’t meant to kill him. He was sure of that. He kept saying he was sorry. When he heard Meg Shiller had disappeared, he kept saying, “Shit, oh shit.”

  Barry and Leon were questioned about the previous night. Barry’s mother came with him and wouldn’t let Barry speak without interrupting him and saying what Barry meant and how the other members of the IIR had taken advantage of him. She said she had known all along that Hark wasn’t any good but that Aaron wasn’t any good either. She said she felt awful about Meg Shiller.

  Again and again Barry asked, “But what about Professor Chihani?”

  His mother said, “Never mind about him.”

  But to Barry, Chihani’s death seemed worse than Meg’s disappearance. Barry saw Professor Chihani all the time, and while he felt bad about Meg Shiller, he couldn’t quite remember who she was.

  Leon knew nothing about Meg Shiller. All he could think about was Chihani. “They killed him?” he kept asking. “But why? What had he done?” He didn’t want to talk about Meg. He didn’t see the point of it. He thought of the papers that Chihani had been writing and how they would go unfinished. “What a shame,” he said. “Think of the work.”

  Jesse and Shannon admitted to smashing the windshield of Jeb’s Blazer. They had hacked around for a while afterward, they said. They had a couple of beers and got home before midnight. Yes, they heard the police knocking on their door earlier in the morning, but they wanted to sleep. They knew nothing about Meg. When they learned that Chihani had been killed, they got angry.

  “What the hell he ever do to them?” said Jesse.

  “The assholes,” said his brother.

  Then Jesse began to sob and his brother put his arm around him. Ryan found himself staring at their blond goatees and blond ponytails. Their emotion surprised him and he asked himself why it should surprise him. Later he told Franklin that he didn’t know diddly-squat about anybody. “You expect a person to do one thing and he does the opposite.” Around noon, Ryan sent the brothers home.

  Harriet Malcomb was reluctant to say where she had been until she heard about Meg.

  “But why would I have had anything to do with her?” she asked. She, too, was shocked by Chihani’s death. “You can’t protect anyone, can you?” she told Ryan. “You can’t protect the teachers and you can’t protect the children.”

  It turned out she had begun having an affair with a married history teacher named Sherman Carpenter, whose class on the labor-union movement she was taking. Carpenter’s marital troubles were known all over town. The two of them had gone to a motel near Clinton. She had gotten home around five in the morning, having been delayed by the snow.

  Ryan wanted to ask her w
hat grade she expected to get in her labor-union class and if she had any thoughts about Carpenter’s wife, who had made complaints about her husband’s violence when he was drinking. But Harriet was cold and imperious and stared at Ryan as if she knew something dirty about him. She wore a tight blue turtleneck sweater and tight Levi’s. She kept touching and tossing her long dark hair as if it were the object of her anger. Ryan thought of her as a ball breaker, but to Franklin the strongest term he used about Harriet was “one tough cookie.” The fact that he had been intimate with her muddled his thinking.

  “You’ve made a mess of this whole situation,” Harriet told him. “Not only am I going to report it to the mayor, but I’m going to talk to the president of the college.”

  “Get the hell out of here,” said Ryan.

  As she left the room, she whispered to Ryan, “It makes me sick to think I ever let you touch me.”

  That left Aaron.

  He had been sitting in an office by himself for two hours and he didn’t like it. Ryan entered and sat down at the desk without looking at him. Because of the people involved in the search for Meg there was a lot of noise, but this office was quiet. Aaron’s hands were folded in his lap and he stared at the floor. Ryan didn’t realize Aaron was angry. He looked reflective, as if considering life’s troubles. Ryan thought of Harriet’s remark that Aaron had told her to have sex with him. He found himself disliking the complexity caused by one’s loss of social anonymity. Maybe he had lived in a small town long enough.

  Ryan opened the drawer of the desk and removed a yellow legal pad. He wrote the date at the top, then he wrote his name and Aaron’s name beneath it. He didn’t say anything. He drew little stars at the top of the page, then he drew a picture of a mother duck followed by a line of baby ducks. He was just drawing the sixth baby duck when Aaron said, “Well?”

  “I drove by your mother’s house this morning,” said Ryan.

  “Is that supposed to soften me up?” Aaron leaned back and stretched out his legs, crossing his feet. His hands were folded across his flat belly.

  “I wonder if the people who live there ever think how your mother was killed right in the living room.”

  “You’d have to ask them,” said Aaron.

  Ryan saw the dislike in Aaron’s eyes. He tore off the yellow sheet with the ducks, wadded it up, and tossed it at the wastebasket. It hit the rim and bounced away. “What did you think of Chihani?”

  “He was harmless. He was also a smart man. I liked him.”

  “I wonder if Hark would have killed him if you hadn’t bitten off Hark’s ear,” said Ryan. He had begun doodling on the next yellow sheet. Eggs this time.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what it says.” Ryan decided it had been a dumb thing to say.

  “You think I’m responsible for him getting killed?”

  Ryan avoided the question. “D’you think the person who killed your mother lives in Aurelius?”

  Aaron didn’t answer.

  “What would you do if you knew who killed her?”

  “What would you do?”

  “I expect I might kill him.”

  “What would that solve?”

  “It would let me sleep better. You haven’t answered my question. What would you do?”

  Aaron looked away. “I don’t see it’s your business.”

  “Do you care one way or the other?”

  Aaron jerked around in his seat. “Of course I care.”

  “Would you want to kill him?”

  “How do you know it’s a man?” Aaron’s tone was mocking.

  “Of course it’s a man.”

  “If she was killed by a man living in Aurelius, then why haven’t you found him?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “That’s one explanation,” said Aaron. Then he asked, “Do you think the same person took Sharon and Meg?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.” Ryan had drawn eight eggs in a row. He began to draw cracks in them. “Why did you tell Harriet to have sex with me?”

  “Did she say that?”

  “Why’d you tell her?”

  “She’s my soldier.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Ask her yourself.”

  Ryan finished drawing the cracks on the eggs. “Who were you with last night?”

  “I don’t plan to tell you.”

  Ryan tore off the sheet of paper, wadded it up, and threw it at the wastebasket. This time he sank it. He got up, went to the door, and called to Chuck Hawley: “Chuck, take this guy over to Potterville and lock him up.”

  Thirty-one

  The ten days after Meg’s disappearance were days of dashed hopes and turmoil. The fact that a second girl had vanished and the increasing certainty that the person responsible must live in our area brought not only national attention to Aurelius but volunteers from all over the country, including a seer—this is what she called herself—by the name of Madame Respighi, who set herself up at the Aurelius Motel and, with the aid of pieces of clothing belonging to Sharon and Meg, began a psychic quest for the girls’ whereabouts. She did not charge for this service and it was the general opinion that she could do no harm, though every time I drove past the motel I thought of Madame Respighi shut up in her room and locked in combat with malevolent psychic forces. Many people held her in scorn, feeling that she was trading on our town’s ill fortune. She was a portly woman who dressed in gray suits, somewhat to my chagrin since I had imagined the colorful long skirts and dangling gold earrings of a gypsy. She wore black horn-rimmed glasses and her short silver hair was all curled and frizzy.

  Several people showed up with dogs that had uncommon abilities. Other people came on their own, just because they wanted to join the search. Two writers materialized because they imagined book contracts. There were psychologists, law officers from around the country who had had similar cases, and social workers trained to help people deal with grief. The most disturbing visitors, to my mind, were the parents of children who had vanished in other places. They came to give solace to the Malloys and Shillers, but also in the hope that the person responsible would be captured and give information about their own children. They were sad people with defeated faces and it was hard to look at them without feeling their grief.

  By the end of the first week in November everybody who might have seen or heard anything relevant had been interviewed. Suspicious automobiles had been traced. The fields and parks around town had been searched by hundreds of people. Ponds were dragged. Meg’s uncle Mike became an active participant in the Friends of Sharon Malloy and the group distributed information about Meg all over the United States. Again there were calls, possible sightings, and suspicious people to be investigated.

  The photograph of Meg Shiller showed a thin thirteen-year-old with long brown hair standing by a picnic table. She was waving at the photographer and had a slightly silly smile. She wore a plaid skirt and a light-colored blouse. Her hair, parted in the middle and tucked behind her ears, hung past her shoulders. She had a straight nose, almost pointed, and her lower lip stuck out slightly in a cheerful pout. Her head was tilted, which gave her a quizzical look: a little smile, a little pout, a little question mark. Within twenty-four hours the photograph took its place next to Sharon’s on store windows and telephone poles and at the toll booths on the turnpike. Many people displayed the two photographs on the rear windows of their automobiles.

  The fear surrounding Meg’s disappearance was greater than the fear surrounding Sharon’s. In Sharon’s case, we could still hope that her disappearance was an isolated incident. But in Meg’s it was clear that we were probably dealing with a sequence of disappearances, and almost immediately no child was seen on the street by herself, or even himself. This was true as far away as Binghamton and Syracuse. Meg’s disappearance made us expec
t a third kidnapping, maybe even a fourth and fifth.

  These fears led to a number of false alarms. Betty Brewer on Forest Street saw a man watching her house and felt he was after her daughter, Ilene. She called the police, who arrived in four separate cars three minutes later. The man watching her house—he had been walking by—was a plainclothesman with the state police. Ten plainclothesmen were patrolling the streets of Aurelius and all were eventually reported. Niagara Mohawk meter readers and town water-meter readers were reported again and again. Men walking their dogs, even mailmen, became suspect. And then at night there were the suspicious noises: the sound of footsteps in a backyard, a window rattling, leaves blowing across a front porch. Ten times a night the police would receive these false alarms and each time they would rush out because this time, possibly, the culprit might be found.

  What kind of person was this culprit? The police had profiles prepared by psychologists and, according to Ryan, it seemed that everybody in town shared some of the characteristics. But that was not true. Primarily the police were looking for a single man between the ages of twenty-five and fifty or, if not single, then a man estranged from his wife. I am sure that police records were sought for several thousand men within the county, including myself. This was the time when Harry Martini was taken out of his office for the whole school to see, when Jaime Rose was brought in for questioning. One man, Herbert Maxwell, a local plumber for twenty years, was questioned by the police and revealed to be a Vietnam deserter. He lived alone and was rather solitary. He had already been punished or pardoned—I don’t know which—for his desertion from the army but he didn’t want it to become public knowledge. Now it was public knowledge. As a single man living alone and private in his habits, he had been suspected. That was true of many men. It was true of Ryan Tavich; it was true of me.