The Church of Dead Girls

by Stephen Dobyns

  The two men began walking slowly down the sidewalk toward town. They were about the same height and both were slim. Franklin wore his Irish fisherman’s hat. Jaime was bareheaded. He was vain about his hair and disliked covering it.

  “Do you have any idea who might have taken the girls?” asked Franklin.

  “I never said I did,” said Jaime. “I only said I knew people with a certain nastiness about them.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t be silly. Do you think I care to have you print their names in the paper?”

  “But if they had anything to do with Meg or Sharon?”

  Jaime looked scornful. “I never said that. They just have desires slightly out of the ordinary.”

  “How many people are we talking about?” asked Franklin, who had begun to imagine several dozen.

  “Two or three, no more.”

  “Docs that include Jesse and Shannon Levine?”

  “Of course not. They’re boorish, that’s all.”

  “What kind of desires do you mean?”

  “That’s the trouble. Just because a respected member of the community likes to be tied up and spanked is no reason to think he had anything to do with the disappearances. And what would happen if I gave you names? Look at Irving Powell. Who in the world would think that silly man guilty of anything? And now they’re ransacking his house. I think we’ve talked long enough.”

  “But if one of these men—” began Franklin.

  “No,” said Jaime, “I shouldn’t even be seen talking to you.”

  But by then it was too late.

  Thirty-five

  The idea of brutality as a cry for help was one I had trouble understanding. It made the motivations of the person responsible for the disappearances increasingly enigmatic. The return of Meg’s clothes gave us further assurance—as if we needed it—that the person not only lived in Aurelius but had inside knowledge about the activities of the police. We needed such reminders because otherwise we might tell ourselves it was impossible that the person was one of us.

  Sunday night I was downstairs dozing over a book when there was a sudden knocking at the front door. Startled, I dropped the book, a Daphne du Maurier thriller that I was rereading. It was close to eleven. I was going to refuse to open the door but then I forced myself out of my chair. It was Sadie.

  “Someone’s trying to get in our back door,” she said. She wore an old-fashioned flannel nightgown and her feet were bare. She kept glancing over her shoulder and I let her in.

  There is nothing so infectious as fear and I wished I had a pistol or rifle—many people had been buying them—but I only had a few dull kitchen knives.

  “Where’s Franklin?”

  “Out.”

  “And Mrs. Sanders?”

  “Asleep on the couch in front of the TV. I can’t wake her. Shadow’s locked in the basement. She keeps barking.” Sadie stood by the fireplace. In her slenderness and with her small breasts, she reminded me of a plant before it blossoms. She pushed her hair back over her shoulders.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I heard the screen door in the back squeak, then someone turned the handle of the door. It was locked. Then the person yanked it hard. That’s when I ran.”

  Though I felt her fear, I didn’t want to think it was true. The night was windy; perhaps the screen door had banged in the wind. My hope that there was no one there kept me from calling the police. I had heard of many false alarms that had made the callers look foolish. Old Mrs. Sherman had locked herself in her bathroom after hearing mice in the pantry. She had refused to come out even for the police. Finally her daughter drove up from Norwich. Chuck Hawley had a good laugh about this.

  “Let’s go see,” I said.

  “By ourselves?” Sadie didn’t move.

  I took the poker from the fireplace set. “At least we can wake up Mrs. Sanders.”

  Sadie nodded and followed me. I gave her an old wool jacket from the hall closet and put on my overcoat. We moved quietly onto the porch. The street was deserted. The wind sent a few dead leaves skittering across the yards. Most of the houses were dark, but the blind girl’s bedroom light was on. A fragment of moon hung over downtown and dark clouds kept crossing its face. Sadie nudged me from behind and I jumped, then I recovered myself. I have never been particularly brave. As a child I found even camp-outs too scary.

  We crossed Pete Daniels’s yard. The streetlight sent our shadows right up his front steps. We moved into Sadie’s yard. Only the living room light was on in her house. Even the porch light was out. I held the poker along my leg so it wouldn’t be obvious. I wondered how often a person endangers himself just from fear of getting laughed at.

  We climbed Sadie’s front steps, which creaked. She stayed right behind me. I opened the front door and we entered. Shadow was still barking in the basement, a steady yapping. The living room was to the left off the hall. The TV was on. The eleven o’clock news from Syracuse was reporting a double marriage at Saint Joseph’s Hospital. There were images of happy celebration. Mrs. Sanders lay on the couch with her head on a cushion. Her shoes were off and her mouth was open. If she hadn’t been snoring I would have wondered whether she’d had a stroke. She was a large, round woman with fiercely permanented silver hair. Her Scottish plaid skirt was rucked up so I saw the mottled white skin on the inner part of her thigh. I looked away. A muted chatter came from the television.

  I went over to the couch and shook Mrs. Sanders’s shoulder. She didn’t respond. I shook her harder and her head slid off the cushion. She opened her eyes, then sat up quickly.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Sadie couldn’t wake you. She was worried.”

  “I’m a good sleeper,” said Mrs. Sanders.

  Sadie stood behind me. I began to leave the living room.

  “Where’re you going?” asked Mrs. Sanders. She was looking at the poker and I realized she was nervous about me. I looked down at the poker as well.

  “Can’t be too careful,” I said. I proceeded down the hall to the kitchen.

  Behind me I could hear Mrs. Sanders saying, “I don’t like him being here.”

  I didn’t hear Sadie’s reply. I went to the back door, which was locked. I turned on the back-porch light and unlocked the door. A garbage can was on the back porch with its lid off. Sometimes we have trouble with raccoons and I wondered if that was what Sadie and the dog had heard. I replaced the lid. Nothing on the porch indicated that somebody had been trying to break in, but I didn’t know what those signs would be. Something broken, probably. Sadie had let Shadow out of the basement and the dog pushed through the screen door behind me, jumped up on my legs, then scampered down the steps. Immediately, she started barking.

  I looked across the yard. Someone was walking toward me between the trees. Instinctively, I raised the poker.

  “Are you really going to attack me?” came a voice. It was Aaron. I recognized his ponytail before I saw his face.

  “What are you doing back there?” I asked.

  “Short cut. Is Sadie still up?” Shadow stopped barking and ran up to him. Aaron bent over to scratch the dog’s ears.

  “Were you here earlier?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sadie thought she heard something.”

  By this time Sadie had joined me on the back porch.

  “Aaron,” she said.

  Aaron stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at us. His ponytail was pulled tight so it pulled at the corners of his eyes, giving him a somewhat Asian appearance. “I got news for you,” he said, speaking to Sadie. “Your father’s going to marry my sister. They’re going to do it this week.”

  I thought it was rather good news, but looking at Sadie and Aaron, I could see that my feelings were not shared.

  “Wha
t’s going on out there?” called Mrs. Sanders.

  “A wedding party,” said Aaron. Then he laughed.

  —

  After my visit to Jaime, I began to notice the Levine brothers’ hostility to him. Of course, Jaime had told me about the encounter at Gillian’s bar, though he didn’t say specifically what he had said to them. Possibly Jaime had addressed them and they didn’t like his tone. But that was not the case. What they objected to was Jaime’s friendship with Barry Sanders.

  Then on Monday morning, as they were walking by Make Waves, they stopped to look in the door. There was Jaime putting curlers in Mrs. Adams’s hair. Her husband was on the city council. Jesse and Shannon stood in the doorway, pointed at Jaime and laughed. It was not a real laugh but a cartoon laugh, a Woody Woodpecker laugh. Cookie chased them out. At first it seemed they would refuse to leave but then she sprayed them with some sort of sweet-smelling scent, which quite offended them.

  On Tuesday Jesse and Shannon went into the Aurelius Grill when Jaime and Barry were having lunch together. I think that Jaime and Barry were no more than friends, or incipient friends, but the Levines found their friendship objectionable. In their minds they seemed to have confused Marxism with a kind of puritanism. And perhaps they felt that Barry was letting down the IIR.

  Barry and Jaime were sitting at a table and Jesse and Shannon joined them. Their identical blond goatees made them look slightly goofy.

  “Nobody asked you to sit down,” said Jaime.

  “Little Pink did,” said Jesse.

  “He winked at us,” said Shannon.

  “I never did,” said Barry.

  “What’s for lunch?” asked Jesse.

  “Leave us alone,” said Jaime.

  “Don’t we have a right to eat?” asked Shannon.

  “He wants to keep us from eating,” said Jesse.

  Jaime signaled to Ralph Stangos, who owns the Aurelius Grill. Ralph is also a volunteer fireman and athletic. Whatever he felt about Jaime, he knew that Jaime was a steady customer. Stangos wiped his hands on a towel and began to come over.

  “Looks like you’re eating soup,” said Shannon, pointing toward Jaime’s tomato soup.

  “I’d like a little soup myself,” said Jesse.

  “Let me give you some,” said Shannon. He reached out, put his finger under the lip of the bowl, and flipped it into Jaime’s lap. Jaime shoved back his chair. “Ooops,” said Shannon.

  “You did that on purpose,” said Barry.

  At that moment Ralph Stangos grabbed Shannon by the back of the neck. “Out,” he said. “Both of you.”

  That was perhaps the most significant episode. But there were others, and I may have forgotten some. Twice they hooted at Jaime on the street. This went on for several days and I know Jaime considered getting an injunction against them.

  Barry came by my house that evening and told me about the business at the Aurelius Grill.

  “Jaime had to go home and change,” he said. “There was tomato soup all over his pants.”

  We sat in armchairs on either side of the fireplace and drank tea.

  “Why are they bothering him?” I asked.

  Barry’s eyes behind his thick glasses were a pinkish blur. “Shannon says homosexuality’s reactionary. But I guess Jaime spoke to them at Gillian’s and they didn’t like what he said.”

  Barry sipped his tea and blinked. We discussed Franklin’s marriage to Paula, which was to occur the next day at the courthouse in Potterville.

  “Sadie’s very upset about it,” I told Barry.

  Franklin felt that Sadie would have to accept their relationship if he and Paula got married, which they had been talking about for some months. He also felt bad about leaving Sadie by herself and thought it would be better if Paula was in the house. Paula was kind and intelligent. Franklin could see no rational reason why Sadie would continue to dislike her. Of course, Sadie needed no rational reason.

  I also thought of what Jaime had said about the secrets of some of the men in Aurelius. It made me wonder about the man with whom Barry had been briefly involved while he was in high school.

  I asked Barry if he was sexually involved with Jaime.

  “No, nothing like that. We’re just friends.”

  “Do you ever see that man you used to be involved with?”

  “What man?” Barry was on the defensive immediately.

  “When you were in high school.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “Is he still in town?”

  Barry repeated that he didn’t want to talk about him.

  “Does Jaime know this man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Barry stood up and said he had to leave. I apologized and tried to calm him.

  “Have some more tea,” I said.

  “I really have to go.”

  There was no keeping him. His mother had told him to come over to Sadie’s at eight and it was shortly after. I was annoyed with Barry. We had known each other a long time and I felt he should trust me.

  Meanwhile the Friends continued their patrols. They talked to people; they were in contact with other groups around the country. Even though it seemed obvious that Irving Powell wasn’t involved with the disappearances, they talked to his neighbors. And they had their own police scanners, so that when someone thought he heard a strange noise or saw something out of the ordinary and called the police in a panic, the Friends would respond as well. Sometimes they even arrived before the police. Captain Percy made various protests to the city council but the council members didn’t interfere. In the midst of this fear a few more people left Aurelius and several others sent their daughters to stay with relatives in towns where they thought the girls would be safe, though the whole idea of safety was increasingly problematic. There were empty seats in my classes. When I reported them, I was told that so-and-so had transferred temporarily to a school in Rome or Baldwinsville. And the word temporarily would hang in the air and no one would question it.

  As suspicion grew, people’s gossip and allegations became increasingly nasty, often verging on slander. I know for a fact that I was talked about, but it was at a level of such ignorance that it was more provoking than frightening. For instance, one day I entered my fifth-period classroom after lunch to find someone had written “Ferry” on the blackboard. Some years earlier we had had a history teacher by the name of Margaret Ferry and I thought at first it was a reference to her. One look at the grinning faces of my eighth graders, however, proved that the word was a misspelling. The hearty cheer of their attentive faces was repugnant. I was tempted to say something but instead I erased the word and began class. We had a surprise quiz that hour in which no one did well. The message was not lost on them.

  But suspicion was felt throughout the school. The teachers’ lounge became increasingly silent. Usually it was a place of criticism, backbiting, and gossip. But now people were uncertain as to the identity of whomever they were speaking to. Was the Sandra Petoski I had seen every day for years the same Sandra Petoski who was co-chairman of the Friends? And what if there was a third Sandra Petoski, someone more sinister?

  I tend to use the term dark side almost as a comic term. Mrs. Hicks’s passion for chocolate was her dark side, as was Harry Martini’s affair with the lady teacher from Utica. But now we had evidence of something truly dark. It increased our sense of how dark such a darkness might be. Someone among us had stolen two little girls. And what had this person done with them? That was the question we didn’t ask. So in the silence of the teachers’ lounge, I never had the sense that my colleagues had nothing to talk about; rather, they were afraid of what there was to say.

  On Wednesday afternoon Franklin and Paula were married by the town clerk in Potterville. Ryan went with them and acted as witness. All three had taken off work for an hour. Ryan skipped lunch. Th
e clerk, Mitchell Friedman, kept making jokes about tying the knot and making an honest woman out of Paula, but Ryan said she and Franklin were as serious as if they’d been at a funeral. When it was over, Franklin kissed the bride and Ryan shook their hands. They drove back to Aurelius. When Sadie got home from school shortly after three o’clock, she found she had a new mother. She wasn’t happy about it. Franklin and Paula spent about an hour bringing over some of Paula’s things from her father’s house, which would be put up for sale. Franklin didn’t have much time, because the paper had to be at the printer’s by five o’clock. There was a problem with Paula’s dog, Fletcher, who didn’t get along with Shadow. Some friends in the country took Fletcher until Franklin and Paula could decide what to do.

  Franklin wrote a short article about their marriage. In fact, he must have written it before they were married. It only gave the basic details, although it identified Franklin as editor of the Independent (as if he needed identifying) and Paula as a psychological counselor in the dean’s office at Aurelius College. People read the article and shook their heads. Many felt they already knew too much about the McNeal family. People wished Franklin well, of course, but I don’t believe there were any celebrations.

  Thirty-six

  The Malloys and Shillers never really became friends but during this time they were quite close. The very sadness, however, that brought them together also kept them apart. After all, each grieved for a different girl. But they were in constant contact with one another, each inquiring if the other had heard anything new. Ralph and Helen Shiller were not directly involved with the Friends but Ralph’s brother Mike was there every day. Mike took a leave of absence from his job at the post office. A second brother, Albert, also gave some of his time to the Friends. And Helen Shiller had two brothers and a cousin who participated in the patrols.

  Ralph and Helen Shiller tried to continue their lives but they lived in a state of near paralysis. They would move forward for a few minutes, then once more realize that their daughter was gone and be knocked down again. Luckily, Ralph had men who worked for him in his shop. The awful thing was not knowing anything, nor could they stop themselves from imagining the dreadful things that might have been done to their child. The oddity of the returned clothes and the fake hand made even the most gruesome scenario possible. Ralph began driving around town in his van, not going on calls or errands, just looking. One would see the van slowly pass by—a blue Ford with “Ralph Shiller, Electrician” printed on the side in white—and see Ralph’s dark, sad face peering over the wheel.