The Church of Dead Girls

by Stephen Dobyns

  The next day, Sunday, it snowed. I woke in the morning to the quiet that a foot of snow on the ground will cause. I heard my furnace go on. I could see big flakes drift past my bedroom window. Something about watching them led me to think of other winters, going back to my earliest memories. Though we had had wet snow on Halloween and flurries a few times since, this was the first real snow of the season. And although I was approaching fifty, I found it exciting. Had it been Monday instead of Sunday, school would have been canceled, and I felt a moment of regret that it wasn’t Monday after all. When I was a child, I used to sled on the hill in Lincoln Park, near the hospital. I had a sled with runners, a Flexible Flyer. Nowadays children have plastic sleds, though one still sees a toboggan or two. It was eight o’clock and I made breakfast. Looking from a window, I saw a police car parked in front of Franklin’s house. Because of the snow on its roof, I assumed it had been there all night. A little cloud of exhaust indicated that its motor was running.

  The quiet in the streets was like fear. Everything was shrouded in it. I’ve said that people were buying guns. Owing to the time required to get a pistol permit, many bought rifles. George Fontini had a sporting goods shop on Main Street and he completely sold out his supply of hunting rifles, even the expensive models. And he sold a number of pistols. He even said, making a joke of it, that he had sold his crossbows and soon expected to sell out his darts.

  Jesse and Shannon remained in jail over the weekend. They denied any involvement in Jaime’s death, though they had no alibi. The coroner said that Jaime had died between midnight and four in the morning, which was not a time when many people have good alibis. On the other hand, the lab reports showed that neither Shannon’s nor Jesse’s fingerprints had been found in Jaime’s apartment or in Make Waves. Nor had the two been charged with the murder. At the moment, Jesse was charged with assaulting a police officer and Shannon with breaking into Ryan’s house.

  The question that people asked was, If Jesse and Shannon were not responsible, then who killed Jaime and why? It was hard for me not to think of what Jaime had said about people with secrets. He’d probably said it to others as well. It seemed obvious he had been killed by somebody with whom he had been sexually involved who did not want that involvement known. The additional question was whether this person had anything to do with the disappearances. Was it the same person or was it another person using the disappearances as a smoke screen?

  The police talked to everyone they could find who knew Jaime. They talked to me as well. A state police detective came to my house, a plainclothesman by the name of Mitchell.

  “I know nothing about him,” I said. “He cut my hair not long ago. Normally I get it cut at Jimmy’s but Jimmy had closed his shop for a week to go hunting.”

  “Who were Jaime’s friends?”

  “I have no idea. Perhaps Cookie Evans would know.”

  We stood in the hall. I wouldn’t even let Mitchell into my living room and I could see he was irritated with me. I was entirely unhelpful, but I found it objectionable that certain assumptions were being made about my life.

  Barry was also questioned. He said he knew Jaime a little bit but that was all. He said he felt someone was looking for him, too, though he gave no sensible reason why this should be so. Because Barry was nervous and stuttered, the police assumed he was a hysteric or was lying to make himself appear important. Barry said nothing about his own experiences with men in Aurelius and instead suggested that someone was after him because of his involvement with Inquiries into the Right. He explained how some members had been forced to leave town. It was just his own bad luck, said Barry, that he had no place to go. The police felt Barry was being overanxious. He seemed so inconsequential that it was hard to imagine he might know something.

  Among the police there was the sense that they were drawing their circle smaller. Percy had mostly kept his suspicions under wraps, but now he began to move more aggressively, especially after Ryan talked to Sheila Murphy. He felt certain that whoever had murdered Janice was responsible for the disappearances and had also killed Jaime. And he brooded about what Sheila had said about Janice’s “professional man.” Twice he had had Sheila brought to City Hall and had questioned her personally. And he questioned Dr. Malloy, who swore he had never been involved with Janice. He even brought in Donald Malloy, who was extremely indignant.

  “How dare you suggest I was involved with such a woman,” he said. “She was no better than a tart!”

  Saturday night, after someone tried to break into Franklin’s house, Percy quickly brought in men to search the area. A number of houses were vacant. Not many, perhaps twenty in the whole town, but they were the houses of people who had left because of their fear. Some were retired people who had gone south for the winter but some were families with teenage daughters. More would leave soon. As Percy saw it, the empty houses could offer protection to whoever might be prowling at night.

  In fact, the house directly behind Franklin’s, belonging to Maggie Murray, a retired schoolteacher, stood empty. Every New Year’s Day she went down to her sister’s in Fort Lauderdale for the remainder of the winter. This year she had left shortly after the first of November. According to Percy, someone could have parked in Maggie’s driveway, then cut across the backyards to Franklin’s house. That was one reason he had been suspicious of Leimbach, whose car had appeared so opportunely.

  And on Sunday he received further reason to be suspicious of Leimbach. A large envelope with Captain Percy’s name on the outside was dropped off at the police station. Afterward no one could determine where it came from, if it had been slipped in with Saturday’s mail—though there was no stamp on it—or if it had been left outside the front door and brought in. Dozens of people went in and out all the time and someone might have picked it up and tossed it on the desk as a way of being helpful.

  By the time the envelope was passed on to Percy, it had been knocking around for a few hours. Percy opened it as he stood by the front desk. Ryan was nearby and he saw Percy give a little start. Inside was a piece of paper with the name “Leimbach” printed on it in big letters. The letters were written with crayon and it was clear that they had been traced over and over with many different colored crayons, as if someone had first written “Leimbach” about ten times with black crayon and then had done the same with green and red and blue and brown and yellow, until the letters were an inch wide and greasy with the thick, almost violent application of waxy color.

  Thirty-nine

  After Meg Shiller’s disappearance, Captain Percy initiated a number of strategies that he hoped would lead to the apprehension of the person responsible. For instance, ten girls who bore a resemblance to Sharon and Meg—all were tall and slender, with long hair—were being surreptitiously watched. License plate numbers of passing cars were fed into computers at half a dozen locations to see if a pattern could be determined or if the numbers could be matched with the license plates of about a hundred people who were known to be in their cars at the time of the disappearances. And there were other projects I knew nothing about. Though they were expensive, it was decided in the upper echelons of the state police that it would be better to pay the price than to lose another girl. Sadly, the expense didn’t help—not in that way, at least.

  One of Percy’s efforts entailed using a decoy. He brought in Becky DeMarino, a thirty-five-year-old state police officer from Corning who was quite small. When she was youthfully dressed, one might think she was in her early teens. The plan was for her to walk along the side streets and for troopers to be hidden along the way. It was more complicated than this and I’m giving only the briefest idea of his plan. For example, I know Percy had a van with the name of a lighting firm painted on the side, while inside was a man with a radio and two troopers.

  Becky DeMarino carried a pistol and a transmitter so that if anyone spoke to her, the conversation would be heard in the van. She came to Aurelius on Wednes
day, November 15. Lieutenant Marcos was in charge of the operation, if it can be called that. It was supposed to start on Friday, then Jaime’s body was found. Consequently, it didn’t start until Sunday.

  On her walks, Becky DeMarino wore a pink parka and pulled a red plastic sled. With a ski cap and a scarf wrapped around her neck, she looked about twelve. I am told they had her practice walking like a child—meaning she had to meander and appear purposeless. Ryan said she had been instructed to skip occasionally. One may infer from this the degree of desperation felt by the police. Despite the feeling of dread in the town, there was a certain amount of sledding in Lincoln Park that Sunday and Becky was to patrol the streets in the general area, pulling her sled behind her. A young girl out on the street in the dusky afternoon: perhaps our abductor would be tempted.

  But again the problem was that quite a few people were aware of the plan. The police knew, of course. Then, when Becky was walking down Walnut Street with her sled, one of the Friends’ patrol cars drew up beside her. The driver—I believe it was Henry Polaski—meant to tell her to go home and was ready to drive her. Another man was in the car with Polaski. Of course, they saw that Becky wasn’t a child and after a brief chat they went on their way. Did they understand she was with the police? Did they tell others about a woman pulling a sled who looked about twelve but was really in her midthirties?

  At that time of year, it was dark in Aurelius by four o’clock, especially on a snowy afternoon. Becky walked along the edge of the park near the hill where kids had been sledding since morning. Although there were trees, they were scattered and children sledded between them. The sidewalk was about fifty yards from the hill and only the fastest sleds could coast that far after their speedy descent. The children had come either with their parents or in a group. The fear of something happening was so prevalent that no child came alone, and many were not allowed to come at all. I remember times when there were over a hundred children sledding at the park, but on that particular Sunday the most was about twenty. Still, there was shouting and dogs were running around. But after three o’clock everyone started going home.

  It was about quarter to four when Becky walked down Johnson Street, which bordered the park. The streetlights had come on though it was still light enough for Becky to see about six kids sledding, their bright-colored parkas muted in the gloom.

  As she reached the sliding path, she saw a green sled on the sidewalk, an inexpensive plastic sled with an orange piece of cord attached to the front. She paused, and at that moment heard someone calling.

  “Karla! Karla!”

  Becky turned and saw a woman running down the hill toward her, though she was still nearly a hundred yards away. The woman fell, then got to her feet again.

  “Karla, where have you been?”

  Becky waited as the woman ran, then walked a little, then ran again. She seemed both angry and frightened. She was a youngish woman wearing a three-quarter-length green down jacket and a blue and red ski cap.

  “Karla, I told you to come right back up the hill!”

  Then, when she was still twenty yards away: “You’re not Karla. Where is she?”

  The woman began running again.

  “That’s her sled,” she said. Then she stopped and put her hands to her face. She began to scream.

  In the sound truck, the technician wearing the headphones yanked them off his head. The driver nicked on his lights and pulled forward, his tires spinning in the snow.

  The woman kept screaming. That was the first anyone knew that a third girl had disappeared.

  The woman’s name was Louise Golondrini. She was a thirty-year-old single mother who worked at the rope factory. She had a boyfriend but he was doing construction in Florida right now. She lived with another single woman, Pam O’Brien, who had an eight-year-old boy named Harry. Pam also worked at the rope factory but on a different shift. Louise was from Utica and had moved to Aurelius two years earlier when she had gotten her job.

  Her daughter, Karla, had been in my eighth grade general-science class the previous year. She suffered from what they call an attention deficit disorder, that is, she stared dreamily from the window or drew horses in her notebook. I could have flunked her but out of kindness I gave her a D. She was pretty in a pale way, thin with long dark hair. All these girls, these thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, are so clearly in transition that they are almost nothing at the moment. That’s not quite right, but one tends to focus more on what they are becoming than on what they are. Now Karla Golondrini would become nothing at all.

  Becky DeMarino’s pink parka was almost the same color as Karla’s, according to her mother. That was why she had at first mistaken Becky for her daughter. They had been sledding since two o’clock and Louise Golondrini wanted to go home; she was cold and her feet were wet. Her car was parked in the lot at the top of the hill. Karla wanted to go down one more time. Her mother finally agreed but said she would wait at the top. Karla slid down the hill and her mother lost track of her in the increasing dark. She waited. Five minutes passed. A dog was jumping around and she was distracted. Then she called for her daughter. Standing on the hill, hearing no answer, she began to think that something awful might have happened. That was when she came running down through the snow. When she had seen Becky DeMarino in her pink parka, she felt great relief. It hadn’t lasted long.

  Karla had been gone less than ten minutes when her mother began to scream. Because of the radio van, the police were alerted right away. A dozen troopers fanned out across the hill looking for Karla. Police visited nearby houses as volunteers searched the neighborhood. By four-thirty, roadblocks were erected on all the roads leaving Aurelius. More were set up at the turnpike and on Route 20. But as Chuck Hawley said, “We all knew the girl was still someplace in Aurelius.”

  Louise Golondrini wanted to stay in Lincoln Park but at last she was prevailed upon to come to the police station. “My baby,” she kept crying. Roberta Fletcher, the nurse who worked for Dr. Malloy, was called. Dr. Malloy came, too, as did his wife. Dr. Malloy tried to give Louise a sedative but she didn’t want one. They took over Chief Schmidt’s office. Really, there was no place else to wait. Soon the Shillers came. It must have been awful for Louise to realize she was now part of their company.

  By five o’clock over a hundred people were looking for the missing girl. It had been snowing lightly all day, sometimes no more than flurries, but with evening it began to snow harder. TV trucks arrived from Syracuse and Utica, even Binghamton, and their bright lights made the fresh snow sparkle. Lincoln Park was not far from where I lived. Sadie and I walked over to watch. She was the one to tell me that Karla had disappeared. I had been home reading the Sunday paper. Someone had called Franklin and he dashed out of the house. Paula hadn’t wanted Sadie to go out, but then she came as well. Sadie walked on one side of me and Paula on the other, as if I were a fence between them. Paula was a few inches taller than I, while Sadie was a few inches shorter. The snow was quite deep and I was glad that I had worn boots.

  The news of a third girl’s disappearing touched us like a sickness. It was as if the disappearance were caused by no human agent, as if our town were under one of those afflictions you read about in the Old Testament. People spoke to one another in hushed voices. Their faces were drawn; some were weeping. They looked hunched. The flashing blue lights of the police cars provided the only color, creating blue faces, blue weeping. In the surrounding houses, I saw more faces pressed to the windows.

  “I knew who she was,” said Sadie, “but I don’t think I ever talked to her.”

  “Her poor mother,” Paula kept saying.

  There was an ominous quality to the silence. Because of their heavy coats and hats and scarves, the people on the hillside seemed more like human shapes than human beings. They walked stiffly and I was reminded of how the dead walked in that movie The Night of the Living Dead. The police were very busy. Excited
staticky voices came over the speakers of the police radios. They seemed to be speaking numbers mostly. At six o’clock we walked back to my house and I made tea.

  Captain Percy had a list of fifty people whose whereabouts he wanted to know as exactly as possible. The list included some people I’ve never mentioned as well as Harry Martini, Sherman Carpenter, and Henry Swazey. It even included me. One man visited by the police was Greg Dorough, a lawyer in town who happened to be gay and who lived with a man who was a technician at the pharmaceutical company in Norwich. One wouldn’t have thought they were gay if one hadn’t known. In any case, the unpleasant part was that Greg was visited—I am sure of this—only because he was gay. The visit was very brief: the police wanted to know where Greg had been during the afternoon. Still, a visit is a visit. I was with Sadie when the police came, and I felt relieved that Paula was with us too. Otherwise I might have heard more remarks about my interest in young girls.

  The police also looked for Paul Leimbach, Donald Malloy, Mike Shiller, and others closely related to the missing girls’ families. Aaron they found in his apartment with Harriet. He said Harriet and he had been working all afternoon preparing a memorial service for Houari Chihani. Mike Shiller claimed to have been ice fishing at the lake. Donald Malloy at first couldn’t be found, then Percy realized that he was among the volunteers scouring the park for evidence of Karla and had been one of the first to respond.

  Percy learned that Paul Leimbach had been alone in his car, ostensibly patrolling his assigned section of Aurelius, when the disappearance occurred. People later said that Percy overreacted but it seemed he couldn’t do otherwise, especially since he had received the piece of paper with Leimbach’s name printed on it in such an obsessive way. In any case, he brought Leimbach into the police station and turned his car over to the lab crew. Chihani was dead, Jaime Rose was dead, Oscar Herbst was still in Troy, other IIR members had left town, Hark Powers was in jail, and so were the Levine brothers—now that the supposedly worst among us had been accounted for, it was necessary to turn to the others, including the best.