by Lois Duncan
“I’m going to call the police,” Don said, getting to his feet.
“You’re all crazy!” Brett insisted angrily. “It was a random shooting!”
“We’ll let the police decide if we’re crazy,” Don said. “To me, two well-placed shots in the head don’t add up to ‘random.’ ”
It was hours later before any of us got to bed that night. Detective Steve Gallegos and another detective from the Homicide Department came to our home and spent several hours listening to us. They were interested and attentive and took copious notes.
When they were getting ready to leave, Detective Gallegos told us that if we thought of anything else he wanted us to call him. Day or night or on weekends, he could be reached on his pager.
“Your input is very important to us,” he said.
I locked that statement in my mind and didn’t forget it, despite the fact that we never heard it again.
4
THE DAY OF THE funeral was filled with frenetic activity. Friends poured in and out of our house all morning, bringing paper plates, covered dishes, and ice chests filled with soft drinks for the wake. It seemed as if every few minutes another delivery truck arrived with plants and floral arrangements. A woman from down the street came to mow our lawn and wouldn’t even let us reciprocate with a glass of iced tea. Two of Kait’s girlfriends, weeping as they worked, vacuumed carpets, dusted furniture, and hung clean towels in the bathrooms.
Family members went in different directions. Don sat out on the patio and conversed with his brothers, whom he hadn’t seen in two years, while their wives kept order in the kitchen. Robin went to Kait’s apartment and transferred her favorite songs from records onto a cassette that could be played before the service. Brett, who worked as a sound engineer for a rock band, drove to the funeral home to test their public address system. Donnie, discovering he had outgrown his only dress shirt, went to the mall to buy another. Kerry spent much of the morning on the phone with her husband, who had remained in Dallas with their two-year-old and four-year-old.
I drifted about the house, detached and disoriented, feeling strangely disconnected from all the activity. Occasionally I found myself glancing around for Kait, half expecting her to come popping out of her bedroom to ask me to iron a blouse or help fix her hair.
The previous day’s sunshine had given way to rain again, and a slow-paced drizzle continued throughout the morning. Then it stopped, and a rainbow appeared above our house, so unbelievably vivid that neighbors called us out to look at it. I recalled how, four years earlier, when we were returning from my father’s memorial service in Florida, a rainbow had suddenly formed outside the window of our plane, creating such a startling effect that Don had taken a picture of it. Kait had insisted it was her grandfather’s way of telling us not to grieve for him, but I couldn’t accept that fantasy, then or now. The dead were dead, they didn’t send messages through rainbows.
When Robin returned from the apartment, she brought a frilly white dress for Kait to be buried in and some items she had found on her bedside table. Among those was a copy of my most recent teenage suspense novel, Don’t Look Behind You. The story was about a family who informed on an interstate drug ring and were forced into hiding in the Federal Witness Security Program. Kait had been my model for the heroine, April, a headstrong teenager who considered herself invulnerable. I opened the book and saw the inscription I had written in it—For Kait, my own special ‘April.’ Always be sure to look behind you, honey! Horrified, I ripped the page from the book, crumpled it into a ball, and hurled it into the wastebasket.
I remember little about the funeral except that the chapel was jammed and people who couldn’t find seats were standing in the aisles. Kait’s body, now hollow as a broken piñata, was in a closed casket. The minister began the service with the Twenty-third Psalm, and I tried to picture Kait lying down in a “green pasture” or wading in the “still waters” of some heavenly pond, but the Shadow of Death was too dark for such visions to be of comfort.
Photo of the remembrance table at Kait's funeral
After the service, people filed past us in an endless stream to offer condolences—neighbors, Don’s colleagues from Sandia Laboratories, my writer friends, and the friends of our surviving children. Kait’s classmates, some dating back to grammar-school days, embraced us and wept, as did many of her teachers and a large contingent of children she used to baby-sit. Dung came through the line, his arms filled with yellow roses, which he tenderly laid on the coffin. His friend, An Le, walked beside him with his hand on his shoulder.
Photographers from the media stood massed on the lawn as we left the chapel for the cemetery. The coverage made the evening television news shows, and the following day both papers ran lengthy articles:
Albuquerque Tribune, July 21, 1989:
Robin Arquette sang her little sister to sleep for the last time Thursday as her friends and family said then-farewells.
Kaitlyn Arquette, a teenager who “had high hopes and great dreams for the future,” was buried after a standing-room-only memorial service.
Dr. Harry Vanderpool, a retired minister who spoke at the service, played a tape made by Robin Arquette, who produces audio- and videocassettes for children. The tape was also played while Kaitlyn lay in a coma in University Hospital.
“For the last time her beloved sister will sing her to sleep,” Vanderpool said. Mourners sobbed aloud as the soft voice of Robin Arquette filled the chapel at the end of the service.
“According to those who knew her best, Kait lived all of her life, however brief,” Vanderpool said. “Kait had high hopes and great dreams for the future. She made the most of the eighteen years she had; she didn’t stand around and watch the world go by.”
He praised the attitude of the Arquette family, who, he said, had chosen to “celebrate the life she had rather than focusing on her death.” He also talked about how her death had created life, for the family donated six of her organs, which went to five donor recipients.
Among those who grieved at the service was Dung Nguyen, who had dated Arquette for two years. They were living together at the time she was killed.
“I don’t know what I am going to do with my life,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes.
Albuquerque Journal, July 21, 1989:
Albuquerque police are searching for a beige Volkswagen they say may be connected to the shooting of Kaitlyn Arquette.
“We are not saying the Volkswagen is a suspect’s car,” Police Chief Sam Baca said during a news conference. “It was seen around the area around the time of the shooting.”
The Volkswagen does not have an engine cover and has a loud muffler, Baca said.
During the news conference Ray Baca, a deputy chief administrative officer for public safety, said the general public is not in danger.
Chief Baca agreed, adding, “The overall crime rate is down. Most drive-by shootings are gang related.”
Outside the funeral Kaitlyn’s girlfriends filed past Dung Nguyen, Kaitlyn’s boyfriend, hugging and consoling him.
Later, he talked about the night Kaitlyn was killed.
“I waited and waited for her,” Nguyen said. “But she never came home. Nobody called me. Nobody told me nothing. Then police came to the door. They started searching my house and going through everything. They asked my whereabouts that night. They asked if I had a gun. I kept asking them, ‘What happened? What happened?’ When they told me, I went down there, but she had already been taken to the hospital. I went to the hospital. It wasn’t like her, it didn’t look like her. I didn’t know who she was.”
The Albuquerque police were represented by six motorcycle officers, more than the usual escort complement.
“It is important that we come out and show that we do care,” said traffic Sgt. John B. Gallegos. “This is just sad.”
Many of the people who attended the funeral came back to the house afterward. Our living room and family room were filled to overflowing, and th
e crowd spilled out onto the back patio and into the yard beyond. A group of Brett’s friends congregated on the front lawn, reminiscing about Kait, the tagalong kid sister, who had both delighted and exasperated them.
One young father wept unashamedly.
“Kait’s diaper was the first I ever changed!” he sobbed.
Another friend recalled the boys’ efforts to ditch Kait when she was a preschooler.
“She was always trailing after us, wanting to do everything we did,” he remembered. “We kept trying to wear her out so she’d go take a nap.”
Brett’s eighth-grade girlfriend arrived with a wooden bowl painted to look like a watermelon. She’d recovered it from Pier One Imports where Kait had put it on layaway, intending to make it a Christmas present for Kerry.
People who knew Kait at different stages of her life remembered her differently. To an elderly neighbor she was the little girl who hung a May basket on her doorknob and hid giggling in the bushes. A junior-high classmate recalled her attempts to learn to water-ski—“She’d get up and fall down and get up and fall down, but she’d never give up.” A nurse recounted how Kait worked one summer as a hospital volunteer and took a special interest in the elderly invalids—“After her shift was over, she’d still be there, sitting by the bedside of some shriveled old woman, listening to her rambling stories about her childhood.”
Those perceptions of Kait, superimposed one upon another, supported the image of the “shining teen” portrayed in the newspapers. But there had been a second side of Kait. The toddler who trailed adoringly after her brothers was the same miniature daredevil who yanked her small hand out of mine and leapt into the deep end of a motel swimming pool. The twelve-year-old at the lake had not only water-skied with her friends in the bright summer sunshine, she had sneaked out at midnight to take the boat and explore the other side of the lake in the moonlight. And the teenager who had listened so patiently to the reminiscences of sweet old ladies was the same young woman who picked up hitchhikers because they looked “interesting” and coaxed them to tell her stories about their experiences on the road.
Despite a high level of intelligence Kait was lacking in judgment. In Don’t Look Behind You there was a scene in which an FBI agent snapped at April, “You’ve still got a lot of growing up to do. You’re a nice enough kid, but you’re part of the Cinemax generation. You can’t believe real life stories don’t always have happy endings.” I had made that same statement so often to Kait that, when she saw it on paper, she burst out laughing.
“Mother, you’re something else! Won’t you ever lighten up?”
That peal of laughter was still so vivid in my memory that for one crazy instant I thought I was actually hearing it. Then reality took over, and the sound was replaced by the voices of friends and relatives and the clink of glasses and silverware as Kait’s farewell party accelerated.
The odors of food and coffee were making me nauseous, and afraid I was going to be sick, I set down my untouched plate and headed for the stairs.
Don and I passed each other in the hall and he stopped to give me a hug.
“You’re doing great,” he said approvingly. “I haven’t seen a tear yet.”
Don is by nature an introvert who keeps a tight rein on his emotions, while I let mine hang out for everyone to see. Oddly, though, it had been Don who wept in the hospital, while I had sat by Kait’s bedside, dry-eyed and stoic, breathing in time with the respirator as I waited for her to die.
I was still working hard to keep my emotions in check. But how could I deny the guilt I felt? “I shouldn’t have let her go out that night,” I said.
“There was no way you could have known—”
“I felt it coming. I had a premonition that something was going to happen to her.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Don said.
“I did have a feeling, though. If only I had listened to it!”
I went upstairs and stretched out on our king-size bed, while the wake churned on without me in the house below. Eventually Dung, who had been out in the front yard with Brett, came in and searched the house until he found me.
“Mom,” he said, “I need pills to make me go to sleep tonight.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any,” I said. “I don’t use sleeping pills.”
“You got pills from the doctor for me that time I got my tooth pulled. Those made me sleep.”
“Those weren’t sedatives,” I said. “They were very strong pain medicine. They’re not meant to be used as sleeping pills.”
“They made me sleep all night and all day,” Dung insisted with surprising stubbornness. “They worked real good. They made me sleep and not dream.”
“That was a side effect,” I said. “It wasn’t the reason for your taking them. Let me see if I can find you something less potent.”
I went into the bathroom and rummaged through the medicine cabinet until I located a small vial of Valium. I started to hand it over to him and then thought better of it and shook two tablets onto his palm.
“Take one of these now and the other before you go to bed,” I said. “You can have more tomorrow if you need them, but I want to make very sure you don’t take too many.”
“I’ll be careful,” Dung said. “I want to take home the bottle.”
“No,” I told him. “I’m keeping the bottle here.”
Later I was glad that I made that decision. Dung didn’t turn up at our house at all the next day, and it wasn’t until that evening that we learned where he was. According to a television news report he had been taken to the hospital by ambulance after stabbing himself in the stomach with a four-inch knife.
My father’s rainbow, 1985
Kait’s rainbow, 1989
5
WE LATER RECEIVED A more detailed account of Dung’s suicide attempt from Detective Gallegos. This is his statement as it appears in the police report:
Writer was contacted by APD Communications, who informed writer that Dung Nguyen was at Kirtland Air Force Base, and attempted suicide by stabbing himself. … Dung Nguyen was staying with Khanh Pham in his dorm.
Also staying in the room was An Le, another friend of Dung Nguyen. … Khanh Pham and An Le left the room during the evening … and went to a restaurant to eat. Dung Nguyen did not want to go and stayed alone in the room, saying he was tired and wanted to sleep. When Khanh Pham and An Le returned to the room about an hour later, they noticed Dung Nguyen asleep in the bottom bunk bed. A short time later An Le and Khanh Pham went to bed and heard Dung Nguyen moaning. An Le and Khanh Pham got up, turned the light on, and found blood on the sheets of the bottom bunk bed where Dung Nguyen was lying.
Upon further investigation they found a folding-type knife in the bed and a stab wound to Nguyen’s stomach area. An Le and Khanh Pham then contacted medical personnel from the base. Arriving to the dorm were medical technicians … who treated Dung Nguyen on the scene and then had him transported to the University of New Mexico Hospital.
Writer then interviewed both An Le and Khanh Pham separately. … Both suspects told’ writer that Dung Nguyen was very depressed and upset over the death of the victim. Dung Nguyen also felt that the victim’s family and the police suspected him of committing the homicide, so he decided to commit suicide.
Writer transported An Le to the main police station, where writer interviewed him. An Le told writer that he liked the victim very much and has no idea who is responsible for killing victim. An Le went on to say that Dung Nguyen and victim have had arguments in the past, but was not aware of any serious problems between the couple. An Le also said he has no knowledge of Dung Nguyen staging any traffic accidents in California.
When we called the hospital to check on Dung’s status we were told he was in satisfactory condition following abdominal surgery.
Kerry flew home the next morning, and Robin was scheduled to do so also, but she canceled her plane reservation. Then she disappeared for an hour and when she returned she called Don and me i
nto the family room and told us to sit down.
“You’d better get braced, because you’re not going to like this,” she said. “I’ve been to see a psychic.”
“You’ve what?” I exclaimed. “Are you crazy?”
“I wanted to know why Dung tried to kill himself,” said Robin. “Was it grief or guilt? I felt that we had to know. Remember my friend Maritza? Well, we got to talking after the funeral, and she told me about this psychic named Betty Muench. She said this woman’s a ‘channel’ who does automatic writing, and after Maritza’s father died, Betty was able to contact him and find out all kinds of things. I couldn’t see anything to lose by trying to reach Kait that way.”
“How much did she charge you?” Don asked suspiciously.
“She doesn’t charge for murders.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” I said.
“Well, you’re going to have to. First, though, I need to explain how Betty Muench works. I expected something exotic, but it wasn’t; she’s just an ordinary woman with an electric typewriter. She didn’t want me to tell her about our suspicions. She just told me I could ask three questions and she’d type out the answers.”
Robin started to read from the transcript:
BETTY MUENCH, 7/22/89
QUESTION: WHAT MAY I KNOW ABOUT THE WELL-BEING OF KAITLYN AT THIS TIME AND DOES SHE HAVE A MESSAGE FOR ME?
ANSWER: There will be this energy that will be as of the impact of a sword. This will be the energy of Kaitlyn and then there will be this energy of the one Robin which will be like a large chevron at the bottom of this image. There is in this chevron that which will seem like the expediter. This will seem to allow that Robin will be informed and she will come to know what Kaitlyn is feeling at this time.