She didn’t record what they said to her, but her response told a tale of its own: They said I was fine. Moments later: Make it stop. . . . Make the torture, torment, make it stop now. Help me.
ON THAT VERY night when Patrick House and Clara Schwartz discussed poisoning her father and how to get away with it, five minutes later, Clara turned her computer back on and signed in, again looking for Patrick.
And there he was.
They talked about menial things for the next half hour and then moved on to the subject of their relationship. Clara was plying this boy with all the right words, spooning him just enough information to keep him satisfied but also wanting more—this all occurred at a time when, Patrick later said, he was thinking of backing off.
Although Patrick might have said in hindsight that he was considering walking away, unsure whether Clara was kidding about killing the OG or just ramping up the Underworld game, he was not sharing any of that trepidation with her.
I love you, Clara said after telling Patrick she needed to get some sleep. But we knew this, right?
Yup, yup, but it can never be said too many times.
Hey, this is the only relationship in which I was being honest about love this early into it, Clara concluded before signing off.
Patrick said he liked hearing that.
CHAPTER 25
CLARA WAS SITTING at her desk inside her dorm at JMU several days later. The computer monitor brightly illuminated the messy room around her. Garbage was strewn all about the floor: food wrappers, empty cans and bottles, balled-up papers, and other trash. She tapped away, hoping Patrick was online.
After a few minutes, there was that familiar greeting glowing across the screen: Hello, love.
Clara said meeting Patrick online was the “happiest” part of her day, besides talking to him over the phone. On this day, she seemed content, in a good mood. This was a rare moment for Clara.
Within a few keystrokes, however, it was obvious that Clara’s fleeting moment of happiness was only the bait. After saying how nice it was to talk to Patrick, Clara wrote: Just a horrid night. Then she explained (after Patrick prompted her) that she’d had another fight with the OG. It had to do with a friend of the OG’s: His brother died ~ grins evilly ~ not sure how.
Patrick warned her to be “nice.”
Clara talked about a theory she had involving mental fury. She referenced a “thought transference” that she personally had projected, ten days previously, proffering a guess that it was that mental fury that was responsible for killing the guy.
You arnt spose to kill people. . . . That’s my job, Patrick wrote.
Was Patrick back in? Was he sending mixed messages? Or was Patrick simply playing the game, hoping to stay in the good graces of his girlfriend?
Patrick soon moved on and talked about something else.
But Clara brought him back around, writing, Now for OG . . . or is that your job? She sounded confused, as if Patrick was saying that Path had handed over his responsibility of killing the OG to another character.
Clara was nervous, as though lost in the conversation—Was Patrick referring to the Underworld or the real world? She brought up that mental fury, mind transference again, and Patrick made light of it, thinking, of course, it was all part of the Underworld game. He suggested that with her mental fury, Clara could make the death of the OG look natural. Therefore, she didn’t need him.
Make what look natural? Clara asked, the eagerness she harbored to hear Patrick’s answer nearly jumped through the screen.
Fury, Patrick clarified.
Compared to? Clara wondered. Then: Somewhat confused ?
Don’t worry, it’s still my job, Patrick cleared up.
To tackle OG?
My job.
Okay ... have you found a natural way?
I may have.
~interested~ go on.
No, I am not going to tell you how, until of course for sure, anyway.
Okay . . . any hints?
It will kill a person.
Beyond that ... herbal, what?
Nope.
?
There?
I am here, and no, I am not going to tell you.
Okay, guess it’s better that I not know. . . . I just wish he’d go away.... [I’m] so sick of fighting.
I understand. . . .
If taken in context, this last exchange certainly sounded like a plan to kill Robert Schwartz. The back-and-forth. The feeling Clara projected of running out of patience and not wanting to fight with her father any longer—the idea that there was a stealthy way available to get rid of him. In no way—if we take into account other conversations when they were clearly discussing the Underworld narrative—had Clara or Patrick alluded to being “in character.” A concerted plan, brought up by Clara, to kill her father seemed to be taking shape.
They talked about money next. Clara was upset because the OG wouldn’t give her any money to buy the things she wanted, such as a stereo and VCR. She said she was “so sick” of him looking at “her finances,” as if the OG was going into her bank account and questioning her about every dollar she spent.
Then they talked about how Katie was possibly cheating on Mike because Clara said she’d seen ads online that Katie had posted where she was looking for dates.
Clara forwarded Patrick several e-mails she’d recently seen that had been in her school account from the previous girl who’d had her same “box number.” The girl had apparently not deleted her account. Clara and Patrick had a nice laugh for a time, going back and forth, talking about the strange e-mails between the girl and several guys she was seeing.
As they continued instant messaging, it was clear when they both became totally immersed in the Underworld. There was no chance of confusing this part of the conversation with reality. It was hard to follow and made little sense, except to the two of them. They were deeply absorbed in the game. Here, at the end of the conversation, while talking specifically about the Underworld, the OG did not come up. Not once. The talk was focused on goddesses and gods, characters, and the narrative of the game.
This observation said one thing: Clara and Patrick were both totally aware of the difference. She and Patrick understood it. Clara, perhaps more than Patrick, worked it. And she made damn sure that when she spoke about the OG’s life coming to an end, she meant Robert Schwartz—not some sort of evil, made-up villain in her wacky, largely plagiarized RPG.
CHAPTER 26
WITH HIS CAR now fixed, Patrick showed up at JMU one afternoon just after that last instant-messaging conversation. He spent the weekend with Clara. The exact date was a little sketchy for Patrick, but it was during this key period—October/November—when Kyle, Mike, Patrick, and Katie were all in the picture.
Clara had been doing research, but not for a school project. Rather, it was for something she had been speaking to Patrick—ahem . . . Path—about for the past few weeks now.
“What is it?” Patrick asked.
Clara was lying on her bed. She had a book in her hands, opened to a specific chapter.
“It’s a book of herbal medications,” Clara explained.
“Of what?”
“Herbal medications.”
Clara pointed to a chapter she’d bookmarked; then she handed it to Patrick.
The theme of the chapter was plants and poisoning—a subject they had discussed at length during one of their last instant-messaging sessions.
Robert Schwartz was now “the target,” as Patrick (and Clara) began referring to him. Clara even made it clear during this conversation inside her dorm room that she was speaking specifically about “my father.” There was no separation between the Underworld (OG) and the real OG for Clara on this day. No blurry line, according to Patrick’s recollection. Clara was not Lord Chaos asking Path to fulfill his role in the game and take out a threat. She was the girlfriend asking the boyfriend to kill her father. It was a direct request. One she hoped her boyfriend would take care o
f sooner rather than later—because Clara was growing incredibly impatient with Patrick. And here, now, in her hands, Clara had a recipe to get the job done.
“She no longer appeared to be inside the game—it appeared to be all reality to her then,” Patrick commented later. In contrast, Patrick added, whenever they’d discuss poisoning the OG, whether they were locked inside the game or not, Patrick always considered the murder to be part of the game. Never a genuine request he felt serious about pursuing. Sure, Clara took things a little too far, he thought, and she came across as being into it more than anyone else, but Patrick always assumed she was role-playing.
Yet, on that day, inside her dorm, when she leaned over and handed him that book, pointing out a recipe for poisoning another human being, Patrick got a cold chill of reality and believed—for the first time, he later claimed—that Clara was unabashedly, seriously requesting that he actually murder her father.
And that scared the shit out of him.
But he left it alone. He didn’t say anything. Or, rather, nothing he recalled later on. Instead, Patrick closed the book and changed the subject.
Then he told Clara he had to go.
As Patrick drove home from JMU, he was thinking about Clara’s request to poison her father, and how she subsequently handed him a formula to get the job done. He began to reconsider the relationship. This was no longer a game, a fantasy.
It was real.
SOME TIME LATER, as Patrick weighed his options of staying in the relationship and murdering his girl’s father, or breaking it off with her, he drove Clara out to West Virginia, where his parents lived. He would often talk himself back into being with her after a spell of thinking she was crazy and seriously wanting her father dead. It was easy to do: No way! She cannot be serious? Clara had spoken ill about her father so often, for so long, it was hard to tell how serious she was at any given moment.
What Patrick didn’t know until later, though, was that with the holiday break at JMU quickly coming up, Clara was going to ratchet things up a notch. Clara had repeatedly told everyone that she dreaded going home for the holidays and spending all that downtime with the OG. So, in many ways, Clara was up against a clock here. She needed something done before the Christmas break.
Going out to his parents’ house was a long ride. Patrick had wanted his parents to meet his girlfriend. Clara, he understood, was not right. She’d had a tough life at home. She and her father fought. He believed that she’d get over it and get on with her life at JMU at some point. Maybe it was a stage Clara was going through? Some sort of growing pains. She had been drifting away from home, anyway. Sooner, rather than later, the OG would be out of her life altogether and Clara would be on her own. Clara, Katie, Mike, and Patrick were talking about getting a place together. There were days when Patrick thought perhaps they had a future.
They pulled into the driveway of Patrick’s parents’ house. He went to grab the door handle to hop out, but Clara clutched his arm, stopping him.
“Wait,” she said.
“Yeah, what is it?”
Clara was somber. She sounded “very frustrated,” Patrick later recalled (in court). She said plainly, calmly, but with petulant commitment: “When are you gonna kill my father?”
There it was—a direct request. It was as serious as Clara had ever sounded.
Patrick felt now that his girlfriend was sick and tired of asking him to fulfill this wish.
“When, Patrick?” Clara said again.
CHAPTER 27
KYLE HULBERT’S LOT in life had been chosen for him as far back as the late 1980s, he claimed, when he was a child without any clue as to how mixed-up his mind would become. In his earliest memory of childhood, Kyle recalled a storm. Lightning and thunder were flashing and crashing, booming outside the window of his home. He was living with his biological mother and father then. He was “between two and five” years of age, he later said, adding that they were living in “Kansas or Missouri.” He was not sure exactly where. Kyle had been born in California. In between a later move to Virginia, where he would grow into adolescence and spend a majority of his life within the foster care system, he and his parents lived in the Midwest.
That storm was loud and dramatic, and little Kyle wanted to see it close-up. So he opened the door and stared out. Motionless, speechless, enamored with the power and might of the lightning, Kyle was mesmerized.
“That’s what I remember the most—bright tongues of light in the night,” Kyle said.
It was wondrous and alarming and exciting—all at the same time. Kyle was struck by the sheer awe and force of nature. It was as if this was the first time he realized and felt the power of weather.
But then something happened, he said, with a caveat that the incident could be stained with “my mind twisting the memory, distorting it.”
As little Kyle stood staring out the apartment’s glass door, he saw a massive flash of lightning burst wide open, almost as if it happened in slow motion. Kyle recalled seeing “a tunnel of lightning, a concentric ring of jagged light” inside the flash.
It was inviting and alluring and altogether magnificent. Kyle wanted to jump inside the storm and get swept away.
He cannot explain it. He can only say that it “might have been a tunnel, or a ball of lightning, or the distortion of the . . . moment in a child’s life [that has] endured the passage of years, a random memory of no more significance than any other.”
It is a description that explains a lot about Kyle Hulbert’s life and what was about to happen in the coming days as he and Clara got closer and began to talk more intimately about the OG: cloudy memories of real or imagined events.
Maybe a combination of the two.
CHAPTER 28
CLARA WAS FREAKING OUT. She realized Patrick was slipping away. He’d stopped calling as often. He found every excuse he could not to drive out and see her at JMU. He sounded different when she did get him on the phone. She needed to speak with Kyle. He was with Katie and Mike. Clara tapped out a message:
You there?
Yes.
This isn’t Kyle? Clara wrote.
She had good instincts. There was something up with the screen name KEIYORAVEN82 (it was actually Katie Inglis’s screen name) writing back to her on this night. Clara could sense it wasn’t Kyle, who sometimes used Katie’s screen name when he slept at Mike’s.
Maybe.
Kate @ keyboard? Clara asked, clearly disappointed.
I’m here, yes, Katie said. Kyle was on the phone talking to his girlfriend, Katie explained, before asking Clara what was up. What did she want? Was Clara interested in talking about anything, such as Kyle being an ass . . .
Not Kyle but Pat . . . Clara answered. Then she explained how upset she was that everyone (including Kyle) had been, in fact, “drawn into” her “hellhole,” and Patrick was just not there for her when she needed him the most.
Katie and Clara went all the way back to the sixth grade. They had gone to the same school. Had just about all the same classes and became close friends during their senior year of high school. According to Katie, it was during their senior year when Clara amped up the rhetoric about her father, beginning with how their relationship “was not the greatest,” Katie recalled later, and “he was continually doing stuff to her, like trying to poison her.”
“The meat he feeds me, it’s poisoned,” Clara routinely told Katie.
“Him hitting her on occasion,” Katie later said. “Other things, like pulling her under the water in their pool while everyone was watching and nobody would help.”
The problem with what Clara had been saying throughout the years was that Clara had been the only one reporting it. No one else saw any of this so-called abuse. Even Katie, who spent the night at Clara’s several times, later said: “I had dinner there.... It was perfectly fine.”
The one major problem Katie—and others—had regarding the physical abuse Clara claimed she suffered at the hands of her father was that no o
ne ever saw any “signs” of it. No bruises, Katie explained. No scratches. No red marks. Nothing. Katie had seen Clara naked many times, either changing inside the dorm or in the locker room when they went swimming at JMU, and never once saw “any signs” of the OG having hit (or even having grabbed) her.
“I just wish he’d leave me alone and let me live my own life,” Clara told Katie one night. (This statement here is extremely telling. Clara was upset that the OG would not allow her to live as an adult—that she could not do whatever she wanted—while he paid all the bills.) “You know, Katie, I wish he was dead!” Clara said.
There was another occasion when Katie and Clara were talking. The guys weren’t around. Clara brought up the OG and the money her family had.
“I stand to inherit a third of a million dollars,” Clara bragged to Katie.
“That’s a lot of money, CJ.”
“Damn straight ... but I can only get it after he’s dead.”
Katie believed Clara was being sarcastic whenever she mentioned the OG being killed, so she responded, most times, in the same manner: “We’ll have a damn party!”
AS THEY CHATTED online that night, Clara explained to Katie how she was losing her patience with Patrick and was more interested in what Kyle was up to. Clara asked Katie about dinner and what she and Mike and Kyle were planning. She wanted them to visit her at JMU.
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