Clara seemed to agree. In fact, all the signs, according to what Clara herself had said, were there. Kyle wanted a phone card. He wanted gloves and a do-rag. He had said, for crying out loud, “I’m going to kill your father. . . .” Why in the world hadn’t Clara said anything to anyone about this—if only to protect herself? And why—another question might have been asked (although it wasn’t)—hadn’t Clara Schwartz ever written about this in her journals? Why had she never penned an entry about how much of a liar Kyle was and the fact that he was starting to talk about killing her father? If Kyle had been such a storyteller and bizarre creature in her world of faeries and gods and goddesses, staffs and swords, why had Clara never written much about him?
Hindsight, Clara said, was clearer for her now that she’d had some time to make the connection between what happened to her father and what had been said. But, at the time, she just didn’t believe any of it. She’d blacked it all out because it seemed so enormously transparent and not at all possible.
Clara steered the conversation back to how violent her father had become after her mother died—to the great surprise of Michelle. Clara claimed the OG pulled her hair, hit her, and screamed at her.
“I was worried about my dad. I didn’t want to die. . . .”
The low grades she was getting had set him off, Clara claimed. It was that trip to the Virgin Islands that worried her most.
An hour into the interview, Clara asked to take a break.
When they returned, Locke and Clara spent some time talking about the injury Clara had suffered while “sparring” with Kyle. Kyle had missed and struck Clara on the thumb while they were practicing sword techniques with sticks in the woods near her house one afternoon when Kyle visited (one of the three times Kyle had met the OG). Clara had a scoring system she’d designed to rate the performance of those she said she trained in fighting with sticks/swords. Kyle was a four, she said. Not bad.
This led them into Clara talking about the Underworld. She spelled it all out for Locke, although not clearly. Locke had a hard time following along. Yet, after figuring things out, the investigator was able to ask pertinent questions, a main one being, “Is there any type of ceremony when you become a master?” Locke was thinking: Is murder the ultimate sacrifice or a rung in the ladder on your way to becoming a master?
Clara broke into a long explanation that made little sense, so Locke brought it back to Kyle and his role in the Underworld.
Kyle was a good student of the Underworld, Clara said, but not great.
There came a point when Michelle chimed in and talked about how her father would get very upset with Clara when she lied and didn’t do her chores around the house, like feeding the horses and cleaning up after them. Michelle said there had been a “lot of arguments” between them that past summer, but they were “arguments.”
They were nothing more.
Locke asked Michelle if she was ever aware of her father hitting Clara.
“I had been home before when he snapped at her—he had snapped at her because she had said some rude things. I had been home when he had done things like that because of things that she had said and things that she had done.”
If there had ever been a moment when he might have hit her, Michelle seemed to say, it would have been then, when he snapped. But she had never seen him raise a hand to Clara.
Clara claimed he had “smacked” her across the face several times with an open hand.
Michelle recalled it being Mrs. Schwartz, their mother, who had done the smacking, not Daddy.
Clara wrote off her father hitting her, just like that, crediting the mistake to having “huge gaps of memory from my past.”
By the time they got into the specifics regarding her father striking her, Clara was adding provisos to a lot of what she said: “If he did” or “If I remember it right.” Yet again, it seemed to Locke that she was constantly and consistently backpedaling from what she had said earlier. Because Michelle was there contradicting what she was trying to get across, Clara was implying, “Oh yeah . . . I forgot about that. Yup. That’s the way I remember it happening now.”
The next half hour consisted of them talking about the relationship Clara had with her father when the other children were home and when they were away. Clara talked about a guy who was, essentially, two different people. Michelle talked about a guy who was calm, talkative, and also a broken man who missed his dead wife very much.
Clara brought up how the OG didn’t much care for her friends.
Michelle agreed, adding that neither did she.
They spoke of religion, and how her father didn’t favor any one religion and didn’t want to raise his children in a religion because he didn’t agree with it as a whole. This gave Clara the opportunity to tell Locke that she grew up with Catholic grandparents who often took them to mass, but there came a day when she told them she didn’t believe in God.
“I mean, I guess the best way to describe my origin is polytheistic, not monotheistic, sort of, I guess.... I think it would be closer to Norse or Celtic than anything else.”
“What do you believe about death?” Locke asked.
“Death is natural. Death is a journey, nothing to be feared. I still fear it because, you know, it’s . . . We don’t know what happens.... I’m afraid of dying, but I know it’s . . . There’s always a possibility of death in life. I just thought I had a greater chance.”
“Because of the possible poisoning and threats?”
“Yeah.”
CHAPTER 78
THEY THEN GOT on the subject of Clara’s driving skills as the interview began to wind down. Michelle pointed out that Clara was a terrible driver and their father was worried greatly about her driving. This was an interesting exchange for Locke to hear. It gave him some insight, from Michelle’s point of view, into how Robert Schwartz thought about his daughter. Clara had described a man who despised his youngest daughter—and she could do no right in his eyes. She talked about a man who had been planning, plotting, and scheming to kill her.
“He was always worried, because every time that you were late,” Michelle said, addressing Clara, “he would always say something like, ‘I hope she didn’t get ... in an accident. . . .’ Every time you were late.”
As Clara talked about showing up home late a lot and the OG not really saying much of anything about it other than pointing out the fact that he was worried, Locke again questioned this versus what Clara had been telling him. He wanted to know if it surprised Clara that her dad never yelled at her for being late. Here was an opportunity and reason for Dr. Schwartz to be genuinely pissed off at his daughter, and yet he wasn’t.
She ignored the direct question and instead talked about how her brother dissed her for being late, and her father, Clara admitted, actually stuck up for her.
“I mean, sometimes my dad and me had a nice relationship, like we were nice to each other and sometimes we were just horrible.”
Clara brought the conversation back to her and how she had thought about killing herself while in high school.
Locke allowed her to stay on her high-school days of fighting and lying to her father and getting into trouble and taking drugs. He mostly listened, asking questions that kept her chatting. Clara did most of the talking, mentioning how “weird” her father had gotten after her mother’s death. “Like I honestly thought he was insane or going insane.”
This mention of the word “insane” brought up a conversation between Michelle and Clara about their mother. Michelle figured that Clara must have thought their mother was insane, but Clara reacted bitterly and said no way.
“Our mother was manic-depressive,” Michelle told Locke. Then she relayed a story about their mother once having a “manic episode” in which she stripped naked in the middle of the night and ran throughout the house, yelling and screaming, “Where is my watch? Where is my watch?” She hid under the bed, Michelle added, “because she thought she was a German alien, and she thought there was .
.. [She was] telling me things like the reason there were serial numbers on the back of road signs was so people could track where you were at.”
Locke took a breath. He listened as Michelle told even more bizarre stories about their mother and the meds she was on, along with how paranoid she had become right before her death. Then Locke turned to Clara. “Let me ask you something, Clara. Do you think that some of the same things that your mom had might be the reason you thought your dad was trying to poison you?”
Clara swallowed. “Um . . .”
“Do you think that’s possible?” Locke asked again when he didn’t get a response. Locke didn’t believe for one moment this was possible, but he wanted to offer Clara, as he later put it, “a way out of this.”
“Like, I think, like, honestly, I’ve read some stuff on bipolar, and I don’t think I have it. I just ... I think I have depression.”
Locke kept asking Clara if she was simply paranoid, like her mother had been, and that was why she thought—or she believed, rather—that her dad was trying to kill her.
“What I find hard to reconcile with,” Clara said, “is the amount of times that I got diarrhea, that I puked, that I felt dizzy, nausea.”
Michelle said, “My father was actually afraid Clara was manic-depressive.”
“Did you know that?” Locke asked Clara.
“Not until recently.”
Locke wanted to know more about what Clara had “told” her “friends” about her father. Specifically, what “role did Kyle see himself in” within your life as it pertained to your relationship with your father?
“Protector,” Clara said immediately, without having to think about it.
“Protector?”
“Well, to an extent . . . ,” she said, again backing off.
Locke cranked up the pressure a bit, asking her directly what role Kyle played in her life.
Clara agreed to some degree that he was her “confidant,” but that she saw him more as her protector against the dangers of herself rather than anyone else.
“Tell me about Kyle being the protector,” Locke pushed. “How did he see himself in that role?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did he feel like he needed to protect everybody?”
“I don’t think so. I think he, just, well, um, ah, well, the thing was, he also liked me and—”
“Liked you in what sense?”
“Like, wanted to date me. And I just found it uncomfortable with him. . . .” Clara also claimed here that all of her friends knew she didn’t have sex with guys and wouldn’t have sex until it was time, she shared, to make children.
“So how ’bout you and Kyle, have you ever fooled around?”
“Once.”
“Once?”
“And Patrick knew I didn’t want to have a relationship with him.”
Locke finally got Clara to talk about December 5 and 6, after asking, “You [and Kyle] had a conversation on the phone about him killing your dad—you said that he had referenced that once prior to that. When did he reference it prior to that?”
“What do you mean?”
After some discrepancy about dates, Clara said, “I think it was Friday or Saturday. . . .”
As they talked it through, Clara maintained that Kyle had never said anything about killing her father until the day before he did it. “And I started going, ‘Yeah, right, whatever. He’s lying.’”
But Locke focused on what Clara had told Kyle. There was a fine line here that both were walking. In telling Kyle that she believed her father was trying to kill her, and her drilling that point into him, was Clara asking her friend to end her misery? Was she knowingly telling Kyle, in beating that drum of “He’s abusive and trying to poison me,” that she wanted Kyle to do something about it?
“Do you think that you could have let it slip and said, you know, ‘I would be better off with my dad out of the picture. I would be better off if my dad weren’t here’?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Clara said. “I don’t think I would have, not—”
“Even inadvertently, just in conversation,” Locke suggested. “Do you think it might have slipped, or something?”
“There’s . . . I mean, there’s always a slim possibility. I don’t think I ever joked around or anything like that. I . . . I mean I think there may be a very faint possibility, but I don’t think . . . I don’t think I trusted him enough to talk.”
“Because I am trying to find out why he went that extra step—why this would have happened—and I thought that, you know, maybe something was said that he took the wrong way. . . .”
Clara explained how she thought Kyle maybe “didn’t want Dad to hurt me. I think he both ... I guess, I think that he was sick of it happening. I guess he took his own initiative. . . .”
The investigator wanted to know if Kyle had seen “any incidents of . . . violence” toward Clara?
“No,” she said.
“Just what you told him?”
“Yeah . . . I don’t remember. I don’t think Dad yelled at me that one time that ... that he was there. I’m almost positive that he didn’t. . . .”
Michelle said she didn’t recall her father yelling at Clara while Kyle was ever at the house. Michelle remembered the times Kyle was there because she thought he was so “creepy.” She couldn’t forget him.
Clara explained that the first time they met each other, Kyle and the OG were cordial.
“So, what would have driven him from point A to point B—from ‘Hi, I’m Kyle’ to killing your dad?”
“Well, he didn’t like my dad when he met him. Kyle didn’t like him. He said that to me. He said he didn’t like him.”
Locke asked what Kyle specifically didn’t like about him.
“I don’t know,” Michelle said, again piping in. She shook her head, disagreeing with Clara. “I think Dad didn’t say anything to Kyle.”
“I know,” Clara responded. “But I’m saying maybe, just maybe, I don’t know. The only thing I got from him is like, ‘Well, what do you think about my dad?’ He said, ‘I don’t like him.’ I said, ‘Okay. Well, what about Michelle?’ He goes, ‘You guys don’t look anything alike.’”
Locke finally got Clara to admit that she believed Kyle might have been protecting her from her dad. Clara said she needed protection; she was scared of her father.
This back-and-forth exchange went on and on. Locke would bring Clara right to the edge of her possibly admitting her role in the murder, and then she’d pull back and break into some story about high school or college.
“Look, in my mind, by this point in that interview,” Locke recalled later, “I believed that she had known all along that they were going to kill her father.... A financial gain is what I think she was looking at from this. Did she have a perfect relationship with her dad? No. I think her dad was probably strict and probably held her feet to the fire, and did not allow and did not want her to just rip and run with all of her friends, as she would have liked to have done.” Because of it, Locke observed, “she resented that.”
Locke wanted to get a few things straight. He acted like he was confused, hoping Clara would clarify and, in turn, back herself into a corner and admit to something.
“So Kyle referred to you as his ‘sister’?” Locke asked.
“Yes.”
“So he told your dad, ‘Because you’re trying to kill my sister’?”
“Or something—something involving sister. And he said that Dad smiled ... and he said that Dad showed no remorse. I just remember thinking, ‘Okay. . . .’”
“How did that make you feel?”
“That kind of creeped me out. I couldn’t believe he—”
“That he didn’t show any remorse for what he had done?” Locke wanted to clarify.
“Yeah.”
“You thought your dad should have said, ‘I’m sorry’?”
Michelle stared at her sister, waiting for a response.
“Well,” Clara
answered, backpedaling yet again. “What was really creepy was Kyle said, ‘When all the others did that, they showed remorse.’” (Clara was referring to the other victims that Kyle claimed to have killed.) “And I’m going, ‘Oh, God.’ It’s sort of like, I guess, when someone realizes that they’ve just talked to Satan or, you know, ‘Oh, God! What, you know ... Who have I been friends with?’ ”
Locke asked if Kyle meant that he had maybe made a mistake in killing Dr. Schwartz.
Clara said she didn’t know.
As they discussed what Kyle and Schwartz were talking about right before Kyle killed him, Michelle asked if she could leave. Apparently, she’d heard enough.
Clara asked her to stay.
So she stayed.
Jesse came in at one point and asked how things were going.
Clara indicated that her throat was parched. She needed some water.
Locke brought the interview back to Kyle and what Clara thought a good punishment might be for him, when all was said and done.
She stumbled and said something about how she had thought about this and was unsure, because she wasn’t so clear that “he’s actually done anything. . . .” However, if he had, “I think it would be better off if he got the death penalty.”
“For Kyle?” Locke asked. He was surprised.
“Yeah!” she said. But here came that bus again. “I think Mike definitely played some—I’m not sure how much—but he should definitely, because he, I mean, even following, gets to a point where you have—I’m not sure if it’s morality—it’s having a conscience. I can’t get the right word.”
After Locke helped Clara figure out what she was trying to say, Clara restated how she believed Mike “honestly, probably, most definitely [deserved] the same punishment because he’s aiding, and what are we going to do if one of his other friends becomes a murderer, too, you know.”
“What about Kate?” Locke asked.
“Honestly, I think Kate is more of a—in terms of souls—I think she has probably a more innocent soul than the others do. Like she’s just dating the wrong guy, happened to be in the wrong car, you know.” Clara stopped. Then she thought some more about it. “But I still think prison, counseling, you know.”
I'd Kill for You Page 27