The Incident

by Andrew Neiderman

  How much farther could he swim here?

  Rob looked at his current cases, if he could call them that, on his desk. At the top he had a man named Flip Kasey who claimed someone had deliberately set his pet’s doghouse on fire. He was apparently having an argument with both neighbors concerning his dog’s constant barking. ‘One of them for sure did this,’ he said when he came in to see him. Rob tried to look as concerned and efficient as he could, keeping his head down and taking what looked like copious notes but were really doodles. In the end, he suspected some kids in the neighborhood were pulling a Halloween prank early.

  The second case was a burglary in Hurleyville that he had investigated. An elderly lady lived alone on a street with houses on both sides and across from hers. No one had heard or seen anyone breaking into her house, but most of her jewelry was gone. Nothing else was disturbed. After less than an hour of questioning and inspection, it was clear to him that the woman’s grandson had done it. He was waiting for a call resulting from a lead he had picked up from the owner of a hardware store who had the grandson arrested for shoplifting only six months before. He told him where the boy would fence the jewelry in Middletown, New York, something he had picked up from the assistant postmaster who seemed to know every closet that held every family skeleton. In this case, the Middletown police chief was his cousin who had told him about an earlier incident with the old lady’s grandson. He assured Rob he could get the information for him to arrest the seventeen-year-old boy. Rob felt sorry for the grandmother.

  The third case was a car theft, and for that he did need the help of the state police. The victim, as was more the rule than the exception in this quiet country world, left his keys in the ignition. There was an APB out on the vehicle.

  He sat forward and stared at the file cabinet that had been moved out of Hal Donald’s office and put into his two by four. There was one thick file of cold cases. Seeing some of the ‘hot’ cases, though, he wasn’t very motivated to re-examine anything. Nevertheless, out of total boredom and self-pity, he rose, opened the drawer and took out the files. As he sifted through them, he grew more depressed. He was about to put it all back when he came upon and read the first page of Victoria Myers’ case. The initial segment was quite professionally completed, he thought, realizing at the end that it had been done by a state police officer. The details of a seven-year-old case, as gruesome as the description read, didn’t give him much hope for solving. This Lieutenant Marcus seemed finally to have concluded it had been committed by perps out of the area, long gone and forgotten.

  He sat back and skimmed some of her interviews. As he reviewed them, he could almost sense her frustration. She had cast a wide net over all the potential persons of interest, obviously hoping to stumble on something. All her more probable suspects had good alibis. She had little else to go by. The victim’s story left so few possible leads. It was as if ghosts had committed it. From the description, though, he also concluded that whoever the perps were, they weren’t dumb. They had left nothing behind. He had to credit Hal Donald with at least doing a thorough job. There were even volunteer police personnel who went through the whole wooded area and every approach to it. Someone had done a very good drawing of the vicinity scoured.

  He was about to close it up when he saw the slip of note paper stuck in behind the last page. He took it out and read Hal Donald’s notes: Scent of gasoline and sound that could be a ring of keys. Rob noted the date and then looked back at the date of the crime. A little over two years later, the victim and her mother had brought in the additional information. At the bottom of the page was scribbled Repressed memory and a question mark.

  He smiled to himself, thinking the chief had absolutely no clue. He was reminded of a serial rapist case he came in on when he worked in Yonkers. They had a forensic psychologist in to report on his interviews with some of the earlier victims, and information extracted from repressed memories was significant. It actually led to the solving of the crimes and the arrest of an assistant librarian. With his thick-lens glasses and his thin physique, he looked incapable of collecting a fine for an overdue library book, much less committing rape, or seven rapes to be exact.

  He thought about the additional clues and then looked at the file again. Apparently, Hal Donald had not used the information to reinvestigate anything. There were no follow-up interviews. Had he passed it on to the state perhaps? He checked the contact number and reached for his phone.

  It took a little over a half-hour, but amazingly he was able to locate Lieutenant Marcus who was now in administration in Albany. She took the call and from the sound of her voice seemed happy to be talking about something happening in the field and not in conference rooms.

  ‘Yes, I remember that case well,’ she said. ‘I was never so frustrated. Getting anything out of the victim was worse than pulling teeth.’

  Rob mentioned the additional information.

  ‘Oh, I had moved on before then, but no, no one passed anything on to us that might have brought me back. Is the victim still living there?’

  ‘I don’t know, actually. I just started rifling through our cold cases and came upon it.’

  ‘How nice to have some time on your hands,’ she said. She didn’t mean it to be sarcastic. It actually sounded more loaded with envy.

  ‘Yeah, well, I might just get into it.’

  ‘Oh, please keep me informed. Failure is usually not in my vocabulary.’

  ‘Understood. Thanks,’ he said.

  He returned to the beginning of the file. The little experience he had with cold cases had taught him to go about it subtly. The worst, most cruel thing he could do was give the victim and her family a sense of real hope that they would have closure. They had already suffered through disappointment and frustration. He wasn’t going to have them relive it until he had something to offer.

  However, he recognized that, in a small community like this, the moment he asked someone a question, it could move through the township with electric speed. He’d be driving under telephone wires that were reporting his latest move, and, eventually, he would have to come face to face with this family. Should he even start?

  He held the file up almost at arm’s length and debated with himself. Then he looked at the first pages again and gazed at the black-and-white picture of the girl. It wasn’t the bruises around her mouth so much as the vacant look in her eyes. It was as though a vampire had come and sucked out her future. She was obviously still alive, but inside she was dead. He couldn’t help wondering if she had recovered at all.

  He got up and, with the file in hand, walked out to the lobby to speak to Lillian Brooke, the dispatcher. She was a tall, slim woman in her early sixties who he knew had been working here for over fifteen years. A widow who now lived alone and was childless, she had what Rob thought was the perfect dour personality for someone who had to be the first to hear desperate cries for help or complaints. Although it was true she wasn’t any poster woman for compassion and sympathy, she was good at picking out what was serious enough to take up police time and what could linger in some waiting room. According to her, if the complaint hung out there long enough, it dried on its own and was forgotten. Most important, she appeared to be knowledgeable enough about the local people to serve as town historian. She always referred to some relative, dead or alive, who might shed light on the issue. He was tempted to put her in for assistant detective pay.

  ‘Hey, Lillian,’ he said, approaching her. She turned, her light gray eyes and lean face expressing a mechanical look of attention, ‘I was looking through this old file and wondered if you had any memory of this case.’

  She took it from him without speaking, glanced at it and handed it back.

  ‘It was quite a splash,’ she said, ‘mainly because of how vicious and violent it was. There was a lot of fear for a while, but nothing like it happened again, at least not until now. Who knows about tomorrow? That’s not to say some girls weren’t forced to have sex on dates and probably s
till are. I can tell you, quite a few mothers over the years asked my opinion about lodging a complaint for their daughters.

  ‘This,’ she said, nodding at the file in his hand, ‘is the touchstone or, if you like, the best example of not only how futile it often is to pursue a complaint like date rape but, maybe more important, what it does to the victim and her family.’

  ‘It didn’t go down like a date rape,’ he said.

  ‘No, but a rape victim is a rape victim. It’s like wearing a scarlet R instead of an A,’ she added, her thin lips dipping so deeply at the sides that it made it look as if she had been sliced across the mouth.

  ‘Scarlet R,’ he said, smiling. ‘Clever. So, what about this girl?’

  ‘What about her?’ she replied with a shrug.

  ‘Did she, is she …’

  ‘She suffered through her remaining high school years. Her mother is a highly respected college teacher, you know, and her father is still the high school business manager – a very, very nice man. She attended college in New York – Columbia, I believe – and, from what I’ve heard, graduated with honors.’

  ‘Oh, that’s great to know.’

  ‘There’s more,’ she said. The phone rang. She lifted the receiver and with a clear, sharp voice snapped, ‘Please hold.’ Then she turned back to him.

  ‘This morning, I heard that she is engaged to Bart Stonefield, the son of one of our more successful businessmen, John Stonefield.’

  ‘The car dealer?’

  ‘Yes. So,’ she added, ‘I’d think twice about resurrecting that ugly corpse. It’s not like bringing up old crimes in a city where people don’t know who their next-door neighbor is,’ she added and lifted the receiver. ‘Sorry. Town of Fallsburgh police department. No, we haven’t had a report of a broken parking meter. Where is this?’

  He looked at her a moment more and then returned to his office.

  He could hear Chief Skyler say, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’

  Would he do more harm than good by looking into this cold case? The girl was or had recovered enough to do well in college and now start a happy new life. What would he have accomplished if he ran an investigation down the same dark road and hit the same dead end? He would only revive the misery for two obviously happy families. He’d even lose the respect of Lillian Brooke.

  He shook his head and put the file back in the cabinet. He perused a few others before he took the call from the Middletown police chief and got up to go and arrest the old lady’s grandson.

  SEVENTEEN

  After the announcements went out, like most hot local news, Bart and Victoria’s upcoming wedding rushed like a tidal wave over home phone lines and into small-talk conversations from the lobbies of post offices to stores and sidewalks. The most common response was ‘I thought that girl would never live a normal life.’ Those who hadn’t seen her for years but knew the tragic history were intrigued. ‘What did she look like? How did she behave?’

  Natalie and Bea, two of the Yalta Three, naturally fielded questions about Florence Stonefield’s reaction to her son’s engagement to Victoria Myers. The top question was ‘How is she holding up?’ Or simply ‘What was Florence’s reaction?’

  Both Natalie and Bea, whose first loyalties lay with Florence, put on as best a front as they could. ‘She’s fine. Florence can handle most any challenge. She loves her son and supports him as any devoted mother would. Besides,’ they added, even though they had little to really go by, ‘Victoria Myers is a beautiful, intelligent and quite stable young woman.’

  Only someone coming back quickly at them with ‘Would you want your son to marry her?’ could tighten their lips and get them to change the subject as quickly as they could.

  For her part, Florence Stonefield did put on a brave front. After all, she was expert at false faces, hosting charity events and having to be nice to high rollers just to get a donation. She had been a social butterfly who flitted from one event to another and changed to whatever color necessary for as long as she could remember. During the earlier years when she and John were building the car dealerships, she could be as ingratiating and as deceptive as a plantation slave out to please his owner. Even her eyes didn’t betray her inner thoughts when she had a mind to wear a mask.

  Her biggest challenge came when she met with Helen Myers to discuss the details of the wedding ceremony and reception. Later, she could confess to herself that she had finally met her match in someone who was as adept as she was at turning an argument in her favor, undermining a counterproposal with sharp, swift logic and getting her own way while smiling and behaving as if she had somehow compromised.

  No, they wouldn’t expand the guest list. It was better to cull mere acquaintances and concentrate on people who really cared about the welfare and happiness of their son and her daughter, wasn’t it? Too many weddings are simply another social affair, didn’t she think? A wedding, or at least the first one, was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things, too special for just anyone you knew. Didn’t she and John, like Helen and Lester Myers, have those special friends, friends who were almost family in fact? When you added mere, casual contacts, it diluted the event, stole from its warmth, didn’t she agree?

  Oh, how to argue against all that?

  Helen Myers was giving her a great lesson in how to be condescending while appearing to care only about what was best for everyone. She didn’t wilt, but she left with her minor victories about things that were so trivial that she wouldn’t even mention them to John or Natalie and Bea. In fact, when she met with each to discuss the wedding arrangements that she and Helen Myers had created together, she used some of Helen’s same logic. It was so much better to plagiarize than appeal for sympathy and look weak.

  Nevertheless, she was taking Miltown like candy practically every night and certainly before she had to attend an event or a dinner party where she knew the questions would be coming at her from all directions. To keep her sanity and perspective, she spent an extraordinary amount of time searching for just the right dress to wear to the wedding. Natalie and Bea seized hold of the opportunities to go shopping in New York City. They needed new dresses, too. There was no better way for a woman to get over an emotional or social crisis than to spend money, they decided. Laughter was pushing depression away, sweeping it out of Florence’s psyche like wiping cobwebs out of attic corners with an old broom.

  On the other hand, Helen and Lester Myers wore their preparations for the upcoming nuptials like battle ribbons, just the way any parents whose child had matured to the stage of setting up his or her own family might. They invited questions and interest. What was there from which to flee? Their child getting a good education, a decent job, marrying, raising children were all proof that they had been successful parents. Yes, personally, they had suffered a major blow along the way, and they weren’t blind to the fact that many in the community found a way to place at least some of the blame on them. Every parent, no matter what the circumstances surrounding what their child had done or had done to them, had to live by Harry Truman’s desktop saying: The buck stops here.

  This marriage, this new and promising life for Victoria, would do the most possible to heal her and them. It was undeniable that Dr Thornton, her therapist, helped her survive, but that paled into insignificance in comparison with all this now. They hoped Victoria’s husband would become her confidant and therapist, just as she would become for him. That bond of trust and dependence was what made most marriages successful after all, wasn’t it?

  Their own home would come; their children would come. There would be birthdays and Thanksgivings and Christmases, just like there were for every normal family. The past would weaken. Its strangling grip on their throats would be broken. It would slip away and shatter at their feet like fine china.

  No one knew all this better than Victoria. There were moments during the first few weeks when she questioned her own motives. Was she marrying Bart because she loved him more than she could love any other man or because she
saw their marriage as her lifeboat? Was marriage merely an escape? Every marriage was an escape in some sense. You were leaving everything – childhood, adolescence and, most of all, dependence on your parents. You would turn them into in-laws and grandparents first, and consider them your parents second. Daddy would always be Daddy, and Mom always Mom, but the first person you would go to now for help and advice was your husband. You were out of their boat. They’d be there to advise and console when needed, just like she would be for her daughter, but the home she had known, the bed she had slept in, the mirrors she had used to ponder herself and the dinner table she had sat at for so many dinners would become someone else’s – her parents’ and not hers, too. It was sad but wonderful simultaneously.

  Bart had felt and sensed all this years ago. Men had more of an obligation to be independent in the 1960s. Other men in his high school class had either graduated college and found good jobs and new lives, or had gone into the armed services and were still enlisted or had left to find work. Many were married; a few like him were involved in a family business, but there weren’t many who were living at home and mainly dependent upon their parents even now. Somewhere he had read that the median age for a man to marry in the 1960s was around twenty-three. He was going to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday in three months. No one could accuse him of waiting too long or marrying too soon. He felt terribly normal, in fact.

  Just about every customer who came to have his or her car serviced greeted him with congratulations. Most were genuinely happy for him, but he knew there were many who were also very curious, hoping he would say something more than thank you and perhaps let slip some detail about what it was like to court Victoria Myers, the victim of one of the most famous local sexual assaults. He would simply express his own personal happiness. Sometimes he would add, ‘I’m a lucky guy,’ deliberately, like a challenge, and wait to see the reaction. No one dared look skeptical. Those who had seen Victoria, in fact, commented on how beautiful she was. They couldn’t deny that.