Cellar Girl

by Josefina Rivera

  They’d lived in New York initially then they’d come to Philadelphia, where they married and where I was born. According to the records, they were no longer together.

  At least for my dad there was a birth date and previous addresses – for my mom, there was nothing. So if we were to have any kind of hope of finding her, we needed to find him first.

  We went through so many agencies, filling out forms, giving them proof of our identities. Finally, I wound up in the state building in Philadelphia where a kind but busy man who clearly had better things to do with his time told me that if I could bring in my birth certificate, he’d see what he could do to help.

  I returned the next day. After checking my documents the man told me straight out: ‘Your father is living at 929 North Sixth Street and if he’s not there when you get there let us know because we will cut his check off. This is where he is supposed to be living and even if you don’t get him there, don’t worry, we will find your father.’

  In the end, I went to see my dad with a friend with instructions from Iris to call her if it turned out to be the right man. I was nervous, of course I was, but I was also determined to know the truth. I wasn’t angry or upset – I truly believed that they’d done me a favor because I ended up with a wonderful family.

  No, it wasn’t about retribution. Things happen; I understand that. I just wanted to know who I was related to.

  We took the trolley to North Sixth Street, a road in a good neighborhood called Northern Liberties. By the time we’d walked the length of the street to 929, my heart was in my mouth. But I didn’t think for a second of going back. It only took a few seconds before a man came to the door, a man who looked exactly like me: large full lips, high cheekbones and a small straight nose. But you could tell from the deep lines on his face and soft saggy eyes that his had not been an easy life.

  The shock of seeing someone who looked so familiar and yet was still a stranger was almost too much for me and I had trouble getting my words out. I’d planned my speech so carefully but in that moment it all flew out of my head. Now I was stumbling and stuttering and trying hard just to remember my own name!

  ‘Erm, excuse me, ahem. My name is Josefina Rivera,’ I started. ‘I’ve been given your address because I think you might be my father.’

  That’s all I said and he started to cry – if there was ever any doubt before that this man was my father, it was wiped out in that instant.

  He knew it was true, he could see it for myself.

  Porfirio told me all about the family – there were seventeen children altogether, including four sets of twins. My dad had six kids before he married my mom and she already had four before she met him.

  And they had both had kids since we were all taken. Of all of us, she kept Ada, her firstborn, with her. She left us, the babies.

  ‘Why did you abandon us?’ I wanted to know.

  My dad started crying again.

  ‘I had to make a life for myself,’ is all he would say.

  I stayed with my dad a couple of hours that day and Iris came down later on. I went back again and again to see him, to learn as much as I could about my family. But I never did find Maria – nobody seemed to know what had happened to her. She just disappeared into thin air.

  Soon after Iris got a house on North Sixth Street and I wound up spending a lot of time at my father’s house. By now he had remarried a woman called Anne Mae and his wife had two sons of her own. One of them was Robert, Ricky and Zornae’s father.

  Dad was a storyteller – he loved to recount the times from his past long ago in Puerto Rico. He’d moved to New York after a bad monsoon season and he still didn’t know where his parents were after that devastating event.

  I loved to listen to him talk and talk but every time I asked him about my mom, his memory failed.

  My foster mom understood my desire to get closer to my real dad – but that didn’t mean she approved. She got the measure of him all those years ago when he came to visit the house.

  The fact was, Dad was a functioning yet utterly hopeless alcoholic. From the moment he got up in the morning till the last thing at night he drank Thunderbirds, a fruit-flavored fortified wine that he bought by the gallon at the convenience store. He’d been drinking since he was thirteen and to be honest, if he’d stopped, I don’t think he would have lasted very long. Being with him just made me grateful I’d found a secure and loving home with my foster mom.

  * * *

  At some point I must have dozed off because I was brought back to the present by hollering and banging coming from the hole.

  For Christ’s sake – we couldn’t get a moment’s peace!

  Ten minutes later Gary was downstairs with us.

  ‘Everything okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Them girls down there are getting on our nerves,’ I said. ‘They won’t shut up.’

  ‘I couldn’t hear them,’ he said, puzzled.

  So then he went back upstairs and conducted a little experiment. He took his car out of the garage and they started hollering and banging again.

  They could hear the vibrations of the car when he took it out and they figured he was out of the house so they could make as much noise as they liked.

  He tiptoed back into the house and stood at the basement door, listening to the noise.

  Then he pulled his car back into the garage and because they heard him coming back, they figured he was in the house and they shut up. So he came back down to the basement and realized they knew he must be back again.

  So the next time he came down it was with the screwdrivers. He got Jacqueline and Deborah out of the hole and he put the screwdrivers in their ears, just like he did with me and Sandra.

  If only that had been the worst of it. If only things hadn’t gone any further. Years later I looked back and wondered if things could have gone another way. Maybe if Deborah had submitted to Gary, just given in, he wouldn’t have thought of all these other forms of punishment.

  Maybe. But then maybe he was so far gone at this point it was inevitable there would be another tragedy.

  I don’t know. All I knew was that Gary’s next idea had devastating consequences for all of us. And perversely, it marked the start of the end of my incarceration.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Losing Deborah

  It was a week later when Gary came downstairs holding a wire and a hose.

  He lifted the board off the hole and he handcuffed Jacqueline and Deborah together. Then he got the hose and fitted it to a nearby faucet before filling the hole up with cold water. We all just watched him in silence, wondering what the hell he had planned.

  When the water was a few inches deep, he turned it off and replaced the board over the top of the hole. Then he picked up the wire, which looked like an ordinary extension cord, except on one end he’d cut it down so that the insulation plastic was gone and the bare wires exposed.

  He plugged the other end into a socket and now we all knew what was coming. He was going to electrocute the girls in the hole.

  Realizing what was happening, Jacqueline and Deborah begged Gary not to do it but he was completely intent on his task.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said coolly. ‘The current isn’t that strong. It’s just a little shock. Nothing too bad. I just got to get you both to straighten up a little.’

  ‘No, don’t do it!’ Deborah shrieked.

  ‘Please, please, please,’ Jacqueline screamed, sobbing.

  He touched the bare wires to the girls’ chains, which were sticking out of a gap in the board, and violent screams erupted from the hole accompanied by the sound of struggling. My heart lurched.

  He held it there for a few seconds before taking the wire off. Then he waited as he listened to the sounds coming from the hole. They were panting hard and crying. He seemed satisfied.

  ‘Okay, now you do it.’ He turned to me. Oh God, no! NO! I really did not want to do this. I felt sick, desperate. I wanted to run but I had no choice – I knew t
hat if I didn’t comply it would be me down in that hole next.

  So I took the wires, trying to still my shaking hands, and held them to the chains. The girls screamed again.

  The yelling and splashing coming from the hole told us the punishment was effective. Lisa and I couldn’t look at each other.

  ‘Now, just you both think about that awhile,’ he called into the hole as he took the wire out of the socket and returned upstairs.

  ‘Are you both okay?’ I put my head close to the hole so they could hear me whisper.

  ‘Shit!’ Deborah exclaimed. ‘Shit shit shit! That bastard is trying to kill us!’

  ‘Was it terrible?’ Lisa asked.

  ‘It wasn’t nice!’ retorted Jacqueline. ‘But it wasn’t like, you know, a big jolt. I thought it would be worse. It was more the anticipation of knowing what was coming. We could see through the holes in the board what he was doing and I was scared as hell.’

  ‘This sure is a fucked-up way to make babies!’ Deborah spat.

  ‘Yeah.’ Lisa sat back on her heels. Gary’s mind was leading him down some very dark alleys and he was taking us all with him.

  * * *

  Two days later he had the girls sitting in a puddle of water again.

  We went through the same routine – first Gary put the wire to the chain and then it was my turn.

  Deborah and Jacqueline were screaming and struggling again.

  After a while he went upstairs and silence took over.

  He was up there a good ten minutes before Jacqueline yelled: ‘Deborah’s dead.’

  Me and Lisa looked at each other, aghast, unable, unwilling to move.

  Is she serious? I can’t believe it. What do we do now? None of us moved or spoke but when Gary returned I told him: ‘Jackie says Deborah’s dead.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Gary moved over to the hole and lifted up the board. The girls were both sitting with their legs straight out in front of them, wrists meeting where they were cuffed, but Deborah’s legs were spread apart and her body had fallen forwards so that she was lying with her face in the water. For the first time since I’d known her, she was still.

  Gary pulled her up by her hair and it was clear she was gone – the rivulets of water dripped down her blank face, her eyes and mouth fell open in a slack, silent scream.

  He uncuffed her from Jacqueline who jumped out of the hole like she’d been stung. Then he pulled Deborah out and laid her on the floor.

  ‘Thank God for that!’ he said. ‘Now all my problems are over and my basement can get back to normal.’

  We all looked at each other. It wasn’t like with Sandra. Nobody cried, we were all too stunned. Gary went back up the stairs.

  ‘How did she die?’ Lisa wondered.

  Jacqueline just shrugged. I couldn’t work it out myself. If the shocks weren’t too bad, what killed her? Maybe she had a heart attack. Maybe her body couldn’t handle the lack of food and constant confinement in an enclosed place as well as the electric shocks.

  Jacqueline was trembling now and Lisa put a comforting arm around her.

  Gary quickly returned with the keys to Deborah’s chains and when he got them off her he took her body upstairs in a fireman’s lift.

  Ten minutes later he was back downstairs again. This time he had a piece of paper and a pen.

  He handed them to me and instructed: ‘Put the date at the top. March 18, 1987.’

  I did as I was told.

  ‘Now the time – it’s 6.30 p.m. Okay, now write this: “I, Nicole Rivera, and Gary Heidnik killed Deborah Dudley by applying electricity to her chain while sitting in a pool of water in a hole in the basement of 3520 North Marshall Street.” Now sign it.’

  I followed his instructions without question – what did this all mean? When I was done he got Lisa and Jacqueline to sign the paper as witnesses.

  ‘Now I’ve got this letter,’ – he held it up for me to see – ‘if you ever go to the cops, I can use this as evidence that you killed Debbie.’

  My mind was whirring, buzzing from the shock but also trying desperately to keep up with the rapidly changing situation. He thought I was guilty of killing Deborah.

  He thought I was as guilty as he was.

  Next he bent down and undid the shackles around my ankles.

  ‘Now go upstairs and get into bed.’

  I could hardly believe it. In the act of torturing Deborah to death, I was rewarded with my freedom. It was grotesque.

  It was what I’ve been working towards this whole time and yet in order to get it, one of us had to die.

  I didn’t say a word. What was there to say?

  I turned my back on the girls downstairs and I walked up, towards my freedom. To the outside world.

  I could hardly let myself believe it was true – this could all be a trick, I was thinking.

  He could be testing me. Don’t screw this up, Josefina! I told myself. Hold tight, hold tight – you only get one shot at this and if it doesn’t work it could all be over.

  I was standing now in the first floor of Gary’s house, looking about at the rooms I walked through four months before. Nothing had changed and yet in that time everything in my world had altered, perhaps for ever.

  Two girls were dead. I’d been starved, beaten, raped, tortured and transformed into an accomplice of a man whose evil knew no limits.

  I wanted to run back down and tell her, ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to find a safe way out of this for all of us. I’m going to get us all out.’

  But I couldn’t – I couldn’t let him see my mask slip for a minute. I was now Josefina, accomplice and killer. He could only see what he wanted to see – everything else was sentimentality. And sentimentality could get us all killed.

  I worked my way up the dark staircase towards the bedroom – for the first time in four months my feet were unencumbered by chains.

  I felt so light I was afraid I might float away. Every step felt like an ascent away from the darkness, away from the depths of hell.

  I was free. Free! It was all over for me, I knew that. I knew I only had to ask him now and Gary would let me out of the house, safe in the knowledge that he ‘had’ me. I was on his side. Even if I ran I wouldn’t tell the police because I was as implicated as him. That was his assessment of our situation.

  He was coming up behind me now but I didn’t falter for a minute. I just kept right on walking, I didn’t turn round or stop to talk to him.

  He had to think this is what I wanted too – so I walked into his bedroom, slipped under the sheets of his sloping bed and I turned on my side towards the window.

  I needed time to think, time to let it all sink in.

  I could run now, if I wanted to, except there were still two girls chained up in that basement. And if I made a break for my freedom, there was really only one course of action for him. He had to kill them.

  So now I had to find a way out for all of us.

  It was some time later before Gary climbed into bed next to me. He didn’t try to have sex with me. He just turned the light off and went to sleep.

  I lay awake the whole night, thinking about Deborah, thinking about the arguments we’d had.

  I heard her voice: ‘I’m going to die here, aren’t I?’

  Then mine: ‘Yeah, pretty much.’

  I’m sorry Deborah, I’m so so sorry.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Upstairs

  The sun rose on a new reality. At some point in the night exhaustion took over and, combined with the fact that I was lying in a bed in the dark for the first time in four months, I’d fallen asleep.

  Now the early spring sunlight peeked through the curtains and I felt elated at that tiny glimpse into the outside world. Sunlight! I wanted to get up and run out of the house that very minute but I knew it wasn’t that simple. As much as I needed to get back to my children, to see them again, I couldn’t do that to Lisa and Jacqueline.

  The man
lying next to me was a cold-hearted killer. The man lying next to me wouldn’t hesitate to kill the two women downstairs if he suspected I was going to turn him in. So now I was playing a role and I had to do it perfectly. I slipped quietly out of bed and went next door to the bathroom to run myself a bath. As I waited for the tub to fill, I looked around. It was a small bathroom – a razor and shaving foam on one side of the sill, toothbrush and paste on the other.

  I picked up Gary’s toothpaste and squeezed a little onto the tip of my finger. Then I put my finger in my mouth and worked the minty paste around my gums and teeth. It tasted so good – my first taste of toothpaste in four months. I didn’t want to use his toothbrush. I wasn’t sure yet just how free I was.

  I got in the warm tub and scrubbed myself over and over again, then when I got out I wrapped a towel around me and walked from room to room in search of some clothes.

  I peered into the spare room – just junk, old TVs, sofas, chairs, nothing I could wear. I returned to the bedroom where Gary was now sitting up in bed, pulling a shirt over his vest.

  ‘What can I wear?’ I asked him.

  He got up slowly and went to the dresser where he pulled out a shirt and a black pair of his jeans.

  ‘Put these on for now,’ he said. ‘We’ll get you some stuff soon.’

  I pulled on the jeans – they were massive so I took a belt hanging off the chair and pulled it tight round my waist, rolling up the legs at the bottom so I didn’t stand on the ends.

  He went downstairs and I followed him. He prepared a pot of coffee then grabbed some slices of white bread out of a bag on the counter – breakfast for Lisa and Jacqueline. I took a slice myself and ate it standing up.

  I didn’t want to go downstairs to the basement with him – I couldn’t face those girls.

  While he was gone I looked about me – it was just an ordinary kitchen. There was cereal on the counter, tea and a coffee pot, a food processor and a collection of snacks and tins in the cupboard: crackers, soup, dog food, packets of noodles.