Seven Deadly Pleasures

by Michael Aronovitz

  I found out her identity four days after her death.

  Mom had not yet begun to drift from me, and we were in that mute aftershock that held loved ones together until the dust settled and they could really think things through. We were also still running on autopilot, our wheels in the grooves of our established patterns and habits. News had always been an absolute requirement before dinner so the both of us could go through life "informed," and with the hoopla surrounding my own case dying down just a bit, we had on NBC, the rabbit-ears antenna thrust all the way over to the fireplace that had on its mantel a picture of me and Ma smiling together at a church picnic last year.

  I was watching Ted Johnson shift from one pile of notes to the other, thinking that his fake-me-out voice was more annoying than professional, when he said,

  "This just in . . ."

  He disappeared and a photograph took his place.

  Good legs. Halter top. A woman in her back yard hanging up laundry. The white basket was perched on her hip. The sheets on the line, military gray, were frozen in time, furling around her in swells. Her expression was alluring in its gentle, girlish sarcasm, saying over the shoulder, "Oh yeah?" in a wry smirk.

  She had straight blonde hair.

  "Pictured here is Maryanne McKusker, a kindergarten teacher from Unionville who has been missing now for four days. The daughter of Minister Charles McKusker, she was last seen leaving her home in a rust orange '73 Honda Civic, enroute to Concord University for a training seminar in child psychology. Miss McKusker never made it to her destination, and her father claims she seems to have 'disappeared from the face of the earth.' The Unionville police have not yet officially made a statement confirming that there has been foul play, yet welcome any information leading to this young woman's whereabouts. Maryanne McKusker is five feet, three inches tall. She has green eyes. She is twenty-nine years old."

  I glanced over at Mother without turning my head. She was staring at the television with the same general indifference as when Ted Johnson had talked about a four-alarm warehouse fire on Grant Avenue half a minute ago. If she suspected some sort of connection between Maryanne McKusker's last four days and the time elapsed since my confession, she was not letting on.

  The good thing was that Unionville sat four towns over from Westville, up the Pike about twenty miles due east. The better thing was that Concord University happened to be three towns due east from Unionville, thirty or so miles in the opposite direction of where she'd made her final resting place.

  She sure as hell was not going to any lecture.

  And even though I was fairly convinced at that point that it would be amazing if they actually traced her here, this was an intellectual deduction that did not take into account my instincts and emotions.

  I never felt safe.

  And the nightmares did not get any gentler just because I knew her name. They continued once or twice every night with a horrid, almost mechanistic regularity. She haunted me in the dark and, in return, I decided to stalk her during the day. It was a defensive move. A coping device. I would know why she was headed in the wrong direction. It became a hobby, but I figured it out long before it could become a lasting obsession. In fact, I learned the truth before I even completed my first ninth-grade research paper. Of course, I had the advantage over everyone else in that it was far easier to unveil the set-up when I already knew the punch line.

  As the summer wound down and I awaited my "trial" before the honorable Rita Moskowitz a few months later, I collected newspapers in my room and followed the investigation. Over a period of weeks the biggest piece of evidence that the Unionville police had uncovered was, in fact, a newspaper. In her room, on the bed, there had been a copy of the County Gazette, left closed and folded at the bottom edge of the mattress. The local police had dusted the paper and done every kind of test imaginable, but had come out with nothing but the statement, "At this point we have a number of possible leads, but we have so far found them to be inconclusive." Evidently, it would have been easier if the newspaper had been left open to a certain section, or something had been circled in magic marker, or she had left more of a wrinkle in the corner of a certain page. The inserts and leaflets, however, had been put back and rearranged in perfect order. And Maryanne McKusker's fingerprints were on every single page, all with the thumb on the front, top right corner, and the index finger on the back. Whatever she had been looking for had been mentally noted and passed. She was a subtle, yet thorough reader.

  I went to the library on a Saturday in late September when the place was relatively empty, and aimed straight for the periodical room. I found the thing, and placed it beside the most current copy they had of the Westville Herald. I kept looking over my shoulder. The last thing I needed was some librarian to wonder why Kyle Skinner's killer was so interested in the sole piece of evidence in the Maryanne McKusker case.

  I scanned the more current paper first. The article on the progress of her case was shorter than the one I read at home the day before, and it was obvious that the police were letting this one fade to the unsolved file without much of a fight. They had completed their interviews up at Concord University, and were now "entertaining other leads."

  In other words, the newspaper evidence had led them nowhere, and they were moving on to other cases.

  I opened the copy of the Gazette, and spent a good while with it. There was only a couple of pages of real news—"Penny Becomes Scarce Commodity," "Amax Strike Drags On," "Local Industries Claim Coal Supply Will Withstand." I went through the various sections, spending most of my time with the advertisements and pullouts. Nothing. All dead ends. There were nature walks available in a national park, there was a special on the Johanson Company's supply of backyard pools, there were five pages of personals. I worked out some scenarios in my head, and though there were possibilities, like a female selling a used stereo, none of them made a straight line with Maryanne McKusker's place in Unionville and the Route 79 overpass. I made a second sweep of the Gazette and widened my focus to goofy stuff not so "evident." I came up with little else. In the back of my mind I had just noted the futility of the exercise considering the fact that the Unionville police had already made these deductions, when I ran across Rolling Joe's advertisement.

  I had initially passed it over because it seemed so silly to be put even in the same paragraph as the person I had imagined Maryanne McKusker to be. Still, the place was local, so I took another look at it.

  Rolling Joe was a Sixties dropout going on forty, who thought himself a visionary. He was balding and still holding on to a ponytail. His dingy shop was crammed with nudie posters, bongs, and other various no-no's, like rolling papers and canisters of nitrous oxide commonly known as "whippets." It was all perfectly legal, and most around these parts thought of Rolling Joe as the perfect asshole.

  Business was limited, but Joe kept his little business going by feeding on teenagers. I had heard lots of high school kids tested the waters of rebellion and believed for at least a short period of time that it was cool to hang at the head shop.

  Clearly, Joe was thinking bigger nowadays. His advertisement read,

  "Rolling Joe's Shop of Dreams. Grand Opening Tomorrow! Monday Will Be YOUR Day of Psychedelic Rest. New Flotation Tank. Appointments Only."

  Evidently, he came upon the new technology that wound up being later popularized mostly in myth by the William Hurt film titled Altered States. Oh yes, Rolling Joe was a trend setter!

  Did Maryanne McKusker actually sign up for an appointment for this thing? I was about to wander out to find a phone booth so I could call and ask him to check his log book from a couple of weeks back, but I didn't. First, the police would have done this already, and second there was something about the ad that bothered me. Then I saw it. He called "tomorrow" Monday. We killed her on a Monday.

  I turned the paper over to the front page. Of course. I didn't notice it before because the date at the top, just under the slightly perforated edge, had the month and day
solely represented by numbers. This was a Sunday paper. That's why it had so many extra flyers. Maryanne had thumbed through it and failed to find what she was looking for. The next day she picked up Monday's paper, saw what she needed or wanted and went directly to it. She was already on the road and either tossed the paper out or left it in the car.

  The police probably didn't jump to the conclusion I did because of those extra flyers. Everyone knew the Sunday paper had all the promotional stuff. Was it possible that whatever attracted Maryanne did not make the weekend deadline? Did they or he or she get a discount for having the ad or announcement or bid first shown in an edition with less circulation?

  I twisted around and took a look through the doorway. The librarian was in the main lobby, half-cut bird's eye glasses on the end of her nose and a pile of file cards a foot high in front of her. There was a small girl with her mother way over by the children's section, and a guy in an army jacket asleep at the long table by the window. I crept over to the rack and slipped the next day's edition of the Gazette off the curled wire. I found what I was looking for in about two minutes.

  It was an advertisement as subtle as the side of a cereal box, but to me, it was more than obvious.

  NO NAMES NECESSARY

  DR. GOLTZ GYN. M.D.

  112 BYLINE RD., DEGGSVILLE

  555-3865

  She had been going to get an abortion. A kill of her own, and the more I thought of the ways that this might not be possible, the more assured I became that it was.

  The father? Yes, where the hell was he in all this? Why had he not come forward to claim his right as a player? Was he a secret, ongoing fling, still under cover now because the disappearance would implicate him? Had Maryanne been on her way to see him in stealth? That did not play right somehow. First, why the secret, and second, someone at either end of it, his work buddy or her little phone-gossip friend or someone like that would have known. They would have come forward by now.

  It must have been what they called a "one-nighter," or what Kyle would have referred to as a "pump and dump." They probably met at some crowded bar or some lecture she had attended in the past and gone and gotten a room. I understand and believe this now as an adult, and even at thirteen I had my imagination. It was not too difficult a stretch.

  Maybe they had been drunk. Maybe recently he even recognized her picture on the news and had remained silent, ignorant of the pregnancy, sure of his innocence, and unwilling to arouse suspicions that would swallow his time, mar his reputation, and prove answerless anyway.

  The fatal ride of Maryanne McKusker came to me with a hideous clarity. She did not want Dad the minister to know she was pregnant, so she anonymously called for directions from a mall or gas station telephone.

  "Interstate 7 to Crum Creek Parkway. Make a right onto Exit 3 and follow the curve to Jukins Cross. Bear left at the 'Y' and continue on Byline Road. It is unmarked at that point, but you will see us a mile up on the right hand side."

  Hell, Rolling Joe's was on Crum Creek Parkway and she probably passed it. But soon afterward she must have gotten lost. I do not believe, in fact, that she ever got to the clinic or much past Rolling Joe's, for that matter. I think she took a wrong turn at the "Y."

  At the end of Jukins Cross there was a "Y" in the road all right, but it was not really a "Y." It was a three-pronged fork that had two major, unmarked arteries and an offshoot to the far left that looked more like a private driveway than a real street. Byline was definitely at the left of the "Y," but to the newcomer it would have appeared more as the center path of three, if you counted the little side-chute.

  Maryanne McKusker's directions had specifically stated "bear left at the 'Y,'" and she did just that, even though the avenue in question looked generally untraveled with a center line of crabgrass sprouting between the dirt-worn tire marks.

  The small patch of unmarked country lane was actually called Mulberry Street.

  Mulberry Street led one way to the Route 79 overpass.

  Maryanne McKusker had bumped along Mulberry Street, maybe fearing she might run over the amount of time she allotted herself for the false appearance at the lecture in Concord, fretfully searching for the clinic a "mile up." What she got was an ongoing, lazy panorama of seemingly deserted horse farms, barns, and meadows back dropped by dustings of trees. No gas stations, no general stores, just a confusing wind of back road stretching farther and farther to nowhere.

  She was probably relieved when Mulberry Street curved suddenly and opened out to the overpass.

  Civilization at last!

  She would have passed under the big green overhead road sign that announced "Westville" in friendly white letters. She would have immediately understood her mistake at the "Y," regrouped, and opted for the first possible left turn allowing her to double back and try it again.

  It was a mere fifty feet between the Mulberry street on-ramp and the fatal left turn. It is entirely possible that she, for that short period of time, was the lone motorist on the overpass and unobserved. It is fact that the triple guardrail kept her from knowing exactly where the left turn was about to take her, and it remains my own speculation that at this particular moment it felt right to her. At least it was a turn in the right general direction.

  Considering the "alibi" she told her father, the time was getting tight. She was probably pressing on the gas a bit harder than usual. She swung down that ramp and onto the dirt road faster than you could say "death trap."

  She wanted an abortion and she got one.

  Kyle and I killed two birds with one nail.

  14.

  The toll booth did not go up until the summer of 1978. There were legal snags, and Runnameade's proposals that received initial local approval were put on hold at the state level. For a year and a half cars simply came into Westville off the turnpike for free. Then in late '75 there were questions about the integrity of the original exit ramp, and they closed off the turn on the overpass for another twenty-three months.

  Of course, I did not know of these details until years later when I could access all the documents, transactions, and bureaucratic maneuverings online. As a developing adolescent I was left to my own assumptions. I therefore took it upon myself to continue going regularly to the jobsite as I had begun doing as a thirteen-year-old, so as to hide in the cover of the trees and see if today was the day the hardhats started poking around again.

  I meticulously read what the papers gave away, but the information back then was spotty at best. It was old news that Runnameade Construction had won the bid with a simple, low-risk scheme to put a single toll booth in at the base of the overpass. In the Nineties, many referred back to this as "The Blair Witch Plan," not only because Runnameade's booth wound up being haunted, but more so to compare it with the miniscule cost the creators of "Blair" put forth to make their blockbuster in the first place.

  The Siegal people always questioned the integrity of that original footer, but those protests were really trivial to them, more footnotes in fine print than the dollar signs that came across in bold. They wanted the powers that were to shoot the moon. Still, neither the "petty" technical angle nor the lofty financial one ever got past City Hall. These mavericks wanted the government to spend big, and plain and simple, the Siegal vision had a higher cost than what many believed would turn a profit. Through the years, as the running debate wore on, interested parties on both sides did traffic volume evaluations and Siegal's independent firms always seemed to come up with different results than those hired by the government. Go figure.

  And when the single booth did go up in the summer of 1978, as predicted, it began turning that slow, faithful profit, like a low-risk, low-interest savings bond. Every time Siegal got to the table through the years, their bid was rejected for the same basic reasons.

  The booth started turning a profit the minute it was put up.

  We are a small town.

  Your plan will cost millions in exposed funds that will take years to show dividends.
As long as that booth stands, and continues to come up in the black on the quarterlies, there will be no plaza. Period.

  That is why I dropped out of school in 1978, a year before graduation. Runnameade installed the booth and could not get anyone to stay in it, at least not after the sun went down. I do not recall the names in the succession of those who tried to work nightshift there throughout that critical month, but I know it was more than twenty. The reported physical symptoms were "lightheadedness, heart palpitations, and minor bleeding for no apparent reason," but it was the psychological symptoms that really captured everyone's imagination. It was bad enough that some actually recognized Kyle Skinner's fleeting image just at the periphery of vision, laughing silently and snapping his head back and forth on that flap of neck-skin. The one that really scared me, however, was Maryanne's image, hair flying behind her in slow motion, eyes crawling with worms, a baby in her arms that she reportedly first caressed, next scratched, then bit into, and finally snapped back and forth in clamped jaws like a frenzied dog tearing at meat. Supposedly you couldn't really "see" her, since the minute you fixed your eyes on the particular glass pane she was occupying she switched to a neighboring panel, but I could not afford to take the chance that someone would actually recognize the face (or worse, take a photograph of it) and connect it to Maryanne McKusker.

  When the trouble in the booth started there were also reports in the newspapers and the Construction Times (of which I had become a regular subscriber by then) that Siegal had heard about the complication and were stirring around again, going back to the footnotes in small print concerning the integrity of the otherwise unexplored footer where that boy died years ago. Suddenly not so trivial.

  I actually read an article about that while goofing off at school, and remember walking straight out of chemistry class and Westville High for good. When I told my mother later that day, she accepted the news with quiet defeat. She brought the collar of her robe up under her jaw in a fist and slowly went back into her bedroom. No shock-blue eyes. She had kept them down to the floor. The blue jean queen had lost her power over me some time ago.