Love Me or Else

by Colin McEvoy

  Others also spoke to the Intelligencer reporter as they were leaving the service that day. Roxanne Miller, a Hellertown resident, admitted she had not felt safe in her own home since Rhonda had died.

  “For years, you’d never think of locking your door,” she said, “and now it’s come to that.”

  Bill Rex, a pastor at the St. Luke Evangelical Lutheran Church in Ferndale, Pennsylvania, shared an even more pessimistic view with the journalist. Rex felt it was only a matter of time before violence made its way to the rural Bucks County area. To reinforce his point, he cited the high school shootings in Columbine, Colorado, a quiet place where residents felt safe until the horrible massacre that killed thirteen people.

  Rex also pointed out that, just three months ago, the local Palisades High School went on lockdown when an anonymous caller told the school two students were armed with guns. The warning turned out to be a false alarm, but it was enough to startle many local residents, including Rex.

  “It’s an infection,” he told the Intelligencer reporter of the epidemic of violence he felt was sweeping across the country. “If it can go to Columbine, it can come here.”

  Other reactions were less extreme but spoken in a similar vein, including that of Paul Rose, who had been with the church for twelve years.

  “You live in this part of the world to get away from all this,” Rose later said. “Then this happens at our own church. It’s not a sanctuary anymore.”

  Jim and Dorothy also attended the first Sunday service at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church since their daughter’s death. And the tiny church was crowded like never before. Just as so many people returned to church after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, members of Trinity Evangelical showed up in force that first Sunday after the tragedy in their midst. There were even people who had never attended before, likely curious about what had happened there. While some attended just that Sunday, many would go on to become permanent members.

  The church council had discussed blocking off the office hallway altogether, but the majority overruled the plan. You can’t hide what went on here, Shreaves felt. Instead, everything was moved out of the office and into the choir room across the hall, which would serve as a temporary office for many months. The office door was locked and its large window into the hallway was covered with paper. And while the office had been cleaned, there still was a slight chemical smell from the cleaning agents themselves and the gunpowder residue.

  To upgrade security, the church’s locks were changed and they were kept locked once the services started. The Springfield police were asked to be onsite and the church also formed its own volunteer group to guard the doors. Mary Jane Fonder was among the volunteers.

  A group from the Lutheran Disaster Response attended and talked with church members between the 8:00 and 10:30 a.m. services about any of their safety concerns.

  Pastor Shreaves drew upon the theme of the conference he had just attended for his sermon. The conference had addressed how people tread on rocky soil amid God’s firm foundation, and Shreaves spoke to how despite living on shifting soil, the foundation of God’s presence is greater than any evil or fear we may have.

  The church also distributed copies of Amish Grace, a book written about how the Amish community in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, had forgiven the gunman who killed five children and injured five others in a schoolhouse. The shooting had happened fairly recently, and Shreaves thought there could be parallels drawn between the two incidents.

  Judy Zellner was particularly touched by the large turnout. As she joined the church choir in the front of the sanctuary, Judy took a moment to acknowledge how much the crowd meant to her.

  “I need you to be here, to get through this,” she said.

  CHAPTER 12

  Pastor Shreaves didn’t remember the first time he met Mary Jane Fonder. He had met so many people all at once when he first started at Trinity Evangelical that most of those initial greetings were a blur to him, and there was no reason for him to have thought of Mary Jane any differently than all the others. In short order he would come to be familiar with her in the same way the rest of the congregation was: an eccentric old lady who could get a bit annoying at times, but was otherwise harmless and had good intentions.

  He hadn’t gotten to know very much about Mary Jane in his first year at the church. Of course, she was a talker, and she had bent his ear a few times after Sunday services. And her physical appearance certainly left an impression. The wigs she wore reminded Shreaves of the divots from his golfing days, and whenever she laughed, Shreaves couldn’t help but think that her belly shook like a bowl full of jelly much like that of Santa Claus.

  The first time Shreaves spoke at length with Mary Jane was the day of the funeral for Sue Brunner’s father in the summer of 2006. The service was in Feasterville, an area in southern Bucks County almost an hour away from the church. Due to the distance, not many people from Trinity Evangelical attended besides Shreaves and Judy Zellner. But Mary Jane Fonder was there, along with her brother Ed.

  During a luncheon at the Buck Hotel after the funeral, Shreaves spotted Mary Jane and Ed wandering alone, looking for a table. The pastor admired them for coming so far to attend the funeral. He also appreciated that despite the oddball reputation Mary Jane had developed, the woman was usually in good spirits—she was often the first one to laugh about her own wigs or her other oddities. He knew that the congregation treated Mary Jane civilly, but he also knew she had few very close friends among them, and was seldom invited to dinners or social gatherings. Nevertheless, no one could question her love of the church and the community.

  Shreaves decided it was time to reach out to the Fonders, and he called them over to sit with him. They chatted casually for the next ninety minutes or so, with Mary Jane herself doing most of the talking, of course. After a while, they started to discuss her artwork. She had a strong talent for painting and crocheting, among other mediums. To Shreaves, Mary Jane seemed a bit lonely, and since she was always eager to do more with the church, he thought of a way to get her more involved while utilizing her interests.

  “Hey Mary Jane, why don’t you come and do some work at the church?” Shreaves said. “How about you decorate the bulletin boards in the narthex for us?”

  Mary Jane happily agreed, and before long she was visiting the church one or two mornings a week. Shreaves would let her into the church and help get her started, then leave her unsupervised to do the work. She worked on the bulletin board for several months, but after a while, Shreaves took over that job himself: It turned out for all her artistic abilities, she really made a mess out of the boards. Nevertheless, she continued coming to the church on weekday mornings and helping out in other small jobs, like updating the calendars or folding the newsletters.

  Sometimes Shreaves would start chatting with her, but for the most part, he tried to steer clear. Once you gave her an opening, Mary Jane had a tendency to go on and on, to the point that it felt impossible to end the conversation at all. As a result, the two tended to only speak in passing from time to time while Mary Jane performed her duties.

  But one day, in the fall of 2006, Mary Jane sought out Shreaves for a conversation. One that would forever change things between them.

  Shreaves was working on his laptop computer atop the L-shaped desk in his office, a relatively small but welcoming room on the church’s second floor. He heard Mary Jane coming up the stairs, but between her age and relatively poor physical fitness, it took quite a while before Mary Jane finally wandered through his door. It appeared she wanted to speak with him, so Shreaves invited her to take a seat in a maroon armchair at the opposite corner of the room next to a bookshelf and a couch.

  It was the first time Mary Jane had sought him out for a one-on-one conversation. She launched into a long discussion mostly about herself, talking about her past, her family, her old home in Philadelphia, the various jobs she had worked over the years. She showed Shreaves old photos of her youn
ger self that she carried in her wallet, and described ballet lessons she used to take as a young woman.

  Shreaves was no counselor, and would normally refer his congregants to a professional after one or two conversations like this one if he felt they needed someone to talk to regularly. But he got the impression Mary Jane simply wanted to tell her story, a story that perhaps few people had ever really taken the time to listen to before.

  Okay, just be a pastor, Shreaves thought to himself. Just listen to her.

  An hour went by, and still Mary Jane continued talking. She talked about how pretty and talented she was back in her youth, about all the things she wanted to do with her life. She talked about moving to Springfield Township when her parents got sick, and how her life changed so much after that. Shreaves spent most of the time nodding and making short acknowledgments like “Yes” or “I understand.” It struck him that Mary Jane seemed to be purging her feelings, almost like a confessional, and he tried to simply affirm what she was saying, without offering his own opinions or passing any judgments.

  Then, out of nowhere, Mary Jane said the words that Shreaves would remember for the rest of his life: “You can’t deny what’s going on between us.”

  He was taken completely aback. Shreaves had never noticed Mary Jane express any kind of romantic interest toward him, and he had never expressed any toward her. His first reaction was to laugh, not a mean-spirited laugh but a surprised, awkward one, as if he could simply shrug the statement away.

  “Mary Jane, there’s no … no…” he started to say, but found that words failed him. “Let’s … let’s not go there.…”

  Mary Jane immediately launched back into her conversation, changing the subject and talking as if nothing had happened. But Shreaves knew he couldn’t just sit there and continue to listen.

  “Mary Jane, we need to stop,” he said. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  The conversation over, Mary Jane simply stood up and left the room, not saying another word about her sudden outburst, but the words seemed to hang in the room even after she had gone. Shreaves was shocked. He tried to think back to whether he had ever given any indication that he was interested in her that way, but nothing came to mind. Maybe she got the wrong idea from the way he reached out to her back at the funeral, or from the way he listened to her discussing her past for the last hour.

  Or maybe it was simply the fact that he was single, even though there was nearly a ten-year age difference between them. Shreaves knew some of the women in the church considered him attractive.

  You’ve got to be kidding me, Shreaves thought to himself. I mean, I’m no Robert Redford, but oh my God, what is she thinking?

  Upon later reflection, Shreaves would come to believe it really had nothing to do with him at all, but rather the position he held. He had learned about this in past seminars, where they referred to it as transference. Mary Jane probably wasn’t interested in him, Shreaves reasoned, but rather what the office he held represented and its connection to God.

  Nevertheless, the whole encounter deeply troubled Shreaves. He called Claire Burkat, a bishop with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod, just to let her know that it happened. Shreaves wanted to make sure someone in an official capacity was aware of the comment, because who knew where something like this could lead? He also called a meeting of the church council just to make them aware of it. But he asked that the council not do anything about it just yet, hoping the whole matter would simply go away.

  It didn’t. In fact, only a few weeks after that conversation, Mary Jane started calling Shreaves’s home on a regular basis. Most of the time, she called when he wasn’t home and left long, rambling messages on his answering machine. She would talk about some random subject for four minutes until the message time ran out and the machine cut her off, then she’d call back and speak for another four minutes until it cut her off again. Sometimes, she would call every day for as many as five days in a row, leaving the same type of long-winded, stream-of-consciousness message each time.

  Sometimes, Shreaves would answer and end up talking to Mary Jane for as long as he could stand it before finding some excuse to end the conversation. But after a while, he realized most of the times that she called, it was when she knew or suspected he would not be home. Shreaves quickly reasoned that she didn’t necessarily want to talk to him at all, but just wanted to leave these long messages for him, so he stopped answering the phone and simply let the machine pick it up.

  It went on that way for months and months. The volume of calls tended to fluctuate—one week she might only call once or twice, the next week almost every day—but they continued well into the winter of 2007. After a while, Shreaves couldn’t take it anymore and decided to have a phone block preventing Mary Jane from calling his home number, a measure that caused him some semblance of guilt. But Mary Jane was hardly deterred by the effort: She simply started calling from her cell phone instead.

  When it became clear that she was not going to stop, Shreaves played some of the messages for the church council and asked them to speak to Mary Jane about it. But, much to Shreaves’s displeasure, they seemed reluctant to get involved. Some council members shrugged it off, insisting it would stop or simply saying something like, “We’ll get to it,” and never addressing it. Others just chalked it up to Mary Jane’s generally unusual nature and insisted it was harmless.

  Then, one week in the summertime, Shreaves noticed he had extra food in his freezer that he had not purchased. He usually left his door unlocked, and a few more times after that, new food would suddenly appear in his home, or a bag of groceries would be left on his front porch. At first, he didn’t make any connection to Mary Jane at all, believing somebody else from the congregation had bought it for him. Then one day, when he answered one of Mary Jane’s phone calls, she asked him if he needed any more food, and he realized she was coming into his house and dropping off groceries for him.

  “No, Mary Jane,” Shreaves said. “Just don’t do that anymore.”

  But Mary Jane persisted, even after the pastor started locking his door. One day, she left yet another bag of groceries on his front porch, Shreaves decided the only way to make his point was to leave them there and not bring them inside. They sat in front of his house for about a week, and the food eventually spoiled.

  Upon learning this, Mary Jane called and left yet another of her messages for Shreaves, but this time, her voice was lower and angrier, like that of a different person altogether. To Shreaves, it was an evil, almost demonic sounding voice.

  “How can you do this?” Mary Jane angrily demanded. “Ungrateful! Somebody’s trying to take care of you and you’re snubbing them!”

  To Shreaves, it was positively frightening. It had gotten to the point that Shreaves didn’t feel comfortable considering himself Mary Jane’s pastor. He would even pray that she stay in good health despite her physical problems, because he was not sure whether he could bring himself to visit her in the hospital if she did.

  Oh this is great, he thought. What have I gotten into here?

  But the whole situation finally came to a breaking point one Sunday, when Mary Jane called at around 10:30 at night. Not accustomed to calls at that hour, even from her, Shreaves worried that it must be some sort of emergency. But instead, he found it was yet again just Mary Jane, looking to leave another one of her messages.

  Fed up, Shreaves yelled into the phone, “Mary Jane, don’t call here anymore. In fact, I don’t know if I can be your pastor. Maybe you need to find another church. I just can’t pastor you.”

  At first, there was nothing but silence on the other end. Then, all of a sudden, Mary Jane launched into an angry tirade against the pastor, much as she did after he refused to accept her groceries. When reflecting back on the call later, Shreaves could not recall exactly what Mary Jane had said, but he remembered her voice perfectly. It was that same evil-sounding voice as the last time she became angry, except this time
with a touch of nervousness and restlessness as well.

  The calls became slightly less frequent after that, but Shreaves was deeply disturbed. It was as if Mary Jane had shed her persona and revealed a completely different, darker personality altogether.

  CHAPTER 13

  Stumpo and Dietz’s recent interview with Pastor Shreaves gave them a lot to follow up on. Just as they had looked into Karen Loch, the disgruntled ex-secretary, they now had to check into Mary Jane Fonder, the parishioner who was apparently infatuated with the pastor.

  Dietz and Bucks County Detective Mike Mosiniak went over to Mary Jane’s house the day after meeting with Shreaves. Her small ranch home was also in Springfield Township, a short three miles or so from the church.

  After pulling up to the house, Dietz knocked on the door and waited, but no answer came. There was a car in the driveway and Dietz believed he saw a light on inside the house. He knocked again, but again, no answer. Dietz and Mosiniak waited a little while longer, pacing around the front step and eventually walking around the house, checking whether anyone was in the backyard or at one of the windows.

  After about ten minutes, Dietz took out one of his business cards and wrote a brief note asking Mary Jane to get in touch with them as soon as possible. After slipping it under the door, Dietz and Mosiniak started back toward their patrol car. But as soon as they reached it, the front door of the house suddenly opened, and out stepped Mary Jane’s older brother, Ed Fonder.

  A sixty-nine-year-old man of medium build and regular height, with a balding head of white hair, Ed wore a pair of glasses and an almost entirely bland facial expression. He did not smile as he greeted the troopers, nor did he appear especially unhappy to meet them. Ed was a retired physics teacher and, the troopers believed, he looked the part.

  The officers explained they were looking for Mary Jane because they were interviewing members of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church about Rhonda Smith’s death. But Mary Jane was not home at the moment, according to Ed. He further explained that unlike his sister, he was not a member of Trinity Evangelical, and instead attended a parish in New Jersey where he previously lived.