by Alex Dolan
Cindy talked about her attempted escape with the tone of someone who’d been interviewed by reporters. She had practiced how to dish about her trauma without crumbling. Only an occasional eye squinch hinted at the flood of emotions behind her composure.
A couple of months after they’d taken her, Cindy had tried to run away with one of the other children. She said, “I was just following Julie. Julie tried to escape, and I went with her.”
This was the first time I’d heard a name of one of the other children. I coaxed the full name out of her. Perhaps now that she’d seen my scars, she trusted me as a confidant. “Julie Diehl. She was one of us.” She paused, and I reached out and gently squeezed her arm to keep her talking, hating myself for doing so. I asked her who else was with her.
She said, “Just three of us. Me and Julie, then Veda. Veda came third.”
“The third child.”
“Veda Moon.”
I tried to lighten the mood. “Hippie name.”
“Berkley hippies,” she acknowledged. “Bona fide.”
“How do you even spell that?”
“V-E-D-A. Apparently, it’s Sanskrit for ‘knowledge.’”
After a few months, Walter realized that the children we were getting sores from the chains. The sores got infected, and he didn’t want to bring in doctors. So he let all three off the chains so their arms could heal. They were still locked in the shed, but now that they had some mobility, Julie decided to tunnel out. The shed had a dirt floor, so the kids borrowed under the wall. It didn’t take more than a few days. Each of them had been led to the shed with a bag over her head, so they couldn’t know how close they were to other houses. On the maps I’d seen, houses on either side looked as close as a run to first base, but the children wouldn’t have known that.
Cindy’s nostrils flared as she spilled her story. Kali would have told her she didn’t need to continue if it was too painful to talk about it. But that day I was Pamela Wonnacott.
Julie was the oldest and the most adventurous of the three children. Cindy was scared. By then Walter had already done things to her. I’d read the reports of sexual abuse that came up during the trial and didn’t press her for details. Despite her terror at the time, Cindy had decided to try and escape. She said, “I assumed my expiration date was approaching, and I would have preferred to die doing something than doing nothing.”
During their escape, Julie and Cindy made it out, but Veda got cold feet at the last moment and stayed behind. When they ran through the hedge, they jangled some brass wind chimes, and Walter heard them. Cindy recounted the ensuing events distantly, as if describing something that happened to someone else. Some of this was reported in the trial coverage, but not all of it. Walter Gretsch lost control when he tackled Julie, and caved her head in with a rock. Cindy made a point of saying that Helena protested, but there was no stopping Walter at that point. He and Helena buried the girl in the ground under the shed, and the remaining two children could smell her through the soil.
As we hovered over our drinks, Cindy relived all of this for my benefit because she had promised herself she’d help people like me. Her eyes watered. I handed her a napkin, but I was enough of a monster that I didn’t interrupt. I wanted to leave. More than that, I wanted to hug her and apologize for putting her through this. But her information might connect to Leland, so I kept egging her on with reassuring strokes on her forearm.
Cindy had been punished but not killed. To keep her from running, Gretsch and Mumm strapped her to a worktable in the basement, where they sawed though the bottom portion of her right leg with a hacksaw. They seared the wound with an electric charcoal starter, a heated coil used for barbecues, so she didn’t bleed to death. The amputated portion of her leg was buried with Julie Diehl in the dirt beneath the tool shed.
At the end of Cindy’s story, I realized my mouth hung open without my choosing. I needed to fill the silence with something and managed to say, “I’m so sorry.”
Cindy took some time to compose herself. She wept and blotted her eyes with the napkin. She asked, “You were captive for how many weeks?”
I had to remember what I’d told her. “Three.”
“I’m not sure if you got there, but that Stockholm syndrome thing is true. I never had good feelings about Walter, but Helena grew on me.” According to Cindy, Helena gave them extra food after that, and sat outside the shed door at night and read stories to them. Tiny perks didn’t make up for the atrocities, but she became the lesser of two evils. “When they finally found me, I even stood up for her. I told the police it wasn’t really her fault. She just wanted to have kids.”
“That’s really what it was about?”
“They wanted a family, and they couldn’t have kids. Or at least they thought it would be wrong to try.” When she laughed a twinkle came back in her eye. She dabbed it with the napkin. “That’s where they drew the line, morally.”
“Did you know they were related?”
“Not until the police told me. I mean, they don’t look much alike. Helena kept talking about how she wanted to give Walter babies, but she couldn’t. I just assumed she was infertile.” She drifted into another memory. “I still sleep with the lights on, you know. I think it has to be the shed that did it. It was dark in there. They boarded up the windows, so we only got sunlight through the cracks in the day. They didn’t light it at night, because it would have been easy to spot. That’s one of my quirks now. That, and I keep a lot of toothbrushes. Thirteen months without regular brushing, I have to brush after every meal now. Do you have anything that sticks with you like that?”
I had to make something up. I could have brought up my spider thing, but it wasn’t the same kind of quirk that she was talking about. I thought about Gordon Ostrowksi—specifically, his smell. “He had a cologne. It was something that a woman would wear, but he decided it was for guys too. I smelled it on a woman once and it made me puke.” This was actually true.
Her smile disappeared. She raised her glass, and for some reason we toasted. Some of the joy drained out of her voice, and she added somberly, “Veda has a thing about smells too—Walter’s smell.”
“Was it that bad?”
“It was memorable.” This talk of smells brought back something else: the smell of FlyNap cloaking Leland in fruity decay. Maybe my real-life captivity had affected me more than I thought. My head spun talking about how atrocities clung to their survivors. Hearing about Cindy’s leg, imagining how it would have felt to be held in place as that hacksaw detached a limb, then the blinding pain of searing steel. My forehead felt clammy, a feeling that usually precedes nausea.
“Can I excuse myself? I could use the bathroom.”
“Of course.” As soon as I left the table she played with her phone.
Inside, I washed my face and stared at myself in the mirror for some time, channeling the same self-reflective mood as when I pumped myself up for a terminus. I tried to convince myself that not only was I helping myself, but by reaching out to Cindy Coates, I made her feel valuable by playing the part of a victim whom she could help. Such was my logic. All this talk of psychopaths kept bringing up memories of my stepfather as well. More than Leland, Gordon Ostrowski came to mind when I imagined a captor, so when Cindy talked about Walter and Helena, her story freshened up my old wounds from Gordon. Maybe I wasn’t so different from Cindy. I had a different breed of childhood trauma, but Gordon’s imprint stayed with me in the same way. Cindy had coped with her trauma through athletics, and I started building muscle so people couldn’t push me around. Not so different, the two of us.
I’m not sure how long I was in there, because I lost track of time. I wanted to apologize to Cindy and leave, but I needed to ask her about the police she’d been in touch with. I needed to find out if she had met an officer who matched my description. I ran through various ways I could broach that subject, trying out various lines in the mirror. Someone finally pounded on the door to snap me out of it.
; When I returned, Cindy was absorbed by her phone screen. She grimaced at whatever she was looking at. Without looking up, she said, “You were gone so long, I kept reading more about you online.” She sounded different, somehow bitter.
As soon as I sat, something whizzed at my head, and I barely had time to see the motion before it collided. Roughly the same spot where Leland had coldcocked me. Right before it hit, my eyes took a quick snapshot of the running blade. Cindy had detached it and swung it like a club. After Leland had gotten the best of me, I should have been on my toes, but her attack was so unexpected, I didn’t have time to defend myself. Her prosthetic whacked the side of my head. I saw stars and tumbled off my chair.
“Who the fuck are you?”
I fell on my back. Cindy tipped the table and climbed on top of me, continuing to beat me with the running blade. With a fuzzy head, my best defense was throwing my forearms up. Patrons stopped talking. I didn’t see them, but I heard the hush fall over the café, quiet as a wake. They were too stunned to intervene. I guess none of them had ever seen a paraplegic cudgel another woman with her prosthetic. They didn’t know whose side to be on, and if I’d been in their shoes, I’d have probably sided with the amputee.
The rubber-coated aluminum could have caused real damage too, if I didn’t have my arms up. She gashed the middle of my forearm, close enough to my wrist injuries that I felt it there too.
“Who the fuck are you?” Whatever composure she had learned to disguise the deep, lasting suffering caused by Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm, all of it was gone. The way Cindy screamed at me, she seemed both terrifying and terrified.
Sparring teaches you to take a punch. For a while, I stayed on the ground and absorbed the punishment. I deserved it. But I also thought her rage would dissipate. Not so. After a minute of hammering, I knew I had to fight back, if only to stop it. Cindy was strong, but not as strong as me. Plus, as we grappled, I remembered the last time I fought with someone, and our struggle reminded me of my fight with Leland in the bathtub. When I fought back, I was fighting Leland as much as Cindy. I caught her prosthetic and bucked her off me. She weighed a little less without the lower leg. With a flailing arm, she ripped down the shelves, and an avalanche of silver coffee bags rained down on us. I scrambled to my feet and fended her off with her prosthetic, holding it out like an épée.
“Who the fuck are you!” She kept wailing.
Two men with café aprons came toward us, and I knew I had to make a quick exit. Her phone was at my feet. I needed to see what she had seen. I dropped the running blade and snatched her phone for a quick look. “I’m so sorry—please believe me,” I told her. I held up my hands to the café staff in a mea culpa gesture, and stole a glance at the cell.
Search results for Pamela Wonnacott had led her to a registry. Specifically, an online sex offender database, the kind parents would use when they wanted to make sure their neighborhoods were safe. A profile on that sex offender registry showed my name, as well as my address in Bernal Heights. Some basic stats on me too—they even got my height right, down to the inch. The headshot accompanying this profile was the angry camera-phone pic Leland had snapped back in Clayton, welts and all.
Chapter 8
At my new motel in Hayward, I Googled everything I could remember from my conversation with Cindy Coates. After 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, my head eventually stopped throbbing. Cindy got me pretty good with that running blade. Served me right. When Lisa Kim threw my childhood trauma in my face, I reacted with a punch. I couldn’t begrudge Cindy Coates for pummeling me after I’d made her relive her thirteen months with Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm.
First on the list, I looked up my sex offender profile. I’m no hacker, so there was no way I could pull it down. If I tried to contact the site manager, I’d probably only succeed in alerting Leland. Once notified, Lord only knew what he would do. He’d caught up to me in Clayton and could have killed me, but he didn’t. The sex offender profile was just another way to wound me. If he wanted me dead, this might turn into a death-by-a-thousand-cuts scenario. Or his shadow might suddenly fall over me, and he might end me quickly with that semiautomatic he carried. I tried to convince myself that all he wanted was for Kali to go back and stick a hypodermic into Helena Mumm, but I honestly didn’t believe it was that simple anymore, or that I could save myself that easily.
The next day, my scalp started to heal. Under a curly black wig in a warm afternoon, it itched like poison oak.
I was walking in Berkeley. Cindy had given me the name Veda Moon, and once I had the name, it didn’t take much to locate the place. Frankly, there weren’t too many Veda Moons out there. Public records pointed me to an address.
The Moon family lived in a midsized craftsman on a quiet street lined with knotty oaks. A wooden swing dangled within the covered porch, and a fresh-ish paint job made the trim glow white. What might have been a small front lawn had been manicured into a flower garden, accessed by a rustic wooden gate. Betty Crocker quaint.
Cindy Coates would probably have called Veda by now. She would have told her that some predator stalked her to a café. She would describe a lanky woman in loose sweats and a hoodie, so I costumed myself to look radically different. Kali dressed in a navy blue A-line dress, purchased at a thrift shop for the cost of a gourmet sandwich. I chose an outfit that would attract minimal attention. Even in something this simple, my legs stuck out like stilts and drew a few looks. But the wig was unruly and gave me the look of someone who didn’t believe in unnecessary bathing. Tortoiseshell reading glasses cast me as a bookish Cal postgrad, someone who’d turned off the plumbing downstairs until she finished her degree.
The most important prop was the dog. A six-month-old puppy named Emmanuel trotted beside me on the sidewalk. He was a mutt, but between his black and white coat and amphibious eyes, I guessed he had some Boston terrier in him. Emmanuel chomped at the fresh air. Unsure what direction he was supposed to go, he lurched at the leash and jumped up on my calves. Plush-toy adorable, he was. The local animal shelter let the public take dogs for walks—play with a dog long enough, you might get attached and want to keep him. We promoted this shelter at the firehouse, and it’s where we got our mascot. Most of us wanted a Dalmatian, but they didn’t have Dalmatians, and the captain ended up bringing back an ancient Chihuahua with a walleye.
Emmanuel was an important distraction. The dog gave me an excuse to patrol Veda Moon’s neighborhood. Now, I was just a girl walking her puppy. Passersby stooped to let Emmanuel jump all over them and barely paid attention to me. A police cruiser slowed down, and I stiffened until one of the guys rolled down his window and asked for the dog’s name. In a crackly murmur I told him Emmanuel, like in the Bible. He didn’t try to chat me up.
With the dog in tow, I made several passes by the Moon house. Whatever qualms I had about reaching out to the victims of Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm, those vanished when I found myself on the sex offender registry. Survivors learn to scavenge. I’d obviously traumatized Cindy Coates, but I was prepared to do it again with Veda Moon. I’d feel worse this time because I knew more about how they’d suffered.
Apparently, Veda was a runner like Cindy Coates. Her name popped up a few times in Internet race results. She’d completed a few half marathons and clocked the San Francisco marathon at 3:17. Not bad. She was twenty-two years old now and still lived at home. That alone said something.
If I found her, I would need to trick Veda into talking to me. I’d hoped to run into her outside. I’d recognize her by her age. In my scenario, Veda would stoop to play with the puppy. Kali could be charming. If I could get her to play with the dog, we could strike up a conversation. I would be new to the neighborhood, full of questions. “Could you give me some advice on restaurants?” I might ask. “What about dog parks?” If I got her talking, Veda might open up. Clients confided in Kali. If she could confide in me, maybe I’d learn something about the man who was chasing me.
Round and round I went in a
long loop, past the Moons’ house then up to a bakery on Shattuck and back again. Dinner was a cronut—half doughnut, half croissant.
The shelter closed at six, but I didn’t return the dog. They’d be pissed, but I’d drop him off in the morning.
During my laps I made small talk with every woman in her early twenties. Like I said, people liked talking to Kali. All of them gave me their names, and none of them were Veda Moon. By eight, the block darkened and everyone who was coming home had come home. I thought about going home, but in my last lap, the front windows were lit, and a silver Volkswagen was parked in the driveway.
The Moon craftsman was designed in a cluster of rooms, so that a peek through any of the windows gave the peeping tom—me—a good sense of the overall layout. Through the front windows, I spied a woman all the way in the back, standing at a kitchen counter. Her arm jiggled in a way to suggest she was chopping vegetables. She had her back to me, and was dressed in a gray business suit with an updo. She had coiled hair and wide hips, and when she turned to the side, light skin. I was too far away to tell how old she was, but the woman was too old to be Veda.
I could only see more if I ventured closer. The wooden gate swung with a subdued whine, and I tromped through the garden to the window. I tugged Emmanuel to follow. Rose bushes grew along the building perimeter, and when I pushed branches out of my face, the thorns felt like unhitched safety pins. The crown of my head rising above the windowsill, I watched the woman work.
The dog found a patch of dirt to pee, but soon got bored and pulled at his tether. He yowled grumpily—not loud, but loud enough. The woman snapped her head toward my window. Maybe she caught a little motion as I dropped below the windowsill. Maybe the reflection off the glass was too strong, and she didn’t see anything. I crouched and waited. But I couldn’t be there long. Out in front of the house, I felt exposed. The neighborhood was quiet, but if someone walked by they wouldn’t miss me.