by Alex Dolan
Then Veda transformed. At first he was just fidgety; he sensed something in the air. His nostrils flared. He smelled me, and he smelled his father. Or rather, he smelled the stink of Walter Gretsch that clung to both of us. His chest curled in on itself, and his lips tightened as if he’d eaten a piece of bad meat and was fighting not to spit it up.
“It’s him.” He gagged and stumbled to his feet, then elbowed his way through a knot of party guests. Down the hallway, we heard the bathroom door slam. Faintly—so faintly that you wouldn’t have heard unless you were listening for it—he vomited into a toilet.
He didn’t stop at a few heaves. It got louder, until the phantom chitchat around us died out. All of us mindfully listened to Veda Moon’s retching. In that moment I understood that our visit to Walter Gretsch was meant to accomplish nothing, except for us to bring back his scent to Veda Moon.
Leland said, “Now you can go.”
Tesmer scooched a few inches away on the sofa.
“What the hell just happened?”
The Moons turned their attention toward their guests. Leland told them, “He’ll be okay. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before.”
A young woman in an empire waist top and jeans asked, “Can I take him to the hospital?”
Tesmer kindly replied, “It will pass.”
I took a look at the woman who’d just spoken—familiar voice, familiar face. Her blond hair knotted in what’s known as a beachy updo. She walked toward the bathroom, and I noticed an unusual bounce in her step. One of her legs was a prosthetic. Cindy Coates. With an upturned nose and a light complexion, her face was a blank canvas for makeup, and once she dabbed on eyeliner and lipstick, her features looked much different. She didn’t acknowledge me. I sank in the cushion once I recognized her, but I was also a wee grateful that she didn’t attack me. I rubbed the diminishing welt on my scalp.
I looked to Leland to explain. “Why would you do that to your son?”
“This is what I wanted you to see.” When he spoke, he didn’t murmur. Clearly, none of this was a secret to any of those in the house.
Tesmer added, “You needed to see him like this.”
Everyone around the room watched me. They reminded me of sidewalk looky-loos during medical calls. Not that I feel like the world revolves around me, but in this instance it felt like it. Every guest had stopped their socializing and stared. Their attention pinned me to the sofa. Some looked at me as if they’d just found a silverfish in their clothes. Others saw how little I understood about what was happening and appeared more sympathetic. I suspected all of them knew who I was. Maybe one of the Moons told them about me, maybe they even knew we’d just visited Walter Gretsch in prison. Likely they all knew why Veda Moon was throwing up.
I addressed the room collectively. “Who are you?”
Leland said, “Friends.” This earned a few nods from the group, even from the ones who couldn’t hide their contempt. One blocky guy in a Darth Vader T-shirt managed a smile when he remembered he was supposed to be friendly.
I asked, “Who’s going to help Veda?”
Tesmer said, “He’ll be in there for some time. He probably won’t eat for two days.” Leland looked slightly ashamed of himself. Not so Tesmer Moon.
“At the very least, you are the worst parents in Berkeley, California. Congratulations,” I said.
Leland insisted, “He’ll be all right. We didn’t want to do this, but we needed to show you…we needed to show you how bad it was.”
Had I been alone with Tesmer and Leland, I would have gone to check on Veda in the bathroom. Jesus, someone should have. He was turning himself inside out in there. Either that or I would have walked out.
Instead, my shoulders went slack and I leaned my head back on the couch. “What do you want from me?”
Leland said, “Let’s start with punch.”
• • •
Guests started talking again; and fairly soon the crowd seemed alive, if not outright festive. Tesmer looked after her son in the bathroom, leaving Leland to walk me through the crowd. I suppose part of the reason I stayed was curiosity.
We cut through the kitchen and out into the backyard. Berkeley homes weren’t known for having yard space, but their trimmed lawn fit a good forty people. Coolers held beer, but most dunked plastic cups into open vats of sangria. Leland and Tesmer had bought old cooper’s barrels from a winery in Napa, lined them, and filled them up with the punch.
I frugally nursed my sangria, gnawing on a pineapple chunk. No way was I getting tipsy around those guys. I might wake up in a bathtub of ice without a kidney.
Now that the talk-talk had started back up, the guests didn’t focus as much on me, so I felt slightly less conspicuous drifting through them. Occasionally I got a nod from one of them, but most tuned into their own acquaintances.
Cindy Coates approached us. Seeing her coming, I braced myself to bolt for the front door, but she charged too fast to go anywhere. This prosthetic resembled a regular human leg, and was hence less exotic than the running blade. Managing the subtle terrain of the lawn, I couldn’t detect any lopsidedness when she walked. She gave us that sporty smile that welcomed me at the café in Alameda. “Getting drunk—good idea.” She clinked Leland’s plastic cup then mine.
I fumbled for something nice to say. “You look pretty.” Dumbass.
“I was pissed at you, but I can understand you doing what you did,” she said. “If things were reversed, I might have done the same.”
“Really?”
“Naw—it was pretty rotten. I mean, come on.” She chuckled. “But I feel bad about socking you with my leg.”
“I feel awful about that.”
“It’s okay. Now I get free coffee whenever I go in. I’d find another café though if I were you—you don’t have many friends there.”
“I’m not much of a coffee drinker.”
“I heard you met Walter today—it’s probably a lot to take in. What did you think?”
“Creepy.”
“He’s a sad little asshole.” I liked her brassiness. She said, “The irony is, I would kick both their asses right now—him and Helena. I was just too young to do it at the time.”
“You’re different than Veda.”
Leland shrugged in a way to suggest he didn’t disagree.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not sure I could be in the same room. He’s like my kryptonite. But if I didn’t know him and he tried that shit today, I’d whoop his ass.” Her candor had surprised me when I first met her, but I started to see some of the true hatred that she still had for them. I could tell she both loathed and feared Walter and Helena, and the lightheartedness was another way of coping. Maybe she was convinced she could cream a jail-hardened convict who’d bulked up since his trial, even with the prosthetic. I wouldn’t contradict her. Her bitterness would have been a natural consequence of the abuse, and her courage, in my opinion, that much more commendable.
Cindy looked around at the other guests. “I’m not sure anyone here would have been able to sit down with that man. It takes some serious gonads.”
“She’s right about that,” seconded Leland. An older woman in a floral sarong waved to Leland Moon from across the yard. He excused himself, and for the first time, left me unattended in his home.
I conferred to Cindy in a sisterly voice, “Why are all these people here?”
She seemed surprised I didn’t know. “It’s a periodic get-together that the Moons run. Leland and Tesmer built this community so we could all get to know each other. So we know we all have each other’s backs. Like a survivor’s group, except we don’t have round-table talks in a church basement. We get to have parties and eat ribs.”
“A survivor’s group?”
“Everyone who’s been hurt by Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm.”
I took in the number people there, and it didn’t compute. “There are too many families here.” It was hard for me to articulate, because I didn’t want to belittle her
experience or Veda’s. “There were only three children taken.”
She kitten pawed my arm. “I get it now. You still need to get the full picture. Walter Gretsch was only prosecuted for three children.” That fact had been omitted in the articles I’d read.
I thought aloud, “There were more.”
Cindy nodded.
I studied the crowd to see who might have been other victims. Not a whole lot of people our age. My eyes lit on a girl in her late teens. She looked like a ballerina and naturally stood in first position. But she was younger than either Veda or Cindy; too young to have been alive when Walter went to prison. A woman in her late twenties was scooping out a cup of punch. She wore thick librarian glasses and caked-on makeup. A lek of tattooed butterflies started behind her ear and floated to her shoulder. “Is she one?”
“No,” Cindy said, watching me. “No one else lived.” She waited for this to sink in and sipped her sangria.
I stared at her. “How many?”
“We estimate that they abducted eleven. Only two made it out—me and Veda.” The conversation must have brought back memories of the events that led her to the party. Despite her resilience, her spirit faded. She forced herself to perk up again. “What you’re seeing here are parents, brothers and sisters, and some cousins. A couple of close friends, but mainly blood relatives.”
“Is your family here?”
“No. They think it’s weird. They don’t like being around the other families. My dad says they judge them because I’m alive.” For a moment Cindy Coates zoned out, lingering on thoughts of her parents. She lazily looked past me to somewhere on the Moons’ clapboard siding.
Leland rejoined us, standing at Cindy’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked her.
She nodded. He threw an easy arm around her and kissed the top of her head. She relaxed into the hug.
After giving it a moment, Leland asked me, “Can we talk?”
Upstairs might have been an attic in another home. Here, Leland kept an office. Both of us had to duck our heads when we climbed the stairs, and depending on where we stood, either of us might have knocked our skulls on the pitched ceiling. “It’s quiet up here,” he explained. The ramble of conversation was muted but I could still hear it.
He kept it dark up there. I’d been at the house long enough that the sun was setting, and the streetlights flickered on outside the window. They were the brightest lights up there. The window faced the Berkeley Campanile. Underneath it sat an ebony mission desk covered with heaps of papers. The room stretched the full length of the house. At the far end a small bed hid in the shadows. Leland said, “That’s where I sleep when Tesmer and I fight.”
“That bed sees a lot of action, then.”
He sighed, “I’m joking. That’s a guest bed. You don’t laugh much.”
“Depends who I’m with.”
By the top of the stairs hung a vintage gilt frame that corralled a handwritten note on lined notebook paper. Scrawled in loopy ballpoint was “Veda Moon.” I thought this might be the first time his son had written his name. To make friendly banter, I asked, “How old was he when he did this?”
“Twelve. That piece of paper is how they found him.”
Leland sat on a swivel task chair at his desk. “You read the case. You know how Veda was found.” Socratic method.
“They picked him up at a post office.”
“That they did. He’d found a scrap of paper,” he pointed to the frame, “that scrap of paper—and written his name on it. When Walter Gretsch was right there trying to pay the cashier. Do you know the serious testicles it took to do that? Gretsch had already said he’d kill him, and he’d kill his family. Veda had seen what they did to Cindy. And he still wrote this and slipped it underneath the safety glass to the clerk so that Walter couldn’t get it back. That was an act of bravery.”
“It was.”
Next to the desk sat a Kermit-green beanbag. This was as close as I was going to get to a chair. Leland gestured to it, and I obliged by collapsing into the polystyrene beads. When I was in the chair, Leland loomed over me—a similar vantage as when he’d handcuffed me. He leaned forward in the chair and made a chapel spire out of his hands. He tried to convey warmth, but I was immune to his warmth. Try as he might, he couldn’t abuse and manipulate me and expect to come out buddies.
“Everyone needs help. Someone that’s been through what he’s been through needs more help than most.”
Something jangled up the stairs. Emmanuel. I hadn’t thought about the dog in days. Last I checked, Leland was going to drop him back at the shelter for me.
“Veda likes him,” said Leland. The dog hopped in my lap and settled in cozily as I ran my fingers through his coarse fur.
On the wall behind Leland, bulletin boards paneled the wall. Papers leafed off them like ivy. Some showed portrait photographs of kids. Others featured skinnier versions of Helena and Walter. A large topographical map of Northern California was mounted at the center. Colored thumbtacks dotted its landscape. Leland saw my interest. “The yellow tacks represent places where Walter Gretsch lived or worked. The blue ones where Helena lived or worked. You can see there are a number of places where yellow and blue are paired, when they lived together. This map only tracks their activity in the region, although we don’t suspect they did much out of state.”
“They moved around a lot.”
“They did.” He got up from his chair and pointed out different areas of the map. “Largely kept to the general region, but here’s them in Stockton, Pleasanton, then over here in Sebastapol, down in San Rafael, then El Cerrito and a few places in Richmond.” On the map, he’d written dates by each location with a marker. “The green tacks are where children went missing.” Each green tack was a knuckle’s distance away from a pair of yellow and blue. “Here’s an example. Over here in Sebastapol, Walter and Helena rented a studio apartment from 1976 to 1978. In 1978, right before they moved, Gayle Nelson was abducted on the way from school to her house. Seven years old. The path from her home to school was about a quarter mile, and she walked it every day.” His finger landed on a crimson pushpin.
“Where did they find her?”
“They didn’t.”
I counted the green tacks. Eleven, just like Cindy Coates told me. “They didn’t find any of them?”
“The only remains that ever turned up belonged to Julie Diehl. She was captive with Cindy and Veda. They buried her in the dirt under the shed where they kept Cindy and Veda, to discourage them from running.” I remembered what Cindy had told me, and as my next thought formed, he amended himself. “Plus, the portion of Cindy’s leg they cut off and buried there as well.” He tapped one of the children’s portraits. “This was Julie.”
Julie Diehl had been a freckle-faced brunette who wouldn’t smile for the camera.
“You think eight other children were abducted by Walter and Helena?”
“They drove a ratty olive green station wagon, pretty distinctive. Tinted windows in the back. They hollowed out the backseat and installed a box long enough to lock up the kids after they took them. That’s how they transported them without being seen. It was a family-friendly vehicle, so people weren’t as likely to suspect it. Witnesses saw their vehicle around these locations. We have security footage of the car popping up at local gas stations and convenience stores.” He pointed to a few printouts tacked to the board, photographs of the car. They seemed staged, probably taken once they’d impounded the vehicle. The station wagon sat on soft tires and was painted an army green; a color no one wanted, so Walter and Helena might have bought it cheap. The tinted windows back then made the glass purple. It looked dingy, but not so bad I’d immediately call the cops. Leland was right—I’d have remembered that car.
A printout of security camera footage, marked with a time stamp in the lower left, showed a grainier version of the car, but it was definitely the car. You could read the plates on one of the video stills. Higher quality photographs had be
en taken once the car was in custody. The windshield had a hairline crack. For some reason, the cargo space held a red plastic sled, even though it never snowed in the Bay Area. Two photographs showed the backseat—on the surface, it looked like a padded vinyl bench, but when the bench slid to the side, like the top of a coffin, it revealed a hollowed plywood cabinet that could hold a child.
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“That’s all you need in some cases. In addition to the car, witnesses saw both of them wandering around town. Walter and Helena stuck out.”
“This never came up in the trials.”
“For a lot of reasons. They lined the lockbox in the backseat with plastic and bleached it, so we couldn’t pull DNA. We searched, but didn’t have any evidence on the rest of the kids, so we kept a tight case around Veda, Cindy, and Julie.”
“Are you sure that they’re all dead?”
“That’s our educated guess. Walter’s in prison. Helena was in prison for a long time and was just released. If they kept anyone else captive, those kids would have died by now. If the children ran away, they would have been found by now.”
I pointed to the map, dreading his answer to my next question. “You think you’ve accounted for everyone?”
“I hope so, but you never know. What we came up with here is a conservative estimate of all the abductions that are probably tied to Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm. When we started pulling this together, other families came to us thinking that they’d stolen their kids too. We looked at every case. But these are the ones where the patterns matched up.”
“What do you think happened?”
“We think Walter and Helena killed eight children and transported them, in that olive station wagon, to some central burial ground. Someplace tucked away.” He pointed to the middle of the map, a region what would have been easy to drive to from any of the pins. “That what we’re trying to find. We’re trying to find them.”