by Dawn Mattox
“Bonita was a CO and investigator with the Department of Corrections,” I countered.
Amanda huffed. “It’s because she’s black, isn’t it? Go ahead. Admit it.”
No, it’s because she’s young and beautiful, and I don’t need my husband whoring after another coworker.
“You got me, Amanda. You’re right. I don’t want Jewell because she is black.” I called Amanda’s bluff and laughed to myself as she bolted upright, her eyebrows knocking holes in the ceiling.
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘I don’t want Miss Jewell because she is black.’ What this unit needs is an experienced bilingual Hispanic.” Not to mention possibly bisexual. Bonita didn’t feel like a threat to my marriage.
Amanda acquiesced by lowering one brow, followed by a “Humph.”
I blinked innocently and stroked her ego. “I hear they’re interviewing for a new ’gator over in the Bad Check unit. I bet Jewell could get that position if you use your persuasive skills.”
This is why I get paid the big bucks.
Amanda “Humphed” again, and Bonita got the job.
CHAPTER 5
Paige dabbed at the tears that trickled along her soft round cheeks. Today she had that mystical glow that sometimes highlights pregnancy, although lately her light was periodically overshadowed by dark smudges under bewildered and sometimes vacant eyes.
I wondered for the millionth time how this could possibly be the same woman who, in her pre-pregnant state, dressed like a hooker, walked like an exotic dancer, and dripped oil and vinegar from her tongue.
“Oh, Sunny,” Paige sniffled, “how can you be so nice to me?”
Good question. I had transitioned over the past two years from genuinely admiring Paige and wishing we were girlfriend close to loathing her, to indulging in occasional fantasies of strangulation, to finally—with God’s grace—working on forgiveness and even engaging in occasional random acts of kindness. Our relational journey had been forged through trials of fire and ice. The road Paige and I traveled was a rough road; full of twists and turns, potholes, washouts, and fallen rocks. But I tried—on occasion.
“Oooh, Pandora charms! My favorite! They are totally adorable,” Paige cooed, clasping the box to her chest as she threw me a radiant look of appreciation. “You are spoiling me.”
I winced. Pandora had been fresh out of morning-after pill charms and Planned Parenthood logo charms, so I had gone with cutesy baby charms.
“Let me help you,” I said, popping off her Pandora bracelet to add a silver pacifier and a tiny heart etched with baby footprints.
“Do you know if it’s boy or a girl yet?”
“No.” She sniffed. “I don’t want to know.”
A new thought occurred. “Paige? Have you even been to a doctor?”
“Nice to see you two hard at work.”
I dropped the bracelet, sending charms bouncing across the room at the sound of Jack Savage’s deep voice. My panic got a laugh out of him.
“Nice to know I’m a cheap source of entertainment,” I said, throwing a mock scowl at my boss. “You startled me.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t say, cheap.” He looked distinguished for a man in his fifties. Today he wore a white shirt and tailored black suit that accentuated his salt-and-pepper hair. Jack looked more like a Supreme Court judge than Butte County’s District Attorney.
“Sunny, I got a call from the director of Behavioral Health this morning. They’re requesting that you put together training on working with crime victims who have mental health issues.” He paused, his brow forming a question mark. “Something about cults. Anything I should know about?”
“I had a victim who made some bizarre claims. Amanda suggested that I consult with mental health.”
Jack nodded. “Good idea. I like it. Put together some outreach for the various social services.”
“I’m not qualified.” That, and I would be the laughingstock of my co-workers. A certified nut.
“Maybe not, but you’ll get there. Make a consultation appointment with mental health.” A jittery attorney danced behind Jack, looking as if he was about to hang himself by his necktie, so Jack moved on.
“What was that all about?” Paige asked as she picked up the last of the charms and put them back on her bracelet.
“I worked with a victim last week who claimed to be part of a cult, or drug dealers, or something.”
“You always get the cool cases. Let me help. Please?” Paige looked . . . charming.
I hesitated and then agreed. I wanted her on my good side before moving on to the next topic.
“I thought I saw Travis on my way out last night. Was he here?”
Paige froze, fumbled, and almost sent the charms rolling again. “Travis? Uh-huh. He was here.”
“How is he?” I enlarged my eyes, feigning innocence, even as Paige narrowed hers. Her divorce from Travis was drawing to a conclusion even as the matter of paternity escalated.
If I had a piece of chocolate for every hour I’d spent lying awake at night, puzzling over Paige’s obsessive refusal to disclose the sperm donor, I’d be a walking pimple. Maybe Paige really was on a power trip like Travis said, but sometimes I thought not.
“Travis is okay, I guess. It’s just a guilt trip he’s on, wondering if it’s his kid.”
“Is it?” I tried to maintain an aura of innocence as Paige rolled her eyes in exasperation. We had never talked about my feelings for Travis. Perhaps she felt she had no right to ask me after having an affair with my husband. If that was so, then Paige and I finally agreed on something.
“Give me your cult cases. I love that stuff,” Paige said as she rose to leave. “That would be so sick”—which I took to mean “cool.”
I thought it totally uncool; totally sick, and I hated all that “stuff.” I wanted no part of it but grudgingly set about trying to figure out some kind of training module for social services.
Bonita barged in as Google brought up 286,000 results to the question “What is Satanic Panic?”
“Got a victim?” she queried as she repositioned herself to see my screen. I noticed Bonita was nicely dressed in a dark pantsuit and white collared shirt. I wondered if she had tats on her biceps like Logan’s entwined snakes, imagining her with death heads and a Mexican flag under that unassuming polyester outfit.
“Maybe.” I shook my head, sweeping away thoughts of tattoos. “What do you know about satanic cults?”
“More than I’d like to. I saw enough of that in prison. The problem is that no one believes anything an inmate says.”
Bingo. “Really?” I tried my no-fail eye-batting charm. “Maybe you can do this training for me.”
“No gracias!”
So much for no-fail.
Bonita slapped me down momentarily with a definitive slant to her right brow that acted as a counterweight to the left side of her mouth.
“But I have a friend who might be able to help you. Old ‘Witch-Hunting Wally’ and I worked together at the Leo Chesney facility in Live Oak.” Bonita wrote a phone number on my Post-it pad. “He works in Glenn County now,” she said, “but he investigated a lot of that stuff back in the day.”
I called Old Witch-Hunting Wally to talk about “that stuff,” and he graciously set an appointment for Thursday.
I spent the next few days bouncing between court and research for my PowerPoints. Thursday came quickly.
The stack of boxes on the dolly was almost taller than the person wheeling them into the office. A happy-looking man popped out from behind the stack wearing a cheery smile and a pair of wire-rim glasses that rested on his fleshy red nose. He extended his hand.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but Wally wasn’t wearing a cross or a string of garlic around his neck, and he wasn’t as large or as old as I imagined either. However, he was packing heat, and I briefly considered the possibility of a silver bullet.
“Hi, there! I’m Wallace . . . Wally. I bro
ught you a little something,” he said with a smile that stretched from ear to ear. “No need to return them,” he asserted. “They are all yours,” he said, patting the stack farewell.
My eyes rounded like a pair of full moons on an alien planet. The boxes contained the remnants of past criminal cases: reports, recorded interviews, and crime scene and evidentiary photos that spanned over twenty-five years of investigations. What I found most disturbing was Wally’s exuberance in unloading them.
“Tell me, Wally—how did you ever get into handling ritual abuse cases? And so many?”
“See this?” he said, lowering his laughing eyes and pointing to his head. “I had hair before I took on these cases. Back when I was an investigator in the sheriff’s office.”
Wally glanced at his watch. “Got time for lunch?” he asked, all shiny-faced and expectant.
Within minutes we were headed for a local café. Wally ordered enough food for himself and his clone—and his clone’s clone—while I picked away at a dismal-looking salad.
“The years went by seeing the craziest things,” said Wally, as he thoughtfully chewed on the side of beef. “Pentagrams on barn floors, dead animals that had been surgically dismembered, altars built from piles of stones out in the woods . . . with black candles on top.” He swallowed and continued. “All covered with animal blood. And then the local cemetery—God, the cemetery was a total nightmare. Bodies dug up, fresh graves dug with grave liners placed inside.”
“What’s a grave liner?” I asked, thinking that Wally would’ve made a fine forensic pathologist, doing autopsies over lunch.
“It a liner that looks like a coffin. The coffin actually sits inside of it. But local Satanists used them to bury people alive and then dig them back up again as part of their rituals.”
I swallowed hard, feeling as if the cherry tomato was stuck in my throat.
“That kind of stuff never made the papers,” said Wally, jabbing his fork in the air emphatically, and then he calmed down to muse, “That—and even worse. Like the refrigerator, we found with jars of body parts—disgusting.” He shook his head and took another bite. “That never made the papers either. It was like nobody wanted to talk about it because it was so damned uncomfortable. So . . . unconscionable.”
Wally seemed to snap out of his muse. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess you’re new to this, huh?” And then he gave a little shrug and smiled a mischievous little smile, adding, “I feel sorry for you. It’s a dirty job, but—”
“No witnesses? No prosecution?” I asked.
Wally tipped his head dismissively. “Yeah. Sort of. It’s just that things change as years go by. Nobody talks about it anymore. The crimes didn’t change—won’t change—just the way we respond to them . . . or don’t respond to them, I should say. The era of Satanic Panic was the best thing that ever happened to a Satanist.”
“How so?” I asked, having already lost my appitite.
“Tons of publicity for recruitment followed by decades of disbelief.” Wally tapped his fork on his plate. “You going to eat that salad?”
Grace took a seat on the office sofa, shaking her head as she declined my offer of something to drink. Staring quietly as I read the police report, she played with the zipper on her hoodie, tugging it up and down, up and down.
“Do you believe me?” she pleaded in a hoarse whisper.
I held up a single finger to indicate that I needed another moment to finish reviewing the police report.
Another domestic violence case. Or so I thought.
I didn’t meet with perpetrators, but, then, Grace wasn’t at my office with the usual request to drop charges. All she wanted was for someone to believe her.
It’s not that I didn’t, I just was hoping Grace was no more than a byproduct of being immersed in Wally’s files. Her story did not grab me by the heart at first, but she did have me by the gut. My intuition and indigestion told me that she was telling the truth—a very uncomfortable truth.
The police report stated that Grace’s boyfriend, Nate, had called 911 to say that Grace was tearing up his home and he needed police assistance. Nate met the responding officer out on the lawn with a good buddy attitude, gesturing over his shoulder toward the house and the sound of screaming and breaking glass, saying, “Check this bitch. This is what I have to put up with.”
Nate went on to show the sympathetic officer scratch marks on his cheek, whereupon Grace was promptly arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence.
“The report says you smashed out the windows in Nate’s home.”
“I did,” said Grace. “I was trying to escape, but the officer didn’t believe me.”
“False imprisonment is a serious crime. Tell me more. How did you meet Nate?”
“I was on a softball team with Feather River Parks and Rec, and he slid into me on third base. The next day he showed up at the pizza parlor during my nephew’s birthday party. My nephew, Runny, was turning seven.”
“Runny?”
“It’s Ronnie’s nickname. Anyhow, Nate talked to me for a while and then offered to buy us a pitcher of beer. I said, ‘No thanks,’ but then he got really freaky. He started telling me all kinds of details about Runny—like, where he lives and who his friends are, where he goes to school and stuff like that. Then Nate said that if I ever want to see my nephew alive again, I’d better go with him to his car. So I did.”
“Where did he take you?”
“He took me to a motel.” Her blue eyes clouded over and threatened rain.
“And then?”
“I was there for a really long time. Nate kept me tied me to a bed, and they would come in and take turns whenever they wanted.”
“Who took turns, doing what?”
“His stupid little Devil friends wearing rubber Halloween masks. They fucked me for three days and nights and said I belonged to them. They told me no one would believe me”—Grace hung her head in despair—“and they were right about that.”
“Did you go to the hospital?”
Grace gave me an incredulous look. “No way. If they would kidnap and rape me, what do you think they would do to Runny?”
The tears fell, and Grace panicked when I suggested we get our investigator involved.
“No cops. They’ll kill me!” Her voice ratcheted with tension. “I just needed someone to believe me.” She cast about the room as though Satanists would come out of the woodwork. Again she whispered, “Do you believe me?”
God help me. I did. And in doing so, I stirred a pot of memories best left behind.
“Mom? You got a few minutes?”
“Sure, baby. What’s up? “Starla took a long pull off a joint and offered it to me.
“No thanks. Um, can we take a walk?”
“Yeah. Sure you don’t want a hit?”
“No, Mom. I don’t smoke.”
Starla sniffed a rebuke and then went inside, interrupting her latest boyfriend and Logan in the middle of a business transaction to say that we were taking a walk. We strolled through the orchard, down to the Maidu grinding stones.
Starla didn’t look overjoyed at our mother-daughter reunion. Her infrequent visits had grown scarce. I hadn’t seen her in months, and here she was with someone new. Always someone new. They were looking to score drugs from Logan.
We climbed up to sit together on the moss-covered boulders in the cool forest shade.
“He knocked you up. Am I right?” Tact was never my mother’s strong suit.
“No, Mom—he knocked me out. He used to just push me around. Last month, he punched me in the head and knocked me out. Unconscious.”
Starla stared for a moment, then flitted her hands in the air as if to brush away an annoying insect. “Oh, Sunny. You are so melodramatic. You always have been. That’s your problem. You’re just saying that because your dad used to beat me.”
Starla relit her joint and took another hit. “You just want me to feel sorry for you. Logan’s not so bad. If you weren’t so damned prissy, y
ou wouldn’t be having these problems. You need to lighten up and stop pissing him off. Logan’s wild—but he wouldn’t hurt you.”
Mom was partly right—I was looking for sympathy. I was also looking for compassion. Hell, I was looking for a ticket out. My mother offered none of these. In the end, Starla drove away leaving me feeling even more helpless and hopeless than when she had arrived.
I sighed, recollecting and resurrecting old wounds. The anguish and disregard felt as fresh and raw as a newly picked scab.
I concluded that there was no greater loneliness than having your biggest fear dismissed. There was no deeper feeling of hopelessness than abandonment. There was no more lasting sense of rejection than being called a liar in the face of your truth.
CHAPTER 6
If I hurry, I’ll have just enough time. I pulled into Babies “R” Us and glanced at the time. Ashley’s baby shower started at noon. I tried to beat down feelings of resentment as I gathered my purse.
Not much different than having your best friend win the lottery—you want to be happy for her. But what if she won the lottery the day after my home was foreclosed? Or was getting married as I was filing for divorce? Or landed her dream job the very day I got fired? I may have been Christian, but I was only human.
Watching other people’s dreams come true felt like another test. The old theme of God loves Ashley more than He loves me seemed to grow along with my best friend’s waistline. She would get two kids—I would get none. I shut the car door with a sigh. Sometimes it was hard to know the difference between an act of God and Lady Luck, but then, I guess I was still young in the faith. Or perhaps, growing in faith takes a lifetime.
That said, throwing Ashley a baby shower turned out to be easier than I’d ever imagined. That was the nice thing about being part of a church and having Christian friends. Logan once said that getting Christians to do good deeds was as simple as baiting a hook, that you “only need to dangle the promise of a good deed and they will snap it up.” But that was Logan, not me.