The Comfort of Monsters

by Willa C. Richards

“What happened to you?”

  “I got mugged,” I said.

  “Mugged,” Pete repeated. His eyes narrowed to slits.

  “Let’s go. I’m ready.”

  I went into the bedroom where I started throwing dirty clothes into a duffel bag, into which I also threw Fear of Flying and my birth control pills. There was a great crash from the other room. When I went into the living room, Peter had punched a hole in our wall.

  “I’ll be outside,” he said.

  Peter was smoking on the stoop, and when I came out, he flicked his cigarette butt into an old gallon-size pickle jar that Leif used as an ashtray. Peter took my duffel from me, which was annoying but I wasn’t about to say, and he threw it into the trunk, opened the passenger door for me, then started the engine. I got into the car and looked at the apartment: the peeling paint, the ill-fitted windows, the scruffy grass in what passed for the front lawn.

  Before we drove away, Peter said, “Goddamn. When Ma finds out about this. She’s already catatonic on account of Candace. If you hadn’t answered the damn phone, I swear. She was a day away from filing a report for you too. But we also know how you can be . . .” He eyed me. “Sometimes you fall off the grid. But Dee . . . Dee never misses her dates with Ma.”

  I turned to the window. I pulled the mirror down from the visor and set to powdering away the fading scars.

  “She’s really missing?” I asked Peter. He gave one tight nod. My stomach clenched, and I felt instantly carsick. I tried to process the information, but it seemed like it was happening to another version of myself in another world.

  “How come you didn’t know?” He eyed me. “You two have one of your fights?”

  Images from the Fourth flashed hot on the back of my eyelids when I blinked.

  “Something like that,” I said. I was afraid to ask, but I needed to know: “How long has it been?”

  “I don’t know, Peg,” he said grimly. “You tell me. Officially or unofficially? Ma filed the report on the ninth. Dee had promised to do Ma’s hair that morning, nine a.m., and you know Ma. You gotta be on time. Dee didn’t show. Ma drove to her dorm. Her roommate said she’d seen Dee pack a bag on the third. All of which you would have fucking known if you’d answered the goddamn phone.” He paused. He breathed. “What the hell happened between you two?”

  I swallowed. Tried to get the days straight. “The day before the Fourth, Dee called me to say that she’d found Frank out.”

  “Who the hell is Frank?”

  “She’s been seeing him . . . since March, at least, I think.”

  “You think?”

  I nodded. Peter’s hands on the wheel were white. His fingernails were tattered and bloody. They looked like they hurt. “This is the first we’re fucking hearing about him.”

  “Well, he’s a piece of shit. She doesn’t want you two to know about him. I honestly didn’t think he would be around as long as he was.” I threw my hands up. He motioned for me to just go on. “Anyway, on the third, she called to tell me that she found another woman’s thong at his place and a driver’s license with another name, issued from Ohio, right? She said she was going to have it out with him, and I convinced her to wait on it and come spend the Fourth with me and Leif.” Peter huffed, but I kept on. “So the night got away from us, and when I woke up, Dee had left without a word.”

  “Hell of a story, Peg,” he said.

  “We need to find Frank. We find Frank, we’ll find Dee. I’m sure of it.” I could hear panic rising in my voice. Pete shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “We should start looking for him now. We don’t need the police. Come on. I know some places we can start.” The bowling alley came to mind. I clawed at my seat belt.

  Pete put his hand on the flat part of my chest. I threw his hand off. “You need to tell the detective.”

  I began to sob then. Long, exhausting wails over which I felt I had no control at all. “Please stop the car,” I cried. “Please. This is crazy. I can find her.”

  “You’re not listening,” Pete said. There was a certain automation to his voice; had he learned this in law school? “We’ve already tried. When we couldn’t reach you. We’ve already tried all that stuff.”

  “You didn’t . . .” I struggled to think clearly. “You couldn’t have . . . You didn’t know about Frank. I have some ideas. We can go now.”

  “You have to tell the detective,” Pete said. “That’s where we’re at with this now. Okay? You’re not getting it, Peg. She has already been gone for at least fourteen days. We need real help now.”

  Fourteen days. Did I even believe that number? I didn’t know what they’d already tried, where they’d already looked, so maybe I still wasn’t convinced. I thought maybe Frank had tried to make up for his bad behavior by taking Dee on some gaudy trip to the Dells or Door County. Or maybe she was holed up with Erik in a high-ceilinged Walker’s Point loft belonging to one of Erik’s flavors of the moment. I didn’t dare voice these hypotheses to Pete, who I could tell was losing patience with my incredulity. Fourteen days? It wasn’t possible.

  I clutched at my seat belt. Milwaukee gushed by me in my peripherals; I felt I was being swallowed by its pathetic skyline. Peter drove white-knuckled and hunched over the steering wheel like we were about to hit heavy rain, though the sky was blue enough to see through.

  Federal Rules of Evidence

  Article VI. Witnesses

  Rule 601. Competency to Testify in General

  Every person is competent to be a witness unless these rules provide otherwise.

  May 2019

  Before the third, and what would turn out to be the final, session with Thomas Alexander, I went to meet with my mother privately. It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t somewhat disturbed by the conversation I’d had with Dana about my files. I wanted to know what my mother thought of the psychic’s version of events, or maybe I wanted her to refute what Dana had said. I wanted her to tell me that what I had, what I had spent decades building, would be enough, especially once we found Dee.

  My mother was surprised to see me. When I walked in her room, her eyes were closed, and when she tried to flutter them open, only the right eye came awake. She pushed her left eyelid open with her right index finger. I sat on her bed. She looked smaller than I ever remembered, and her skin was translucent and stretched tight over her bones.

  “I’m so tired, baby,” she said.

  I nodded. “Me too,” I admitted.

  “Would you read to me?” She motioned toward a copy of My Ántonia.

  “Okay, Mama,” I said. “But I want to ask you something first.”

  She frowned slightly. She knew what it meant when our conversations began this way. It also occurred to me that she thought I’d come only to visit: to be with her. I cursed myself for not doing that more often, especially since the prognosis.

  “Is it true what you said?” I asked her. “You don’t care what happened anymore?”

  “Of course I care,” she said. She broke eye contact. “But knowing won’t change anything for me one way or the other.”

  I thought on this. That was how we were different. I believed it would change everything for me. I felt sometimes that I would be consumed by the unknowable. This was why I’d worked so hard to build my own case against Frank, because it’s always easier to believe in something, no matter how flawed, than to believe in nothing and to admit you know nothing. Hardly anyone ever admits this. It was only at the end of her life that my mother was able to do so.

  “So if Frank—if the person who did this to Dee—gets away with it forever, you think you’ll feel the same way, the exact same way, as if he is arrested, tried, and sent to jail?”

  She shook her head. “I just want her next to me. Finding her is enough. It has to be.”

  “It’s not enough.” I felt myself becoming frustrated, which often made me feel like a child again, especially in front of my mother.

  She softened her tone. “Peg, baby, we’ve had this discussion. Why
are you pressing it again?”

  “Because I think this time is different.” My mother looked at me, eyes narrowing, her jaw beginning to tense. “I think this time I’m going to get him,” I kept on. I began to tell her a little bit about the files I had and how Dana was helping me. I tried to explain to her why this time felt different. When I’d exhausted myself, she gasped, drawing in air as if she were breathing through a straw and couldn’t get enough. She was aware that if she told me what she really thought, it would break me, so she did what we do when we cannot bear to be honest with our loved ones: She said nothing. She motioned at her book again. This time I opened it.

  My mother was drifting off to sleep when Suze arrived. My aunt seemed surprised to see me there, which I took very personally. As if I never visited my mother. When Suze saw her sister sleeping, she gestured for me to step into the hallway so we could chat. Outside Ma’s room, she wrapped me in a tight hug. I leaned in to it for a second.

  “I wanted to ask,” she said. A nurse smiled at us as she hurried past. Suze produced a forced half smile, then turned back to me. “What’s your feeling on these sessions—do you think we have a shot?”

  I wondered if she’d come to Ma’s for the same reason I had—to gauge Ma’s hope. Suze needed to know how she should prepare. It occurred to me then that we were all pretending at something for one another’s benefit. It’s hard enough to gauge your own capacity for faith, let alone someone else’s.

  “I think—” I paused. I wanted to be careful. I wanted to be honest. “I think we’re going to find her this time.” I saw a twinge of disappointment on my aunt’s face, or maybe it was something else. A feeling we had no name for: hope, but sicker and murkier. A kind of troglobite.

  She nodded. “Me too.” She looked past me into the dark cave of a room where her sister was dying. “Me too,” she repeated. It frightened me to admit that I had no idea if this was what she really felt.

  July 1991

  Our detective, Pete told me, was Gary Wolski, Jr. No relation, apparently, to the bar, whose bumper stickers were plastered all over the city of Milwaukee: I Closed Wolski’s. I had once closed Wolski’s too, with Dee no less, but we were underage, so we didn’t think we should wait around for the sticker. I also didn’t have a car at the time. Peter and I met Wolski Jr. at the Milwaukee Police Department, which was in an odd part of the city, home also to the coroner’s office, the morgue, the courthouse, and several very old, very grand churches whose stained glass windows had been removed or boarded up to prevent looting. The freeway interchange hovered above the surface streets and cast long, permanent shadows on the buildings beneath. In 1997 a muralist painted the walls of the on-ramps with three full-size blue whales and two calves swimming through deep blue ocean and thick kelp forests. The whales’ eyes were trained on the Grecian columns of the Milwaukee County Courthouse. It became the only beautiful part of that section of the city. Not long after they’d dedicated the mural, Milwaukee redirected the highway and demolished the mural in the process. Dee never saw it, but I knew she would have loved the painting.

  Because of the wind off the lake, this was also the part of the city where all of the floating garbage collected and stayed—stray newspapers, egg cartons, plastic bags, condom wrappers, cigarette butts. Heaps of garbage piled up in the street corners, wound around lampposts and electrical poles, and got caught in fences and underneath car tires. The city didn’t seem to mind that their political headquarters were situated in the filthiest part of the city, which is to say I never saw anyone trying to clean any of it up.

  MPD HQ was housed in a tall, skinny building with very few windows. As soon as Peter and I pulled up, I wanted to leave. The perimeter of the property was ringed by news vans. The spirals of their satellites made the city block look like a Dr. Seuss book. Reporters had flocked from across the nation to cover the Milwaukee Cannibal.

  Newscasters milled about on the sidewalk and in the street. One man was eating a hot dog, the yellow mustard dripping down his chin. He wore a fedora and was clutching a microphone in his hot dog–free hand. He caught my eye and headed in our direction. Instinctively, I touched Peter’s wrist, and he turned toward the reporter. Maybe Peter’s face deterred the man, because he stopped short and busied himself with the remainder of his hot dog.

  “What are they waiting here for?” I asked Peter.

  He shrugged. “Fucking vultures,” he said.

  In what dark corner of the city were they keeping the serial killer? They’d started warning parents about letting their kids watch the news because the coverage was so gruesome. Pictures, he’d kept hundreds of pictures of the men he’d murdered, and pictures of the procedures of these murders, in a drawer in his bedroom. He had wanted to be caught.

  Tracy Edwards, the man who’d led the police to the serial killer’s home, and thus precipitated his arrest, began an extensive national TV circuit. He was on all the talk shows, and we could trace the sensational crescendo of these interviews from network to network. Of course, he didn’t need to do much to sensationalize; the whole story was about as sensational as it gets. This man, like Konerak Sinthasomphone before him, had escaped in handcuffs from the apartment. He’d flagged down a pair of cops on their beat and led them back to the serial killer’s apartment, where a struggle ensued, and where the cops found pictures of mutilated victims and, eventually, the bodies of some of the victims too. On TV, Edwards liked to describe the sound of the serial killer’s scream when he understood he was about to be arrested: a primal scream, a death scream.

  Inside, we took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor. It’s true what they say about some buildings: There was no button for the thirteenth floor. It unnerved me that the police were a superstitious bunch too. Peter and I held our breath, and I refused to make eye contact with him, even though I could feel him trying. His face was fluorescent under the elevator lights.

  Wolski Jr. met us at the elevator. He shook our hands and, to my annoyance, called Peter “Pete” like he was already a part of the family. He was a short man and, at that time, just on the precipice of graying. He seemed to me then the kind of man who took aging very personally and went to great lengths to delay it. I imagined him rising very early and doing push-ups straight out of bed; he seemed like the kind of man who had a punching bag hanging from a hook in his bedroom. He nodded toward a door at the back of a large, open room.

  We wound our way around desks that were mostly empty; phones rang and no one picked them up. I was reminded of those days after Dee had left when Leif and I were coming down and it seemed the phone might never stop ringing, and my stomach ached when I thought I might have missed a call from her.

  Wolski ushered Peter and me in, but Peter shook his head and took a seat near the door. Wolski nodded at him like they had some kind of understanding. This annoyed me too, but I made an effort not to show it.

  “Your mother has already filed the report, so we’ve got most of what we need,” Wolski said.

  “Need for what?” I asked.

  “For the report.”

  I frowned, and Wolski began to eye me like I was slow. Many men believe they are smarter than most women.

  “However, you might be able to fill in some gaps in the days before she went missing, so I’m going to ask you a few questions, and you just answer to the best of your ability.”

  I nodded for him to go ahead.

  “When did you last see Dee?”

  The noise of the shutter echoed in my head. It rattled me to think that image existed somewhere in the world, even if it was only burned backward onto film by light.

  “July Fourth,” I said.

  He shuffled his papers and added something to one of them. The end of his pen was riddled with bite marks. “What did you guys do?”

  “The day before the Fourth, she’d found out her boyfriend—”

  “Hold on,” Wolski said. He put his hand up but continued to write. He did not look at me. “Both your mother and Pete said she
isn’t seeing anyone.”

  “Well, she is. Or was. She doesn’t want my mom or Pete to know because Frank is . . . older.”

  “How much older?”

  “Thirty-five,” I said. “Or that’s what he told Dee.”

  Wolski scribbled and scribbled. “Okay, so she was seeing this . . . Frank? Does Frank have a last name?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “What about an address or a telephone number?”

  I blinked. I realized I had no idea where he lived. I shook my head.

  Wolski frowned. “Okay,” he said. “So what happened on the Fourth?”

  “The day before the Fourth, she called to tell me he was cheating on her. She said she was going to confront him about it, and I told her to wait. She agreed, so I went to pick her up at her dorm. She was a mess, real upset, so we went to get a burger and catch the fireworks together. After the show, we went to bed at my place, and then we went to pick my boyfriend up at Ambrosia at the end of third shift. The three of us spent the Fourth drinking, and Leif and I passed out, and when we woke up, she was gone.”

  Wolski hadn’t raised his head, but he moved the chewed pen furiously. When he did look up, he leaned across the desk toward me. I didn’t like the feeling of his eyes scanning my face.

  “Isn’t it possible she’s left with this . . . Frank and didn’t tell anyone?”

  I shook my head, and bubbles of white light burst in front of me. I was suddenly dizzy, so I put my hands on Wolski’s desk to steady myself. The desk was sticky.

  “I mean . . . I’m not sure. Maybe. Either way, you should find him.”

  “She didn’t tell your mother or Pete about Frank. Seems like she might leave without telling them that. Maybe without even telling you.”

  “Maybe. But I think she would have told me.”

  “Pete said it was hard to reach you. Maybe she did try to tell you.”