The Comfort of Monsters

by Willa C. Richards

  “Okay,” Suze said.

  Pete frowned. “Should we wait to be sure?” he asked Ma.

  Half her body began to shake convulsively. “I have waited,” she said. “Now you want me to wait longer?”

  “No, Mama,” he said. “I just thought . . . I don’t know.”

  There was a bout of silence in the car. I felt compelled suddenly to confess something, though I’d never really been able to explain what I felt most guilty about, and I sensed then that even if I had ever been capable of saying it, no one in my family would have understood.

  In the end, Ma was forced to wait anyway. Though DNA testing on the fragments could be done in a matter of days, the state crime lab in Madison, which was the only accredited lab in the state, had a backlog of more than eight hundred samples. Most of the samples were from untested rape kits. They said it could take months, even years, for us to get a definitive answer. Pete, Ma, and I sent in our own samples for comparison.

  September 1991

  In September, authorities found hundreds of tiny bone fragments in an Ohio woodland near the serial killer’s childhood home. They identified one man by a vertebra and a molar. But there were some remains they could not put to a name. This meant there were many families out there just like mine. The serial killer was charged with sixteen separate counts of murder, and though some people suspected he’d killed many more men, he said he had confessed to all his murders. His lawyers began to pursue a guilty but insane plea. They rounded up all kinds of experts—psychologists and psychiatrists who argued that he suffered from borderline personality disorder, alcohol dependence, schizotypal personality disorder, necrophilia, and psychotic disorder. They said he was driven by impulses he could not control. I didn’t understand how this was a defense. I wasn’t alone.

  Pete was the one who first saw the announcement. The new firefighting recruits were holding their annual inauguration at the end of the summer. There was a list of names—men who were to be inducted into the Milwaukee Fire Department. Frank’s “real” name was on that list. I couldn’t believe it. There was little else, not his sleazy demeanor, or his lack of alibi, or what I believed had been his attempt to frame Leif, or his summer disappearance, that made me more suspicious than that announcement.

  We did not tell Wolski we were going; we’d lost almost all confidence in him by that point. They held the inauguration in a grassy clearing at Lake Park. There were white plastic chairs set up in tight rows, red streamers strung from a stage, and long banquet tables filled with cupcakes. Lake Michigan shone hungry at the bottom of the bluff like a massive blue cenote waiting for a sacrifice. Dee had once shown me a picture of the cenote at Chichén Itzá into which she said the Mayans used to throw virgins. I imagined the gracile skeletons piling at the bottom of the well. I never asked if the women were alive when they were tossed into the well.

  The guests milled about the park, slapping backs and kissing cheeks and shaking hands. Seagulls cried and picked through garbage. The day was still except for the hot energy I could feel pulsing in Peter’s body beside mine. We stayed in the car and watched the clearing fill in with men in black uniforms and white caps. The heat rose in shining waves from their patent-leather shoes. The crowd began to take their seats. There was a feeling of great promise and pride in the air, and I breathed it in from inside the car; I hoped it would renew something that was molding inside me. We waited for Frank.

  Peter saw him first, and I knew only by the way Pete went rigid like a rabbit caught unawares. He stayed perfectly still, except his eyes were tracking. I traced Peter’s gaze to the banquet tables, where Frank helped two children pile cupcakes onto a paper plate. One of the children stuffed an entire cupcake in his mouth. Frank laughed. He wiped frosting from the corner of the boy’s mouth and licked it from his fingers. Peter made moves for the door, groping at his keys, but I steadied him. “After,” I said.

  Peter nodded. From the car, we watched the class graduate. When Frank crossed the stage, there was a sprinkle of applause, one man whistled with his fingers, and one woman yelled his real name, Tony, drawing out the O forever, which turned Frank’s face so red that Peter and I could see it from the car. He grinned, though, with his big blond teeth.

  After the ceremony, the crowd squeezed out of their lawn chairs and celebrated. The smarter guests wandered away to the beer gardens or the bars. I wished suddenly I were one of them; there’s nothing like the feeling of celebrating after a stuffy ceremony. While Frank was within sight, Peter swung open his car door and then slammed it so hard, it startled a few of the guests. I followed his lead, but I had the sinking feeling we were making a mistake. As we approached (we were making a wide approach and using tree cover to stay hidden), I saw Frank had hoisted two children up, one on each hip. They had their legs wrapped tight around his waist, and one looked like he might fall asleep; his limbs were limp against Frank’s body. A woman, maybe Peter’s age, had also fitted herself into Frank. His arms stretched long around all three of them. The woman was stunning, tall, bleached blond, tan, and smartly dressed in a floral shift dress. Her white pumps were sunk into the wet grass. I craned my neck, and my suspicions were confirmed: Frank and the woman wore matching wedding bands. I mimed the wedding ring at Peter, and doubt clouded his face. We stopped at the tree line, watching people tousle the boys’ hair, and laugh at their frosting-caked faces, and beam at Frank’s fit form, and admire the woman’s dress. She had beautiful toned legs.

  “What’s the plan?” I whispered to Pete.

  He didn’t turn to me, but he licked his lips. “He’s got a family,” he murmured. “Kids. I mean, Jesus Christ.”

  The boys shared Frank’s long nose. Peter attempted a step toward Frank but fumbled and caught at a low branch. It snapped loudly, and Frank turned toward us. Peter straightened in the trees, his body poised to approach but seized, and I was reminded again of city rabbits, paralyzed by their own fear of human footsteps. Frank met Peter’s eye. The men had never met, so there was no flash of recognition on Frank’s face. I expected the recognition when he turned to me, but there was no change. His face was steady, a twinge of confusion, maybe, but he did not blink; he was a good actor. The woman had noticed nothing. I kept my eyes on Frank and waited for him to show that he knew me, or to show a shot of pain or regret, but his face stayed solid. He put the boys down and shoved them behind his large frame. Pete began to move, and my heart felt large, heavy, and impossibly wet in my chest.

  “Pete,” I whispered. “Stop.”

  “Why?” he hissed at me. “Why would I?”

  He strode confidently over to the family, and I hung back for a minute. Now I felt paralyzed, unsure what I should do with my feet, my face, my hands. I wanted to be bodyless. I followed my brother.

  Pete stuck his hand out to Frank, who looked at it like a snake.

  “Congratulations, Anthony,” Pete said. “Really well done, man.” A few of Frank’s friends looked on. His wife frowned. Pete’s hand hung awkwardly between them. I made eye contact with the wife from my spot behind Pete. She did a once-over of me and then stepped back, dragging her kids by the hands some distance away from us. Frank slowly offered his hand to Pete in return, and the two shook once before letting go quickly. Pete coughed and then hawked a thick glob of phlegm a few centimeters away from Frank’s freshly polished shoes. “Can we talk for a minute?” Pete said.

  “I really can’t,” Frank said. “We’re about to leave.”

  “When was the last time you saw my sister Candace McBride?”

  “I’m sorry, man. I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Like hell,” I said. “Where is she?” I leaped at him and Pete caught me.

  Frank’s wife kept moving with the children farther and farther away. “Go get in the car,” Frank shouted at her, and she hurried across the field to the lot on the other side of the park.

  “You piece of shit,” I said. “People know about you. Dee’s roommates, her boss.”


  “I don’t know you. I don’t know your sister. If you have any further questions, you can speak to my lawyer.” He held out a business card from some fancy law firm, but Pete and I just looked at it. He dropped it on the ground and then went after his wife and kids.

  I stayed quiet in the car while we drove back to Ma’s house. I swore to let Pete do all the explaining. I couldn’t let them know I felt vindicated. I couldn’t let them know I was relieved by our discovery of Frank’s double life. I couldn’t let them know the immense guilt these feelings created. I knew what this meant—Frank had gotten rid of Dee so he could have that life. The shiny, polished click of his standard-issued shoes across the stage. I wondered if Peter knew now too.

  When we were kids, our parents used to make us help with the yard work on weekends. One of our assigned tasks involved picking up large sticks and branches that had fallen down, so our father could mow the lawn, and also because our mother clearly believed the front lawn looked much better without them. Dee and I collected the branches in tall creepy stick piles that were spread across the grass. Peter would bring the wheelbarrow around and collect each pile to take to the local dump.

  We dreaded these yard-work Saturdays, and one hot afternoon I announced loudly to Dee that I’d never force my own children into such pointless tasks. I must have been thirteen. She turned to me and pointed a spiky, forked branch at my chest. “You said you were never going to have children,” she said. She prodded me, and I pretended to be mortally wounded. I fell backward into one of our piles of sticks. She looked down on me.

  “You can always change your mind, dummy,” I told her. She shrugged, broke the stick she was holding across her knee, and threw it into the pile.

  Once Peter forgot to collect one of our piles, and in the morning, we woke to find someone had used the sticks to spell out Dee’s name in the long grass. We could see it from our bedroom window on the second floor. I thought Dee might be embarrassed, but she went outside in her baby nightgown (white cotton tank dress with faded rose hips on a hem that fell to her shins) and re-collected all the sticks herself. She threw them into Peter’s wheelbarrow and then stood on the front lawn with her hand above her eyes like a surveyor. She was looking for him, as if maybe he’d hid out beneath one of the old pines to catch a glimpse of her reaction, but there was no one there. From our window, I saw the thin impressions of bike tires in a trail down to the street. We never found out who did it, although I suspected Dee knew. She didn’t tell us, but she had many admirers even at eleven.

  When Peter and I got back to Ma’s house, I noticed the lawn. There were so many fallen branches that the grass was hard to see. The grass that was visible was long and in need of a cut. The whole yard had a sad tornado-torn look about it.

  “We should do something about the yard, huh?” I said to Peter.

  “I swear to Christ, Margaret, I don’t know where your head is half the time.” He got out of the car, slammed the door, and went into the house.

  I vowed not to say anything else for the rest of the night. This was my punishment. My head was gone. I was already, at the time, living in the world of memory. I think I realized right then, when I was thinking about the sticks, and as I’m writing this now and comparing my own story to Thomas Alexander’s sad story, that I would live there for the rest of my life. That’s where my head would stay. I wanted to tell Peter, but I didn’t trust myself to say the right thing. I’d never been able to say the right thing. I stayed outside and started collecting sticks. It was still light out, plenty of light left in the day, and I knew I could finish the task. I moved methodically across the whole yard, piling sticks just like Dee and I used to, and I could feel Ma’s and Peter’s eyes on me for as long as it stayed light. When I was done, there were piles of sticks spread all across the yard, and I chose one right in the middle, no tree covering, and I spelled Dee’s name out with the sticks, just like the lovesick kid had done years ago, and underneath her name I wrote, I love you.

  Everybody knows the longer a person is missing, the less likely it becomes that they will be found. I listened to an NPR story on missing persons in America. There was some academic on the show to report on the “surprising fact” that most missing-persons cases in the United States are solved quite quickly. The guy cited all kinds of statistics, lots of feel-good numbers to prove that most people who go missing are returned to their families within days, if not hours. It didn’t seem fair, because these were old people with dementia or general confusion who wandered away from their home or their local grocer and didn’t make it very far before they were tracked down. What he didn’t say was that most children who go missing are not found quickly, and sometimes they’re never found. Many women are never found either. I cringed when he repeated what Wolski had said and what the other MPD officials had said of the boys on the back door of the bars: It’s not a crime in this country to leave your life and start another one someplace else.

  Federal Rules of Evidence

  Article VI. Witnesses

  Rule 612. Writing Used to Refresh a Witness’s Memory

  a) Scope. This rule gives an adverse party certain options when a witness uses a writing to refresh memory: (1) while testifying; or (2) before testifying, if the court decides that justice requires the party to have those options.

  July 2019

  After the excavation, Dana came to see me. Her parents had enrolled her in a new school for the fall, and she’d already started practicing with their swim team. She said she loved being in the water now. Over the past month or so, I’d noticed she had built some bulk in her shoulders. I tried to push away the memory of her heaving in my car, her soggy clothes fogging up the windshield while we drove in silence.

  I said, “You look strong.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Thanks,” she said. She sat down on my couch and took some papers out of her backpack. They looked like files from my boxes, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked me. I eyed her. It was an uncharacteristic question. “About the case, I mean? Do you feel ready?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “But there is a lot I don’t remember.” It pained me to say this out loud. I sensed Dana knew.

  “I can look through what you’ve got again,” she said. “If you want.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got it,” I told her, and I squeezed her knee. She allowed this. “How are things? At home?”

  Dana shrugged. “Dad is—” She paused. “He’s frustrated.” I nodded. They were still giving us the runaround at the crime lab. They said they were doing everything they could to process our samples expediently. Pete had asked Charlie Makon to write a piece for us, but he said he was busy with a bigger story. He’d said it more sensitively, of course, but that’s what he meant. There was always a bigger story. Dr. P said the only way our samples might jump the line would be if there was some public pressure. We had never been capable, it seemed, of drumming that up for Dee.

  “The whole thing is taking longer than we thought,” I said.

  “It’s not just that,” Dana said. “I don’t know if I should tell you this. But I think he’s losing hope.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t think he thinks it’s Aunt Dee anymore.”

  “Why do you say that? Did he tell you that?”

  She shook her head. “I can just tell.”

  I didn’t agree with this assessment, but I didn’t want to argue. “I’ll talk to him,” I offered.

  She shrugged. “Okay. Are you sure you don’t want me to read through the case again? I’ve been going through all the transcripts you’ve got. I might be able to piece a few more things together for you.”

  Maybe I gave in because of fatigue. Maybe I gave in because I loved her and I wanted her to love me back. Did I believe she would be able to see something I couldn’t? I don’t know. I think above all else, I wanted, even if temporarily, to let go. I pushed a stained stack of legal pads toward her, and I was re
warded with a kiss on the cheek.

  September 1991

  When we told Wolski about the inauguration, about Frank’s wife and kids, he said he would go see about the guy after all. He got Frank’s real address, using his real name, from a buddy over at the MFD. Peter wanted to go too, but Wolski said we’d already risked too much when we’d unlawfully entered Frank’s apartment. He’d said he’d had to fudge too much paperwork to make that all go away. Pete was irate. Did I think Peter was capable of killing Frank? I’m convinced now that we are all capable. Over millennia, our brains have gotten very large, and very complex, but I know that the simple animal portion of our brains is still powerful. Why did he leave his dog alone in his apartment? Where was he the whole summer? How long had he lied to Dee about his wife and family in Ohio? Where was he the night she went missing? When was the last time he saw her? Did he send the picture of Leif and me to Wolski?

  Wolski met us at Ma’s to report back on all of Frank’s dumb answers. Frank had thought of everything. This was not impressive. He’d had a long time to formulate these answers—he’d effectively been missing since Dee had been. Apparently, Frank had asked his buddy to take care of the dog while he was back in Ohio, but the asshole had forgotten and abandoned the animal. Frank had allegedly spent most of his summer in Ohio, where his family lived. He had the apartment in Milwaukee as a sublet while he was training for the firefighting exam. I thought it was a hell of a nice place for a firefighter in training. He planned to move the whole family up from Ohio after the inauguration. His wife had a good job at GE and was waiting to be transferred to the Milwaukee branch. The kids’ names were Samuel and Joshua. They were five and seven years old. Frank said he barely knew Dee. He said it was true they’d met at a bar, but they hadn’t had a relationship. It was his word against ours. He said he was at a cookout in his Ohio neighborhood on the Fourth. Wolski said he didn’t act suspiciously or seem perturbed by the interview; Frank said he was happy to help.