The Comfort of Monsters

by Willa C. Richards

  We sat at the kitchen table to receive the news. My grandfather had made that table when he was a young man, and though it was worn by the time he passed it on to Ma, my father had refinished it beautifully. He’d polished it in the garage until it glowed amber. I rubbed my thumb into a whorl of wood until it shone with grease. Ma only nodded at Wolski’s report as if she’d been briefed already. Peter stared at his hands folded tightly on the table. When Wolski was done, he let us be quiet for a minute, and I admired the space he left for silence. He occasionally showed a gentleness and a compassion that I never would have believed he was capable of when I’d first met him. After some long minutes, he asked, “Do you folks have any questions?”

  I was certain Ma would (she had so many questions for us), but she only shook her head and stood up. She put her arms out to receive Wolski, and he pushed his chair back brusquely, and they hugged. I caught Peter’s eye and he shook his head at me just slightly. I didn’t know what he was trying to communicate. Ma climbed the stairs and we heard her bedroom door shut with a click. Wolski had a line of sweat running down the right side of his face. I had an urge to dab it away. He jerked his head toward the door and motioned for me and Pete to follow him.

  Outside, he lit a cigarette and offered one to me. Pete didn’t flinch when I accepted, and Wolski lit it for me. Maybe Pete figured I was black on the inside anyway. He was maybe right. We had learned all kinds of secrets about each other that summer. I’d learned that Pete was seeing one of Dee’s friends during our informal investigations into her disappearance. He’d met her at Dee’s dorm. I’d never heard of the girl, but she claimed that she and Dee were in drawing together during the spring semester. I saw Peter with the girl in his car outside of Ma’s house late one night. It was dark out, but the sky was purple, and the streetlamps flooded the inside of the car so their faces were lit up. They were arguing. Peter kept tossing anxious glances toward the house. The girl had her hand on the car door. When the argument ended, Peter put his hands on the sides of the girl’s face and drew her into him. They kissed gently, and then he started the car back up and drove her maybe back to her home, or maybe back to the dorm, or maybe to someplace where he could be sure there weren’t any eyes on them. Peter never mentioned the girl to me or Ma.

  I inhaled deeply on the cigarette and blew the smoke up to the sky. Wolski was eyeing the sad stick shrine I’d made on the lawn, and sweat rolled from his temples.

  “She’s a strong woman,” Wolski said. Pete and I nodded, and Pete motioned for him to go on. “I couldn’t do it to her, though.”

  I was getting impatient. “What is it, Gary?” Pete asked him. He almost never used Wolski’s first name, and finally, Wolski wiped the sweat from his temples.

  “Frank, or Tony or whatever, tried to tell me that your sister was a . . . an escort or a call girl type of what have you . . .”

  “Fucking ridiculous,” Pete said. “What was his evidence?”

  “He showed me bank statements, money he’d paid her, I guess. And . . .” His face was pinched. “Pictures . . . of her all dressed up . . . and in compromising . . . situations.”

  “First he says he doesn’t know her and that he never had a relationship with her, and now he says she was a call girl,” I protested. “He’s got so many different stories.” I had a memory of Dee on the bus with her Walkman. I had a memory of opening her closet to stacks of SlimFast cans behind which hung long shimmery dresses. Why hadn’t those dresses seemed suspicious to me? Where had she gotten them? Why did she have them? Maybe I’d assumed they belonged to her absent roommate.

  “Well, he didn’t consider it a relationship. Now, I have to be honest. I felt compelled to investigate this, so I had one of my buddies who has ears in a couple of those . . . agencies ask around.” I wanted to ask Wolski if this was the first time he’d actually done any investigative work by himself, but I held my tongue and let him continue. I knew what he was going to say. People with that kind of lifestyle go missing all the time. “The girls all have fake names, but one company said they had a woman with Candace’s description working for them this summer. They haven’t seen her in about a month, though.”

  Peter shook his head. “You’re an incompetent asshole, you know that? Fuck you, Wolski. Fuck you. I should have believed Peg.”

  I felt my face flush. I could see Wolski was hurt, and I suddenly felt for him, though I hated myself for it. “What description? Did you send her picture?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “I didn’t want to risk it. The fucking Journal. They’re pariahs over there. That’s the last fucking thing you need is for someone to leak the photo, and then there’s a whole news story about how she was a . . .”

  “So what . . . Five-seven? Dark blond hair? Brown eyes? You know that describes half the white girls in this damn city,” I said.

  Wolski shook his head. I still had a hard time looking at the man without seeing the twitching St. Bernard at his feet. Blood does not flow like any other liquid I’ve ever observed. “Dee thought they were going to get married. She thought they were serious. He’s a fucking liar. Why would he agree to meet me? To meet my boyfriend?”

  “He says he never met you either.”

  “We hung out twice!”

  “Now, look, I’m not saying I believe him. I’m just telling you. And there’s something else. Frank was acting so smug the whole time, I thought I’d test him a little bit. Asked if he’d mind if I took a look in his car. He’s no fool. He read me the whole riot act about warrants and reasonable suspicion and what have you. Gave me his lawyer’s card. The whole thing. And then he surprised me. He laughed, said he was just joking, clapped me on the back, led me out to the garage, and handed me his keys. Everything was pretty tidy—a couple of atlases in the glove box and a pack of Marb Reds on the dash. It reminded me of the way his apartment looked—sort of sanitized, you know. But then I looked in the trunk and found a whole bundle full of shovels.” Wolski paused.

  “Fuck,” Peter said.

  “He said his parents own a cemetery, and he helps them out from time to time. We already knew that, though.” Wolski scuffed the toe of his shoe against the stoop. “Look. This guy. I mean. If he didn’t do it, he had something to do with it, and he’s lying through his teeth. I know that. Believe me, I know that. I just want you to know that . . . without a body—”

  “We know,” I interrupted him. “No crime.”

  “I’m sorry, Pete,” Wolski said.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Pete said. “Maybe we should get some more help. I’ve made some appointments with private detectives. I know you’ve got other cases. I’m not saying you’re doing a bad job. I just. I thought we should exhaust all our options. We have to.”

  Wolski inhaled deeply. His eyes narrowed. Pete hadn’t said anything about this to me. Maybe he’d discussed it with Ma.

  “Those people will suck you fucking dry. I’m telling you right now. They are disgusting. They hang around grieving families and sell you a whole bunch of bullshit. I’m not kidding, Pete. Listen to me. They’ll get you on a retainer and they’ll give you less than nothing.”

  Peter turned his back and went inside without a word. I walked Wolski to the car. He seemed surprised by this gesture. I stood on the curb rocking back and forth on the balls of my feet. He turned the engine over, and it hummed awake. He rolled the car windows down and clenched the steering wheel. I leaned into the open passenger window.

  “What about the photo?” I whispered, as if Peter and Ma could hear me from the house over the noisy engine idling.

  Wolski shook his head. “You don’t know Frank sent it,” he said. “There’s no evidence of that.”

  “Who else could it have been?”

  “Honestly, I thought you’d had enough of that photo,” he whispered. “I was ready to let you forget about it. Let it go.” I slammed my fist down on the hood of the police car. Did he think he was protecting me? “That is official City of Milwaukee property, Margaret.
Step away from the vehicle.” I took my keys out—I had a key to my place with Leif, which I was sure, as I stood there on the curb, was collecting so much dust and grime that it was now inhospitable to life, and my house keys, which I never used because our house was always unlocked. I jabbed the end of my apartment key into the passenger side of Wolski’s car and dragged it across the door. The noise broke something inside my ear. He put the car into a jerky first and sputtered away, and I stood there on the curb with the keys clenched in my fist. Across the street, a woman I didn’t recognize was watching me with her hose running at her feet. The water ran to the curb and swirled down the sewer.

  I was embarrassed that I’d keyed Wolski’s car. Peter and I had treated Wolski badly that day. He was an easy target. Hell, he was the only target. He called later that night and left a long voicemail on the home phone. He didn’t seem to care if Ma heard it. Maybe he wanted her to hear it. I think his intentions were good, but much like the rest of us, he never had any idea what he was doing. In the message, he said he wished he was better at his job. He said he wished the department had given him the resources he needed. He said he wished they’d tracked Frank down that first week. He said there was only one piece of knowledge he could pass on to us that might put our souls at ease. He said humans are not so complex as we’d like to believe. They are weak and easily consumed by their own thoughts. When someone commits a crime like murder, it will eat, and eat, and eat away at every part of them, at every part of their life, until it has ruined them and everyone near them. I wished this were true, but I really didn’t know.

  And honestly, I didn’t know how that was supposed to comfort us. Pete said before we’d seen the kids, Joshua and Samuel (Pete got in the habit of saying their names), and the leggy woman at the graduation, that he’d had fantasies about killing Frank. I remember Dee’s pained voice on the phone when I’d told her I’d tell Pete about Frank’s infidelity. Don’t, she’d said, he’ll kill Frank. My brother was capable of this. I had no doubt. He said that sometimes, in order to keep from getting too sad, he’d dream up different ways of killing Frank. He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t want to know. But he said after we saw the kids, Joshua and Samuel, that he began to force himself to quit. He couldn’t believe he’d turned into the kind of man who would ruin a family. But he said it was hard to control the fantasies, and he doubted they’d ever go away completely. Now I was scared of him too.

  November 2019

  When the results did come in, Ma refused to believe them. I’ll admit I also had a difficult time accepting the data. The state crime lab in Madison reported that there was absolutely no overlap in our DNA samples and the DNA of the bone fragments they’d analyzed. There was no chance the fragments belonged to Dee. Dr. P corroborated this assessment when she noted that, given the advanced decomposition of the fragments and the associated coffin, the individual was likely interred between 1870 and 1920. Further, given the soil strata, the grave had likely been disturbed and the coffin’s original remains scattered. Apparently, someone had emptied the coffin of most of its original contents and buried the dresses and the dog there more recently. Dr. P said she would not conjecture beyond that.

  Months later, when a backhoe stripped that same plot of land and they excavated a thousand tightly packed graves, including some coffins that had been stuffed with medical waste—parts of humans, and waste from dissections, and other unspeakable things in jars—they didn’t know who those people were either. Milwaukee had a bad problem with losing track of its people, the living and the dead alike.

  Ma didn’t care. She wanted the bones buried next to her anyway. She believed they were Dee’s. We didn’t know what to do. Over and over, she called Dr. P, who told her there was no possibility that they could give the bones to her because it was illegal to do so. Ma called the Journal Sentinel, who refused to engage. She called our congresswoman, who said what politicians always say—I’ll see what I can do. Ultimately, what she could do was very little. Ma became irate and inconsolable. She would throw things at us when we visited her. She smashed all of our photos except Dee’s. The nursing home tried to put her on sedatives, but she refused to take them. She felt she’d come closer than ever before, and now she was being deliberately denied solace. Most days I felt the same way. I had also believed the results would be conclusive, because I’d sunk so much energy into my case against Frank. But I knew I couldn’t and shouldn’t believe any of it now. Still, it wasn’t easy to accept.

  Alexis Patterson’s case came to my mind. Alexis was seven years old when she disappeared on her way to school. The Journal Sentinel covered her story, but there was no outpouring of support from around the world, and there was barely any national coverage. In fact, a white supremacist, who was later arrested (but not prosecuted), posted hateful flyers near America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee asking why any white person would care about the disappearance of a Black child. The national outlets seemed, largely, through apathy, to endorse this hateful man’s perspective.

  Alexis Patterson was never found. Her family endured far worse than mine: racism, national indifference, bogus tips, and futile citywide searches. Divers skimmed the muck of the Milwaukee River’s bottom: nothing. Much later, an Ohioan claimed his wife, who had no memories of her childhood, was Alexis Patterson. The Sentinel covered this development, too. This woman had a scar under her left eye that matched the scar seven-year-old Alexis had. The Sentinel called this woman, who by then had two children of her own, and she said only, “I am not that girl. That is a ridiculous question.” Police said that, given the woman’s age (she was seven years older than Alexis would have been), it was unlikely this Ohioan was the missing child. But Alexis Patterson’s mother said, “My heart is telling me this is my child. My baby is coming home.”

  I understood this sentiment perfectly. So did my mother.

  In the wake of the results, I realized that my case against Frank, especially without Dee’s body, was exactly as Dana had described: very weak. It wasn’t that I no longer believed Frank was guilty; I believed it more strongly than ever. But in this retelling, I saw that I had somehow exposed my own complicities more than I had indicted Frank. As I reviewed the pages I’d lent to Dana, it occurred to me that I’d almost built a case against myself.

  What emerged most clearly from these memories was that I’d kept Dee’s relationship with Frank a secret; I’d never explicitly tried to deter her from seeing him; and perhaps even more unforgivable, I’d acted badly in the days and weeks and months after her disappearance. First I’d been incredulous, then I’d been distracted and confused, and finally, I’d zeroed in on Frank in a way that had left my family frustrated. Against my own will, this was the narrative that had taken shape. Dana corroborated this assessment when she came by to return the pages I’d lent her. She handed them back to me with an old transcript stapled to the top. I didn’t recognize it.

  “Would you be okay if I asked you a few more questions?”

  I shrugged. I’d promised myself in the days after we got the results that this time I was really done. Maybe I’d go through the study and clear out some of the files. Maybe I’d finally clean up the apartment. Maybe I’d even try to leave the bounds of the city. (I knew this was all a reach.)

  “I don’t know what else there is to ask,” I told her.

  “Does anyone else know about the photo you showed me?”

  “Wolski. It’s in the police records. That’s it.”

  “Has my dad ever seen it?”

  Even decades later, I blushed. I shook my head. “Not that I know. Thomas Alexander, he seemed to know about it. Not sure how. Leif thought Erik had seen it too. I don’t think so, though.”

  Dana thought on that for a minute. “The photo. What happened that day,” she said. “It’s why you blame yourself . . . for what happened to Dee.”

  “Oh, baby,” I said. “I mean. It’s complicated. I don’t really blame myself.”

  “You do, though,” she said. �
��I know. I’ve seen it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They made a transcript with you too. I found it.”

  “A transcript?”

  “An interview like they did for everybody else . . . Leif and Dee’s roommates and her friends. I found yours too.”

  “I don’t remember any interview,” I said.

  She pointed at the transcript she’d stapled to the top of the case. “Read it,” she told me.

  “Okay, okay, I will,” I assured her.

  Interstitial

  Name: Margaret McBride

  Relation: Dee’s sister

  Date: July 29, 1991

  Interviewer: Suze

  Location: Ma’s House

  Suze: You’re sure you want to do this now?

  Peg: I’m fine. I’m good.

  Suze: Okay. Why did you keep Dee’s relationship with Frank a secret?

  Peg: She asked me to. She said she knew you and Ma and Pete wouldn’t like it. Wouldn’t like him.

  Suze: Why did she think that?

  Peg: He’s older. He’s a player, you know? Honestly, he’s a piece of shit.

  Suze: Why do you say that?

  Peg: He’s a liar and a cheater.

  Suze: You met him?

  Peg: Yeah, twice.

  Suze: When was the last time you saw him?

  Peg: I don’t remember. Beginning of the summer, maybe? I didn’t like him. Leif didn’t like him, so we didn’t hang out. Leif and him got into a fight.

  Suze: Okay. So when was the last time you saw Dee?

  Peg: The Fourth of July.