A Checklist for Murder (45 page)

Still, as I reviewed Peernock’s habit of tape-recording practically every aspect of his life, I wondered how she managed to keep the past from haunting her more than it does. For example, many of the family belongings are now in Tasha’s hands by court order. Among the things she hasn’t thrown away are stacks of those tape recordings, accumulated over the years by her father. One tape was made when Tasha was a baby, at two and a half months of age. The tape consists of her infant sounds as Robert pesters her endlessly to “say something” for the microphone. With a music box playing Brahms’s “Lullaby” in the background, he begins with a sickly sweet cooing, urging her on. But when she doesn’t speak (at ten weeks), he badgers her to say something, say something, with growing intensity until she eventually begins to cry. He refuses to pick her up and comfort her until she “says something,” leaving her to cry louder and louder until the child is eventually wailing at the top of her lungs. Robert leaves the tape rolling, on and on. It is apparent on the tape that he does not pick her up. Little Tasha’s mouth stays right next to the microphone while Robert can be heard moving around in the background, doing nothing to comfort her because the infant won’t “say something.” Her punishment for saying no to Daddy had already begun. After a long time Robert’s angry voice finally says, “I don’t think I like that,” and the machine snaps off. He nevertheless saved the tape as a souvenir, for all those years.

I mentioned the tape to her and told her it was only one reason why I was having so much trouble finding the source of her quality of spirit. There were countless others. She sighed and her voice grew quiet, but she began to explain. We talked about my question over the course of several days and the answer slowly came forward as she offered her understanding of herself.

Natasha Peernock grew up in California, in an environment rife with spiritual viewpoints of every kind. She sees
this lifetime as one of many she has had in this world. This time, as a little girl, she was given the maximum strain anyone could possibly carry, but as a result now she has the chance to make the maximum growth in herself. If Robert Peernock is indeed simply the end product of a long line of his own family’s abuses that grew in ferocity until a monster emerged, then it has fallen to a spirit with Tasha’s depth of serenity to overcome the power of that evil.

From her refusal to give in to defeat on the night of the crimes to her stubborn insistence upon taking charge of her own recovery, Tasha took the lead in speaking out for the Peernock family women and in restoring what measure of justice she could.

It’s just that it took everything she had, that’s all.

Tasha finished by saying that she is determined to reap the peace and contentment due to her now, but given her past in this life, she hopes that this might be her last goaround on this particular planet. Even though she has a strong taste for adventure, she would like to try someplace else next time.

After I had already spent months interviewing her for this book, night owls burning up the long-distance lines at two in the morning, I made my last trip out to see Natasha in person. We had become familiar with each other, comfortable in one another’s company. And so, as we sat up one night going over some of the hardest personal issues in the story, she took my hand and brought my fingers up to the side of her face, gently running my fingertips over the bones that were shattered around her eye socket, her cheek, her forehead.

“Can you feel that?” she asked softly.

She didn’t need to ask. It is the track of the monster, left behind like a horror story written in Braille. It must be an
indication of the plastic surgeon’s skill, that her face can look so good while the bones feel so broken under the flesh.

We left it at that and went on to other things. I can feel those bones under my fingertips every time I think of it, as clearly as if I were touching them again. Yet even though the monster track will be there all her life as a reminder of the monster’s passing, Tasha readily agrees that her survival itself is a larger reminder of the track of the Grandfamily that formed around her when everything might otherwise have been lost.

The people in Tasha’s Grandfamily only knew that they had found a time and a place where doing the right thing in the best way they could was the only alternative acceptable to them. For all they knew at the time, they were making those choices alone and they would never see a moment of victory from it. But each one found that he or she had to do it anyway.

Someday some genius in an attic lab somewhere will make special goggles that let the wearer see the millions of lines of glowing energy flashing back and forth among the Grandfamilies of the world like magical webs of light. Until then we can only track their invisible presence by the healing they create, by the strength they give, by the lives they change for the better.

If that mad inventor had had his magic goggles ready back then, any one of us might have been able to put on a pair and see the energy lines of this story’s Grandfamily connections flashing through the air. As the actions of all its members reacted upon one another, they snatched power from demonic hands and restored a measure of justice in the aftermath of evil. Having seen it then, we could have gone on to watch the same process every day with the connections linking our own lives to the lives of countless like-minded people, whether they are strangers or not.

But maybe imaginary goggles work as well. Seeing it in
our mind’s eye might be enough to encourage any one of us to make the tough choices when lesser parts of us would rather take an easy way out. It might be enough to give us heart.

Because we all know the monsters are out there. If we are to believe the toxic news coming nonstop over the media tubes, the monsters are growing in number, prowling the streets with impunity, tapping at the door, scratching at the windows. Nobody needs to invent special goggles to see the monsters. We all know that they are walking free among us, loud in their contempt, bold in their disrespect.

But if we could just get Tasha’s flying saucer repaired and take it for a joyride, high up over the stratosphere, out there where the cold-eyed engineer/astronauts have those life-changing spiritual revelations that cause them to land, grinning ear to ear, talking crazily about the Big Picture, and if some beautiful mad scientist actually did issue sets of those magic Grandfamily goggles right before our own takeoff, then we could peer out of the view port and gaze back down toward the little ball hanging in space and see millions of lines of glowing energy flashing back and forth over the surface of one lonely planet as it rolls through the endless darkness.

The aftermath of the Peernock story is proof of how strong that power is, whether we can actually see any Grandfamily connections around us or not. It is proof that although a society whose values appear to be crumbling in all directions can never endure without a return to higher levels of personal responsibility, the true believers are quietly making their stand. And so there is good reason to dare to be full of hope, to dare to be strong in the determination that we can yet make the world as we know in our hearts it ought to be.

Meanwhile it probably couldn’t hurt to keep those goggles handy.

SELECTED REFERENCES

Brazelton, T. Berry.
Families: Crises and Caring.
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1989.

Fontana, Vincent J.
Save the Family, Save the Child: What We Can Do to Help Children at Risk.
New York: Dutton, 1991.

Layman, Richard.
Child Abuse.
Detroit: Omnigraphics, Inc., 1990.

Moran, Richard (Special Editor).
The Insanity Defense.
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 477. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, Inc., 1985.

Noguchi, Thomas T.
Coroner at Large.
New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1986.

Sarason, Irwin G.
Abnormal Psychology: The Problem of Maladaptive Behavior.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1984.

Strean, Dr. Herbert and Lucy Freeman.
Our Wish to Kill: The Murder in All Our Hearts.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1991.

Swanson, David W.
The Paranoid.
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970.

Willwerth, James.
Badge of Madness.
New York: M. Evans & Co., Inc., Philadelphia: distributed in the U.S. by J. B. Lippincott Co., 1977.

and if nothing else works …

Pawlicki, T. B.
How to Build a Flying Saucer.
New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1981

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The names of certain individuals who are not central to this story have been changed to preserve their privacy. A few small details that have no bearing upon the story’s truth have also been altered, once again in the interests of protecting the privacy of those who have done nothing to warrant the dangers of public exposure.

Concern for this level of privacy is based upon the fact that elements of lethal threat behind this story remain all too real at the time of this writing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The emotional courage of those who agreed to be interviewed on the record for this book is truly admirable. Others spoke only on condition of anonymity, with reservations that were either personal or due to legal restraint. But they also served to round out the truth of the story.

Mark Renie from the American Film Institute gave invaluable commentary upon the early drafts.

The indefatigable Mary Lu Murphy, official court reporter on the Peernock case, was most gracious in allowing access to many volumes of her court transcripts.

Literary agents Al Zuckerman and Todd Wiggins of the Writers House in New York City matched my belief in this story with their own, then performed their prestidigitation in the marketplace with such élan as to make it look easy.

Editor Shawn Coyne gave the story an enthusiastic home. He applied keen editorial skill and his knowledge of the truecrime genre to the honing of the final manuscript. Jacob Hoye shepherded it into galley form and finally on to publication.

And evergreen thanks to personal counselors Laurel Rose, Lynn Benner, Ken Olfson, and Joan Lightfoot, as well as to writer Stewart Stern and to psychology instructor Bill House. Along with Elva Johnson and her magical kitchen roundtable, their generous expressions of belief and support created
miniature versions of themselves who became perpetual residents in my own inner gallery—an unseen circle of fellow travelers who showed up just in time.

A better Grandfamily is not to be found.

PARTING THANKS

to Napoleon Tunafart and The Flashy Boy
for demonstrating jail-break techniques,
to Miss Kitty
for her sensuous lap dancing, and
to Ellie ’n’ Sham
for lovely background vocals
throughout so many of those long, long nights.

Happy trails

Anthony Flacco
attended Missouri State University and received an M.F.A. degree in screenwriting from the American Film Institute. He has written numerous plays, musicals, and screenplays and has acted in both plays and musicals in Chicago and New York. He currently lives in California. This is his first book.

Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036

Copyright © 1995 by Anthony Flacco

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