Authors: Allison Leotta
“Are you prepared for what will happen if you do this?” Rob said.
“No. But I’m doing it anyway.”
“If you shoot at the king, you’d better kill the king. Because if you don’t, he’ll come after you.”
“I understand.”
“My father took the reports before he retired. I honestly think he didn’t believe the girls. Or if he did, he thought they wanted the coach, and he didn’t think the coach should be punished.”
“But your father didn’t decline the cases,” Anna said. “Not by himself.”
“No. A prosecutor had to do that—or a judge could refuse to sign a warrant.”
“Who?”
“Judge Upperthwaite. And before that, District Attorney Upperthwaite.”
51
I
pressed the clicker, and the garage door slid up, revealing the coach’s gleaming four-car garage. I pulled in, closed the garage door, and turned off the car. The garage was cavernous, brightly lit, and empty. In days past, Coach would have parked many of his automotive toys here. Now, with all his creditors closing in, the Corvette had all four spots to itself.
I got out, went around, and opened the passenger door. Coach crashed into me; I yelped and leaped back. But he was still unconscious. His legs were strapped in, but his arms dangled onto the concrete floor.
I took a deep breath, tucked my hands under his armpits, and pushed his torso back into the seat. It wasn’t easy. You don’t realize how heavy a body is, or how difficult it is to move if the body itself isn’t providing momentum. There was no way I could move his whole body by myself.
But that was okay; I didn’t have to. The door to the house opened and Wendy and Kathy came out. They moved with the efficient calm of competent women who know exactly what they’re doing. Wendy unfolded a wheelchair that was tucked into a corner of the garage. She pushed it to the passenger side of the Corvette and lifted the arm so the seat of the wheelchair was level with the seat of the car. Between the three of us, and with a lot of grunting, we were able to slide his body from the car to the wheelchair.
Kathy brought over a gym bag that held three thick sweatshirts, three pairs of sweatpants, and two rolls of duct tape. We put all the clothes on him, over what he already wore. The sweatshirts were easy enough, but for the pants, two of us had to lift his bottom off the chair while the third slid the waistband over his hips. It took some doing.
When he was more padded than the kid from the Cottonelle ad, we duct-taped his arms to the armrests of the wheelchair, starting with his wrists and wrapping round and round till we got to his armpits. We did the same with his legs, from ankle to thigh, and then his torso, securing him to the back of the chair from hips to chest. When we were done, he looked like a giant silver mummy reigning in a small wheeled throne.
By padding his skin and spreading out the restraints, we minimized pressure points and avoided making indents in his skin. We wanted his body to be perfect when we were done with it.
Wendy went to a side wall and flicked a panel of switches, turning off the outdoor lights. She opened the garage’s side door, and Kathy pushed the unconscious coach out into the backyard. The night was warm, lovely, and black. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that the yard was landscaped beautifully. There was a flagstone patio, with a path leading to the edge of the sandy cliff side. Lake Huron was black and quiet beyond. A wooden ramp led down to the dock.
Wendy wheeled him down to the lake. The wheelchair thumpety-thumped on the wooden slats of the ramp. The bottom of the cove was perfectly secluded. The sandy cliff and the trees shielded us from any neighbor’s eyes. When Wendy stopped the wheelchair, the night was silent except for chirping frogs and water lapping softly on the shore. It was dark except for the stars above. There was no human sound except our breathing.
A pontoon boat was tied to the dock. Wendy said he’d had to sell off his other boats. But this one would work for us. Kathy and I pulled the boat flush with the dock and Wendy pushed the chair on.
The pontoon was a big flat square, surrounded by a long cushioned bench seat. The floor was covered in green AstroTurf. In one corner sat a white plastic bucket. In the middle was a captain’s wheel, which Wendy helmed. She expertly untied the boat, turned on the ignition, and steered us away from the shore. Kathy held on to the wheelchair and put on the brakes so it wouldn’t roll around with the motion.
Lake Huron is big, more than twenty thousand square miles. But I’d say we only went a mile or so from shore. Far enough so that no
one was around, and no one on land could hear anything. When the lights from land were just pinpricks, Wendy turned off the motor. The stars seemed closer than the houses. They blazed bright, with no city lights to compete with. Long ago, the Incas living in the Andes made constellations not from the stars but from the dark spaces between them. That’s what the sky looked like over Lake Huron on that June night.
There was nothing to do until the coach woke up. The three of us sat next to each other on the bench seats.
“You okay?” Wendy asked me.
I nodded. “You?”
“Absolutely.”
We looked to Kathy, who shook her head. She looked like she was going to vomit. She pulled out a flask and took a sip, then held it out to me. I smelled pure vodka and shook my head. She’d been drinking a lot ever since her daughter died. I probably should’ve taken the flask away from her, but at the time, I thought anything that would steady her nerves was good. I held her hand.
It took close to an hour for the coach to come to. He started mumbling, then moving his head. He might’ve tried to move other body parts as well but couldn’t because of the duct tape. Eventually, his eyes blinked open. He looked at the three of us. He looked down at his silver-cocooned body, which must’ve felt like a full-body cast. He looked at the blackness of the lake surrounding him. And he started to scream.
52
Y
ou’re wondering how the three of us agreed to abduct a man, aren’t you? We’re not mobsters. None of us had ever been part of a murderous conspiracy before. We were just three regular women, trying to find a little justice in a man’s world.
You know that Kathy and I were friends forever. But Wendy and I kept in touch, too, over the years. We weren’t social friends. She wouldn’t be comfortable at the dive bars I hung out at, or Kathy’s trailer park. I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable in Wendy’s Junior League meetings or her big pink house, where I might run into the coach. But after that day in Meijer when I saw Wendy’s black eye, we had a bond. We talked on the phone every couple months, just checking up on each other, keeping each other sane. Every so often, she’d come have coffee at my place. I always sent a present for Isabel’s birthday. She sent flowers when I bought my house.
The first time we talked about killing the coach was last spring. The three of us didn’t get together to plot a murder. We got together to garden.
See, Cooper had bought the lots across the street from his farm, to make that community garden. But farming in Detroit is a funny thing. Before you plant a single seed, you need to clear away everything that came before. It was a mess, and he needed hundreds of man-hours. He asked for help, sending out an e-mail to a few friends. They e-mailed a few more friends, and soon it went viral. Someone set up a Facebook page. Everyone in Holly Grove wanted to pitch in. When Cooper came home from the army minus a leg, everyone tried to lend a hand. This was the first time he actually accepted help.
It was a beautiful Saturday in April, a few weeks after Hayley died.
I made Kathy come with. She’d been drinking a lot. I thought the fresh air and sunshine would do her good.
When we got to Cooper’s house, he had put up a sign that said:
THE DETROIT CITY GARDEN CLUB
. Ha. The lots were overgrown with weeds and full of garbage. Our job was gathering all the crap and hauling it into two piles: flammable and nonflammable. There was a lot of it: bricks, pipes, old sinks and TVs, charred wood from the old houses that used to stand there, tree stumps, random trash, you name it.
Wendy came too. She brought her own pair of pink gardening gloves, but she got down in the dirt with everyone else. She has a lot more substance than people give her credit for.
Tons of people showed up that day. It was like a Holly Grove High School reunion. Cooper made us a huge lunch, which we ate on paper plates. Then we hauled more trash and tilled the ground. We got sweaty, dirty, and sore—but in a good way, the kind of exhausted you get from a real workout instead of insomnia.
At the end of the day, there were two massive piles of trash on a few acres of cleared land, all nice brown soil ready for planting. It was a satisfying sight. As the sun was setting, Cooper gave out tins of granola like goody bags to thank people. Folks headed home.
“Will the city come pick this all up?” I asked, gesturing at the two enormous piles.
“Ha,” Cooper said. “I can’t even get the city to come pick up one bag of garbage. I’ve been trying for months.”
“So what will you do with this?”
He gestured to the first pile, the one with bricks, sinks, and nonflammable stuff. “I’ll haul that stuff to the dump.”
“And this one?” I pointed to the second pile, heaped with wood, tree stumps, and paper products.
Cooper smiled. “You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, we do,” Wendy trilled.
“It’s not technically legal.”
I said, “Cool.”
We were the only three volunteers left. Turns out, we three women had a lot in common, though we didn’t know the full extent
of it. At that point, we had nowhere better to go, and holes in our lives we were trying to fill. We were happy to be somewhere with other people. I think we all sensed that loneliness in each other.
Cooper doused the pile of flammable debris with lighter fluid. We each dropped a match onto a section. A massive bonfire whooshed up, the flames reaching high above our heads. It felt like a pagan festival.
It must’ve violated all sorts of city rules, but no authorities showed up. It’s hard to get officials to come to house arsons in Detroit, much less burning trash. Cooper said if he was going to live here, he had to find a way to deal with the trash himself. This was what his family did on the farm; they burned their own garbage.
“I have to do some chores around the orchard,” Cooper said, as the sky grew dark. “Can you guys keep an eye on this?”
“Happy to,” I said.
Kathy got a round of beers out of the cooler and passed them around. The three of us stood watching the fire.
That night had a magical quality. We felt like we were the only people for miles. Maybe it was the fire, or the fact that we spent the day working together, or the beer, but our talk veered toward the sort of truthfulness you don’t usually get in after-dinner conversations.
“Where’s Isabel tonight?” Kathy asked. “With her father?”
“I try to keep her away from her father as much as possible,” Wendy said. “She’s sleeping over at a friend’s house tonight.”
Kathy and I glanced at each other. I asked, “Why do you keep Isabel away from her father?”
Wendy took a sip of beer and looked at me. Her face glowed yellow in the firelight. “Because he’s a pedophile. I expect you know that.”
I felt my eyes get big. Of course I knew it. But I didn’t expect his wife to say it. In all our conversations, she’d never said it before.
I nodded. “But he’s her father. So how can you keep him away from her?”
“That’s a problem. If I file for divorce, he’ll get at least partial custody. And then he’ll have Isabel half the time. Alone.” Wendy looked into the flames. “I don’t know how to protect my daughter from her own father.”
Kathy started sobbing. I had no idea why. I put my arm around her and tried to comfort her. My first thought was that the coach had raped her, too, when she was a kid. In between her sobs, she told us what had happened to Hayley. Before then, I thought Hayley killed herself because of the teasing by other kids. Now Kathy told us that the coach had raped Hayley, and that was what pushed the girl over the brink. Wendy came over and put her arm around Kathy too.
I felt like someone had punched me in the chest. “This is my fault,” I said. Coach Fowler had done exactly the same thing to me when I was Hayley’s age, but I was too ashamed to warn Kathy—or any of the other moms in Holly Grove. Their daughters were vulnerable because I hid what happened to me. Sure, I went to the police, ten years ago, but I folded way too easy when they declined the case.
I should’ve made a fuss. I should’ve gone to the press. I should have done
something.
If I had, Hayley would still be alive. Instead, the coach had been free to keep doing the same thing, again and again, to God knows how many girls over the next decade.
I told them what the coach did to me. I told them why it was my fault. Wendy shook her head. She said, “I’m so sorry. It’s
my
fault more than anybody’s. I had the most to gain from him not being caught. I didn’t know for sure, but I suspected this. The first time we had sex, he was forty and I was a twiggy seventeen. After I had Isabel—after I had a woman’s body—he lost all interest in sex, at least with me. But I didn’t really
want
to know. I wanted to be living the life everyone thought I was living.”
“We could go forward now,” I said.
Wendy shook her head. “He has the town in his pocket. Police, judges, parents—everyone’s on his side. It’s why I’d never be able to win full custody.”
I looked at the pile of burning trash, orange flames against a black
sky. I said, “Sometimes you have to deal with garbage yourself. If the city won’t come and take it, you have to get rid of it your own way.”
Wendy met my gaze and nodded slowly. Her eyes reflected the bonfire. She said, “You have to clear out the ugliness and waste in order to let the beautiful new things grow.”
Kathy said nothing, she just looked at me fearfully. And then she nodded, too.
We made a decision that night. I know it’s not what you believe in, Annie. You believe in working within the system, changing things from the inside. And . . . you’re right. We live in America, not one of those countries where girls are sold as brides, where women are treated as property and have no voice. We could have gone about things differently. And, probably, we should have.