Authors: James DeVita
A
t the end of their senior year, Gary and Neal Peterson posted a comment on Facebook saying that Melissa Becker and Deborah
Ellison should run for “Queen and Queen” of the prom. Until then the relationship had been pretty discreet, but still, people talked. Plus Gary and Neal had had no luck trying to have sex with Deborah or Melissa all through high school so they had to find some other reason for being turned down besides their own inherent repulsiveness.
The summer before senior year, Melissa lost her leg to the cancer. Deborah had stayed with her as much as possible through the whole ordeal: the follow-ups, the chemo, radiation, physical therapy. Insurance covered only the most basic prosthesis, so Deborah helped organize a fund-raiser to buy Melissa a top-of-the-line artificial leg. She even got along with her mother then, and despite the cancer, it was a good time, a close time, when everyone in Winsome seemed to be a little more thankful for the things they had, when people acted just a little kinder. But that was before it all came out and the town discovered that there was “something going on” between Melissa and Deborah.
“Why are you doing this to us?” her father screamed at her. “Why?”
“Oh my godâthis has nothing to do with you!”
“It doesn't? You know what they're saying about us? The whole town?”
“I could care less what this stupid town thinks!”
“Well, you're going to start caring.” He grabbed Deborah's scrap-book off the hallway table. “This is done! You hear me? It's over!” He tore out the pictures of Melissa.
“Dad, please, no! Dad, stop!”
Deborah's mother stepped into the hallway, “Tom! Tom, what are youâ”
He whirled on her, “Shut up! Get theâjust shut up!”
She retreated to the kitchen, noticeably smaller. The incredible shrinking woman. All fog and vodka. Deborah tried to grab the book from her father, but he wrenched it away, knocking her to the ground. He raised his hand to strike her, but stopped suddenly, his arm trembling. “When you're eighteen,” he said, calmly, “you do whatever you want, but until then, while I'm feeding you and putting clothes on your back, you do what I say. Do you understand me?”
Nothing from Deborah.
He laid out each word for emphasis. “Do you understand me?”
She nodded.
Her father left the house.
Deborah gathered up the pieces of Melissa's pictures.
Her mother stayed in the kitchen the rest of the night.
Later, when things calmed down, Deborah's mother tried to reason with her husband, tried to get him to understand his daughter, or at least to have a mature discussion about the situation. It didn't work. He wasn't built for that kind of conversation. Each attempt quickly escalated into what Deborah called an adult version of a temper tantrum, born of an inherited ignorance, which, tick-like, only burrowed deeper when challenged.
Her mother then brought over the local priest to talk with Deborah and her father. Maybe he could help, she'd thought. But no. The subject was far outside his scope of practice, and the painfully awkward counseling sessions invariably ended up with a generic prescription to pray. So Tom Ellison, devout man that he was, dragged his daughter to church every Sunday and knelt beside her on the bishop's spanking new and improved kneelers and made her pray for forgiveness. And she did. She prayed just as she'd been taught. She prayed with every cell in her body and her mind and her heart, and she squeezed her thin fingers together till they hurt and she dug her skinny knees into those friggin' kneelers and she asked her God, with an open heart, she asked him or her or whomever, she asked to know that if this was wrong, if what she felt for Melissa was evil, if it was this horrible abomination that her father kept screaming about, then he or she or whoever should let her know it right then and there.
He or she or whoever made no response.
It was the great scandal of the town, that shithole town with all its petty, ignorant people who had nothing better to do with their time than trying to justify their own worthless existences by trashing everybody else's. Nobody posted comments on Facebook about the not-so-secret drunks in Winsome Bay, or the women sleeping with other women's husbands, or the men having sex with girls twenty years younger than them, or the graying front-pew couple in church who never missed a Sunday but watched hardcore porn behind locked doors while their kids machine-gunned people into masses of bloody flesh on the newest Xbox slaughter game; nobody posted comments about the girls who drank, or did pot or meth or coke, or who had been having sex since they were twelveâno, nobody called Father Ryan and tried to help
them.
That summer the girls were kept apart. Deborah worked at the Subs 'n' Spuds sandwich shop. Dropped off, picked up, and curfewed. Melissa was sent to a camp for disabled athletes in Pennsylvania for six weeks. She returned in August, and still, the families kept them apart. And after the graffiti on the school walls, and the prank phone calls, and Facebook, and the textings, after the looks and the sneers and the laughter from the righteous and religious, Melissa Becker's family moved to Minnesota.
Deborah went off to college in La Crosse.
Melissa died in November.
The cancer had come back. In her lymph system and lungs.
Something spilled out of Deborah that day and never filled again. She had sex, she had relationships, but she never felt that thing again, that flutter in her heart. Her parents had been paying for college and now it made her physically sick to take their money. She dropped out of school and moved back to Winsome. She didn't know why; it was the last place on earth she wanted to be. To spite her parents maybe, she thought, to spite the whole town. She lived in a rundown apartment by the lake. She avoided her parents. Avoided friends. Her father tried to make contact with her. She wouldn't respond to him or anyone. And then the drinking started, and the drugs, and the tattoos, and the piercingsâshe wanted to do things to her body, to brand it, to cut it, to use her body like a huge fuck you scream. She slept with women. They meant nothing. She slept with men. They meant less. She hitched rides to Chicago and whored herself there to pay for drugs and rent. She had sex with Winsome men on drunken nights back at her apartment, thinking,
How's this, Dad? Is this better? Are you happy now? Huh? Are you and Father Ryan and God okay with me now?!
And it might have gone on like that.
But that she met someone.
O
n a good day of writing, when the ideas were really coming, 5:30 in the morning couldn't come quickly enough for Jillian. On a bad day, she dreaded the eerie blue numbers on her digital alarm more than estimated taxes. On this morning, out in her office, writing, coffee in hand by 5:38, the ideas were coming. She'd had a phone interview the day before with a young officer on the Winsome Bay police force, Dan Ehrlich.
J. McClay/Killing/American Forum
Winsome Bay has always been a great place to raise kids. People still leave their doors unlocked and the keys in their cars. You can forget your money at any of the stores in town and come back later to pay, and mail with just your name on it will still find its way to your house.
Mixed in with the local population of Winsome Bay are a lot of refugees, as officer Dan Ehrlich told me, an unassuming man who sounded too young to be a police officer. “Refugees,” he elaborated, are people who have left big cities like New York or Chicago to settle out in the country. Some seem to be running away from something, others seem to be running toward something. They've brought a little diversity to the town too, which ethnically looks a bit like a modern-day Viking settlement: fair skinned, blond, and blue eyed. There are also a number of “hippie types” living around Winsome, said Ehrlich, quickly adding that he meant no disrespect by the term. He stammered the slightest bit before explaining further. A lot of them had moved into the houses of farms that had failed in the late seventies. The two-hundred-acre farms, chopped up and auctioned off into forty-acre lots, were ideal for growing organic produce. A pretty good crowd shows up every Saturday when these farm families come into town in their rubber boots, rain slickers, and Rastafarian hairdos to sell vegetables at the Winsome Bay Farmers' Market, which basically consists of two pickup trucks and a few old card tables. “They're a bit different at some things,” Ehrlich said, “but if weren't for them, there'd be hardly any farming going on here at all.”
This still beautiful community is in danger of being transformed into what most small towns outside of larger cities look like today: a jammed conglomeration of fast-food chains, gas-grocery-liquor stores, and used-car dealerships. Urban sprawl is spreading, quickly, and its negative impact on rural America is undeniable: reduced green space and animal habitats, pollution, economic disparity, petty crime, and drugs. Heroin has had an alarming resurgence here, as well as crystal meth and marijuana.
And now, a murder.
Today, there is a little less winsomeness in Winsome Bay.
Jillian took a break and went back to the house to make some breakfast.
Maybe all of her morning's work wouldn't make it into the final draft, but she thought that fleshing out the location and the feel of the town would help her readers get a greater sense of the world in which this horrible story happened.
The story.
Jillian had been waiting for it to show itself, for it to tassel itself out of the images she'd been living with for so long. That's the way it usually happened for Jillian: An image would strike her and, for some reason, would not leave her alone. It would hound her thoughts. Then she would start to see similar patterns everywhere she looked. The earliest promptings for her story had begun showing themselves long before the murder had even happened.
Jillian had been driving home from a swim meet with Michael. It was late. As they drove into town, they passed a carnival, one of those traveling companies you often see in school or church parking lots: kind of seedy, kind of fun, all the rides just a little too greasy and dirty, like the people running them. This one had been set up on a large expanse of lawn in front of the high school. A giant red-and-white-striped tent stood center, patched up and stitched together with wide knots of graying sutures, mendings from years of teardowns and put-ups. There were games and rides, loud mechanical music, food stations, barkers, a glittering of colored lights flashing on and off everywhere you lookedâa mobile Chuck E. Cheese, only outdoors. As Jillian drove past, Michael asked if they could stop. It was late and she was tired, so Jillian said they could go tomorrow. They won't be there tomorrow, Michael complained, they'll be gone. Of course they'll be there, Jillian said. They've just set everything up. They'll be there for the whole weekend.
The next morning the carnival was gone. Completely. Nothing, not a piece of litter left behind. The only thing left was the massive impression it had made on the ground. The grasses had all been matted down where it once stood, a footprint the size of half a football field. For months Jillian had no idea why that image stayed with her. Then, over time, its meaning started to show itselfâor she started to
give
it meaningâshe wasn't exactly sure how it worked. She started to believe
that the image had something to do with a
disappearing
of some kind. How could something so vibrant, so big, have vanished so quickly? The impression marks obsessed her, the matted-down image of the grasses, the
footprints
that people or things leave behind after their actual physical presence is gone.
Then she read about the disappearance of a young Chicago woman and the discovery of her body in the small town of Winsome Bay, not far from her home. In the article, the woman who had discovered the body described what she had first seen as a dark
impression
in a grassy field. The hay in this area had all been matted down, leaving a shadowy
footprint
of the body.
A body.
That's what her writer's mind had been hovering around. As soon as she'd read about the murder, the ideas in her mind started to click. She knew a story was there, a good story, and one that only she could write. It felt very odd when she'd first read about the killing in her local paper, but also very right. The words used to describe the discovery of the body were nearly identical to Jillian's own musings about the disappearing carnival. It was as if the image in her head had refused to leave until it found the story it belonged to, as if it somehow knew that Deborah Ellison was going to be murdered. In Jillian's still creepier Stephen Kingâlike thoughts, it almost felt as if her image had caused the murder. A pang of guilt flitted through her as she thought this, but she chased it away. It was ridiculous. No, if anything, she was feeling more and more that she was being drawn to this story for some greater reason. Deborah Ellison's story needed to be told. A young life so horribly ended. And now her obsession had purpose. Yes, yes, she thought, realizing that it was a very different story she was writing this time.
And it wasn't for children.
D
eborah stacked the plastic plates she'd bought at Saint Vincent De-Paul's into an empty, newspaper-lined, white cupboard. They reminded her of the miniature mess kit plates that she used to play with as a little girl, part of a collection of G.I. Joe accessories that she'd bought for twenty-five cents at a yard sale, for her Barbie doll. G.I. Joe's mini mess kit opened on a flimsy plastic hinge. One half of it was a frying pan and the other was a tiny gray tray divided into three separate compartments
to keep G.I. Joe'sânow Barbie'sâfood in order. There was a teeny fork and a teeny knife and an even teenier cup. Deborah used to take sandwich meat and tear off a little piece and put it into the largest section of the plate to look like a steak. A pea or a kernel of corn would go into the next largest section, and nothing for dessert. Even though Barbie hiked trails, built lean-tos, and chopped firewood, she still had to watch her figure.