It was the first time she had spoken to me in the waking world, and she had been speaking to others before me.
I came through the weeds, trudged up the back lawn, and looked up at the face that came into the kitchen window. I didn't really feel the pull of those shock-blue eyes anymore, and it was easy to break the glance first. I turned and sat on the edge of the concrete patio, drawing up my knees to my chin. I stared out into the woods. What was going to become of me? What would I do if it became public knowledge that you passed out if you stood directly above the burial place of the neglected dead? I bumped my lips gently against my forearm. Maybe growing up was all about the ability to handle loneliness while living with the fact that there were possible outcomes, some horrific, that you could not control.
The doorbell rang inside.
I jerked my head up. It was a strange sound. Since the incident I had not been afforded the opportunity to invite over many "friends," and it was rare we had a caller. I pushed up and moved to the kitchen window. There was a wash of glare on it so I went up on my toes and made a hood with my hands for my eyes to peer through. I moved over to the left a couple of inches. I could not see the whole exchange because of the corner of the hall archway, but I had most of the front doorway in view. It was Mr. Skinner. He was wearing his Sunday best, reddish-orange plaid flood pants, a collared shirt, and a tan leather jacket that went down a bit past the waist. He removed his hat and held it before him. His hands were sort of wringing it. I could not really hear what he said even with the kitchen door standing open, but I could hear that his tone was soft.
I wondered what he could possibly want. An apology? A heart-to-heart? The civil suit had caved weeks before.
Suddenly I saw Mom's elbow pop into view. Her hands were obviously on her hips. Her voice was also unintelligible for all but the tone, but the pitch was of a sharper nature than that to which she had responded. She closed the door, came around the corner of the living room, and went down the far hall toward the garage.
I walked into the house and followed her steps. I walked past the refrigerator, into the utility hallway, and down the two wooden stairs. I stood outside of the screen door and peered into the garage.
It was a woman's space, filled with gardening tools thoughtfully placed on nails in the walls, lawn furniture, a couple of mulch bags neatly piled on top of each other, and a spiffy workbench. There were soldering tools, shears, strips of lead arranged across the surface, and colored glass pieces stacked at the right front corner. Dead soldiers. The stale remains of Mommy's little stained-glass hobby that got ditched when I started having my "problems."
She was by the utility sink. Her long fingers were making the prayer shape, her thumbs tucked under her jaw and her nose pressed between her index fingers. Her shoulders were gently shaking up and down.
"Mom?" I said. I pushed the screen door half open and it squawked.
She ripped her hands from her face and jerked her eyes to the wall in front of her. She was wearing faded jeans and a white cotton shirt that had blue stripes across it. It made her look both cold and fragile. There were tears on her face, but she had cut that particular faucet off to the quick. Rain on marble.
"What is it, Jimmy?" Her face was still looking off at the wall in profile.
"Ma?" I said. I came forward an inch or two, then stayed in the doorway. "Mom, do you love me?"
She looked over slowly.
"I'll always love what you could have been, Jimmy. We'll always have that, I suppose."
I went back to my room and turned up my radio as loud as it could go.
13.
Before I give the violent details of my second and final run-in with Mr. Skinner nine years later, I think it is necessary to talk for a moment about Maryanne. The woman buried in her car, twenty-five feet under the concrete apron at the base of the Route 79 overpass. Maryanne McKusker.
I found out her identity four days after her death.
Mom had not yet begun to drift from me, and we were in that mute aftershock that held loved ones together until the dust settled and they could really think things through. We were also still running on autopilot, our wheels in the grooves of our established patterns and habits. News had always been an absolute requirement before dinner so the both of us could go through life "informed," and with the hoopla surrounding my own case dying down just a bit, we had on NBC, the rabbit-ears antenna thrust all the way over to the fireplace that had on its mantel a picture of me and Ma smiling together at a church picnic last year.
I was watching Ted Johnson shift from one pile of notes to the other, thinking that his fake-me-out voice was more annoying than professional, when he said,
"This just in . . ."
He disappeared and a photograph took his place.
Good legs. Halter top. A woman in her back yard hanging up laundry. The white basket was perched on her hip. The sheets on the line, military gray, were frozen in time, furling around her in swells. Her expression was alluring in its gentle, girlish sarcasm, saying over the shoulder,
"Oh yeah?"
in a wry smirk.
She had straight blonde hair.
"Pictured here is Maryanne McKusker, a kindergarten teacher from Unionville who has been missing now for four days. The daughter of Minister Charles McKusker, she was last seen leaving her home in a rust orange '73 Honda Civic, enroute to Concord University for a training seminar in child psychology. Miss McKusker never made it to her destination, and her father claims she seems to have 'disappeared from the face of the earth.' The Unionville police have not yet officially made a statement confirming that there has been foul play, yet welcome any information leading to this young woman's whereabouts. Maryanne McKusker is five feet, three inches tall. She has green eyes. She is twenty-nine years old."
I glanced over at Mother without turning my head. She was staring at the television with the same general indifference as when Ted Johnson had talked about a four-alarm warehouse fire on Grant Avenue half a minute ago. If she suspected some sort of connection between Maryanne McKusker's last four days and the time elapsed since my confession, she was not letting on.
The good thing was that Unionville sat four towns over from Westville, up the Pike about twenty miles due east. The better thing was that Concord University happened to be three towns due east from Unionville, thirty or so miles in the opposite direction of where she'd made her final resting place.
She sure as hell was not going to any lecture.
And even though I was fairly convinced at that point that it would be amazing if they actually traced her here, this was an intellectual deduction that did not take into account my instincts and emotions.
I never felt safe.
And the nightmares did not get any gentler just because I knew her name. They continued once or twice every night with a horrid, almost mechanistic regularity. She haunted me in the dark and, in return, I decided to stalk her during the day. It was a defensive move. A coping device. I would
know
why she was headed in the wrong direction. It became a hobby, but I figured it out long before it could become a lasting obsession. In fact, I learned the truth before I even completed my first ninth-grade research paper. Of course, I had the advantage over everyone else in that it was far easier to unveil the set-up when I already knew the punch line.
As the summer wound down and I awaited my "trial" before the honorable Rita Moskowitz a few months later, I collected newspapers in my room and followed the investigation. Over a period of weeks the biggest piece of evidence that the Unionville police had uncovered was, in fact, a newspaper. In her room, on the bed, there had been a copy of the
County Gazette,
left closed and folded at the bottom edge of the mattress. The local police had dusted the paper and done every kind of test imaginable, but had come out with nothing but the statement, "At this point we have a number of possible leads, but we have so far found them to be inconclusive." Evidently, it would have been easier if the newspaper had been left open to a certain section, or something had been circled in magic marker, or she had left more of a wrinkle in the corner of a certain page. The inserts and leaflets, however, had been put back and rearranged in perfect order. And Maryanne McKusker's fingerprints were on every single page, all with the thumb on the front, top right corner, and the index finger on the back. Whatever she had been looking for had been mentally noted and passed. She was a subtle, yet thorough reader.
I went to the library on a Saturday in late September when the place was relatively empty, and aimed straight for the periodical room. I found the thing, and placed it beside the most current copy they had of the
Westville Herald.
I kept looking over my shoulder. The last thing I needed was some librarian to wonder why Kyle Skinner's killer was so interested in the sole piece of evidence in the Maryanne McKusker case.
I scanned the more current paper first. The article on the progress of her case was shorter than the one I read at home the day before, and it was obvious that the police were letting this one fade to the unsolved file without much of a fight. They had completed their interviews up at Concord University, and were now "entertaining other leads."
In other words, the newspaper evidence had led them nowhere, and they were moving on to other cases.
I opened the copy of the
Gazette,
and spent a good while with it. There was only a couple of pages of real news—"Penny Becomes Scarce Commodity," "Amax Strike Drags On," "Local Industries Claim Coal Supply Will Withstand." I went through the various sections, spending most of my time with the advertisements and pullouts. Nothing. All dead ends. There were nature walks available in a national park, there was a special on the Johanson Company's supply of backyard pools, there were five pages of personals. I worked out some scenarios in my head, and though there were possibilities, like a female selling a used stereo, none of them made a straight line with Maryanne McKusker's place in Unionville and the Route 79 overpass. I made a second sweep of the
Gazette
and widened my focus to goofy stuff not so "evident." I came up with little else. In the back of my mind I had just noted the futility of the exercise considering the fact that the Unionville police had already made these deductions, when I ran across Rolling Joe's advertisement.
I had initially passed it over because it seemed so silly to be put even in the same paragraph as the person I had imagined Maryanne McKusker to be. Still, the place was local, so I took another look at it.
Rolling Joe was a Sixties dropout going on forty, who thought himself a visionary. He was balding and still holding on to a ponytail. His dingy shop was crammed with nudie posters, bongs, and other various no-no's, like rolling papers and canisters of nitrous oxide commonly known as "whippets." It was all perfectly legal, and most around these parts thought of Rolling Joe as the perfect asshole.
Business was limited, but Joe kept his little business going by feeding on teenagers. I had heard lots of high school kids tested the waters of rebellion and believed for at least a short period of time that it was cool to hang at the head shop.
Clearly, Joe was thinking bigger nowadays. His advertisement read,
"Rolling Joe's Shop of Dreams. Grand Opening Tomorrow! Monday Will Be YOUR Day of Psychedelic Rest. New Flotation Tank. Appointments Only."
Evidently, he came upon the new technology that wound up being later popularized mostly in myth by the William Hurt film titled
Altered States.
Oh yes, Rolling Joe was a trend setter!
Did Maryanne McKusker actually sign up for an appointment for this thing? I was about to wander out to find a phone booth so I could call and ask him to check his log book from a couple of weeks back, but I didn't. First, the police would have done this already, and second there was something about the ad that bothered me. Then I saw it. He called "tomorrow" Monday. We killed her on a Monday.
I turned the paper over to the front page. Of course. I didn't notice it before because the date at the top, just under the slightly perforated edge, had the month and day solely represented by numbers. This was a Sunday paper. That's why it had so many extra flyers. Maryanne had thumbed through it and failed to find what she was looking for. The next day she picked up Monday's paper, saw what she needed or wanted and went directly to it. She was already on the road and either tossed the paper out or left it in the car.
The police probably didn't jump to the conclusion I did because of those extra flyers. Everyone knew the Sunday paper had all the promotional stuff. Was it possible that whatever attracted Maryanne did not make the weekend deadline? Did they or he or she get a discount for having the ad or announcement or bid first shown in an edition with less circulation?
I twisted around and took a look through the doorway. The librarian was in the main lobby, half-cut bird's eye glasses on the end of her nose and a pile of file cards a foot high in front of her. There was a small girl with her mother way over by the children's section, and a guy in an army jacket asleep at the long table by the window. I crept over to the rack and slipped the next day's edition of the
Gazette
off the curled wire. I found what I was looking for in about two minutes.
It was an advertisement as subtle as the side of a cereal box, but to me, it was more than obvious.
NO NAMES NECESSARY
DR. GOLTZ GYN. M.D.
112 BYLINE RD., DEGGSVILLE
555-3865
She had been going to get an abortion. A kill of her own, and the more I thought of the ways that this might not be possible, the more assured I became that it was.
The father? Yes, where the hell was he in all this? Why had he not come forward to claim his right as a player? Was he a secret, ongoing fling, still under cover now because the disappearance would implicate him? Had Maryanne been on her way to see him in stealth? That did not play right somehow. First, why the secret, and second, someone at either end of it, his work buddy or her little phone-gossip friend or someone like that would have known. They would have come forward by now.