Authors: Koethi Zan
His wife came out to the entryway to greet us, wiping her hands on her apron as she stepped toward us. We introduced ourselves, but didn’t use our real names.
“What, Dan’s got you standing out there in that heat? Come on in, girls! Have a seat.”
We went into their bright living room and sank into the broad floral-patterned sofas. Wall-to-wall carpeting gave the space an almost womblike feel, and the perfectly controlled climate turned it into its own little biosphere. It was immaculately clean, smelling a little of the fake freshness of powdered room deodorizers.
I was puzzled. I had assumed Sylvia came from a broken or abusive home. Someplace where her self-esteem had been shattered early on, making her vulnerable to someone like Jack. Not this cozy little outpost in the backwoods of America.
Dan Dunham turned to his wife, who was looking at him expectantly.
I wished suddenly we hadn’t come here to disturb this sweet couple who were clearly grieving for their daughter who was as lost to them as I had been to my parents all those years ago. I looked over at Tracy. I could see she was feeling something too. These two people were also victims of Jack Derber. Victims in a different way, but victims nonetheless.
Dan began. “Erline, they are here about Sylvia. She’s not hurt,” he said quickly, “but they’d like to find her to ask her some questions. They think she may be a witness to something.”
“Well,” Erline said, drawing herself up tall and looking off into the distance, “we wouldn’t be able to help you much on that front. She doesn’t have much to do with us these days.”
Dan continued for her. “It’s been over seven years, as a matter of fact, since she left here to join that religious group. I don’t know why she had to go so far away. We’ve got plenty of them right around here. It’s the Bible Belt, after all.”
“How did … how did Sylvia manage to get involved with one so far away?”
He sighed. “It was all on those computers. We don’t have one here at the house, but she would spend hours at the library in town.”
“She found the group online?” I asked, surprised.
He nodded. “There was no stopping Sylvia once she got something in her head. She was twenty when she left, so it was hard for us to tell her what to do.” He shook his head. “I’d hoped she’d at least finish up at the junior college first, though.”
“What was she studying?” asked Tracy.
Erline sighed, “Religion. It was all she cared about then. I could see it was taking over her, and it didn’t seem healthy for a girl her age. But you know, everyone has to find their own way. You can’t live their lives for them.”
“But it was too much,” Dan continued. “Praying all the time, going to religious revivals, church lock-ins, all that stuff. At first I thought maybe she was in love with the young preacher over at Sweetwater. He was a good enough man, despite his profession.” He tried to muster a laugh. “But then he up and married Sue Teneval, over from Andalusia.”
Dan and Erline stared off in different directions, reflecting on their daughter, I supposed. I wondered exactly what she had found at those terminals in the public library.
Then Erline pulled herself back from her thoughts and said, “But I’m being so rude. You ladies must have come pretty far from civilization to make it all the way out here. Can I invite you to supper?”
Tracy nodded almost imperceptibly at me as I thanked Erline for her hospitality.
While Erline prepared dinner, Dan gave us a little tour of the farm. We stepped out into the still-sweltering heat to explore the land where Sylvia had been raised. I somehow hoped I would be able to sense a kinship with her, seeing these fields where she’d spent her youth, where she’d dreamed of her future.
As Tracy and I looked out over the rolling hills, Dan took out a small pocketknife and picked up a stick. He started whittling it, his head down, ignoring the gorgeous sunset that was starting off on the horizon. Finally, he spoke.
“She was a bright girl, our Sylvia. The school said they’d never seen a student score so high on those standardized tests they gave. And she was a delight to be around, warm and helpful and full of
love. It all changed when she hit her teens. People always said it would. We didn’t believe them. We figured she’d go off to some fancy college, and maybe she’d even live someplace like New York City, or even Europe. That we would have been able to handle, even if it meant not seeing her all the time. That’s what we expected. But we never expected the way things turned out.”
“How did it all begin, Mr. Dunham?” I asked.
He went quiet for a moment, holding the stick up close to his face, examining his handiwork.
“The religion thing started her senior year of high school. She would talk to us about it at first—wanting to have deep, philosophical conversations. It really wasn’t my sort of thing, I told her. But I realized if I didn’t discuss it with her, she would shut me out forever. So I went to the library and checked out a bunch of books. I fell asleep most nights trying to get through all of it.
“I only started to worry when she got on the Internet. Soon she was telling us about her ‘religious leader.’ I didn’t know what was really at the root of it. Was it some sort of scam? Were they trying to get money? But she didn’t have any money, and neither did we.”
He tossed aside the first stick, its point now fine, and picked up another.
“She drifted further and further away from us. Barely talking at the dinner table, which had always been the heart of our family life.
“By the time she physically left, she’d really been gone for quite a while. She finally did pack up her bags, though. Told us she was meeting her leader down at the depot in town, and not to worry, she would stay in touch. We tried to go with her, but she wouldn’t have it. She seemed panicked at the suggestion. So we let her go.”
“She left us with only her e-mail address. I set up an account that day, with the librarian’s help. She did e-mail us back a few times, but they trailed off very quickly.”
“Did she … did she write to you when she got married?” I asked tentatively, sure that would touch a nerve but hoping he knew something specific.
He shook his head.
“We hadn’t heard anything from her for two years, and then, when we did, it wasn’t from her. It was in the newspaper. Saying she had been writing these letters to a man in jail, and that she was marrying him. When we looked into it and found out who this man was, Erline just crumpled up in my arms. She cried, and I am not too ashamed to admit that so did I. So did I.” At that he lifted his head up, put his knife in his pocket, and looked out over the hills.
“It’s hard to explain it. Picturing the little girl you raised up out here, on the same land farmed by her grandparents and their parents before them, ending up in the arms of a sick and twisted man. A man who would hurt other girls. Almost anything would be better than thinking your daughter chose a life like that over the life you offered her.”
I saw tears welling up in Dan’s eyes, and I had to turn and walk a few steps away. I wasn’t prepared for this much emotion, and I certainly wasn’t equipped to see the same kind of anguish I had imagined my own parents going through, all those nights I spent in that dungeon. All the nights wishing I could tell them that I was okay. Well, not okay exactly, but alive, and thinking of them.
Tracy kept her eyes on the ground. Here was this man showing an outpouring of love such as she had never known from a parent. I could only imagine it must have hurt her to think it was wasted on this girl who walked away from it all, voluntarily, into the arms of the devil.
But Dan stood upright and wiped his eyes. “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now, I suppose. She’s an adult and can make her own decisions.”
I turned around and walked back over to Dan.
“Mr. Dunham, I know this might be a hard question, but do you happen to have those e-mails she sent you all those years ago?”
Dan pulled himself back to reality. “Well, I know we printed them out back in the day. We can probably dig them up, but I don’t think you’ll find them to be very useful.”
After baked ham and several kinds of deep-fried vegetables, we cleared the table and Dan brought out his old box of files. Marked on a thick folder toward the back was one word:
Sylvia
. He pulled it out, and her life until the age of twenty spilled out before us: her birth certificate, immunization cards, school reports, and class photos tucked in a small pink envelope.
I picked up a photograph.
She was a pretty girl, with sandy blond hair, blue eyes, and a forthright smile. She looked confident, appealing. Dan told me it was the photo from her junior year.
In the next one, she had the same haircut and was only barely older, but her smile was tight and her eyes appeared to be settling on something far away. Dan didn’t have to say a word, but he lingered on that photo for a while before putting it back into the envelope with a sigh.
Erline didn’t leave the kitchen as we sifted through these old memories. I pictured her in that kitchen alone, standing before the darkened window with a pained expression, vigorously scrubbing pot after pot, her hands red and scalded from the dishwater, as we pored over the life of her child reflected in official records.
Finally, Dan thumbed through the last pages at the end of the file, the printed e-mails. Tracy and I looked through them but couldn’t find anything meaningful. They reminded me of Jack’s letters, poetic but nonsensical. But they were also optimistic, idealizing her new life with her leader.
The last e-mail didn’t sound as if it would be the last one. It sounded like an enthusiastic fourteen-year-old, writing home from
camp about finally swimming across the lake. She was thrilled to be “enveloped in this mystical and divine experience,” to have her “dreams made manifest through a true and living miracle.”
I wished it were a letter from camp. A letter with a postmark so we could know where she went from there.
Tracy and I declined Dan and Erline’s offer to stay the night, and instead we drove for more than an hour before finally coming to a brightly lit motel on the side of the highway. Tracy glanced over at me, and I shook my head. I couldn’t do it. She continued on, looking for something bigger and safer. We ended up driving the entire two hours back to Birmingham, where we found the sturdy edifice of a historic hotel in the center of downtown. With valet parking no less.
I felt relieved to be ensconced in the fortlike structure of the hotel, as I dropped my bags onto the soft cream-colored carpet. The room felt like a sanctuary. The sheets of the bed were taut and crisp, the duvet thick. And the paper case of my room keycard had the passcode for the hotel’s Wi-Fi. I was in heaven.
I picked up the remote, turned on the television, and flipped open my laptop. I ran a search on Sylvia Dunham and discovered in seconds that it was a common name. The first hits were the Sylvia Dunham in question, though: the news stories in the small local papers in Oregon and a couple of the Web sites of the bigger news outlets, all articles about her marriage to Jack Derber. The angle most of the stories took was how this evil beast had found love through the mail. They would have been human interest stories, if they had been about an actual human.
One was even written with a humorous slant, filled with crass, silly jokes—calling him “Professor Pain” in the headline—as though Jack had been little more than a comic book villain. When I read it, I slammed my laptop shut so hard, I had to open it back up again to check the screen, to make sure it hadn’t shattered. I
grabbed the remote and turned off the television. I sat in the silence, staring at myself reflected in its blank display.
I didn’t know what I was looking to find in those news stories. I guess I’d wanted to see a more recent picture of her, to see which face of hers was looking back at me—the girl from junior or senior year. But of course there were only pictures of Jack, the star of the story, staring out with his own creepy half-smile.
Could Sylvia really have found that happiness of her junior year being bound to a man like Jack?
I could certainly understand her appeal—that smiling exuberance bursting from that stiff school picture pose. From what I knew of Jack, it must have been enticing for him to meet someone so young, vulnerable, full of life. I could only imagine how he would have treasured her enthusiasm, her naïve ideals. And mostly, how he would have enjoyed putting out that special light of hers with a brutality few could understand as well as I.
CHAPTER 23
The next day Tracy and I set out on our detour to New Orleans. I felt even more anxious than usual because I was impatient to get back out to Oregon to investigate. All the threads of this story were coming together—I could feel it—though in what way I couldn’t yet see. This trip was Tracy’s one condition, though, so I knew we had to go. I wondered where she was taking me, but I didn’t ask any questions, for fear of invading her privacy.
We finally reached New Orleans in the late afternoon. I found myself strangely excited to see it, remembering vividly all the stories Tracy had told us over the years in the cellar. It had sounded so magical.
The French Quarter was indeed beautiful, both stately and ramshackle at once. But as Tracy drove me up and down the streets, she pointed out the gritty landmarks of her childhood: a street corner of panhandlers, a run-down deli, a creepy back alley.
“Not exactly from the tourist brochure, right?” she said, smiling as she parallel parked in front of a seedy diner.
It was only when we returned to the car after a quick bite that I noticed how serious she had become.
“Okay, let’s go.”
I had no idea where we were going, but I nodded. I was always nodding to Tracy, as I did all those years ago when she ruled my life almost as much as Jack Derber had. I noticed she never expected me to do anything other than follow her every command. She never asked me now—as she had never asked me back then—what I thought. I felt a small revolt happening somewhere deep inside, but I stifled it. I owed Tracy at least that much, since she had joined me on this wild journey.