by Larry Crane
“Oh yes. Precisely. Dig down and you’ll see. I’ve done it. The police made careful measurements with a tape. It was evidence presented in the courtroom. The street here between our houses was a dirt roadway leading into the sandpit. The map shows it went in exactly 175 feet from Chapel Road right there. Not 176 feet. 175 feet, exactly.1
“But it’s paved. You can’t dig down.”
“That point is right at the edge of your driveway where it touches our street, Fardale. Fifty-one feet in at a right angle from there, straight into your yard is where they found the brains. Ouch. Sorry to be so specific. That’s exactly at the corner of your garage.”
Marcella closed her eyes tightly, pulled her arms close across her breast, and squeezed her hands into tight fists to fight off the surge of revulsion that rose inside her.
“I don’t want to be ghoulish. It’s gross. I’ve upset you. I’m sorry,” Philomena said.
Marcella gulped. “And the body, where did they find the body?” she said.
“Ten more feet beyond the brains. There was a mound of sandy dirt about six feet high. She was on top of it—or on the back side of it, I should say. You’ve got a beautiful peony clump in your flower garden that’s just below the exact spot. Forgive me, Marcella. I don’t take any pleasure in knowing this, or telling people about it. I really don’t. But it’s wrong to sugarcoat it. The girl was horribly murdered and people should know it wasn’t like she sort of fell down and bruised her knee and died of it or something.”
“I believe you,” Marcella mumbled.
“We wouldn’t have moved here if we knew this before we bought, but now it’s too late.”
“Neither would we,” Marcella said.
“But, I am pleased, you see, in a different way. People around here need to know. They shouldn’t erase it. The girl wants us to know exactly. She’s happy to know that there are people like you who care what happened to her and won’t forget.”
Marcella grabbed Philomena and hugged her, then broke away and looked into her eyes. “You talk as if you know this girl, that you can see her, that you know what she would want if she were actually here with us.”
“I do see her,” Philomena said.
“You dream of her?”
“I see her. Walking up and down the street outside at night, fidgeting and worrying, and muttering to herself. I can’t hear what she says, but I can imagine it. “Don’t let them fudge the facts. Don’t let them. Don’t let them.”
“I’m a believer in ghosts,” Marcella said.
“I’ve seen her, not just once. Would you like to come inside and have a glass of soda, Marcella? Would you like to talk about it more?”
They sat across from each other at Philomena’s built-in breakfast bar in the kitchen. It was an immaculate, ultra-modern kitchen with granite counters, gourmet stove, and stainless steel appliances.
“I went absolutely bonkers when I first found out about this,” Philomena said as she put cheese and crackers out. “I don’t have any good reason, but I dug, literally dug for more information. Call it an obsession.”
“How did the girl get to the sandpit?”
“Smith picked her up and drove her here.”
“She went willingly?”
“I don’t think so. She got in his car, thinking he was just giving her a lift, and before she knew it, he was taking her to a lonely spot, and then he was all over her.”
“She knew him then.”
“Yeah. He was older, married. He’d given her rides before. She was only fifteen.”
“Had given her rides? What was she doing hanging out with married men?”
“She wasn’t doing that. He knew who she was, that’s all. They were acquaintances. She was a good girl, a good student. She wanted to be a cheerleader. She had aspirations.”
“What was her name again?”
“Victoria Zielinski. She lived in Ramsey with her mother and father, two sisters, one older and one younger, and a younger brother.”
“I thought it was Mahwah.”
“The towns are next to each other. We’re maybe two miles from the Zielinski home. Half a mile, give or take, from Smith’s trailer.”
“God, cheek by jowl,” Marcella said.
“You don’t know who’s living next to you. But you know bad things happen to people even if they haven’t happened to you. She was afraid to walk alone to her girlfriend’s house at night along that dark, spooky road. It turns out she was right to be afraid.”
Philomena drank from her glass and then pared some thin slices from the triangular chunk of Jahrlsberg cheese. She stood and went to the kitchen window and looked out toward Marcella’s house across the street. Marcella sat still, reached for a cracker and a slice of cheese, nibbled at the combination, leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “How did you learn all this?” she asked.
“It’s only been fourteen years. The images are razor sharp. It’s as if you have a fourteen-year-old child. Raising her is not a bed of roses, nevertheless you can’t help it, and you curse how fast the time goes. It seems like yesterday you gave her life. That’s the way the people feel who lived here when all this happened. The pain of it is burned into their memory as clear as clear can be. The Kromkas down the street, they remember the exact time when Mary Zielinski, Vickie’s mother, knocked on their door to ask to use their phone. They heard her talking to the police: ‘we found our daughter’s shoe along the road, and her babushka, and there’s blood,’” Philomena said.
“The Kromkas.”
“Go out to the corner and look down Fardale. That’s their house, the first one on the left. “Vickie ran from him, down toward their house.”
Marcella pictured a coal-black night except for faint light coming from windows far off in the distance. She thought she heard—no, heard for sure—labored, desperate gasps coming one after another after another.
“Excuse me, Philomena. I really have to go home. I have to lie down.”
“I have Alka-Seltzer. Let me get it for you,” Philomena said. She darted into the bathroom, then re-emerged with a bottle. She filled a tall glass with water and dropped two tablets in.
“It’s horrifying. I couldn’t sleep at all at first. Maybe this will help,” she said, handing over the glass.
“The worst part is imagining how desperate she must have felt when she realized he was coming after her. He was convicted and he’s rotting in jail, but now, there’s a stream of newspaper and magazine articles making it sound as if he couldn’t have done it, and that the trial was faulty, and even if he did kill her, it was not first-degree murder. But, I keep thinking murder like this is unforgivable. Fourteen years of jail time? It’s nothing. Nothing. I almost died on the operating table having my gallbladder out fourteen years ago. It seems like yesterday.”
How much of this story applies in some way to what happened to my little girl? Marcella thought. Nothing like murder happened to Hannah. I wanted to tell Philomena all about her. Philomena would understand and see the absurdity of them leaving Illinois to come here only to fall into this. But she didn’t want to dissolve into incoherence again talking about Sweetie. So, she pushed the thought away.
* * *
1 Ronald E. Calissi. Counterpoint: the Edgar Smith Case. (Hackensack, N.J.: Manor Book, 1972), 21.
Chapter 15
She was light-headed as she crossed back over, carrying two books Philomena had pressed into her hands. The vision of Victoria scrambling for her life had brought on vertigo. Now, guilt piled up steadily in her mind—guilt at having left Gavin with the chaotic state that the house was in. She approached the open garage door and peeked inside—expecting to see the garage space at least already up to Gavin’s high standard of organization. After all, he was a man who was easily absorbed in the task that was right in front of him to the exclusion of everything else that was going on—little things like moving into a new house.
The time had passed so quickly. For all she knew, she’d spent a couple of
hours at Philomena’s—time enough for him to fully test all of his machinery for functionality and to have all the smaller tools and appurtenances meticulously stowed. Instead, she found the garage much as it was when she sidled out while he had busied himself with the lawn mower—total chaos.
She found him in the kitchen working on a large slice of pie. “I had to go over and thank Philomena for her hospitality,” she said. “Then, we got started gabbing on a bunch of other stuff. I’m sorry I left you in the lurch over here.”
“Did you find out any more about it?” he asked.
“About what?”
“Come on, Marce,” Gavin said, a tolerant look on his face. He studiously kept his eyes off the books.
“Okay. She knows a lot about it.”
“It happened literally right out there?” he asked.
“The street in front was a dirt track leading into the sandpit in ‘57. They found her body right about where the peonies are growing in our garden. The real estate people aren’t exactly broadcasting any of it, judging by how many people have bought places here. We’re the first neighbors to listen to Philomena and show any interest at all in the murder.”
“What do you have there?” Gavin asked, indicating the books. He’d begun stacking empty cardboard boxes that had contained all the pots, pans, bowls, dishes, and silverware they’d brought with them—but he hadn’t put away any of it in the cupboards and drawers. Now, he slid his empty pie plate and fork into the sink and headed for the living room where he stretched out on the couch. Marcella followed.
“She lent me these, Brief Against Death by Edgar Smith, and this one by Ron Calissi, Counterpoint. She’s got about a thousand little snippets of paper marking important sections. She doesn’t need them anymore. She has both of them virtually memorized.”
“Shall we crack them and learn some more?” Gavin asked, taking Smith’s book out of her hands.
“Only if you want to,” she said.
“Wild horses,” Gavin said, settling into one end of the couch.
Marcella scrunched into the other end of the couch with Calissi’s book. “How about this,” she said. “We each crack our book at one of Philomena’s markers at random and read.”
“Screw the boxes and other random shit littering our house,” he said. “They can wait.”
“Screw ‘em,” Marcella said.
Gavin cracked his book open to page six, and read Edgar Smith’s words aloud:
Victoria Zielinski was a very pretty girl. Five foot two, one hundred and twenty pounds, with brown eyes and dark brown, shoulder-length hair. She was an exceptionally well-developed fifteen-year-old, with a figure that belied her age—a fact she knew, was proud of, and made no effort to conceal. To the contrary, her favorite clothes were tight, form-revealing sweaters and blue jeans.1
“I object, your honor,” Marcella said, mimicking an imaginary trial attorney. “Because this low-life jailbird gives a half-assed, self-serving description of the girl that gets printed in a book, she gets tagged as a teenage Jezebel. It’s hearsay and inadmissible.”
“Objection sustained,” Gavin said.
“What kind of man leers at fifteen-year-olds and projects lurid flirtatious urges onto her where there are none?” Marcella asked. She pictured Hannah on her way to school and imagined a man such as Smith watching her from the window of a car.
“Here’s this guy, writing a book and he can say anything he wants,” she said. “So, he trashes the girl he murdered, as much as saying it was her own fault.”
“You think that’s bad, listen to this,” Gavin said. He’d cracked his book to another marker:
She was a confused, physically mature woman-child, fascinated by the older men she had been secretly dating, though apprehensive of the emotions they were able to arouse in her. These secret dates—mostly with men I knew, fellows in their early or mid-twenties—usually were arranged with the connivance of her older sister.2
“What a sensitive, caring man,” Marcella said, dismissively.
Gavin said, “And this, what he says she told him about her father:”
He thinks every guy in town is trying to get in my pants. He always wants to demonstrate what guys will try to do to me, pawing all over me. He makes me sick to my stomach. He’d kill us both if he ever caught me in the car with you.3
“Why in the world would he attack her father like that?”
“Who knows? Maybe to paint him as a violent tyrant? To pin the murder on him,” Gavin offered.
Marcella randomly flipped the pages of Calissi’s book to the paper marker on page forty. She opened the book and saw a black-and-white photograph taken in the sandpit with Edgar Smith, hatless, and dressed in khaki pants, loafers, and a short dark jacket over his shirt, standing in a group of men all wearing long overcoats over business suits, all with neckties, some wearing a hat—obviously the police investigators. 4
She turned the page and saw yet another black-and-white picture at the top of a dirt mound, then another facing in the opposite direction, with the same group of men. In the background, the first house on Fardale Avenue east of Chapel Road appeared, making it the Kromka’s house that Philomena had described. Edgar Smith stands looking down at the tire tracks in the sandy soil of the pit, one hand in his pants pocket, and the other with a cigarette between his thumb and index finger.
His hair is combed back. At five foot ten and 145 pounds, he is about the same size as the nine men surrounding him—although a thousand times slimmer. He’s a good looking man with light-brown hair and blue eyes. He appears calm and intent on giving his statement.5
“Look at these pictures,” Marcella said, handing the book to Gavin. While he flipped through the pictures, she stood and stretched. “He’s no monster. You expect to see this giant of a man, but here’s this shrimp. He’s scared but doing his best to look calm. He’s got to be nervous, recounting to this group of men who must have seemed like a posse to him, what happened there in the sandpit.”
Gavin put his book down and rose to go into the kitchen again. “Want something?” he asked. “How about a Coke or a sandwich?”
“I’d go for a Coke,” Marcella said, engrossed in her book.
They settled into their cushions and waded further into their books, rising periodically to get another snack or a drink from the kitchen. They stayed glued to the pages without speaking. By late afternoon, they both had to stand up and move about to relieve their stiffness.
“So, what do you make of this whole setup?” Gavin asked, finally. “You’ve got this bunch of ne’er do wells, ex-sailors and a Marine, who spend all their time hanging around in a gas station, playing pickup basketball or baseball or bowling. It’s like they’re stuck in time back at high school—still hanging around at the local teen haunts when they’re well into their twenties—picking up fifteen-year-old girls.”
Marcella shifted her position on the couch, and said: “Not everybody sails right through high school and then right on to college or could even afford to. They all seem to have a job. They were all probably paying their parents rent. They had a car and some money, not like the high school boys who were their competition. Some girls go for older guys.”
“I suppose it was like high school everywhere. The big wheels all club up and hang out together—oblivious to the troubles of the rest of the world,” Gavin said.
Marcella agreed: “So, the girls that are out on the periphery—invisible to the stars of the class—gravitate to the hot rods. They walk around town in groups. They know every car on sight and who drives it. A car passes them on the street and they’re looking to see who’s driving, and if the driver’s looking back.”
“You’ve got this Edgar Smith guy, twenty-three years old with a wife and child, living in a trailer, and he’s going to high school basketball games. He’s just been fired from his umpteenth job and afraid to tell his wife. In his crowd he’s a celebrity of sorts, telling stories about traveling the world as a Marine. He’s got his last fiv
e bucks in his pocket, a bum oil heater in the trailer, a shivering wife and baby waiting at home for relief—and he’s blowing the whole wad on beer and bowling. Shall we go find a restaurant?” Gavin asked.
“There’s got to be a pizza place that delivers somewhere close by,” Marcella said.
“Sit tight and read,” Gavin said. “I’ll track ‘em down. One large pie, loaded, hold the pepperoni. Right?”
“Right,” she said, not even looking up from her book.
“We don’t even have a telephone book yet,” he groused. “I’ll go into town and look around.”
It was actually a relief to Gavin to finally be able to shift his thoughts away from Hannah and all that sadness. Sure, it was replaced with somebody else’s, but this was just an interesting story, not true living sadness, an interesting story that would fade away given half a chance. It was over and done with. Still, he hadn’t seen Marcella so exercised over something since long before Hannah disappeared.
* * *
1 Edgar Smith. Brief Against Death. (New York: Knopf, 1968), 6.
2 Ibid., 8.
3 Ibid.
4 Calissi, Counterpoint, 40.
5 Ibid., 38.
Chapter 16
A pizza carton lay open on the coffee table—half the pie still uneaten. The empty boxes from the kitchen were stacked in the living room. Chairs that eventually would go to the bedrooms upstairs were scattered around. Table lamps were grouped in one corner. A half dozen drained beer cans littered the floor. Gavin and Marcella lounged at opposite ends of the couch under floor lamps, staring into their open books, their feet intertwined.
“Listen to this,” Marcella said. “It’s thirty-six hours after it all happened.” She read the transcript to Gavin:
POLICE: Do you recall an incident that occurred on Monday past?
SMITH: I do, partly.
POLICE: Did you go out to get some kerosene for your heater?
SMITH: Yes, I went to Secor’s. I started back home. As I was riding along, I saw this girl walking. I knew her from meeting her in town.
