by Larry Crane
“Shall we get you in the tub, Sweetie?” Marcella asked. “None of your stuff fits anymore, does it? We’re going to have to dig for something of mine that’s a little closer to fitting, I can see that.”
On the way to Fardale, Brett and Celia stopped at a ModCloth Store in Ridgewood where Celia began looking over clothes for Hannah. She poked around in the racks but stopped short. They had kept all of Hannah’s clothes—it would have been heresy not to. It would be a nice adventure to go shopping for new stuff tomorrow. So, Celia settled on a cute set of paisley pajamas and a blue beret to add to the striped knit scarf and mittens she bought at the Carleton Bookstore as special homecoming gifts. They stopped and picked up a couple of pints of Hannah’s favorite cherry vanilla ice cream.
When they came through the front door together, Hannah sprinted across the living room and leaped into Brett’s arms. The three of them collapsed on the couch together.
Brett came up with the thought that they should all sit in a circle on the living room carpet and grab slices of pizza from the carton in the middle. He worked hard to dredge up funny stories about life in boot camp. Celia joined in with her adventures during sorority pledge week at Carleton. Hannah basked in the stares they wouldn’t stop raining down on her. She crossed her arms in front of her and stared up into their faces one by one. They were all yawning by the time the pizza was finished off. Hannah’s eyes closed as she sagged against Celia.
Brett, Gavin, and Marcella sat together on the couch. They couldn’t resist checking to see if TV news had picked up any of the story. It was the lead. There was video coverage of the Kentucky State Police loading a stout, gray haired woman into a cruiser. Her hands were shackled in front of her. She kept her head bowed. Her name was Rose Prendergast. Her sister, the local post mistress in New Concord, Pinky Nugent was not taken into custody. Their brother, Harold Nordquist of Galesburg, Illinois, was also arrested.
“It all broke open like lightning when they intercepted the letter and saw where it was mailed from. It seemed like there was never going to be a lead worth pursuing,” Brett said. “Then, boom, all hell breaks loose.”
“Credit Rathskeller. He must have a made a million phone calls,” Gavin added.
“And I had my doubts about him,” Marcella said.
“Have you been following Edgar Smith’s triumphal tour through the countryside?” Brett asked. “It’s not front page—more like page three—but it seems he’s booked all across the country, giving talks about prison reform. Crowds never tire of hearing stories of prison life from someone who knows firsthand what he’s talking about. They wait to hear how close he’d come to sitting in the chair.”
Marcella felt a visceral protest rise up in her whenever she read about the warm reception Smith got from the faculty and students of colleges where he spoke. They came to the lectures wanting him to be the brilliant victim of injustice they knew in their heart he was. When had he become the victim? Had any of these people read what he’d published? Had they formed an opinion of their own? Or, if they just wanted to go along, why would they go along with an icon of conservatism, William F. Buckley? Ordinarily, his stamp of approval would be a death knell to liberals. But now it was upside down. It had become doubly legit when they all agreed. It was berserk.
Buckley kept his party going when he wrote in his column:
Edgar Smith may not be in the mood for celebration. But, I cannot believe his struggle will be uncelebrated in the annals of the human spirit. And it is always possible that the man who really did it will one day identify himself. Meanwhile, Smith can stop fighting. The knock on the door won’t be the executioner’s.1
The Bergen Record couldn’t let go of the case file brief format. They ran a long piece on the Sunday Op-Ed page with the subject: Who was Victoria Zielinski? It was Marcella’s story about Vickie, the new cheerleader candidate who dominated the tryouts at Ramsey High in ‘57, straight from the mouth of a senior at Ramsey High at the time: Connie Breckenridge.
“She was bright and athletic all at once, a star,” Connie said. “Then she was gone. We lost the best.”
Marcella had become something of a local celebrity with her articles—had gone head-to-head with all the local Edgar Smith apologists.
“You’re coming to the dedication, I hope,” Philomena said. She came to the door in the morning to make sure they knew there would be a gathering at about 11:00 a.m. to dedicate a bronze plaque. “Without you, it never would have happened.”
The family bundled up and walked in a group across Chapel Road on Fardale Avenue. They shivered in the cold. The trees had no leaves. The dry wind rustled through the weeds beside the road. The Kromka’s house was the only building they could see. It was a forlorn, lonely landscape. Marcella shifted her gaze all around. Except for the chain link fence around the tennis courts and the blacktop road, it looked much the same as it must have looked in March 1957.
A small crowd of men and women from the neighborhood gathered in front of the Mahwah Recreation Center tennis courts. They closed in as if to shield themselves against the wintry weather. A single local reporter jotted notes. The mayor of Mahwah, a middle-aged man in a dark overcoat stepped forward and turned to address them:
“Thank you all for braving the wind and coming out for this important renaming of the rec center tennis complex. It’s been long overdue, but today with this bronze plaque donated by the people of Mahwah, we honor the memory of Victoria Zielinski, a brilliant young lady from our town who died young. From this point on, this site will be known as The Victoria Memorial Courts.”
The plaque was embedded in a large rock at the entrance of the tennis complex.
In Memory Of:
Victoria Ann Zielinski
September 6, 1941 - March 4, 1957
That night, with everyone headed upstairs for bed, Marcella opted to step outdoors before she went up, and she prevailed on Gavin to go with her. Huddling together against the cold, they went out to the head of the driveway and down the street a little so they could stand and look back and take in the whole house. Lights were on in almost every room it seemed, giving the house a warm glow. They pressed together and looked up and all around. It wasn’t the same spectacular night sky they saw in The Valley the Gods all those months ago, not with the urban profusion of man-made light. Venus and the moon were blocked from their view by the trees. Rather than the feeling that they might actually be floating in outer space that they had in the desert, their feet were very much planted on the ground here—this ground, their ground.
Hannah stayed mostly in her room at first. For two weeks Geraldine Colgate, the Kentucky State Police child psychologist, paid daily visits that lasted through to the end of most afternoons. It had taken a couple days until Hannah began to talk about what happened. As Colgate related it to Marcella, Hannah seemed pleased that she could tell it all to her and not her mother, almost as if she was ashamed of herself. It was normal behavior for young abductees, Colgate said. In all probability, in time, Hannah would let it all come out. For now, it would have to be second hand.
What kind of person snatches a child at random off the streets of Naperville to go live with her in a ramshackle country bungalow three hundred miles away in the backwaters of Kentucky? It was the first question Marcella had for Geraldine Colgate.
“I’ve talked with the state police who transported Rose Prendergast to Frankfort for questioning,” Colgate said. “It wasn’t random. Rose lived in Warrenville, Illinois and worked as a dishwasher in the Naperville school cafeteria. She first spotted Hannah when she was just in second grade. She found out where Hannah lived. She thought she looked just as her daughter Birdy would have at that age if Birdy had not died young twenty years or more earlier. Rose and her sister Pinky retired at the same time and moved together from Illinois to Kentucky where the living was cheaper, and where Pinky’s husband could fish for bass. They lived in separate towns in Calloway County for a year before Rose became overwhelmed with loneliness a
nd got it in her head to drive back to Naperville, lay in wait, and lure Hannah into her car.”
Rose Prendergast had gotten Hannah in her car by telling her that she was her aunt from Kentucky. After a long drive, Hannah found herself in an area that didn’t look or feel anything like surroundings she knew in Naperville. There didn’t seem to be any other houses anywhere near them. Rose Prendergast told her not to leave the house at all because the woods were full of snakes and coyotes and bears, and that she’d never make it through a night out there without getting eaten. At night, she heard all kinds of animal sounds, and a snake actually crawled into one of Rose’s bird cages one night and swallowed the canary. When it rained and stormed, it made a terrible racket on the roof.
Rose Prendergast had school books and supplies, and a school desk set up, and she sat with Hannah all day in a regular home schooling routine. Rose taught her as if she were teaching an entire class of fourth graders, then fifth, all the way through sixth grade. She went faster than the teachers in Naperville. They did a lot more reading, and got through the whole workbook on diagramming sentences. She played the piano and taught Hannah songs. “My Grandfather’s Clock” was her favorite. She marked up a report card and gave it to Hannah to read every six weeks, just like in regular school. She got an A in every subject, and they weren’t made-up A’s either. The only thing they didn’t do was recess. Rose told her that if she continued being such a good student, she would take her to visit Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace in Hodgenville.
Rose told her that she had a little girl of her own a long time ago. Her name was Birdy. Well, that wasn’t her real name. She was really Brenda, and she died of bad whooping cough when she was three months old. Hannah heard Rose talking on the telephone a lot, and she could tell that she was very nervous about Hannah being there with her. Rose wanted her to talk more—to tell her about her dolls and toys that she used to play with, and the fun she had with her friends, and camp, and scouts, and sports.
But Hannah thought her mother and father and Brett and Celia would be sad if they knew she was talking to Rose about such things, so she wouldn’t, and that made Rose sad. Hannah said she wouldn’t tell anybody about these things ever because she had been so stupid to get into Mrs. Prendergast’s car. As much as she wanted to go home, Hannah knew that if she was patient, her family would find her. Hannah thought a lot about Auntie Rose in jail and the punishment she would get, and sometimes she felt guilty about it.
Hannah had friends in Naperville, but not a lot of them. She was a bookworm, and her two best friends were too, Dina and Shelley. She knew she could always make friends with other bookworms. She wanted to go to school in their new town. She wasn’t scared, and she didn’t want to fall behind kids of her age in school. She joined the sixth grade in Mahwah Middle School, and quickly learned that she was far ahead of the others in her class. Marcella drove Hannah to Darlington Park day camp all summer, picking and choosing from among the weekly themes that were offered, and making friends with a dozen new friends who she would be going to school with in the fall. In early July, Dina and Shelley, flew to New Jersey with their mothers to spend a week.
In the morning, on September 8, the first day of school, Hannah stood with Marcella at the corner of Fardale and Chapel, waiting for the bus, until Hannah said, “Mom, I’m in seventh grade. Can I wait here by myself?”
THE END
* * *
1 William F. Buckley, Jr., “Looking over the Edgar Smith Case,” Lawrence Journal World (December 13, 1971), page 11.
About The Author
Larry Crane graduated from West Point. He then commuted to Wall Street in New York City for nearly twenty years.
The author of the thriller, A Bridge to Treachery and Baghdad on the Wabash and Other Plays and Stories, he lives on the coast of Maine with his wife Jan.
Reviews help increase the readership of a novel. Please consider writing a review of Missing Girls, and posting it on Amazon and Goodreads.
You may find Larry Crane’s thriller A Bridge to Treachery to your liking. Here’s a description the novel:
In this up-tempo, menacing thriller, Larry Crane plunks Army Ex-Ranger Lou Christopher in the midst of a mind-boggling domestic terrorism plot that tests his bed-rock values of patriotism, integrity, and marital fidelity.
After retiring from a heroic career that nearly got him general officer stars, Colonel Christopher finds that his Brigade Commander chops don’t necessarily translate into a comparable civilian job—-and he settles instead for the lure of a lucrative stock broker post.
Unfortunately, the stock market is plummeting, taking his self-esteem and confidence with it. He’s approached with a high risk scheme promising to resurrect his life, and against the qualms of his wife and his own nagging doubts he rolls the dice, with his honor and marriage at stake.
A Bridge to Treachery is a twisting, turning chase through the back woods of Bear Mountain and the marble canyons of Wall Street on a mission to reclaim respectability from the clutches of temptation.
Both A Bridge to Treachery and Baghdad on the Wabash and Other Plays and Stories, a collection of shorter works and a full length play, are on sale at Amazon.
Contents
Chapters:
Part 1
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
21 |
Part 2
22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 |
41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 |
51
About the Author
