by Drew Franzen
“It may,” said Pridmore, “though not this business specifically. I see no reason to believe she might have been. Besides, it’s hard to believe this could happen here, right under our nose.”
“You’d be surprised, Sara—shocked—at what goes on under some people’s nose.”
“Are you speaking from experience, Cass? Tell me what went on under the nose at Maggie and Eugene’s?”
Cassie cradled herself as if she were cold. “Nothing, never: it wouldn’t have occurred to me to think in those terms. Not about Eugene and Mag. If I knew something, don’t you think I’d say?”
Becoming tetchy, Sara said, “We’ve been through this. Missy was having sex, consensual, even though she wasn’t of an age to consent to anything, which means, if nothing else, whoever was sleeping with her is guilty of statutory rape. If she was being either physically threatened or coerced, we see nothing to suggest it. And who would be in a position to emotionally coerce? A doctor? A teacher? An instructor? A family member?” Sara thought of Jordy Bitson. “But your family isn’t talking and either are you. Not to the police anyway. Knowing what the Medical Examiner had to say, I’d think you would be more forthcoming. Were you blind to her behavior, in denial, or covering up?”
Despite the mounting physical and circumstantial evidence to the contrary, on subsequent visits to the Bitson residence the family refused, unequivocally, to disparage Missy’s conduct. It was honorable but counterproductive. If sex were involved, it was rape, despite the results of the medical findings. They refused to accept the opprobrious characterization of the evidence. If Missy were courting trouble, they claimed steadfastly, she was doing it on a tight leash.
Cassie gave Sara a withering look. “No one is covering up, Sara, because there is nothing to cover up. This is beyond our capacity to absorb, that’s all, or to understand. It’s as if we’re talking about someone else, in the third person; it’s surreal. Maybe we simply can’t—understand it, or absorb it. Why should we? She’s gone now. You can’t bring her back.”
“It’s what Maggie says.”
“It’s true, isn’t it? She died horribly and alone. There is nothing we can do for it now but to protect her reputation. There is nothing you can do now but slander it. It’s easy for you, to be clinical and detached. To you, she wasn’t family.”
Cassie regretted the remark, knowing it was unfair, yet unable to repent and unable to apologize. She needed an outlet for both her anger and her anguish so she lashed out at Sara, who like a rock was protective, understanding and ready to accept this obligation—perhaps even welcoming of it—as if it were her own.
In the year since they had become acquainted and despite the more than fifteen year gap in their ages, Sara had proven to be better equipped, emotionally and morally even, than Cassie, the Servant of God, to understand and weather the inevitable and destructive vicissitudes of life. And what of Maggie, poor Maggie, having lost now not only one child, but two? How would she survive this trauma, how would she bear-up? She had been so careful to monitor and manage the daily routine of her daughters, having them telephone when they arrived at their destination and before they returned for home. Inevitably, as children do, they complained and they rebelled, but who could foresee that Missy, at only thirteen, would do so to such a destructive extreme?
“Let’s not fight,” said Cassie after a moment.
“We’re not fighting. You’re emoting. That’s good. If you don’t, you’ll explode. Nothing you say right now will anger me, or turn me away. It may hurt—a little bit.” Sara smiled. “I may wish you hadn’t said it and that you’d take it back, but not because it’s wrong, Cass. Because maybe, it’s too close to the truth.”
Sara moved to stand with Cassie, by the window overlooking the small garden. Bordering the church cemetery, here the garden received the full benefit of the sun, its spring perennials in full and colorful bloom. Death in the midst of life, thought Sara lyrically.
“We have so little to go on,” Sara admitted. “Only that for a girl her age, Missy was involved in some pretty heavy duty stuff. Toxicology will show whether she was intoxicated or drugged, but the physical evidence is conclusive, Cass. We owe it to the community as much as we owe it to Missy to know all we can.” Without preamble, Sara then asked, “Tell me about her cousin?”
“Kendra?”
“Jordy, Kendra’s brother.”
“What’s to tell?” Cassie moved from the window to the table, dragging her body as if it were an over-weighted sack. “Jordy is trouble, with a capital T. I warned Missy to stay away from him. For a while, she did, but from either curiosity or attraction, she kept being drawn back to his flame; like a moth.”
“Why were you concerned?”
“C’mon, Sara, wouldn’t you? You know as well as I; Jordy is responsible for most of what’s happened over the last few months here in town: the broken windows, the desecrated gravesites, the graffiti, the vandalism. It’s him. He may not be personally responsible for all of it, but my guess he’s the motivation behind most of it. He’s an instigator, Church Falls’ answer to Fagin. Jordy commands a small group of shit disturbers; small but committed.”
“You never mentioned this to me before.” Sara thought briefly of a long list of other daily obligations and responsibilities that lay piling up on her desk and to which her attention was long overdue.
“Not my job is it? Besides, sanctity of the confessional and all that.”
“Jordy spoke to you about this?”
For the first time that day, Cassie smiled. Not ironic, but genuinely amused. “No silly, figure of speech.”
“Aside from Jordy being rambunctious and destructive, what else?”
“Drugs?”
“You know this for a fact?”
“No. This I definitely would have confided to you.”
“Do you have any reason to believe Missy may have been using?”
“Not at all. But then again, I didn’t suspect she was having sex either did I? Still can’t imagine it if you want the truth. Am I naïve, Sara? I shouldn’t be, after all I’ve seen and done myself.”
“No.” Sara reached out, touching Cassie’s hand. Cassie replied by squeezing tightly. “No, not at all. Simply willing to see the better side of human nature in people even, if sometimes, it isn’t there.”
“Missy was a good girl, Sara.” Before Sara could tell her it was not what she meant to say, Cassie continued. “Sometimes, she gave the impression of being grown-up, an adult trapped inside the body of a child. She could be headstrong and rebellious, but always, I thought, in attitude rather than behavior. When she started to sprout, physically, that’s when it became difficult for Maggie, harder to manage the curfew, the clothes, the make-up.”
“Not so sweet and innocent Missy.”
Cassie said, “I was closest to her, Sara; closer than Maggie, closer than Mandy, closer than anyone. I thought so, anyway. How could I not recognize the signs? I’m a PhD for God sake, supposedly trained to sense troubled behavior. And it’s not as if I don’t have experience of my own to draw on, is it? Jesus, I remember being that age, vividly: what I did, what I was like. I slept with every guy in junior and senior high. I knocked them down in bunches, as if they were bowling pins. It showed on my face, for God sake, like a scar.” Cassie paused for a moment, then said, “Is there any truth, do you think, that the apple never falls far from the tree?”
“Stop Cassie; she didn’t take after you. And what happened to your sister, with Eugene, was a mistake; she didn’t take after her mother. Missy isn’t responsible for being violated. She isn’t responsible for getting herself killed. Don’t portray her that way.”
“It’s not what I was suggesting, Sara. I was thinking of Jordy. About his family, about their past.”
Curious, Sara sat forward, retrieving her hand from Cassie’s grasp.
“The Bitsons?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me more.”
“I couldn’t have been more than six, maybe seven. My brother had just been shipped to Vietnam. He’d volunteered, apparently, and my mother held my father responsible, as if my brother going overseas were somehow his idea. My mother never forgave Dad; she’s spent the last thirty years submerged in a bottle, trying to forget.” It was during this time, she said, that Drew Bitson—Eugene’s elder brother—had been accused in the rape and murder of a local girl. “He couldn’t have been convicted though,” Cassie decided, “because he did go on to college and to play pro ball, didn’t he?”
Her memory of the events was understandably obscure, so many years removed that it was now not open to discussion among family members or the small, if not so tightly knit, community.
Sara said, “It must have been what Rena was referring to; events in the past, she told me. I thought she was referring to the psychic.”
“Angelique? My competition for the hearts and souls of the good folks here in town?”
“Yeah, Ed’s wife believes she somehow has an inside track on naming the killer.”
Cassie shrugged. “I only mention it myself, to make a point. Just because Drew Bitson wasn’t convicted doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. Maybe all those years ago, he did get away with murder.”
Sara said, “Maybe Jordy inherited a bad gene. It seems too coincidental to me that two killings separated by thirty years are so similar and linked to a parent and his child, doesn’t it?”
Cassie said, “It was crazy times in our house, Sara, terrible, confused. Lots of yelling and screaming back and forth between my mother and my dad, and, lots of drinking.”
“Over your brother?”
“That, and I think my father may have been seeing another woman. Don’t ask how I know; instinct, I guess. I was too young at the time to understand but I got the impression the old man was sleeping with someone other than my mom.”
“We’ve known each other almost a year, Cass, and this is the first you’ve spoken in any detail about your past. You’ve been holding out on me.”
“It may be therapeutic, Sara, but does it help?” Cassie said with a dismissive wave of her hand. They were silent a moment. Cassie said, “Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nietzsche.” Cassie replied in explanation. “Essentially, our future is predetermined. Our present is dictated not by where we are, but by where we’re destined to be. So, it’s not a matter of, if I had only done this rather than that, things might have turned out differently. No matter which fork in the road you take, Sara, a train wreck is waiting before you get to the station. Whether you choose door number one, two or door number three, you’re life is pretty much fucked.”
Sara managed a dull smile. “That’s pretty fatalistic.”
“You didn’t grow up in my family.”
“Thank God.”
“When can we have her back, Sara?” Cassie asked. “The wait is killing us. Maggie is falling apart; she needs to grieve.”
“Soon?” Sara replied with a shrug. “It’s all I can promise, Cassie. It’s a murder investigation; we’re reluctant to release the body prematurely.”
“We can’t put this behind us until we bury her. Even then, we never will.”
Standing, Sara said, “I should go. You’ll be okay?”
“No,” replied Cassie, “I won’t. But you should go anyway.”
CHURCH FALLS, SOMETIME IN THE SEVENTIES
Leland Junior staggered but he did not fall. The bittersweet taste of his own blood exploded in his mouth and over his tongue like sour candy—familiar one moment, utterly foreign the next—prompting a wave of nausea he suppressed only temporarily before it spilled out onto the Persian area carpet covering his mother’s hardwood floor. He stared at his father in shocked disbelief. To his amusement, Leland Senior stared back, as if his fist had acted independently from his mind. Never before had he raised a hand in anger toward his son. As if viewing the incident in hindsight, Helen McMaster twisted her hands anxiously, wedding band slicing through the skin of her fingers. Moments later, she rushed from the room, supporting herself unsteadily on the doorjamb on the way out.
Not one to apologize, Leland Senior said, “You’ve put yourself—and me—in a bad spot, son.” Given the circumstances, an understatement.
“How was I to know he would take pictures? I thought he was doing me a favor by letting me use his room. The little pervert,” Leland Junior uttered through teeth clenched partly in anger, more in pain. “Let me deal with him, Dad.”
“It’s too late for that,” his father said impatiently. He massaged his knuckles cautiously, as if hoping to understand the aberrant behavior of his appendage. “Copies are in the possession of the county prosecutor. In itself, not so bad and a problem I could fix. But the photos came from Sheriff Womack, who, if he has his druthers, will hang you by your foreskin.”
Leland groaned, his confidence sagging like the soiled mattress on which the photos had been taken. As he had admitted to Ed Dojcsak on the Fourth of July, if Sid Womack discovered Leland was feeling up the youngsters, the Sheriff would skin him alive. Apparently, now he did.
Leland cursed both his manhood and his immaturity in the same notion. Had the sex been his idea? After more than six months, Leland was no longer sure. He knew for certain Seamus had suggested the photographs. As son of the self-proclaimed wealthiest man in the county, Leland resented always being broke, and after Seamus had offered to pay to photograph him having sex, Leland became driven by the twin bogeys of irrepressible teenage lust and greed. The girls were always young and impressionable, though in the case of Frances Stoops, Leland knew upon entering her it was not her first time.
“I didn’t kill her,” Leland said.
“Lot of good that does you,” replied his father. He stepped forward, removing a clean handkerchief from his pocket, handing it to his son. “Which is why we’re having this conversation. Clean yourself up. Come in to the study, you look as if you need a drink.”
“You know I don’t drink.”
“After you hear what I have to say, you’ll want to start,” said Leland Senior, wearily sliding open the heavy oak doors to the study in a way that lacked his usual, self-confident flair.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
MAGGIE BITSON WAS less surprised than disappointed to know Missy was having sex. She had suspected, though refrained from confronting the girl, less able to accept what it said about Missy than what it said about herself.
“I’ll fix lunch,” Maggie offered to Eugene, though it was only nine-thirty in the morning. The blood behind Maggie’s forehead boiled, burning like an overheated electrical transmission wire, circulating unwelcome images and irrepressible demons and thoughts. Every so often, Maggie pressed her fists to her eye sockets as if to prevent the negative energy escaping through her eyeballs. The dark, green-gray circles that appeared as a result of the effort made her resemble a raccoon, or a concentration camp survivor, depending on your perspective and experience.
“I’ll take it with me,” Eugene replied, thinking Maggie had meant for him to eat the lunch later while at work, though had he asked he would have realized she didn’t mean this at all.
“Will you be home for supper?” she wanted to know.
For days now he hadn’t been, instead locking the door to the video shop and making the short run across the street to the Big Top Diner after ordering his dinner in advance by telephone, returning to the store within minutes carrying a hot meal in an insulated Styrofoam container and eating alone at the service counter surrounded by a plethora of sex novelties; flavored, textured and multi-colored condoms; dildos varying in color and size; studded dog collars, cats-o-nine-tails, seductive li
ngerie, inflatable dolls, molded poly-urethane vaginas and chocolate novelties in the form of both female and male genitalia, the candy confections and sexy underwear selling briskly at Christmas, but especially so in the week preceding Valentine.
Eugene’s appetite was just now beginning to return to normal. Had he been home more often and less preoccupied with himself, he might have noted that not only had Maggie’s appetite not returned to normal, she had regained no appetite at all. If Eugene resembled a man turning himself inside out like a reversible skin—as Ed Dojcsak had imagined him on the day after the death of his daughter—less than one week later, in his wife, the process appeared to be almost complete.
Since the killing, the Reverend Cassie McMaster had been telephoning her sister at least twice daily and taking the fifteen-minute walk from the rectory after dinner each evening to sit with Maggie, usually for an hour but sometimes longer, huddling in the living room together, foreheads pressed close, voices low, as if conspiring. During these moments, Eugene watched television, alone: he did not complain, though the sight of the two women so deeply engaged was unnerving.
Since the killing of her sister, the whereabouts of Mandy Bitson had become less a concern for Maggie, if it had ever been a concern at all, as if in failing to protect Missy what hope was there for her elder sister? With the death of Missy, increasingly it appeared Maggie was willing to helplessly throw up her hands against the whims of tragic fate, as if to say “Que Sera, Sera, Whatever Will Be, Will Be”. (Even so, Maggie Bitson did not fancy herself a Doris Day.)
Ostensibly, the visits from Cassie were meant as comfort and support to Maggie. Eugene was happy for his wife to have the distraction and to remove the obligation from him. Though Cassie noted Maggie’s deteriorating physical appearance, she didn’t comment, believing it to be the next and necessary in another of the many crosses this child of Leland McMaster was obliged to bear. (Cassie sensed her own burden to be more from association than experience, subconsciously thankful thus far, for her, Maggie and Missy had done much of the heavy lifting.) As for Eugene, he was happy for Dr. Henry Bauer to increase the dosage of the sedative Maggie had been prescribed.
