Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  I didn’t know what Mariah’s cares were, but I hoped I was destined to find out.

  “IT WOULD HELP IF YOU’D STOP CALLING IT ‘prophetic,’” I said a month later, on the evening of the day that Junior did appear before me in court.

  “Come on, Andy,” Mariah asked, “are you going to give him the leniency you promised, or what?”

  “I didn’t promise, and drumsticks aren’t the issue anymore.”

  For me the best of Mariah’s yoga techniques turned out to be “don’t be such an asshole yoga,” which I discovered when she gave me a yoga mat to celebrate my victory in the election. We’d just put our mats away, in fact, and were about to walk our dogs when the subject of Junior’s day in court came up. Mariah didn’t live with me, but she stayed at my house on weekends and on Wednesdays, the day it currently was.

  “Did you let Junior out on bail, at least?” she asked when we finally got Bovary and Rocky on their leashes.

  “I did, but his dad didn’t have money enough even for a bail bondsman, so I don’t know if he’s actually out.”

  I hadn’t been a judge long enough for good courtroom management. I knew the law but was still learning the system’s nuts and bolts.

  “Are you going to make me ask what Junior’s accused of? Really, Andy, he was one of my favorite yoga kids.”

  I didn’t want to tell her, not only because it seemed a violation of Junior’s rights but also because I didn’t want to see her disappointment. But I said rather quietly, “Assault and grand theft auto. He and another kid knocked a man down, took his car, and went joyriding. It’s a serious charge, Mariah. What’s worse, or almost worse, the other kid is still at large and Junior won’t give him up.”

  “Oh hell, I’ll give him up,” she said. “It’s got to be Tyrone Wiggins. He was in rescue yoga, too, but an absolute jerk. Get him out of Junior’s life and Junior might have a chance.”

  When she took out a plastic bag, I moved ahead of her with Bovary. We’d grown close in a month, Mariah and I, but both of us still picked up our own dog’s shit.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I DISCOVERED that Junior was still in jail, and told the investigating officers about Tyrone Wiggins. They looked him up, found him asleep at his mother’s house, arrested him, and brought him in. He said yes, he’d been riding in Mr. Simonetta’s car, but that Junior’d been the one who knocked Mr. Simonetta down. Junior said Tyrone did it, which Mr. Simonetta confirmed, so when the prosecutor turned her focus on Tyrone, I let Junior off, on the condition that he write a letter of apology to Mr. Simonetta, do five hours a week of community service until the end of the school year, and find an after-school job. Junior’s father, a baker, brought me a strawberry shortcake that afternoon as thanks. I took the shortcake but shared it with everyone in my office. Junior’s dad and I sat on my uncomfortable couch. When he asked how Mariah was, I said, quite unexpectedly, “She’d be the woman of my dreams if I weren’t too old or she too young.”

  I haven’t said yet that 16.8 years separated Mariah and me, I guess because of the embarrassment. But to have a woman of my dreams, rather than to want to be the object of hers, as I’d always done before … that was unexpected, too, and pleasing.

  “She’s not too young, but you’re too old if you think she is,” said Junior’s dad. “You’ve got to strike while the iron is hot, man, not go around second-guessing yourself. Biggest sorrow of my life is that I did that with Junior’s mom till she got tired of it and flew the coop. Just let the woman know your future’ll be dark without her. And build yourselves a life together in a house that neither of you lives in now. That way, you’ll be building fresh memories, not living among your old ones.”

  Over the course of the rest of that day his words—“build yourselves a life together in a house that neither of you lives in now”—simply would not leave me alone. I’d lost houses to each of my ex-wives and was currently living in the back house of a lawyer friend, while Mariah, it turned out, had been renting a room from her dog-walking neighbor since her divorce. Neither of us had any money…. I’d been a lawyer and now I was a judge, but the two divorces meant I seemed always to be starting from scratch.

  I had a terrible and a wonderful idea before I left my office, which I determined to share with Mariah that evening. You will remember that I mentioned Ted Bundy’s having been in a law school class I’d taught. Well, that was a bit of a stretch, for I’d been an adjunct at the law school, only tutoring a few of the first-year students in lawyering and criminal law. Lawyering dealt with legal problem-solving skills, criminal law with blameworthiness as a precondition for criminal liability. What I didn’t mention was that Bundy stayed after a tutorial session I had given one evening to ask if the opposite of blameworthiness wouldn’t naturally be blamelessness and to insist that if a person were held blameless, then there could be no criminal liability. I thought that was obvious, but his interest had been so intense that I went into a rambling, youthful spiel about the insanity defense, with him standing there staring at me. I remember feeling sorry that I’d gone on like that, but I forgot about it until a few years later, when his infamy made him the talk not only of the town but of the entire country.

  And then, for a time, I grew obsessed with him. I learned what he liked in women—long straight hair, parted in the middle—read everything I could find on his victims, even memorized their names: Lynda Ann Healy, age twenty-one, attacked while sleeping; Donna Gail Manson, age nineteen, kidnapped while walking to a concert; Susan Elaine Rancourt, age eighteen, abducted from Central Washington State College. Once I even stood in the flower bed of a house on North Fourteenth Street right here in Tacoma, where, it was suspected, he’d pulled his first victim from her bedroom back in 1961. Ann Marie Burr had been eight years old, her house on Bundy’s paper route. Ann Marie’s murder has never been solved.

  After Bundy’s execution, my interest in him waned, but whenever his name came up, I felt it breach the surface of my consciousness again, like the back of a whale might breach the surface of an otherwise-calm sea. How could someone be so heinous, so heartless … and more specifically, how could I not have recognized such consummate evil when it stood in front of me asking a question?

  A couple of nights before Junior’s father visited my office, I had read in The News Tribune that a local Realtor was trying to sell Bundy’s childhood home … nearly selling it and failing, nearly selling it and failing … with the price plummeting each time a prospective buyer discovered who had lived there. The paper also mentioned strange occurrences, like the words help me! and leave! written some mornings in the condensation on the windows.

  Pranks, of course, but when I told Mariah that I thought we ought to buy the place, fix it up together, and try to live there, what do you think she said?

  2

  IT WAS A MODEST, BOXY AFFAIR, only fourteen hundred square feet, but with a fenced backyard where Bovary and Rocky might better get to know each other. The current owners—not the Bundys—priced the house at eighty thousand dollars, but we got it for thirty-five, which we managed to pay with what little we’d saved, twenty thousand from me and fifteen from Mariah, decided on the theory that the law was more lucrative than yoga teaching, which was true, of course, over the long run.

  The street the house sat on, tree-lined and full of people going about their business, produced a cadre of kids on bikes, come to greet us on the afternoon we got the keys and opened the place to the cold November rain.

  “You really moving in here?” one kid asked.

  His bike formed the point of the V of the bikes of his friends.

  “Yep,” said Mariah. “Any advice you want to give us?”

  “Maybe don’t do it?” he suggested.

  His friends turned into a flock of nodding Canada geese.

  “It’ll be a while yet. We’ve got to get things shipshape first,” Mariah told them.

  We’d come in both our cars, packed with supplies we’d bought at Gray Lumber and thought necessary for the
repairs we could do ourselves. Buckets, mops, sandpaper, scrapers, primer and paint, paintbrushes and rollers, two stepladders, drop cloths, gloves, and turpentine.

  I walked back past the kids, ready to begin unloading.

  “He still comes here,” the lead kid said, and then he and his flock flew down the road.

  “I think we just discovered who’s been writing on the windows,” said Mariah, “and we’ve got the antidote.”

  She nodded at her car, which Junior had just gotten out of. We’d hired him for after school and weekends. We were paying him five bucks an hour, twenty-five cents above the minimum wage.

  “Want me to sleep here tonight so I can chase them off?” Junior asked.

  “No,” I said, but I could see Mariah brighten.

  “You have to get your dad’s permission first,” she said.

  The house had four bedrooms, one in the basement, which the Realtor said had been Ted’s. His mother and stepfather had slept in the largest of the upstairs bedrooms; the others had been occupied by his stepsisters. Mariah and I would turn those into a yoga room and an office. We’d already hired someone to refinish the hardwood floors everywhere but in the bathrooms and kitchen, where we’d replace the linoleum with tile later on. Today and over the weekend we planned to rip out a terrible carpet, scrape and patch and prime the walls, and do what we could with the basement.

  “We’ll get pizza at the Cloverleaf for dinner,” I told Junior. “You can call your dad from there.”

  For the next couple of hours, Junior and I pulled up the carpet in the living room and bedrooms, and carried it to the backyard. Then I put Junior to work removing four decades’ worth of carpet tacks while Mariah vacuumed and washed the kitchen cabinets and I opened a door next to the one that led to the backyard and made my way down to the basement.

  The stairs were laid with the same orange shag that had ruined the living room, but the light in the stairwell was soft, as if someone had wanted the mood down there to be mellow. More carpet spread out on the basement floor for four or five feet, but after that was bare cement. To my left were the hookups for a washer and dryer, to my right a door that led, I had to think, to Ted’s childhood room. Had he had his paper route when he slept here? Had he come back one morning in 1961, the scent of Anne Marie Burr still on his clothes? I put a shoulder against the door and pushed it open.

  The room was grimly neat and had a dankness that told me, as the Realtor had, that the owners after Bundy’s parents hadn’t used it. Though I flipped a light switch, there was no bulb in the overhead fixture, and the long, thin window at the top of the far wall was covered with a stained and yellowed bedsheet. I sensed that to reach up and pull it down might contaminate me, but that was what I did, with barely a pause. The only light in the room, after all, came from beyond that sheet, and from the door that I had left ajar.

  The moment I touched the sheet, two of my fingers poked through it, tapping against a window that seemed colder than the day outside, and sent something awful pulsing through me. The urge was strong to fling the horrid thing away, but I held my breath, bunched it against my chest, and turned and left the room with as much sense of carriage as I could muster. I walked up the stairs and out through the yard to dump the sheet in a garbage can in the alley. A cat crouched nearby, drinking from a puddle. When I finally took another breath, the cat looked up, its dark eyes shining.

  Once in the backyard again, I saw Mariah through the kitchen window, standing on one of our stepladders and running a nozzle of the vacuum cleaner along the kitchen’s narrow crown molding. Could I go in and tell her I’d changed my mind? That I’d been wrong? That we should find a better garden in which to plant the seeds of our love?

  No, I could not, for Mariah and I hadn’t talked about love. We had talked about wanting to find a refuge from the storms that had caused us both such havoc.

  The air in the yard was fresh and wet and cleared my head a bit, letting me walk back past the soggy carpet and around the side of the house to where I could view that basement room from the outside looking in. I had left its door open, so I could dimly see an obtuse triangle of light spreading across the floor, with echoes of it forming a series of lines, faint and climbing the opposite wall.

  As I stood there looking at it, Mariah called me.

  “Andy, are you still outside?”

  “Can you come here a minute?” I asked. “I’m around the side of the house.”

  She must have stepped back into the kitchen to turn off the vacuum, for suddenly I could hear the pop and clang of Junior pulling tacks and throwing them into a bucket.

  “You’ve changed your mind,” she said when she got to me. “You think we’re in over our heads.”

  There wasn’t any judgment in her voice, only intuition, and the thoughtfulness of someone who doesn’t stand in the way of another person’s confession.

  “What do you see through this window?” I asked.

  She stepped into the flower bed, knelt to put her hands against the window, and rested her face against her hands. “I see a bed and nightstand, and a ceiling that’s too low to let you stand up straight. I also see a room I wouldn’t want to go into.”

  She put her hands down and looked at me. “Is that what you see, Andy? The terrible amount of exorcising that’s ahead of us with this place? Exorcising and, I guess you’d call it, courage?”

  “Look at the lines running up the wall,” I said. “The light from the door is making them. They remind me of the lines in someone’s notebook.”

  She put her hands against the window again.

  “Oh yes, I see them,” she said.

  LYNDA ANN HEALY, DONNA GAIL MANSON, Susan Elaine Rancourt …

  I’d told Mariah about my Bundy obsession when I’d suggested we might buy the place, but I hadn’t told her that I’d memorized his victim’s names. So when we got to the basement with a marking pen we’d bought to label boxes, at first I spelled only those three while Mariah wrote them on the wall.

  “It’s Lynda with a y,” I said, “and Ann without an e at the end.”

  Junior had come to the basement after us, to stand in the doorway and watch.

  “Whose names are those?” he asked.

  “Come in, Junior,” I said. “Don’t block the light.”

  “They are his victims,” said Mariah. “Kids just like you, Junior, only girls.”

  Junior put his tack bucket down and asked Mariah for the marker, his demeanor utterly serious. When I said and then spelled Roberta Parks, Brenda Ball, and Georgann Hawkins, he wrote them as steadily and as clearly as Mariah had the first three. That made six names, so I took the marker and added two more: Janice Ann Ott and Denise Marie Naslund. I guess I thought it would be liberating to do such a thing, but it was punishing, each name a fist to the stomach. I put the cap back on the marker.

  “The list goes on,” I said, “but I don’t think I can.”

  “Oh, but you must,” said Mariah. “Now that we’ve started, we have to write them all.”

  I took the cap off the marker again. Nancy Wilcox, Melissa Anne Smith, Laura Ann Aime, Carol DaRonch, Debra Jean Kent.

  When I said, “They all died in 1974,” Mariah took the marker to write “1974” at the edge of that wall. She then went to the opposite wall, stood on top of the bed, and waited for me to give her more names.

  Caryn Eileen Campbell, Julie Cunningham, Denise Lynn Oliverson, Lynette Dawn Culver, Susan Curtis.

  “Is this supposed to make us feel good?” asked Junior, for he had also felt that stomach punch.

  “It’s supposed to free the house from the hold he’s got on it,” Mariah said.

  I’d memorized the names of Bundy’s victims six years earlier, at the time of his execution, but knew them still, as if, as they say, by heart.

  “Margaret Elizabeth Bowman, Lisa Levy, Kimberly Diane Leach. Kimberly was only twelve years old.”

  “I got a cousin who’s twelve,” Junior told us.

  Mariah wro
te those last three names, making twenty-one in all, not including those who survived him, nor those whose names Bundy hadn’t known.

  Before we left the room I took the marker to write the name Ann Marie Burr across the floor.

  3

  EATING PIZZA SEEMED ABOUT AS FAR from something we could do after that as spending the night in the house did to Junior. So we washed our hands and arms to our elbows, closed and locked the doors, and Mariah drove Junior home, with me following behind her. When she happened to pass the Cloverleaf, however, she put her turn signal on and pulled in and parked. So I did also.

  “They’ve got a section in the back for underage people,” she said when we got out of our cars. “It’s ten o’clock and none of us has eaten, not since lunch.”

  Inside the tavern, people were sitting around with their sleeves rolled up. They wore work shirts and plaid shirts, with jackets slung across the backs of their chairs. And most of them had pitchers of beer on their tables, pushed to the sides by their pizzas. The bar itself was in the shape of a cloverleaf and occupied by solitary men, drinking and watching TV. We walked around them to the underage section, which was just then closing for the night.

  “You can sit out front if you don’t order any alcohol,” the cleaning person told us.

  From what I remembered of Washington State liquor-licensing laws, that wasn’t true, but we went back out to sit in a half-moon booth anyway, hunger and melancholy driving us.

  A waitress came to take our orders, a Coke for Junior, water for Mariah and me, plus two large sausage-and-mushroom pizzas, the specialty of the house.

  In the booth next to us, three women in their forties sat eating pizza with knives and forks and chatting about haircuts.

  “I wore mine long forever,” one of them said. “Sometimes it takes a while for a person to know that it’s time to give up on youth.”