Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

  “What are you talking about, Steve?” Marie asked.

  I felt embarrassed, surprised by the level of my own distraction.

  “I was thinking about my father,” I explained quickly. The odor of his hands.”

  “Why were you thinking about that?”

  It was the perfect chance to tell her about Rebecca, her book, the meetings I’d had, the ones I expected to have in the future. And yet, I found that I couldn’t do it.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “Sometimes, things just pop into my head. This time, it was my father.” I shrugged. “No reason.”

  And so, it had begun.

  It was a Thursday afternoon, and I was at the drafting table in my office at Simpson and Lowe when Rebecca called to arrange another meeting.

  “It’s Rebecca Soltero,” she said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I was wondering if you might have an evening free this week?”

  “Most of my evenings are free,” I told her.

  She didn’t seem surprised to hear it. “Well, we could meet tonight, if you want.”

  “All right.”

  “Where?”

  I suggested a small restaurant north of town. In the past I’d gone there alone in the late afternoon, simply to sit in the generally quiet atmosphere and have a drink before going home. At times I would do a little work, perhaps add a line or two to the drawing of the “dream house” I had been elaborating and modifying for years, and vaguely hoped to build one day. It was a house of floating levels and dreamy, translucent walls, of rooms that melted into other rooms. It was impractical and unrealizable, a structure bereft of all those mundane pillars and supporting beams without which it could not hope to stand.

  She arrived promptly, carrying a black briefcase, and wearing a dark red silk blouse and a long black skirt. She’d added a bolero jacket, also black, unnecessary in the unusual warmth of that long Indian summer, but worn, I think, in order to conceal or diminish the more obvious contours of her body.

  Thanks for meeting me again, Mr. Farris,” she said as she sat down.

  “Steve,” I said. “It’s no trouble.” I glanced about the room. “It’s a nice place, don’t you think?”

  It was a garden restaurant, made of glass and hung with vines. Small fountains sprouted here and there among the foliage.

  “A sort of Garden of Eden effect,” I added.

  “Yes, it’s fine,” Rebecca answered briskly.

  The waitress stepped over, a young woman named Gail, with whom Wally claimed to have had a brief affair, though he probably hadn’t. I ordered a beer on tap, Rebecca a glass of red wine. Gail glanced at Rebecca, then at me. She grinned knowingly, as if privy to a secret.

  “When do you have to be home?” Rebecca asked after Gail stepped away.

  “Home?”

  “You’re married, aren’t you? With a son?”

  I nodded. “A family man,” I said, then added, “My son is nine years old. His name is Peter.”

  “And your wife’s name?”

  “Marie.”

  Rebecca smiled quietly, but with a certain quickness that made it clear that she had only a passing, casual interest in my present family, that her entire focus was on the other one that had been destroyed.

  The drinks came promptly, and I lifted my glass casually for the customary toast. She raised hers as well, but when I moved to touch my glass to hers, she drew it away quickly, almost in an act of self-defense, and took a quick sip.

  “I’ve been working on the book for three years,” she said, after returning the glass to the table.

  I nodded silently, watching the steady gaze of her eyes. They were dark eyes, sensual, but not dreamy, and there was nothing in the least sultry about them. They were the eyes of an explorer, searching, determined, curiously ruthless. I imagined them in the face of Pizarro or Cortes.

  “I finally settled on five cases,” she went on. “At this point I’ve finished four of them.” She opened the black briefcase she’d placed on the table between us and drew out a large manila envelope. “I thought you might like to see the ones I’ve already studied.”

  “See them?”

  “Well, I brought photographs of the men, and the victims,” Rebecca explained. “I’ve also written short summaries of each crime. You can read them if you like.”

  She hesitated, her hand poised to open the envelope, her eyes leveled upon me, sensing the chilly dread that had suddenly gripped me as my eyes fell upon the yellow envelope.

  “Of course, if you’d rather not do any of this …”

  I rushed to assure her that she didn’t need to be delicate with me. “No, no, I think I should know about the others,” I told her.

  She took a smaller envelope from the larger one, opened it, and pulled out a short stack of photographs. The one on top was in black and white, and it showed a tall, slender man as he leaned idly against the fender of a dusty pickup truck.

  “This is the first man I studied,” Rebecca said. “Harold Wayne Fuller. Age, thirty-seven.”

  That was all she said as she turned the photograph toward me.

  In the picture, Fuller was dressed in loose-fitting trousers and a plain white shirt, its sleeves rolled up beyond the elbows. He wore a dark-colored baseball cap with the initials “AB” on the front, and a slender baseball bat dangled from his right hand.

  “He was a steelworker in Birmingham, Alabama,” Rebecca said, “a union leader, very respected by the men he worked with. As a young man, he played professional baseball for a few years, but a knee injury finally made him quit.”

  Her tone was very matter-of-fact, even a little rushed, as if this were a task she was anxious to get through.

  “He had been married to his wife, Elizabeth, for fourteen years,” she continued. “They had two daughters, ages twelve and thirteen. Both girls attended the local school, and both were good students. No one at the school had noticed any signs of emotional disturbance in either one.”

  She stopped, watching me as I continued to stare at the picture.

  The face of Harold Wayne Fuller was the face of Everyman. It was plain and flat and impossible to read. There was no sign of dementia or murderous intent, of anything lurking beneath the surface, tightening the fingers around the baseball bat.

  Rebecca let my eyes linger on the photo a while longer, then drew it away to expose the one that lay beneath it.

  “This is the couple together,” she said.

  The second photograph showed Fuller and his wife on their wedding day, a picture taken outside a large gray public building, probably by a stranger, and which showed them smiling brightly, Fuller in a baggy double-breasted suit, his arm draped over his wife’s nearly bare shoulders.

  “Fuller married Elizabeth in the summer of 1952,” Rebecca added. “She had their first daughter, Emily Jane, the following year.”

  Once again Rebecca drew the photograph away to reveal the one beneath it.

  “This is Emily Jane,” she said. “Age, nine.”

  In the small, black-and-white picture, Emily Jane Fuller was standing beside the same red pickup truck which had been captured in the first picture, the baseball bat her father had been holding now leaning against the truck’s closed door, her father no doubt behind the camera now, aiming it steadily at his daughter.

  After a few seconds, Rebecca slid the picture away, bringing a fourth photograph into view.

  “A second daughter, Phyllis Beatrice, called ‘Bootsie,’ was born a year later,” she said.

  In the fourth photograph, “Bootsie” stood in a nondescript living room, dressed in a cowboy skirt and blouse, her long hair partly concealed by a large, western hat.

  “Bootsie belonged to the same square-dancing club her mother attended,” Rebecca said. “They seem to have been very close.”

  I let my eyes rest on the picture for a time, then glanced up toward Rebecca.

  “Did he kill them all?” I asked.

  Rebecca nodde
d. “With the baseball bat,” she said. “The police still have it stored in their evidence locker.”

  They kept everything they took from my house, too,” I said. “I don’t even know exactly what they took. I just know that they never gave anything back.”

  “No, of course not,” Rebecca said. The case is still open.”

  I dismissed the thought of it. “Open? That’s just a formality. They can’t ever officially close an unsolved murder case. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. But they’re never going to find my father. It’s been thirty-five years since he did it.”

  Rebecca said nothing. She took a second, small envelope from the larger one and handed it to me. It was identical to the first, and as I drew it from her hand, I heard her call the man’s name and age, though without expression, as if doing an inventory.

  “Gerald Ward Stringer. Age, forty-one.”

  The second set of pictures was arranged in exactly the same order as the first, more or less chronologically.

  The summation of the case is under the photographs,” Rebecca said.

  I nodded, my eyes already settling on the first picture.

  Gerald Ward Stringer sat in a recliner, shirtless, legs stretched out, his bare feet aimed at the camera, his belly pouring over his beltless trousers. He was nearly bald, a shiny star of light gleaming on his forehead, the result no doubt of the reflected flash that had been used to take the picture. He was smiling, very broadly, the happy fat man in his cluttered lair. The room in which he sat was paneled in pinewood. A few mounted animal heads hung from the walls that surrounded him, and I could see a rack of hunting rifles hung between a deer and a fox. A safari hat, one side of its bill turned up raffishly, dangled from one of the deer’s upturned antlers.

  Rebecca gave her narration as I leafed through the photos.

  The murders occurred six months after this picture was taken,” she said. “Stringer killed Mary Faye, his wife of nine years, and his three sons: Eddie, four. Tyrone, six. And Jimmy Dale, seven.”

  She waited a moment, then added softly, “With a rifle, as you’ve probably already figured out.”

  As if realizing that I didn’t want to read the summations she’d written, she continued on, relating the details of the case, describing what had actually happened on February 11, 1967. As she did so, I found that I could see it all quite graphically in my mind.

  Gerald Ward Stringer had come home from one of a string of small, very successful bakeries that he owned in Des Moines, Iowa, at the usual time of seven-thirty. He’d gone to work at five o’clock that morning, and he was, as he later told police in a description of himself that was eloquently simple, “a very tired man.”

  Mary Faye worked as an office clerk at a local brewery, and she had been at work all day, too. When Stringer arrived home, he found her sleeping on the sofa in the den, one leg hanging over the side, her right foot almost touching the floor, her body in the exact position in which the police would find her several hours later, and which Stringer described as looking “sort of like a big towel that somebody had just thrown onto the couch.”

  The children, all three of them, were in the basement. Tyrone and Jimmy Dale were playing at the miniature pool table they’d gotten for Christmas two months before, while Eddie played with a set of Tinker Toys on the large square of outdoor carpet which covered the basement’s otherwise cold, cement floor.

  For nearly an hour, Stringer sat in the den only a few feet from his sleeping wife. From time to time during that fateful hour, Miss Zena Crawford, the woman who rented the small apartment over the Stringers’ two-car garage, looked down from her window and glanced into the Stringer family house. From her position over the garage, she had a commanding view of the den and kitchen. In the den, she saw Gerald Ward Stringer as he sat silently in the big recliner. He sat upright, his hands in his lap, rather than the usual reclining position in which she’d glimpsed him at other times.

  At 8:20 P.M., Miss Crawford heard Tyrone calling to his mother, asking her to unlock the door that separated the basement from the upper floor of the house. She looked out the window and saw both Tyrone and Jimmy Dale at the basement window, the one which looked out at just above ground level, and which was situated almost directly below the window in the den. She glanced up and saw Mrs. Stringer rustle slightly on the sofa, as if the voices of her children were awakening her.

  Having seen nothing that alarmed her, Miss Crawford turned from the window, took a couple of steps toward her small kitchen, then heard a shot. She returned to her window, glanced down, and noticed that the blinds in the Stringer’s den had been lowered. She looked down at the small basement window just in time to see Tyrone and Jimmy Dale as they turned away from her, back toward the basement’s interior darkness, as if in answer to someone’s call. They lingered at the window for an instant, then shrank away from it. Seconds after the two boys had left the window, Miss Crawford heard three shots.

  Rebecca paused a moment after she’d finished her narrative. She was watching me closely, no doubt because this particular crime resembled my father’s a bit more closely than the first. It had been committed with a firearm, and three of the murders had taken place in a basement, which, on the surface, appeared to resemble the sort of place in which my mother, too, had died.

  “Do you have any questions?” she asked tentatively as she returned the pictures to their envelope.

  “No.”

  Rebecca pulled out a third envelope.

  “Herbert Malcolm Parks,” she said. “Age, forty-three.”

  She said nothing else, now clearly preferring that I read the summaries she’d attached to the photos rather than listen to her own narration of the events.

  The summary was neatly typed on plain white paper, and it was very succinct, giving the details briefly and without the slightest literary adornment.

  Herbert Parks was a real estate agent in San Francisco. On June 12, 1964, he’d suddenly been stricken by an upset stomach while sitting at his downtown office. After complaining of the pain to several fellow agents, he’d driven to his home in Mill Valley, and there murdered his wife, Wenonah, age thirty-eight, and his two daughters, Frederica, twelve, and Constance, seven. Mrs. Parks had been shot once in the back of the head. The two girls had been forced to drink orange soda in which their father had dissolved several rat control pellets which contained cyanide. All three bodies had been stacked one on top of the other in the walk-in closet off the master bedroom.

  The murders had occurred at approximately two-thirty in the afternoon, and as a result, there was no Miss Crawford to glance out her window and see something strange going on at the house next door.

  Nonetheless, there were witnesses of a type. George McFadden, an electrical lineman perched high above the street only a few yards from the house, saw Parks’s dark gray Mercedes pull into the driveway at approximately two that afternoon. According to McFadden, Parks had not gotten out of the car right away, but had remained behind the wheel, “as if waiting for some kind of signal” before entering the house.

  A few minutes later, two young girls had come from the house, both of them moving toward the car. The smaller one, who must have been Constance, darted enthusiastically toward her father, while the larger one, Frederica, held back. Parks had already gotten out by the time they reached him, and, once again according to McFadden, he took each of them into his arms, hugged them for a long time, then, hand in hand, his shoulders slightly hunched, led them back into the house.

  No one else saw or heard anything after that.

  After reading the summation, I turned to the photographs. Arranged once again in the established order, the first picture showed Herbert Parks in a dark double-breasted suit. It was a professional photograph, done at a studio, and the smaller marks and blotches which must have been on his face had been air-brushed into oblivion. He had gray hair at the temples, but otherwise jet black, and for the purposes of the photo he appeared to have pulled a single curl down s
o that it dangled, slightly greased in fifties matinee-idol style, near the center of his forehead.

  There were only two other photographs. The first, just under the studio picture of Herbert Parks, showed his wife posed beside the same dark Mercedes which George McFadden saw pull into the driveway on the afternoon of June 12, 1962. She was wearing a light blue blouse, its ends tied in a knot across her waist, a pair of jeans, rolled up to mid-calf, and white tennis shoes. She was holding a water hose and a red plastic pail, and seemed to be pretending to wash the car.

  The last picture was from the family’s personal Christmas card of the year before. Both Herbert and Wenonah Parks were in the photograph, but the focus of the picture, its heart and soul, was the two little girls they held in their arms. Constance was clearly laughing, but Frederica seemed to stare pensively toward the lens, her tiny mouth firmly set in place, not so much frowning, as refusing to smile, her eyes oddly vacant, her arms wrapped tightly around Wenonah’s slender neck.

  Rebecca noticed how my eyes lingered upon her, then spoke:

  “He put her on top.”

  “You mean, in the closet?”

  “Yes. She was larger than Constance, but he stacked her on top, and folded her hands over her chest. The others were just sprawled across the closet floor.”

  I remembered how my father had done something odd as well, how he’d washed my mother’s body and arranged it carefully on the bed while leaving Laura and Jamie to lie in their ugly, smelly pools of coagulating blood. And as I remembered it, my eyes drifted back to Frederica, and suddenly I thought I knew why she had clung so desperately to her mother in the Christmas card photo, why she had, as George McFadden had mentioned, “held back” from running heedlessly to her father on the day he had assigned to kill her.

  “It was because she knew,” I said, almost to myself, but loud enough for Rebecca to hear me.

  She looked at me curiously. “Knew what?”

  That it was coming,” I told her, “that her father was going to kill them.” I looked at her pointedly. There must always be someone who knows what’s about to happen, don’t you think? Not everyone can be entirely in the dark.”