by R. G. Belsky
“That kid was always trouble,” she said now about her dead son. “Missing school, running away, pissing off me and his father. A real pain in the ass. I mean I tried to be a good mother, but you know”—she belched loudly—“there’s only so much you can do.”
“How old was he?” I asked.
“Twelve.”
“It’s kind of hard to imagine him being that much of a troublemaker when he was only twelve.”
“Sometimes kids are just no good.”
She reached under the lawn chair and pulled out another beer. There was a case of them there. She did not offer any to me or my film crew. More for her that way.
“Tell me about Joey,” I said.
“What’s to tell?” She shrugged. “He’s dead.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“The police said someone abducted him. Or maybe he went willingly. Then they killed him.”
“Did you call the police right away once you realized he was missing?”
“Nah, we waited for about a week or so.”
“Why?”
“Just figured he’d run away. Did that a couple of times before. Once he even stole a car and made it all the way to Delaware. The cops arrested him, and we had to go down to the station house to pick him up. Damn kid’s only twelve, and he’s already stealing cars. Most of the time when he ran away, he came back when he got hungry or tired enough. Then his father would whip his butt, and that would be it until the next time. Only this time he never came back.”
“What made you eventually decide to call the police?”
“The welfare lady.”
“What do you mean?”
“The welfare lady came out here one day to check on us. Since we couldn’t find Joey, she said we wouldn’t get paid for him. I told her he’d run away. She said I should report it to the police as an official missing persons case. That way we could still get our money. So that’s what I did.”
“Right,” I said casually, as if her answer was the most logical one in the world.
“Anyway, the cops never found out anything about Joey for a long time. After a while, we just sort of forgot about him. Then one day these federal agents showed up at the door with the local police. They said they’d found his body in New Hampshire somewhere with a bunch of other kids. They think some pervert killed him.”
She casually took another swig of her beer and belched loudly, as if she she’d just finished talking about losing the family dog.
After a while, we just sort of forgot about him?
“What do you remember about the last time you saw Joey?” I asked.
“I don’t know … it was a long time ago.”
“What did he say?”
“Something like … ‘Ma, I’m going down to the highway.’”
“The highway?”
“He liked to go down to the highway that passes by about a half mile from here.”
“What did he do there?”
“He watched the trucks.”
“That’s all?”
“Like I said, he was a weird kid.”
“Did he have any friends that he might have confided in?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember if he had any friends?”
“I really didn’t pay that much attention.”
“If there’s anyone at all you can think of …”
She shook her head no. “I never noticed who he was with.”
The door of the trailer slammed and a big man wearing a sleeveless t-shirt and cutoff shorts came out. Ralph Manielli, Joey’s father. He had several days’ worth of stubble on his face and scratched his crotch as he looked first at us, then at his wife.
“Are these the TV people who were supposed to come here today?” he asked her.
“No, asshole, this is the Avon lady taking a picture of me. Of course it’s the TV people asking me about Joey. Who the hell do you think it would be anyway?”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I tried.”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s because you were out drinking all night with those drunken friends of yours.”
Ralph Manielli didn’t deny the accusation. Instead he looked down at the beer cans under her chair.
“Is that my beer?”
“It’s my beer, too.”
“How come you’re drinking it this early in the morning?”
“Nothing better to do.”
“Why don’t you go inside and clean up our place for once in your life, you lazy bitch?” His voice angry now. “I’m tired of living in a pigsty.”
“Clean it yourself,” she said, opening another can of the beer. “Hell, you’ve got time. I mean it’s not like you’ve got a job or anything.”
Manielli moved menacingly toward her with his fists clenched. For a second, I thought he was going to hit her. I wasn’t sure what to do if that happened and exchanged worried glances with the members of my film crew. But he thought better of it and stopped.
“You better stay away from me,” his wife said. “You remember what the sheriff said the last time you beat me. One more time, and you’re going to jail. I’ll call the cops and swear out a complaint if you lay a hand on me.”
“Ain’t going to jail again,” he muttered, as he reached down and took one of the beers. “Ain’t worth it for the likes of you.”
He didn’t know much more about what happened to Joey than his wife did. He remembered giving him a beating a few days before he disappeared for something or other, he couldn’t remember exactly what it was. Then it was all kind of a blur until the authorities told them they’d found the body.
“He was always a bad kid,” Manielli said. “He did everything wrong. It doesn’t surprise me that he wound up getting himself killed that way.”
After we left, I asked the guy driving the van to stop by the highway for a minute. The highway where Joey Manielli had gone that last day before he disappeared.
Sitting there, watching the traffic pass by, I wondered what it must have been like for little Joey. Living in a place like this. Getting beaten up regularly by his father—and probably his mother, too. Growing up without knowing what it felt like to be loved. He was only twelve years old, but maybe he imagined that there must be a better world out there somewhere.
So he came down here to the highway and looked at the trucks and dreamed of being on one of them and driving far away from here. Maybe someone stopped and took advantage of this. Maybe he even got into the truck or the car with them voluntarily. Nothing could be worse than the world I live in now, he might have thought to himself as he made the fateful decision.
But he was wrong.
He was an unhappy, confused little twelve-year-old boy who dreamed about a better life somewhere else.
One way or another, that dream turned into a nightmare.
CHAPTER 16
BECKY GALE HAD lived in Princeton, New Jersey. That was less than a hundred miles away from Joey Manielli and the trailer park in Allentown, but it seemed like a million miles’ difference between the two places.
Princeton was everything an Ivy League college town should be—quiet tree-lined streets, quaint shops, students spread out reading on the campus green. The Gales’ house was on a cul-de-sac about a half mile from the heart of town. There were two cars in the driveway and a swimming pool in the back. From the front porch, you could see woods, a nearby lake, and some of the buildings on the Princeton campus.
Victoria Gale, Becky’s mother, was no Janis Manielli either. She answered the door wearing a fashionable pantsuit, all made up and with her hair carefully combed. Inside, the house was immaculate and—by my standards—expensively furnished. There was a big picture of Jesus Christ on the coffee table and a painting of Jesus on the cross hanging from the wall. I assumed the Gales must be a religious family. I wondered idly if that had happened before or after their daughter was murdered. Mrs. Gale offered me some iced tea a
nd what appeared to be freshly baked cookies. I sipped on the tea and ate a cookie while the crew set up for the interview around me.
“Have you lived here for a long time, Mrs. Gale?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s a wonderful area.”
“Does your husband work for the college?”
“Oh, no.” She laughed. “We’d never been able to afford this house if he had. Professors and academics don’t get rich, I’m afraid. My husband was a financial investor. He worked for Dow Jones for a while, then went out on his own. Started his own company. He went to Princeton University, though. That’s how we first moved here after we were married.”
“Where is he now?”
“Oh, Paul died several years ago.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. All the articles at the time they identified your daughter’s body talked about the two of you …”
“It was a blessing really when he went. He had bone cancer. A nasty disease. He was in a lot of pain at the end.” She looked over at the picture of Jesus on the coffee table in front of us. “I was grateful to the Lord for taking him to heaven.”
She said it almost by rote, like it was a refrain that she had uttered many times before. She picked up her tea, took a sip, and smiled at me.
I smiled back.
“Did you have any other children besides Becky?” I asked.
“Yes, Becky had a sister. Samantha. She lives in New York now. Becky was a year older. Actually, Becky’s birthday would be coming up now if …”
Her voice trailed off slowly and she looked again at the Jesus picture as if it could somehow give her comfort.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Gale,” I said, not knowing what else to tell her.
“God has a plan for us all,” she said. “We just have to be strong and trust Him and keep our faith in the Almighty.”
The camera was ready now. I did the interview with Mrs. Gale about her daughter Becky. She told me how Becky had gone off to have a piano lesson on that fateful day. When she didn’t come home, the Gales called the police. The piano teacher said he never saw her. He was interrogated relentlessly by the cops, but eventually passed a lie detector test. They tracked her route from the Gale house to the piano teacher’s place, no more than a quarter of a mile. No one saw anything. No one heard anything. No one knew anything. Becky Gale simply walked out of her house one day and then disappeared. Just like Lucy Devlin.
“We always held out hope,” she said. “My husband used to say that one day we would find her and she’d be all right. But she wasn’t, of course. The police came here a few years ago and told us about finding her body. They said she had been …”
Her voice broke now and she began to cry. She sobbed for a few minutes. The cameras got it all. It was great TV, but I felt uncomfortable. It was as if this woman had let her guard down and let me get a glimpse of her that she didn’t show the world very often.
She pulled herself together then. She asked me if I had any other questions. There didn’t seem to be much else to say. We already had the money shot of her crying, so I just shut the cameras down.
While the crew was packing up their gear, I tried to make some small talk with Mrs. Gale to fill the time.
“It’s hard to imagine something so terrible happening in a wonderful place like this,” I said, looking at the pristine neighborhood outside her living room window.
“Sometimes evil comes from where you least expect,” she said.
Suddenly Mrs. Gale began to cry again.
Talking about her daughter during the interview had obviously brought a lot of long-buried emotions to the surface again.
“Sometimes I just don’t understand,” she said. “This was a good house. A God-fearing house. Paul and I and the girls went to church every Sunday. We read the Bible regularly to them. We always taught them right from wrong. But now Paul is gone. And Becky too. I’m all alone.”
“What about your other daughter?” I asked.
“Samantha?”
“Yes, you said she lived in New York. Do you see her often?”
Mrs. Gale shook her head sadly. “Samantha and I haven’t talked in years.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“I had such high hopes for my daughters. They were both so bright, they loved to read, they did well in school. I wanted them to go to college at Princeton one day, just like their father. But then suddenly Becky was gone and after that … well, Samantha was never the same. Her grades fell off, she started to run with the wrong crowd, and she even tried to run away a few times. As soon as she was old enough, she did move out and went to New York City. She never comes back here. She won’t return my phone calls. She sends back my letters unopened. I’ve lost her, too. Just like I lost Becky.”
I thought again about the way Patrick and Anne Devlin’s marriage had fallen apart after Lucy disappeared. The loss of a child frequently has far-reaching repercussions that we don’t realize until much later. The family can never be the same. It leaves behind a wound that time can ease a bit, but never truly heal.
“I know God has a reason for putting me through all of this,” she said, looking one more time at the picture on the wall. “He has a reason for everything. There must be a purpose, an explanation for what has happened. I have to believe that. I have to have faith in His eternal wisdom. I have to accept that there is a reason for everything that takes place in His kingdom. Don’t you agree?”
I wasn’t sure what to say to her.
Because I didn’t see any reason for any of this.
No reason at all.
I left Victoria Gale there all alone in the big empty house with her memories.
* * *
I went online and made a lot of phone calls when I got back to New York to track down information about the other four kids in that New Hampshire grave from their families and teachers and friends around the country.
Donald Chang had gone to an arcade near the Santa Monica pier in California and was last seen playing one of the machines there. Someone thought they spotted him talking to an older man, but no one ever confirmed that. He never came home that night. Like Anne Devlin, his parents had spent years putting up posters and chasing down false leads until they finally got the news that his body had been uncovered.
Tamara Greene was on a school outing when she disappeared. She lived in Elyria, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland. Her class had taken a school bus into Cleveland for a tour of the historical museum there. The teacher remembered her going into the museum with the rest of the class. But, when they reassembled by the bus a few hours later, she was gone. A massive search turned up no evidence about what happened to her. Her parents later filed a lawsuit against the local school board for negligence in her disappearance.
William O’Shaughnessy went missing on a Florida beach not far from his house. He’d bicycled over there with a group of friends on a hot summer day. At first, everyone assumed he must have gone into the water and drowned. But his bicycle was missing, too, and he was positively identified by a vendor who sold him an ice cream cone later that day. The vendor said the O’Shaughnessy boy was with a man who acted as if he were his father. But the father had been at work all day, and the identity of the mystery man was never resolved. A few years ago, William O’Shaughnessy’s father had gone into the garage, turned on the ignition of his car, and committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. People said he’d never gotten over the loss of his son.
Emily Neiman disappeared from a Houston mall while her mother was trying on a skirt in one of the shops. The mother was only inside the dressing room for a minute or two, but there was no sign of Emily in the chair where she’d left her. The family hired private detectives, put up posters all over the Houston area, and got volunteers to conduct massive searches for their daughter—all to no avail. “I’ll never give up hope,” the mother said in interviews. “Never, no matter how long it takes. I know she’s out there somewhere and she wants to come home.” There was an article i
n the Houston paper a few years later about how the mother had left Emily’s bedroom and possessions untouched ever since then, waiting for her to return one day. That waiting ended when her body was discovered with the others in New Hampshire.
By the time I was finished with the calls, I had plenty of facts on all six kids. Plenty of stuff to do the soft feature piece I’d promised Faron for our newscast. But that was all I had.
I couldn’t figure out any connection between the six deaths—how they all wound up in that single grave in rural New Hampshire.
I couldn’t figure out any connection between them and Lucy Devlin’s disappearance either.
And I couldn’t figure out what any of this could possibly have to do with Elliott Grayson.
CHAPTER 17
THE TOWNHOUSE WHERE the Devlins had lived was between Third Avenue and a quiet little street called Irving Place. There were trees and bushes out front and a walkway with a metal gate that took you up to the front door. It was a peaceful, pleasant-looking neighborhood. Not the type of place you’d expect to have been the scene for one of New York City’s most infamous crimes.
I’d gone back to it just to get the feel of that day when Lucy Devlin walked out the door on her way to school and was never seen again. Looking for some sort of inspiration, I suppose. I wanted to see the house again and trigger whatever memories it might still hold after all these years.
The person living there now was named Liz Girabaldi. I knew that because I’d checked the listing from the office.
I stood there staring at the house for a long time. The sun was shining, but there was a chill in the air. The weather forecast said the temperature was going to go below freezing tonight, and we might even get snow. Springtime in New York is always like that—Mother Nature teases you with a few nice days, then throws some more winter at you. I thought about how nice it would be if I were someplace warm like Southern California right now. I thought about how nice it would be if I were in Miami Beach or the Bahamas. I thought about how nice it would be if I were anywhere else instead of standing in front of Lucy Devlin’s old building.
