by R. G. Belsky
They believed everything he said.
He was a believable guy.
Of course, someone from the families might change their mind at some point and demand that those other five bodies be dug up—wherever they were now—to make sure they were who he said they were. But, even if that did happen, it probably wouldn’t have any impact on the election. After all these years, positive IDs would take a long time and most likely have to be done by DNA testing, medical experts said. This could take months to complete. Whatever the outcome, Grayson would probably be already elected by that time.
There’d still be a big controversy then, but most observers didn’t expect anything that dramatic to happen.
Like I said, people bought Grayson’s story.
Why would he lie, they asked.
I’d hoped this was going to be the break I needed to go after Elliott Grayson and reveal the true story about him—whatever that might be.
But it wasn’t enough.
I was going to have to find something else.
CHAPTER 40
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM with a story like this one—about crimes that happened a long time ago—is that the trail is so cold.
People die over the years, they move away, or they just disappear.
Like Phil and Nancy Wilkinson. They were the family who raised Joey Manielli after getting him from Marston. I’d hoped to be able to get them to open up about the whole deal—how they met Marston, how much they paid him, and who else might have been involved. But I found out the Wilkinsons had both been killed in a car crash a few years earlier.
At first, the tabloid reporter instinct in me had speculated wildly about how maybe it wasn’t an accident after all—that they’d been killed by Marston or Grayson or someone else to cover up the Manielli adoption truth.
But, after I looked up the details of their deaths in some old newspaper articles, I realized that wasn’t the case.
It was front-page news in several of the northern California papers. A tanker truck filled with gasoline had overturned on a busy freeway, exploding into flames that engulfed several cars near them at the time. Investigators later determined that the driver had gone thirty-two hours without sleep on a cross-country trip—and then dozed off at the wheel, losing control of his fuel-filled vehicle. Five people died in the tragedy, including Phil and Nancy Wilkinson.
Nope, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Too bad for them—and too bad for me because they took whatever secrets they had about how they got Joey Manielli to the grave with them.
Who else was there to talk to?
I’d already talked to the other five families of the bodies identified in the New Hampshire grave besides Joey Manielli. But I went back now and talked to each family again. All of them had different stories. Some had been forever devastated by the loss of their child, while others were able to pull themselves together and continue on with their lives.
Tamara Greene’s parents had gotten divorced, just like Patrick and Anne Devlin. David Chang’s family had had another little boy who they said proudly looked just like David had when he was younger. William O’Shaughnessy’s parents had moved from Florida to another state because they said the memories were too difficult to deal with once he was gone—and then the father later killed himself. Emily Neiman’s mother had thrown herself into a volunteer organization that ran a day camp and other outdoor activities for city kids in the Houston area. And Victoria Gale told me again about all the good work she was doing for the Lord at her church in Princeton in memory of her beloved daughter Becky.
All of them said they believed Elliott Grayson—that they were convinced it was their children buried in that mass grave in New Hampshire.
And what about the sixth body in the grave? The one that had been misidentified as Joey Manielli? All we knew for sure was that he was a young boy about the same age as Manielli had been when he disappeared. But any other possible clues to his identity were destroyed when the Manielli family had him cremated so that they didn’t have to pay for an expensive funeral. And there was no DNA crime scene evidence on file to check—DNA wasn’t being used as commonly as a law enforcement tool fifteen years ago as it is today. Damn.
This was all interesting enough, but it didn’t give me any answers. I was at a dead end again.
I went back over my notes and looked through all the interviews I had done with the families of the six children who had disappeared back then. Trying to find any kind of loose end I could go after. Manielli. Chang. O’Shaughnessy. Greene. Neiman. Gale. Who else was there?
That’s when I remembered the sister. Becky Gale’s sister. Becky’s mother had said that she’d lost her other daughter, too—that Becky’s younger sister, Samantha, lived in New York City now and she hadn’t seen or talked to her in years. Maybe I could find out something from the sister.
I sat down at my computer, punched in the name of Samantha Gale to an online phone listing site for Manhattan—then waited to see what came up. I didn’t know for sure she lived in Manhattan, of course. But her mother had said she lived in New York City—so that seemed like the best place to start.
There were no Samantha Gales in the Manhattan phone listings that I found. But there were some S. Gayles. I went through all of them—calling the numbers there one by one until I finally found an answering device where the woman identified on the phone message identified herself as Samantha.
Except the address listed with that number turned out to be for a fortune-telling place in Chelsea.
I called Victoria Gale to ask if that could be right.
“Yes, that’s my daughter,” she said.
“An astrology parlor?”
“She tells fortunes for a living.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea,” Victoria Gale said sadly. “If you find out from her, please tell me. I’m sorry, but I have to go now. I’m on my way to pray at our church.”
CHAPTER 41
THE SIGN ON the window of the storefront building near Eighth Avenue in the West 20s said: “Astrology, Tarot Cards, Crystals, Palm Reading. Come Inside.” A bell tinkled when I pushed the front door open. There was a small, darkly lit waiting room. On the wall was a framed document that proclaimed Samantha Gale was a licensed practitioner in astrology, who had been approved by some international astrology organization based in Barstow, California. Guess that made the suckers feel better.
I have a very low threshold of patience for people who think that stuff like stars tell their future. Sure, I look at the newspaper column once in a while to see if I’m going to find true love that day or not. But mostly I think it’s ridiculous. I remember a newspaper where they fired the astrology columnist. When she got the bad news, she was very upset. “Hey, if you were any good, you would have seen it coming,” the editor told her. That’s pretty much the way I feel about astrology and the people who practice it.
A woman came out of a door in the back. She was young, in her twenties, with long dark hair, big brown eyes, and a pretty, almost angelic face.
“Samantha Gale?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“Well, you’re not here for a reading.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m a psychic, remember?” She smiled.
“Okay, then … why don’t you tell me why I’m here?”
“Your name is Clare Carlson,” she said. “You work for a TV station, Channel 10. And you’re doing a story about my sister, Becky, so you want to ask me some questions about her. How am I doing so far?”
I stared at her in amazement.
“How’d you know that?”
“It’s all in the stars and the spirits,” she said, waving her hands and making a spooky sound with her voice.
“Really?”
“No,” she said. “I watch TV. I recognized you right away. I saw your newscast, the one which mentioned my sister. I knew from that you’d
been to see my mother in New Jersey. Then you walk into my store and say that we need to talk. Ergo, I figure it must be about Becky.”
I smiled. This was a smart woman. I remembered her mother saying she could have gone to Princeton. What the hell was she doing reading fortunes in Chelsea?
“Let’s talk about Becky,” I said.
“There’s nothing to say. She’s dead.”
“Okay, then let’s talk about your mother. She’s alive.”
Samantha made a face. “Is the old lady still keeping Becky’s room the way it was? Like Becky’s going to come back one day and find it the same as she left it. Is she still going to church every day to pray for Becky’s soul? All that grief, all that sorrow, all the energy she puts into being the heartbroken mother. Maybe it would have been better if she’d cared a little more about Becky when she was alive. Maybe she could have done something useful for Becky then.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the guilt is her payback for what happened.”
“I don’t understand …”
“Of course you don’t.”
“What did your mother do?”
“She didn’t do anything. Not a damn thing.”
“Okay.”
“That was the problem.”
She led me into another room. There were black curtains on the windows, and it was dimly lit. A smell of incense filled the place and a single candle flickered on a table in the center of the room.
“I was just a little girl, of course,” she said. “I didn’t understand a lot of it. But I knew something was wrong in that house, even then. One day, Becky came to me and said she had a secret. She said our father …” Her voice wavered at this point … “Our father had done things to her. They were sexual things. He’d come into her bedroom late at night and force her to do this stuff. She said it made her cry. She was confused and afraid.”
I stared at Samantha Gale.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I told her she needed to tell our mother.”
“Did she?”
“Yes, for all the good it did.”
“Your mother didn’t believe Becky.”
“She claimed she was lying. She told her God would punish her for saying terrible things like that. She didn’t even want to think about the possibility that it might be true. She couldn’t believe this man she’d been married to for all those years could be capable of something like that.”
I nodded. Denial was common in cases like this. I’d come across it in stories I’d covered on the subject before.
“The weird thing is I didn’t really understand it,” Samantha said. “I mean, I loved my father. I was almost jealous that he wanted Becky more than me. Then, after she was gone, he started coming into my room. That’s when I really knew what my sister had suffered through all those years.”
“Did you go to your mother?”
“No, not then.”
“Because you decided she wouldn’t believe you, just like she didn’t believe Becky?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But she knows now?”
Samantha nodded.
“My shrink tells me I repressed the whole thing for a long time. All I knew was how miserable I was growing up after Becky was gone. Then, when my father died, I guess it all came pouring out. The shrink said I was finally confronting my demons or something like that. Anyway, that’s when I went to my mother and told her. She realized then that Becky had tried to tell her the same thing, but she never listened. That’s why she talks to God all the time now. To get rid of the guilt.”
“And your mother never suspected anything?”
“So she says.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“How could she not know? He was getting in and out of bed in the middle of the night to come into our rooms. What’d she think he was doing? No, I guess she was just in denial. That’s what her whole life has been about. Denial that her husband was a sick pervert. Denial that I was long gone from that house and from her. Denial that Becky was dead.
“I realize now that she must have known something was wrong. But she hid her head in the sand and pretended she didn’t see it. My father … well, he was just sick. But my mother had the opportunity to save Becky and me from the unspeakable things he was doing, and she did nothing.
“It’s funny, but my parents provided us with so many things on one level. A good house to live in, food on the table, a good education, anything like that we wanted. Anything except for the most important thing. They couldn’t protect us from evil, the evil that was right in that house. I couldn’t even look my mother in the face after that.
“I was supposed to go to Princeton. I wanted to major in English literature. I wanted to teach it, maybe be a professor there. Be close to my family and all that crap. But now I wanted to be as far away from that house as possible. I moved to New York, lived here until I decided what I wanted to do, and then a friend of mine turned me on to astrology. I know you probably think it’s no way to make a living, but I like it. It’s honest. I help people. Or at least I make them feel better. I’m not a phony like my mother and father.
“I’ve never been back to Princeton. My mother called and tried to see me at first, but I wouldn’t talk to her. After a while, she just gave up. I guess I’m dead for her now, too. Just like Becky.”
* * *
I called Victoria Gale again when I got back to the office and she confirmed it all.
Then she started to cry over the phone.
“I’ve often wondered if this somehow played a part in what happened,” she sobbed. “What if Becky was so upset by what her father had done that she was running away? She’d tried to talk about it with the only person she could. Me. And I hadn’t believed her. Maybe, in the end, that’s what got her killed.
“When Paul was dying of cancer, he was in terrible pain. They gave him drugs at first, but after a while even that didn’t help. He would lie in his bed and cry out in agony for the Lord to have mercy on him. Now I wonder if that was the Lord’s punishment for him. That he had to suffer like that for the terrible things he did to his own daughter. Do you think that’s possible, Ms. Carlson?” I didn’t know the answer to that.
What I did know was that Joey Manielli and Becky Gale—even though they came from completely different backgrounds—had been abused in some way by a member of their family.
Joey from the beatings he got from his father.
Becky Gale by her father’s sexual coercion.
And I remembered all over again what Anne Devlin had told me that Lucy said the day before she disappeared. About her father and sex. Like I said earlier, I at first assumed that was a reference to having caught me in bed with her father. But what if Patrick Devlin—despite his denials—really had been doing things to his daughter, too? That would mean all three of them were suffering from horrible abuse in their homes before they disappeared.
Did someone take advantage of this? Someone who zeroed in on kids who had been abused and were unhappy and despondent about their own family? Someone who used that to convince them to run away—and then murdered them himself?
I’d been looking for a connection between the six children whose bodies turned up in that New Hampshire grave.
Now maybe I had one.
Maybe even a connection to Lucy Devlin, too.
Maybe.
CHAPTER 42
THERE’S A PATTERN to every story.
Most of the time we never see this pattern because the story only lasts for a day or two. It goes on the air or in the newspaper and then we move on to the next story. Nothing is so easily discarded as yesterday’s news, and all of us in the business have a very short attention span.
But when a journalist really digs into a story in depth—like I was doing now—things sometimes begin falling into place in a way you never thought would happen.
When I was a reporter for the Tribune, I covered a popular TV newscaster that e
veryone loved. A great guy, they all said. Then one day it turned out he was beating his wife. He got arrested and suspended from the station. After that, more people started telling stories about him. How he’d been picked up for drunk driving a few times. How he had a bad drug habit. How he hadn’t paid his income taxes for several years. In the end, he went to jail and wound up committing suicide a few years later. Everyone said they saw it coming, and how troubled he was. Except that wasn’t true. No one predicted anything like that, no one saw anything wrong with the guy until they started digging into his life.
That’s what was happening with the families of the children found in the New Hampshire grave.
Everyone had assumed they had been taken by chance—at complete random—by a crazed mass murder. All that mattered was the person who abducted them. No one paid much attention to what happened before they were abducted. They didn’t think it mattered, and maybe it didn’t. On the other hand, it might prove to be a clue that would point to whoever committed the crime.
Joey Manielli had had a wretched existence as a child. A bully of a father, a drunk of a mother—no supervision, no love, no hope for anything for him in that run-down trailer park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Everyone—including me—had just assumed that was simply a description of his life before he disappeared, not that it might have something to do with his disappearance.
Because Joey Manielli’s life didn’t seem to match up with the lifestyle elements of any of the other five children found in the mass grave.
But now I’d determined that Becky Gale—who seemed outwardly to live a perfectly happy life with a loving family in a beautiful town like Princeton—had been living her own nightmare as she grew up.
What did that say about the other four?
* * *
Emily Neiman, William O’Shaughnessy, Tamara Greene, and Donald Chang were all from different parts of the country. Different kinds of families, economic backgrounds, ethnic heritages. They didn’t seem to have much of anything in common. But they’d turned out to be a connection between Joey Manielli and Becky Gale. Both had been victims of abuse at home. Joey, an obvious one. Becky, not so obvious. Maybe that was true of them, too.
