Women of the Mean Streets

by J. M. Redmann

  There are no shoes. The feet are bare and the soles have a series of round, red marks, some seeming to suppurate, even after death. The circular marks are paler at the outer ring, darker in the center; lividity intensifies this effect. Cigarette burns. About thirty in all. And around the ankles, small cuts, like razor marks, and traces of adhesive—more duct tape.

  The duct tape around the head begins to unwind. Slowly at first, with the head rising, so that the effect—reddish brown hair flowing back and the tape unwinding—reminds Muriel of a painting by the French surrealist Magritte. The tape continues to unravel in a languorous swirl. Muriel looks closer and closer, waiting for the face to be revealed, but as the last bit of tape sweeps off and blows away into the intensifying wind around the floating body, Muriel sees that there is no face, that the face has come off onto the tape, skin flayed away from the bone, leaving nothing but a swollen pit of gore where the face—her mother’s face—once was.

  *

  The short, staccato shrieks, low and guttural, split the darkness as Muriel ejects from sleep, the dream of her mother’s death surrounding her, a thick miasma threatening to suffocate her, just as her mother had been suffocated. Suffocated. Muriel cannot get away from this thought, cannot escape the images that come to her at the edge of sleep and even in full wakefulness: Her mother, tortured. Her mother, burned. Her mother, bound. Her mother, gagged. Her mother, suffocated. Muriel holds her breath several times a day, counting, and tries to imagine what it is to want to claw away one’s own face just to get to the air, just to hold on to life. Muriel holds her breath—seconds, tries a minute, tries not to remember what the coroner said at the inquest, that suffocation is the most terrifying form of death after fire, that if her mother had been able to reach the tape around her face, if her hands had not been bound at the time of her death, she would likely have clawed away all the flesh of her face in an effort to remove the tape and breathe.

  Muriel pushes the duvet off, pulls on the robe tossed beside her, gets out of bed, walks to the window and opens it wider. Every night since her mother’s body was found three days after Christmas, Muriel has slept with the window open—December, January, February, March. Tonight, the air of a delayed London spring bites through her; she shivers involuntarily, pushes her hands deep into the Polartec pockets of her robe as she looks out over the little garden below her flat. Shadows creep and shift. Above, clouds drift over a barely discernable moon. Muriel would like to cry, or at least cry out. She would like to feel something other than dizzying horror, complicated remorse, and a deep, inchoate rage. She would like to reinvent another death for her mother, the mother with whom she was never close, with whom she had never quite been able to connect, even as a small child, but whom she nevertheless loved in the blind animal way that all children love their mothers. She would like, above all, to be able to delete the last thirty hours of her mother’s life, to make them an unconscious blur—both for her mother and herself. Delete the hours in which her mother’s house had been invaded, delete the hours in which her mother had been slashed and burned, tortured and buried—buried alive. The hours in which her mother had died and her aunt had, just barely, survived.

  Muriel had lived in London for five years, doing art restoration at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was the job she had worked toward for a decade, in a city she adored, at a museum where many of her former colleagues yearned to work. But the pay was painfully poor and the flat she shared with her lover, Liz, was too small and in a dodgy area near the Brixton Market. Muriel couldn’t afford more than one flight back to the States a year to visit her mother and her other relatives back in the low, flat Kansas of her childhood. Kansas, the place she had flown away from three hours after she had graduated from college, never to return except for the annual visits, preferring to have her mother visit whatever East Coast city she was studying or working in before she moved to London.

  Muriel and her mother had decided on a January visit this year. The terrorist warnings would lessen after the holidays and the flight would cost considerably less—a half-month’s rent on the exorbitant flat less. Muriel’s mother had promised to leave the tree up through Epiphany. They would celebrate Christmas then, like Russian Orthodox, instead of the Irish Catholics they were.

  There had been no arguments, no recriminations. Muriel had agreed to work through the holidays at the museum, making the two-week trip to Kansas possible. And she had looked forward to seeing her mother. She really had.

  But then… Then the calls had gone unanswered. She had rung and rung from Christmas Eve into Christmas morning until well into Christmas night. She had called her aunt, then, and her brother, as well. No one was home. She had expected that her aunt Jane would be with her mother—midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, followed by a Midwestern midday dinner on Christmas Day. Both widowed with their children far afield, Muriel’s mother and Muriel’s aunt—the wife of her mother’s brother—frequently spent their holidays together, companionable as they had always been, liking each other’s company more, Muriel believed, than they had ever liked that of their men.

  Where are they? Muriel began to imagine car wrecks in sudden snow squalls; blizzards could blow up as fast as tornadoes this time of year and the sixty-something women, despite years of life in the bitter Kansas winters, had never mastered the art of driving in a storm.

  On Boxing Day, Muriel tracked down her brother, Charlie, at his in-laws’ in Oklahoma City. He, his wife Sharleen, and their two young children had driven out from Austin where Charlie taught history at the university. They weren’t due in Kansas for another couple of days.

  The conversation was brief and as usual, a little fraught. Charlie and Muriel had been estranged since she had told him, the night before she left Kansas on the eve of both her graduation and her twenty-first birthday, that she was going to New York to live with the woman, Liz, she had fallen in love with in her senior year of college. Liz, whom Charlie had asked out every time Muriel had brought her over to the house. Liz, the smart and sexy valedictorian of their class, specialist in Russian studies, mysterious and intriguing with her jet-black hair and eyes like coals. Liz, whom Muriel wished was with her now, rather than traveling through Russia on a fellowship that would keep her incommunicado except for occasional e-mails and even more rare cell phone calls through April. Liz—who Muriel knew, because Liz was her bedrock—who would somehow know how to find her mother or at least know how to keep Muriel from worry, if only she were here.

  Muriel was never sure what it was Charlie resented most, that she got the girl he wanted instead of the one he settled for, or that she got to leave Kansas for good and he didn’t, staying through grad school and beyond until he got the job at Austin. Charlie wished her a Merry Christmas and told her not to worry, that Mom was with Jane and they were both safe, he was sure. There hadn’t been snow, in fact there had been a brief warm-up—unnaturally springlike for Christmas in their part of the world. He’d be there in two days, at the weekend, he’d call her and let her know everything was all right. Muriel could feel a tug of concern for his younger sister in his voice; momentary, brief, but she could hear it.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her. But she was worried, nonetheless.

  In the end, Muriel had been right to be worried.

  *

  Aunt Jane had arrived at Muriel’s mother’s house at nine o’clock on Christmas Eve. She had walked through the unlocked front door just as she had hundreds of times over the forty years she had been coming to the house to visit her sister-in-law and best friend, Irene. She had walked into an empty parlor and called up the stairs to her friend, Merry Christmas, time for Mass. But there had been no answer. No sounds at all, it seemed. Nothing to intimate that Irene was in the bathroom and just hadn’t heard Jane.

  Her foot was on the second step when Jane saw the wrapping paper just outside her periphery. It was in a ball on the floor where the hallway met the parlor, just below the stairs on which she now stood. A small trail of ribb
on, then the big wad of crumpled paper. As if there had been visitors who had come early for their gifts and had left in a hurry.

  Was it a sudden sense of dread or foreboding that made Jane back down the stairs and run toward the door? Was it the unconscious but clear sense that her well-ordered friend of forty years would never leave a scrap of paper on her floor, let alone this mass of wrapping and ribbon? Was it the eerie silence in the house that had always held some sound, even after the children had moved out and Dermott had died and even the dog was gone?

  Jane hadn’t known as she ran to her car and locked the doors behind her and drove to the police station across town that she had just escaped an excruciating death, a death she would have been unable to prevent her friend from experiencing, but which she at least would not now, herself, have to witness, before it was her own turn.

  Menninger is a small replica of Topeka and lies just at the outskirts of the second-largest city in Kansas. In towns like these in the Midwestern plains states, most everyone knows everyone else or there is the sense that they should. When Jane walked into the Menninger police station at just past nine thirty on Christmas Eve, it didn’t matter that she didn’t know any of the men sitting around the big front desk eating Christmas cookies and listening to Frank Sinatra singing “Silent Night.” They all looked as if they were cousins once removed and the desk sergeant came out to greet her and ask if he could help.

  In small towns, missing persons reports or signs of trouble at a house where trouble never existed aren’t dismissed for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, the way they are in big cities. Everyone knows what everyone else should be doing. And Sergeant Michaels and Officers Perez and McGee knew that widows in their sixties don’t go missing on Christmas Eve when their family is coming by to take them to Mass.

  It was Tony Perez who drove Jane Corrigan back to Irene Corrigan McManus’s house, all the while hoping that this was indeed a false alarm and Mrs. McManus would be meeting them at the door with a warm cider and a plate of cookies and an admonishment to her friend for jumping to conclusions when she had only been in the basement looking for a particular Christmas ornament she had misplaced. But that thought receded when he asked Mrs. Corrigan to stay in his patrol car and he drew his weapon and walked gingerly through the still-unlocked front door.

  The wrapping paper lay on the floor just as Mrs. Corrigan had described it. And there was a creepy quiet in the house that he had experienced before. The kind of quiet that goes with killing, except he didn’t yet smell the death he feared was just past the kitchen or right up the stairs.

  The kitchen was empty, but messy. Too messy for the kind of woman who kept a house like this neat and tidy little package. Chairs were pulled out from the table at odd angles and two beer bottles and a couple of half-drunk cups of coffee were scattered over the table top, where in the center lay an ashtray filled with two kinds of cigarettes, several lipsticked at the ends. The remains of a lunchmeat sandwich lay next to the ashtray right on the table, no plate, no napkin. Mrs. Corrigan was right; something was wrong here.

  Perez stood at the bottom of the stairs feeling a dread similar to what Jane Corrigan had felt an hour before. He thought of his wife, Terri, and their baby, home with her parents on the kid’s first Christmas Eve and made a quick sign of the cross before climbing the stairs, his gun cocked and outstretched before him.

  The rooms were dark except for the bathroom where a fine spray of blood layered the gray tile floor just like artificial snow at the corners of the shop windows on Montrose Avenue. Between the tub and the toilet lay a washcloth soaked in blood.

  Back at the car, Officer Perez asked Mrs. Corrigan if she could return to the station and make a statement. Jane didn’t cry, but her eyes blurred for a moment. Mass would be starting in a few minutes and she would miss it for the first time since her first Holy Communion fifty-seven years ago. She would miss going with Irene for the first time in thirty-nine years and at that moment Jane knew that praying would not help. She would never see Irene again. And she might never be able to go to Mass again, once she knew what had become of her friend. She might just blame God for whatever hellish thing it was that had happened on this of all nights.

  Irene Corrigan McManus had been doing dishes in her kitchen at eight thirty in the evening on December twenty-third, the longest—and thus darkest—night of the year, when the front door had opened. The tree was lit and the parlor was full of Christmas gifts for Jane, Muriel, Charlie and Sharleen, and of course, her grandchildren, Belinda and Will. Irene had grabbed a tea towel and walked smiling toward Jane only to find a boy and girl she had never seen before staring at her from the hallway.

  Irene heard the knife before she saw it. Her father had worked cattle and she knew that sound of a switchblade clicking out from its sheath for all manner of unpleasantness. She had never liked the sound and right now it made her want to run, something she hadn’t done in more than a decade. There was nowhere to go in the small house. No way to get to the back door before these tall, lithe young murderers had got hold of her and sliced at her sweater just below the armpit. Nowhere to go as the girl rummaged through the pantry closet and brought out duct tape and matches and the few beers she kept on hand for when Charlie came to visit, or Father Meehan. Nowhere to go as the tall, lanky boy with the sharp blue eyes leaned into her face and asked her for money, nowhere to go as the girl wound the tape around her wrists. They put the end of the tea towel in her mouth as they led her up the stairs and went from room to room searching for the money and jewelry she simply didn’t have. There was the surprise iPod she had bought for Jane, wrapped under the tree, fully loaded with songs she knew her friend would love. The coin set for Will, who even at ten was a born collector. The gold filigree necklace with the three inset sapphires that had belonged to her husband’s mother that she was giving to Muriel, also under the tree. But nothing else. Her TV—only 30 inches. Her DVR. No exciting new Blu-ray, just the cheapest on-sale no-name from Best Buy. Some other small appliances—microwave, coffeemaker, radio. Three hundred dollars for emergencies stashed in the top drawer of her dresser under her silk scarves. Her mother’s silver server on the breakfront in the dining room.

  After a few hours of swimming in and out of consciousness, of feeling her feet on fire, of lying in small pools of her own blood on the bathroom floor, Irene knew that money and jewelry and her eight-year-old car wouldn’t be enough. Scott and Gina wanted to hurt someone, wanted to watch her suffer, wanted to spend their first Christmas together unwrapping other people’s gifts and doing irrevocable damage. They had entered her house because the tree was lit, the gifts were wrapped, and the door had been open. But they had stayed well beyond two cups of coffee, a couple of sandwiches, a plate of Christmas cookies, and a few beers for something else, something so sinister Irene couldn’t contemplate it. She could only pray. Hard.

  The phone had rung and rung that morning while they hurt her over and over. Irene knew it was Muriel, Muriel who never remembered about time differences and was calling to wish her a Happy Christmas—she had stopped saying Merry once she moved to London—long before it was actually time. Muriel, whom Irene now knew she would never see again. Never have the opportunity to pass on that necklace, to say that she finally understood about Liz, to say that she knew they had never been what mothers and daughters are supposed to be to each other, but that she had loved her nonetheless, felt proud of her daughter who did a job she never fully understood, was always glad to see her, strong and fit and seemingly happy when she came to visit every year.

  Irene was unconscious when Jane came through the front door on Christmas Eve, after twenty-four hours of torture and mayhem had suffused her house with a layering of evil that Muriel would later feel the second she walked through the door, ten days after her mother’s murder. Irene was unconscious as she was dragged to her own car and shoved into the trunk, unconscious as the leggy blond girl wrapped the tape over her mouth and nose and eyes and ran out of tape before s
he got to Irene’s throat. Irene was unconscious as her feet swelled from the cigarette burns and the razor cuts that Scott and Gina had taken turns inflicting, he looking bored and she just a little terrified as Scott crushed his hand over Irene’s mouth when she screamed. Irene was unconscious as Scott neatly dug a pit just large enough to lay a hundred and twenty-seven pound, five-foot three-inch, sixty-seven-year-old woman at the end of the rhododendron garden in Menninger Park three blocks from the clinic where Irene had worked for the seventeen years since her husband, Dermott, had died suddenly of an aneurysm. Irene never knew the terror of being buried alive, for she was unconscious—yet still alive—when they laid her in what was to be her grave and tossed the dirt in after her. She never knew that it took seven full hours for her to slowly asphyxiate because of a small cigarette burn in the duct tape just below her left nostril allowing just a whiff of air, protracting her death.

  *

  Muriel sat in her kitchen that was too bright in the manner of all English kitchens, drank a cup of strong black tea with just a hint of cream, no sugar, and tried not to think of suffocating. The newspaper was spread over the table: No murders, no tales of mayhem caught her eye. She had seen the papers after her mother’s murder. Had read them over and over trying to get a sense of her mother’s last hours, wanting to glean some clue about nineteen-year-old Scott Powell and eighteen-year-old Gina Tucci, both from Oklahoma City, who had gone on a crime spree in three small towns between theirs and her mother’s. Scott, who had spent two years in juvenile detention for aggravated assault, having nearly beaten a fellow classmate to death with a baseball bat in a fight over a girl, and Gina, the special education student who had been in trouble over drugs and bad boys. Gina, with the beautiful waist-length blond hair and pretty, vacant expression, whom Scott had befriended in a court-mandated class for problem students a year before they decided to kill Muriel’s mother and stab the man from whom they stole the car that took them out of Oklahoma City and into Menninger in time to destroy Christmas for Muriel, Jane, and Charlie for all time.