BG: I see. Now, Dawn, here’s a question I think anyone reading this story would want to ask. In light of what you’ve just told us, why would you want to spend the rest of your life with the man who attacked your parents in the way you’ve described?
DS: This is what I want people to understand. It wasn’t really Rud who did it. I mean, something took over—rage, or something—and I know his body did those things, but he wasn’t in his right head. His real head. It wasn’t the Rud I know, or the Rud I love. (A pause as she seems to reflect.) And it never would have happened if my parents hadn’t treated him the way they did.
BG: What about the dog? The dog didn’t do anything.
DS: (voice shaking) I know. I told you, it was an accident. Collateral damage, Rud called it. I still don’t know what that means. (She appears to try to regain her composure.) But I know he’d give anything if the whole thing hadn’t happened. And when we get to start over together, he’ll never do anything like this again.
BG: Okay. Do you mind if I just look at my notes for a minute?
DS: Take your time. Wow, this scone is good.
BG: Is it okay if I switch tracks for a sec?
DS: It’s your interview. Shoot.
BG: Some people might assume that once you met Rud Petty, you became a victim yourself. That he held a power over you it was impossible to resist, leading you to do things you wouldn’t normally have done. Most people who know you don’t realize that your tendency toward violence—or destruction, anyway—precedes your time with him.
DS: What?
BG: I had an interesting conversation with your next-door neighbor, Emmett Furth. You might recall that the defense tried to implicate him in the attack against your parents.
DS: What does Emmett Furth have to do with anything?
BG: You remember the day your family’s tree house burned down, in tenth grade?
DS: (voice rising) Of course I remember. Why are we talking about this?
BG: It’s always been assumed that Emmett was responsible for that fire. But he says he actually saw you out there, standing on the ladder and lighting sticks before tossing them inside.
Now I thought I might choke on the hot shriek gathering in my throat. But I was afraid Abby would hear me from the yard and be alarmed, so I swallowed hard to keep it down.
DS: I have no idea what you’re talking about. Of course he would say something like that! He doesn’t want people to know what he did. Look, aren’t we done here? Didn’t I do what you wanted? Did you bring my check?
BG: I went back and looked at the date. The fire happened the morning after we had auditions at school for A Chorus Line.
DS: (nearly shouting) So?
BG: You didn’t try out for a part, even though your name was on the list. You signed up, then changed your mind. (Ed. Note: Dawn Schutt remains silent.) You were upset by that, weren’t you? I think you wanted to audition, and you were mad at yourself for pulling out.
DS: (attempting to regain her composure) That’s completely crazy. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry, Cecilia, but that has nothing to do with anything. I get that you want to “stir up interest,” but you can’t just make (expletive deleted) like that up out of thin air.
I’d read enough—in fact, I’d read too much. But every time I tried to force myself to click the X at the top of the website, I couldn’t make myself do it. As with the transcript of Dawn’s interrogation, I couldn’t stop reading the next paragraph, and then the next. Finally, I forced myself to close the website’s window and then, as if it meant anything, shut the computer down.
The first thing I did was walk to the hall closet and, taking a deep breath before pulling it open, saw that Joe’s old “Puff Daddy” jacket was not hanging where it always had, with our winter clothing. I’d never noticed it missing before. I went through the rack three times, hoping I’d just rummaged over it, but there was no mistaking—it was gone.
Numbly, I went to the back door and let Abby in. Usually she was calmer when she entered the house after being outside, but tonight she still seemed agitated. “Sorry, girl,” I told her, assuming she hadn’t appreciated my leaving her alone for so long while I was at Warren’s house.
Then I said, “Come with me,” and she panted up the stairs behind me. At the closed door to Dawn’s room she paused and sniffed, giving a little yip, but I barely noticed because I was so intent on my mission.
It was true that I hadn’t remembered anything significant when I’d gone into our old bedroom by myself a few weeks earlier, but somehow I believed that tonight might be different, especially given everything I’d just read. I felt a new resolve, though it contained a measure of dread I didn’t recognize fully until later. And I planned to go further in my efforts to reenact that night.
Opening the door, I tried to focus on my breathing, as Barbara had taught us all in Tough Birds. But it didn’t work. I swallowed hard and took a deep breath as I switched the light on and walked to the spot I’d stood in the first time, when I remembered the tattoo—at the foot of the bed, across from the bathroom.
This time, though, I took a step closer to the bed, feeling my breath catch in my throat. It came out in a sound that resembled a muffled scream.
I heard myself, but it was through a rushing in my ears. I was two places at once—the present and the past, this night and the one from three years earlier holding equal weight at either side of my pounding head.
Before I realized that I was doing it, I turned off the light and sat down on the bed, then swung my legs on top of it and settled down against one of the pillows where no head had ever lain. Abby came over and turned her face up, as if to ask, Are you sure you want to do this?
“It’s okay,” I told her, trying to soothe both of us.
I closed my eyes, and after a moment I could almost imagine the sound of Joe’s breath next to me. Because of his asthma, he was never silent when he slept, and I had gotten used to the familiar noise over all the years of our marriage. Though part of me knew the sound was only an illusion, I listened to it for a minute or so, tempted to give in to the comfort it made me feel.
Then Abby whined at my side, and I sat back up and patted her on the head. “You were downstairs on your bed that night, next to the TV.” Somehow, narrating my thoughts out loud put them at a distance I could bear. When I said this, I realized that now I actually did remember Abby settling into her big cushion in the family room after Joe turned off the movie, and I knew I had the right night in my head because, on our way up the stairs to the bedroom, I assumed Joe was thinking about the awful scene earlier in the day with Dawn and Rud, and I told him, “She’ll probably call in the morning and apologize.”
In the room where I sat trying to remember, Abby barked. And then it was all clear before me—so clear that it was as if it had always been there, and immediately I couldn’t remember what it was like not to have it at the front of my consciousness. The sudden, vivid clarity felt like a kick in the forehead. It was the most disturbing sensation I’d ever known.
“You weren’t barking that night,” I whispered, allowing myself to return slowly to a lying position, knowing that if I didn’t take care, when I sat up again everything would have changed in a way I wasn’t prepared to face. “That means Dawn was here with him. Right?” In retrospect, I can almost feel amused to realize I was asking a dog for confirmation, though there was nothing remotely funny about it then.
The next thing I remembered was hearing Joe—not his strained breathing, but his voice. He was saying something, but not to me. He started wheezing, and he knocked his inhaler off the table when he tried to grab for it.
I reached up to turn on the light on my nightstand, but a voice said, “Leave it off,” and I recognized it as Rud Petty’s. Across the bed, I saw Joe sitting with his legs over the side, putting his head down to his knees. At the time, I thought he was only trying to catch his breath. After reading Dawn’s interview, I understood that he had also been
hit in the head already with the mallet.
Then I heard another sound—not a word but a more high-pitched, asthmatic gasp, the sound so familiar and chilling that I heard my own voice scale an octave when I asked, “Dawn?” Dimly, through the darkness, I thought I could make out the Fair Isle pattern on the blue sweater I’d bought her that morning. “It looks so pretty on you,” I’d told her, when she tried it on for me. “It brings out the color in your eyes.”
In the store, she told me she liked the sweater. I wouldn’t have bought it for her otherwise.
In the bedroom, she raised her hand to touch the pattern on her chest, and I saw 768*—our alarm code—scribbled in black ink on the back of her wrist. I must be dreaming, I thought.
But she murmured, “Shit,” and came toward me; I could see her face, now that my sight had readjusted in the dark. “Be quiet, Mommy,” she said. I heard right away that her words were more of a command than an attempt to calm me.
“Are you okay, honey?” I reached my hand up toward her and opened my palm, as if she might lay the answer inside it. In the distance I heard Abby—not barking, but squealing in pain, and I thought I saw Dawn flinch at the sound.
Joe was standing now, though hunched over, still having trouble with his breath. He bent to pick up his inhaler from the floor, but Dawn beat him to it. Looking relieved, he reached out for her to give it to him, but instead she lifted a foot and squashed the inhaler with a force that made the floor shake.
I thought I heard Rud Petty laughing. Is it possible he would have laughed at a time like that? Then his tone turned quickly to alarm, as he must have noticed me trying to lift myself. “Shit, she up?” He made a movement in my direction, but then Joe made a sound like a sharply wounded animal.
“Get out of here,” he gasped, and I watched Rud raise what I thought was a baseball bat above my husband’s head. In the next instant, I saw him swing the thing through the air and heard Joe yelp as it hit him, sending him to the floor.
I shrieked as Joe fell beyond my sight, then grabbed for the phone on the night table. I managed to dial 9 and 1, but then Dawn darted over and pulled the cord out of the wall. “Dawn?” I said again, still thinking she might help me as I tried to get out of the bed, but then Rud pinned me back onto the mattress, and after a few moments I gave up struggling and collapsed. Looking up, I felt rather than saw something coming at me, being swung hard and fast. Then nothing until I heard Kenneth Thornburgh’s voice as if he were speaking through cotton. He asked if I could hear him—if I knew who had done this to me.
Of course, it was Rud Petty who’d hit us, with what I learned later was a mallet from our own croquet set.
But it was Dawn, not Rud, who withheld Joe’s inhaler from him and then crushed it to pieces. It was Dawn, not Rud, who pulled the phone cord out of the wall when I was trying to call for help. In the space where all this had happened three years before, I slumped onto the bed, once again feeling barely alive, although this time it was a psychic condition instead of a physical one. Then, shivering against the idea of lying there one moment longer, I forced myself to muster the energy to stand and leave, shutting the door behind me with an emphatic click that made Abby’s ears rise.
She rustled along beside me, barely able to keep up as I pitched myself downstairs toward the kitchen. I found Dawn’s cell phone number and dialed, but she didn’t answer. Her recorded voice came on and told me, “Just wait for the ding-dong,” followed by the sound of a ringing bell.
I started to leave a message, then stopped, realizing that I had no idea what it was I would say to her.
As if observing my own actions from a distance, I rummaged in my junk drawer to find my address book, where I knew I had the number for Opal Bremer’s house in Glen Cove. When Opal’s mother, Saffron, answered, I tried to keep my voice normal and my manner as pleasant as possible, even though Opal had told us stories that made me critical of her. I reminded her who I was and asked to speak to Dawn.
“Why would Dawn be here?” I heard Saffron reach for something, then the flick of a cigarette lighter.
“I—well, she was going to your house.”
I couldn’t tell if it was a laugh or a snort that came back at me.
“I don’t know why she would come here.” Now I realized that the voice sounded medicated and off-speed.
“She thought Opal might be upset.” I felt the urge to hang up because I knew that whatever was coming, I did not want to hear it. But a mix of politeness and paralysis kept me on the line.
“Is this some sick kind of joke?” The laugh again, or the snort. I heard a long exhalation—either smoke or anxiety, or both. “Well, no, Dawn isn’t here. And Opal isn’t here, either, because she killed herself last month. After that D.A. came down and said she wanted her to testify again, at that asshole’s new trial.
“No, don’t say anything,” she told me, hearing the noise I made. “I don’t want to hear it, especially from you. She was never the same after all that shit with your family.” In the background I heard a man’s voice inquiring, and Opal’s mother said, “Nobody.”
“You know what I think?” she asked me, even though I understood that it was not actually a question but a preamble for whatever she already planned to say. “Your daughter got Opal to lie for her, the first time. She never told me in so many words, but a mother knows.” Though I had used that same phrase—“A mother knows”—in defending Dawn to Claire, it carried no weight with me coming from this other woman. “I think my girl was afraid of Rud Petty. And she was too weak to say no. But she was never the same after that trial. The guilt got to her.”
I knew I should tell her I was sorry and just hang up, but against my better judgment I said, “Opal was always depressed. Since before she met Dawn.”
“I’m not talking about depressed. I’m talking about guilty. And scared. Because she perjured herself—that’s a crime, right? And the district attorney knows it. So now my daughter’s dead, and I have you to thank for that. You and your degenerate daughter. Same thing.” Another sucking sound, and she hung up before I could collect myself to do the same.
I sat for a moment just looking at the phone in my hand, feeling it vibrate as if Saffron Bremer’s fury had been transmitted physically along with her words.
My head throbbed. My mind felt clogged, overloaded. As dazed as if I hadn’t slept at all. I couldn’t think how to clear it.
When Abby barked a warning, I almost didn’t notice, but at the last minute I turned as I felt someone approaching behind me, from the stairs. I heard myself cry out, though I don’t think it was an actual word. Instinctively I tried to move backward, but tripped over the dog. Squealing in panic, she caught me against her body before I could fall, and I righted myself by grabbing the kitchen counter to regain my balance.
I couldn’t see him, but I knew that whoever came toward me held something high over his head and was preparing to hit me with it. Instead of closing my eyes and waiting for the impact, I swung wildly with both arms and knocked whatever he held to the floor, striking him on the wrist with the force of my resistance.
“Shit!” he spat out, grabbing his arm. “Son of a bitch!”
Through my shock and the thunder of my heart beating in my ears, I saw that it was Stew. The “go-between,” Dawn had called him. “Oh, my God,” I said, my voice sounding unfamiliar to myself.
He gave out what sounded like a growl and thrust himself toward the weapon he’d dropped, but I stepped on his hand, and we both heard something crunch before he began cursing loud enough to make Abby back away.
I leaned over to pick up what he’d been reaching for. It was the trophy Dawn had won in fifth grade for her participation in the egg-and-spoon race. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, and the absurdity of it made me feel like laughing, though my stomach still curled in alarm.
With the trophy in my hand I looked down at him writhing on the floor below me. “I know who you are, you know. You’re the cousin. Right?”
“The fuck you know that?” He was still folded over his injured hand.
“It’s online. It’s out there for everybody to see.” Emboldened at seeing the trepidation this raised in him, I went on. “They’ll be looking for you. If you hurt me now, everyone will know who did it. It’ll be a no-brainer.” I picked up the phone and pressed the buttons for 911.
He turned and ran, almost tripping over himself in his rush toward the back door. As the operator answered on the other end of the line, I could have sworn I heard Dawn’s voice in the driveway shouting, “You fucking wimp!” and the sound made my heart go cold. For a moment I couldn’t speak into the phone, until the operator prompted me, and I said, “I want to report an intrusion,” knowing that it was much, much more than that, but not having the courage to come up with the right word.
Kenneth Thornburgh arrived within seven minutes. I know because I watched the clock the whole time—he pulled in with a screech, his red light flashing, at 12:04. I told him what had happened, leaving out only the part about thinking that I’d heard Dawn’s voice after Stew bolted from the house. I could have been wrong, couldn’t I? In my confusion, couldn’t I have hallucinated that sound?
“He must have been hiding in here, waiting,” I said, putting it together only as I thought back to what had happened since I’d returned from Warren’s house. “In Dawn’s room. The dog was trying to tell me, but I didn’t listen.”
The detective cleared his throat in that nervous way he had, when he didn’t want to say the next thing but knew he had to. “Do you have any idea where your daughter might be, Mrs. Schutt?”
I shook my head. “Why?”
Before he could answer, Warren stepped into the house and said, “Hanna? You all right?”
I told him I was fine, although of course he could see that I wasn’t. He came over to put his arm around my shoulder, and I felt grateful for the support.
“They’re trying to find Dawn,” I whispered.
Lacy Eye Page 27
