“June 26. Wayne gave me some books to read. One is named Fanny Hill. It’s about a fifteen year old girl in the 18th century who turns into a whore and it’s a classic. It’s written in old-fashioned language that’s hard to understand. So far it’s sad because Fanny is an orphan and has to sell herself to make money. Wayne doesn’t have a girlfriend. He used to but she got boring. She wanted to have sex all the time, she was a nimfomaniac. Wayne said he had sex the first time when he was thirteen with one of his mother’s friends. She was an artist and she was married but her husband didn’t care. He used to watch them. I said that was disgusting. Wayne said it was funny. He said it should be like that, somebody should teach you. He said he likes to have a lot of girlfriends because then you don’t get tired of sex because everybody is different. Freud is one who talks about sex. Jung is more about mythology. Wayne took me to a photographic exhibit of nudes. He said people should love their bodies. I hate mine, my boobs are too big. Wayne said I’d grow into them.”
“June 28. Heather called and wanted me to go swimming and then to the mall to meet Jamie and Mark. But I said I didn’t want to. I think Heather is really stupid, she never reads anything and the only thing you can discuss with her is boys. Wayne and Rob got into a fight tonight. Rob said he should be looking for a job. Wayne said he just got to Seattle and he didn’t know his way around yet. I thought Rob would hit him but he didn’t. They watched a baseball game on TV and drank beer. My Mom was upset about something, she went in her room. I think it’s better when Wayne is here, then Rob doesn’t hit me. I am reading Fanny Hill. Wayne came in to say good-night and I was reading it. He said my nightgown was sexy. I wanted him to kiss me but he didn’t. I love him so much. I can’t think of anything else.”
“July 1. I told Heather I was in love with Wayne and she said it was incest. But it’s not because he’s not my family. She asked if we did ‘it.’ We talked about sex, she used to do it with Sam. If you do it standing up you don’t get pregnant. I asked Wayne but he said it wasn’t true. He said it was too bad there wasn’t more sex education. He asked me if I ever masturbated. I said I did when I read some parts of Fanny Hill. Then I was really embarrassed!”
“July 2. I went swimming with Heather. When I came back home I didn’t think anybody was here. Then I heard Wayne in Rob and Mom’s room, he called to me to come in. The curtains were closed and he had a lamp on. He was reading one of Rob’s Playboy magazines and he was rubbing himself. He asked me if I had ever seen a man’s penis before. I said no, but I guess I saw my Dad’s a couple times. He asked me to rub him up and down. It seemed weird because he had never even kissed me but I did it because I love him. After a while the white stuff came out and he got soft again and talked about books and things. He asked me if Fanny Hill had given me any ideas. I said there were a lot of things I didn’t understand, but he said he would explain them. The main thing to remember he said is that sex is fun and people should do it as often as they can. At the end he kissed me. I love him to kiss me.”
“July 6. Wayne says he won’t hurt me. Every day except the Fourth of July I rub him. It’s kind of boring except when he kisses me. He showed me the pictures in Playboy and explained the jokes. He said the girls have hair down there but they brushed it out for the pictures. He asked if he could see me down there but I felt stupid because I didn’t look like those girls. Then he asked me to suck him. First it grosses you out but I guess it’s the same as rubbing. It’s weird to see Wayne get so excited but then he says, Baby I love you and kisses me. I hate the taste though.”
“July 8. Today we went to a guy Wayne just met named Karl who’s an artist, and smoked some pot, then he gave Wayne some pills. I was bored, I went to the bathroom, when I came back out I heard Karl say, can I have some when you’re through and Wayne laughed and laughed. Wayne says he knows a lot of people who use coke. It’s the best drug but it’s expensive. He’s going to get some from Karl.”
“July 9. Today we did ‘it.’ I knew it would hurt because it hurt Fanny Hill the first time, but not that it would hurt so much. I guess I liked it. I like to be close to Wayne. I feel like he’s always going to take care of me and watch to make sure nothing bad happens.”
21
THERE WAS A BREAK AFTER THAT and when the diary started again it was as if a different Trish were writing, jaded and cynical. She was cutting classes regularly in the ninth grade. She hated all her teachers except Mrs. Horowitz in English. She didn’t have many friends and she didn’t seem to feel too well physically. There were a lot of references to “being out of it” all day, to oversleeping and having her mother yell at her. Some entries seemed to be written under the influence of drugs. They were full of strange thought associations, visions and an obsession with death. She no longer talked of killing herself, but of being close to some self-destructive edge that attracted as much as frightened her.
Wayne was still living at home, but seemed to be increasingly gone from the house. There were a lot of references to “looking for W.,” “W at K.’s house,” “W says he needs to see K.” Was K. Karl or another girl? Trish seemed jealous and miserable. She no longer mentioned kissing, but sometimes went on for paragraphs about how she loved W, dwelling on his hair, his eyes, his voice.
Then, in November, Rob kicked Wayne out of the house. There was a big blow-up and the beatings began again. The difference now was that Trish didn’t passively accept it, but fought back. And she started running away. To W.’s usually. But sometimes W. wasn’t around. He was at K.’s and then at N.’s. Trish ended up downtown looking for him.
New initials began to make their appearance and the entries became more and more cryptic. It appeared that Trish was making dates or keeping appointments.
On January 15, a year ago, she wrote, “Went to K’s. Two guys in exchange for a gram. W. happy. Bought me dinner and told me I should get out of Rob’s for good. Could make a lot of money, get new clothes. Offered to set me up. I don’t know. When I’m high I feel like I could do anything, it doesn’t touch me, but the next day I hate myself. Last week a guy at the clinic told me I had gonorrhea and gave me penicillin. I didn’t tell W. He’s not going to catch it from me until he gives up S.”
A few days later she was in the detention center, picked up for prostitution. She got out the next morning but wrote, “Rob called me a whore. Mom just cried. I didn’t care, I felt like a whore, I really did. I didn’t before I was arrested, I was pretending it was something else. Now I’m not. I never want to go back to school again. I hate them all. I hate Wayne. I’m not going to see him anymore. I’m just going to stay here in my room and rot.”
But she didn’t. She ran away again. Was picked up again. And again. Suddenly she was in a foster home.
“March 4. The lady who’s my foster mom says she doesn’t care what I do as long as I come home by eleven. She also said no drugs in the house but she wouldn’t know if I was high, she’s drunk half the time anyway. Yesterday she told me her life story when she was drunk. She got pregnant when she was seventeen and had to leave high school, her first husband ran off with another woman and her second husband just ran off. She has three kids, the oldest one is eleven and already has a record for shoplifting. She doesn’t work and makes her money from foster kids. She told me if I wasn’t careful I’d end up like her. Fat chance. I’d kill myself first.”
By the following month Trish was in another foster home where they would hardly let her out of their sight. She ran away from them to W.’s who turned her on to some really good speed. It sounded like she was shooting it.
The diary stopped and didn’t take up again until late summer and again it was a different Trish writing, a little older and wiser. She’d been through a drug abuse program and was clean. She was living at a halfway house and attending a group for prostitutes. There were few references to Wayne and they were all in the past tense, but a lot about Beth Linda and some of the girls in the group.
“August 5. Julianne started crying i
n the group tonight, talking about how her Dad started having sex with her when she was only six. She didn’t understand what was going on until she was older and by then it seemed too late to tell her Mom, because she’d say Julianne had been doing it for too many years. Julianne started running away when she was eleven. A lot of these girls seem really stupid to me and I don’t think Julianne can even read. But then I think, I’ve been stupid too, even though I thought I was acting so grown-up and reading all those books Wayne gave me. Then Julianne said something that really shocked me, she said she didn’t feel anything in her body anymore and she thought it was because when she was little she would just pretend it wasn’t happening to her, like she would just close it all off. And that was weird because I know that feeling. So many times I was high and I didn’t think about what I was doing. Sometimes I couldn’t even remember what I’d done, it was like a bad dream. A couple of other girls in the group said that too. It was weird to think you can stop feeling like that.
“Beth said it happens a lot. That it’s a way of protecting yourself. She said to think about how you maybe did it not because you hated yourself and hated to think about what you were doing, but because deep inside you loved yourself and that was the only way you could protect yourself. She said a lot of girls get things done to them by people who say they love them. It’s like a mixed message and it screws up your trust for people. She said we shouldn’t think of ourselves as victims but as survivors. We were all alive and we were here to change some bad parts about our lives and get more in control.
“It was a good meeting, but afterwards I felt depressed. I thought about how happy I was last summer when I first met Wayne, and thought I was learning so much about the world. It was like we had a real friendship and he was teaching me about psychology and literature and everything. He said he loved me but he just let me get all screwed up. It’s weird that he’s never gotten hooked himself. Maybe if you’re a dealer you don’t. I guess it was my fault though. I guess that’s why he got tired of me.”
“August 12. I told Beth I had read some Freud and Jung. She said she liked Jung better because he was more hopeful. We talked about dreams and she asked me if I ever wrote mine down. I said it was hard to remember them, but she said if you thought about it you could do it. She said she’d done that once and it had helped her. She told me that she’d been an alcoholic and that she’d had a baby when she was fifteen. She wasn’t like that foster mother who said to watch out, I’d end up like her. Beth said you can change, you can do anything you want to.”
“August 19. In the group tonight Julianne said she went to her father and told him what he’d done to her. She said it had been hard but it had made her feel a whole lot better. Beth called that confrontation. She said it could be dangerous, but that it could also make you feel more in control and assertive. She said a lot of times the man would lie and say he didn’t do anything and you just had to expect that. Julianne said her father told her she was crazy and didn’t say he was sorry at all, but she knew. This made me start remembering a lot of things I didn’t think I remembered. I thought about confronting Wayne. I don’t know what I would say. First I loved him and then I hated him, but somewhere inside I still love him. I haven’t seen him for almost three months.
“Last night I dreamed that he and I were sailing in a boat. It was on a lake with the sun setting. He was reading a book to me. At first it was a fairy tale kind of thing with a princess and a king. He started explaining it all to me though and it got dirtier and dirtier. Pretty soon it was just words like fuck and dick and cunt coming out of his mouth. I put my hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear him. And then all of a sudden it was nice again. He looked so handsome and sweet, smiling at me with his lips moving, but with no words coming out to spoil it.”
And then, abruptly, the diary ended. The last couple of pages had some notes and addresses, including one for Art Margolin in Portland. Her father. She must have bought another diary, perhaps she had it with her now, wherever she was. Perhaps it told about confronting Wayne and falling in love with him again, about dropping the group and taking up prostitution again, about Rosalie and what had happened to her.
It was two when I fell asleep and my dreams were sad, violent ones.
22
IT WASN’T EASY TO get the blood out of the back seat. June came over early the next morning and we took a pail of soapy water and a bottle of all-purpose spray cleaner down to the car along with rags and a stiff brush.
“This is something you never see on TV,” June commented. “Bang, bang, and then a commercial. If Magnum, P.I. had to clean up after himself you’d see a whole different type of show. Hey, he could even do his own commercials—‘If you have trouble getting out those stubborn blood stains after a big shoot-up, try FLEX. And see the difference!’”
I needed her humor, especially after reading Trish’s diary last night. I told her about it and about going to Rosalie’s old hotel room.
“I was hoping the diary would give me some clue about who killed Rosalie and why Trish disappeared, but it ended last fall, with an entry about confrontation. I suppose Trish went to Wayne to confront him and that’s how she got involved with him again. But the diary doesn’t have much about Karl and nothing about Rosalie.”
“You ever think that old Trish herself killed Rosalie, used you to make her getaway and to screen her from the cops, and then went into hiding on her own?”
“You know that can’t be true, June,” I said, scrubbing with an averted face. “If you’d seen her that night. She was so upset… No, I keep thinking about what Cady said, that Rosalie wanted to get out of prostitution. If she was working for Karl or Wayne maybe that’s why they killed her. Or maybe she was involved with them in some kind of drug ring, and tried to rip either one or both of them off. She had to make money some way if she wasn’t hooking.”
“And Trish was seen by the murderer and had to keep low?” June was inside the car now, trying to get into the corners of the backseat.
“Especially if it was Karl or Wayne,” I said. “Especially if she thought she might have been the one they were trying to kill.”
“Tell me about this Karl character.”
“There’s not a whole lot to tell. Cady said she didn’t know him or if he was a pimp or not, and there are only initials in Trish’s diary for the most part. She only mentioned him directly once, when Wayne met him. But you should have seen Wayne when Karl came into the room. Wayne was nervous, like a little kid trying to please him almost. What if he was totally under Karl’s influence, what if Wayne was just a mock pimp, a front man for Karl? What then?”
June muttered something indistinct and I went on. “That still doesn’t solve the problem of where Trish is, and if she’s in danger. She could be hiding on her own, or Wayne could be hiding her from Karl or Karl could be hiding her from Wayne.”
June climbed out of the Volvo. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that Trish might have just wanted to get away from you? Maybe she didn’t like mothering all that much. Maybe she was afraid you’d turn her in after all.”
“Maybe,” I admitted, though that hurt a little. “But she wrote me that note, June. She said she’d be back.” I wrung out my cloth and tried to think. “Or what if it was her stepfather who killed Rosalie, I mean, what about that possibility? Would Trish try to tell her mother, or would she want to keep it a secret? Even though she hates him, maybe she’d want to protect her mother.”
“Aren’t you forgetting about the Green River killer? It could have been a total stranger who got Rosalie.”
“The Green River killer is probably long gone by now—they just keep finding bones two and three years old and no traces of the guy. He could have moved to another state, anything. Just because a girl gets killed doesn’t mean it was him.”
“That’s right. Girls get killed every day. No big deal. But did you ever think of the possibility that one of those guys, Rob, Wayne or Karl is the Green River killer? I mean
, take Wayne…”
“That’s impossible,” I said shortly. “It’s hard for me to think that someone like Wayne killed one woman, much less forty or seventy or however many it is. He may be a pimp and drug dealer, but I can’t believe he’s a serial murderer. He’s too smooth.”
“That’s exactly the type,” said June, stepping back and scrutinizing her labors. “Look at Ted Bundy, Republican campaign worker, law student, good-looking charm boy, going around with his arm in a sling to ask college girls, ‘Excuse me, dear, but I’m temporarily incapacitated. Could you please open my car door for me…’” June approached me with an ingratiating grin. “And then, bop! They still can’t lay a count to all those girls—Washington, Utah, Colorado, Florida. There was a raving maniac behind that handsome face. Or what about that guy they called the 1-5 Killer, the star athlete, who almost had his picture in Playgirl? Cruising up and down the Interstate looking for women working in out-of-the-way Burger Kings. ‘A large Coke and french fries, honey, and while you’re at it, into the back room so’s I can rape and murder you.’ He killed over forty girls. And nobody could believe it. My little baby,’ his mom said. And he had a fiancée who was head over heels about him too. Those are the guys to watch. Finished? Let’s go in and get some coffee.”
“Why are all the serial killers in Washington?”
“Cause it’s roomy and wild out here. And we’ve got all these cool highways. You don’t get girls into your car in New York City—you gotta kill ’em on the subway and then people see you. Plus, it’s a lot easier to get a gun permit in the West. You know, I was reading statistics in some magazine. Over ten thousand deaths from handguns in the U.S. last year. In the rest of the world it was like forty to fifty a year and in England it was only eight. Who says the frontier days are gone? Shoot ’em up, baby!”
Sisters of the Road Page 10
