A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder And Its Aftermath

by Jeanine Cummins

As the dark of the evening came down over the window shades, Kevin too kissed Ginna good-bye and headed to his home in South County. He’d be back at the crack of dawn to help with whatever needed doing, he promised her. Everyone was finding a role.

  The eleven o’clock news was, unfortunately, more eventful than the earlier broadcast. Tink and Kathy sat side by side on their grandfather’s organ bench, where they had the best view of the television and where they had eaten their stir-fry dinner just the evening before. The grown-ups filled the surrounding chairs.

  “The Chain of Rocks Bridge story,” as their family tragedy was rapidly becoming known, was at the top of the news, and the newscaster was wearing a grim face while Julie’s and Robin’s photographs hovered over her right shoulder. In a clipped voice, she began reading from her typed notes.

  “Alleged murderer Thomas Cummins is in custody tonight . . .”

  Even the first sentence was too much for the girls to take in. Tink stood up hysterically, upending the organ bench and her sister. She couldn’t speak, but she could no longer sit quietly either. She clamped her hands over her ears and began looking around wildly, her eyes spinning from the front door to the faces of her family, and across the walls of the room. Her eyes jumped on everything in sight except the television. She looked like a frightened animal seeking escape.

  Skip was up from his seat in an instant and standing in front of her. He pulled her head into his chest and tried to hush her. Kathy sat stunned behind her, with glazed eyes and a stupefied expression. Skip walked Tink a few steps into the hallway and away from her sister, in case the hysteria might prove contagious. He hummed quietly into her ear, holding her tightly the whole time.

  “Sshh, sshh, sshh, we all know it’s not true, honey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Skip murmured.

  It was a momentary hysteria and soon Tink and Skip returned to the room, where Tink resumed her place beside Kathy, whose expression had not changed despite the tears that were racing down her face and gathering in a puddle on her upturned hands in her lap.

  “Well, if that isn’t the greatest load of hogwash I’ve ever seen,” Grandpa Art muttered angrily as he stood and slapped off the television.

  Tink and Kathy sat speechlessly staring at the black screen. Grandpa Art spun toward them and marched straight up to Tink, who was still quivering in the aftermath of her outburst. He bent over her, gripped her strongly by the shoulders, and spoke forcefully into her face, almost shaking her as he talked.

  “Don’t you believe a single word of it. Not a single word — do you hear me?” He was almost shouting. “Your brother did not do this. He loved those girls. He is not a murderer. Do you understand me?”

  Tink nodded lamely.

  “Good girl,” he finished and released his grip, patting her head before he turned to go.

  Grandpa Art was such a quiet and reserved man. He had always been rather shy with his emotions and Tink was certain that she had never seen him even the slightest bit irritated. The fact that his ire had been stirred on behalf of her brother touched her very deeply, and his words were like strong hands that grabbed her under the arms and stood her up again. She snapped out of her pitiful state and almost smiled as he patted her head.

  The whole day suddenly seemed like a dream. She knew that Tom was innocent, but the shock of hearing him called “alleged murderer” by some tight-lipped newscaster in a fuchsia suit had proven more powerful than she had expected. For a single, terrible instant, she had wondered what had happened, what the truth was exactly. Her grandfather’s words were just the strength she had needed in that instant, and they had restored her faith as quickly as it had floundered. She took a deep breath and wiped the remaining loose tears from her face, setting her jaw at a hard angle again and resolving to be strong.

  “Thanks, Grandpa,” she whispered to his back.

  It was a Friday night and not everybody in the St. Louis area was grieving. In Wentzville, not far from where Gene’s and Ginna’s sister Lisa lived with her family, there was a party going on, hosted by a friend of Danny Winfrey’s. Winfrey and his three companions from the night before were all in attendance, along with about thirty other young people. The noise level in the house was high as conversations competed with music, television, and laughter.

  Gray, as usual, was entertaining a rather large crowd all by himself. He hardly missed a beat when Tom Cummins’s face flashed up on the eleven o’clock news. The panic that momentarily flitted across his face was immediately replaced with a smirk. He pointed at the television, laughing, and said, “Man, that fat white kid couldn’t’ve pulled off a stunt like that. I did it! That shit was my handiwork.”

  “No, you didn’t, you sicko,” one of his friends retorted. “I did it.”

  “No it was me,” somebody else countered.

  Three or four others chimed in, all claiming to be the murderers of the missing Kerry sisters. Julie and Robin were dead and it was a joke. Tom’s picture stared grimly back at them from the television screen. He wasn’t laughing. Finally, a voice of tentative reason spoke up.

  “Y’all shouldn’t say shit like that,” somebody quietly warned. “Somebody’s gonna believe you.”

  Danny Winfrey had listened with restrained alarm to the ironic volley of claims, but at the tone of serious warning, he stood abruptly from his seat, knocking his beer bottle over as he stood. His girlfriend, Amanda Marshall, uprighted the nearly empty bottle and followed her boyfriend out of the room. Gray noted Winfrey’s brusque departure, and in response continued his show with even greater energy than before.

  In the bathroom upstairs, Winfrey sat on the edge of the porcelain bathtub and stared at his shoes. Amanda sat on the lid of the closed toilet seat and leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees. Her face was the picture of concern.

  “What is it, Danny?” she asked.

  Winfrey nibbled his bottom lip and studied his sneakers with increased scrutiny.

  “Whatever it is, you know you can tell me,” she prompted.

  So Winfrey opened the floodgates. He told her everything. When Gray’s heavy knock fell on the wooden door a few short minutes later, Amanda hadn’t even begun to process the story that her boyfriend had just confided in her. She didn’t have time to take any of it in before Danny opened the door and Gray came barging in.

  “We gotta talk,” he barked at Winfrey, and then, turning to glare at Amanda, added, “Alone.”

  Amanda scooted out the door, past the intimidating figure of Gray, and went back downstairs while Winfrey took his seat again on the edge of the bathtub. Gray kicked the door shut hard and whirled around to face Winfrey.

  “You have got to get your shit together,” he said quietly, leaning into Winfrey’s fifteen-year-old face. “Could you be any more fucking obvious? Listen, just chill the fuck out — everything’s gonna be fine. They’ve got that rich boy in custody. They think he did it. There is no way in hell they’re gonna find us. Besides, if anybody says anything, I’m gonna fucking kill ’em.”

  Gray placed his thumb under Winfrey’s chin. “You hear me?” he said. “We’re gonna be just fine. We stick together. We keep calm, and they will never catch us. Got it?”

  Winfrey looked up into Gray’s eyes, squirmed, and then nodded.

  “Yeah, I got it,” he said.

  After the commotion of the newscast had passed, Kathy and Tink settled back in to their well-worn places on the couch with a deck of cards — anything to keep their minds numb and occupied. They played gin rummy, but their hearts weren’t in it. Kathy was the first to spot headlights through the living-room curtains. Fair Acres Road was not a busy street, and the headlights approached and then passed the house before the brake lights came on and Gene backed the van into his in-laws’ driveway.

  “Dad’s home,” Kathy announced.

  Gene couldn’t bring himself to come into the house for several minutes. Kay was just considering going out to him when the front door squeaked open. Kay’s parents and brothers h
ad made themselves scarce, giving the others some privacy. Grandma Polly had invented an urgent load of laundry in the basement and Grandpa Art had suddenly remembered a new painting he wanted to show his sons.

  So Kathy and Tink alone witnessed the slow, hesitant opening of the front door and their mother’s anxiety as she threw her body across the room toward their father. For Kay, her husband’s homecoming was the moment of release she had been waiting for all day. The emotion she had been almost successfully hiding from her daughters was now on full display and her shoulders heaved heavily and soundlessly as she wrapped herself in Gene’s open arms.

  Tink and Kathy were terrified by their father’s face. They had never seen him look so desperate, so frightened, so helpless. They moved themselves from the couch, but everything was slow in the room, as if they were underwater or characters in a slow-motion nightmare. The carpet felt like quicksand as they crossed the room to where their parents were hugging each other.

  “I’m sorry,” Gene was saying, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Kay just shook her head and clung to him, still unable to speak.

  “I tried to bring him home. I’m so sorry I couldn’t bring him home. They wouldn’t let me bring him home.”

  He searched the faces of his wife and daughters for forgiveness and reassurance. Tink and Kathy squeezed themselves into the middle of their parents’ embrace. The four unincarcerated members of the Cummins family huddled in the space that had been occupied by the kids’ folding dinner table and six happy plates of chicken stir-fry the night before, and wept together.

  Ginna was there almost immediately, it seemed to Gene. He hadn’t had time to do anything. He hadn’t showered or brushed his teeth or even shaved, and a one-day growth of beard on Gene was enough to solicit Chia Pet remarks from his two daughters, even in their current state of distress. His homecoming from Fabbri’s office had been an emotional one and he had just sat down at the dining-room table to try to gather his thoughts when the doorbell rang. Kay’s brothers had left a few minutes earlier, and Gene presumed that one of them had forgotten a wallet or something and was back to retrieve it. He heard Kathy holler, “I’ll get it,” and a few moments later she appeared wordlessly in front of her father and then stepped aside to allow Ginna to pass into the room. Jamie followed, looking lost but not entirely hopeless.

  “Genie,” Ginna whispered, holding her hands out toward her brother.

  Kathy ushered Jamie quickly into the kitchen as Gene looked up at his sister and burst into tears.

  “I’m so sorry, Ginna,” Kathy heard her father saying, and Ginna responded:

  “No, no. Sshh. There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. I just came to let you know that none of us believe this. We all know that Tommy didn’t do this.”

  Gene’s and Ginna’s voices dropped into the hushed tones that Kathy had grown so accustomed to hearing the grown-ups use throughout the day.

  “How about a Coke?” she said to Jamie, who nodded her response.

  More than anything, the Coke was just an excuse to make noise. Kathy didn’t even think about the fact that before today she would not have helped herself to a Coke without asking her parents first. It was just one of the many tiny but somehow significant changes that had taken place since that morning. She and her sister Tink had both become grown-ups today, with grown-up perks like the ability to curse or drink a Coke whenever they wanted, but with grown-up responsibilities too, like trying to protect their young cousin from the uglier, more distressing scenes surrounding her sisters’ violent deaths. She pulled two glasses from her grandmother’s kitchen cabinet and let Jamie fill her own glass up with ice. No sooner were the girls entrenched at the kitchen table, fortified by their Cokes, than Gene and Ginna appeared in the doorway and announced a kind of makeshift family meeting.

  “Why don’t y’all use the game room downstairs,” Grandma Polly suggested. “It’s private, there are plenty of seats for everybody, and there’s a phone if you need it.”

  So they moved downstairs. Tink, Kathy, and Jamie were invited to join the parents. Everyone seemed to recognize at this stage that, though there was the occasional need for privacy during personal moments, there was no point in trying to hide anything from the children. They were going to have to get used to this tragedy, and withholding information from them would only serve to confuse them. And to their credit, the girls had proven strong so far, apart from their collective inability to hold much food down. They had all been so good to each other today — their parents were proud of the way they were handling the whole ordeal. Tink, Kathy, and Jamie sat at the green felt-covered table where they had played poker the night before, trying not to look at the empty seats where Robin, Julie, and Tom had sat. At Jamie’s request, Tink dealt a game of go fish, but they all paid more attention to their parents’ conversation than they did to the game.

  Ginna, Gene, and Kay sat talking quietly on the two facing leather sofas behind the girls. They talked about how everyone was holding up, and they discussed the impending arrival of their parents, who would be flying in from Florida in the morning. Gene had made that most difficult of phone calls just after Tom’s arrest. Gene had always trusted in his father’s strength, but nonetheless had been floored by his reaction. Gene Senior had taken the news very hard initially. He had taken down Gene’s pay-phone number at the police station and excused himself to go have a good cry. But when he phoned back twenty minutes later, his tone had been entirely different.

  “Well,” he had said to his son, “your mother and I could have gotten on a late flight tonight, but I need to get to the bank in the morning before we come up there. I will be bringing the deed to my house. Tell Tommy not to worry about a thing. If he needs bail, it’s covered — and he’ll have the best damn lawyers that money can buy. And you’re not to tell your mother about this. You know I have more than enough money in stocks to cover it. I don’t want to bother her with the details.”

  There had never even been a question about guilt or innocence in Grandpa Gene’s mind. And Gene Junior would certainly not mention this deed business to his mother. In fact, he hadn’t even mentioned it to Tom or Kay or Ginna. Instead, he tried to put the whole thing out of his mind. It was just too big to talk about, too big to take in. His father’s generosity and faith contrasted so starkly against the terror of the day that it was emotionally overwhelming.

  So instead he kept it to himself and talked lightly of logistical things — who was going to pick up the grandparents from the airport in the morning and such. While they discussed these matters, the phone rang. It was well after midnight. All eyes in the room snapped to the phone, and the girls’ cards hovered like a still life over the green felt-covered table. There were footsteps upstairs and then Grandpa Art called down.

  “Ginna? The phone’s for you.”

  Ginna stood shakily and she stepped cautiously toward the phone, a mother who was waiting for terrible, terrible news. She stood with her back to the room and lifted the receiver slowly. For the next couple of minutes the room was silent except for Ginna’s occasional “mm-hmm”s. When she put the phone down and turned back to face her brother, her face was cracked with the lines of grief. She was crying.

  “I have to go . . . We have to go . . . Jamie, come on,” she said.

  “Wait,” Gene started, confused. “What’s going on? What . . .”

  “That was Rick,” Ginna responded. “He said he wants his daughter out of here. He said he doesn’t want Jamie in the home of the man who murdered our girls.”

  Ginna was sobbing now as she spoke and the three girls abandoned their card game and approached the grown-ups.

  “I’m so sorry, Genie,” Ginna said. “He doesn’t mean it, I know he doesn’t, he just, he’s very emotional right now.”

  Jamie cuddled in under her mother’s arm while her mom cried and held her tightly. It was such a childlike gesture that it nearly startled Tink and Kathy, who in the course of the day had forgotten just ho
w young Jamie was. She was so mature, so witty for her age that it was easy to forget that she was just nine years old. The unhappy party trudged up the stairs and Ginna paused at the front door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  But Gene hushed her and they hugged for a moment. Kay kissed Ginna on the cheek and bent to hug Jamie as well. Tink and Kathy waited patiently, and when their turns came they embraced their aunt more emotionally than they ever had, as if they feared never seeing her again. Ginna clung to them and touched their hair and faces.

  “You’re such good girls. We’re all gonna get through this, aren’t we?” she said.

  They both nodded and she smiled through her tears. She took Jamie by the hand and they left. Jamie looked over her shoulder as Ginna led her toward the car and waved at her cousins who stood leaning their faces against the screen door.

  On the green metal shelf, without pillow or blanket or dreams, Tom slept on in blackness. The clanking approach of keys did not wake him, nor did the sound of his cell door opening, or the guard calling to him to get up. The night watchman had to actually enter the cell and physically shake Tom awake. When he did so, reality returned instantly. Tom felt no moment of confusion, no terrible shock of remembering. He knew where he was and he felt as if he hadn’t been sleeping at all.

  But the sleep was still heavy in his eyes and limbs as Tom stood to follow the policeman out of the dim green cell. Together they trudged down what seemed to Tom like endless hallways until they came to a small office that served as a waiting area. There was a Plexiglas window at one end of the room and a clerk was seated behind it. Tom was instructed to take a seat on a low bench along one wall that was already occupied by two other young men. After several minutes of paper-shuffling, the clerk called a name and one of Tom’s companions stood and walked to the little window. After obtaining the man’s name, age, and address, the clerk began to explain the charges against him.