There was nothing to do until the coach woke up. The three of us sat next to each other on the bench seats.
“You okay?” Wendy asked me.
I nodded. “You?”
“Absolutely.”
We looked to Kathy, who shook her head. She looked like she was going to vomit. She pulled out a flask and took a sip, then held it out to me. I smelled pure vodka and shook my head. She’d been drinking a lot ever since her daughter died. I probably should’ve taken the flask away from her, but at the time, I thought anything that would steady her nerves was good. I held her hand.
It took close to an hour for the coach to come to. He started mumbling, then moving his head. He might’ve tried to move other body parts as well but couldn’t because of the duct tape. Eventually, his eyes blinked open. He looked at the three of us. He looked down at his silver-cocooned body, which must’ve felt like a full-body cast. He looked at the blackness of the lake surrounding him. And he started to scream.
52
You’re wondering how the three of us agreed to abduct a man, aren’t you? We’re not mobsters. None of us had ever been part of a murderous conspiracy before. We were just three regular women, trying to find a little justice in a man’s world.
You know that Kathy and I were friends forever. But Wendy and I kept in touch, too, over the years. We weren’t social friends. She wouldn’t be comfortable at the dive bars I hung out at, or Kathy’s trailer park. I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable in Wendy’s Junior League meetings or her big pink house, where I might run into the coach. But after that day in Meijer when I saw Wendy’s black eye, we had a bond. We talked on the phone every couple months, just checking up on each other, keeping each other sane. Every so often, she’d come have coffee at my place. I always sent a present for Isabel’s birthday. She sent flowers when I bought my house.
The first time we talked about killing the coach was last spring. The three of us didn’t get together to plot a murder. We got together to garden.
See, Cooper had bought the lots across the street from his farm, to make that community garden. But farming in Detroit is a funny thing. Before you plant a single seed, you need to clear away everything that came before. It was a mess, and he needed hundreds of man-hours. He asked for help, sending out an e-mail to a few friends. They e-mailed a few more friends, and soon it went viral. Someone set up a Facebook page. Everyone in Holly Grove wanted to pitch in. When Cooper came home from the army minus a leg, everyone tried to lend a hand. This was the first time he actually accepted help.
It was a beautiful Saturday in April, a few weeks after Hayley died. I made Kathy come with. She’d been drinking a lot. I thought the fresh air and sunshine would do her good.
When we got to Cooper’s house, he had put up a sign that said: THE DETROIT CITY GARDEN CLUB. Ha. The lots were overgrown with weeds and full of garbage. Our job was gathering all the crap and hauling it into two piles: flammable and nonflammable. There was a lot of it: bricks, pipes, old sinks and TVs, charred wood from the old houses that used to stand there, tree stumps, random trash, you name it.
Wendy came too. She brought her own pair of pink gardening gloves, but she got down in the dirt with everyone else. She has a lot more substance than people give her credit for.
Tons of people showed up that day. It was like a Holly Grove High School reunion. Cooper made us a huge lunch, which we ate on paper plates. Then we hauled more trash and tilled the ground. We got sweaty, dirty, and sore—but in a good way, the kind of exhausted you get from a real workout instead of insomnia.
At the end of the day, there were two massive piles of trash on a few acres of cleared land, all nice brown soil ready for planting. It was a satisfying sight. As the sun was setting, Cooper gave out tins of granola like goody bags to thank people. Folks headed home.
“Will the city come pick this all up?” I asked, gesturing at the two enormous piles.
“Ha,” Cooper said. “I can’t even get the city to come pick up one bag of garbage. I’ve been trying for months.”
“So what will you do with this?”
He gestured to the first pile, the one with bricks, sinks, and nonflammable stuff. “I’ll haul that stuff to the dump.”
“And this one?” I pointed to the second pile, heaped with wood, tree stumps, and paper products.
Cooper smiled. “You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, we do,” Wendy trilled.
“It’s not technically legal.”
I said, “Cool.”
We were the only three volunteers left. Turns out, we three women had a lot in common, though we didn’t know the full extent of it. At that point, we had nowhere better to go, and holes in our lives we were trying to fill. We were happy to be somewhere with other people. I think we all sensed that loneliness in each other.
Cooper doused the pile of flammable debris with lighter fluid. We each dropped a match onto a section. A massive bonfire whooshed up, the flames reaching high above our heads. It felt like a pagan festival.
It must’ve violated all sorts of city rules, but no authorities showed up. It’s hard to get officials to come to house arsons in Detroit, much less burning trash. Cooper said if he was going to live here, he had to find a way to deal with the trash himself. This was what his family did on the farm; they burned their own garbage.
“I have to do some chores around the orchard,” Cooper said, as the sky grew dark. “Can you guys keep an eye on this?”
“Happy to,” I said.
Kathy got a round of beers out of the cooler and passed them around. The three of us stood watching the fire.
That night had a magical quality. We felt like we were the only people for miles. Maybe it was the fire, or the fact that we spent the day working together, or the beer, but our talk veered toward the sort of truthfulness you don’t usually get in after-dinner conversations.
“Where’s Isabel tonight?” Kathy asked. “With her father?”
“I try to keep her away from her father as much as possible,” Wendy said. “She’s sleeping over at a friend’s house tonight.”
Kathy and I glanced at each other. I asked, “Why do you keep Isabel away from her father?”
Wendy took a sip of beer and looked at me. Her face glowed yellow in the firelight. “Because he’s a pedophile. I expect you know that.”
I felt my eyes get big. Of course I knew it. But I didn’t expect his wife to say it. In all our conversations, she’d never said it before.
I nodded. “But he’s her father. So how can you keep him away from her?”
“That’s a problem. If I file for divorce, he’ll get at least partial custody. And then he’ll have Isabel half the time. Alone.” Wendy looked into the flames. “I don’t know how to protect my daughter from her own father.”
Kathy started sobbing. I had no idea why. I put my arm around her and tried to comfort her. My first thought was that the coach had raped her, too, when she was a kid. In between her sobs, she told us what had happened to Hayley. Before then, I thought Hayley killed herself because of the teasing by other kids. Now Kathy told us that the coach had raped Hayley, and that was what pushed the girl over the brink. Wendy came over and put her arm around Kathy too.
I felt like someone had punched me in the chest. “This is my fault,” I said. Coach Fowler had done exactly the same thing to me when I was Hayley’s age, but I was too ashamed to warn Kathy—or any of the other moms in Holly Grove. Their daughters were vulnerable because I hid what happened to me. Sure, I went to the police, ten years ago, but I folded way too easy when they declined the case.
I should’ve made a fuss. I should’ve gone to the press. I should have done something. If I had, Hayley would still be alive. Instead, the coach had been free to keep doing the same thing, again and again, to God knows how many girls over the next decade.
I told them w
hat the coach did to me. I told them why it was my fault. Wendy shook her head. She said, “I’m so sorry. It’s my fault more than anybody’s. I had the most to gain from him not being caught. I didn’t know for sure, but I suspected this. The first time we had sex, he was forty and I was a twiggy seventeen. After I had Isabel—after I had a woman’s body—he lost all interest in sex, at least with me. But I didn’t really want to know. I wanted to be living the life everyone thought I was living.”
“We could go forward now,” I said.
Wendy shook her head. “He has the town in his pocket. Police, judges, parents—everyone’s on his side. It’s why I’d never be able to win full custody.”
I looked at the pile of burning trash, orange flames against a black sky. I said, “Sometimes you have to deal with garbage yourself. If the city won’t come and take it, you have to get rid of it your own way.”
Wendy met my gaze and nodded slowly. Her eyes reflected the bonfire. She said, “You have to clear out the ugliness and waste in order to let the beautiful new things grow.”
Kathy said nothing, she just looked at me fearfully. And then she nodded, too.
We made a decision that night. I know it’s not what you believe in, Annie. You believe in working within the system, changing things from the inside. And . . . you’re right. We live in America, not one of those countries where girls are sold as brides, where women are treated as property and have no voice. We could have gone about things differently. And, probably, we should have.
The world needs order. If it doesn’t have that, if people take matters into their own hands, you end up with your house and everything in it being burned to the ground.
And you end up with some horrible memories. You can never get them out of your head.
I still have nightmares about what we did. I deserve them.
But that night, watching the bonfire of trash, the answer seemed so obvious. Kathy, Wendy, and I had tried the system, each one of us. It hadn’t worked. So we decided to get rid of the garbage ourselves. We’d take care of our own.
Once it was clear that we all agreed on the outcome, the rest was just planning the logistics. We put aside the beer, sat on a rock, and talked details. We’re very organized women. We covered everything. Or so we thought.
53
The glassy black water of Lake Huron seemed to amplify Coach Fowler’s screams. Kathy and I each grabbed one of the handles of the wheelchair and tipped it backward until the chair was reclining fully on its back and Coach’s head was on the AstroTurf floor of the boat. Wendy picked up the white plastic bucket, which was full of lake water. She poured it over his face. The screaming was replaced with gurgling.
When the bucket was empty, Wendy dipped it into the lake and refilled it. She set it down near the wheelchair and knelt by her husband’s head. He was choking and snuffling on the water in his lungs. She stroked his hair, pushing his soaked bangs out of his eyes. “Shh,” she said. “Shh, Owen.” When he quieted enough to take a breath, she said, “Scream again, and I’ll do that again. Keep quiet and we can talk like grown-ups. Deal?”
He coughed, then nodded as vigorously as his position would allow. Kathy and I righted the chair. He choked up more water, then dry heaved. He was fully awake now, his eyes wide, his wet blond hair plastered back. His head was the only part of his body he could move and he kept turning it back and forth, desperately trying to take in the situation. But now he was quiet.
Wendy opened one of the bench seats, which held a large storage area beneath the cushion. She pulled out a red milk crate full of odds and ends. Kathy angled the wheelchair until the coach was facing a bench. The three of us sat down together.
The most powerful man in Holly Grove stared at three regular women wearing T-shirts and jeans. A jury of his peers? Not exactly. But it was the closest we’d ever get.
We didn’t put a piece of tape on his mouth. That might have left a mark. And we wouldn’t be able to hear what he had to say.
I stood up and said, “Owen Fowler, you are charged with three counts of being an evil, perverted asshole. How do you plead?”
“What?”
“This is your trial. The one you deserve. The one that was never going to happen in Holly Grove.”
“This is crazy. Let me go, and we’ll pretend this was one big joke.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘not guilty’ plea. Fine. For my first witness, I call Wendy Fowler.”
You’re looking at me like I’m insane, Annie. I understand. Why not just kill the man? We considered it. We could’ve just shot him as he came out of Screecher’s one night and made it look like a mugging. That certainty would’ve been simpler. But it would’ve been too easy for him. Our goal was protecting future girls, yes, but it was also justice. And for justice, he had to know that he was being punished for what he’d done. He had to understand what was happening to him, who was doing it, and why.
Wendy reached into the crate and pulled out a small pink Cinderella sleeping bag. She stood up and put it on his lap. “Do you remember this? From the night of Isabel’s last sleepover?”
He nodded, his eyes growing big.
“I always suspected you were touching the girls from the high school. I saw them come to your summer camp, all smiles and hope, and then drop out, all haunted and hollow. I knew what you did to me, on the seat of your Corvette, when I was seventeen. But I couldn’t prove you were doing it to other girls. And I didn’t want to.
“It wasn’t easy putting up that front. I felt like a fraud. All the concealer and sunglasses I wore to cover my bruises. The willful blindness to your after-school activities.”
“Wendy, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I always loved you. I—”
“Shut up,” she said. “You’ll have your chance. And don’t tell me you loved me. You were a good provider, that’s all. I had a roof over my head—two, actually. I didn’t have to scrape by for everything, like my family had. I thought that would be enough. Even if my husband didn’t love me. At least you loved Isabel. And for Isabel’s sake, you’d restrain yourself. Our home was an out-of-bounds zone. I believed that; I had to believe it. Until the night of the sleepover.”
She picked up the sleeping bag.
“You just couldn’t keep your hands off those girls, could you? Not even in our own house? I came down that night to get a glass of milk. And there you were, with Zoë Malone—Isabel’s best friend!—on your lap, showing her the Holly Grove yearbook. Telling her she was a good girl. Your hand was pushing up Zoë’s nightgown—it was up past her thighs. She was ten! What would have happened if I hadn’t come down then?”
He pursed his lips and looked away. She grabbed his face and turned it to hers, like he was her disobedient child.
“Answer me!” she said. “I was your wife for ten years. I cooked your meals, washed your underwear, made you respectable. I deserve an answer.”
“Baby doll.” His voice was soft and pleading. “I was just showing a little girl a book. I would never do what you’re suggesting. Not when I had you upstairs. The most beautiful woman in Holly Grove in my bed, and I’m going to mess around with a ten-year-old? That’s crazy.”
“You had an erection.” She whispered the last word. Nice churchgoing mom didn’t like potty language, not even in the middle of Lake Huron. She let go of his face and took a step back. “You were rubbing that little girl against your erection.”
“No, no, no. You were tired, baby doll. You thought you saw something that you didn’t actually—”
“Don’t insult my intelligence, Owen. I know what I saw. Do you think I’d have you here—like this—if I weren’t sure? I know who you are. I know you better than anyone else in this world does. You might be able to fool the town, but not me.” She stared at him. “You’re a child molester.”
He looked down at his silver-wrapped knees. He nodded.
It was an acknowledgment. And that made me pause. There’s something about a bad man admitting his sins that has power.
But it was my turn, and I wasn’t giving it up, not after all this.
I reached into the milk crate and pulled out the big trophy I got when I set the record for the high jump in 2004. It was a standard track-and-field trophy: a large brass woman frozen midstride, standing atop a heavy wood and marble base.
“I trusted you,” I said. “I thought you cared about me. I fell in love with you. And then you raped me. After that, I never trusted another man. For ten years. I barely graduated from high school. And here I am. A dead-end life. Because of you.”
“I thought—” He glanced at his wife. “I thought you wanted me as much as I wanted you. I thought it was, you know, consensual.”
“I said ‘no.’ And I was a kid.”
“But you got me all riled up! You can’t tease a man like that and just expect him to pull back. You were the one who—”
He noticed us glaring at him. He stopped and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I’m very, very sorry.”
There’s not much to say after someone apologizes. It makes me wonder why people don’t do it more often. I sat down.
Kathy’s hands were shaking as she reached into the milk crate. She pulled out a tiny lavender ski jacket. It was the one Hayley used to wear when she was a little girl. It was the one she’d worn in Meijer that day that Kathy put on the big fruity hat and Hayley tried to eat the “gapes.”
“She was my little girl,” Kathy whispered. “My baby. She was all I had. And you killed her.”
A Good Killing Page 26
