On the fourth day of Stephen Chehalis’s confinement in San Jose hospital prison ward, he’d made a full and complete confession. No surprise in that; his kind, once they’re caught, are chronic confessors. Their crimes are a matter of warped pride with them, the only real accomplishment in their miserable lives, and they take satisfaction, even pleasure, in sharing them with the world. Chehalis knew exactly how many women he’d raped and beaten and killed in twenty-plus years. He’d had each assault documented in his scrapbook: newspaper clippings and little souvenirs of each “adventure,” as he termed it—bits of hair, fingernails, clothing, personal items. The total was seventy-nine rapes and four murders, not three; the fourth was of a young hitchhiker near Grant’s Pass, whose body had never been found.
Seventy-nine and four. Seventy-nine and five, at final tally. The fifth homicide victim was his wife.
The reason he’d attacked her and then strangled her to death, he said, was the scrapbook. He’d come home early because she “acted funny” when he spoke to her on the phone, and she confronted him, and he denied his guilt until she told him what she’d done with the scrapbook. “She had no right to burn it,” he said. “It was mine and she had no right to snoop into it, destroy it like that.” Police and FBI investigators found Sally Chehalis’s body where he’d buried it, in a remote section of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
He showed no remorse over any of it. “The bitches deserved what they got, every one of them.” He didn’t see anything wrong with raping and beating Melanie Aldrich, either. “Daughter, hell. I don’t believe that. Jody Everson got herself pregnant by somebody else, not me.”
Evil. As evil as they come. John Chehalis had been right, and I was glad, very glad, that I had not been present when he learned the whole truth about his son. Or when poor Doris Chehalis learned it. Neither would be alive a year from now—two more victims of their bad seed.
I’d gone to the hospital twice to see Melanie Ann. She hadn’t said a word to me either time. Whether she blamed me or not I still felt responsible, and that made seeing her all the more painful. Physically, she would suffer no permanent damage. Psychologically, there would be scar tissue that might never heal. The possibility of her remaining one of her birth father’s victims for the rest of her life was one I didn’t dare let myself think about. I had enough crosses to bear.
And you have to move on. That’s the nature of life in one sense: to move on if you can from the bad in search of the good. Happiness, love, peace of mind—the human animal needs these almost as much as food and shelter. So here we were, Kerry and I, on a beach at Monterey Bay, sharing our love and seeking happiness and peace of mind while others less fortunate suffered. The only life you have to live is your own.
We walked about a mile and then turned back. After a little ways she let go of my hand and swooped down on a sand dollar she’d missed, half hidden under a chunk of driftwood.“This one’s perfect,” she said, but when she brushed all the wet sand off she found a tiny piece missing on the front edge. “Oh, damn, look. One little chip.”
“Keep it anyway. It’s still pretty nice.”
“I might as well. The surf is just too strong here and sand dollars are so fragile. I’m not going to find a perfect one.”
“There’s still tomorrow and Sunday. Keep looking.”
“Optimist.”
“The ocean does that to me. Washes out all the cynicism.”
“We need to spend more time by the ocean then.”
“You’re right,” I said, “we do.”
We plodded along, taking our time, until our cottage appeared behind its screen of dunes. I veered off that way, but Kerry said, “Let’s keep walking a while.”
“Uh-uh. Time to head back.”
“Why?”
“My ears are cold and my feet hurt. Besides . . .” I waggled my eyebrows at her.
“Oh, Lord,” she said. “Again?”
“Again. That’s what honeymoons are for.”
“Sex—is that all you men think about?”
“All men think about?”
“You heard me. Don’t you ever get enough?”
I glanced sideways at her; she was serious. I burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“You are. Marriage is. Marriage is hilarious.”
“I’m glad you think so. Okay, we’ll head back. Race you to the cottage.”
“Then I’ll be too tired to perform.”
“That’s the idea,” she said, and took off running.
I ran after her. Not too fast, though—conserving my energy. Feeling pretty good with the wind prodding my back and the salt tang in my nostrils. Feeling lucky to be married to a woman who loved me as much as I loved her, and lucky that I still had her unharmed and unscarred.
Maybe that, the element of luck, was the reason I hadn’t quite been able to relax yet. It was the chip off the perfection of this honeymoon, like the chip that marred the sand dollar Kerry had found. We’d both been lucky, her especially: she could have ended up the same as Melanie Aldrich, or the same as Sally Chehalis. Luck can run out, though—that was the thing. Nowadays anybody can become a victim at any time. And a woman is more of a target than a man. Stephen Chehalis was not an isolated case, a singular aberration; there are others like him walking around loose, a frightening number of others.
Still, the odds were in our favor. And fear of evil and of luck running out are themselves chips, as is bearing the weight of too many crosses; live with them too long and they grow larger, mar more and more of the surface of your life until finally it begins to crumble. You have to move on, hold the bad at bay with the good as long as you can. It’s the only philosophy that makes any sense in this last screwed-up decade before the millennium.
Kerry was almost to the cottage now, her hair flying in the wind and shining in the pale sunlight. I ran faster.
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