06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (6 page)

As she considered James’s actions, Linda began seeing him in a new light. “Here was someone who was hurt, someone who wanted to be noticed and cared for,” she said later. “Here was someone who cared a great deal for me.”

That night, for the first time, Linda told James, “I love you.”

James said he couldn’t go home, the blowup had been too bad. Linda agreed and they drove to a motel and checked in.
They held each other, kissing, James touching her on the bed. “But we never even got fully undressed,” said Linda. “James said someday we’d get married and he wanted to wait.”

Years later James would tell Linda another story about that night. That instead of his relationship with her and the money he had spent on it, the argument with his parents had been about something vastly different. That on that particular night the young girl he’d molested told James C. and Irene Bergstrom what James had done to her while the rest of the family slept.

Without understanding why, Linda sensed that from that night on, everything was thrown into fast forward. Suddenly, James told her, his parents wanted him to follow in his younger brother’s footsteps by joining the navy.

Actually, pushing their oldest son to join the service was not a total turnaround for the Bergstroms. James C., after all, talked fondly of the intrigue and excitement of his days in the air force, and James’s younger brother, Chris, was climbing the promotional ladder in the navy. After Chris was on the inaugural crew of the U.S.S.
Ohio
, the country’s first Trident submarine, his father talked often of the younger son’s success. Chris was married, the father of two small children, and one of the youngest chiefs in the submarine fleet. The pressure mounted, and one day James walked into the house and found a marine recruitment team there at his father’s request to talk to him about the opportunities in the military.

In fact, James C. had always argued that James’s slot at Devoe & Raynolds was a dead end. “My father kept telling me that someday they’d have a robot do what I did and they wouldn’t need me anymore,” James said later. When his father voiced objections to his job soon after James began working at Devoe, James insisted he would work only long enough to save money for college. But he liked the work and stayed, much to his father’s disapproval.

Since the night of the big fight and James’s flight to Linda’s side, the Bergstroms were pushing in earnest for their son to leave the house. Enlisting in the military must have seemed like the perfect solution. “James never came right out and said he didn’t want to go,” remembered his high school friend Eddie. “But you could tell it, underneath.”

Before long, James agreed to enlist, but he told Linda he had one condition. There was only one way he would join the navy, he said: They had to be married before he left for basic training.

It had been clear from the night she made it that Linda’s pledge of love hadn’t had the effect she had anticipated. She thought it would put James at ease and allow him to stop worrying about what others said about her intentions. James, however, was not appeased but even more anxious about their relationship. As if now that she had admitted her feelings for him, he needed to have her sign it in blood.

She sensed her words also had a secondary effect; they had irrevocably tipped the scales of their relationship. If she had been the strong, independent one in the beginning, the one able to make demands, James now held that power. He needled her constantly, craving continual proof of her love. If she loved him, she needed to show it, he insisted, by marrying him.

The arguments they’d had in the past paled in contrast to James’s urgent anger now. It erupted in shouting matches and enraged phone calls, ending only when Linda slammed down the phone in desperation. It was so obvious James was constantly on edge that one night at work Allen Gibson pulled him aside and suggested James and Linda take time apart from each other. “Look, James, why don’t you blow it off for a while,” he advised. “You know, step back and see what’s going on.”

As usual, James nodded agreement but then continued to pressure Linda to marry him. One night after they squabbled on the telephone, James jumped in his car and screeched to a stop in her driveway. Linda was outside when he pulled
up, and James immediately continued the argument where he had left off, chasing her around the yard, thrusting his finger at her face. Daniel heard the commotion and rushed to his sister’s rescue.

“You’re going to have to go,” said Daniel, who outweighed and towered over James.

Linda ran into the house, and James attempted to follow, but Daniel blocked him.

“If you don’t tell her to come out here, I’m going to do something to you,” James threatened.

“What’s that?” Daniel countered.

James jumped into his Z28 and punched it, driving directly toward Daniel, who leaped out of the way. James slammed on the brakes just before crashing into an old pickup truck parked in the driveway. Daniel rushed around the side and grabbed James through the open window, smacking him in the mouth. James threw the car into reverse and sped away.

Inside the house, Linda was crying.

“There’s something wrong with that guy,” Daniel told his older sister. “He’s not normal.”

That night Santos, too, was worried about her middle daughter.

“How come he acts like that?” she asked Linda.

“I guess because he loves me, Mama,” Linda answered, finding herself making excuses for James’s behavior. “He was just upset. He won’t act like that anymore.”

“If you marry him, you better know who you’re marrying,” Santos concluded. “He is too possessive. He reminds me of your daddy.”

Though Linda listened to her mother’s words, in her view there was a world of difference between James and her father. James had never hit her and he was always sorry after they argued. One night, for instance, he had dropped to his knees on the street in front of her mother’s house and shouted until the neighbors came outside to investigate the ruckus: “I’m sorry, Linda. I love you. I love you.”

As the days passed, James continued to exert pressure on Linda to marry him. One afternoon he stopped at a navy recruiting station, where he was told that under the buddy plan he could request duty near his brother, who had settled in Bremerton, Washington, across Puget Sound from Seattle. “And if we end up in Washington State, Chris’s wife, Tina, would be there to help you get settled,” James excitedly assured Linda later that night.

Still, almost nightly he fluctuated between concluding he would enlist to ruling it out completely. Finally, he usually worked his way around to asking Linda what she wanted him to do.

“You need to do what you want to do, not what your parents want or I want,” she told him. But inside she was hoping he would decide against the navy. She hated to see him go, and the prospect of moving across country was terrifying.

Finally he called one afternoon from a navy recruiting office to say he was signing his enlistment papers.

Linda cried on the phone, “I don’t want you to go.”

But James insisted he had to. “My parents want me to sign the papers and I’m going,” he said. “But before I leave Houston, we’re getting married.”

Linda, unsure, agreed but kept putting the date off until one day James announced they had to get married that week. He wouldn’t wait any longer. Linda was troubled, still uncertain this was the right move for her. But if they did marry, this was far from the way she had envisioned it, in a hurry with little ceremony. She wanted a church wedding like the one she had always dreamed of. But James insisted.

“Okay, James, I love you,” she finally acquiesced. “I want to marry you.”

On April 25, 1985, alone because they knew neither of their families approved, James and Linda drove to the courthouse in Pasadena, Texas, another of the small cities bordering Houston on the south. James was twenty-two years old; Linda was twenty-one. In the court of the justice of the peace, they married. The ceremony took less than five min
utes, and afterward Linda felt disappointed. “It just wasn’t the way I ever thought it would happen,” she said.

After they left the courthouse, James decided they would leave things as they were, Linda living with her family and James with his, until she left to follow him wherever he was stationed. Linda didn’t argue. She knew only Gino in her family liked James, and she didn’t look forward to telling her mother she and James had eloped.

Still, she was confused when James drove up in front of her house to drop her off. She had thought they’d spend a romantic night together in a motel. They had yet to consummate their marriage.

“Suddenly James worried about money. He told me that this was the last day to renew his car insurance, and now that we were married, he could get a lower rate,” she later said. “I couldn’t believe it, but that’s how he had picked our wedding date.”

Despite his plan to keep their marriage a secret, Irene Bergstrom somehow guessed what her son had just done. James called Linda from a motel later that night where he sought refuge after his parents forced him to leave the house.

“They were really pissed about us getting married,” he told Linda, describing the battle that had ensued after he’d admitted they’d eloped. “But I stuck up for you and I told them that now you’re my wife.”

Later Irene Bergstrom would say that she was surprised to learn her son and Linda had married. “They didn’t tell anybody. Suddenly we just knew they were married,” she said, dismissing it all with a disgusted frown and a wave of her hand.

In the Martinez home, things went on as they always had. No one realized their Lily was now married. But it wasn’t long before James boasted of the news to a few friends at work. When Allen Gibson returned from a vacation, a co-worker pulled him to the side and told him James and Linda had eloped.

Gibson tracked James down and asked, “James, you got married?”

“Yeah,” answered James. “It seemed like the thing to do.”

“As long as you’re happy.” Gibson shrugged.

But in the days that followed, Allen Gibson noticed a change in James. He seemed almost giddy, happier than Gibson had ever seen him. Not contented but prideful. Gibson thought about it long and hard until he finally came to one conclusion: “All the time they were dating, James didn’t have control over Linda. The marriage was a purchase that gave him title. In his mind, she was his property, and that was that. It was like he’d bought a new car. Linda was his.”

In January of 1986, James submitted a request for a leave of absence to Devoe & Raynolds and packed his bags for navy boot camp in San Diego. Linda cried when he left, but he seemed optimistic and excited. Thirteen weeks later, she flew to California for a graduation ceremony in which James was one of the flag bearers. “I was really proud of him,” she said. “He was making something of his life.”

Since he had filed a request asking to be assigned to a Trident submarine, James was then given a battery of intelligence, aptitude, and psychiatric tests. The psychological exams were designed to determine how he would fare in the submarine corps. The navy is well aware that not everyone can take the claustrophobic confinement of months submerged at sea. In fact, many who initially request the subs wash out during their first voyages and are discharged or reassigned in other types of service.

Once his scores were tabulated and he was determined to be a candidate for sub school, James, like all nuclear submariners, became the subject of an FBI security check. Called the hundred-hours exam—because each exam theoretically consumes one hundred hours of manpower—it grants a basic security clearance. “Everybody on the sub has at least ‘secret’ security status,” one officer later explained. “They’re working with classified data and equipment. There’s lots that you wouldn’t want to go wrong on a nuclear submarine.”

When Bergstrom’s security clearance came through without a hitch, orders were issued assigning him to submarine school in New London, Connecticut.

At home, Linda maintained the charade of not being married, but soon Santos Martinez, like Irene Bergstrom, suspected that the young couple had eloped. Despite their agreement, James was evidently anxious to be sure their situation was public knowledge. From Connecticut he sent letters to the Martinez house addressed to Mrs. Linda Bergstrom. One day a saddened Santos found one such letter in the mailbox and brought it to her daughter, remarking, “I didn’t know you married him.”

“Yes, I did,” Linda answered.

Santos said nothing more. Since her daughter had made her choice, she felt it was no longer her place to interfere. But from then on she prayed for Linda every night, prayed that she was wrong about James Bergstrom and that he would not bring her daughter pain.

The rest of the Martinez family felt much the same way. “By the time we knew she was going to marry him, it was too late,” said Daniel. “We couldn’t say anything. It was already done.”

Inside the plain white envelopes, the letters James sent were all the same. They were written in a careful script on navy stationery with a small sailboat outlined in one corner. In each, James described his classes and training, learning to be an interior communications technician—an IC man—on a Trident submarine. Then he told of their plans once he completed his schooling, and of their impending move to Washington State. His agenda was simple: During the four years of his commitment to the navy, they would live simply and save their money, until they could move home to Houston and buy a house. Then he would return to Devoe and back to work with his friends. Before sealing the envelope, James always added one finishing touch, a black cross, like a crucifix, on the center top of each page.

As he had throughout their relationship, however, James kept some secrets to himself. Never mentioned in the letters was one particular night in Connecticut when he went alone to a bar with a big-screen television to watch a basketball game. “There were these guys playing pool—other guys from sub school. I started playing, too, and one invited me back to his place,” he would later recount. “This one guy started taking his clothes off and coming on to me.” James claimed he bolted and ran, just as he said he had on the other, similar incident. “But I couldn’t help wondering,” he admitted angrily, “why all these guys just kept assuming I was gay.”

One or two weekends a month, James flew home from Connecticut. Linda spent the days before his arrival daydreaming about what they would do while he was home. He never disappointed her. From the moment James arrived in Houston, they clung together. The long absences forgotten, they frolicked like children, picnicking at the park or driving on the beach. Almost every night, they went out to dinner or to a movie. They never fought. To Linda, it was as if they were living the childhood neither had ever experienced: a childhood without the fear or violence that haunted her earliest memories.

At night they slept blissfully entwined in each other’s arms in Adelaide’s bedroom. Linda wouldn’t learn for another three years what her husband had done in that very room—that it was there he had repeatedly sexually molested his first victim.

Although she’d had doubts before the marriage, Linda felt content and happy. Her one disappointment was in the privacy of the bedroom, where James was unimaginative. Though he had an insatiable sexual appetite—often insisting they make love as many as three or four times a day—it was always in the same way. Invariably James climbed on top of her, and in minutes it was over. Immediately after, he rolled over and fell into a deep sleep.

James had been such an ardent suitor, Linda had imagined he would be as ardent a lover. After she’d waited so long to be with him, his lack of passion and fun was disillusioning. Yet it seemed petty to complain. Instead, Linda attempted to ease James into trying new things, such as making love in the park one night under the stars or while he was sitting on a chair. Always James refused, insisting that was not “proper.”

So when James asked one night if they could do something a little different, Linda was not only intrigued but hopeful.

“What did you have in mind?” she said, flirting.

“Let’s play a little game,” he suggested. “Can I tie you up?”

“Why?” she asked.

“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” he answered. “But I was afraid to ask.”

Although the idea made her vaguely uneasy, Linda agreed. As she watched from the bed, James meticulously checked the room, determining the door was locked and the drapes were pulled. Then he took a perfectly rolled pair of long white athletic socks from his duffel bag and painstakingly unwound them. He pulled her nightgown slowly over her head and left her shivering in nothing but her white bikini briefs. Then he carefully knotted the first sock and bound it around her left wrist, yanking the knot tight before he looped and tied the unused length around her other wrist, ensnaring both hands helplessly behind her. She wriggled her hands to loosen the restraint as he turned his attention to her ankles. Linda was on her knees with her feet behind her as James encircled first one, then the other ankle, and pulled tightly on the ends of the second binding until they, too, were locked together.

“There was a guy in boot camp who had handcuffs,” James whispered, excitedly, as he industriously tested the tightness of the restraints. “Wouldn’t that be great?”

Linda just smiled. Though she was uncomfortable, she didn’t want to complain. This was an adventure, an exciting new game, she told herself. “I was just glad to see him. I loved him,” she said later. “He could have done anything to me.”

When he was sure her bindings were secure, James started slowly. He ran his fingers lightly up and down the sides of her body. He inched closer to her breasts, then held them in his hands and kissed each of her nipples. It was a pleasant sensation, tender and warm.

Then he moved downward, toward her thighs. He glided his fingers lightly across the sensitive skin between her legs. It made her tingle and the muscles in her leg contract. In an involuntary reflex, she writhed and pulled slightly away. James looked up at her.

“That tickles,” she whispered, with a nervous smile.

James stared silently at her, his eyes piercing.

Without saying a word, he untied her legs and discarded her underpants, then retied her, and bound the restraints even tighter than before. The cloth cut unyielding into her skin. Her hands and feet tingled, numbly cold.

Though she pulled against her bonds, James, absorbed in the game, appeared not to notice her discomfort. This time he ran his fingers quickly up over her breasts and down her arms. An icy chill encompassed Linda, marking her skin with thousands of tiny bumps. She shivered.

“You don’t like that?” James asked.

She shook her head, no.

But rather than stop, James again lowered his hands toward the delicate skin between her legs and edged his fingers up and down inside her thighs.

Linda’s flesh crawled. The sensation made her jerk uncomfortably back, and the rigid restraints on her wrists and ankles tightened, the knots pressing into her flesh.

James looked at her coolly and smiled, as if from a distance. He stared as dispassionately as a scientist inspecting a particularly interesting specimen.

A wave of anxiety swept over Linda. It wasn’t only her husband’s barren stare, but the hard set of his jaw. He seemed like a stranger, bewitched by his own game. Not the James she knew.
Why is he acting so odd?
she wondered.
What’s wrong with him?

Frightened, Linda drew slightly back, and James lunged forward. She turned to the right and he followed. To the left and he was beside her. She felt trapped.

“James,” she whispered, finally.

But he simply gazed up at her. With that same expressionless face and distant eyes, he came at her again, running his hands up her thighs until her body shuddered. Every pore felt exposed.

“James,” she said more firmly, pulling against the restraints and discovering she was powerless to break free. “Please, don’t.”

Suddenly James looked up at her, his eyes clear and attentive. Whatever spell held him, it was broken. He hesitated only a moment before untying her. Then he laid her down on the bed and mounted her, making love in his usual way.

Before she drifted off to sleep that night, Linda considered what had happened and why it frightened her so. James hadn’t done anything particularly menacing. He had never raised his voice, never inflicted even the slightest pain. It was something else. Something less concrete. His vacant stare. The chill of his touch. But what she hated most was the knowledge that he could have done anything he wanted to her and she would have been defenseless to stop him.
James liked it,
she puzzled as sleep overtook her.
He wanted me to struggle. He wanted me to be afraid.