Echoes in the Darkness (15 page)

A terrible thing had happened after the last spring term. The typewriter had been stolen from school. There was no mistaking the machine Sue found in the attic, and she speculated that the tape recorder also belonged to Upper Merion.

She was as furious as she could get, and confronted Bill Bradfield who at first seemed a bit vague. But then he said that he'd bought the typewriter from Jay Smith for $75, and was going to give it to her as a Christmas present to type little merchandise signs for the art store. He said that he didn't know the machines were stolen.

Sue Myers said the typewriter had been bought by the school for the handicapped boy and that Bill Bradfield knew it and this was too much and he must be.absolutely insane to be buying stolen machines from Jay Smith. And then Sue Myers demanded that Bill Bradfield take the typewriter back to the school.

"They'll think I stole it," he said.

"Sneak it back in the school," she said, and then she started crying.

From that day on, she was absolutely certain that Bill Bradfield was meeting with Jay Smith. The typewriter proved it. Soon the machines disappeared from the attic, and Bill Bradfield swore he'd returned them, but the special stand for the typewriter was later found by Vince Valaitis in the basement.

Sue didn't know why in the name of heaven Bill wanted another typewriter in the first place. She thought a whole lot about mental illness in those days.

Bill Bradfield suddenly wanted to get out of town during the Christmas holidays, the precise time at which he felt Jay Smith went around massacring half the population.

To Sue Myers it made about as much sense as everything else he said. She didn't question it much. She was just glad to be away from school and the art store and the cold damp weather. She looked forward to heading south. She might even get a suntan.

Vince Valaitis, who was also asked to go along on the trip to Florida, thought that his friend had just about reached his limit because of what was happening with Jay Smith. He was pleased to tag along.

They rented a camper from another teacher and hit the road. But if Sue Myers thought she was going to spend a Christmas vacation without hearing about Jay Smith she was dead wrong.

They weren't five miles out of Philadelphia before Bill Bradfield said, "If Doctor Smiths true to form and kills on holidays, there's nothing I can do about it if I'm in another state, right?"

"You've done all you can do," Vince Valaitis reassured him, while Sue Myers might as well have been stone deaf.

And that was about the best way to deal with it. At the mention of Jay Smith or Susan Reinert, she would let the hum of the engine obliterate human speech. In self-defense she'd make herself immune to voices.

Vince Valaitis was still partly ascribing the talk of murder to a symptom of Jay Smith's mental disorder. He continued to reassure Bill Bradfield that Jay Smith loved to shock people, and that Bill should try to forget about it, at least during the holidays.

But Bill Bradfield started telling some things that Vince hadn't heard. For example, he said that Jay Smith claimed to have "hit" more than a few people.

And when Vince asked how many, Bill Bradfield without blinking those brooding blue eyes said, "Two hundred and fifty."

That did it. Vince Valaitis hoped there'd be lots of room in the funny place for Jay Smith and Bill Bradfield. Maybe they could go to St. Elizabeths together and share Ezra Pounds old padded cell.

Whether or not Jay Smith had killed his own daughter and son-in-law, it seemed obvious to Vince that the only guy with two hundred personal hits was Count Dracula.

The more outrageous claims that Jay Smith made (always according to Bill Bradfield) the more Vince was discouraged from telling Susan Reinert or police authorities for fear of looking silly.

The itinerary included Charleston, Atlanta, Orlando, St. Augustine. They got as far as Charleston when the specter of Jay Smith once again hopped aboard the camper. They had gone to a store to buy a sleeping bag when Vince called Bill Bradfields attention to the gun display, and that brought up maybe having to shoot Jay Smith, and the next thing Sue knew Bill Bradfield decided he had to buy a handgun.

Sue got furious at Vince and at Bill Bradfield and at Jay Smith and at Susan Reinert and at Bill Bradfields parents for buying him that toy truck, because as far as she was concerned all this was mostly an attempt to get the new piano his sister got and the attention that went with it instead of that lousy stinking goddamn toy truck!

In a St. Augustine hardware store he made another try at buying a .22 handgun, but he was told he had to be a Florida resident and got turned down. Pretty soon Vince was informed that a gun might not do much good anyway if it came to a showdown with the prince of darkness. Due to his years of army training, Jay Smith could kill with any ordinary household utensil, according to Bill Bradfield.

Despite himself, Vince started to believe again. He envisioned nightmare chases by a potato peeler and a curling iron.

Vince Valaitis went to mass in Orlando and Bill Bradfield accompanied him. When they got to St. Augustine, Vince went to mass again. Bill Bradfield went to a Quaker meeting and to the Catholic mass. Sue said that that made him a Quack-lik.

While in a Catholic church with Vince, Bill Bradfield lit a candle and said, "I pray that no evil will befall Susan Reinert."

That sort of talk terrified Vince Valaitis, because when you started bringing the Church into this business it had to be true or else sacrilegious. And the fear of God was by far the dominant fear in his life.

Vince and Bill Bradfield had occasion to stay up one night talking. Just when Vince thought he'd heard every possible bit of Jay Smith gossip, Bill Bradfield, with his secret-sharer voice, said, "Vince, Jay Smith told me something else. I can't vouch for its authenticity. I can only repeat what the man said. Jay Smith knows how Jimmy Hoffa was killed. He was chopped into pieces and dissolved in acid."

And Vince saw in his mind's eye several big bottles of nitric acid that Jay Smith had stolen from Upper Merion. And if you took parts of Jay Smith's lunatic talk and joined it to demonstrable events in his weird life, and if you thought about his daughter Stephanie and Eddie Hunsberger . . .

"Jay Smith knows how to make human beings absolutely disappear," Bill Bradfield said, his last words on the subject during that holiday trip.

Virice's nightmares now included ghastly parcels dropped into school Dumpsters to offend and bedevil poor old Norman the janitor.

After they got home, Bill Bradfield managed to see little Shelly during the end of the holidays when she was back from college in California. Shelly was by now pushing nineteen and she told Chris Pappas that Bill Bradfield had promised she only had to wait until graduation when they would be married in a "cathedral in France." He was going to be financially secure by then and they were going to buy an oceangoing sailboat. The rest of it was open-ended.

According to Shellys later statements, she and her intended sometimes went to motels in King of Prussia, but the girl always denied that there was sexual intercourse during the few hours they would spend there. Snuggling and hugging and kissing were implied in Shellys statements.

When this devout girl, a Catholic convert through the efforts of Bill Bradfield, later denied sex with Bill Bradfield few witnesses believed her. But the more that became known of Bill Bradfield's romantic techniques, the more it was thought to be true. The motel trysts may have been a job for Elliot Emu.

Once when Sue Myers was working at the store, he took Shelly to their apartment. Shelly told her girlfriend that during this visit Bill Bradfield had said, "Someday all this will all be yours."

As might be expected, Bill Bradfield also told Shelly that Jay Smith was on the loose and threatening to kill Susan Reinert. This time he said that the reason was because Jay Smith had an idea that she was somehow going to interfere with the alibi testimony that Bill Bradfield felt obliged to offer in Jay Smiths upcoming trial. He told Shelly that Jay Smith had admitted that he'd killed a couple of people in King of Prussia, probably prostitutes. But Bill Bradfield still had the moral obligation to testily.

He told Shelly how frightened he was for Susan Reinert, but that he didn't dare go to the police because Jay Smith's contacts were everywhere in the police service. Bill Bradfield had to resort to protecting Susan Reinert on his own. He said that he circled the streets around Susan's home late at night and often rang her on the phone only to hang up in relief when she answered. He prayed for her.

Of course Shelly promised not to breathe a word, and before she returned to college in February they went to motels a couple more times and played with the invisible ostrich or whatever they did.

Chapter
10

Disciples

The associates of William Bradfield had certain traits in common: they were either especially impressionable, riddled with self-doubts, fearful of the future, or all three. Intimate experience with the opposite sex had been very limited or nonexistent in their lives. None had spent a significant period of life outside a classroom. Sue Myers, Vince Valaitis, Chris Pappas, Shelly, and Susan Reinert were decent trusting people. They were also more vulnerable than bloodroot.

The only one who was in some way different was Rachel, now off at Harvard pursuing a graduate degree, and learning how to look even more like Charlotte Bronte. Her love letters to Bill Bradfield, always mailed to Upper Merion Senior High School, are penned in the tiny precise formal script taught in British boarding schools, though she hailed from the American West.

Dear William:

I thought about you all day yesterday & (so far) all day today. Knowing you wouldn't, but hoping to have you call up. Vaguely nervous with your people so close. I imagine what a confrontation would hold. All nonsense, of course, but inner dialogues haunting me all day. Have been in foul mood upon foul mood. You said something about my new-found interest in political matters. It isn't. That is, the interest has always been there. The feeling of responsibility. But my notions of what seems sane don^t coincide with anyone's-well, maybe yours, and that's why I talk to you about things and the frustrations of never being able to get the kind of information I want I keep wanting to have you here to say-"That's why!"

Perhaps you weren't even here this weekend? That would be strange. You've been locked up in my head these days. I miss you horribly. CSEPAHC? Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries, (see clipping) Stung. Paralyzed. What can be said which will do justice to such a thing??? Its beyond me. At Yale, yet. They should be ashamed.

I sat here gazing for a minute at the Pound picture. Not thinking about it really, or you. But having my head-the whole pan of my mind, my senses-feeling all the parts of your world coming to me through these black ana white dots. Because I am so inextricably bound to you and you to the something that is, was, Ezra Pound. My nerves work differently. My heart and breathing speed up whenever I bump against one of the objects of your world. I cherish them all and no one can tamper with them in the least because what's there that could be tampered with isn't in the object but in the relation. And there for as long as I hold up my end, it is safe.

I have the control over things at last. The frustrations of not determining my world can ease. And there is peace and calm and quiet. The writing of these letters is an exercise in indulging myself-holding up of my end and revelling in the control and ownership. Generating rewards-exquisite ones-for myself. To end the letters becomes almost impossible. The stopping of the motion and the empty space and the thoughts that continue in my head but cannot go to you bring again the frustration that signals my entry back into the setting of things beyond my control. There is nothing else left to me but to make do with whatever it is that must be done to keep us together. Don't worry, William. Sometimes I feel as if I surely must be getting wise.

Love me. Think of me. Something MUST be done to get around all the intricacies. I need your hugs.

Those who knew about Rachel were puzzled by the nature of her love affair with Bill Bradfield, Sue Myers in particular. Their relationship seemed as intricate as a DNA blueprint.

The letters that Rachel posted to Bill Bradfield at the school deal mostly with ethereal matters and a conviction that a unique notion of "sanity" is theirs. Sue decided that despite Rachel's earlier marriage she was the icy Gothic maiden he'd always needed and if you took her picture it would come out sepia.

But in her Ezra Pound letter Rachel had mentioned "control" three times and hugs once, so if he controlled her three fourths of the time and hugged her for the remainder she might be quite obedient ana happy. Probably, Rachel was more like Sue Myers and all the others than Sue cared to admit.

All of the Bill Bradfield cohorts led pretty ordinary lives on a day-to-day basis, lives revolving around school and books and papers, until Bill Bradfield, tireless as a laser beam, scorched them with the latest from Jay Smith.

Bill Bradfield was like an auteur film director who writes the scenario while he shoots the movie, and ends up with a plot so convoluted that he has to withdraw for a few days to let the players wait and wonder while he conceptualizes the next scene.