Echoes in the Darkness (22 page)

Pathetically, at the bottom of her notations she wrote: "When can I meet family?"

Throughout the late spring, at least three of the neighbors of Susan Reinert began seeing a faded blue VW Beetle parked on their street. By early summer the car was being seen there late at night and was still there in the morning when they went out for their newspapers.

None of the neighbors had ever talked to Bill Bradfield, but all had seen the man with a beard coming and going. Only one had learned his name. The neighbors had often said that Susan Reinert was an ideal mother and a fine quiet neighbor. They were a bit surprised that her gentleman friend was apparently being allowed to sleep over.

In early June, something unusual happened at Susan Reinerts home. Her neighbor Donna Formwalt was standing on her front porch on a very warm afternoon and saw Susan Reinerts friend leaving her house in a hurry.

"He wasn't running," she later said. "But you could tell he was determined to leave."

As he got to the yard, Susan Reinert came out the front door, crying.

"Bill!" she called, but then she saw Donna Formwalt and went back inside.

The event approximately coincided with Susan Reinerts call to her therapist claiming that she was going to demand satisfaction regarding his perjury on behalf of Dr. Jay C. Smith.

On the 15th of June, a more unusual event occurred at the quiet and peaceful Reinert home in Ardmore. It was just days after Michael's tenth birthday, and he had a baseball game to play that afternoon. His grandparents John and Florence Reinert drove twenty miles from Phoenixville to watch their grandson play, but they had only remembered the game at the last moment and didn't call before coming. When they arrived, the house looked empty. Hie windows were closed even though it was a warm evening.

They spotted Michael and Karen playing in the yard next door, but instead of running to the car for hugs and kisses, both children looked apprehensive. They ran straight home across their neighbor's yard.

Florence Reinert called to Michael and asked if he had a baseball game and he only said yes and went inside.

The elder Reinerts walked to the porch and waited. After a minute or two, Michael came out with his baseball uniform on and Susan Reinert followed, but quickly shut the door behind her.

She didn't invite them in and didn't make small talk and the Reinerts didn't know what to think.

"We'll walk to the game," Florence Reinert said to her former daughter-in-law. "Aren't you coming with us?"

"I'll be over later," Susan said, and went back in the house.

Florence and John Reinert took Karen and Karen's friend Lee Ann, and went to watch Michael play. Halfway through the game Karen and Lee Ann got bored and decided to buy some water ice and go home for a few minutes.

"We'll be right back," Karen told her grandparents, but when they didn't return John Reinert decided to check on them.

Donna Formwalt was at home when the girls came back from the game that evening. They were carrying cups of water ice, and Lee Ann asked her mother if she could have the water ice before dinner. She was told to put it in the freezer until later.

Karen decided to run next door and put hers in the freezer too, but she found the front door locked. Donna Formwalt saw Karen climbing in the window by the back porch.

A minute later she heard Karen scream and then start to cry.

When John Reinert got to the house, he didn't see the girls so he drove his car back to the ball park. About ten minutes before the game ended Susan and Karen Reinert finally arrived. Karen was visibly upset and so was her mother.

When the game was over the grandparents wanted to take everyone for ice cream but Susan declined and said she and Karen wanted to walk home.

Michael decided to ride with his grandparents so they waited and drove him home. When they got to the corner of his street they saw a seedy-looking VW Beetle with a bearded man behind the wheel driving away from the house. Then they saw Susan and Karen running toward the car. Susan began talking to the man after he stopped.

The Reinerts dropped off their grandson and drove home to Phoenixville confused and disturbed. They'd never seen Bill Bradfield prior to that day and knew nothing about him. It got them thinking. Earlier in the spring when the Reinerts had their grandchildren over for a weekend, Michael had spotted a van in the parking lot of a shopping center and said, "We're going to get a van like that when we go to Europe with Bill."

And when his grandmother said, "Who's Bill?" her grandson would only say, "My mother's friend."

Susan Reinerts secrets were obviously taking a toll on her children. She'd started telling her therapist that she was fretting over having let her relationship with Bill Bradfield get to the stage where they were sleeping together under the same roof with the kids, and turning them into secret sharers.

Some say that the land around Downingtown is so lovely it can break your heart, and that it's impossible to drive through the rolling countryside near the frontier of Amish country without at least a minor attack of nostalgia. It's what a city dweller longs for when urban life gets unbearable, this postcard-pretty landscape.

Fields of corn and alfalfa envelop those twisted country roads, and past each winding turn is a traveler's delight: an eighteenth-century inn turned restaurant, restored with reverence for history, or a cedar and stone farmhouse snugged within a cleavage of hills patched by wild lavender, or one of Chester County's historic covered bridges. Haystacks are scattered about the farmland, eccentric-looking haystacks molded like enormous loaves of bread.

Pat Schnure, the best friend and colleague of Susan Reinert, lived with her husband Biv and daughter Molly near Downingtown. They were tenants on a large piece of land just off Pennypacker Road. A grand white barn on the property had been turned into a meetinghouse, and the Pennypackers had developed part of the parcel into a tennis and swim club.

The Schnures occupied a "springhouse," so called because a century ago there had been water below the house that sustained the people who worked this land. A fine elm still stood beside the house, as well as an ancient hollow maple that fascinated children but had to be watched because of the tendency of old maples to shudder and die without warning.

Susan Reinert loved the old springhouse with the rounded Chester County curve to the walls, and the inimitable patina on wood dating from the American Revolution. The doorways were so low that Biv had to duck through them. It was a warm, cozy, enduring retreat.

In June of 1979, Karen Reinert was eleven years old and Michael was just ten. Visiting the Schnures on Pennypacker Road was always a fun event, especially for Michael.

"A real boy" is how Biv described Michael. "Ill never forget how thrilled he got when he hooked a small trout in the pond. A real boy."

The Schnures had one child, brown-eyed Molly, not yet two. When Molly was born, Biv Schnure had received a telephone call from Bill Bradfield.

"He recited poetry by way of congratulations," Biv recalled. "I think it was from Ezra Pound. I didn't know what the devil he was talking about."

When Molly was a baby, Susan Reinert had given Pat a white youth blanket that used to belong to Karen. Molly wouldn't part with it even when it went gray with age.

Karen later gave Molly a baby doll in a blue dress. It was a very old doll made of real rubber and Molly called the doll Karen. The doll's eyes were blue, but the real Karen had the kind of eyes that went from dove-gray to olive-green depending upon the light and the color of her clothes.

Michael's hair was dark blond, but Karen's was changing color. It was chestnut now, with streaks of butterscotch. She was an especially photogenic child with an instinct for the camera. Her poses could range from tomboy to coquette depending on the photographic moment.

Karen was a moody little girl, squeamish about insects and field mice and other critters she might encounter around the springhouse, but she enjoyed playing with Molly and loved to mother the tot. She said she couldn't wait for Molly to get old enough to play school. Karen, of course, wanted to be the teacher like her own mother whom she obviously idolized.

Pat Schnure recalled how Susan sometimes brought Karen and Michael to faculty meetings where they'd sit in the back of the room and quietly draw pictures. They actually enjoyed the company of adults, and Susan probably brought them to show off a bit. She was extremely proud of those children.

In that they spent so much time with their mother they were accustomed to adult games. When they stayed with Pat and Biv as houseguests, Karen and Pat would challenge Michael and Biv to a game of bridge. The losers washed dishes and the winners went to Downingtown to buy ice cream.

Usually they came for day visits but sometimes the children and their mother stayed at the springhouse when the Schnures were out of town. Twice during the preceding weeks they'd stayed overnight with Pat and Biv while their mother was occupied.

It was left unsaid with whom she'd be occupied. The children were ordered by their mother never to discuss the man who would one day be their stepfather, but sometimes Pat couldn't resist trying to draw out a kernel of gossip.

"I'd ask something about Bill Bradfield and the kids'd just look at each other," Pat Schnure explained. "And I'd say, 'Oh, come on. It's okayV

The children never mentioned Bill Bradfield when they visited their father, nor to the Reinert grandparents, but Pat Schnure, well, she was their mother's friend.

"I like him okay," Michael told Pat. "He's teaching me how to wrestle."

But Karen said, "I think he's kind of weird. I make him pancakes for brealcfast and he says it's great. Michael makes him a sandwich and he says that's great. It's all great. I mean, nobody eats a sandwich with pancakes. Shouldn't someone tell the truth and say he doesn't want a sandwich with pancakes? Sometimes I don't think he's an honest person."

There was a large pond by the country road and it attracted squadrons of Canadian geese, some of whom stayed yearround. Karen thought they were beautiful, so large and sleek with heads and wing tips like sapphire. These wild honkers were mostly unmolested and didn't panic at the approach of humans. They'd swivel their ebony heads for a wary look, but fly only when commanded by their leader. But when they flew there was a roar of wings like a hundred heavy banners snapping in the bright brittle air.

The children found the honkers exciting. It was fun to watch their precision flight in exact formation. It was thrilling when a young honker would get rebellious and break from the squadron for no better reason than to shatter the silence on the pond with a rifle crack of wings. Simply to cry out and fly. Any child could understand the impulse.

But on the ground, that was another story. Karen would just as soon sit on the grass a safe distance away and watch her braver brother try to tempt the honkers with food.

Karen was even more wary of garter snakes and frogs, but as a result of her exposure to country life there near Downingtown she wrote some whimsical verse. Beneath the picture of a golden Egyptian slave bracelet that she'd clipped from a magazine, the sixth-grader wrote:

Oh, snake, you're so gold.

I wonder if you're ever cold,

Scaly or slimy.

Please don't climb me!

Her poem to a Downingtown bullfrog revealed more about her own contemplative nature:

Froggy, Froggy

Why are you so green?

I wonder. And dream.

They were very easy children to manage and the Schnures hated to see them go home. When Susan Reinert would arrive for the kids she and Pat took strolls together. As the end of term approached it was just about impossible to discuss anything but the impending wedding.

Susan Reinert told her friend that she hoped that a query she'd sent regarding a teaching position in England would be favorably received. She smiled when she told Pat that she'd included Jay Smith's letter of recommendation, trusting that his notoriety hadn't spread clear across the Atlantic.

They speculated that anything he'd stolen was long spent on lawyers, and paying for his wife's illness. And that he was reportedly living on welfare and food stamps while facing a prison term. But on such a night it wasn't easy to talk about a man who, as Susan Reinert reported, had always "made her skin crawl" when he so much as entered the same room at school.

It was far more pleasant to talk about the wonders to be seen in Europe, while American crickets sang cheerily by the pond in the maidenhead fern. At night it was spectacularly beautiful out there with tree shadows like black satin, and buttery light shining from the barn and the springhouse. Shadows on the moon were only made by the coming and going of migratory birds.

And beautiful wild flowers like bloodroot grew wherever they chose in this fertile country, but were too delicate to survive the touch of a single human being, or so said folklore, and William Bradfield.

Chapter
14

Summer Storm

Woman? Oh, woman is a consummate rage, hut dead, or asleep, she pleases. Take her. She has two excellent seasons.