House of Secrets (3 page)

Traci told him. “It’s a good way to remember.” Joel eventually raised his grades to C’s. Other students rarely insulted his lack of intelligence. Joel Good wouldn’t argue, and he certainly couldn’t be goaded into a fight. People gave up quickly on trying to push his buttons, especially when their insults were met with that Forrest Gump stare. Even Traci’s sister Terry, the consummate cynic, noticed it.

“He believes in people,” she said. “He always thinks good of people, no matter what they do.” Like when Traci took his desk. That became their morning routine, their little ritual through the fall and winter.

Traci in his seat, talking to Terry. Saying a nasty line, then giving it back to him when he showed up. Then Traci landed a baby-sitting job in Joel Good’s neighborhood. He began dropping by to see her after school, pedalling over on his bike. They talked about homework and the Cleveland Browns and life after high school. One day she asked, “What are you going to do after graduation?”

“I’d like to have a family,” he said. “I’d like to have a wife and kids.”

“That’s a good goal,” she said. Terry pulled her aside at school one day. “Traci,” she said. “I think Joel wants to ask you out.” He asked her a few days later, in front of his aunt’s house, standing in the driveway, looking at his feet. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But she’d been going with a boy named Eric for six months.

Eric had already asked her to the prom, she said. “You’re still my friend, Joel,” she said. “Is there anybody else you want to ask?

Maybe I can help.” He answered the next day. “I sort of like that girl you guys sometimes hang around with.”

“What girl?” Traci asked.. “Stella,” Joel said. “She seems nice.”

The day she first heard the girl’s name, Teresa Boron panicked. Joel Good had sprung the question on her at 10,30 that morning, a Saturday, when mall parking was a major challenge in and of itself. “What do you wear to a prom?” he asked. She always called him Joey. “Joey, you’re going?” Teresa asked back. Her eyes filled with disbelief. He nodded.

Teresa asked, “You’re going with Traci?” Weeks ago, she’d suggested her nephew ask the neighborhood girl who often stopped by their house after school. He’d finally gotten up the nerve, only to be rejected.

Teresa thought, Traci must have changed her mind. Now Joey had waited until the day of the dance to break the news. “Traci has a boyfriend,”

Joey said. “I’m going with a girl.”

“What girl?”

“Her name is Stella.”

“And who is Stella?”

“She’s a girl at school. Traci kind of set it up.”

Stella, Teresa thought. That was an unusual name. Her nephew had shown little interest in dating. He had moppy brown hair and innocent eyes that might have charmed a half dozen girls, if he’d only had the confidence to make the moves. He was shy and academically slow. Not retarded, but his IQ was borderline. She’d hired a tutor to help him, but she could only guess what he was up against in the high school’s social scene. Joel Michael Good, Jr. was four weeks from graduation.

Unlike most of the students at Jackson, he did not have a stack of college acceptance letters to consider. But in her house, Teresa Boron figured, he had a shot at making a life for himself. She was the coowner and bookkeeper of her husband’s machine shop. They made guide rollers for mills in the rust belt. She handled the payroll and the accounts payable and receivable between raising four kids of her own under the age of 10. She never thought twice about taking in Joey. As a child, he called her “Aunt Tee Tee.” Sometimes he still did. He’d lived with her sister Velva, then her parents. Joey’s younger brother Danny was still living with his grandparents in south Canton. When Joey said he wanted to move in with her, Teresa figured she was fulfilling an old promise. Her sister Linda had called her to her sickbed six years ago, blind, her organs failing. “I have to make sure my kids are going to be okay,” Linda said. That day Teresa promised, “I’ll always be there for them.” She wished her sister could be there now. A first date, to the senior prom no less. How proud his mother would be. “You wear a tux to a prom,” Teresa said. Joey did not have a tux, or reservations at a restaurant. He’d given no thought to flowers, color coordination, or any of the other details most students spent weeks planning. Teresa glanced at her watch and reached for the Yellow Pages.

“My God, J-oey,” she asked. “What color is Stella’s dress?”

“I don’t know,” Joey said. He didn’t have Stella’s phone number, either, and only vague directions to her house. Eight hours later, they sped down Wales Avenue toward Massilon, Joey in the backseat, Teresa’s friend in the front, along for the ride. They would find this Stella’s house, pick her up and take the young prom couple to a restaurant called the Leprechaun. They would let the two seniors dine by themselves on the other side of the restaurant, while Teresa and her friend sipped a couple of drinks. Then, they’d drop them off at the Mckinley Room in the Canton Civic Center, site of the 1989 prom. They were calling the dance “When I’m With You,” inspired by a song by the band called Sheriff. Teresa scanned the houses, her eyes straining from behind the wheel of her Chevy van. It was twilight, the sky a dark off-white from a murky overcast. Dusk had turned the lawns and homes and leafless trees into ill-defined dark shapes. They were looking for a pond. “She said it was the house on Wales next to the pond,” Joey kept saying. So far, they’d gotten lucky, Teresa figured. Her nephew was dressed in a brilliant white tuxedo, complimented by white shoes and a powder blue tie and cummerbund. They’d found a rental shop that did one-day alterations. There was a table waiting for the couple at the Leprechaun. At the flower shop, Joey had picked out a rose corsage.

“You can never go wrong with a red rose,” Teresa said. When they found the pond, Joey went up to the house on the north side of the water, but returned after a few moments. When he got back into the backseat, Teresa spun around, wondering. “Wrong house,” Joey said. He pointed south. “The people said there’s a girl named Stella who lives over there.” Teresa wheeled the van back around on Wales, then up Caroline, finding the driveway. The house was almost imposing, sitting there on top of the hill at dusk. She watched her nephew walk slowly up the sidewalk, carrying the clear plastic case with the rose corsage in front of him, doing it carefully, as if it were a liquid that might spill. When he returned minutes later, the girl Stella was with him.

Teresa Boron got out of the van and walked toward them, a camera in her hand. She could see the parents hovering near the front doorway on the deck. They didn’t come out to introduce themselves. Teresa didn’t approach. She figured this was no time to chat. After all, this was Joey’s night. Besides, Stella Sexton had captured Teresa’s eyes. My God, she thought, this girl is very pretty. Her dark brown hair was pinned up on her head. She was wearing a full-length formal, not one of the tight body dresses or skimpy satins popular with teenage girls today. The outer shell was white lace, her bare shoulders covered with a transparent lace shawl. The color was powder blue and white, the same shades as Joey’s tux. Stella had pinned a white carnation on Joey’s lapel. But Joey was still holding the red rose corsage in front of him, the flower still in its plastic case. In the back of the van, the two of them said nothing. They remained silent for miles. The two shyest students in Jackson High School have somehow found each other, Teresa thought. A perfect match. Teresa broke the silence, asking about their plans. Stella said her father and brother would be picking them up from the prom. She spoke in a hardly audible voice. “I have to be home early,” she whispered. Teresa thought, on prom night? That would not be the only deviation in prom protocol. As Teresa dropped them off at the Civic Center, Stella still hadn’t put on the red corsage. Later, Teresa learned the flower never left its plastic case.

Stella Sexton had emerged from the house on Caroline Street wearing a blue-and-white wrist corsage. She would not replace it with the rose.

“It’s a gift from my father,” she said. s They watched them in an awkward slow dance. A couple of times, Joel tried to hold her hand, but Stella would touch him only for a few moments, then slide her fingers away. They sat at Terry and Traci’s table. When Joel slipped away for a cigarette, Traci followed him outside. He sucked hard on the smoke. Traci Turify had never seen him so frustrated. “Man,” he said. “She hardly says anything.” Traci was feeling like little miss matchmaker. She’d personally gone to Stella Sexton and told her that Joel Good wanted to ask her out. Only after she said she’d probably go did Joel decide to invite her as his date. “Maybe she’s nervous,”

Traci said. “Nervous?”

“Well, she’s not well-liked at school. You know that.” They’d talked about her pregnancy. Neither Traci or Terry had been able to get a straight answer from Stella about the father of her baby, whether he was ever coming back. “Maybe that’s it,” Traci said. “This boyfriend in the service.”

“I don’t know,” Joel said. Joel wanted to ask her to a class trip the next day to Cedar Point, a world-class amusement park west of Cleveland. “But, man, she sure is shy,” he said.

Coming from him, Traci thought, that had to be about as shy as shy gets. They went back inside. Well before midnight, Traci came back from the dance floor and realized Joel and Stella were gone. A couple days later in school, Traci asked him, “So, how did it SA)

Joel looked disappointed. “I took her home and that was it.”

“You didn’t go to Cedar Point?” she asked. He shook his head. Joel Good never mentioned Stella Sexton again until their graduation ceremony. Stella had just walked past Traci with her diploma. She said hi, but Stella just kept walking, not even bothering to look at her or wave.

When she saw Joel, she asked, “Hey, what’s the deal with Stella?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “She doesn’t call or anything.”

“That was short-lived.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. It was the last conversation they would ever have. It was summer the next time Teresa Boron saw the girl. Joey had decided to try to ask Stella Sexton out again. Teresa suggested he invite her to a family cookout. Teresa drove over to the house on Caroline Street to pick her up. Stella Sexton came walking out of the door with a baby in her arms. “Is that your sister?” Teresa asked in the car. “No,” she said. “It’s my baby.” Her name was Dawn, she said. Teresa didn’t probe. It was the girl’s business. She thought, kids sometimes made mistakes. Later, Joey told her about the father in the Navy. “The guy walked out on her,” he said. “He claimed it wasn’t his.” When Teresa looked at the baby, something seemed profound about the girl’s looks. What an uncanny resemblance to her mother she thought. At the cookout, Teresa tried engaging Stella in conversation.

She spoke in a hardly audible voice. “Getting any information out of her was like pulling teeth,” Teresa later recalled.

Teresa eventually put a few facts together. Like Joey, Stella had been held back one year in school, but it wasn’t because of her grades. She had a high B average in high school. She’d repeated the first grade after she’d been hurt in a cooking accident in the family home. She was hospitalized for two months, her arms and chest burned by hot grease. She’d studied culinary arts in high school, but dropped out of the co-op cooking program when she had the child. She’d worked at Pizza Hut and Frank’s Family Restaurant in Massilon “What does your father do?” she asked. “He has his own painting business,” she said.

Estella May Sexton. That was her full name, exactly the same as her mother’s. Stella was the oldest girl in a family of 12 children.

There were seven boys and five girls, ranging in age from 6 to 23. Her parents had given her a nickname. “At home, everyone calls me Pixie,”

she said. Pixie Sexton said she had to be home by no later than eight.

It was summer, daylight savings time. It wouldn’t even be dark.

“That’s awfully early,” Teresa said. “My father wants me home by eight,” Pixie said.

For the next date, Joey got his rusted Datsun working and drove over to see her. Then he began visiting her a couple of nights a week. “What do you guys do at Pixie’s?” Teresa asked. “We sit around and talk,”

Joey said. “We watch TV. The baby really likes me.” He began bringing Pixie to their house on weekends, sometimes Pixie’s brother William in tow. They called him Willie. He was a dark-haired, gangly boy Joey’s age. He was as quiet as his sister. The three of them would sit in Teresa’s family room and watch TV. They had to be the quietest teenagers in Stark County, Teresa thought. The first time Teresa Boron heard the rumor, it came from a boy in the neighborhood who mowed their grass. He’d gone to school with the Sexton children.

He claimed the family belonged to some kind of cult. “Cult?” Teresa asked. “What kind of cult?”

“Some kind of strange rituals,” he said. “And the Sexton boys used to come to school looking like they’d been beat up and stuff.” She pressed him for details, but he had none. She tried to dismiss it, but as the weeks went by, it lay there in the back of her mind. Joey said one night, “I really like Pixie.” She thought, like wasn’t the word.

He confirmed that when he added that he’d like to marry Pixie Sexton one day. She said, “You don’t know her. I mean, you don’t even know who her child’s father is?” Joey repeated the story about the father being in the Navy. Later she would get a more developed version, Pixie saying now that the baby’s father had died.

Teresa Boron began to worry. The cult story kept coming to the front of her mind. It wasn’t just these mysterious Sexton kids, it was Joey.

She couldn’t count on her nephew to discern fact from fiction. His slowness hampered him in the simplest of things. The first time he tried to get his driver’s license, a frightened state examiner aborted his road test, made him park the car on the street, and walked back to the state office. Teresa discovered he needed glasses, but it still took him three more tries to get his permit. She had to remind Joey to take a shower. She still had to coax him to brush his teeth. Not because he wanted to be dirty, he just forgot simple necessities like that. “My nephew wasn’t ready for marriage,” Teresa Boron would later say. “My nephew wasn’t ready for life.” Teresa believed she had two extreme options. She could ignore what appeared to be happening to Joey with Pixie. Or she could get him declared incompetent by the court. She’d be damned if she’d do that. That was not “taking care”