Mortal Memory (9 page)

I
T WAS NEARLY
a week before I heard from Rebecca again, and I remember that the days passed slowly, like soldiers in a gray line. During that interval, I often thought about the life my family had lived on McDonald Drive. I recalled how, when I was very small, Laura had taken me out to the swings and played with me for hours. My father had often sat in a small wrought iron chair and watched us. “Don't swing him too high,” he would caution at those times when Laura's natural energy would get the better of her and she'd send me hurling skyward, my feet soaring into the summer air.

There were other memories, too. I could recall my mother piddling about in the garage, moving small boxes from one place to another. She seemed always to be hunting for something small and inconsequential that eluded her again and again, a pruning fork or a spool of thread. Jamie would joke about it from time to time. “Everything she touches disappears,” he once said with a mocking grin.

There'd been a fireplace in the living room, and I remembered the sounds the fire made in the winter, along with the rhythmic thump of the axe when my father chopped wood beneath the large maple tree in the backyard.

Smells returned. Laura's nail polish, the raincoat that Jamie often hung wet in the closet we were forced to share, my mother's cooking, always bland and unaccented, the smell, I often thought, of little more than boiling water. And last, my father's hands, the strange odor that always came from them, and which, one night during that week before Rebecca called again, I actually mentioned to Marie.

“Like soil,” I said suddenly, as we sat at the dinner table one evening. The words had come from nowhere but my own mind. We'd not been talking about my father, or anything even remotely connected to him.

“What are you talking about, Steve?” Marie asked.

I felt embarrassed, surprised by the level of my own distraction.

“I was thinking about my father,” I explained quickly. The odor of his hands.”

“Why were you thinking about that?”

It was the perfect chance to tell her about Rebecca, her book, the meetings I'd had, the ones I expected to have in the future. And yet, I found that I couldn't do it.

“I don't know,” I told her. “Sometimes, things just pop into my head. This time, it was my father.” I shrugged. “No reason.”

And so, it had begun.

It was a Thursday afternoon, and I was at the drafting table in my office at Simpson and Lowe when Rebecca called to arrange another meeting.

“It's Rebecca Soltero,” she said.

“Yes, I know.”

“I was wondering if you might have an evening free this week?”

“Most of my evenings are free,” I told her.

She didn't seem surprised to hear it. “Well, we could meet tonight, if you want.”

“All right.”

“Where?”

I suggested a small restaurant north of town. In the past I'd gone there alone in the late afternoon, simply to sit in the generally quiet atmosphere and have a drink before going home. At times I would do a little work, perhaps add a line or two to the drawing of the “dream house” I had been elaborating and modifying for years, and vaguely hoped to build one day. It was a house of floating levels and dreamy, translucent walls, of rooms that melted into other rooms. It was impractical and unrealizable, a structure bereft of all those mundane pillars and supporting beams without which it could not hope to stand.

She arrived promptly, carrying a black briefcase, and wearing a dark red silk blouse and a long black skirt. She'd added a bolero jacket, also black, unnecessary in the unusual warmth of that long Indian summer, but worn, I think, in order to conceal or diminish the more obvious contours of her body.

Thanks for meeting me again, Mr. Farris,” she said as she sat down.

“Steve,” I said. “It's no trouble.” I glanced about the room. “It's a nice place, don't you think?”

It was a garden restaurant, made of glass and hung with vines. Small fountains sprouted here and there among the foliage.

“A sort of Garden of Eden effect,” I added.

“Yes, it's fine,” Rebecca answered briskly.

The waitress stepped over, a young woman named Gail, with whom Wally claimed to have had a brief affair, though he probably hadn't. I ordered a beer on tap, Rebecca a glass of red wine. Gail glanced at Rebecca, then at me. She grinned knowingly, as if privy to a secret.

“When do you have to be home?” Rebecca asked after Gail stepped away.

“Home?”

“You're married, aren't you? With a son?”

I nodded. “A family man,” I said, then added, “My son is nine years old. His name is Peter.”

“And your wife's name?”

“Marie.”

Rebecca smiled quietly, but with a certain quickness that made it clear that she had only a passing, casual interest in my present family, that her entire focus was on the other one that had been destroyed.

The drinks came promptly, and I lifted my glass casually for the customary toast. She raised hers as well, but when I moved to touch my glass to hers, she drew it away quickly, almost in an act of self-defense, and took a quick sip.

“I've been working on the book for three years,” she said, after returning the glass to the table.

I nodded silently, watching the steady gaze of her eyes. They were dark eyes, sensual, but not dreamy, and there was nothing in the least sultry about them. They were the eyes of an explorer, searching, determined, curiously ruthless. I imagined them in the face of Pizarro or Cortes.

“I finally settled on five cases,” she went on. “At this point I've finished four of them.” She opened the black briefcase she'd placed on the table between us and drew out a large manila envelope. “I thought you might like to see the ones I've already studied.”

“See them?”

“Well, I brought photographs of the men, and the victims,” Rebecca explained. “I've also written short summaries of each crime. You can read them if you like.”

She hesitated, her hand poised to open the envelope, her eyes leveled upon me, sensing the chilly dread that had suddenly gripped me as my eyes fell upon the yellow envelope.

“Of course, if you'd rather not do any of this …”

I rushed to assure her that she didn't need to be delicate with me. “No, no, I think I should know about the others,” I told her.

She took a smaller envelope from the larger one, opened it, and pulled out a short stack of photographs. The one on top was in black and white, and it showed a tall, slender man as he leaned idly against the fender of a dusty pickup truck.

“This is the first man I studied,” Rebecca said. “Harold Wayne Fuller. Age, thirty-seven.”

That was all she said as she turned the photograph toward me.

In the picture, Fuller was dressed in loose-fitting trousers and a plain white shirt, its sleeves rolled up beyond the elbows. He wore a dark-colored baseball cap with the initials “AB” on the front, and a slender baseball bat dangled from his right hand.

“He was a steelworker in Birmingham, Alabama,” Rebecca said, “a union leader, very respected by the men he worked with. As a young man, he played professional baseball for a few years, but a knee injury finally made him quit.”

Her tone was very matter-of-fact, even a little rushed, as if this were a task she was anxious to get through.

“He had been married to his wife, Elizabeth, for fourteen years,” she continued. “They had two daughters, ages twelve and thirteen. Both girls attended the local school, and both were good students. No one at the school had noticed any signs of emotional disturbance in either one.”

She stopped, watching me as I continued to stare at the picture.

The face of Harold Wayne Fuller was the face of Everyman. It was plain and flat and impossible to read. There was no sign of dementia or murderous intent, of anything lurking beneath the surface, tightening the fingers around the baseball bat.

Rebecca let my eyes linger on the photo a while longer, then drew it away to expose the one that lay beneath it.

“This is the couple together,” she said.

The second photograph showed Fuller and his wife on their wedding day, a picture taken outside a large gray public building, probably by a stranger, and which showed them smiling brightly, Fuller in a baggy double-breasted suit, his arm draped over his wife's nearly bare shoulders.

“Fuller married Elizabeth in the summer of 1952,” Rebecca added. “She had their first daughter, Emily Jane, the following year.”

Once again Rebecca drew the photograph away to reveal the one beneath it.

“This is Emily Jane,” she said. “Age, nine.”

In the small, black-and-white picture, Emily Jane Fuller was standing beside the same red pickup truck which had been captured in the first picture, the baseball bat her father had been holding now leaning against the truck's closed door, her father no doubt behind the camera now, aiming it steadily at his daughter.

After a few seconds, Rebecca slid the picture away, bringing a fourth photograph into view.

“A second daughter, Phyllis Beatrice, called ‘Bootsie,' was born a year later,” she said.

In the fourth photograph, “Bootsie” stood in a nondescript living room, dressed in a cowboy skirt and blouse, her long hair partly concealed by a large, western hat.

“Bootsie belonged to the same square-dancing club her mother attended,” Rebecca said. “They seem to have been very close.”

I let my eyes rest on the picture for a time, then glanced up toward Rebecca.

“Did he kill them all?” I asked.

Rebecca nodded. “With the baseball bat,” she said. “The police still have it stored in their evidence locker.”

They kept everything they took from my house, too,” I said. “I don't even know exactly what they took. I just know that they never gave anything back.”

“No, of course not,” Rebecca said. The case is still open.”

I dismissed the thought of it. “Open? That's just a formality. They can't ever officially close an unsolved murder case. There's no statute of limitations on murder. But they're never going to find my father. It's been thirty-five years since he did it.”

Rebecca said nothing. She took a second, small envelope from the larger one and handed it to me. It was identical to the first, and as I drew it from her hand, I heard her call the man's name and age, though without expression, as if doing an inventory.

“Gerald Ward Stringer. Age, forty-one.”

The second set of pictures was arranged in exactly the same order as the first, more or less chronologically.

The summation of the case is under the photographs,” Rebecca said.

I nodded, my eyes already settling on the first picture.

Gerald Ward Stringer sat in a recliner, shirtless, legs stretched out, his bare feet aimed at the camera, his belly pouring over his beltless trousers. He was nearly bald, a shiny star of light gleaming on his forehead, the result no doubt of the reflected flash that had been used to take the picture. He was smiling, very broadly, the happy fat man in his cluttered lair. The room in which he sat was paneled in pinewood. A few mounted animal heads hung from the walls that surrounded him, and I could see a rack of hunting rifles hung between a deer and a fox. A safari hat, one side of its bill turned up raffishly, dangled from one of the deer's upturned antlers.

Rebecca gave her narration as I leafed through the photos.

The murders occurred six months after this picture was taken,” she said. “Stringer killed Mary Faye, his wife of nine years, and his three sons: Eddie, four. Tyrone, six. And Jimmy Dale, seven.”

She waited a moment, then added softly, “With a rifle, as you've probably already figured out.”

As if realizing that I didn't want to read the summations she'd written, she continued on, relating the details of the case, describing what had actually happened on February 11, 1967. As she did so, I found that I could see it all quite graphically in my mind.

Gerald Ward Stringer had come home from one of a string of small, very successful bakeries that he owned in Des Moines, Iowa, at the usual time of seven-thirty. He'd gone to work at five o'clock that morning, and he was, as he later told police in a description of himself that was eloquently simple, “a very tired man.”

Mary Faye worked as an office clerk at a local brewery, and she had been at work all day, too. When Stringer arrived home, he found her sleeping on the sofa in the den, one leg hanging over the side, her right foot almost touching the floor, her body in the exact position in which the police would find her several hours later, and which Stringer described as looking “sort of like a big towel that somebody had just thrown onto the couch.”

The children, all three of them, were in the basement. Tyrone and Jimmy Dale were playing at the miniature pool table they'd gotten for Christmas two months before, while Eddie played with a set of Tinker Toys on the large square of outdoor carpet which covered the basement's otherwise cold, cement floor.

For nearly an hour, Stringer sat in the den only a few feet from his sleeping wife. From time to time during that fateful hour, Miss Zena Crawford, the woman who rented the small apartment over the Stringers' two-car garage, looked down from her window and glanced into the Stringer family house. From her position over the garage, she had a commanding view of the den and kitchen. In the den, she saw Gerald Ward Stringer as he sat silently in the big recliner. He sat upright, his hands in his lap, rather than the usual reclining position in which she'd glimpsed him at other times.

At 8:20
P.M.
, Miss Crawford heard Tyrone calling to his mother, asking her to unlock the door that separated the basement from the upper floor of the house. She looked out the window and saw both Tyrone and Jimmy Dale at the basement window, the one which looked out at just above ground level, and which was situated almost directly below the window in the den. She glanced up and saw Mrs. Stringer rustle slightly on the sofa, as if the voices of her children were awakening her.