Murder in Little Egypt (22 page)

Her new routine was up at five to fix the boys’ breakfast and lunches, off to work by six-thirty. She worked from seven to three-thirty and was home by four-thirty or five to fix dinner, asleep before nine. She found a young girl in the neighborhood to stay with Patrick when he arrived home from kindergarten and to keep the peace until Mom appeared. Her schedule exhausted her, but Marian was so relieved to be out of Eldorado, so pleased to be able to manage on her own, that she did not mind; and she loved the old farmhouse on Conway Road with its garden and cedar trees and the pond that froze for skating in the winter. It was only thirty minutes from the heart of the city, but Chesterfield had a semirural quality, roadside stands selling vegetables and preserves, several large nurseries. Marian felt that she had come home—to her city, to a sense of self-confidence and hope that, she now understood, she had almost lost in Little Egypt.

Unfortunately the boys, especially during that first year, did not share in Marian’s enthusiasm. They were homesick. They found, as Kevin had experienced at Chaminade, that their southern Illinois accents branded them as hicks, easy marks for ridicule by their schoolmates, who shunned them and called them hillbillies and clodhoppers. Marian knew that in the long run they would adjust, but the boys regarded themselves as outcasts; and they were confused, not understanding why they were there. Mark was particularly disoriented and lost all interest in school. Marian worried that he was hanging around with an unsavory crowd and smoking marijuana; she prayed that he was not taking LSD. It was not that there were any more drugs in St. Louis than in southern Illinois: Pot and acid had spread down there by 1968 and ’69. Smoking dope, Marian knew, was common among kids Mark’s age. Mark had changed from a good student to a dreadful one. When she talked about getting into college, he looked blank. At home he shut himself into his room with his music.

Kevin’s grades also fell; and Sean, always on the roly-poly side, started putting on weight and clung to Marian as if he feared losing her, always waiting for her at the garage door when she came home from work. As for Patrick, he was withdrawn. Marian hoped that he was young enough for her to lead in new directions, but when she took him to a performance of
Peter and the Wolf
by the St. Louis Symphony—just the thing, she thought, to appeal to an unformed kid—he fell asleep. She was unable to talk any of the other boys into accompanying her to cultural events.

Mark failed to graduate from high school that year, although he was permitted to participate in the commencement exercises. Dale came up for the event and behaved badly, drinking and making sarcastic remarks about Mark’s failure; but Mark and Kevin spent the summer working for him on the farms and living in the trailers. Mark acted lost and aimless, and Dale said that he would teach him to discipline himself, which he did by yelling at him and telling him that he had become an embarrassment. He waited up for Mark one night, hiding in his bed and prepared to let him have it when he stumbled in late and drunk. When Mark came home early and sober, Dale raged at him anyway, hurling an iron skillet against the wall and sticking a butcher knife into the floor at his feet. He forced Mark to telephone his mother in St. Louis to tell her that his father was making him toe the line.

“Tell her that I’m not beating on you,” Dale said, picking up the skillet again. “Go on! Tell her you’re lazy and no good but that I’m not going to hurt you, I’m not going to beat hell out of you, but I’m not putting up with your crap either.”

Mark pretended to dial the phone and managed to fake talking to his mother. He told Kevin what had happened, but they agreed not to upset Marian by informing her of Dale’s latest tirade. Mark said that he would never work for his father again. When the summer was over, he was going to get a job somewhere away from everyone and start a new life. He would get his high school diploma somehow. He didn’t know about college: His senior grades were so bad, where could he get in? And what was the point? He was no student. He wasn’t some kind of damned genius like his father. He didn’t want to be like his father anyway. Working on the farms was a joke. They were never told what to do except stare at the cattle and the catfish and watch Dale get drunk. The whole thing was a farce. The dikes at Hickory Handle gave way one day and the place was covered in dead fish. At night people snuck in and stole the fish. What was he supposed to do, keep watch all night? He was getting out.

Kevin agreed with Mark but kept quiet. In spite of everything, he and Sean still felt more at home in southern Illinois than in St. Louis. There was something about the land between the rivers that drew them back.

On November 20, 1972, Dale stood with his lawyer before presiding Judge Dorothy Spooner at the Saline County Courthouse and changed his plea to guilty on two charges of reckless homicide and one charge of driving while intoxicated. He was fined five hundred dollars on each count and placed on probation for three years. The sentence was the result of a plea-bargain agreement between Dale’s attorney and the state’s attorney of Saline County, Deneen Watson.

When Dorothy McLaskey learned that Dr. Cavaness had been given no more than a slap on the wrist for killing her husband and daughter, she was outraged, but she was not surprised. From what she knew of the doctor’s power and influence, she had not even expected the grand jury to indict him. Hanging would have been too good for him as far as she was concerned. Since the accident she had survived and partially recovered with the help of her mother and her sister, a psychologist who lived in Connecticut. Her memory was impaired, and every afternoon at five o’clock, no matter what she was doing, she was overcome by a compulsion to weep. Her sister deduced that Dorothy cried because five was the hour when her husband had always come home from work at the telephone company. She kept a snapshot of her husband and her baby with her and looked at it every day.

Dorothy McLaskey sued Dr. Cavaness. She hoped that the guilty plea, however minimal the punishment, would help her to collect a large amount of money, but she had trouble standing up under the questioning of the insurance-company lawyers during her deposition. They accused her of having been drunk on the night of the accident, even of having been driving when it happened. She knew that the blood tests and other evidence proved her innocence, but her mental state precluded a protracted fight. She settled for a hundred thousand dollars. It did not seem much for the lives of her baby and her husband.

She moved to St. Louis and took a job as a nurse in a school for retarded children. She hoped to marry again someday, but the doctors told her that she would never be able to have another child of her own.

About the time of Dale’s conviction, the owners of the Chesterfield farmhouse decided to sell it. Marian begged Dale to give or to loan her enough for a down payment: The place was perfect for her and the three remaining boys; Mark was now on his own, working at various jobs in St. Louis and the upper Midwest. But Dale refused. He was broke, he said; it was all he could do to make the child-support payments. Marian moved into the Forum West apartments for the next year, glad at least to be able to stay in the same area so the boys would not have to change schools again. A year later Dale relented and sent her five thousand dollars for the down payment on a house in the Shenandoah development in Chesterfield, a modern, two-story place with four bedrooms. Marian looked forward to a few years of stability.

And they were relatively stable and peaceful years, except when Dale came up for one holiday or another, drunk and argumentative, or when the boys visited southern Illinois. In 1974 Sean pleaded to be allowed to spend part of the school year with his father, and Marian reluctantly permitted it, partly because Sean was doing so poorly at school. She was willing to try anything, and the longer she was away from Dale, the more she tended to forget how impossible he could be.

Sean craved being near his father, but he was lonely stuck out in a trailer at the Galatia farm, fixing his own meals, having trouble getting rides to and from school. He began telephoning home and crying: His father was either never around or angry when he was; maybe it had been a mistake to stay so long. Marian told him to come home whenever he liked, although it did not seem a good idea to switch schools again in the middle of the year.

When Patrick went down to visit him, Sean showed his brother a hole in the trailer’s wall. The hole had been made by his head when Dale had picked Sean up and thrown him—but Patrick was not to tell Mom about it; she might worry and make him come home. He was not ready to return to St. Louis yet; he liked the freedom of the outdoors, even if Dad was tough on him.

There was too much freedom around Eldorado, Marian knew, but the boys always wanted to head down there, and she was not about to try to forbid them to see their father. Kevin fell into trouble near the end of the Christmas holidays in 1974. He had done nothing himself, but he was arrested with a friend who had thrown a brick through the window of an Eldorado auto-parts store and stolen twelve dollars from the cash register. Kevin was charged with theft, but the case was transferred to St. Louis and dropped.

Also in 1974, while still on probation for the reckless-homicide convictions, Dale was indicted on charges of “deceptive practice” for falsifying claims to the State Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. The sort of phony billing with which he had fattened his income and endeared himself to his patients for years was finally discovered. He had concealed giving women obstetrical care, which was not covered by state insurance, by claiming to have performed such procedures as a laparotomy or a cholecystectomy, terms for abdominal exploration and gallbladder removal. He was only trying to help people, he said.

His lawyer demanded a jury trial—the perfect strategy given Dale’s local popularity and renown—and launched a series of motions for continuance. A year passed, and another, and a third without a trial or a judgment.

But few people believed that Dr. Cavaness had much to fear from Saline County justice; he had already got away with paying a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine for two homicides; it took a lot of wishful thinking to imagine that a little larceny from the state would cramp the doc’s style.

Two teenaged boys found out what it was like to try to bring Dr. Cavaness to justice when they complained to the sheriff that the doctor had terrorized them and nearly drowned them when he had caught them hunting frogs on his Galatia property. The boys and their parents wanted the doctor thrown in jail or at least fined and reprimanded.

But Dale readily admitted to the truth of the boys’ account of what had happened. He had indeed caught them gigging frogs (hunting frogs with a forked stick), had run them down, wrapped them in tire chains, and dragged one of them through the waters of Harrisburg Lake until the boy begged for mercy.

Dale said that he had taught the boys a good old-fashioned lesson. They had been trespassing.

The authorities filed no charges.

14

BY THE FALL OF 1976 KEVIN WAS ENROLLED AS AN INDUSTRIAL-technology student at Southeastern State College in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Sean and Patrick were getting on better at school, and Marian was beginning to glimpse a brighter future. Only Mark remained a worry. After wandering as far as Nebraska, he had been laid off from his most recent job as a telephone lineman in Lexington, Kentucky, and had drifted back to southern Illinois. Once again he was working for his father on the farms.

Dale complained that his eldest son was amounting to nothing and was a pot smoker. When Marian spoke to Mark on the phone, she urged him to come back to St. Louis and live at home until he could find a better job there. She hated the idea of his being under Dale’s thumb again and subject to his father’s baiting and sarcasm. She could tell from Mark’s tone of voice that he was down on himself but, after all, he was not the first young man to spend a few years roaming before latching on to something. He was only twenty-two years old.

As Easter, 1977, approached, Mark asked Marian to come to Eldorado to celebrate the holiday with him. She dreaded the idea of going down there. She had been back a few times to visit friends and for Noma’s and then for Peck’s funeral. Noma had died in 1973, Peck two years later. The services at the First Presbyterian Church had been hard to take, especially Peck’s, with Dale and the boys awash with weeping; the processions to the family graveyard in McLeansboro made Marian feel too acutely the pain of old associations. Merely visiting southern Illinois plunged her into gloom and anxiety. Dale had let the ruins of the house on Fourth Street stand until 1974: Eldorado was so small that she could not avoid catching sight of that ghostly emblem of disaster. Now the lot next door to the Chevrolet dealer was empty, making it easier to remember good times; she could see the bridge parties and the children playing in the yard. She had no idea whether Dale still owned the property or where the insurance money had gone.

He had hung on to Grandpa’s house on Maple. Supposedly he was also looking after other properties which Peck, after inheriting them from the Dales, had left in trust for the boys. Marian suspected that Dale was using the trust to pay child support and Kevin’s college tuition, but she did not have the resources to hire a lawyer to find out.

Reluctantly Marian agreed to go down to Egypt for Easter. Mark sounded lonely; too many speeding tickets had temporarily cost him his driver’s license, so it would be difficult for him to get to St. Louis. And the other boys were as usual eager to visit the place they still considered home. They could stay at Grandpa’s house, which Dale was renting out to nurses who would clear out for the weekend.

Marian drove down on Thursday, April 7; Kevin got a ride over from his college, which was across the Mississippi, a hundred miles west of Eldorado. They were surprised that Mark was not there to greet them. When he did not show up the next day, Good Friday, they wondered what he might be up to. He had sounded so eager to see them.