Murder in Little Egypt (6 page)

Marian rarely saw her father, but she looked forward to his visits. He would hold her on his knee and sing to her. Her mother spoke of him as a well-meaning ne’er-do-well, and that was how Marian thought of him. He was simply incapable of responsibility, Marian believed, loving her brother and her from a distance.

When Marian was thirteen, her mother suddenly died, and Marian went to live with family friends, Truman and Ella Yard. Her father continued to keep his distance, but Marian felt wanted and loved by the Yards, and her brother had become more of a father to her. When she was troubled, she confided in Bill, and she liked to remember the time when she had accidentally caught her sweater on fire and he had saved her, embracing her to smother the flames. When he joined the service in 1942, she dedicated a poem to her brother:

I can remember long ago

When we played with our wooden blocks;

I can remember my big red bow

And your little horse that rocked.

Remember the day you broke your arm,

And the dreadful day I cut my hair.

And remember how on Christmas morn

We’d hunt for Santa everywhere?

And remember the cave you fellows dug

You wouldn’t let us near?

You chased us away with a big fat bug

Then sent up a mighty cheer.

Our hearts were young & gay then,

The years went swiftly by.

We hadn’t a troubled day when

We were happy, you and I.

And then the impossible came,

God took Mother away.

Things will never be the same,

But perhaps it’s better that way.

For you went marching off to war—

Mother would worry so!

But yet, no matter how near or far,

She’s praying for you, I know.

And so amid the world’s dark maze

Of turmoil, war, and hate,

I keep remembering our childhood days,

And leave what may to Fate!

Some day we’ll be together—

You and I and Mother.

Come fair or stormy weather,

God bless you, my dear Brother.

Marian also wrote poems in memory of her mother, asking God to lend her some of her mother’s loving devotion “and a bit of her heartening friendly cheer,” for her mother remained to her an example of selflessness worthy of emulation. She kept a notebook filled with quotations from her favorite poets—Shakespeare, Browning, Oscar Wilde, and A. E. Housman—copying out passages about love, hope, and the soul in a small, backward-slanting hand:

. . .
call to thought, if now

you grieve a little,

The days when we had rest, oh Soul,

for they were long.

She practiced the piano and attended the opera and the symphony in the city as often as she could. In October 1945, she went to a performance of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at Kiel Auditorium and was so entranced that she waited by the stage door afterward to get Alexandra Danilova, Maria Tallchief, and Frederic Franklin to sign her program. Balanchine’s choreography and Tchaikovsky’s music for the
Ballet Imperial
moved her to write a poem wishing that when she died, her ashes could be thrown to the air, so that she could ride the wind forever.

But there was more to Marian’s disposition than romantic melancholy, and her enthusiasms encompassed more than the arts. By the time she had graduated from Kirkwood High and entered the Washington University School of Nursing, she had become a lively little beauty, raven-haired with dark eyes and an olive skin, as fond of dancing and sports and silly good times as she was of the concert hall. The boys flocked to her, but she was in no hurry to marry, determined to have a profession and not to suffer as her mother had from a man’s capriciousness. Her brother, too, had taken his mother’s advice about education. Bill returned from the war with a Purple Heart and earned his law degree from Washington University in 1948, when Marian received hers in nursing.

When Dale Cavaness asked Marian out, she was beginning her third year working at Barnes Hospital. She had been in love once, with an Irish Catholic engineering student who had gone east for a job. They had corresponded for a while; Marian wondered whether she should have followed him, but their letters dwindled and stopped. She had been feeling restless, missing the Irishman and questioning whether nursing was right for her: Confronting suffering every day was taxing; she had no true passion for the work; no one aspect of medicine particularly fascinated her. Nursing was becoming routine, merely a job and an underpaid one. She longed to travel before it was too late and toyed with the idea of becoming an airline stewardess to see more of the world. New York appealed to her.

After Dale’s apology, Marian relented and agreed to go out for coffee with him to hear his version of what had happened to his marriage. What he said floored her.

Dale told her that he was afraid that Helen Jean had fallen in love with Chet Williams. At first he had scarcely been able to believe it, Dale said. He had been too stunned, had suspected nothing. It had never occurred to him that his marriage might be in trouble. As for his friend Chet, Dale was totally surprised. If Chet had cared for anyone, Dale had thought it was Marian.

As Dale spoke, Marian saw a different person from the cocky, brash medical student she thought she had known, the fellow who had seemed to have everything in his life under control and to be destined for success. He now appeared haggard, wounded, almost pitiful. She had never thought that Dale was anybody she would ever have to feel sorry for, but she felt the urge to comfort him.

“I haven’t seen Chet for a while,” Marian said. “I never suspected anything either, believe me. He never said a word about Helen Jean to me, except how much he enjoyed both of you. We had fun, didn’t we? Oh, Dale, you poor thing. What did you do? Did you just leave, or what?”

Dale said that he had confronted Chet, demanded to know whether he was in love with Helen Jean, even challenged him to fight. But Chet had just stood there, hanging his head and saying he was sorry. A lot of good that did. Dale had wanted to break him in two.

Color came into Dale’s face now. His clenched fists grew white-knuckled. Marian was glad that the two had not fought. Someone would have been hurt, probably Chet. She had heard that Dale had a temper, though she had never seen it. As for Chet, Marian was surprised at him. He had not seemed like the type to get involved in something like this—something so, well, passionate. He had seemed to her to have the cool temperament of a surgeon, which was what he was studying to become. You never knew about people. Not that she blamed Chet, or for that matter Helen Jean. These things happened. People did what they did. Helen Jean must have been unhappy with Dale. Probably they had married too young.

“How do you feel now?” Marian asked. Dale was looking at her with eyes that asked her to say something. To give him advice. She could not say what color those eyes were. She had thought they were a steely blue or a battleship gray. Now they looked green. They were deep-set, shadowed.

“I feel betrayed. Goddamnit, I’ve been betrayed.”

“By Helen Jean?”

“By both of them. I thought he was my friend. Especially by Helen Jean. She’s filing for divorce.”

“Already?”

“It’s all over. I could never trust her again. She doesn’t want me anyway. She says she wants to marry Chet.”

He spoke like a man who had been tricked and could not figure out a way to get back.

“Oh, Dale. Where are you living?”

“I found an apartment by myself.”

“You’ll get through this, you know. It’s just terrible luck.”

It happened quickly after that. Easily they grew close. They loved going to sports events and movies together, and Marian introduced him to classical music. She taught him to dance to big-band music, leading him around the floor, amused at the way he stayed on his toes—to appear taller, she supposed. She discovered that he was wearing lifts in his shoes, and she talked him into throwing them away. After all, she was only five feet four, so he did not have to worry about being overshadowed by her.

They laughed at Judy Holliday playing the dumbbell in
Born Yesterday
and afterward Dale did a hilarious imitation of Broderick Crawford as the crude, aggressive junk merchant. Marian was pleased to see Dale regain his sense of humor so quickly. He gave her a pet name, Maria, and called himself Lucky Pierre. They spent a lot of time partying at the fraternity; she enjoyed his being president there.

She introduced him to her brother and to the Yards, who had continued to care for her like parents, and to an old friend, Ed Bell, and his wife. All of these people acted protectively toward Marian; she would have found it difficult to care for someone whom they discounted or disliked. Her father, who had died just after the war, would also have approved of Dale, she thought, although she would hardly have relied on her dad’s judgment.

Marian had known Ed Bell since his marriage to her first cousin, Thelma Schott, for whom Marian had been a bridesmaid. Ed had spent the war in the Pacific, had been wounded, and had never felt quite right since, although his doctors had failed to figure out what was wrong with him. Dale diagnosed Ed’s symptoms as diabetic—pinpointed what was wrong with him in seconds, it seemed—and advised him to begin insulin treatment. When Dale turned out to be correct, everyone could see that Marian had latched on to a brilliant guy on the verge of a great career. All of her friends and relatives, including her brother, loved Dale, she felt, and why not? He was dynamic and funny and smart.

And, Marian thought, he seemed to have got over Helen Jean: Marian hoped that she could take some credit for that. She must be good for him.

They made no specific marriage plans, neither proposed to the other, but let matters evolve. When Dale received word that he would be interning at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore, Marian decided that this was just the opportunity she needed to become an airline stewardess. She would train at the American Airlines flight school in Chicago, then get herself based somewhere in the East. She and Dale would not be together all the time, but they could visit one another.

In the spring of 1951, as the two of them prepared to begin this new phase of their lives, Dale decided that it was time for Marian to meet his parents. They made plans to drive down to Eldorado one Saturday in Dale’s ’47 Plymouth, which they called the Green Beetle. They could have dinner with Noma and Peck, stay the night and be back in St. Louis by Sunday evening.

Like almost all St. Louisans, Marian knew nothing of southern Illinois. Unless they recalled the days of labor strife and gangster wars, St. Louisans never thought about the place called Egypt and had no idea that Egyptians considered St. Louis their city. To Marian, Illinois meant Chicago or the great central plain. At first, as they crossed the Mississippi and headed toward the center of the state, the just-planted corn and wheat fields fit her image of limitless expanses, flat and dull. After they turned south near Mt. Vernon, the landscape gradually became more hilly and wooded, the farms grew smaller, the towns—Benton, West Frankfort, Johnston City, Herrin—more run-down.

“It’s not very prosperous down here, is it?” Marian observed as they headed east at Marion.

“You should’ve seen it ten or fifteen years ago,” Dale said. “Things are picking up.”

Marian decided that she would keep any other comments to herself. This was Dale’s home territory, after all, and he was probably sensitive about it. As they drove east along Route 13, past Crab Orchard and Shady Rest toward Harrisburg, she noticed lakes and hills to the south. The countryside was pretty, anyway.

“Saline County,” Marian read the sign aloud, pronouncing it as in saline solution.

“Sa
-lean
,” Dale corrected her. “The way we say it down here. We’re coming into the Jordan curve now and Dead Man’s curve.”

Around the second big curve, through trees to the left, an enormous black pit, acres wide and thirty or forty feet deep, came suddenly into view. A gigantic mechanical shovel stood in the pit.