The Euthanist (17 page)

Cindy interpreted my nerves as a symptom of recent trauma, and not guilt for being a rotten human being. “Those wrists look pretty raw.” I’d unwrapped the gauze from around my arms, and my wrists were purple and scabby from where they’d ground against Leland’s handcuffs. The abrasions had authenticated my crap story. She said, “They threw manacles on me too. On all of us. They suck, don’t they?”

“They do.” Finally, I got to say something honest.

“There’s something about losing your freedom. Not being able to walk across a room if you wanted to, because you’re shackled to a pipe. That freaked me out, even before any of the really nasty stuff happened.” She showed me her own wrists where thin scars crisscrossed along the undersides. “I fought against my handcuffs until I cut myself.”

“Same here.”

My time with Leland shared similarities with her experience. I wondered if Leland found me again, how he might torture me before fulfilling his promise of killing me.

Her forearms were dotted with a different type of scar. Clusters of four small points in alignment stippled both arms. Cindy saw me looking and explained, “Helena stuck me with a fork if I got out of line.” She added with some pride, “I was out of line a lot.” She winced at the memory, for a moment shedding her veneer of confidence. Then she remembered herself and beamed like she was invincible.

Now that we were talking details, I had the chance to extract information from her that could help me. I fumbled through it. When I asked for details about her abduction, I explained that they might help me make sense of my own experience. I could tell this made her uncomfortable, but she told me anyway. I asked her how she escaped, and she said, “I didn’t escape.” Her perennial smile vanished for a moment. “I tried. We only tried once.”

Walter and Helena had kept the kids in a cabin on the compound. This much I’d read in the news articles. It was a glorified tool shed. Walter had soundproofed it because he’d tried to be a musician, and he’d built a modest recording studio like the Manson Family. Walter had recorded a handful of songs from that shed. The MP3s I found online played a lone, canned voice and an aggressively strummed acoustic guitar. His lyrics bitched about things—the government, women, white folks—in a blues voice inspired by Howlin’ Wolf.

I had found maps of the property. Behind the house, the yard extended in a long, thin rectangle. Halfway to the rear border, they’d grown a hedge that bisected the property, so the yard looked about half the size. Once, police visited them when neighbors reported screaming. Officers came to the house, looked around, and walked around the backyard but never got farther than the shrub.

Cindy talked about her attempted escape with the tone of someone who’d been interviewed by reporters. She had practiced how to dish about her trauma without crumbling. Only an occasional eye squinch hinted at the flood of emotions behind her composure.

A couple of months after they’d taken her, Cindy had tried to run away with one of the other children. She said, “I was just following Julie. Julie tried to escape, and I went with her.”

This was the first time I’d heard a name of one of the other children. I coaxed the full name out of her. Perhaps now that she’d seen my scars, she trusted me as a confidant. “Julie Diehl. She was one of us.” She paused, and I reached out and gently squeezed her arm to keep her talking, hating myself for doing so. I asked her who else was with her.

She said, “Just three of us. Me and Julie, then Veda. Veda came third.”

“The third child.”

“Veda Moon.”

I tried to lighten the mood. “Hippie name.”

“Berkley hippies,” she acknowledged. “Bona fide.”

“How do you even spell that?”

“V-E-D-A. Apparently, it’s Sanskrit for ‘knowledge.’”

After a few months, Walter realized that the children we were getting sores from the chains. The sores got infected, and he didn’t want to bring in doctors. So he let all three off the chains so their arms could heal. They were still locked in the shed, but now that they had some mobility, Julie decided to tunnel out. The shed had a dirt floor, so the kids borrowed under the wall. It didn’t take more than a few days. Each of them had been led to the shed with a bag over her head, so they couldn’t know how close they were to other houses. On the maps I’d seen, houses on either side looked as close as a run to first base, but the children wouldn’t have known that.

Cindy’s nostrils flared as she spilled her story. Kali would have told her she didn’t need to continue if it was too painful to talk about it. But that day I was Pamela Wonnacott.

Julie was the oldest and the most adventurous of the three children. Cindy was scared. By then Walter had already done things to her. I’d read the reports of sexual abuse that came up during the trial and didn’t press her for details. Despite her terror at the time, Cindy had decided to try and escape. She said, “I assumed my expiration date was approaching, and I would have preferred to die doing something than doing nothing.”

During their escape, Julie and Cindy made it out, but Veda got cold feet at the last moment and stayed behind. When they ran through the hedge, they jangled some brass wind chimes, and Walter heard them. Cindy recounted the ensuing events distantly, as if describing something that happened to someone else. Some of this was reported in the trial coverage, but not all of it. Walter Gretsch lost control when he tackled Julie, and caved her head in with a rock. Cindy made a point of saying that Helena protested, but there was no stopping Walter at that point. He and Helena buried the girl in the ground under the shed, and the remaining two children could smell her through the soil.

As we hovered over our drinks, Cindy relived all of this for my benefit because she had promised herself she’d help people like me. Her eyes watered. I handed her a napkin, but I was enough of a monster that I didn’t interrupt. I wanted to leave. More than that, I wanted to hug her and apologize for putting her through this. But her information might connect to Leland, so I kept egging her on with reassuring strokes on her forearm.

Cindy had been punished but not killed. To keep her from running, Gretsch and Mumm strapped her to a worktable in the basement, where they sawed though the bottom portion of her right leg with a hacksaw. They seared the wound with an electric charcoal starter, a heated coil used for barbecues, so she didn’t bleed to death. The amputated portion of her leg was buried with Julie Diehl in the dirt beneath the tool shed.

At the end of Cindy’s story, I realized my mouth hung open without my choosing. I needed to fill the silence with something and managed to say, “I’m so sorry.”

Cindy took some time to compose herself. She wept and blotted her eyes with the napkin. She asked, “You were captive for how many weeks?”

I had to remember what I’d told her. “Three.”

“I’m not sure if you got there, but that Stockholm syndrome thing is true. I never had good feelings about Walter, but Helena grew on me.” According to Cindy, Helena gave them extra food after that, and sat outside the shed door at night and read stories to them. Tiny perks didn’t make up for the atrocities, but she became the lesser of two evils. “When they finally found me, I even stood up for her. I told the police it wasn’t really her fault. She just wanted to have kids.”

“That’s really what it was about?”

“They wanted a family, and they couldn’t have kids. Or at least they thought it would be wrong to try.” When she laughed a twinkle came back in her eye. She dabbed it with the napkin. “That’s where they drew the line, morally.”

“Did you know they were related?”

“Not until the police told me. I mean, they don’t look much alike. Helena kept talking about how she wanted to give Walter babies, but she couldn’t. I just assumed she was infertile.” She drifted into another memory. “I still sleep with the lights on, you know. I think it has to be the shed that did it. It was dark in there. They boarded up the windows, so we only got sunlight through the cracks in the day. They didn’t light it at night, because it would have been easy to spot. That’s one of my quirks now. That, and I keep a lot of toothbrushes. Thirteen months without regular brushing, I have to brush after every meal now. Do you have anything that sticks with you like that?”

I had to make something up. I could have brought up my spider thing, but it wasn’t the same kind of quirk that she was talking about. I thought about Gordon Ostrowksi—specifically, his smell. “He had a cologne. It was something that a woman would wear, but he decided it was for guys too. I smelled it on a woman once and it made me puke.” This was actually true.

Her smile disappeared. She raised her glass, and for some reason we toasted. Some of the joy drained out of her voice, and she added somberly, “Veda has a thing about smells too—Walter’s smell.”

“Was it that bad?”

“It was memorable.” This talk of smells brought back something else: the smell of FlyNap cloaking Leland in fruity decay. Maybe my real-life captivity had affected me more than I thought. My head spun talking about how atrocities clung to their survivors. Hearing about Cindy’s leg, imagining how it would have felt to be held in place as that hacksaw detached a limb, then the blinding pain of searing steel. My forehead felt clammy, a feeling that usually precedes nausea.

“Can I excuse myself? I could use the bathroom.”

“Of course.” As soon as I left the table she played with her phone.

Inside, I washed my face and stared at myself in the mirror for some time, channeling the same self-reflective mood as when I pumped myself up for a terminus. I tried to convince myself that not only was I helping myself, but by reaching out to Cindy Coates, I made her feel valuable by playing the part of a victim whom she could help. Such was my logic. All this talk of psychopaths kept bringing up memories of my stepfather as well. More than Leland, Gordon Ostrowski came to mind when I imagined a captor, so when Cindy talked about Walter and Helena, her story freshened up my old wounds from Gordon. Maybe I wasn’t so different from Cindy. I had a different breed of childhood trauma, but Gordon’s imprint stayed with me in the same way. Cindy had coped with her trauma through athletics, and I started building muscle so people couldn’t push me around. Not so different, the two of us.

I’m not sure how long I was in there, because I lost track of time. I wanted to apologize to Cindy and leave, but I needed to ask her about the police she’d been in touch with. I needed to find out if she had met an officer who matched my description. I ran through various ways I could broach that subject, trying out various lines in the mirror. Someone finally pounded on the door to snap me out of it.

When I returned, Cindy was absorbed by her phone screen. She grimaced at whatever she was looking at. Without looking up, she said, “You were gone so long, I kept reading more about you online.” She sounded different, somehow bitter.

As soon as I sat, something whizzed at my head, and I barely had time to see the motion before it collided. Roughly the same spot where Leland had coldcocked me. Right before it hit, my eyes took a quick snapshot of the running blade. Cindy had detached it and swung it like a club. After Leland had gotten the best of me, I should have been on my toes, but her attack was so unexpected, I didn’t have time to defend myself. Her prosthetic whacked the side of my head. I saw stars and tumbled off my chair.

“Who the fuck are you?”

I fell on my back. Cindy tipped the table and climbed on top of me, continuing to beat me with the running blade. With a fuzzy head, my best defense was throwing my forearms up. Patrons stopped talking. I didn’t see them, but I heard the hush fall over the café, quiet as a wake. They were too stunned to intervene. I guess none of them had ever seen a paraplegic cudgel another woman with her prosthetic. They didn’t know whose side to be on, and if I’d been in their shoes, I’d have probably sided with the amputee.

The rubber-coated aluminum could have caused real damage too, if I didn’t have my arms up. She gashed the middle of my forearm, close enough to my wrist injuries that I felt it there too.

“Who the fuck are you?” Whatever composure she had learned to disguise the deep, lasting suffering caused by Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm, all of it was gone. The way Cindy screamed at me, she seemed both terrifying and terrified.

Sparring teaches you to take a punch. For a while, I stayed on the ground and absorbed the punishment. I deserved it. But I also thought her rage would dissipate. Not so. After a minute of hammering, I knew I had to fight back, if only to stop it. Cindy was strong, but not as strong as me. Plus, as we grappled, I remembered the last time I fought with someone, and our struggle reminded me of my fight with Leland in the bathtub. When I fought back, I was fighting Leland as much as Cindy. I caught her prosthetic and bucked her off me. She weighed a little less without the lower leg. With a flailing arm, she ripped down the shelves, and an avalanche of silver coffee bags rained down on us. I scrambled to my feet and fended her off with her prosthetic, holding it out like an épée.

“Who the fuck are you!” She kept wailing.

Two men with café aprons came toward us, and I knew I had to make a quick exit. Her phone was at my feet. I needed to see what she had seen. I dropped the running blade and snatched her phone for a quick look. “I’m so sorry—please believe me,” I told her. I held up my hands to the café staff in a
mea culpa
gesture, and stole a glance at the cell.