The Talk-Funny Girl (37 page)

He shook his head. “I’ve learned how to wash it out. Mostly. Or, at least, to let it be there and not matter so much.”

“Teach me for that then,” I said.

“I will.”

“That part is part of the cathedral, I think. Why you would be sitting in there quiet those times.”

“That’s right.”

“Teach me for that and I’ll try to talk right if I can.”

When he pulled up to the cathedral we got out and walked around it separately for a little while. I was glad that, for once, there were no reporters nearby to bother us. I didn’t look at the work or touch the stones, I just walked around the outside and then went in through the front door and stood in the cool interior, glancing up at the way the sunlight came through the small corner of one stained glass window we hadn’t covered all the way with the tarpaulins. Sands met me in there and stood a few feet away. “Turned out pretty good,” he said. “So far.”

I nodded but didn’t look at him.

“Come into the rectory,” he said, and I followed him there.

I sat at the kitchen table and drank from the glass of water he poured me. Being in the cathedral had lifted me a little ways out of the darkness I had been living in, but I still wasn’t sure I could talk about some things.

“We can go see Lily on the way home,” Sands said. He hadn’t sat down with me. “She’ll be ready to come out of the hospital in a week or so.”

“Me and Aunt Elaine are taking her back to us.”

“That’s the right thing.”

“For all the three of us.”

“Four,” he said, and then he seemed to wish he hadn’t said it. After shifting his weight for a while, looking at me, then pacing back and forth a few steps in the kitchen, he went to the room where I supposed he slept and he came back with a pad of paper and a pen. He sat opposite me. “My mother told me you read one of the articles,” he said.

I nodded and looked straight at him. I liked being with him there, liked it in a new way. I liked the way he’d led up to talking about what we had to talk about. “It said they caught him for going speeding on the interstate behind us, and when they did they saw the blood.”

“That’s right.”

“He told them it was of my mother’s.”

Sands nodded. “It was.”

“They wouldn’t let him go to the hospital though. He was asking if they could.”

“They had a sighting of the truck, or a truck like it.”

“I didn’t know it.”

“Someone near where one of the girls had disappeared—that last girl—had seen a truck like that about the same time she was taken, so as soon as they stopped him, even before they saw the blood, they were suspicious. He was agitated and yelling about his wife and a baby but they couldn’t understand him very well. They saw the blood and they wouldn’t let him go anywhere, not to the hospital, not anywhere. They held him in the local lockup until they did some tests, and then they moved him to a jail an hour or so north and east of here.”

“They have those new tests now. Even here.”

“DNA. You’ve heard of it, haven’t you? In school? Or seen it on TV.”

I nodded. “Not on a TV.”

“The police found one of the girls, the last one. They found her body, you knew that.”

“Yes.”

“And they had something—even my friend isn’t saying what it is—that was left there by the person who killed her. They had blood or a hair or a cigarette butt or a fiber from clothes or something. That’s all they need now.”

“But it was from my mother, what they found.”

“That’s right. What they found on the girl matched the blood on the seat of the truck.”

“Then it was my mother who …”

“They don’t know. They won’t know until the trial. They might never know, because your father isn’t talking. But your mother was there, they know that much. If your father did it, he didn’t do it by himself.”

I was shaking my head. “I don’t think he was who did it. Not the worst part, anyways. I just have a guess it wasn’t.” I sat for a long time looking at my hands on the water glass, trying not to let myself imagine exactly what my mother and father had done, and how. But I couldn’t stop my mind from going to those places, imagining those girls tied to trees and my mother behind them, imagining their bodies buried in places no one would ever find. “I think Pastor Schect might to know something,” I said at last.

“I’m sure they’ll talk to him and call him to talk at the trial.”

“Tell them now to get him, can you? With your friend at the states? Can you ask?”

“Of course.” Sands waited until I looked up again. “I’ll do that as soon as we finish. They’ll call you, too, unless we can get enough down on paper and convince them they don’t have to.”

I looked into his eyes through the thick lenses, trying to search behind them for any more surprises, any more of the world collapsing around me, any more of things being the worst way they could possibly be. “I like it that you told me … this way,” I said. “And Aunt Elaine like she did.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Now I am. More than I was.”

“You shouldn’t be now.”

“But I am, though. I worry what’s inside of me … from them.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

I sat there looking down and sideways at a piece of door trim where the cut had not been made just right.

After a while Sands said, “Can you tell me something so I can write it down?”

“Yes.”

He picked up the pen. He pushed the glasses back against his face and waited for me.

I drank some water and started talking. I said, “When I had a birthday—seventeen—my mother and my father they told me to go out for full-pay work. So I did.”

“I think we have to go back before that,” Sands told me. “I think … just start with the first thing you remember.”

I felt like I had been holding very tightly to my mind for that past week, not letting it go places. But I knew then that I had to release it, and when I did that the memories came flooding back over me fast and bad and I just let them out. “I remember,” I said, “watching my father to make the old shed burn. I remember the feeling it made inside my mother. That she was happy.”

Thirty-two

W
e went back to work the following week. It was the day before Lily came home. A team of four men from Keene arrived and put the slate on the roof of the cathedral, hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces nailed through two holes into the wood. Sands and I watched for a while and then started work on a low wall that was going to surround a flagstone patio. Sands had drawings for what he wanted to do with the interior of the building, he said as we set out the stones, but he wasn’t ready to show them to anyone yet, not even me. There would be surprises, he said. It wasn’t going to be an ordinary church.

Even just bare and clean, though, with the stone walls and wooden ceiling and big oak beams going across, I could feel that the pain and evil and craziness of the outside world would have a hard time reaching into a building like the one we had made. It wasn’t very large, but, even so, I’d started to think that maybe cathedral
was
the right word for it after all. People like Pastor Schect wouldn’t ever stand at the pulpit in a place like that. Angry gods like his god wouldn’t be able to breathe there.

When I told him I was ready, Sands took me inside at the end of one workday and taught me what he said was a Quaker prayer, though people who weren’t Quakers used it, too. You were supposed to sit
quiet and bring your mind back to a secret word or a picture. “Your mind will wander away in all kinds of directions,” he said, “and you bring it back. Just like you would with a puppy. Never angry at it, just gently carrying it home. If you keep doing it every day it will get easier. For some people, it starts to make every bad thing inside you have less and less power.”

I chose “Lily” for my secret word and tried to do the prayer, but a hundred pictures and thoughts crowded in. Still, I kept at it the way I kept at a lot of things in those days, as if my life depended on it.

“That’s all right,” Sands said when I told him I was having trouble. “The thing is not to give up.”

“I’m not a giving-up girl,” I said.

“I kind of know that by now.”

W
hen we brought Lily home to Aunt Elaine’s, I sat next to her in the backseat. She was facing backward—the safe way to ride—and I kept one hand on her small knees. It made me so happy to have her there, to have something else to think about than my father and mother and the dead girls, but I admit I looked at her pinched face and tried to see if there was any visible damage from my mother’s smoking and drinking and the way she’d been born. After a while of thinking about it, I realized who she looked like, through the eyes. Dad Paul, my father’s father.

For a time, as September approached, Aunt Elaine tried to convince me I should go back to school, but I was stubborn about that and I refused. She was right, and I would pay for being stubborn, later on, when I had to go back and finish at an older age. But that wasn’t a time for me to be with other kids. It just wasn’t something I could do then, and eventually my aunt understood. In the mornings I stayed home and took Lily for walks in the stroller, changed her diaper, fed her, and held her when she cried, and made up songs to sing to her. I was good at it. Safe and happy and clean and never hungry was what you wanted
a baby to be, I told myself, with no trouble in its mind. I made that kind of a world for my sister and I was happy to do it because in some way it was like I was doing it for myself, long in the past. When she slept, I found a quiet place to sit close by and tried to do Sands’s prayer or read a little bit. In the afternoon, Aunt Elaine would come and I would take the bus north and work with Sands, and he’d drive me home at night, and we’d always have Lily there on a blanket on the table, sleeping while we ate. Or we’d put her on a soft blanket on the carpet in the living room, or in a crib in my room, and then Sands would drive all the way back and sleep in the rectory.

Because of what had happened, I thought there might be some trouble from the kids I’d known, that they would come by the cathedral and bother me. I avoided the school and the quarry. It was another reason I liked living in Watsonboro then, a safe distance. For a while, after the first newspaper stories, I’d sometimes see people walking slowly past the work site, or driving slowly past in a car, looking at the building, maybe, but probably more curious to see the girl whose mother and father were killers. In spite of everything, I still couldn’t believe those words; even now, there’s a small small part of me that can’t really imagine them doing what they did. I feel guilty about that. I have gone to the graves of the three girls whose bodies have been found and left flowers. I’ve prayed for them many times, on lunch breaks in the cathedral, before bed, when I first wake up. I’ve thought of writing to their families, but I’ve never had the courage to do that. There are some kinds of sorrow that words can never reach, certain kinds of things you can never hold in the box of your thoughts, certain kinds of pain you can’t soften in other people.

On her days off, Aunt Elaine brought Lily up to see the cathedral. We laughed at the way her noises echoed inside. Sands and I were mostly working out back on the patio by then, or, if it rained, indoors. People from the newspapers and TV still called occasionally (it got much worse when the trial started) but we told them I wasn’t talking to anyone, and after a while they let us be. I remember Sands saying to me
then that if you thought about yourself from the outside, if you looped thoughts out through other people’s heads before bringing them back into your own, then you’d never be happy.

Cindy was going to have a baby. She came to the cathedral several times on Saturdays and had lunch with the four of us, not showing yet but as happy as I’d ever seen her. I let her hold Lily for a little while. We’d talk about how to care for an infant, and Cindy would tell me what the kids and her parents were saying about my father and mother, but not in a mean way. There was a simple goodness about her, there always had been, and that was what I needed then. In spite of everything—getting pregnant when she was so young, losing her husband a few years later, having another child with someone else—she’s more content than a lot of people I know, even now. She cooks breakfast and lunch at Art and Pat’s, and cares for her son, Willie, and her daughter, Jess. She has a talent for both jobs and sometimes now I’ll go visit the cathedral and she’ll come and sit with me there for half an hour, so we can make our quiet prayers together. No amount of distance between the way we live our lives has ever really been able to damage our friendship, and I’m grateful for that.

One important thing that happened in those first weeks was that, after the detectives worked on him and worked on him, and after hours of being alone in his cell, my father finally broke and told them what he knew. That’s how they were able to find two more of the bodies. Pastor Schect had been under surveillance and he was arrested the same day, and then Cary Patanauk, on lesser charges. It turned out that, very early on, from the larger group of his congregation, Schect had chosen my parents and Aaron’s uncle for a kind of inner circle. With his satanic intuition, the pastor had sensed something in them—a mix of lust and anger in Patanauk’s case, and a mix of eagerness and bitterness in my mother’s. And in my father, I think, just the trait that so many evil leaders have counted on over the centuries: a willingness to be convinced that their worst impulses
are actually the word of God. It would come out at the trial that this small group had met a half dozen times at Patanauk’s shop, where Pastor Schect began to take his twisted ideas about the punishment of children and bring them, week by week, to a new level. There were girls and young women, he said, who God had sent to earth as sacrificial lambs. Wasn’t it then their own God-given work to accept these girls as offerings?

Patanauk—who testified to all this in exchange for a reduced sentence—was tempted at first, he said. He hosted those first few meetings, then opted out and left the church. Which gave my mother the opportunity to pit my father against him, to urge him to be more of a man than her former lover—if that word can be used where Cary Patanauk was concerned. The last thing I want to do is to paint my father as an innocent victim. The fact is, he drove his wife around the back roads of New Hampshire and eastern Vermont, many times, hoping to stumble on a solitary young woman they could trick into the vehicle and then terrify and slaughter. There is nothing innocent about that. But there was always a certain simpleness about him. I think of him sometimes as a kind of donkey who could be led to someone and told to bite. I like to hold on to the idea that if my mother hadn’t been mentally ill, if his own father hadn’t ended up in disgrace, if the people who published
True Home and Country
had never sent their poison into our mailbox and led us to Pastor Schect, then Curtis John Richards might have lived an unexceptional life, doing what so many other people do around there—cutting and burning wood, making and spending money, eating and chasing small pleasures, growing old. I like to think the connection between us might have blossomed into something like the love that should exist between a father and daughter, a parent and child. In certain foolish moods I like to think that way, even now. Maybe because I want there to be some goodness in myself. Maybe because I worry there isn’t. Or maybe only because there is a certain loneliness that comes from being so distant from the family you were born in.