Dreams in the Key of Blue (20 page)

“It was like the Gleids became her family,” Kramer
said. “A court-appointed psychiatrist said she was delusional.”

“One of the psychologists blamed the LSD,” Squires said. “None of them considered the possibility of a peak emotional experience. To quote a friend of mine, ‘Sydny Clanton was dreaming the blue dream that never ends.’ ”

“She was watching TV when the Gleids arrived home,” Travis said.

“Does anybody know what she was watching?” Kramer asked.

I believed that TV triggered Clanton’s dissociative episode in the Gleids’ home, and that LSD caused the synesthesia she experienced. “I could smell what that girl was saying,” Clanton said of the newscaster she watched. “She had an aura of fresh-cut pine. The screen turned blue. It made me sad, and I don’t like to feel sad. So I got mad.”

The capacity to translate depressed feelings into rage was a phenomenon I’d frequently encountered in my practice. When a patient presented depression, I probed for unexpressed anger.

After killing her parents and eviscerating her father, Sydny Clanton hitchhiked I-80 west. Everyone who picked her up—two men, a woman, a young couple—died.

In Walnut Creek, California, Clanton watched an in-depth TV account of her parents’ murder. Carl Clanton, the respected realtor and Rotarian, received most of the coverage. The broadcast included Mrs. Clanton only as one of the two found dead in their mountain home.

Later, when they considered Sydny Clanton’s account of her parents’ murders and the physical evidence at the scene, investigators speculated that the rebellious daughter returned home drunk and stoned late one night, became embroiled in a heated confrontation with her father, and killed him. When her mother walked out to see what
all the noise was, Clanton killed her, too, then gutted her father.

It was a sixties wrap: rebellion, drugs, and violence. Case closed. The town buried its dead, and America banished the case to its great, silent subconscious.

When Clanton later told a tale of sexual abuse by her father while her mother pretended to be unaware, it was a one-day story on the inside pages of mainstream newspapers on the West Coast. The tabloids gave it page two at the grocery checkout.

Clanton’s prison psychiatrist, Susan Paynter, sent me a tape and transcript of a session with her client and asked for my opinion. The convicted killer described sadistic sexual abuse from the ages of eight to thirteen and offered the kind of detail that was verifiable.

I had sent Ray Bolton a wish list: any available police photographs of Carl Clanton’s basement office and workshop; copies of inventory sheets listing materials removed from the Clanton residence. Bolton did not disappoint me, and I wrote to Dr. Paynter.

“Police photos taken of the two basement rooms while the bodies were
in situ,”
I wrote, “show none of the items that Clanton describes. The police inventory log of items removed from the residence lists no bondage magazines, no photos of children in sexually provocative poses, and no leather straps or other bondage paraphernalia.”

I listened to Paynter’s taped therapy session. The lack of emotion in Sydny Clanton’s voice struck me immediately. “I enjoyed the killing,” Clanton told Paynter. “There was this rush, a high that was better than any drug.”

She recited dates and facts, recounted atrocities, and discussed her favorite music, all in the same flat tone of voice. She could have been reading a grocery list.

Dissociated rage, I thought, a fury so overwhelming that Clanton split it off to its own compartment and
self-medicated with any mind-altering substance she could find.

“She killed eleven times,” Squires said. “She carried a leather pouch, and every time she killed, she placed a small stone in the pouch. She was keeping score. When a killer runs up those numbers, and loves what she’s doing, she can’t be dismissed as a thief.”

At the end of class, Dawn Kramer approached me. “I heard about Mr. Weld,” she said. “I never took any of his classes, but I knew who he was. Sara Brenner went home. My parents want me to come home. I’ve been stalling them. Are the police close to arresting someone?”

“Investigations take time,” I told her, wishing that I could say something reassuring.

“People keep dying,” she said, shaking her head as she walked from the room.

AS I GUIDED MY JEEP SOUTH ON I-95 THAT AFTER
noon, I felt like a Ragged Harbor-to-Portland commuter.

My gut told me that I was driving in the right direction. I was also nearly certain that I was about to visit what Jasper had erroneously called a blast from my past.

In the mid-sixties, sitting beside me in the sand at Race Point, Katrina Martin announced that she wanted to be a dancer. “Not ballet,” she said. “Cabaret.”

She pushed herself up, twirled her way to the water’s edge, and stared at the dark, earlymorning sky as waves washed over her feet. Suddenly she turned and ran back to where I sat.

“I want to be an actress,” she said. “I want to be Cleopatra and Cordelia, Arthur Miller’s Katie in
A View from the Bridge,
and Shaw’s Saint Joan, and all those Ibsen women.”

I patted the sand and asked her to sit.

“Shit,” she said, dropping to her knees. “The acid’s wearing off. I was going to play the Palladium next. There’s no point in praying to an empty sky.”

She curled into fetal position, wrapped her arms around my waist, and said, “When I get married and have
babies, one of them will be a girl. She’ll grow up to be just like Joanne Woodward or Bette Davis. New York and London theaters will chase after her.”

Her voice faded to a whisper, and she slept.

With the aid of Herb Jaworski’s directions, I had no trouble finding Bayberry Trailer Park. A single nail held a bullet-riddled, rusted Nehi sign dangling on a vegetable stand’s burned-out shell. Below the sign was a scrawled invitation to Bayberry Court.

The “courtyard” consisted of hard-packed dirt and broken glass, and reeked of dog shit. Clumps of grass grew at the corners of a dozen trailers that appeared to have settled at odd angles into the earth.

No one answered my knock at number three. I stepped away from the door, gazed through the louvered window and saw a TV’s blue glow in a darkened room. I was about to pound louder when a woman stepped from between trailers two and three and said, “She don’t answer when her soaps is on.”

She was short, nearly toothless, and povertythin with sunken eyes. Her voice was husky and ragged from too many cigarettes over too many years. She pulled a frayed, knitted shawl around her shoulders. “Soaps is like going to church for her. You don’t want the Lord’s house to be a shithole like the one you live in. Some days Katrina don’t answer the door at all. Freaks me out ’cause I gotta use my key, go inside, and make sure she’s alive. Stinks in there. She don’t keep the place clean.”

Wind whipped through the trailer park, stirred fallen leaves, and threatened with storm clouds rolling in from the east.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“A friend,” I said.

She cocked her head to one side. Her expression said disbelief.

“It was a long time ago,” I added.

“Musta been.”

“If she’s going to open the door…”

“Cartoons come on at four. Like I said, even then she mightn’t open that door. Katrina don’t remember too good. Lot that she don’t want to remember. I don’t blame her.”

“My name is Lucas Frank.”

“I’m Ellie. You want coffee and talk while you wait? Or are you gonna bother waiting?”

I imagined a dusty aluminum box with low ceilings and the odor of refuse, but Ellie’s trailer was clean and comfortable, complete with plasticlace placemats. With the exception of a proliferation of crucifixes and religious statuary, the place was not at all foreboding. Ellie had maintained the sheen of her dark, paneled walls and the polished metal molding’s luster.

We sat at a small, laminated kitchen table and drank a respectable coffee. A radio played softly in another room.

“I don’t watch the soaps. I listen to Imus when I wake up, maybe watch Oprah in the afternoon.”

“I’m trying to learn what I can about Harper Dorman,” I said.

“I’m glad the bastard’s dead,” Ellie snapped, staring hard into my eyes. “I seen on TV where somebody shot him. Should’ve done it a long time ago.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“I thought you were Katrina’s friend.”

I nodded. “We were young.”

“You with that cop that was here?”

“Detective Jacobs. I know who she is.”

She sipped her coffee and looked away. “I guess I don’t mind talking. Harper fixed outboards at a boatyard. Most Fridays he got a check, picked up his Jim Beam at the port, and was halfway through the bottle by the time he got home. He beat Katrina something awful. Around
here, we don’t call the cops. More trouble than they’re worth. Besides, Katrina said not to. Couple of times I did anyway. Never told her, but I did. Just made matters worse. I feel bad about doing that.”

Ellie wanted to talk. Bayberry Park was a relic, a decaying scrap heap of low-or no-rent hovels sinking into the back-filled tidal marsh where a developer dumped them in the 1950s. These days, young families mired in poverty sought subsidized housing in the city where they could walk to the make-work jobs the law required of the disenfranchised. The park’s last “new” tenant had arrived in 1986 and died in 1991.

“Katrina and Harper had a child,” I said.

“You mind if I smoke?”

I shook my head.

“So many people do these days,” she said, lighting an unfiltered, generic cigarette. “The state took Lily. Put her in an institution. She ran away when she was fifteen.”

Ellie took a deep drag from her cigarette, then exhaled. “Harper beat on Lily, too,” she said, looking down at the table.

That summer day at Steampot Pond, Katrina decided that the most amazing flower in the world sprouted from the earth beneath six feet of water, then surged its way to the surface with flamboyant white blossoms and broad green leaves. A water lily.

“I think he did more than beat on that child, but Katrina never said. Whatever happened, he got away with it for years. The cops arrested him, but nothing came of it. She finally threw him out. Got a court order, not that it did much good. He still came around. That was a long time ago, mister. Katrina should’ve killed him back then. She didn’t kill him now, if that’s why you came here. She ain’t been out of the park in months.”

I assured Ellie that Katrina-as-suspect had not entered my mind.

She dragged on her cigarette and tapped the ash onto her saucer. “I remember when Harper killed the dog,” Ellie said. “The cops came that time, too. Some days he came home, and he had cookies and chocolate milk for Lily. That day, he came home and killed her dog. What’s a child supposed to make of that? He smeared the dog’s blood on the living room walls.”

I pictured the sweeping arcs of blood on the walls above the two dead students’ beds. Before I could make sense of the image or formulate a question, Ellie spoke.

“Harper always quoted Scripture. He grabbed his King James and banged on that Bible and banged on his chest, and told every woman within hearing that her duty was to God and her man. ‘God is first,’ he yelled, ‘but I ain’t far behind. Fix my supper.’ Somebody shoulda fed him that blessed dog.”

“What exactly did he do to the dog, Ellie?”

She looked at me as if I were a dunce. “He shot it. Is that what you mean?”

Ellie stubbed out her cigarette. “Then he cut it open to get at the blood. Got his hands all covered with it and wiped the walls red. The place looked like a war went on. Lily spent that night with me. It was stay here or go to foster care, and I couldn’t let that child go through another nightmare on top of what she already saw. She sat at this table and drew pictures. I kept paper and colored pencils in the cabinet for when she visited. Lily was good at drawing. She was left-handed, and she kind of wrapped her arm around her pictures while she worked on them, like she was protecting them.”

Left-handed arcs of blood—shit. My stomach threatened to erupt. Was this tortured kid our killer?

Ellie demonstrated. “I couldn’t see what she made until she showed me. She drew people. When she finished each one, she took the red pencil and made slash marks across it. I asked her what she was doing. ‘I’m making them bleed,’ she said.”

“Did Lily ever come back here?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Last year there was a woman came around who’d be about the right age. She was tall and just so beautiful. If that was Lily, she turned herself into something special. Rich, too. That woman that was here, she was a princess.”

“Did Katrina say it was her daughter?” I asked.

“When she ain’t taking her pills, you can’t put stock in what comes out of her mouth.”

I had a hundred questions, but could not organize my thoughts. I imagined Katrina and Lily in their separate struggles against an abusive drunk.

“What was Lily like as a child?” I asked.

“Strange,” Ellie said, sipping her coffee. “Lily was a smart kid, did real good in school, helped her mother. She cooked the meals, cleaned house, did the laundry. When she got time to herself, she did her homework, wrote in her diary, or she prowled the swamp behind the park. She’d come out of that swamp talking to herself. ‘Vanessa Stripe needs help taking care of the babies,’ she’d say. Or, ‘Billy Brown-spot is overweight.’ Don’t ask me. She walked by my kitchen window gabbin’ away to herself. There were times she’d come press her face against that window and stare in here, like it was someplace she’d rather be. The swamp’s where she buried Spike. That was her dog. She dragged him down there in a burlap sack, dug the hole all by herself. Maybe Spike’s who she was talking to.”