One of Us (12 page)

“I think it’s true,” I tell her. “The accusation is too bizarre to be something Anna just made up. And why write it down? Why keep it all those years?”

“How am I supposed to explain the actions of a crazy person? The woman was seriously disturbed.”

“Then you’re saying it’s not true.”

“Of course not.”

“Then you won’t mind if I show the letter to your husband?”

She bows her head slightly. This time when she raises her glass to her lips, I notice a slight tremor in her hand.

“We both know he’ll insist on knowing if it’s true or not, and he won’t take your word for it,” I go on. “And there
is
a way to find out the irrefutable truth nowadays. A very easy way.”

I continue staring at her, willing her to look up at me, but she won’t do it. She slowly, distractedly swirls the ice in her glass and watches it closely.

“I always wondered why you kept her as a nanny. She never struck me as being well suited for the job. She didn’t really have any qualifications. Now I know. It was to protect your secret. She knew what happened. Not only that, you forced her to help you.”

“I didn’t force her to do anything,” she counters harshly, finally glancing up at me, then immediately dropping her stare back into her drink.

“I told you it’s a lie.”

“So I can show it to Walker?”

I get no reply.

“Personally I think he’ll be more bothered by the deceit than the violence. What do you think?”

“What do you want from me?” she asks in a low voice.

“I want to know if it’s true and if it is, there’s one other person involved in all this who’s just as guilty as you are and maybe even more repulsive. I want a name.”

She raises her gaze and sits perfectly still, holding her glass in two hands now like a beggar might hold out a cup for some change. She fixes her eyes on a point in the past. I watch her and wonder if she thinks about it every day, or only occasionally, or maybe never, and which of these would make her a more terrible woman.

She has always been capable of exquisite acts of ruthlessness because she has no allegiance to anything but her family and her wealth, but now she knows I have even less than that.

“I want a name,” I repeat.

“Go away, Scarlet.”

“Sorry, Mom, but you’ve just guaranteed that I’m going to stick around. I’m going to stay until I find out what I want to know. What I deserve to know. What do you have to say to that?”

Her eyes open so wide they seem to fill her face and a pale blue pulse begins to flutter beneath the tissue thin skin of her fragile throat.

She’s afraid, but the moment passes.

A private smile spreads slowly across her lips and she raises her glass to me in another salute.

“Welcome home, darling.”

twelve

DANNY

L
IKE MANY BOYS WHO
never knew their own fathers, Carson Shupe was a collector of father figures: a math teacher who was the first person to tell him he was smart; a young loan officer who lived briefly in the apartment across the hall who was the only man he ever remembered
not
sleeping with his mother; a black mechanic who worked in a nearby garage who let him hang out and drink Cokes and watch him work on cars; a long-winded assistant manager at a White Castle who was his first boss; a potbellied pharmacist who also lived across the hall and who
did
sleep with his mother and also molested him for several years when he was a child.

In speaking about all of these men, Carson painted pictures of astounding individuals who possessed a rare mix of machismo and sensitivity. They were patient and caring, yet stern and demanding; encouraging and playful, but tough and dogmatic: all the qualities a boy wants in a dad and all the ones he needs. I highly doubt they were any of these things. I imagine the one quality they all had in common was time on their hands.

They’re all here, though, sitting in the gallery at his execution. It’s bigger than I expected and much more opulent. The seats are upholstered in red velvet. The walls are covered with colorful tapestries of hunting scenes. A chandelier of polished deer antlers and candles hangs from the ceiling. The flames sputter as if unseen lips are blowing on
them, and the wax drips liberally onto the laps and the tops of the heads of the spectators, but no one seems to notice.

The district attorney is here and all the members of the prosecution team. I wave at Sam, the assistant DA I worked with the most. He sees me but doesn’t wave back.

Carson’s defense attorney is here, too, and the two psychiatrists who testified on his behalf. Behind them sit a quartet of silent, broken men, and I know without knowing that these are the fathers of the murdered boys.

I search but none of the mothers are here. I realize there are no women here at all.

Men continue to file in: prisons guards, inmates, the judge, reporters.

Along the very back of the theater where the light is dimmest I see a group of figures I can’t identify. I strain my eyes and begin to make out their white hoods. They start to slowly shuffle down the aisle toward their seats. Their ankles and wrists are shackled.

It can’t be the Nellies. The Nellies are dead and there’s no such thing as ghosts. It must be Tommy and the others in their memorial service getups. But why are they here? They have nothing to do with Carson Shupe.

And why am I looking at the spectators? I should be sitting with them. We should all be facing the stage.

“Tommy!” I call out.

I expect my voice to echo around the cavernous room but it goes nowhere.

I hear the clack of Rafe’s candy coming from under one of the hoods.

“Rafe!” I cry.

“Mommy!” I cry.

She materializes out of the blue along with Molly and Fiona. They’re all the same age. They’re all young women the way Mom described them in her hospital room. Their skin is gray. They stare with their mouths open. Fiona is dressed in an old-fashioned long dress from her era. Molly wears jeans and a Speed Racer T-shirt, the cartoon I was
watching when Mom’s screams ripped through the house when she found Molly missing.

Mom is in a straitjacket.

“You were supposed to protect her,” she says.

“I was too little,” I plead with her.

“You were her big brother. It was your job.”

Carson strolls in wearing street clothes. He joins the women. He stands next to my mom and puts his arm around her shoulders. On one of his mangled fingers with the shiny pink tips is a big ruby ring.

I start to tell him to keep his hands off my mother, but before I can get the words out all of their faces begin to melt then become the shifting images of a hologram: his face is my face; my mother’s face is his mother’s face; Molly’s face is the face of a strangled boy; Fiona’s face is the face of the Devil.

I try to run but my ankles are wrapped in heavy chains. My wrists are, too.

“Hello, Danny,” a soothing voice says behind me.

I turn and find a man in a red suit. His hands are clasped in front of him and he smiles sadly at me.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Why I’m Walker Dawes.”

He unfolds his hands like the spreading of a fleshy bird’s wings and reveals to me the blood-slick head of an unborn infant.

Vomit rises in my throat.

He opens his mouth to speak to me again and my father’s voice says, “Go get me a beer.”

I jerk awake with such force that I shake the entire couch and hit the end table. A lamp goes crashing onto the floor.

I let out a shout. My ears are ringing with the sound of my heart banging. I fell asleep in my clothes again and my shirt is drenched in sweat.

I wait for either my mom or Tommy to appear. We brought Mom home yesterday and installed her back in her childhood bedroom. It’s directly above me.

Nothing happens.

I take deep breaths until I feel like I can stand. It’s still dark outside but dawn will break soon.

I get a dish towel and drape it over Fiona’s face, then return to the kitchen to make some coffee.

While listening to the drip and gurgle of Tommy’s pot I settle down on the couch and open the box containing the files for my most pressing case, hoping to distract my thoughts and calm me down. It’s the death of Baby Trusty at the hands of his mother, Mindy Renee Trusty, a cute student from an upper-middle-class family who loves
Gossip Girl,
skinny jeans, and pineapple on her pizza, and is shaping up to be, in my opinion, one of the most cold-blooded killers I’ve ever met.

I put aside all the materials from the DA’s office: medical records, witness statements, autopsy reports, psychiatric reports by no fewer than six defense experts; then my own voluminous notes from interviewing her family, friends, neighbors, teachers, classmates, former boyfriends, and Mindy herself. I stop when I get to the folder containing her MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the most widely administered standardized psychological test.

She finished the 366 questions in record time, only looking up from her scratching pencil every now and then to complain about the fact that she was missing a yoga class and to glare at her cell phone, which I had confiscated, turned off, and left in plain view on the table in order to watch her reaction.

I scored her test that same night. There were no significant clinical elevations in the curve, no signs of mental illness, depression, or any type of thought disorder. Her profile showed her to be absolutely normal, yet she had given birth to a baby alone in a bathtub in a hotel room less than three months earlier, cut the umbilical cord with scissors she had brought with her, stuffed loose change down the baby’s throat until he suffocated, cleaned up the mess, put the baby’s body into a plastic bag provided by the hotel for overnight dry cleaning, and put him in the trunk of her car with the intention of driving to her grandparents’ farm near Lancaster and burying him somewhere in the woods. She might have gotten away with all of it if she hadn’t passed out from dehydration and exhaustion and wrecked her car. No one
had known she was pregnant; she had gone to great lengths to conceal her condition.

Her defense team is putting forth the all-purpose standby excuse for crimes that seem otherwise unimaginable; she snapped.

The problem with this argument is that no matter what certain attorneys, the media, and pop culture like to insist, mental illness doesn’t work this way. People don’t just snap. Any criminal—whether sane or insane—is a long time in the making and exhibits many signs throughout his or her life of impending danger for anyone who chooses to notice.

Traditionally, infanticide cases are rarely even prosecuted, and when they do go to trial, they are the single most successful use of the insanity defense. It seems incomprehensible to a jury that any mother would willfully kill her own child.

Being mentally ill is an easy explanation to accept when someone does something this awful. People prefer it over the only other available explanation, which is what I’m going to present to them in this case: Mindy Renee is a monster.

My own mother is one of the few women in this country who has been convicted and sent to prison for killing her own child, and if ever there was a woman who was obviously mentally ill and should have been acquitted, it was her. But she was a victim of circumstance, time, place, economics, and a fact of the case no one was able to overlook for even a moment: there was no other conceivable suspect.

Random lunatics didn’t break into people’s homes in the country, kill an infant, and bury her in her own backyard, and my father had an unassailable alibi; he was in a coal mine when Molly went missing.

The circumstantial evidence against my mother was overwhelming, but even so, Tommy never believed she did it. At the time I did my best to be on his side and defend my mom, but my support was halfhearted. I wasn’t convinced, even though a few things didn’t make sense to me.

I was there when my mom first realized Molly was gone. I had just come home from school and Mom was lying on the couch taking her nap while Molly was taking her nap in her crib.

Mom greeted me and asked me about my day, then took my hand and we walked upstairs together.

I’ll never forget her screams or the terror on her face as she flew wildly around the little room I shared with my newborn sister, throwing herself on the floor and looking under the crib, slamming open the closet door, my toy-box lid, the dresser drawers, running to the window and pressing her forehead against the glass with a sob.

If she had killed Molly and buried her in our backyard where Dad found her body later that night, why would her shock and anguish have been so real? If she was acting, who was she acting for? Me? I was five years old.

I knew Mom did strange things, sometimes dangerous things, yet I also knew her actions were never motivated by anger toward others. She would have never purposely harmed someone.

I knew how much she loved Molly. I saw how she smiled at her and heard her sing the same lullabies to her that she sang to me. She held my little hand in hers and helped me gently stroke Molly’s tiny arms and legs and talked about all the fun things we were going to do together. If she had hurt Molly it would have been an accident, and her first response would have been to get help for her. It would have never occurred to her that she should try to cover it up. She didn’t think that way.

My mother could tell the most fantastic stories involving her ongoing delusions that were completely untrue, yet at the same time she was incapable of telling a lie.

I told all of this to Rafe when he took my statement. I was sure he believed me, but like me he also believed my mom was crazy and by definition, crazy people did crazy things. They were completely unreliable. They were always doing stuff that was out of character.

I’ve since spent my entire adult life discovering just the opposite is true: the mentally ill are the most predictable people in the world.

Mom never stopped denying that she killed Molly, but to the jury, it was painfully obvious that she had killed her. This fact wasn’t being questioned. Why had she done it? What had led to this horrible tragedy? These are the answers they wanted to hear.

Over the years, people may have whispered to each other behind closed doors that Arlene McNab was crazy, but no one ever knew this for sure, and even if we had known, nothing would have been different. Our family could have never afforded treatment for her and we wouldn’t have wanted her to get any. In a coal town in the 1970s, psychiatry was only for the truly crazy, and crazy was nothing more than a catchall term for the weak who couldn’t cope. In a culture where a boy blowing off his fingers with butane and blasting caps was considered to be a whiner if he asked to go to the hospital, a woman claiming she couldn’t get out of bed to make dinner because she was depressed wasn’t going to be met with much sympathy.

Yet at the trial she desperately needed a psychologist to say she suffered from manic depression, but Dad and Tommy still couldn’t afford one. They also couldn’t afford a competent attorney.

I didn’t attend the trial. Tommy felt any sympathy the jury might feel for my mom would be outweighed by the damage the experience might do to me, plus he thought the ploy could backfire and the jury might want to protect me from my mom instead of return her to me. I guess my dad agreed with him.

The public defender assigned to Mom’s case also pointed out that if he were to put me on the stand for the purpose of saying nice things about Mom, this would mean the prosecutor would also get a chance to talk to me, and he would ask questions that would make my mom appear to be exactly the kind of violent, unstable woman who might kill her baby.

It was the only smart move Mom’s lawyer made, and any good that might have come of it was overshadowed by his crucial error of putting Mom on the stand, where she said over and over again that she didn’t kill her baby.