Charley's Web (19 page)

Charley took another glance around before stepping inside the woman’s small foyer, papered in brown and gold stripes. She wiped her feet on an old sisal mat, and shook some of the water out of her hair with her hand. “Thank you, Mrs….”

“Fenwick. You’re…?”

“Charley Webb.”

“You’re a reporter?”

Charley tried not to appear either too surprised or flattered. The woman was clearly more sophisticated than she looked, and had better taste than the brown leather bean bag propped against the living room wall on her left would indicate. “Yes. You read the
Palm Beach Post
?”

“Why would I read the
Palm Beach Post
?” Mrs. Fenwick scoffed.

“I just assumed…. How did you know I’m a reporter?”

“What else would you be?” Mrs. Fenwick rolled watery blue eyes toward an overhanging light fixture that looked vaguely like a crown of thorns. “I would have thought you people would have had your fill by now. There’s not much meat left on the bones.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Bunch of vultures,” Mrs. Fenwick elaborated. “Isn’t it enough Jill’s sitting on death row? You gotta pester poor Pammy to death as well?”

“I’m not trying to pester anybody, Mrs. Fenwick.”

“You’re not here to interview Pam about her sister?”

“I’m here at Pam’s invitation.”

“Really? Then why isn’t she answering her door?”

Charley forced her lips into a smile, felt a drop of rain fall from the tip of her nose into her mouth. She glanced back outside, looking for Alex, but he was still nowhere to be seen. “Look. I’m writing a book….”

“A book? My, my. Aren’t we ambitious?”

“It was Jill’s idea. I assure you she’s cooperating fully.”

A strange look passed across Mrs. Fenwick’s face.

“Maybe I could ask you a few questions,” Charley broached, her reporter’s instincts sensing a shift in the woman’s attitude, and deciding to take advantage of it.

“Such as?”

“To start with, how long have you lived next door to the Rohmers?”

“Twenty-five years.”

“So you’ve known Jill…”

“All her life. Pammy, too. Lovely girl, Pammy. Takes wonderful care of her mother.”

“And Jill?”

Mrs. Fenwick shook her head, picked some invisible tobacco from her tongue with her fingers. “Polite, respectful, eager to please. Hard to believe she did those awful things,” she added without prompting.

“Hard,” Charley repeated, hearing a qualifier in Mrs. Fenwick’s voice. “But not impossible?”

There was a pause. “Not impossible,” Mrs. Fenwick concurred.

“Charley!” Alex suddenly called out. “Charley, where are you?”

Charley opened the front door, although she still couldn’t see Alex. “Be right there.” She turned back to Mrs. Fenwick. “Why not impossible?”

The woman reached into the pocket of her sweatpants, pulled out a loose cigarette and a book of matches. “I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

“Why should I tell you?” Mrs. Fenwick put the cigarette in her mouth, lit it, and inhaled deeply before slowly releasing the smoke into the space between them.

“Because I think you want to.”

Mrs. Fenwick shook her head. “The last thing I need is more trouble with Ethan.”

“More trouble?”

“Pammy’s the sweetest girl in the world. I’d do anything for her. And her mother is, well, you know, she’s been in that wheelchair for years, and getting worse every day. But that husband of hers, and that Ethan. Always angry about something. One time I complained his car was blocking my driveway. Next thing I knew, the front of my lawn was covered with trash. Another time, he threw eggs at my front door.”

“Charley?” Alex called again.

“What can you tell me about Jill, Mrs. Fenwick?” Charley asked, ignoring him.

“It’s probably nothing. Just a feeling I had….”

“Tell me.”

“This goes back a long time, maybe eight, nine years,” Mrs. Fenwick began. “We had this bird’s nest in one of our trees out back, and the eggs had just hatched. Don’t ask me what kind of birds they were. Probably just sparrows. Not very interesting really, but I used to love watching them. They were all scrawny, their mouths always open, crying to be fed. I showed the nest to Jill, and she seemed quite intrigued. Anyway, one afternoon, I came home from work….”

“Charley!”

“Over here!” Charley called back impatiently as Alex materialized on the Rohmers’ front lawn. “What happened when you came home from work, Mrs. Fenwick?”

“I really don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“What was Jill doing when you came home from work that day?”

A moment’s hesitation, then: “She was in my backyard, standing at the foot of the tree, the nest on the ground, the poor little birds lying dead at her feet. She was crying, said a cat must have gotten to them. I comforted her. We buried them together. I didn’t think too much about it until later on, when I looked out my bedroom window, and I saw her sitting on the grass, her back against her house, playing with this big, long stick, and staring up at my tree with this weird little smile on her face. That was when I knew it wasn’t a cat that got to those poor little birds.”

“Charley!” Alex ran up the front walk.

“Can we talk again?” Charley asked her.

Mrs. Fenwick shook her head. “No. I’ve said quite enough.

You should go.” She opened her door, all but pushed Charley into Alex’s arms.

“What’s going on?” Alex asked.

“I’ll tell you later. Did you find Pam?”

Alex pointed through the rain toward the Rohmer house. The curtains in the front window had been pulled back. Pamela Rohmer stood between the panels, watching them approach.

T
he front door of the Rohmer house opened directly into the living room. The room was a small, perfect square, completely dominated by a large plasma TV that took up most of one cream-colored wall. A well-worn, beige chesterfield was pushed against the wall at right angles to it, between two brown leather La-Z-Boy loungers. A real guy’s room, Charley thought, surprised by a vase of fresh-cut flowers on a glass side table beside the archway leading into the tiny dining room, the only indication a woman might also live here. Charley noted that the table was already set for dinner. She checked her watch. It was barely two o’clock.

Pamela Rohmer was standing by the large front window. She was taller than her sister, with the same dirty blond hair and heart-shaped face, but while her eyes were a similar brooding shade of brown, they lacked Jill’s vitality. They were faded, like a photograph left too long in the sun, and void of curiosity, as if she already knew the answers to all life’s questions, and found them to be both useless and uninteresting. She was wearing jeans and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and her freshly washed hair hung straight to her shoulders. “Charley’s kind of a strange name for a girl,” she said before Alex could formally introduce them.

“It’s actually Charlotte.” Charley decided to wait until later to request a photograph.

“Charlotte Webb.” Pamela nodded as she absorbed this information. “Guess your parents thought that was cute.”

“You have no idea.”

Pamela smiled. “Can I get you something to drink?”

Charley shook her head.

“Sorry about keeping you waiting for so long. I was busy with my mother and couldn’t get to the door.”

“Is she all right?” Charley asked.

“She’s asleep. For the moment.” Pamela’s voice was as deep as it was distracted, almost as if she were speaking to you from another room. Charley wished she could jot that observation down before she forgot it. “Have a seat.” Pamela indicated the sofa with a wave of her hand.

Charley sank down, a vaguely musty smell rising from the cushions to compete with the scent of citrus air-freshener. Pamela perched on the edge of the sofa’s far end, crossing one ankle neatly over the other, and folding her hands primly in her lap. Alex walked to the window, pretending to be looking out at the rain. “Thanks for agreeing to see me,” Charley began.

Pamela shrugged. “It’s what Jill wants.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“She called last week, asked me to cooperate.”

“Well, I appreciate it.” Charley looked to Alex for a nod of encouragement, but he was still looking out the front window, seemingly engrossed in the growing downpour. She glanced back at Pamela, who was staring at her without expression. What am I doing here? Charley wondered. I have no idea what to ask this woman, no clue where to start. She tried to dredge up the list of questions she’d been tossing back and forth in her head all week, but her mind was as blank as the look on Pamela’s face. What do I say to this woman to get her to trust me? “Listen, before I forget,” Charley heard herself say, “my brother said to say hello.”

“Your brother?”

“Bram Webb?” Charley asked, as if she wasn’t sure. “Apparently you knew each other a few years back?” Again, the sentence emerged as a question. Charley bit down on her tongue. She’d always hated people who attached question marks to the end of obvious statements. Didn’t they know what they were talking about?

“Bram’s your brother?”

“I understand you took some classes together.”

“Art classes, yes. He’s very talented.”

“He said the two of you dated for a while.”

“We went out a couple of times, yeah. Bram and Pam, we used to joke. A perfect match. How’s he doing?”

“Great. He’s doing great.” I hope, Charley added silently. She hadn’t heard from her brother since she’d called to tell him a family reunion was in the offing.

“Please tell me I’m hallucinating,” was all he’d said.

“I always thought he had such an unusual name. Obviously your parents…”

“Obviously,” Charley repeated, with a roll of her eyes.

“Bram Webb,” Pam said, shaking her head in wonderment. “Wow. Small world, huh?”

“Small world,” Charley agreed, reaching into her purse and bringing out her tape recorder, setting it on the cushion between them. A flash of fear interrupted Pam’s blank stare. “If you don’t want me to tape this,” Charley said quickly, “I can just take notes.” She quickly withdrew a small pad from her purse, began rifling around for a pen.

“No, I guess it’s all right.”

“You’re sure?”

Pam nodded, smoothed down the sides of her hair, almost as if she thought the tape recorder was a camera.

Charley realized the recorder was still running from her encounter with Mrs. Fenwick, and wondered if Pam could hear its gentle hum. “I was talking to your neighbor,” she said.

“Mrs. Fenwick?”

“She’s a big fan of yours.”

Pam absorbed this latest piece of information without any noticeable change to her expression. “She’s a nice lady.”

“She says you take very good care of your mother.”

Pam shrugged. “I do my best.”

“Okay. So, are we ready?” Charley asked.

“I guess.”

“Do you have anything you want to say before we start?”

“Like what?”

Like, do you think your sister is a cold-blooded killer of little children? Charley thought, deciding it would probably be more prudent to take a slower, gentler approach. “Look, why don’t we start with some background information, kind of ease into this.”

“Background information?”

“You’re how old exactly?”

“Twenty-five on May sixteenth.”

“And you’re not married.”

“I’m not married,” Pam repeated.

“Divorced? Engaged?”

“Single.”

“Have you always lived at home?”

“Yes.”

“Do you work? Outside the home, I mean?”

Pam shook her head. “My mother’s kind of a full-time job.”

Charley noted this was said without rancor. “It must be hard for you.”

“She’s my mother.” Again Pam shrugged. “What would you do?”

Charley cleared her throat, moved the tape recorder several inches to the right, although it had been perfectly fine where it was. “There’s nobody to help you?”

“Well, there was Jill, but…”

“Jill told me that at one time you wanted to join the Peace Corps.”

“She remembered that? It was so long ago.”

“She also said you talked of becoming a nun.”

Pam grimaced. “Kind of hard to be a nun when you’re not Catholic.”

“She said your father was very upset by that, that he hit you so hard you lost partial hearing in one ear.”

Reflexively, Pam raised her hand to her left ear. “That was an accident.”

“An accident he hit you?”

“An accident he hit me so hard,” Pam qualified. “It wasn’t like I didn’t deserve it.”

“You think you deserved to be beaten?”

“I never said I was beaten.”

“Weren’t you?”

Pam’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you were going to ask me about Jill.”

“Well, I’d like to know about both of you,” Charley sidestepped. “I find it interesting that siblings often have such different memories of their childhood. Sometimes you’d never suspect they’d grown up in the same house.”

“Is that true of you and Bram?”

“Well, it’s certainly true of me and my sisters,” Charley acknowledged.

“Alex says your sisters are pretty famous.”

“Yes, they are.”

“Are you close?”

“Not so much.”

“Why? Are you jealous?”

The question caught Charley by surprise. “Jealous? No. Well, maybe a little,” she admitted after a pause. Then, “Maybe more than a little.” Was she? Or was she just saying that to disarm Pam, worm her way into her confidence? “Were you jealous of Jill as a child?”

“Yes,” Pam said simply. “I hated her.”

“That’s a pretty strong word.”

“I guess. She was just so pretty and angelic-looking, and everybody was always making such a fuss about her. I resented her for that. The way all she had to do was smile and everybody let her do whatever she wanted. My father used to call her his ‘little cupcake.’ Even Ethan let her get away with murder.” Pam stopped abruptly, perhaps caught off guard by her choice of words. “It was the same way at school,” she continued after several seconds. “The boys hovered like flies. I was pretty jealous of that. I was always shy, nervous around guys. One time, I asked for her advice about this boy I liked, his name was Daniel Lewicki, and she laughed and said, ‘You gotta treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen.’ But I could never do that. Jill said I was hopeless. She said I didn’t deserve to have a boyfriend, that she was gonna get Daniel to ask her out. And she did.”

“She stole your boyfriend?”

“Well, we’d never actually gone out.”

“But you liked him. Jill knew that.”

“It was no big deal. Besides, she was right—she treated him like dirt, and he just kept coming back for more.”

“What about Wayne Howland?” Charley asked.

“The preacher’s son? What about him?”

“I understand he and Jill were close.”

“They were friends. But then they had some sort of falling out, and he stopped coming around.”

“Do you know what caused the falling out?”

“No. But Jill was stubborn like you wouldn’t believe. It was either her way or no way at all. Maybe Wayne wasn’t quite so ‘keen’ after awhile.”

Charley tried to reconcile the picture Pam was painting of Jill with Alex’s view of his client as a young woman who’d been abused and manipulated by every man she’d ever met. Of course it was entirely possible that Pam’s animosity toward her sister was coloring her recollections. “What are your feelings for Jill now?”

“I feel sorry for her.”

“Because she’s in jail?”

“Because she’s in pain.”

“What makes you think she’s in pain?”

“How could she not be?”

“Because of what she’s done?”

“Nobody’s blameless,” Pam said cryptically.

“What do you mean?”

There was a long pause. “There were things that happened to Jill,” Pam said slowly, “things I could have prevented, things I should have done.”

“Such as?”

Pam shook her head slowly from side to side, said nothing.

“What things could you have prevented?”

Pam fidgeted in her seat, looked as if she was considering bolting from the room.

“Jill told me about Ethan,” Charley said slowly. “About what he did to her.” She reached across the cushions for Pam’s hand, cupped it inside her own. “About what he did to you.”

Pam pulled her hand away, as if she’d been burned, then folded one arm under the other across her chest. She began swaying back and forth.

“How old were you when the abuse started?”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Okay.” Charley pretended to be reading from her notes. “Can you just confirm a few things for me?”

Pam said nothing, continued rocking back and forth.

“Jill said you went to Disney World for your tenth birthday….”

“I really don’t want to talk about this.”

“And that she shared a room at the motel with you and Ethan, Ethan in one bed, you and Jill in the other. Is that right?”

Pam nodded, her entire body starting to tremble.

“And in the middle of the night, Ethan moved her into his bed, then crawled in beside you. She said she heard you crying and telling him to stop, and that the next morning, there was blood on the sheets.”

“I can’t do this,” Pam said.

“Would it be easier if I weren’t here?” Alex asked.

Charley jumped at the sound of Alex’s voice. She’d forgotten all about him.

“Maybe you could go check on my mother. If you wouldn’t mind.” Pam motioned toward the rooms at the back of the house. “Through the dining room. The last door on the right.”

Alex glanced briefly at Charley as he left the room. Go easy, the glance warned.

“I’m sorry to have to dredge up such painful memories,” Charley began.

“You keep thinking it’ll get easier with time,” Pam said, speaking as much to herself as to Charley. “What’s that saying? Time heals all wounds?”

Charley nodded.

“Well, it’s not true. Some wounds never heal.”

Charley recalled watching her mother pack for Australia, along with the hollow sensation that filled her chest, as if she’d been stabbed repeatedly and was slowly bleeding out. She remembered discovering the empty cabinet that once held her mother’s extensive doll collection, and the way her body had collapsed in on itself, as if she’d been sucker-punched. She experienced anew the numbness that had overtaken her body as she stood waiting by the front door, night after night, for her mother to come home. Pam was right, she thought—some wounds never healed.

“I’m sorry to be such a baby,” Pam said.

“Please don’t apologize.”

“I want to cooperate. Jill says it’s important.”

“What else did she say?”

“That she doesn’t want me to hold anything back, that she wants me to tell the whole story.”

“Do you think you can do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you can.”

“It’s not easy. Everybody has his own truth. Nobody ever thinks he’s the bad guy. We all have our own elaborate system of justifications and rationalizations for the things we do. I know Ethan does.”

“Have you ever talked to him about what happened?”

Pam laughed, a sharp, hollow sound, like a tree branch snapping in two. “I tried to once. After his wife kicked him out and he moved back here. But he denied everything, said I was just trying to make trouble for him. He insisted he never touched me, that I’d imagined the whole thing.”

“What about your father?” Charley asked.

Whatever color had been left in Pam’s face quickly disappeared. Her fingers reached for her left ear. “Sometimes he gets a little rough.”

“Is it true he shot the family dog?”

“The dog was old and sick. Shooting him was an act of kindness more than anything else.”

“You really believe that?”

“What difference does it make? It happened a long time ago.”

“Some wounds never heal,” Charley reminded her.