The Church of Dead Girls (11 page)

Aaron meant to take her to the emergency room at the hospital, but by the time they got to town the bleeding had stopped. “I don't need to go to the hospital,” said Sadie.

They discussed it. At last they decided to stop by the drugstore and take care of the leg themselves.

There were two drugstores in Aurelius: Fays Drugs in the strip mall and Malloy's Pharmacy on Main Street. Donald Malloy had moved to Aurelius from Buffalo some years before, following his brother, Allen, a doctor and the father of Sadie's friend Sharon. Donald Malloy was a heavy man in his midforties with sandy red hair and a red face. He wore a white coat with his name across the breast pocket in red lettering. He was alone in the pharmacy. A woman by the name of Mildred Porter also worked with him but she was on her lunch break.

Malloy urged Aaron to take Sadie to a doctor.

“It's stopped bleeding,” said Aaron. “We can take care of it ourselves.”

“Let me see it,” said Malloy. He had a high, reedy voice. Sadie said his breath smelled sweet, as if he had been eating mints.

Sadie sat up on the counter by the old-fashioned chrome cash register. Malloy took the towel off her leg. The scrape was about twelve inches long.

“Nasty,” he said. “You should have a tetanus shot.” He cleaned the cut with alcohol, which caused Sadie to squeeze Aaron's hand. “You're a brave girl. What's your name?”

“Sadie Moore.”

Malloy mentioned that he knew her father, then he nodded to Aaron. “And I'm sure I know you but I don't recall . . .”

“Aaron McNeal.”

“Ahh,” said Malloy. He returned to cleaning the rest of Sadie's thigh with a piece of cotton.

“Is my reputation that bad?” asked Aaron, intending a joke. “You probably knew my parents too.”

“Yes,” said Malloy, “I remember them both.” He seemed on the brink of saying more but then changed his mind. He had large pink hands and the fingernails were perfectly manicured. Taking a tube of ointment, he dabbed it on and around the cut. Then, very precisely, he set a square of gauze on top. He paused and gestured to a ring on the middle finger of Sadie's left hand, a cheap silver ring, engraved with a dove, that Aaron had given her.

“Why do you wear that ring?” asked Donald.

“It's pretty. A friend gave it to me.”

“Do you know what it means?”

“Does it have to mean something?”

“All creatures have meanings. For instance, a lion might mean courage or it might mean the great beast in the Book of Revelation.”

“I suppose a dove means peace and friendship,” said Sadie. “Even love.” Her cheeks reddened a little.

“Those are some of its meanings,” said Donald. He began to put tape around the gauze.

“What else does it mean?” asked Aaron. He stood beside Sadie, resting a hand on her shoulder.

“It could signify the divine victim, or even hope.”

“What do dogs mean?” asked Sadie, with more interest.

“It depends on the breed. Most simply they signify fidelity.” When Donald had finished with the tape, he patted Sadie's knee. “Don't forget the tetanus shot. My brother can do it or his nurse. Go over there right now and I'll call him.”

Sadie touched the bandage, which was precisely aligned on her leg with the white tape running vertically and horizontally like a professionally drawn game of tic-tac-toe. “This is great,” said Sadie. “You should have been a doctor.”

“My brother got there first,” said Donald. Then he smiled.

“How much do I owe you?” asked Aaron.

Malloy shook his head. “It's my good deed for the day.”

The pharmacy was cluttered with displays of greeting cards, magazines, coolers with soft drinks and ice cream. Near the door was a large basket of volleyballs and basketballs. Next to it were boxes of badminton sets.

“You want anything?” Aaron asked Sadie. He felt they should buy something after Malloy's kindness.

“We were going to get a volleyball,” said Sadie.

“Good idea,” said Aaron. He chose one and tossed it to Sadie. Then he paid for the ball.

As Malloy handed Aaron his change, he asked, “Didn't your father move to Utica?”

“He's teaching high school there.” Aaron's tone suggested that he was speaking of a distant acquaintance.

“And you have a sister, if I'm not mistaken?”

Aaron laughed. “She's Sadie's father's girlfriend. You see how incestuous it gets?”

He put his arm around Sadie's waist and helped her out of the store. Malloy watched them go.

Aaron took Sadie to the doctor's for her tetanus shot, then drove her home. That night when Franklin saw her bandaged leg, he asked what had happened. In telling him the story, Sadie didn't think to hold anything back. After all, it had been an adventure.

R
yan Tavich lived alone in a brick bungalow on Jackson Street, where he had been since first moving to Aurelius in the late 1970s. It had two maples in the front yard and no backyard to speak of. I knew one of his neighbors, Whitey Sherman, and Whitey said it often seemed that no one lived in Ryan's house, that the house appeared vacant. I might have suspected something bizarre, but Franklin had been in Ryan's house and he said that nothing could be plainer. The only peculiarity was that Ryan's two living room chairs had been scratched to ribbons by his cat, a large black and white animal with extremely fluffy fur named Chief.

Ryan had a collection of jazz records and in the basement he had his weights. There was nothing on the walls except over the fireplace, where he had hung a picture showing a pheasant skimming the tops of yellow cornstalks. And there was a small bookcase, though Ryan got most of his books from the library and wasn't much of a reader anyway. On top of the bookcase was a stereo and an electronic chess game. In the corner was a locked wooden cabinet where Ryan kept his hunting rifles and shotguns. He had had several dogs, setters mostly, but he didn't have one now because he didn't want to upset the cat.

When Ryan left in the morning, he'd shout, “Guard the house, Chief.” And when he came home at night, he'd call out, “What's new, Chief?” In the interim Chief would tear up the furniture.

Ryan Tavich was originally from Oneonta, but he left when he was eighteen and joined the army. Although the Vietnam War was going on, he was sent to Korea, where, as he told Franklin, “I froze my ass off.”

Franklin had done an interview with Ryan several years earlier. It wasn't one of his better ones, either because Ryan gave nothing away or because he had little to say about himself. After the service, he worked for a security company in Albany as a guard, went to the police academy, then worked as a patrolman in Cohoes before taking a job in Aurelius. Police are poorly paid in small towns and the jobs attract men who either can't do better or want to be in the town for a specific reason. Ryan fit neither category. He was good at his job and could work anywhere in the country. Instead, he settled in Aurelius, which was our gain, but I sympathized with how he was gossiped about, as if he had a secret in his past.

He had few friends other than Franklin, and Ralph Belmont, the undertaker, and Charlie Kirby at the YMCA, but he had great loyalty to them. Consider, for instance, the hours he spent with Sadie, taking her fishing and even hunting. I assumed he used these occasions to praise Paula McNeal or to convince Sadie that she was harmless, but Sadie said that he never mentioned Paula.

Though Ryan dated a number of women, he never dated one for long. Sometimes he broke it off and sometimes the woman broke it off, but if the woman broke it off it was because she knew there was no future in the relationship, that Ryan wouldn't settle down on someone else's terms. The exception was Janice McNeal. It was Franklin's opinion that what made Janice different was her sexuality. She was the kind of woman who completely controlled whatever man she was with and perhaps Ryan liked that.

Franklin said that Ryan still talked about her and talked about her sexuality.

“She would describe how each man's come tasted different,” he had told Franklin. “How some was sweet and some tasteless and some tasted bitter. I asked about mine and she said it ranked between sweet and tasteless.”

And who did Ryan think had killed her?

“I'm sure it was someone in town. Someone who came to her house on foot and left on foot.”

Could it have been a woman?

“A woman wouldn't have strangled her.”

Sometimes Ryan struck me as dense. I would think that he lacked all imagination, that he was someone who hadn't married or found a companion because he was perfectly happy in his own company. But I was also jealous of his relationship with Sadie and must not criticize him unjustly. At times he seemed no more than a dark block of wood, but maybe that was because he wasn't very tall and because his weight training had made him so rectangular. I should say he was someone with whom I rarely spoke.

But he gave the impression of loss, of secrets, and it was easy to imagine something's having happened in his childhood or even in the service in Korea. Franklin said that Ryan's parents were dead but he had a sister in Corning. I believe she was married to a man who worked for the glass company. More likely Ryan was like a plant that never develops. He lacked the final something that makes a person link with life, become part of the flow of life. And perhaps I wasn't entirely comfortable with him because the same thing could be said of me.

I often wish that people had little screens in their chests, small television monitors, that you could flick on and see the interior lives within. I don't mean blood pumping and lungs flexing, but what they think and worry about and love. Because otherwise it is all speculation and observing their actions, then coming up with a few possibilities that one tries to shift into the realm of probabilities.

For five weeks during July and August Ryan dated Harriet Malcomb and saw her often. I assumed what brought them together was purely sexual, because what would they have to talk about? But later I found that was not entirely the case. Then Ryan broke up with her, primarily because of her involvement in the vandalism of Homeland Cemetery. He didn't report it, even though he understood it made him an accomplice after the fact. It seems he was unsure of Harriet for other reasons too. As he told Franklin, “She asks too many questions about Janice.”

Three weeks after Ryan stopped seeing Harriet, the phony bomb was found at Albert Knox Consolidated School. Right from the start, Ryan conducted his own investigation with officers on the Aurelius police force. I say that because the state police were also investigating. But ever since Janice's murder, Ryan hadn't had a good relationship with the state police. Though he worked with them on a hundred other matters, he couldn't forget how he had been removed from the McNeal case. Professionally, he knew that the state police's behavior had been correct, but personally he found it unforgivable. That was another trait of Ryan's: he had a long memory. He didn't treat the state police with anger, he simply remembered, with the result that if there was a case in which they were involved he might not tell them all he knew.

One Friday morning ten days after the bomb had been found at Knox Consolidated, Ryan left his office about nine without saying where he was going. This was not especially odd, but Patty McClosky, Chief Schmidt's secretary, said she saw him checking his pistol and putting a pair of handcuffs in his pocket. Privately, Patty called him Old Silent.

Ryan took an unmarked police car, a gray Ford Taurus, and drove over toward Aurelius College, which had been in session since the end of August. It was one of those cool sunny days that make you realize that summer is gone and something new is beginning. Kids were in school and the streets were quiet.

Ryan parked on Juniper Street near the corner of Spruce, a few blocks from the Aurelius campus. He locked the car, checked a piece of paper he took from his pocket, then walked half a block back to 335 Juniper, a white Victorian house that had been broken up into six apartments rented by students. The house needed paint, the front porch sagged, and the front lawn was a mixture of weeds and bare dirt scarred with tire tracks. Two empty Budweiser cans lay on the porch.

Ryan Tavich entered the house. Oscar Herbst rented an apartment on the second floor. Ryan checked the number on the door against the number written on the paper, then he knocked.

After a moment, Ryan heard a muffled voice. “Who is it?”

“Police,” said Ryan.

He waited. Then he knocked again, louder. He paused and listened at the door. Quickly, he stepped back and kicked at the lock. The door flew open. Ryan ran into the room. He started to draw his pistol, then didn't bother.

Oscar, wearing a T-shirt and jeans but barefooted, was halfway out the window. Ryan grabbed him by his belt and yanked him into the room. Stumbling, Oscar fell to the floor. He darted a look at Ryan, then jumped to his feet and ran toward the door. Ryan grabbed him again, a little rougher this time.

“Stop it,” said Ryan.

Oscar again tried running for the door.

Ryan grabbed him, slapped him, then put the handcuffs on him. Oscar was about four inches shorter than Ryan.

“We're going to the police station,” said Ryan. “Do you want your shoes?”

Oscar licked at the stud in his lip. “Fuck you,” he said.

Ryan took the shoes anyway.

On the street, Oscar tried to run again, but Ryan held him by the back of his neck. “You want me to carry you?” said Ryan.

He put Oscar in the backseat of the Taurus, then drove to police headquarters.

“You still fucking Harriet?” said Oscar behind him.

Ryan didn't bother to answer.

“You should be scared of me,” said Oscar.

At headquarters, Ryan took Oscar into his office and shut the door.

Patty McClosky saw all this. A few minutes later when Phil Schmidt left his office to play racquetball at the Y, Patty said, “Ryan's got a college student in his office. He's got handcuffs on him.”

Schmidt shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He hated to be late for his racquetball games. Just then Ryan came out of his office with Oscar.

“This kid's confessed to planting those bombs,” he said.

Ryan booked Oscar and put him in a cell. He left it to Phil Schmidt to call the state police.

Though Oscar had confessed, he also claimed to have acted on his own. A man walking his dog early in the morning had seen him outside Knox Consolidated, and another witness had placed Oscar outside Pickering Elementary School the week before.

“They weren't real bombs,” said Oscar. “It was a joke.”

That same Friday and over the weekend, Ryan talked to the other members of Inquiries into the Right, including Houari Chihani. All claimed to know nothing of Oscar's actions.

The problem was Aaron. Ryan was positive that he knew more than he was telling, but Ryan had a complicated relationship with Aaron. After all, he was still in love with Aaron's dead mother.

“I don't know anything about those bombs,” said Aaron. “Oscar must have been acting on his own.”

“He never said anything about it?” asked Ryan.

“Not to me he didn't.” He spoke coolly to Ryan, as if he disliked him.

Aaron kept Ryan standing in the hall outside his apartment door. Ryan wondered if Harriet was with him and he imagined her naked body in Aaron's bed. She, too, had told Ryan that she knew nothing about the bombs.

Franklin interviewed Oscar in jail. Because Oscar was arrested on Friday and the paper didn't come out until the next Thursday, everybody knew about the arrest from the Utica and Syracuse papers long before the
Independent
was printed.

Oscar told Franklin, “They're lucky they weren't real bombs.” Then he said, “Why don't you write a story about a cop fucking a student half his age?” And he called Franklin “a capitalist lackey.”

“What's a lackey?” Sadie asked me when the paper came out.

“A servile follower,” I told her.

“Like a servant?”

“Technically, I believe it's a footman.”

Oscar spent the weekend in jail. On Monday his father drove down from Troy to bail him out. After talking to the judge, Mr. Herbst withdrew his son from Aurelius College and took him home. There would be pretrial hearings and other visits to Aurelius before the trial, but otherwise Oscar would stay in Troy.

The news that Oscar had planted the bombs was surprising and in trying to explain it people heard a lot about Inquiries into the Right. Questions were raised at the college and in the city council concerning the possibility of banning the group.

There was also an attempt to remove Houari Chihani from his position at Aurelius, but Chihani was used to such tactics and retained a lawyer. He was in the second semester of a three-year contract and unless wrongdoing could be proved against him he planned to stay every minute of his time. Of course he had no hope of being rehired at the end of his contract, but by then the whole matter was irrelevant in any case.

Ryan talked to Chihani in his home. Had he perhaps encouraged Oscar and the others?

“Why would I do such a thing?” said Chihani. “I am a philosopher. I am not a revolutionary.”

“Don't you preach revolution?”

“I teach people to see clearly. I preach accuracy of vision.”

“Don't you feel some responsibility?”

“None.”

“What if it had been a real bomb?”

“But it wasn't.”

“Oscar Herbst was your student.”

“He has an excitable nature. That is a matter of genetics more than education. You would do better quizzing his parents.”

“Do you know what conspiracy is?” asked Ryan.

“Conspiracy is something that needs to be proved in a court of law,” said Chihani.

Franklin talked to Chihani as well.

“Education,” said Chihani, “provides young people with information about the world. If those young people act upon that information, we cannot blame their teachers, just as we cannot blame the newspaper for the news that it prints. I am simply the medium for a particular kind of information.”

“Don't you feel responsible for Inquiries into the Right?” asked Franklin.

“They are a study group, nothing more. They read books and meet to discuss them.”

“Do you think one of these books set off Oscar Herbst?”

“We go back to the nature of information. It is possible that Oscar was driven to action by something he read. He's enthusiastic. In learning about the nature of the world, he grows indignant. That's not surprising, is it? But what worries me, Mr. Moore, is that you consider punishing the book and the teacher.”