Confession

  “Matthew defied them, didn’t he, Mrs. Mayer?”

  That made her pause, perhaps even shocked her. But she recovered well enough to say, “Matthew is not Ron. They were different sons entirely.”

  What Geof did not say in response was, But they had the same horrifying mother and father. He found her astonishing, this woman who would sacrifice the freedom, maybe even the life, of one son to try to salvage the memory of the one she loved better.

  “Mrs. Mayer, why didn’t they live on the cul-de-sac with the rest of you?”

  She was silent for a moment, and Geof thought maybe she was trying to recall old memories. Finally she said, “Ron and Judy were married when they were very young. Matthew was only a junior in high school, and the other boys were even younger. We weren’t even thinking then about houses for so many families.”

  “Why did your family start your own religion?”

  “It isn’t our religion, it’s God’s.”

  “Then I’ll put it this way: Why did you feel called to worship God in the way you do?”

  “Ours was a family in need of cleansing,” she said tightly. “I’m very tired, Lieutenant. What must I do next?”

  When she and Geof emerged from his office, Lee Meredith thought that Mrs. Mayer looked a century older than when she’d first gone in.

  33

  ON A RAINY, COOL FRIDAY MORNING IN SEPtember, Matthew Mayer turned himself in and was arraigned and imprisoned to await sentencing for the first-degree murder of Dennis Clemmons. He came to the courthouse dressed in a white suit. He was accompanied by his mother and father and his brothers, also all in white, and three attorneys. The attorneys didn’t wear white. One of them carried the videotape of Matthew’s “confession” of his “sins.”

  Geof and I attended the preliminary hearing.

  David Mayer was there, with Damon Montgomery on one side of him and Sheila Montgomery on the other side, at the rear of the courtroom. When we entered through the double doors at the rear and walked past the aisle where they sat, I looked down and saw that they were holding David’s hands. The two adults acknowledged us with nods and smiles; David glanced at Geof only once, then looked away.

  Geof paused there for a moment, as if he were wondering if he should say anything, even if it was only hello. The moment disappeared with the turn of David’s face away from him, so Geof merely nodded back to the Montgomerys, and we walked on toward the front.

  But when it was over, and everyone was standing up, getting ready to leave, David stopped Geof in the aisle to ask him about the investigation into his parents’ deaths.

  “We can’t prove it happened any other way,” Geof told him.

  The boy’s response was “Screw you, cop.”

  David ran out of the courtroom then, before the grandparents and the uncles had reached the door at the rear. The Montgomerys, mother and son, quickly followed him out. While I hung back, staring at Mrs. Mayer, Geof stepped toward the family of the accused, or, as he thought of them, the accusing family.

  “I’m coming after you next,” he told the elder Mayers in a clear voice. Then he stared at the sons in turn: “And each of you.”

  “Don’t talk to him,” one of the lawyers advised his clients, while the other two attorneys shepherded the Mayer men out the door.

  “Like a flock of white sheep,” Geof said on our way out.

  It took only a few calls to Port Frederick High for us to learn that David returned to school the next week. They made no mention to him of the graffiti, they slid him smoothly back into his classes, they delicately suggested that he visit the school counselor.

  His response to them was, essentially, “Screw you, too.”

  But he stayed in class. We knew, because we checked.

  His landlady called to report that David had moved back “home.”

  I avoided the Amoco station during his shift, but Joe gave me good reports on him when I pulled in at other times during the day. He was showing up, he was catching on to the job, he was, it appeared, getting on with his life.

  During that period, Geof got on with what he seemed to believe was his life’s work at that time, too—dismantling the Mayer family and Jesus’s Carpenters, down to their last tack and nail. With search warrants, he went after their videotapes without success, because the tapes had already disappeared from the shed; with arrest warrants, he went after the adults, attempting to prove they had beaten the children,but without the tapes, it was going to be difficult; with the IRS, he went after their tax-exempt status. He developed infections in his back and had to see a doctor after all. But that pain only seemed to drive him harder for his vengeance.

  Penance was the password at our house during those days.

  He could think of nothing but the Mayers. If he couldn’t stop them, he would at least make their lives miserable and expensive for as long as he could stand to concentrate on them. “For David,” he said, like a vow.

  And me? I found myself thinking mostly of Judy. It felt as if she’d gotten lost in all that had happened. She who started it all had disappeared from the story as if she were too short to be seen among all the tall men who were so loudly and violently mixing it up in every direction. It seemed as if she had vanished, along with the other women of the Mayer family, those invisible sisters-in-law and the grandmother, whose first name I didn’t know. She was still Mrs. Mayer to me, until I finally recalled that Damon Montgomery had referred to her as St. Catherine the Martyr.

  When I had glimpsed some of the women through the crack in the kitchen curtain at their farm, they hadn’t been individuals to me; they had been only figures clothed in white, a group of pale faces with no distinguishing features, the female members of the hive.

  It was true, even the other sons in the family were unknown to me as individuals. I wouldn’t have recognized Mark or John if I’d passed them on a street, and there was only a slim possibility that I’d recognize Luke from the videotapes I had seen. They, too, seemed to exist only as part of the group, the malevolent organism, that was their family.

  But it was the women who puzzled me the most. The women who’d given their children over for penance. If only I could understand even one of them …

  Finally, after stewing about it for a week, I realized that what I really wanted to understand was … Judy. Easy lay. Pregnant girl. Thief. Snitch. Liar.

  A line from William Blake’s poetry ran through my mind: “Little lamb … who made thee?”

  34

  ANNABELLE BAKER TOLD ME OVER THE phone that she still lived in the “little house” where Judy had grown up. She sounded pleased to hear from me a second time and delighted that I had known Judy even a little bit in high school. She seemed grateful that I wanted to pay my condolences to her, and she gave me the impression of being eager for a visitor.

  “You just drop by any time,” she said warmly. “I was just so busy before—”

  “I understand,” I assured her.

  Over the phone, she sounded more girlish than elderly.

  When, on an impulse the next day, I dressed up and drove to her house, I expected to meet a lonely white-haired woman, rouged and lipsticked to look younger.

  “Jenny!” she greeted me as if she’d always known me.

  The woman who opened the door to the slovenly little house was probably no more than twenty years older than I was, which would have made her only about sixteen when her daughter was born.

  “I’ve got whiskey and I’ve got beer, honey.”

  My telephone impressions of her went straight to hell.

  Rouged, she was; lonely, she wasn’t, to judge by the number of people inside her house. She squeezed me into her crowded living room, shouting at me to make herself heard over the blast of jazz music.

  “Come on in, it’s just a little ol’ Tupperware party!”

  “Tupperware?” I shouted back at her as I goggled a bit.

  “Kinda like that.” She giggled.

  “I’m sorry!” I yelled at he
r. “Are you the hostess? I’m interrupting. I could come back another time—”

  “Don’t be silly!” she screamed in my ear. “Think maybe you could use some nice little storage boxes?” She giggled loudly, as if she’d told a dirty joke. “Stick around! Got a brand new line! You might see something you want to buy!”

  I was not dressed for this: There I was in my nice pay-your-respects kind of shirtwaist dress and flat black shoes, with my hair all sweetly curled around my shoulders. And here she was: pink miniskirt, off-the-shoulder gypsy blouse, sling-back heels, and dangling earrings. It was three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, and there was definitely a party of some kind going on at Judy’s mother’s house, but if it was Tupperware, I’d eat my plastic lettuce bowl. I began to feel a little queasy, wondering just what exactly she was selling, like maybe this was one of those sexy lingerie sales parties.

  And then I smiled to myself behind her back. I’d almost forgotten: I like sexy lingerie.

  I followed her trim pink behind through the mob.

  “A babe,” Geof’s old high school friend had called her.

  No wonder the neighborhood boys had liked making bicycle deliveries for her as he’d told Geof. Now I began to wonder what they had delivered …

  Annabelle guided me past a small portable bar where several men and women stood talking, laughing, and pouring drinks.

  “Who’s this pretty doll?” one of the men asked, eyeing me.

  I had an impulse to draw myself up, purse my lips, and demand, “Are you referring to me, sir?”

  “This is Jenny,” Annabelle said brightly, with a wink for me. “She’s an old friend of my daughter’s, isn’t that nice?”

  She took me by my hand to a tiny bedroom with a single bed, a dresser, and a desk, all painted bright pink.

  “Remember this, Judy’s room?”

  “I’m sorry, I was never here, I really didn’t know—”

  “Ya’ll shoo!” She laughed at a smiling man and woman who appeared to want to come into the room and join us. The people at her party were middle-aged and older, frayed around the edges of their clothes and their smiles, a good many of them already very drunk. So far, however, the party seemed to be in the jovial phase. I decided I’d like to get out of there before that changed. Annabelle laughed again and kicked a shapely leg up. “And close the damn door on your way out!”

  She sat perkily down on the little bed and patted its cover.

  I took the invitation and eased down beside her.

  “This is so nice!” She touched my arm. “You’re the only one of Judy’s old friends to even call me. Can you imagine? And her with all those friends she had in high school! Why we had boys running in and out of this house day and night, it was so much fun!”

  The picture of Judy’s life was getting clearer to me by the second, coming into focus like a camera lens.

  “Really,” I said, leaning away from her beer breath.

  “I miss my baby girl, I really do,” Mrs. Baker confided. “We were never like mother and daughter, we were more like sisters!” She fluffed her strawberry hair. “’Cause I was so young when I had her, of course. She had her boyfriends and I had mine, and we just told each other everything. Well, until she married Ron, that is, and his parents put the kibosh on everything Judy did that was fun.” A malicious amusement came into her face. “But I guess they’re having fun now, aren’t they?”

  “Not much,” I agreed.

  She laughed in a burst of raucous pleasure.

  “Sure you don’t want a drink, Jenny, honey?”

  “Thanks, no. Mrs. Baker—”

  “Oh, honey,” she drawled, patting me, “I’m not Missus anything, I’m just Annabelle. That’s what Judy called me, I wouldn’t ever let her call me mom.” She made a face. “I’ll never look old enough to be anybody’s mother, now will I?”

  “No.” I so wanted to add “ma’am,” but I bit my lip instead.

  The door opened suddenly, and a man poked his face in. “You comin’, Belle? We going to get this thing started or not?”

  “Oh, hold your own, Percy,” she said, laughing at him. “I’ll be there. You don’t need me. You can start passing the albums around, Percy, and you know where the order blanks are.”

  He withdrew, but he left the door ajar, so the little bedroom where we sat was awash in loud music. I could feel the drums vibrating into me, up from the floor, through the mattress, into my hips.

  I heard him yell above the party noise, “Annabelle says we can start this without her! Everybody sit down, and I’ll show you some pretty little things!”

  “Tupperware?” I said to her.

  Suddenly Judy’s mother’s eyes got a guarded look in them, a sly expression, like somebody waiting to see how somebody else would react. “It’s a little party for some of my customers, Jenny.”

  “What do you sell really?”

  She licked her lower lip as she gazed appraisingly at me. “Videotapes. Magazines. Personal pleasure equipment. It’s what some people might call pornography, Jenny.”

  I swallowed.

  “Honey, all people are sexual beings.” She reached over and patted my hand. “Especially children.” She began to lightly stroke my forearm with her fingers. I kept my arm very still, although I felt the hairs rise as well as a cringing inside of me. “Why, Jenny, honey, we need to be touched and loved, especially when we’re little. Little children just naturally love their sexual feelings and their sexual organs, and they want to express those natural … uh, feelings. And people who say otherwise, why they’ve just got dirty minds, don’t you think so?”

  Carefully, I slid my arm away from her fingers, masking the movement as a need to scratch my shoulder. I disciplined my eyes, my mouth, my body, my voice, to express only a neutral kind of interest.

  “You’re holding a party to sell child pornography?”

  I smiled, or tried to, attempting to look intrigued.

  “Oh, no, honey! I’d never do anything to hurt a child! I sell things to educate people, how there’s really no such thing as pornography, why it’s all in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? A picture of a naked child is a beautiful portrait, only a pervert would find anything evil in it! We want to educate people to the truth, to protect the little children.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said, slowly feeling my way over this strange, upside-down terrain I had walked into. It was hot in her house, and there was a crowd of people just outside the door of the bedroom, and I was bigger than she was, but I felt chilled and frightened in her presence. I wanted my anger to kick in, and soon, to protect me from this vulnerable feeling I was having. I stared at her while she was talking, and I kept thinking, Judy grew up here, Judy grew up here, even as her mother was saying, “A really loving parent encourages his child to pleasure himself and to be pleasured, and a photograph of that can be as sweet as a picture of a baby playing with a kitten.”

  “Oh,” I said and swallowed again.

  She touched me again. I had to force myself not to flinch. “So you see, we are meeting here as concerned adults. We need to abolish legal penalties against the perfectly decent people who are now being railroaded for their private enjoyment that doesn’t hurt anybody. We need to legalize all expressions of sexual pleasure and beauty for the sake of our children.”

  I thought of Judy in the studio of the glamour photographer.

  Judy, who was so sexually promiscuous, who married a man whose family would punish her for her sins, over and over, and who used a camera as a tool of their vengeance. She had wept, the photographer said, and she had told him the session brought back early, painful memories. She wished she had never been born, she had said to him. The following week she had sold her business, and she had left two tapes and a pink scrapbook in a box for her son to find.

  “Mrs. … Annabelle … do you remember Dennis Clemmons?”

  “Oh, Dennis!” She dismissively waved a hand at me. “Worthless little fucker. Only good for running erran
ds. I’ve known Dennis forever. He had a crush on Judy practically from the time she was born. I hated it when they got married, but I imagine he thought he’d died and gone to heaven.”

  “Why’d she marry him?”

  “Oh, ’cause he knew, honey.”

  I took a deep breath. “Knew. What?”

  “That David wasn’t really Ron’s son.” She laughed as if that was a good one; hah, what a joke on the Mayer family.

  “Was it like blackmail, you mean?”

  “Yeah, I guess so, sort of like that. He’d been using it against her for years to get her to tell him which houses to break into and rob. Then he finally got smart and realized he might as well use it to get what he really wanted—her. He always told her he’d hurt Ron or David if she didn’t do what he wanted.”

  “I don’t understand how you can sound so calm about—”

  “He never would have!” she protested. “I always told her that! Besides, she oughtn’t to have felt so ashamed of what she did. I don’t believe in shame. I always told her, don’t be ashamed! I’m certainly not ashamed of anything I’ve ever done.”

  “Geof Bushfield …” I started to say.

  “Who?” she said. “Oh, yeah, that kid in high school she had a crush on for a while, the one who became a cop? He was a cute, wild thing—I could have gone for him myself. Just a crush, though, that’s all he was for Judy. None of those crushes ever lasted, ’cause she was really always crazy about Ron. She’d make these scrapbooks, you know? Crazy girl! I’ll swear she had scrapbooks about practically every boy she ever knew.”

  Annabelle smiled, a parody of parental fondness.

  “It was just so cute. She started putting together little albums when she was tiny, maybe only four or five years old. She was just doing it to imitate me and my work! I’d have my pictures, she’d have hers, I’d make my little albums for my customers, and she’d make a little album for herself to play with. So cute!

  “She kept ’em up, too, those scrapbooks, a long time after she was all graduated and all that. You know, if she’d see their picture in the paper, she’d get out the old scrapbooks and paste it in. I threw a lot of ’em away when she married Ron, and I threw a whole bunch more away after she died. It was fun, though, going through them one more time, seeing all those cute boys again, like it used to be.”