Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls (30 page)

I touch his face tenderly with one finger. Sad, I think, it's all so damn sad.

On a whim, I check Facebook for Harold Novak—a very popular name, it seems. One is a nuclear physicist. Another is a neurosurgeon. Yet another is a professor of economics at Tufts. I think I can rule them all out. None of their faces looks right.

Come to think of it, why would Buddy join Facebook? I doubt he wants to find old friends from high school.

I sit and watch the snow fall. Five inches on the ground already and more to come. In the tree outside my window, a bluejay hops from branch to branch, his feathers plumped against the cold and the snow. I should fill the bird feeder, but I hate to leave the warm house.

I try the phone book. Fifteen Harold Novaks live in the Baltimore area. I have a load of laundry in the washing machine, an unfinished painting to finish, a driveway to shovel, but finding Buddy suddenly seems more important than any of these.

I call the first Harold Novak. I can tell by the voice on his answering machine he's not Buddy, not with that New York accent. The second one tells me he's on the no call list and hangs up. He doesn't sound like Buddy either. The third one says he wishes he was the Buddy I'm looking for and asks me if I'd like to meet him for coffee at the Starbucks on Reistertown Road, across the street from a Shell station. I say no thanks and go on to the next. And the next and the one after that until I get to the thirteenth Harold Novak.

When I tell Harold number thirteen who I am and why I'm calling, there's a long silence.

"Hello," I say again, "are you still there?"

"Yeah," he says, and a jolt goes through me. It's Buddy. I know it is.

"Buddy?" I whisper.

"Yeah." His voice is flat, lifeless.

"It's me," I say, "Nora Cunningham."

"I know. You already said."

I'm sixteen again, a girl calling a boy, something I never did in 1956. Awkward, clumsy, disappointed that he's obviously not happy to hear from me, I stumble on. "Did you see the
Sun
this morning?"

"Yeah, as a matter of fact I did."

"Well, what do you think? Do you remember those boys?"

"Nora, it's been fifty years. What the hell difference does it make who killed them? It's not going to change a goddamn thing."

I hear bitterness in his voice, anger. I wonder what kind of man he is. I press the receiver to my ear and wish I hadn't tried to find him. A bad idea, like tossing a lit match into a gasoline can that might not be empty after all. "I'm sorry I bothered you," I say.

He's silent again. Should I hang up? The bluejay cocks his head at me and flies away, a flash of color in the snow.

"You still live in Elmgrove?" he asks.

"Federal Hill," I say.

"In the city, huh?"

"Yes."

"You're not worried about crime?"

"Crime can happen anywhere."

"Yeah."

Silence stretches between us. I'm in Federal Hill, he's in Pikesville, but we're both in the park again, the day we can't escape.

The bluejay returns. My cat sees him and makes a chittering sound. His tail lashes back and forth. He sings softly to the bird, invites him inside, lies about his intentions.

"I wanted to be sure you knew someone confessed," I say. "I thought you'd be glad."

"There's no proof that woman told the truth," he says. "Remember, two or three crazies confessed back in the fifties."

"But Buddy," I say, "the poem, how about the poem? How could she know about it if the real killer didn't tell her?"

He sighs so loudly I can almost feel his breath in my ear. "Just ask anybody—Ellie, Charlie, Paul—they'll say I did it. Even now, even today, no matter what the
Sun
says, no matter what the cops think, those SOBs made up their minds in 1956 and they'll believe it till the day they die. They have their teeth in me like a dog with a rat. They'd break my neck if they could."

His voice has come to life. He sounds like Buddy now, eighteen years old, scared and mad.

"I haven't seen or heard from any of them for years now," I tell him. "They all drifted away. Or maybe it was just me. Maybe I did the drifting." I shrug and stroke the cat, who has scared the bird away and needs comforting.

After a short silence, Buddy says, "We never went to that movie." He laughs, maybe to show it's not a big deal.

"No," I say, "you never called me." I laugh, too. No big deal here either.

"While I was in the navy, my parents moved to Florida. What was the point of going to Elmgrove?"

There's another silence.

"Are you married?" Buddy asks.

"Twice," I say. "And twice divorced."

"Got you beat," he says. "Married three times, divorced three times." He says it lightly. Even laughs. Three divorces. What the hell. No big deal.

"What do you do now?"

"I ran a linotype machine for the
Sun
until they computerized everything. Lucky for me it was just about time to retire." He pauses and I know he's lighting a cigarette. I can see it dangling from the corner of his mouth in that tough-guy way of his. It's hard to believe he doesn't still wear his hair in a ducktail. Even harder to believe he might be bald, he might be fat, he might have a beard or need a shave.

"Now I take pictures," he says, "just a hobby, but some are pretty damn good. My daughter framed a bunch of my best ones and hung them all over her house. It's like a goddamn museum or something."

He takes a puff on his cigarette and coughs. "But what about you? Did you go to that art school in Baltimore?"

I shake my head and say, "Towson State." I wonder if he can tell I'm still disappointed. "I ended up teaching art at Eastern." Another disappointment, but after a while I got used to it, and being a teacher wasn't so bad. "I'm retired now." Something that still surprises me when I say it. How can I be old enough to retire?

"I haven't seen Eastern since I joined the navy," he says.

"It's changed a lot."

"Not enough for me. It could look like the Taj Mahal and I'd still hate it." I hear him inhale, exhale. "Do you still go around asking people if they believe in God?"

Surprised he remembers, I laugh. "I keep things like that to myself now." I think of telling him I'm a lapsed pantheist, but only Charlie would get the allusion.

He coughs again. "You want to get together sometime, meet for coffee maybe, see that movie?" He might not look like he did then, but he certainly sounds the same. A little hesitant, a little unsure.

I gaze into my cat's wise eyes. He blinks slowly and stretches, extending his claws for a moment. Then he settles into my lap as if he has no intention of ever leaving. The snow is still falling, coming down thick and heavy, blanketing the house.

"Sure," I say.

We agree on the Daily Grind, a coffee place in Fells Point. A week from today. At ten a.m.

After I hang up, I stroke my cat's side. His body is warm, strong, relaxed. He purrs softly. "I wish you'd bring me a cup of coffee," I tell him.

His ear twitches but he remains where he is.

The snow continues to fall, six inches, seven inches, they've given up predicting how much to expect.

O
N
a June morning in 1955, two teenage girls were shot and killed in a suburban park near Washington, D.C. Because of my friendship with a girl in the neighborhood, I knew them both. I was at my friend's house when the bodies were discovered. Hearing sirens, we went outside and saw police cars and ambulances speeding into the park across the street. My friend talked me into following them to find out what was going on. Just as we reached the edge of the woods, a group of neighborhood kids ran toward us screaming and crying, "They're dead, they're dead."

I am returned to that moment every time I think about it. I feel the fear I felt then. I remember the screaming kids, the sirens. The world spins, my knees turn to water, my friend and I run away from her house toward mine, a mile or so away. We see a boy we know and he asks what's wrong, we look like we've seen a ghost. My friend says, "If we've seen a ghost, you know whose it is."

Bewildered, I run after her. I ask her why she said that and she tells me he did it, he killed them, she saw him in the park on her way to school. She had overslept that morning, and her friends went on to school without her. Ten minutes later, she met the boy on the bridge near the place where the bodies had been hidden. He drove her to school.

She shudders. If she'd been on time, if she'd been with her friends, he would have killed her, too.

The police took the boy in for questioning. They held him for more than forty-eight hours without charging him, they gave him lie detector tests (which he passed), they interrogated him about the gun. This happened in 1955, eleven years before the Miranda Warning was enacted in 1966.

Reluctantly, the police let him go. There was no evidence. The gun was never found. However, most of the people in his community believed the boy was guilty. He joined the navy and left town.

The unsolved murders dominated the front pages of the
Washington Post
and the
Washington Evening Star
for the rest of June. World news was elbowed aside. Important events moved to the second and third pages. As the investigation dragged on, the story slowly receded from the front pages and eventually disappeared from the news, but not from people's memories. Every now and then, as the years passed, follow-up stories appeared, including one in which a woman claimed her dead husband's brother had murdered the two girls.

At my fiftieth high school reunion, the subject came up. No one believed the woman's story but me. The people I was with still believed the boy did it.

The murder, like all murders, made a profound impact on everyone who knew the girls, and even on those who didn't know them. I'm not the only one who has never forgotten a single detail of that morning in the park.

That's what has made it so hard to write this novel. I've been struggling with it for more than thirty years now. How do you fictionalize an event that was extremely painful for people close to the victims? How do you avoid presenting characters in a way their families might dislike?

Finally I decided to begin with the actual event but fictionalize the story surrounding it. The characters do not reflect actual people. They spring from my imagination, as do many of the story's events. Although I'd been to parties in the neighborhood, I was not at the party the night before the murders. I'm still ashamed that I was too scared of death to go to either funeral.

My main connection with the neighborhood was my friend. She knew both girls much better than I did. It's her story far more than mine.

Before the murders, the boy and I took a high school photography class together. He signed my yearbook. I saw him at parties. I never talked to him after the murders, not then, not now, but I saw him once at a high school homecoming dance in the fall of 1955. Word spread around the gym—"He's here, the boy who killed them." Everyone rushed to the doors, faces ugly, full of anger, looking for him, hating him. I glimpsed someone in a sailor suit, a mob of kids following him, yelling at him to get out. How does it feel to be accused of a crime you did not commit?

In creating Buddy Novak, I've tried to explore the impact of being accused of murder.

 

I've been truthful about my memories of my own teenage life and the thoughts and fears and worries the murder aroused. It was definitely the beginning of my religious doubts. Nora's experience with the priest is based on a similar experience of my own.

Like Nora, I kept my doubts from my mother until I was in college and could no longer pretend to believe.

Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls
is an attempt to exorcise some of my ghosts. I sincerely hope no one thinks the characters in this story are meant to be anything but fictional. They are simply teenagers in a story that has haunted me for many years.