Murder in Little Egypt (20 page)

“You were real lucky,” Dale told him. “If your head had been turned a quarter inch either way, you’d be blind or dead. It’s amazing the way that bullet went through. You couldn’t hold a man down on the ground and shoot him and expect a bullet to pass through that way.”

There were other close calls. Knowing Sean’s enthusiasm for cowboys, Grandpa Peck took him riding one day at a friend’s farm. Sean brushed too close to the rear of a horse and got kicked in the side of the head.

By the time Peck brought him home, Sean’s face was swelling, blood and fluid were dripping from his ear and, trying to clean his wounds, Marian noticed that the top of the ear had been torn loose. She rushed him to Pearce.

At the hospital Dale cleaned and stitched up the ear without an anesthetic, to Marian’s irritation and alarm. Afterward he poked at Sean’s face and gave him a rude slap that set him crying anew and made Marian protest. Wasn’t he being rather rough on the boy?

“He’ll be all right,” Dale said. “You don’t need to call me about this again. I don’t have time to play baby-sitter. Let the kid grow up.”

Dale’s behavior upset Marian more than the injury had done. She was always hearing what a kind and considerate doctor Dale was, but he had treated Sean no better than a wounded calf.

Yet she resigned herself to hanging on, living this way indefinitely, concentrating on her children, letting Dale do as he pleased, calling on him in a crisis, as she believed she must. Eventually, she supposed, she and Dale would divorce; but she would stay on in the house until the boys were old enough to fend for themselves. She often considered moving away, but uprooting the children and relying on Dale to send money seemed too risky.

She made it through Christmas, 1969. Dale had now been gone nearly four years. He had slept in her bed only once in all that time, on the ghastly night when Martha honked in the street. For the past several months, Marian realized, apart from the period of Kevin’s injury, she no longer lay awake all night. Nothing Dale did surprised her now. If he wanted somebody like Martha for his old age, or one of the other women he appeared to get involved with, so be it. His actions were beyond reasonable explanation.

Patrick’s baby-sitter was Marian’s only paid help: The era of housekeepers and gardeners, not to speak of shopping expeditions to St. Louis and Colorado and Florida holidays, was over. Every once in a while Marian caught herself drinking too much. There were nights when, exhausted after a full day’s work and making dinner and tidying up the house, she wanted to lock herself in her room with a glass and forget the world. A drink or two brought memories of Dale and herself wishing that they could grow old together, die on the same day and have their ashes scattered on Candlewood Lake. What a man he had been then, alive with energy and fun and promise! What a son of a bitch he had become!

Was there a chance that he could change back into the man she had loved—loved still, if only he would be himself again? But then she would scold herself for being so foolish, idiotic, immature—all the other things that you were not supposed to be. And she would pour her drink down the sink and count blessings: her sons, her decent job, the house that was her security. At her age, her mother had been keeping house for a Latin teacher. All around her in Eldorado, people were living on relief.

On the afternoon of February 17, 1970, Marian was at work, teaching young women how to take a patient’s blood pressure, when she was called to the telephone. It was a member of the Eldorado Volunteer Fire Department, auxiliary branch, telling her that she had better get home. Her house was on fire.

Marian’s first thought was for Patrick, there with the baby-sitter. Patrick was fine, the man said. He had escaped with his dog. The baby-sitter was all right, too, but Marian had better get home right away.

By the time she arrived, the fire was out. She embraced Patrick, who was standing in the street with the baby-sitter and neighbors. The house was gutted, a ruin of ashes and water. The fire had started in the family room, where the fiberglass drapes went up quickly, the flames spreading upward through the paneling to the upstairs bedrooms and the roof. Had the main crew of the volunteer fighters not been busy putting out a grass fire in the countryside, they might have been able to save the house. The auxiliaries had done the best they could, but they were inexperienced and had arrived too late. More time had been lost when they had run over the hoses with their truck.

Everything was gone. In the living room the big breakfront holding Marian’s grandmother’s mother-of-pearl dishes and cut-glass bowls and vases had been smashed with an ax. Her heirlooms lay in pieces in the inches of water on the floor. At least her piano had not been damaged, Marian thought bitterly. She had sold it to pay bills a year before.

The upstairs was hopeless: all her clothes, Dale’s suits, everything belonging to the boys. And everywhere the powerful, sickening smell of ashes and water. Nothing was left of the family room, the hi-fi and record collection, the stuffed birds, Dale’s best guns. The firemen counted eighty-eight rifles, pistols, and shotguns taken from various parts of the house, most of them beyond saving. Piled on the front lawn, they looked like the end of a war.

In the downstairs hallway Marian managed to save some albums of family photographs and Dale’s love letters from their courtship, which she had stored in a cupboard beneath the Great Books of the Western World.

Dale arrived. They could not speak to each other. Kevin rushed up, holding Sean by the hand. Kevin, who was in the eighth grade, had been attending a special class at the high school and was riding in a bus when he passed within a block of the house and saw the smoke and flames. He could not convince the driver to stop. Back at the elementary school, he told the principal that his house was burning down, fetched Sean out of class and ran home with him.

“What are we going to do?” Kevin asked his mother as they stood staring at the wreckage.

“I don’t know,” Marian said. Patrick held on to her skirt and she pressed his head to her.

Patrick, then three and a half, had started the fire. He had been playing with his toys in the family room. The baby-sitter—an old woman, not Jewel Kinnear—was in the kitchen. Patrick had taken some of his toys out of their box and placed them in a paper sack. Somehow he had got hold of a book of matches and managed to strike one and set fire to the sack. The drapes caught. The baby-sitter panicked and ran into the street. Patrick’s dog led him out.

Marian had warned the baby-sitter about Patrick’s fascination with fire and had instructed her to make sure that he never got near any matches. It was bad enough that she had not been watching him closely, but to run away, leaving him in the burning house! It was a miracle that the dog had barked and Patrick had followed him out: That was what the firemen said must have happened. As for the baby-sitter, she disappeared once the firemen got there.

But Marian blamed Dale more than the baby-sitter. Marian would never have left the child at home had Dale not forced her to go to work. This was exactly the sort of thing that happened to mothers who did not stay home with their young children. She would never have had a fourth child had she known that she would be unable to care for him properly.

Everything was going to hell. She had no home, no money. She could not go to work and leave Patrick again: It would take months—years!—to reassure him that the fire was not his fault but the fault of irresponsible adults. What on earth was she going to do?

Marian and the boys stayed with Peck and Noma for the first few days. Then Kevin and Mark went to friends’ houses. Shirley Oshel, a friend who had helped Marian get the nurse’s training job, kindly offered her house while she and her husband were away in Springfield for several weeks. Marian and the boys remained at the Oshels’ for as long as they could, but Dale did nothing to have the old house torn down and a new one started. By May, Marian was stuck at the Harrisburg Motel with Patrick, the other boys living with friends once again.

Marian was beside herself. She knew that the house on Fourth Street was insured for a hundred thousand dollars: She asked Dale how long he expected her to wait to have the debris cleared and a new house built. He said he had no idea. She told him that it was a disgrace. Had he forgotten that he had a family? What was she supposed to do, go live in a boxcar? If he didn’t do something quickly, she would go out and buy a new house herself. She was desperate, depending on friends, wearing borrowed clothes; the boys looked like orphans. Dale told her that she had better not go and do something stupid. He would have to sign the papers for a new house. She would only make a fool of herself.

Dale bought a used forty-foot trailer and a new one and placed them in a lot on Scott Street, at the edge of town. Marian and Pat would have to live in one, the three older boys in the other. For the time being, Dale said.

12

BY THE END OF THE SUMMER MARIAN AND THE BOYS WERE STILL living in the trailers, and the shell of the house on Fourth Street remained standing. Marian believed that work on the new house ought to have been started by now, but nothing was happening. She had been unable to force Dale to talk to her about the plans. She did manage to wheedle him into paying Kevin’s tuition at a private school in St. Louis. He was such a good student that she wanted to give him the advantage of a better education than he could receive in Eldorado, and she hoped that being in a different atmosphere would encourage him. She was pleased when Dale agreed to come up with the money—she took it as a sign that he might be mellowing; maybe the fire had shocked him into paying more attention to his children.

But the experiment did not work out. The school, Chaminade, was too radical a change for Kevin. He lasted only three weeks before telling his mother that if she did not come to take him home, he was going to hitchhike to Florida. The Catholic brothers beat the students with coat hangers, Kevin said, and the other boys made fun of him because of his country accent and would have nothing to do with him. He returned and entered Eldorado High School.

The Cavanesses celebrated Thanksgiving in the trailers that year. Dale dropped in for an hour or so. Grandpa Peck took Marian outside and for the first time confided to her that he was worried that something was seriously the matter with Dale. He did not know what it was. Dale had returned Peck’s dogs to him one day after hunting, and Peck dared to challenge him.

“Where are you going now?” Peck asked as Dale got back into his car. “I suppose you’re going off to see that damn girlfriend of yours. Why don’t you see your own family? You’ve got a son four years old. Do you ever see him? When are you going to build them a new house? You expect them to go on living like vagabonds? I never treated your mother and you that way. Everything I had was yours.”

Peck told Marian that he had been working himself up to confront Dale. It had felt good to let it out. But Dale turned on him:

“It’s no business of yours! You take care of your own business, old man!”

Peck stepped in front of Dale’s car. He pleaded with him to calm down and get hold of himself. He was ruining his life and his children’s.

“And then do you know what he did? He just revved up that car and threw her into gear and headed right at me. I had to jump out of the way. I had to roll in the dirt to get away from him. I think he would’ve run me down. I know he would have.”

Peck looked bewildered as he told the story, and very sad. He did not know what was happening to his son, but was inclined to blame everything on Martha. If only Dale could get rid of her, everything might be all right again.

Marian believed otherwise. Whatever was eating away at Dale lay inside him, and as much as she resented Martha, Marian could not imagine that any woman could endure Dale’s behavior indefinitely. She would have to be awfully peculiar herself to countenance a man who would try to run over his own father. Sean was present one day when one of Dale’s jokes backfired against Martha—the story was confirmed by one of the hired hands at the Galatia farm, who repeated it to Mark. Standing around one afternoon near the lake with Martha, Sean and a couple of the hands, Dale had opened the trunk of his car and forced her into it—just picked Martha up by the seat of her jeans and dropped her into the trunk, slamming the lid while she screamed.

He jumped behind the wheel and backed the car up to the edge of the lake, yelling, “I’m gonna drown you now! I’m gonna drown you!” He kept on backing until the waterline reached the rear bumper and nearly covered the rear wheels. Martha was screaming. Then he threw the car into gear and gunned it, but the wheels started spinning and sinking deeper into the mud. Dale had to rush around behind and open the lid to rescue Martha from drowning. Mad as a wet hen, was how the hired hand described her. Sean said that he had been frightened, although everyone had laughed afterward.

If the tale had involved anyone else, Marian would not have believed it; but it sounded just like Dale. It reminded her of the boat in the swimming pool and of the time when Dale had made fun of another doctor’s preppy clothes and had pushed him out of a houseboat into Lake Harrisburg, ending an afternoon’s fishing.

With the chaos in their lives, Marian worried that she was losing control of her boys. Half the time she had no idea where Mark was or what he was up to; even little Patrick had taken to running off by himself every time Marian turned her back. He drew a crowd one day when somehow he managed to climb halfway up a television tower. The blackened brick of the house on Fourth Street still stood, a year after the fire. Dale must have blown the insurance money on something else. Marian was desperate.

She wrote her brother in California about her plight but tore the letter up. She was too ashamed to admit the failure of her marriage, and she was reluctant to burden Bill with her troubles. She confided in trusted old friends such as the Sullivans and the Davenports, spending hours confessing her despair, crying, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with Dale. Opening up to anyone was a last resort for Marian; she prided herself on being able to solve her own problems, but she could no longer hold back. Friends consoled her, but they could offer no solutions.