The Church of Dead Girls (16 page)

Saturday afternoon Sadie helped me rake leaves in my front yard. I was keeping an eye on her because Franklin was working.

“Aaron didn't have anything to do with Sharon's going away,” she told me. She wore a red jacket and her hair was loose.

“Why do you think so?”

“Because he didn't know her and even if he had he wouldn't have taken her. He's not like that.”

“Like what?” I had stopped raking by this point.

“Like the sort of person who would steal a child.”

“And what's that sort of person like?” I wasn't baiting Sadie; I wanted to know what she would say.

“Mean. Aaron's not mean.”

“What do you think happened to Sharon?”

“You know how people steal dogs to sell to laboratories? Maybe something like that happened to Sharon. Maybe she was taken for some kind of experiment. But you know what?”

“What?”

“I keep thinking it'd be better if she was dead, because if she's not then she's probably being tortured.”

“Maybe she'll turn up safe and sound,” I suggested.

Sadie looked at me sternly. “You don't believe that.”

F
ranklin Moore's energetic nature was severely put to the test by Sharon's disappearance. Where he had worked fifty hours a week, he now worked seventy. In addition to his duties for the
Independent,
he was also stringing for papers in Kingston, Rome, Binghamton, and Albany, writing articles for them on the missing girl. When out-of-town reporters and TV crews visited Aurelius, Franklin was someone they talked to and counted on for information and introductions to the right people. I don't know if his being so busy was hard on Sadie, but she spent more time with Mrs. Kelly and at my house. I pretended to grumble but I enjoyed it. I let Sadie plan the menu and we ate a lot of macaroni and cheese. She spent so much time with my pickled animals that their jars found a permanent place on the kitchen table. Each morning I was greeted by the doleful stare of the cow eyes.

Apart from the official investigation run by Captain Percy, there were other groups involved—church groups, Boy Scouts, and the VFW. The Pentecostals were especially active. But during the second week a larger group, calling itself the Friends of Sharon Malloy, was formed and took the place of and, in some cases, absorbed the smaller groups. It distributed posters and raised money for information as to Sharon's whereabouts and even more money for her safe return (at first the amounts were $10,000 and $20,000, though eventually they got much higher).

The group also fielded calls from people who believed they had useful information. Most were perfectly sincere. They had seen a girl who resembled Sharon or a man behaving suspiciously (usually someone in a van) and they thought it worth calling, though one wonders how many had an eye on the $10,000. There were also crank calls, even malicious calls—people calling about witchcraft or accusing Sharon of moral pollution, of being a filthy little girl who deserved what she got. But these made up a tiny fraction.

The Friends of Sharon Malloy worked closely with the police and helped with the searches, while the phone calls they answered saved the police a lot of time. They became part of a network of groups around the country sending out and receiving information about disappearances. Soon posters with the faces of other missing children began to appear around Aurelius. Some had been missing for years and many were from the West Coast.

Sandra Petoski, who taught social studies, was co-chairman of the Friends of Sharon Malloy along with Rolf Porter, who ran the Century 21 real estate office. Porter had been married to Mildred Porter, who worked in Donald Malloy's pharmacy, but they had been divorced for some years. The Friends of Sharon Malloy had hoped to enlist Sharon's parents, feeling that the doctor's presence would be a great boost, but neither Allen Malloy nor his wife wanted the constant attention, even though they gave their support. Paul Leimbach joined, though, and he brought his brother-in-law Donald, who was a great help because he could add the Malloy name to the group's attempts to raise reward money. Donald contributed a few hours a day to the group, helping with the phones and talking with people.

Donald was about five years younger than the doctor and he shared the doctor's florid Irishness, though he was heavier, rather stout in fact. And he had more hair than his brother, that same sandy red color. He had immaculate hands: thin, considering his size, with long, delicate fingers. Donald suffered terribly over his niece's disappearance, brooding and erupting in anger. Having come from large cities, both brothers felt especially betrayed to find the dangers that they had fled turn up in a small town like Aurelius. Their sister's husband, Paul Leimbach, who had been born in Aurelius, didn't share their anger, though he loved his niece and was extremely upset.

Franklin talked to Donald regularly and he took out-of-town reporters to see him as well. His anger made good copy and he often applauded Governor Pataki's reinstatement of the death penalty in New York State. Indeed, it seemed that a jail sentence, even a long one, was too light a punishment for an abductor of children. Donald posted a huge blowup of his niece's picture, at least eight feet by five feet—the same picture of Sharon standing before the garage door with a baseball glove—on the front window of his pharmacy, and though the pharmacy was certainly not the headquarters of the Friends of Sharon Malloy, the huge picture made it a focal point and one sometimes saw people taking photographs of it. Harry Martini, our principal, said the huge picture didn't do Donald Malloy's business any harm either, but his remark was dismissed as cynical. Paul Leimbach's CPA firm also had an office downtown. It, too, had a picture of Sharon in the window, though one of the regular nine-by-twelve posters.

In talking to Franklin, Donald would vent his disbelief at the psychology of someone who would abduct a child.

“Why should anyone do that?” he asked. “There's no punishment too great for such a person.”

Donald often made these remarks from behind the prescription counter of his drugstore, which was slightly raised, making him taller than anyone else in the store. As always, he had on the white jacket with his name stitched in red over his heart, and beneath it the word
Pharmacist.
His glasses had colorless frames, and whenever he made an important point, he would remove them, hold them in one hand, and tap them against the palm of the other.

Donald was able to supply Franklin with many anecdotes about Sharon: a squirrel with a broken leg that she nursed back to health, the fact that she had sold more cookies than any other girl in her Girl Scout troop; that her mother had taught her to cook and that Sharon had been responsible for dinner every Wednesday evening, usually a chicken casserole or pork chops Florentine. The effect of this information was to make Sharon much more than a face on a poster, bringing increased support and pledges of money to the Friends of Sharon Malloy. Sharon was a typical fourteen-year-old and the articles in the
Independent
about her many kindnesses and what she was like around the house led people to think of her as being like a relative of theirs. Pam Larkin, a teller at Fleet Bank, let me know several times that Sharon was exactly like her sister Betsy, who had moved to California ten years ago and now lived in Bakersfield. Sharon's idealization, if I may call it that, brought her into many families and increased the level of pain and incomprehension. It seemed that everyone remembered a fourteen-year-old like Sharon who had been important to them, and so the blow of her disappearance affected them all.

In printing these stories, Franklin saw himself as doing his duty as a journalist. His job was to give information but what his readers actually got was a diminishment, a distortion of what had taken place. I may be on shaky ground, but by idealizing Sharon and by describing her disappearance in such black-and-white terms, Franklin's articles made people think in those terms too. In the faculty lounge, I heard Frank Phelan, a history teacher, say that when ninth-century Britons caught a marauding Dane, they would skin him and nail his skin to the church door. The same, he argued, should be done to whoever abducted Sharon. That the person might be sick, mad, or crippled in some way meant nothing.

But it was more than duty: Franklin was totally engaged by his profession. He wasn't just the fellow who lived next door with his doubts, griefs, and ambitions. He became his job. I have felt this as a biology teacher, that I can be so engaged by work that my fallible side, my uncertain side, slides away and I become the role I have chosen. It is wrong to say that Franklin was less human, but events in our town increasingly allowed him to change himself into his definition of a journalist. Perhaps this is what I saw in Captain Percy and Dr. Malloy: they had been absorbed by their professions. It freed them from a burden of personal obligation—their professions made their choices.

I found it queer that Franklin left Sadie alone when a girl had just disappeared, but it wasn't him, it was his profession. And by becoming his profession, he was dealing with his fears. Even in appearance—his old sheepskin coat and Irish hat, his constant rush and clutched notebook, his untidy hair and loosened tie—even in his air of knowing the facts behind the facts, he reflected the characteristics of a small-town journalist. At such times one's vulnerabilities and fears can seem to disappear.

—

By early October everyone in the county knew that Chihani and the IIR members had been questioned about Sharon's disappearance. This created unpleasantness and, as I have said, Jason Irving's parents thought it best to withdraw him from college and take him back to Kingston. Franklin, of course, bore some responsibility for the increased attention. But the
Syracuse Post Standard
had also done a story on Chihani and the IIR, and several papers had written about the vandalism at the cemetery as well as the two bombs deposited by Oscar Herbst. Newspapers have a need to establish patterns of causality and so they argued, or perhaps suggested, that these acts were premeditated and were part of a general conspiracy by the IIR. And they were able to find city officials and even police officers who felt the same way, though Ryan Tavich and Captain Percy never publicly discussed the group.

People dislike unattached pieces of information and so they linked these bits into a conspiracy theory that began with the arrival of Chihani at the end of the previous year. The mildest proponents pointed to the IIR as a Marxist reading group that espoused Marxist theories. The more radical saw the IIR as fomenting rebellion and committing anarchist acts. They saw a clear line from Chihani's arrival to Sharon's disappearance. Indeed, the Friends of Sharon Malloy obtained photographs of Chihani, Aaron, Oscar, and the rest and sent them to other parts of the country where there had been abductions. They even sent a picture of the red Citroën. One fellow at Spencer's Texaco noted a link between the color of Chihani's Citroën and the fact that the devil wore a red suit. It was on the tip of my tongue to suggest that the same could be said of Santa Claus, but I thought it wiser not to speak. These were precarious times, and if I were seen as mocking a popular theory, then I, too, might come under suspicion.

Paula was one of those who feared the progression of events, and she experienced an increasing dread. She knew her brother's intransigence and his need to provoke. And she may have suspected his current behavior was related to the death of his mother, as if he held the town responsible for her murder. Given Aaron's character, Franklin's passionate reporting, the reaction of the townspeople, and the activities of the Friends of Sharon Malloy, Paula might have foreseen where these lines of behavior intersected, and that could have terrified her.

She also saw how people treated her because she was Aaron's sister. She felt a certain coldness in stores and on the street and how people who once spoke to her no longer did. She was a beautiful woman with great charm and energy. She was friendly to people and they tended to respond with warmth. Now this changed. Each night she took her dog for a two-mile walk through town. She regularly crossed paths with the same people and exchanged a few words. But people stopped speaking to her and she felt uncomfortable. She changed her routine, taking the dog out at different times and choosing other streets to walk along.

Even as a guidance counselor in the dean's office, she was aware of a change. The students didn't treat her differently, but she felt a coldness or curiosity on the part of the staff and custodial people—people who were from Aurelius and for whom the town was more important than the college. Paula felt them watching her and disapproving or just pointing her out as Aaron's sister. Pam Larkin at Fleet Bank was barely civil and Lois Schmidt, a produce manager at Wegmans, walked away when Paula asked some perfectly innocuous question about the lettuce. Paula knew that if she was receiving this sort of treatment, then her brother and the other members of the IIR were getting far worse.

“This is a small town,” said Franklin, when she talked to him about it. “People get excited.”

It was a shortcoming in their relationship—however fond they were of each other—that he, as a reporter, tended to state the obvious while she, as a psychologist, distrusted the obvious. They were sitting on the couch in the living room of Paula's house, the house she rented from her father. The couch was rather threadbare, with a design of blue and purple flowers. It was a couch that Patrick and Janice had bought shortly after their marriage twenty-five years ago.

“It's the fact that people jump to conclusions that bothers me,” Paula said. “And each day with no news of Sharon makes it worse.”

“Aaron has to say where he was,” said Franklin.

“He claims it has nothing to do with Sharon.”

“He can say that all he wants,” said Franklin, “but people won't believe him.”

“Talk to him some more. I'm afraid of what could happen.”

Franklin made a soothing noise. “Sharon will turn up or they'll find the person who abducted her and the whole thing will be over. People will forget about the IIR.”

“That's what you want to believe,” said Paula. “Did they ever find the person who murdered Janice? People are upset and as each day passes the pressure gets worse. Look at us—we hardly see each other anymore.”

Franklin took her hand. “I've been a lot busier and then there's Sadie. I can't leave her by herself.”

“Sadie,” said Paula, as if she was going to say something else. And then she didn't.