The Inverted Forest (33 page)

Not everything the paralegal sent them could be called a revelation, but each item was, in its own way, interesting to Marcy. The Kindermann
Forest camp van was a 1992 GMC Rally Wagon with 112,000 miles on the odometer. The air temperature the night and approximate time of the murder was seventy-eight degrees. The sky had been clear, the moon in its waxing crescent phase. Insignificant details maybe, but they stirred her imagination. Then came the coroner’s report. Christopher Waterhouse’s recovered body had weighed one hundred and eighty-three pounds. At least six of his ribs had been broken. Two of these broken ribs had punctured his lungs. His abrasions numbered in the dozens. He’d died of traumatic asphyxiation. There were details from the coroner’s report that Dr. Lammers said he’d better keep to himself. (Though he did tell her that the attack on Christopher Waterhouse was mostly likely an act of rage, and not anything sexual.) At the very least Marcy wanted to know where and in what condition Christopher’s body had been found. In a shallow creek bed, Dr. Lammers explained. A quarter mile deep into the forest. He’d been dropped into the creek and covered with large slabs of flagstone. Most likely he’d been dead prior to this makeshift burial.

How horrible it was to know this. Now she had to strictly guard her thoughts. If not, her anxious mind would pull back the screen of forest branches and see Christopher’s pale and muddied body mounded with stones.

She was more cautious then about which documents she allowed herself to look at. Court petitions and pretrial motions? Yes, fine. No problem. The crime scene reports from Ellsinore Chief of Police David Pressy and from the Missouri State Highway Patrol? No thank you. Over the course of three months the evidence kept coming. It wasn’t exactly an orderly progression. Several of the bureaus and departments to which the paralegal applied gave up their documents in miserly increments.

Sometimes Marcy wondered: Were they being purposefully
obstructed? She phoned and asked the paralegal if someone might be working behind the scenes to keep this evidence from reaching them.

No, no, the paralegal said. Any difficulties they’d encountered had to do with authorizations and filing procedures. The remedy for this was always the same: time and persistence. For example, the paralegal had needed to use a delicate brand of persuasion when it came to the case files belonging to Shannon County Prosecuting Attorney Henry Masner. And for good reason. Henry Masner had died in office three years earlier. Portions of his files were stored in the Shannon County Courthouse, the town hall basement, and Mr. Masner’s home office. He was still, fortunately, an admired figure in Shannon County. On his behalf, the county’s single records clerk, Mrs. Denita Medlock, was willing to do a respectful search of his files. She was seventy-nine years old. Her search took time.

But what riches Mrs. Medlock discovered. In one of Mr. Masner’s files was a time allotment sheet that detailed the work hours he’d put in building a second-degree murder case against Wyatt Huddy. This would have been an almost inconsequential document, yet it revealed that during the spring of 1997 he’d had five meetings with Camp Nurse Harriet Foster at the Shannon County Courthouse. Five meetings! This meant that Harriet Foster had driven down from St. Louis on five separate occasions to speak with Mr. Masner, the attorney assigned to prosecute Wyatt Huddy. You had to wonder what topics had been discussed at these meetings. Or, the better question, what agenda Harriet Foster had been pushing.

It took six weeks for the records clerk Denita Medlock to uncover and pass along a document that answered this question: a typed statement from Harriet Foster seven pages long, signed and notarized and submitted in the early summer of 1997 to both the prosecuting and defending attorneys.

And what had she, Marcy Bittman, been doing while Harriet Foster met with attorneys and composed her elaborate statement? Marcy had been away at a private college in rural Illinois earning a degree in public relations. This was a very fortunate thing. She adored her school. And she loved the other young women who were her sisters at the sorority. But she was also a changed person. Most evenings she’d pack up her school textbooks and climb to the higher floors of the college library and find a window-side table from which to look out over the darkening campus. It was as if she were receiving, for the first time in her life, a strange, one-of-a-kind feeling. If she’d known how, she would have drawn a bleak picture or written a sad song for Christopher Waterhouse. But that was an absurd notion. She wasn’t a singer or an artist. She’d always known herself to be an extremely positive person—a bright personality, happy-go-lucky, caring, purposeful, full of joy. And there she was those evenings at the library window receiving the first stirrings of a lonesome ache she’d later learn to call “getting moony.”

According to her statement, Harriet Foster believed—was convinced, in fact—that Christopher had manipulated a prize drawing so that he would have a reasonable excuse to be alone with the state hospital camper Evie Hicks; so he might bring her into the camp van and drive her out beyond the confines of Kindermann Forest. His intention was to find a secluded area where he could molest or rape her. Wyatt Huddy had prevented this from happening.

The charge wasn’t a complete shock to Marcy. (There’d been ugly rumors in the days following Wyatt’s arrest.) But lurking just beneath the calm tone of this statement was an awful insinuation.

Yes, Harriet Foster admitted. What happened to Christopher Waterhouse was tragic. He’d died a violent and terrifying death. She’d been devastated to learn of it. More so, she’d been overwhelmed with
remorse to realize she’d set the tragedy in motion by sending Wyatt Huddy out alone to search for the camp van.

But beneath Harriet Foster’s supposed remorse, her apology—if that’s what it was—lay another line of reasoning, unaddressed, unwritten. What Wyatt Huddy had done upon finding the camp van may not have been wise or justified. But it may have been necessary.

How wildly unfair this was. It was enraging, really, for Marcy to have to consider this accusation. To read the statement was to be lectured to in a tone that was deliberate and vaguely superior. Sentence by sentence, over the course of seven single-spaced pages, it all added up to a terrible and sprawling lie. (But—and this was hard to admit—she admired the statement, too. The patience it took to compose something this long and clear, the hours of hard work. It made you wonder: Where did a black nurse from the inner city learn to write this way?) If possible, she’d track Harriet Foster down and wave a mangled copy of the statement in her bewildered face.
Look here, God damn it. I know what you’re up to. I know what you’re trying to pull here.

All of which made for a very satisfying fantasy, but here at the kitchen table, reading the statement for the second and third times, she was more inclined to scream. She didn’t dare. Not in Dr. Lammers’s cool presence. With Dr. Lammers all the evidence had to be dispassionately considered. The pages of Harriet Foster’s statement needed to be set out before them on the table.
All right then,
they had to say and sip from their warm mugs of raspberry herbal tea.
Let’s take a moment and break down the argument piece by piece.

For instance . . .

Less than an hour before the murder, Harriet Foster claimed to have stopped Christopher Waterhouse and Evie Hicks in the camp van. She said she’d tried her best to convince Christopher to leave Evie Hicks with her and drive to the Ellsinore Dairy Queen alone. But he could not be persuaded. He’d been extremely patient and
polite, but this was a pretense; he barely listened to her. His attention was elsewhere. He put the van in gear and drove off. She ran after him. At the camp gate he turned right instead of left, and she knew then, beyond any doubt, that he did not intend to take Evie Hicks to Ellsinore. Instead he was driving east along County Road H looking for an isolated place to park the van.

It was terrifying, she said, to realize his true intentions. There was no other counselor, no other staff member, whom Harriet could find to help her. She ran back to the infirmary. Desperate as she was, she made an appeal to one of the campers who happened to be staying that night in the infirmary: Wyatt Huddy, large, powerful, obedient.

But this made no sense at all. In her previous affidavit—and in the affidavits she’d no doubt helped gather from others—Harriet Foster had insisted Wyatt Huddy showed all the signs and symptoms of a retarded man. Now she was saying she’d chosen him to be her hero?

Another sip of tea. A shuffling of papers.

“Not likely,” Marcy said, and Dr. Lammers nodded, perhaps in agreement.

When you got right down to it, there was very little that could pass for evidence in Harriet Foster’s long statement. She saw this. Or she noticed that.
Christopher Waterhouse had rigged a prize drawing. He’d turned right on County Road H.
But could any of it be verified? According to Harriet Foster, two and half hours after Wyatt had gone off in search of Christopher, he’d come back to the infirmary in the camp van. Harriet had run out and thrown open the van door. And what had she seen? Wyatt Huddy scratched and disheveled and smeared with dirt. Evie Hicks strapped naked onto the bench of the van, her clothes piled beside her. She had the dazed look of someone who’d undergone a terrible ordeal. This was Harriet’s evidence that Christopher had molested or raped her.

But really, Marcy insisted, it was important to look beyond Harriet’s
easy explanations. Why not suspect Wyatt Huddy of this attack? He’d already proved himself to be a murderer.

“Yes, that’s right,” Dr. Lammers said evenly. “It’s a valid possibility.”

Marcy was so very glad to hear him admit this. But honestly, she’d’ve liked to have noticed a shred of intensity in his reaction, a trace of passion, for goodness’ sake. Without it, she worried that the cool sincerity of Harriet Foster’s statement had had its effect.

They sifted through other documents. There were lesser topics to discuss. What had Marcy thought of the camp management? Linda Rucker? Very average, Marcy said. And what about Schuller Kindermann? Oh, there was something wonderful about Mr. Kindermann, she said, though she couldn’t at the moment articulate what it was. Instead she rose and put a half dozen cinnamon scones in the toaster oven. She was bundling up and filing away documents when the oven buzzer went off.