The last picture was from the family’s personal Christmas card of the year before. Both Herbert and Wenonah Parks were in the photograph, but the focus of the picture, its heart and soul, was the two little girls they held in their arms. Constance was clearly laughing, but Frederica seemed to stare pensively toward the lens, her tiny mouth firmly set in place, not so much frowning, as refusing to smile, her eyes oddly vacant, her arms wrapped tightly around Wenonah’s slender neck.
Rebecca noticed how my eyes lingered upon her, then spoke:
“He put her on top.”
“You mean, in the closet?”
“Yes. She was larger than Constance, but he stacked her on top, and folded her hands over her chest. The others were just sprawled across the closet floor.”
I remembered how my father had done something odd as well, how he’d washed my mother’s body and arranged it carefully on the bed while leaving Laura and Jamie to lie in their ugly, smelly pools of coagulating blood. And as I remembered it, my eyes drifted back to Frederica, and suddenly I thought I knew why she had clung so desperately to her mother in the Christmas card photo, why she had, as George McFadden had mentioned, “held back” from running heedlessly to her father on the day he had assigned to kill her.
“It was because she knew,” I said, almost to myself, but loud enough for Rebecca to hear me.
She looked at me curiously. “Knew what?”
That it was coming,” I told her, “that her father was going to kill them.” I looked at her pointedly. There must always be someone who knows what’s about to happen, don’t you think? Not everyone can be entirely in the dark.”
“Why not?” Rebecca asked.
“Because so much is going on,” I said. “In the family, I mean. Surely someone has to sense it.”
Rebecca looked at me squarely. “Did you?” “No.”
“Did Laura or Jamie?”
It was odd to hear their names again, to hear them spoken of as if they once had actually existed, had lived and observed the life around them, rather than simply as the faceless victims of my father’s crime.
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think so.”
“And your mother?”
It was strange, but at that moment, I suddenly suspected that somehow, through all the mists that must have clouded and thwarted and befuddled her, “poor Dottie” must have known that my father was approaching some dreadful line, and that if he crossed it, he might kill us all.
“She might have known,” I said quietly.
“What makes you think so?”
A memory invaded me, and I recalled how often she’d gone off to her bedroom, closed the door and remained there for hours, as if locking herself away from him, from us, from whatever it was she could feel heating the air inside the little mock Tudor house on McDonald Drive.
“She spent a lot of time in the bedroom,” I told Rebecca.
Even as I said it, I wondered what dreadful possibilities my mother might have envisioned while she lay alone on her bed. In her mind, had she ever seen him coming up the stairs, the shotgun in his hand? And if she had glimpsed such a thing, had she ever considered packing us into the car and taking us away before it was too late?
“But if she did suspect something,” I said, “she didn’t do anything about it.”
Except to let us drift, I thought with a sudden bitterness, let us slide into destruction because she was unable to summon up even enough will to throw off her red housedress, gather us into the station wagon, and take us away from him.
As all of this swept over me, I found that I suddenly blamed my mother as much as, maybe even more than, I blamed my father. The cool rancor and cruelty of my next remark amazed me.
“My mother was very weak,” I said. “She was a nothing. She could have left him, but she didn’t.”
“Had he ever been violent with her?” Rebecca asked.
“No.”
“With any of you?”
“No, never,” I said. “He would sometimes get irritated. Especially with Jamie. But he never raised his hand against any of us.”
To my surprise, Rebecca didn’t ask any more questions. Instead, she simply handed me another envelope.
“This is the last one,” she said.
I took the envelope from her and read it quietly.
Hollis Donald Townsend. Age, forty-four.
On July 12, 1961, Hollis Townsend, a certified public accountant and avid foreign-stamp collector who lived and worked in Phoenix, Arizona, returned with his family from a two-week vacation at Yellowstone National Park. A neighbor, Sally Miller, who came out to welcome them back, placed the time at 3:35 P.M. For the next few minutes, while Hollis Town-send unpacked the car, she spoke to his wife, Mary Townsend, thirty-seven. During this brief time, as she later told police, the Townsend children, Karen, five, and Sheila, eight, had played with the family dog, a large collie named Samson.
Nearly nine hours later, at around midnight, Mrs. Miller was awakened by a single shot, followed rapidly by two others. She rose, walked to her window, glanced out, and saw Hollis Townsend as he stepped out of the house, turned left, and headed for the garage. He had a large suitcase, one which appeared to be very heavy, since Townsend needed both hands to drag, rather than carry, it across the lawn. He was dressed in the same beige trousers and short-sleeved knit shirt he’d been wearing earlier in the day, an indication that he had not gone to bed, although, as Mrs. Miller told police, all the lights in the house had been off for more than two hours.
What had he done in that darkness?
Rebecca’s summation gave a short but graphic answer. For one thing, he’d written several letters, all of which he’d eventually thrown into the kitchen wastebasket. The letters, written in Townsend’s pinched script, alluded to an “inadequacy” which he had to face, the inadequacy, as he put it, “of life, of what I can’t find in it somehow.”
At some other point during the night, Townsend had poured gasoline in every room in the house, drenching carpets and furniture, and leaving a trail which began in the kitchen, then led through the rooms on the ground floor before heading up the stairs to where his family lay sleeping obliviously. At the last moment, however, he had not lit a match, but had simply dragged his enormous suitcase out across the lawn, leaving the house intact behind him, the bodies of his wife and two children still lying in their own beds.
Each had been shot one time. Karen and Sheila had been shot in the back of the head, Mary through the forehead, presumably because, unlike her daughters, she slept on her back rather than her stomach.
Only two photographs were attached. The first showed Hollis Townsend beside the family swimming pool. He was wearing only a bathing suit, and he appeared to be beating his breasts comically, in a mocking imitation of Tarzan.
The second photograph was of Mary Townsend. She was kneeling down, her arms around her small daughters. It was a picture that had undoubtedly been taken during the family vacation at Yellowstone. Old Faithful, the park’s most famous geyser, could be seen exploding from a cloud of steam behind them.
Without comment, I returned the summation and photographs to their envelope and handed it to Rebecca. She took them from my hand, placed them in her briefcase.
“I think that’s enough for tonight,” she said abruptly.
I was surprised. “I have more time,” I told her.
She began to gather her things together. “I’d rather start fresh next time,” she said. The questions I want to ask you would take a long time to answer, and I’d rather not go into them now.” She closed the briefcase and started to rise.
I touched her hand. “Why my father?” I asked. “Why did you pick him?”