She promised, of course, and then he confided that he'd undertaken an undercover investigation on behalf of a wealthy woman, a Mrs. Fulraine, who'd hired him to tutor and coach her sons. This woman's daughter had been snatched by her au pair years before and never seen again. Because the au pair had performed in pornographic films, there was reason to believe pornographers had been behind the snatch. Tom told her that basically he was pretending to be a pedophile purchasing pedophiliac material, letting it be known to contacts he made along the way that he was interested in commissioning a home movie of a little blond girl performing sexual acts on adults.
It was a dangerous mission, first because the people he was meeting were extremely suspicious, and second, because, being a teacher, he was putting his career on the line. If the pornographers decided he was a penetration agent, they might kill him to keep him from talking. And if anyone connected with Hayes found out what he was doing, he'd probably be blackballed from teaching for life.
"But how can you do this?" Shoshana demanded. "Why you and not the cops? And who is this woman to you that you'd take such a risk for her?"
He lied to her then, told her the woman was paying him a large sum for his help. Also that the police had failed her and so had the private detectives she'd hired, and that she felt that on account of his manner and looks he had a better chance of getting inside than a pro.
"He told me the people he was meeting with, a couple in their forties, looked like ordinary folks leading conventional suburban lives. It bothered him that they didn't look as he'd expected, weren't the sleazy types you imagine when you think of kiddie porn. When he'd started his search, haunting the porn strip on DaVinci, he'd met his share of the latter – burly, bearded, intimidating guys who wore soiled tanktops and flaunted tattoos. But the couple he'd linked up with, serious purveyors of hardcore child porn, looked and talked like teaching assistants at Calista State."
"In fact they ran a legitimate business making promotional films. Their whole approach was highly professional. They asked him to describe exactly which acts he wished to see performed. Their manner appalled him – sympathetic smiles, soft, inquiring voices conveying their eagerness to create a customized filmed fantasy for his ‘viewing pleasure.’
"They inquired whether he'd prefer moody lighting or hard, raw light; whether he wished the little girl's hair to be curly or straight; whether he wanted to see her eyes while she performed or would be content just to see the back of her head; whether the girl should act slutty and wear lipstick, or behave like a little schoolgirl, stripping guilelessly out of a jumper or school uniform."
"After he made his initial deposit, ten thousand dollars supplied to him in cash by Mrs. Fulraine, he was shown an album of photos of underage girls from which he was to choose one to play the starring role. Hoping against hope, he asked if he could take the album home to study the pictures before making a decision. ‘Sorry, he was told, ‘the casting album is super-sensitive; it never leaves the premises.’"
"Casting album! The blandness of that phrase made the transaction all the more horrifying. Better, he thought, to deal with the burly porn shop proprietors than this smarmy, cinema-savvy couple. And yet he desperately needed that album, for if it contained a photo of Mrs. Fulraine's stolen child, then everything he was going through would be justified."
He was now at the point, he told Shoshana, where he had to choose a girl from the album and also make a large second payment. The couple was pressuring him. Just the previous week, they'd told him that the moment had passed when he could back out. ‘It's what we call pay-or-play,’ they explained.
"Tom told me he'd passed all this on to Mrs. Fulraine, told her he'd gone as far with it as he could. It was now up to her to bring in the police. But if for some reason she didn't or didn't provide the thirty-thousand-dollar balance due on the film, then he would be in terrible trouble, for the couple had let him know that their backers could be pretty unpleasant when collecting an unpaid debt."
"I remember how, after we talked, we went out to the garage behind the house, sat against the back wall, and shared a joint. I don't think we ever felt closer. I was just so relieved he wasn't a pedophile it didn't occur to me to question his story. I remember we got really stoned, hugged one another, and then both of us wept."
I sit back. Tom's mysterious utterances to Susan Pettibone when she called him late at night suddenly started making sense: ‘Did he do it yet?’; ‘Putting an end to some really bad business’; ‘Finally done with’; and ‘I think there's going to be a fire.’ All this fits with the Times-Dispatch article about the house fire on Thistle Ridge, the two bound-to-the-bed bodies in the basement and ‘the sordid nature’ of unspecified items found at the site. Suddenly various disparate thoughts I've had snap together into a pattern, like iron filings on a piece of paper suddenly arranging themselves when a magnet is passed beneath.
Shoshana continues: "I was in my living room studying when I heard about the killings. It was a little after 6 p.m.. One of the other kids in the house came rushing up the stairs. ‘Tom Jessup's been killed!’ he yelled. ‘It's on TV. He and some society lady were shot together in a motel!’
"I ran downstairs. Everyone in the house had gathered in the living room. The scene on TV was chaotic. Reporters were shoving microphones into peoples' faces. A detective was being interviewed. He said the two were lovers, that their naked bodies had been found entwined, that they'd been meeting afternoons at the motel for months. Also that the woman was related to the family that owned Fulraine Steel and that the young man had been her sons' teacher at the exclusive Hayes School."
"I think that's when I started to go crazy." Shoshana's voice is level-steady now. "I mean really crazy, not just nutty like before. I remember standing in the back of that room watching that incredible report, suddenly understanding that Tom had lied to me for months – that he wasn't gay, never had been, that he'd been involved with this woman, that they'd been fucking in some sleazy motel. Also that whatever he'd done for her with the child pornographers had been done not for money but for love."
"I don't remember much after that… except that I didn't stay glued to the TV like everybody else. Instead I went right up to Tom's room, let myself in, went straight to his bureau, pulled out all the kiddie-porn material, gathered it all into a garbage bag, took it downstairs, then stuffed it into the trash pail outside the kitchen door.
"I think I was in some kind of trance state. Instinct took over. I felt this need to protect Tom, make sure no one could ever say that he was bad. Going into his room all those times I'd betrayed his trust, just as he'd betrayed mine with his lies. In some strange way, I felt I'd now squared our accounts. I couldn't hate him for his deception without also hating myself. But what I could do was protect him, protect his reputation, his good name."
Two days later, she suffered a complete mental collapse. She wept uncontrollably, refused to eat, screamed in the middle of the night, and in the morning couldn't bring herself to get out of bed. Someone in the house phoned her parents. Her father, an accountant, drove down from Detroit, packed up her stuff, helped her into his car, and drove her home. A week later on the advice of her family doctor, Shoshana Bach was admitted to the Rand-Barloff Clinic, a private mental hospital in Bloomfield Hills.
She spent a year there recovering her sanity and sense of self. She underwent a regime of electroshock treatments and intensive individual and group psychotherapy. She took classes in pottery making and expressive dance, also took up croquet and became clinic champion. She met a young man her age, equally fragile, and embarked upon an affair. The best part of the year were her sessions with Dr. Deborah Barloff, a Jungian analyst, daughter of the clinic director, who helped her work through her feelings of guilt and betrayal while providing her with a feminist perspective, a prism through which she eventually came to view herself as attractive and her alleged ‘inadequacy’ as bogus.