The fate of the girls didn't much interest him. He read about them once in a while, and heard them talked about, but out of sight for William was pretty much out of mind. There were better things to watch. With the town in disarray he had much to spy on: casual seductions and abject slavery; furies; beatings; bloody-nosed farewells. One day, he thought, I'll write all of this down. It'll be called Witt's Book, and everyone in it will know, when it's published, that their secrets all belong to me.
When, on the infrequent occasions he did think of the girls' present condition, it was thoughts of Arleen he favored, simply because she was in a hospital where he couldn't see her even if he wanted to, and his powerlessness, as for every voyeur, was a spur. She was sick in the head, he'd heard, and nobody quite knew why. She wanted men to come to her all the time, she wanted babies the way the others had babies, but she couldn't and that was why she was sick. His curiosity concerning her died, however, when he overheard somebody report that the girl had lost all trace of her glamour.
"She looks half dead" was the way he'd heard it put. "Drugged and dead."
After that, it was as if Arleen Farrell no longer existed, except as a beautiful vision, shedding her clothes on the edge of a silver lake. Of what that lake had done to her he cleansed his mind thoroughly.
Unfortunately the wombs of the quartet's remaining members could not cast the experience and its consequence out except as a bawling reality, which new stage in the humiliation of Palomo Grove began on April 2nd, when the first of the League of Virgins gave birth.
Howard Ralph Katz was born to his eighteen-year-old mother Trudi at 3:46 a.m., by cesarean section. He was frail, weighing a mere four pounds and two ounces when he first saw the light of the delivery room. A child, it was agreed, who resembled his mother, for which his grandparents were duly grateful given that they had no clue as to the father. Howard had Trudi's dark, deep-set eyes, and a spiral skull cap of brown hair, even at birth. Like his mother, who had also been premature, he had to fight for every breath during the first six days of his life, after which he strengthened quickly. On April 19th Trudi brought her son back to Palomo Grove, to nurse him in the place she knew best.
Two weeks after Howard Katz saw the light, the second of the League of Virgins gave birth. This time there was something more for the press to elaborate on than the production of a sickly baby boy. Joyce McGuire gave birth to twins, one of each, born within a minute of each other in a perfectly uncomplicated fashion. She named them Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray, names she'd chosen (though she would never admit this, not to the end of her days) because they had two fathers: one in Randy Krentzman, one in the lake. Three, if she counted their Father in Heaven, though she feared he'd long passed her over in favor of more compatible souls.
Just over a week after the birth of the McGuire twins Carolyn also produced twins, boy and girl, but the boy was delivered dead. The girl, who was big-boned and strong, was named Linda. With her birth the saga of the League of Vir-gins seemed to have reached its natural conclusion. The funeral of Carolyn's other child drew a small audience, but otherwise the four families were left alone. Too much alone in fact. Friends ceased to call; acquaintances denied ever having known them. The story of the League of Virgins had besmirched Palomo Grove's good name, and despite the profit the town had earned from the scandal there was now a general desire to forget that the incident had ever occurred.
Pained by the rejection they sensed from every side the Katz family made plans to leave the Grove and return to Alan Katz's home city, Chicago. They sold their home in late June to an out-of-towner who got a bargain, a fine property and a reputation in one fell swoop. The Katz family were gone two weeks later.
It proved to be good timing. Had they delayed their departure by a few more days they would have been caught up in the last tragedy of the League's story. On the evening of July 26th the Hotchkiss family went out for a short while, leaving Carolyn at home with baby Linda. They stayed out longer than they intended, and it was well after midnight, and therefore the 27th, when they got back. Carolyn had celebrated the anniversary of her swim by smothering her daughter and taking her own life. She had left a suicide note, which explained, with the same chilling detachment the girl had used to talk of the San Andreas Fault, that Arleen Farrell's story had been true all along. They had gone swimming. They had been attacked. To this day she did not know what by, but she had sensed its presence in her, and in the child, ever since, and it was evil. That was why she had smothered Linda. That was why she was now going to slit her wrists. Don't judge me too harshly, she asked. I never wanted to hurt anybody in my life.
The letter was interpreted by the parents thus: that the girls had indeed been attacked and raped by somebody, and for reasons of their own had kept the identity of the culprit or culprits to themselves. With Carolyn dead, Arleen insane and Trudi gone to Chicago, it fell upon Joyce McGuire to tell the whole truth, without excision or addition, and to lay the story of the League of Virgins to rest.
At first, she refused. She couldn't remember anything about that day, she claimed. The trauma had wiped the memory from her mind. Neither Hotchkiss or Farrell were content with that, however. They kept applying the pressure, through Joyce's father. Dick McGuire was not a strong man, either in spirit or body, and his Church was wholly unsupportive in the matter, siding with the non-Mormons against the girl. The truth had to be told.
At last, to keep the browbeaters from doing any more damage to her father than they already had, Joyce told. It made a strange scene. The six parents, plus Pastor John, whc was the spiritual leader of the Mormon community in the Grove and its surroundings, were sitting in the McGuires dining room listening to the pale, thin girl whose hands went first to one cradle then to the other as she rocked her children to sleep telling, as she rocked, of their conception. First she warned her audience that they weren't going to like what she was about to tell. Then she justified her warning with the telling. She gave them the whole story. The walk; the lake; the swim; the things that had fought over their bodies in the water; their escape; her passion for Randy Krentzman— whose family had been one of those to leave the Grove months before, presumably because he'd made a quiet confession of his own; the desire she'd shared with all the girls to get pregnant as efficiently as possible—
"So Randy Krentzman was responsible for them all?" Carolyn's father said.
"Him?" she said. "He wasn't capable."
"So who was?"
"You promised to tell the whole story," the Pastor reminded her.
"So I am," she replied. "As far as I know it. Randy Krentzman was my choice. We all know how Arleen went about it. I'm sure Carolyn found somebody different. And Trudi too. The fathers weren't important, you see. They were just men."
"Are you saying the Devil is in you, child?" the Pastor asked.
"No."
"The children, then?"
"No. No." She rocked both cradles now, one with each hand. "Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray aren't possessed. At least not the way you mean. They just aren't Randy's children. Maybe they've got some of his good looks..." she allowed herself a tiny smile. "...I'd like that," she said. "Because he was so very handsome. But the spirit that made them is in the lake."
"There is no lake," Arleen's father pointed out.
"There was that day. And maybe there will be again, if it rains hard enough."