She stood, skittering her chair across the floor, her eyes narrow with an anger I could feel was being willfully stoked. “Not only that, but you’ve been insinuating I know something I haven’t told you, that somehow I’m tied up in something underhanded. Well, I resent the hell out of that. I resent you barging in on my grief-on my memories of a sweet, neglected, murdered girl-so that you can throw insults at me while you soften me up with tea. That is the height of hypocrisy, and not something I will stand for. My God-what is it Gail sees in you? I think you’re a simple bastard, and I want you out of my house. Now.” She pointed with a trembling flourish toward the door.
Sammie and I sat quietly in the car for a while with the heater running, looking at Mary Wallis’s peaceful, nondescript house.
“Quite a performance,” I finally said.
“You think it’s all bullshit?”
“Parts of it. Hard to tell which ones.”
“You think she killed her?” Sammie tried again.
I mulled that over for a moment. “I doubt it.”
I put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. “But I do think she knows a lot more about all this than she’s letting on.”
10
I moved a pile of books from one of the chairs in Gail’s study and took their place. She was sitting in her armchair again, with her laptop computer, taking notes from the man on the videotape. But this time, despite it being eleven o’clock at night, she wasn’t dozing off.
She looked at me warily. “What’s up?”
Taking the hint, I skipped the preliminaries. “What do you know about Mary Wallis?”
“Why?”
“Because as far as we can tell right now, she was the last person to see Shawna Davis alive.”
Gail shifted the computer off her lap and tucked her legs up under her, hitting the pause button on the VCR remote, her veiled irritation becoming concern.
“A mailman saw Shawna standing on her front lawn last spring,” I continued. “Mary confirmed this evening that she met the girl at Mother Gert’s, and that Shawna came by to say good-bye on her way out of town a few weeks later.”
“You think she had anything to do with her death?”
“I don’t have any proof of it, but she’s not being straight with us. She was crying when she answered the door. She claimed she had just heard about Shawna’s death. But by the time she threw us out fifteen minutes later, she was all bluster and fury and being very careful about what she told us. She also referred to the death as a murder, with no prompting from us.”
Gail cradled her chin in her hand and looked thoughtfully at the floor. “I’m not surprised she struck up a friendship with the girl. From what you’ve told me, they have a lot in common.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear more about,” I murmured.
“Mary’s originally from Pennsylvania-a single child. Her father was a drinker-very rough on her mother and her. I don’t know if he sexually abused her, but all the hallmarks are there.”
Gail hesitated, obviously uncomfortable. “I normally wouldn’t tell you this, but you’ll find it out anyway. She killed her father. He was beating her mother, and Mary slammed him on the back of the head with an iron skillet. He was dead before he hit the floor. She was fifteen.”
“She do any time for it?” I asked.
Gail shook her head. “No. The mother was in the hospital for a month. The neighbors all knew what was happening. The DA didn’t even indict. Everyone figured her father got what he deserved… Except Mary, of course. She had to live with it, and she didn’t know how.”
“The mother was no help?”
“No more than before. One of life’s born victims. She married again-same type of guy-and this time I know Mary was sexually abused. She left home almost as soon as the new husband moved in.
“She wandered to New York City, began drinking, doing drugs, God knows what else. She pretty much hit bottom. And then she became pregnant.”
I listened with growing fascination, reminded of how much we assume we know of other people’s lives. I never would have guessed at such a background to the Mary Wallis I thought I knew.
“The baby died a week after birth. Mary was convinced she’d poisoned it with her own drug abuse and malnutrition, and I wouldn’t argue the point. But it was the second death she’d played a part in, and she thought she’d better put an end to a dangerous habit.”
“By committing suicide,” I suggested, familiar with the pattern.
“You got it.”
“How?” I asked.
Gail looked at me quizzically. “I’m not sure… Sleeping pills, I think. Yeah, because she checked into a shelter and somehow or other got into the dispensary and stole the stuff. She almost pulled it off. She was in a coma for a week or more. That, typically, is what eventually saved her. People finally took notice. A women’s crisis organization was called in and helped turn her around. She began to fight back. She’s been fighting ever since.”
“What brought her up here?”
“Her mother’s been in a vegetative state for years. Mary heard about the Retreat’s geriatric care unit and moved both of them up here about a decade ago. She visits her twice a day. Her mother’s the only person I know who gets that much of Mary’s attention, even though she hasn’t said a word to anyone in all that time.”
“Jesus,” I said. There was a long silence while I thought about how to phrase my next question. “Her mother, in a way, is permanently asleep. And when Mary tried to kill herself, she took sleeping pills-”
“And Shawna’s hair,” Gail finished for me, “was full of phenobarbital. Does make you wonder.”
I’d expected some reproach for my suggestion and was surprised at Gail’s seemingly detached response. “You think it’s possible?”
She didn’t smile as she said, “I’ve come to think everything’s possible.”
There was a telling pause as we both reflected on the toll of her own recent trauma.
“Shawna was about Mary’s age when she attempted suicide,” Gail mused. “They met in a shelter, and for all we know, Shawna might’ve been pregnant when she came to see Mary the second time. She might’ve killed the girl, except you’d expect some noticeable psychological change-some behavior modification.”
I returned to a thought I’d had earlier that evening. “But she did change. Remember how hard she fought the convention center? Tooth and nail up to last spring. Then, all of a sudden, she dropped out of sight. The suit she’d threatened never materialized, and the opposition she’d almost singlehandedly organized collapsed.”
Gail frowned. “I was so buried in my own problems, I never paid any attention to that, but I guess you’re right. And she also missed a golden opportunity to sink the project last month, when Gene Lacaille ran into financial trouble, and the bank ended up holding the bag.”
I glanced at the morning newspaper, lying by the wastepaper basket, its headline still mocking my efforts to make Shawna the day’s number one item. “Interesting,” I murmured and rose to my feet.
Gail looked up at me. “What’re you going to do?”
“For starts,” I answered, “I’m going to put Mary Wallis under a microscope.”
The new day’s first business, however, involved none of what Gail and I had discussed. By dawn’s gray light, I was standing in the McDonald’s on the Putney Road, ordering enough coffee and food to feed a large horse.
In a car steaming with an aroma no doubt carefully conceived in some sterilized Midwestern laboratory, I then drove north to just shy of the Dummerston town line and took a right onto Old Ferry Road, past UPS, the dump, and the corporate offices of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, to the trailer yard of Ferguson Trucking-where George Capullo had told me Danny Soffit and Phil Duke were camping out.
They were there by permission, more or less. Roger Ferguson had once kept his trailers under lock and key, protected, he hoped, behind a tall chain-link fence. But the attraction of all those huge, empty, romanticized eighteen-wheeler bodies had proved overwhelming. Nightly, people had climbed that fence-bums looking for a place to sleep, teenagers hot to smoke dope or play doctor, and graffiti artists in search of more canvas. There’d been accidents, a couple of small fires, one boy had died of an alcohol overdose. Years ago, Ferguson had finally given up, thrown open the gates, and left them that way ever since. The boxes, when being readied for use, still had to be cleaned out of bottles, cans, and condoms, but the strategy-such as it was-had worked. No longer on the list of forbidden places to go, the yard had lost its appeal. Now the bums alone still considered it prime real estate, and Ferguson’s people were under orders to leave them alone.