A Silence of Mockingbirds (4 page)

E
xpect hell to freeze first. That’s the gist of the reply I
received from Shawn Field after sending him a letter, week after
week, for a year. Only the date has changed.

Shawn Wesley Field

Inmate ID: 16002306

EOCI

Mr. Field:

I am at work on a book about the murder of Karly Sheehan.
I am interested in hearing your side of the story. But in order to do that
I will have to be added to your list of approved visitors. If you will add
me to your list, I will make an appointment to visit with you.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Karen Spears Zacharias

Detective Wells also attempted to interview Shawn Field. Field
turned down the detective, too. Wells is the father of three daughters.
His oldest daughter was only four years old when he was working the
Karly case. Having a daughter so close to Karly’s age made this case
more personal than others. Wells could easily imagine David’s grief,
but the detective could not understand the systematic senselessness, or
the vile sickness behind the murder. Like me, Wells remains haunted
by unanswered questions. Who is Shawn Field? Why did he kill Karly?
What role did Sarah play in all of this?

I’ve been warned more than once that I ought to give up trying
to get an interview with Shawn. “Short of a Grade B miracle, you will not
get the chance to sit down with Shawn. That door is closed and he has no intention
of opening it.”

That warning came to me via an e-mail from a man in my community— Jack, I’ll
call him. Jack’s in-laws are close friends of Hugh and Ann Field, Shawn Field’s
parents. Jack meets with Shawn on a regular basis as part of a prison ministry
and he sends me intermittent e-mails, informing me of all the ways in which
God is working in Shawn’s life.

“God never ceases to amaze me with how he works through the
grimmest situations,” Jack writes. “Only God can change lives and I
remain confident that he is doing that in Shawn’s life. I pray that Sarah
might come face to face with God here on Earth while she has a chance
to receive his gift.”

It’s hard for me, when I receive notes like this, not to be put off. I’ve
read thousands of pages of documents, police interrogations, evidence,
and autopsy reports. I’ve studied the reports filed with the Oregon
Department of Human Services Child Welfare Division in the months
leading up to Karly’s death. I’ve seen the photographs Shawn took in
the moments before Karly died and the glossy color autopsy photos that
caused me to flee the office of the Oregon Court of Appeals building so
that I could cry unnoticed within the confines of my car.

I want to sit Jack down and walk him through all the evidence I’ve
plowed through. I want him to study the photos of Karly’s battered body
that caused doctors and nurses alike to break down in tears. Yes, I’m
disturbed and defensive over Jack’s suggestion that Shawn is on some
holy path that Sarah seems to have missed.

I wrote back to Jack and told him it’s a good thing I believe in the
God of Grade A miracles because I have every intention of continuing
to pursue an interview with Shawn. And oh, by the way, I added, “I
think if you were to ask Sarah she would tell you she is washed in the
blood of the Lamb…or was at one time.”

A week later, I received another e-mail, this one a little sterner in tone
than all the previous exchanges:

Karen,

Shawn said you contacted him again. He also tells me his stance
hasn’t changed. The door is closed and locked to you. No matter how many times
you contact him he will not answer any of your letters or add you as a visitor. 
I assume he isn’t kidding. 

Have a nice day.

Jack

I’m sure Jack believes it was his Christian duty to write me that
e-mail, to persuade me to back off my pursuit of an interview. I am
confident Jack means well, but we are at crosshairs on this issue. I don’t
know if I will ever get an interview with Inmate 16002306 but I will
continue trying no matter how many testy e-mails I receive.

I
didn’t know about Karly’s
murder or the three-year-old’s desperate prayers for deliverance when Tim
and I made the trek upriver to Bend, Oregon, in March 2007 to visit two of
our four kids. Stephan, our eldest, worked at the High Desert Museum, one
of the region’s most popular tourist attractions. Our youngest daughter, Konnie,
had just moved to town.

We’d spent the night at Konnie’s new digs. I slipped out of bed at
7:45 a.m. Tim, who was wedged between the edge of the twin mattress
and the wall, didn’t flinch. Prying a peephole in the aged blinds, I
glanced across the parking lot of the Boys & Girls Club. Half a dozen
pines stood motionless, like trees in a picture book. Blue sky. No wind.

We didn’t have big plans. After Tim got out of bed and got dressed,
he and I grabbed a cup of coffee at the joint down the street, read the
paper, poked around town a bit. Later that afternoon, Stephan gave us
the town tour.

“What’s
The Source?
” I asked, as he turned left past a brick building
with a sign bearing that title.

“A newspaper,” he replied. Parking the car in front of the saltbox
house Konnie was renting, Stephan walked to the end of the block and
grabbed a paper. He flipped through the weekly arts and entertainment
guide while we huddled around a space heater in the living room.

Stephan opened the paper and leaned over to show something of
interest to his father.

“What?” I asked.

Stephan turned to me and leaned in. “Isn’t that Sarah?” he asked.

“It sure is,” I said.

There she was holding up a dollar bill, wearing what was obviously
her St. Paddy’s Day t-shirt, the one with the four-leaf clovers that read,
FEELING LUCKY
.

“Does it say anything about her?”

“Nope,” Stephan replied. “It doesn’t even give her name.”

It was a blip about some women who’d gone to a restaurant with
an open fire pit. Their money had gone up in smoke after being blown
into the pit by an unexpected wind. Sarah was holding up a dollar with
burnt edges. She had that same engaging smile, the one that had slain
dozens of men, and charmed nearly as many women.

“You think she lives here?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Stephan said with a shrug.

The day after Stephan discovered Sarah’s photo, I cranked
the shower to a hot-as-I-can-stand-it setting and let it rain down over me.

“Please, God,” I prayed, “if Sarah lives here, let me run into her
today.” Sometimes I have my best talks with God in the shower.

It was the morning of March 28, 2007.

At 5:30 p.m., Konnie burst through the door, ran to her bedroom,
and changed into running clothes.

“Meet me at the bridge down by REI at the Old Mill,” she instructed,
as she grabbed her iPod and jogged off.

Tim and I walked down to the Old Mill shops and stood at the end of
the bridge, watching for our daughter as brightly colored flags snapped
overhead. I saw Konnie waving to us from across the Deschutes River.

We walked back, past the Old Mill and through the parking lot at
Strictly Organic Coffee. At the top of the incline, we approached a man
and a woman talking outside a small bungalow, their backs to us. The
woman wore red shoes with three-inch heels, unusual in a town where
flat, rubber-soled shoes are the most common footwear. Konnie strode
a few steps ahead of us. When she got to the other side of the couple,
she turned, cupped one hand over her face, pointed at the girl, and
mouthed “Sarah!” to me.

I turned toward the couple.

“Sarah?”

It was the first time I had spoken to her since that nasty phone call
in February 2003 when she told me she was divorcing David.

Sarah’s jaw went slack. “Excuse me,” she said to the man next to her.
“These people are like my family and I haven’t seen them in a very long
time.”

We embraced warmly.

“Do you live here?” she asked. Her dark-roasted eyes scanned the
three of us, searching for some sign we were part of the Bend community.

“Konnie does,” I answered. “She just moved here.”

“Yeah, I live up the street,” Konnie added. “Why don’t you come
up?”

The man shifted his feet anxiously. We had interrupted.

“Let me finish up here,” Sarah said. “Then I’ll come up.”

Konnie gave her the address.

“How bizarre is that?” our daughter asked as we turned to leave.

“Pretty bizarre,” her father said.

“Not bizarre at all,” I said. They didn’t know about the power of a
shower prayer.

We’d barely walked in the front door before Sarah drove up. I met
her on the stoop.

“I knew you were in town,” I said, hugging her again.

“How?” she asked, laughing. I’d missed Sarah’s easy laughter.

“I saw your picture in
The Source
. I wasn’t sure if you lived here
or were visiting but I had a strong feeling we’d run into each other.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty random,” Sarah said.

“Not random at all,” I said.

Then Sarah laughed again, but in a tense way people do when
they are trying to appear confident but are anything but. I chalked it
up to the normal anxiety that can exist between two people whose last
conversation was an exchange of harsh words. I couldn’t have been
more wrong about the nature of Sarah’s unease.

“How long have you lived here?” Tim asked from the corner of the
sofa where he was sitting. A heater was pulled up next to him. Tim is a
lean athlete who doesn’t tolerate chill very well.

“Two years.”

“Do you work?” I asked as I took a seat on the U-shaped footstool
nearest the chair where Sarah sat.

“I manage the restaurant for one of the hotels in town,” she said.

Sarah pulled a strand of her dark hair through her fingers. I
recognized the nervous gesture. I’d witnessed it a thousand times back
when she lived with us. Our daughter Shelby has the same habit.

“Do you keep in touch with anyone from Pendleton?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“Are your parents still there?”

“Yes.”

“How’s Hillary? What is she, like, ten now?”

“Thirteen,” Sarah replied.

I looked at Tim. “Has it been that long? God, I feel old.”

“You are old,” Tim said. Everyone laughed.

“Chuck and Missy moved to Mexico,” Sarah added.

“Really? When?”

“Three years ago.”

“So you haven’t seen Hillary in all that time?”

“No.”

“Do they write? Send photos?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And what about Karly? Is she with David?”

Sarah had been in the house for nearly half an hour and hadn’t
mentioned Karly once. I wasn’t sure how the custody issues had been
ironed out. When we’d last spoken, Sarah said she and David would
share custody of Karly. But with her living in Bend, and him in Corvallis,
I didn’t see how that would work. Karly would’ve turned five in January.
She’d be old enough to attend preschool, at least. I assumed Karly was
with her daddy.

A bad pause followed. That’s how Tim described it later.

“If it had been good news, it would’ve come rushing out. But there
was that bad pause,” he said.

Tim swears he knew then, in that moment of silence, that Karly was
dead. But I had no clue anything could be so wrong.

I watched as Sarah fumbled around with different phrasings before
answering. I figured she was trying to find the best possible way to tell
us she didn’t have custody of her daughter.

“She has—” Sarah started, stopped, then started again, blurting it
out in one breath. “Karly passed away. That’s why I’m in Bend. But I’m
having a very bad day so I don’t want to talk about it. We’ll have that
conversation on another day.” Sarah’s eyes begged for grace.

My mind scattered like birds, startled. I’d spent the better part of the
past two years on the road advocating for war widows and the children
of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. If a war widow said to me that
she didn’t want to talk about something, I backed off. I knew she’d talk,
eventually, when she was ready. I did as Sarah asked—I dropped it. Let it go.

Over dinner we talked about Sarah’s current boyfriend—how she
loved the boyfriend’s family, but him, not so much. We talked about the
job market in Bend, skiing, snowboarding, and the upcoming play at
Second Street Theatre, where Stephan had the lead role.

“We’ll be back next week to see Stephan in the play,” I said, as we
hugged goodbye.

“You can stay at my place, if you like,” Sarah said. “I’ve got an extra
bedroom.”

“I’ll call you before I leave in the morning,” I said.

“Okay,” Sarah said. Then she made sure I had her new phone
number.

I called her first thing the next morning, as promised.

“Hey, Sarah. I’m sorry to wake you.”

“You heading out?” she asked in her sleepy voice.

“In a bit. Listen, I’m sorry about that last phone call. I never meant
for us to lose touch with each other that way.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“I quit my job, went to Vietnam, moved away from Pendleton. Life
got crazy.” Then I said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when you lost
Karly.”

Silence. There was no explanation from Sarah.

“Well, don’t be a stranger, okay?”

“Okay,” Sarah said.

Tim spent the night at Stephan’s place, while I stayed with Konnie.
He came by early the next morning and we loaded up the car.

“Can we go by Starbucks on the way out?” I asked, yanking on my
seatbelt. I hardly looked at Tim as I began to chatter. “Konnie thinks
maybe Karly died from a car wreck. Maybe Sarah was driving and that’s
why she can’t talk about it, ’cause did you see how nervous she was? It’s
obvious she feels guilty. I don’t think it was cancer.”

There was that bad pause again.

“It wasn’t a car wreck,” Tim said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Stephan looked it up online when we got home last night.”

“Looked up what? Karly’s obit? What did it say?”

“I don’t want to tell you,” he said, clenching his square jaw. “You
don’t want to know.”

“Well you might as well tell me because you know I’m going to look
it up myself as soon as I get home.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Sarah’s boyfriend tortured and murdered Karly.”

My stomach fell to the floorboard. I wanted to vomit. I felt faint.
My hands were sweaty, my heart racing. I couldn’t breathe. I could only
mumble: Oh, dear God. Dearest. God.