A Silence of Mockingbirds (5 page)

S
arah sent me a Mother’s
Day card the year Karly was born. In those early days, after I bumped into
Sarah in Bend, that card fell out of a notebook I kept stashed in my office.
The card is inscribed:
Our friendship is such a special part of my life.
I’ll always be thankful for that— and for you. Happy Mother’s Day
.

In her own flourishing script, Sarah wrote me the following message:

Karen –

Here’s hoping you have a wonderful Mother’s Day. Although
you’re not old enough to be my mother, you were always the kind of mother
I wished that I had, and now the kind of mother I hope to be to Karly. Thank
you for always being there to talk, to listen, or just to hang out with. I
love you & I love your family. Thank you for being wonderful you! Love
ya! S–

I sat on the floor of my office and bawled as I read Sarah’s words
and recalled the laughter that had filled our home during the year Sarah
lived with us. She was such an easy girl to love.

Sarah would get so unnerved when I cooked supper for seven. I’d
invariably pull all the kitchen cupboard doors open during the course
of the preparations and Sarah, who couldn’t stand to leave a cupboard
door open, would follow behind me, slamming them all.

In the mornings, after I’d gotten the kids off to school, I’d make
my way through the maze of the unfinished basement we called the
Dungeon and curl up under a white down comforter beside Sarah.

“Good morning, Sunshine. What are you reading now?”

Sarah loved to linger in bed and read. She liked to write, too. She
kept a journal and talked of writing a book herself one day.

After moving in with us, Sarah signed up for classes at the local
community college, and went in search of a part-time job. She was
called back for an interview at a local bank, and afterwards, we sat in
the kitchen rehashing the questions they’d posed.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“Good, I think.”

“What did they ask you?”

“They wanted to know if I had any experience with money.”

“Did you tell them you have a lot of experience with other people’s
money?” I teased. Sarah laughed. Fiscal responsibility was not her
strong suit. “Anything else they want to know?”

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “They wanted to know what I’d bring to work
with me every day if I got hired.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“I said I’d bring my purse.”

I waited for Sarah to crack a grin, when she didn’t, I asked, “Really?
Did you really tell them you’d bring your purse to work?”

“Yes,” Sarah said, clueless. “Why? Something wrong with that?”

I was doubled over, laughing hysterically.

“What is so funny?” Sarah’s dark eyes were filled with confusion.

“Oh my gosh, girl, they wanted to know what assets you would bring,
your personal strengths. They didn’t mean what would you literally bring!”

The memory of that conversation makes me laugh still, but it also
reveals something of Sarah’s character. She can come off guileless and
very naïve. Sometimes she does it purposefully, other times it’s just
Sarah.

Wiping away hot tears, I removed the photos I kept inside that
long-forgotten Mother’s Day card. One was a snapshot of Sarah sitting
on David’s lap, cradling their newborn daughter. Karly wore a pink
stocking cap and a bright-eyed expression. David was beaming; Sarah,
smiling.

In the hours after learning of Karly’s death, I could not
get David out of my head. I knew without asking that Sarah had never told
him about our ugly phone exchange in 2003.

Since then, I’d had no contact with Sarah or David. While Karly’s
death had been headline news in Corvallis, her connection to Eastern
Oregon had gone underreported. Few people in Pendleton who’d been
friends with Sarah knew her daughter had been murdered.

David must have wondered why I didn’t show up when Karly died.
Why I hadn’t been present for her funeral or for the trial. I had been
totally absent, and David had no idea why.

I did not Google Karly’s death as I had threatened to do in those
moments before Tim told me she had been murdered. Not that night
and not for several months to follow. I didn’t think I could handle what
the news reports said.

But I called David that very night. I wanted to hear everything from
him, all of it. I told David I had just learned of Karly’s death. I told him
about running into Sarah in Bend. I told him about the phone call in
2003, the one in which I pleaded with Sarah not to leave him. I told
David that I had believed her doing so would put Karly at risk, and
that I was afraid for Karly. Even so, I never imagined the terror Karly
endured before dying.

I asked David to meet me for coffee. He agreed. It’s a five-hour
drive between my home in Hermiston and David’s in Corvallis. I got up
before dawn and headed out.

Driving west along the Columbia River Gorge, I thought how much
more than distance in miles had separated me from David. I berated
myself for not having kept in contact with him. I should have called. I
should have told him sooner about that fight with Sarah. I should have
assured him he could call, anytime, if he needed anything.

Why didn’t I? It was very unlike me. I have friends from junior high
school I keep in touch with: Jan Chaney Rabe in South Carolina, Sherri
Davis Callaway in Georgia, Jerry Burke in Tennessee. I’ve cultivated
friendships from Atlanta to Albuquerque, and maintained them over
the years. I sent letters to Granny Leona in the hills of Tennessee as
soon as I could pick up a fat pencil and write between the lines. The
first thing I did as soon as I learned my daddy had died in Vietnam was
to write a letter to Mrs. Eye, my third grade teacher. Mama helped me
address it and send it to Oahu’s Helemano Elementary School.

It was not like me to lose all contact with someone I cherished.
What had happened?

My trip to Vietnam, mostly. I flew out of LAX to Ho Chi Minh
the week after the blow-up with Sarah. I’d spent eight years researching
and writing about my father’s death in an unpopular war, how it had
devastated our family. I sold that book,
After the Flag has been Folded
,
to HarperCollins within a few months of my return from Vietnam. That
propelled me into a role I’d never envisioned, as an advocate for a whole
new generation of war widows and their children.

But David didn’t know any of that. All he knew was that during a
time when he could have used support the most, I wasn’t there.

T
he mountains that make up Oregon’s coastal range were on
my right as I drove into Corvallis. I can’t look at those hills
without thinking of Agnes Ferngren, the woman who was the
mentor to me that I tried to be to Sarah. As a college coed, I’d lived
with Agnes. Her husband, Gary, an Oregon State University history
professor, was on an educational cruise ship, touring and teaching. I
needed a place to live and Agnes needed help with the couple’s three
daughters, all preschoolers.

It was Agnes who taught me the mothering skills I would later
employ with my own four children. Agnes taught me how to bake
bread, how to French braid a little girl’s hair—a skill I would later pass
on to Sarah—and how to instill faith in a child.

Agnes and I were standing in the kitchen, washing up the dinner
dishes one evening, when she brushed back her red bangs and looked
out the window over the sink.

“Whenever I see those mountains I think of the Psalmist,” Agnes
said. “‘I will lift up my eyes unto the hills. Where does my help come
from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.’”

Agnes died in the spring of 2006 after a battle with a virulent lung
cancer. I hadn’t been back to Corvallis since her memorial service. I
missed her terribly. I still do. Passing those mountains as I drove south
into town, I asked God to help me, to give me the strength to write this
story.

I knew if David gave his blessing for such a project I would tell
Karly’s story. I also knew doing so would enrage Sarah, and that troubled
me deeply. I didn’t know how I would handle that. I still don’t.

David and I met downtown at Corvallis’s New Morning Bakery. We sat
at a back table. Slim as a seventh grader, David wore jeans and a navy
Patagonia Henley. His fair hair was cut short. His brogue thick as the
day he first came stateside.

David retained his proud Irish citizenship up until 2008, when he
finally took the oath and became an American citizen. Honestly, given
all I learned of what the Oregon legal system put him through, I was
moved by his desire to become an American citizen. It speaks volumes
about the kind of man David is.

David’s sky-blue eyes grew misty several times during our visit as
he spoke of Karly. He recalled that he took his daughter to Ireland twice
during her brief life. The first time was in November 2002, when Karly
was ten months old. David and his baby girl made the trip without the
benefit of a mother’s help.

Sarah had moved out when Karly was six months old. She would
move back in once more, taking yet another stab at marriage and
motherhood, but David was perfectly competent as a single parent. So
traveling across the oceans alone with an infant or a toddler did not
terrify him the way it might some fathers.

Father and daughter made their second trip to Ireland in July 2004.
By then, Karly was on her way from potty-training toddler to full-fledged
girlhood and she could talk the hind legs off a donkey. Karly
displayed a verbal acuity that would make any Irish grandmother proud
and any Irish grandfather exhausted.

The toddler’s excitement about the trip could not be contained. She
insisted on picking out her own carry-on luggage, test-driving a Dora
the Explorer wheeled backpack in the aisles of a department store. She
settled on that particular bag because it had a detachable pouch that
Karly declared would be handy for the candy treats she’d need to sustain
her on the long flights.

David had finished his master’s classes at George Fox University
on July 27, and the two of them flew out of Portland the next day. Any
form of travel enchanted Karly, be it a boat, a horse, a bus, or a plane.
David had taught his daughter the chorus to “Leaving on a Jet Plane,”
and the two of them sang it loudly like bar drunks as they packed bags
and headed for the airport.

Their first long layover was in Chicago, a place that would one day
play significantly into David’s future—though, tragically, not Karly’s.
They walked all over O’Hare, grabbed some grub, and lollygagged
around the towering Brachiosaurus dinosaur in the B concourse. The
four-story-high, seventy-two-foot-long skeleton was on loan from the
Chicago Field Museum. Karly called it a “disonaur,” her own particular
pronunciation for dinosaurs. Her quirky way with language tickled
David. No matter how many times he corrected her, Karly liked her
enunciation best, and truth be told, so did David.

It was nighttime when they finally left O’Hare, bound for Heathrow,
but Karly retained her good-natured disposition. Traveling might make
others cranky, but not Karly. She loved the way her tummy flipped on
takeoffs. She played quietly with her toys, and was thoroughly delighted
by the plastic cow that pooped out jellybeans with a lift of its tail, a trick
that elicited endless giggles. She finally fell asleep in David’s arms and
they both woke bleary-eyed the next morning upon landing in London.
After a short layover, they boarded the familiar green Aer Lingus for
the short fifty-minute flight to Cork, where Grandpa and Grandma
Sheehan were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the granddaughter they
hadn’t seen since she was a baby, except in photos and in videos. It was
good to see David, too.

Having made the trip enough times himself, David knew that the
best way to deal with the jet lag was to stay awake until the local bedtime.
So he made the rounds, taking Karly to his grandmother, then to visit
his siblings and the many cousins. Later that night, as David tried to put
Karly to bed, he started to sing her a lullaby but was stopped abruptly.

“Karly covered my mouth with her hand and said, ‘Hush! Daddy!
That’s enough. You can never, never sing, and if you do, you must ask
me first,’” David said. “I was astonished that my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter would say that, but then again Karly was very talkative. I
laughed and laughed but Karly remained steadfast that I not sing, even
after we returned home; she was adamant that I was not allowed to sing,
although she did make exceptions if I sang ‘Ring of Fire’ or if I made up
songs about her wearing striped shirts.”

While in Ireland, David turned thirty. Doing her part to help with
the celebration, Karly helped herself to the strawberries that adorned
her father’s cake, while her cousins ate the chocolate chips sprinkled
on it.

Karly bonded easily with her cousins and the local kids, charming
everyone with her laughter, her joy, and tales of her own imagination.
She would boldly knock on neighbors’ doors to see if the kids inside
wanted to come out and play. During the day, she would happily spend
time with her grandmother or cousins, but when evening rolled around
it was David she wanted. She would get clingy if David wanted to go for
a beer with his father.

“One evening I was able to reason with her to let me go out with
Dad for a while, but Karly made it conditional, telling me that I had to
run home, i.e. ‘Don’t be gone too long, Mister,’” David said.

Karly and her daddy crammed in a lot of life during the few weeks
they were in Kenmare. They made a trip to the countryside, where
Karly borrowed David’s grandmother’s cane and turned it into a rifle,
the better with which to shoot pesky goats. They took a trip to the
beach, where Karly romped around with her cousins in the shimmering
waters.

As Karly and David held hands and walked through the town of
Kenmare, where the streets are lined with buildings bright as Crayolas,
the two chattered away, blissfully unaware of the dark clouds gathering
back in Oregon.

And later, when Karly discovered their flight home to America was
aboard an Aer Lingus plane called the “St. David,” she was delighted.
This thing Karly had suspected for a long time was true: her father really
was a special man—he even had a big jet airliner named after him!

Over our coffee that day at New Morning Bakery, I asked for and received
David’s blessings to write this story. As far as I was concerned, he was
the only person who had the right to ask me not to write about Karly. I
didn’t want to see him victimized any further, so I told him if he didn’t
want me to write this book, I wouldn’t. But David gave me his blessings
and his full cooperation.

There are many reasons why David wanted Karly’s story told, but
one of the foremost is because David wanted people to know that his
daughter wasn’t a tragic kid that nobody cared about.

“Karly is more than a statistic, a subject, a patient, a case number,”
David said. “She had many people that cared about her and loved her.
She lived as full a life as a three-year-old can. She traveled to Ireland
twice, charmed everybody she met, and made plans to buy a cell phone
when she went to college.”

Like most everyone connected to her death, David has his own
regrets. “I did not do enough to protect Karly. I regret not standing
up to the Children’s Services investigation by pointing out the obvious
things that were blatantly missed. I placed too much faith in the system.”

David’s naïve trust in Oregon Department of Human Services to
help him protect his daughter did him far more harm than good. David
was the primary suspect in the prolonged abuse case of Karly Sheehan.