Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls (29 page)

"Dumb kid," the waitress mutters.

"Shut up!" the younger girl cries to the waitress. "You're the meanest, rudest person I've ever met. What's wrong with you?"

The waitress shrugs, wipes her hands on her dirty apron, and goes back to scrubbing the counter.

"Please, please," the girl begs her friend. "Don't just sit there, do something."

"There's nothing to do," her friend says. "Nothing as in nothing. Zero as in zero. Zip as in zip."

The younger girl runs to the door. Everyone watches her. Their sadness fills the diner. It's suffocating me. If only I could reach out, put my arms around her, comfort her.

She looks outside. It's still dark, it's still raining. Puddles in the empty parking lot reflect the diner's neon sign. The traffic light swings in the wind, blinking red, staining the sky a dull pink. No other lights. No cars. Not a dog. Not a cat.

Nothing as in nothing. Zero as in zero. Zip as in zip. Nada as in nada.

Suddenly, I see what she sees. Not the empty parking lot, not the rain, but a different place, a place I know well. A path through the woods, a bridge just ahead. No one is sitting there.

I hear what she hears. Gunshots. Bobbi Jo turns toward me and I see her face. She's scared, so scared. She runs, she runs, she runs, and I run with her, trying to pull her away, trying to save her, but she can't escape the bullets. And I can't save her, I can't change anything.

She falls. Behind her, Cheryl lies broken, her full skirt streaked with blood. Dead. They are both dead. Nothing can change that.

No, no, no, I try to scream, but I can barely whisper. No, no, no.

Two boys come out of the woods. One has a rifle. They begin to drag the girls away. I don't recognize them, but I know that the one with the rifle is the boy they laughed at, he's the one, he did it, he shot them because they laughed at him.

Then Bobbi Jo and I are in the diner again and Cheryl is sitting at the counter, her face as sad as the other faces.

Bobbi Jo runs to Cheryl. She grabs her hands. She's crying. "What's going to happen to us?"

No one answers. The woman with the cold hands and the kind face sighs. The man beside her mutters a cuss word under his breath. The waitress scowls and wipes the counter.

 

I lie in my own bed, safe in my room but scared to move, breathing hard. A breeze rustles the leaves and shadows dance on my wall.

This is the true dream, I think. Not the one both Ellie and I dreamed the night after they died. This dream is the truth.

The boy they laughed at in the picnic grove. The one whose name I can't remember, whose face I can't remember. He did it, he killed them.

Nothing as in nothing. Zero as in zero. Zip as in zip. Nada as in nada.

I wish Buddy were here so I could tell him about my dream.

I'
M
sitting at my desk reading my e-mail. Among the dozens of messages is one from Eastern High School. The class of 1957 is planning our fiftieth reunion.

I stare at the screen. Fifty years—is that possible?

I've been to only one reunion. The twentieth. Paul and Charlie didn't come. Ellie graduated from St. Joseph's, so she was absent too.

The cheerleaders, the athletes, the class officers, and the popular kids sat together just like they used to. The rest of us were lucky if they spoke to us. I must confess, it was gratifying to see how much weight Ralph had gained and how much hair Don had lost. They both were married to cheerleaders in my class. Ralph to Sally, of course, and Don to Denise McCarthy. The girls looked like the boring housewives they'd become—overweight, hair in out-of-date beehives, too much makeup.

I didn't talk to either Don or Ralph, but once I noticed Ralph looking at me across the room. As soon as our eyes met, we both looked away.

In his opening remarks, our class president read the names of the dead. Not many then. After all, we were in our late thirties. He didn't mention Cheryl, maybe because she didn't graduate. That really bothered me. We'd been together in tenth and eleventh grade. He should have said something about her. Whether or not we knew her, we all remembered her. Of that I was certain.

At dinner, I was sitting with Susan and Julie and Nancy and four or five other people. Just as I feared, someone mentioned the murders. All the other people at our table still believed Buddy did it. They asked me to tell them about the party in the picnic grove and what it was like to be there when the bodies were found and why Buddy wasn't ever convicted when it was obvious he did it. I remember thinking, people will never tire of talking about the murders. Never. Even those who barely knew the girls consider themselves part of the story. The legend. The ballad of.

I gaze at the invitation on my computer screen and let my thoughts drift back to 1956, a long-ago day in June, the last day of school. I see us sitting on the footbridge in the park—Ellie, Charlie, Paul, and me. It's the day the bodies will be found by a boy walking his dog, but we know nothing about that yet. Ellie and and I wear full skirts puffed out with crinolines, Ship and Shore blouses, collars turned up in the back. We both swing our feet, white Keds with the little blue tags on the back to show they're the real thing, not Thom McAn imitations. Our bobby socks are thick-cuffed. Paul is next to Ellie, his arm around her, khaki pants pressed, plaid shirt, crewcut. Charlie's beside me, wearing pretty much the same outfit, his arm around me. We're smoking cigarettes and laughing. Summer stretches ahead—picnics, swimming pools, car rides, movies, parties. The four of us together, always together.

But things happen. Things change. What you plan doesn't happen. What you don't plan almost kills you.

After Ellie transferred to St. Joseph's, we saw each other a few times, but the murders were always there when we got together. They defined us somehow. We both wanted to stop thinking about them. The easiest way to do that was to drift apart.

I haven't seen her for years now, but we still exchange Christmas cards. She lives in Missouri, she's married, has three sons, teaches high school chemistry. I still miss her.

In our senior year, Charlie and I had a few classes together, Problems of Democracy and senior English. We joked and laughed, but we never kissed each other again. He stopped dedicating "Long Tall Sally" to me. I worried he might think I was cheap because of the things we did at the reservoir.

In February he started going steady with Judy Spencer, who was short and cute. By the time we graduated, we were almost strangers. He signed my yearbook
To Nora, keep drawing—see you at Towson! Your friend Charlie.

I forget what I wrote in his yearbook, but I never saw him at Towson. It was a big campus. He majored in electrical engineering and I majored in fine art.

Buddy wrote to me a few times, but after a while I stopped hearing from him. He never took me to the movies. As far as I know, he didn't come back to Elmgrove.

I wonder what happened to him, where he is, what he's doing. It's a shock to realize he's almost seventy, a year or so ahead of me on the dark path. Retired, probably. Old like all of us who have lived this long.

I've been to Greenwich Village many times now, but I still haven't watched the ball fall in Times Square, except on TV. Although I used to look for Larry when I was in the Village, I never saw him, but I have the copy of T. S. Eliot's poetry he gave me, and I often lose myself in
Leaves of Grass.
I still know Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal" by heart, as well as the words to lots of songs. Funny what you keep.

I click
WILL NOT ATTEND
and shut down the computer.

Then I gaze out my window at the trees blowing in the wind. It's late December. Twenty-three degrees, cold for Maryland.

 

A few weeks later, I pick up the morning paper and stare at the headlines:
POLICE HOPE TO CLOSE
1956
DOUBLE MURDER.

Stunned, I set my coffee down and spread the paper out on the kitchen counter. A woman in Montana has called the police and told them her brother-in-law shot Cheryl and Bobbi Jo. He was sixteen at the time, she said. He lived on Twenty-Third Street, about a block from Ellie's house. He went to Eastern High School. So did his younger brother, the woman's husband.

Just before he died, her brother-in-law told her he killed the girls because they made fun of him, especially the older one. He said the girl had a sharp tongue and mean eyes. He was never sorry he shot them. Never. Now that her husband was also dead, the woman had decided to inform the police.

I study the woman's last name. I don't remember a boy with that name.

The killer told his sister-in-law two things the police had never revealed to the public. He'd climbed a tree and shot the girls the way a hunter shoots deer. His younger brother had helped him hide the bodies. Before he disappeared into the woods, he'd covered Cheryl's face with a sheet of notebook paper. On it he'd written
and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed girls, Mister Death.

The reporter identified it as a quotation from a poem by E. E. Cummings. He didn't need to tell me. I knew the poem well enough to recognize that the killer had changed one word. In the original, Cummings had written "blueeyed boy," not "blueeyed girls."

Blueeyed Girls, yes, they'd been blue-eyed girls, both of them. I remember. Blue eyes, blond hair, hardly more than children.

After the woman hung up, the police tried to find her, but she'd dropped out of sight. According to her relatives, she and her husband were scam artists and grifters who traveled all over the country, masters of false identities and quick disappearances. Unfortunately, the killer and his brother were both dead, and there was no one to corroborate the woman's story. No witnesses. No gun.

So, even though the police are satisfied with the woman's story, the case is still officially open.

But not for me. I
know
this is the true story. It has to be. How else could the woman have known about the poem? And the tree? What more do the police need?

I look out the patio doors and watch the snow. It shows no sign of stopping. The trees behind my house are almost hidden by blowing veils of white.

Slowly a dream takes shape, one I've had many times since that summer. I'm following Cheryl and Bobbi Jo, not sure who they are at first. We go into a diner where nothing seems right. The waitress is rude; the customers are strange. Bobbi Jo runs outside. I'm scared, but I follow her into the woods. I know what's about to happen. I want to save her, but I can't. I hear shots. This time I know what they are. Bobbi Jo turns, runs toward me, falls. Behind her, Cheryl lies crumpled and broken and bloody. They're dead and I can't change it. No one can.

Then the boys come. Somehow I know the one with the gun was the one they laughed at. That's why he shot them. They laughed at him. Laughed.

 

I pull myself out of the dream and fold my arms tightly across my chest. The room is cold. The wind is leaking in everywhere.

I continue reading the newspaper. Using a 1956 Eastern yearbook, the reporter had contacted people from our high school class. Although he talked to several people, they all said the same thing. They didn't remember the brothers. Not even a girl named Bonnie, who lived in Ellie's neighborhood, even though that boy probably cut through the park every day on his way to school and back home. We all must have seen him and his brother in Ellie's neighborhood, at school, here and there in Elmgrove.

Puzzled, I get out my 1956 yearbook and find him and his brother. Their faces are small and blurry, not quite as big as postage stamps. Ordinary boys with unsmiling narrow faces and dark hair. Nothing warns you, nothing cries out danger.

He might have been in my chemistry class, he might have sat in front of me in English, but I could swear I've never seen him. Never heard his name.

My mind drifts back to the night before the killings. It's hot, humid. There's no breeze. Heat lightning flickers across the sky stained pink with neon light from the shopping center. We're in the picnic grove. Little Richard, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Shirley and Lee sing in my head.

While Ellie and I are laughing and dancing and probably drunk, a boy comes along. It's dark, no one sees his face, no one notices him. He talks to Cheryl and Bobbi Jo, tries to flirt with them. They laugh at him. They insult him. He walks away. Disappears into the shadows.

Such a little thing to them, not worth talking about. Forgettable.

But not little to him. Not forgettable. No, not to him.

But how could we know? How could anyone?

I think of Columbine, of Virginia Tech. Today the brothers wouldn't have stopped with Cheryl and Bobbi Jo.

I cry. Not the huge gulping sobs that almost choked me then, but silent sobs and slow tears, the way Niobe wept for her dead children. Cheryl and Bobbi Jo have been dead much longer than they were alive. They've been held fast in darkness by rocks and stones and trees day after day, night after night, season after season.

Yet the killer lived to be almost seventy. He was never sorry. He was never caught. He was never punished. To me, it's proof you can't count on God to redress the sins of the world.

So I hope his time on earth was racked with pain and guilt and failure. I hope he suffered. I hope he died a miserable death. Not very charitable, I know, but it's how I feel.

I turn to my yearbook's senior section and look for Buddy's picture:
Harold Novak, a.k.a. Buddy. Photography Club, Rifle Club. Ambition: To be successful.

He's smiling and his eyes look directly into the camera. He's combed his hair into a carefully constructed pompadour. His face is sweeter than I remembered—young, untouched. He had no idea what was waiting for him.

I read his autograph and smile:
To Nora, the nice gal I met at Ellie's house and fellow photography sufferer, good luck, Buddy.

His handwriting sprawls across his face. In a fancy curlicue under his name he's written
Class of '56.