The Lost Women of Lost Lake (28 page)

Jane waited another second, and then said, “I was told the death of Allen Feigenbaumer had something to do with the antiwar movement.”

“I can give you the quick down and dirty on what happened, but to really understand, I need to explain a few things first. You interested?”

“Not only am I interested,” said Jane, “I'm grateful that you'd take the time.”

Cordelia scooted over closer to the phone.

“Where to start. Well … first, I guess, you should know that Sabra and I met at an SDS meeting in Chicago in the fall of sixty-seven. We'd both been part of the civil rights movement for years, both been involved in demonstrations. I'd been arrested once. I was a couple of years older and had taken part in Freedom Summer in Mississippi in sixty-four. I worked to get African Americans registered to vote. Sabra was doing stories for an underground newspaper in Chicago by the beginning of sixty-six—the
Radical Beat
. We went out for coffee after the SDS meeting that first night. Back then, nobody was out. You think of the sixties as being sexually liberated. I suppose it was—but
heterosexually
liberated. It took Sabra and me a while to tell each other the truth. By the time we did, we were already in love. We had to hide though, even from our friends.

“Sabra had a younger brother—Jeff. He wasn't all that politically active before he entered college, although once he got there, looked around him and started to see what was happening in the world, his ideas changed. I talked to him a lot, tried my damnedest to radicalize him. After all,
his
life was on the line. He was the one who had a draft card. He began to get noticed in the ranks because he was a good speaker. He had this gentle kind of charisma that drew people to him. He was a great guy. Believe me when I tell you that he never wanted in the girlfriend department. When Judy came along, though, he fell hard. She was pretty, I guess. Knew how to get a guy's attention. She was nowhere near as political as we were. Judy was always more interested in the ‘sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll' angle and in partying hard. Did she ever change?”

“I never knew her all that well. But she was married four times.”

Yvonne hooted. “Doesn't surprise me. Anyway, Sabra was doing grad work at Loyola when Jeff and Judy were undergrads. I'd quit college after my first year. Just wasn't cut out for it. There was too much grassroots work to do. The fall I met Sabra I was making ends meet by working as a part-time waitress and part-time bookkeeper. We moved in together in December of sixty-seven. Honestly, I'd never been happier.

“It all came to a head in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in August of sixty-eight. Most of the major antiwar groups were there. So were people like Allen Ginsberg and Jean Genet. We had big plans. We tried to get a permit to demonstrate in Lincoln Park, but the city denied it. They officially closed the park, and when we wouldn't leave, that's when all hell broke loose. Tear gas– and billy club–wielding pigs descended on us in droves. It was brutal, like nothing I'd ever seen before, not even in the South. Kind of changes your opinion of how power works in this country when you're in the middle of something like that. Anyway, there was this one blue-shirted Chicago cop who seemed to really be into it. He was an absolute wild man. I can still see his eyes. He came close to clubbing Sabra that day, but she ducked at just the right moment. I think Jeff was stunned by the level of violence. I remember him just standing there while others were running and shouting all around him. I think, deep down, he still believed that cops were the good guys.

“The worst day that week was Wednesday. Some people called it the Battle of Michigan Avenue. A lot of it was recorded on tape, so if you want to see it for yourself, you can find it on the Internet. Of course, you can't smell the tear gas or the terrified sweat—or feel the fear in the air. It was adrenaline-fueled rage alternating with terror, as close to pure hell as I ever want to get. We planned to march to the Convention Center. God, but I hated Johnson and his puppet, Humphrey. At some point, the cops simply went apeshit. They moved on in, started beating everyone in sight. Innocent bystanders were hurt. So were newsmen who were just there to cover the story. Their tear gas and our stink bombs got so thick that it started to drift into some of the hotels.

“That was the day it happened. Back then, the government kept trotting out this thing called the domino effect. If Vietnam went Communist, so would the rest of Southeast Asia. What happened to us was a more personal kind of domino effect. The cop we'd seen in Lincoln Park happened to be in the group that attacked us on Wednesday. Sabra, Judy, and I screamed that he was a pig, a fascist, a baby killer. He came at us with his billy club raised. Jeff saw what he was about to do and stepped in front of us. Judy ran off just as the cop began to whale on Jeff. I hopped on the guy's back, tried to make him stop, but some other cops grabbed Sabra and me and slammed us to the ground. By the time we got back to Jeff, he was out cold. We dragged him into an alley and tried to get him to wake up. The back of his head was bloody and he had scrapes and cuts all over his face and arms.

“We were finally able to lift him up and help him back to his apartment—he lived with two other guys, none of whom were home. We stripped off his clothes and tried our best, which wasn't all that good, to doctor his wounds. Thank God, nothing was broken. He was black-and-blue from head to toe. One of his knees had swelled up pretty badly. Sabra went to buy aspirin and vodka while I got him settled on the couch. We spent the rest of the day watching the news on TV. Jeff slept on and off. He'd wake up and watch for a while, then he'd drift off. We figured he was in shock. Looking back, we should have taken him to a hospital, but at the time we didn't have a dime to our names and we were afraid that if they asked how he'd been hurt, that we'd get arrested. Paranoia reigned.

“That was August. By late September, the change in Jeff was so apparent, nobody could miss it. He wasn't upbeat anymore. His gentleness had disappeared. I don't know how to say it except that he was a different guy—moody and depressed most of the time. He and Judy fought like crazy, although I'll give her this much. She hung in with him. There were days when he wouldn't even get out of bed.

“By mid-October, he'd begun locking himself in his bedroom and refusing to come out. He'd stopped bathing. Stopped going to classes. The guys he lived with tried to look the other way, but they eventually got sick of it and threw him out. He couldn't live with Judy because she had three roommates. Since he had nowhere else to go, he came to live with us. That's when the rages began. We never knew what would set him off. He'd just lose it, start throwing things, accusing us of shit we hadn't done. We kept telling him that he had to go see a counselor at Loyola. I finally extracted a promise that he'd go. He actually made the appointment, which surprised the hell out of me.

“Sabra was planning to drive him. The appointment was on a Friday afternoon. That morning, Sabra and I went shopping. We bought him a new sweater, a new pair of jeans, several new shirts, new socks, and a new belt. We climbed the four flights up to our apartment carrying the packages, feeling more hopeful than we had in months. When we came into the living room, we called for Jeff to come and look at all his presents. He didn't come, so we went looking for him.

“He wasn't in his room. His billfold was on his dresser, so we knew he hadn't gone out. We followed a cold draft into our bedroom. The window was open. I stuck my head out to look around and saw Jeff's body lying on top of a Dumpster four stories below. Sabra ran out of the room and got to him first. She was screaming that he was dead, that his neck was broken, when I made it down. I tried to cradle her in my arms, but she pushed me away. It was the single most horrible moment of my life.

“From that day on, Sabra and I had one goal. We intended to kill the cop who killed Jeff. I didn't know much about brain injuries. I read up on them while I was inside. The kind of injury Jeff sustained can change a person's entire personality. We had no idea he was suicidal, although after he was gone, we discovered a journal that he'd been keeping. He'd been thinking about little else for nearly a month. I'd never considered myself a violent person before. And yet it was all around us—part of the air we were breathing. Sabra and I didn't immediately tell Judy what we intended to do. Against our better judgement, we eventually did. She said she wanted in.

“I put out some feelers, finally found a guy who showed me how to make a bomb I could attach to the underside of a car. It would blow when the engine caught. You know the rest.” She paused, drawing in her breath. “If you were to ask me if I could go back and change what I'd done, would I? The answer is yes. I'm an old woman now and I've learned that violence only begets more violence. But nobody could have convinced me of that back then. I believed what I was doing was right. I hated our government, still do for that matter. I hated the police and everything they stood for. In the end, of course, it wasn't worth it. I wasted my whole life on a principle I don't even believe in anymore. Revenge was intoxicating. So was the camaraderie, the sense that we were in a righteous war, good verses evil. And yet, I always remember that famous line. Gandhi said it: ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.'”

31

Tessa woke the next morning to find Jill sitting on the bed fully dressed. “I didn't hear you leave,” she said, clearing her throat. She turned over and smiled, thoughts of their lovemaking still fresh in her memory

“I couldn't sleep. I got up around two, went up to the loft to watch some TV. That's when I found this.” She waited until Tessa was looking at her and then held up the black journal.

Tessa felt suddenly light-headed. “You found that … where?”

“In the loft. I dropped my glasses. When I bent over to pick them up, I saw it under the couch.”

She didn't want to ask the next logical question, and yet there was no way around it. “Did you read it?”

“Most of it.”

Shutting her eyes, Tessa placed the heels of her hands against her forehead. “I never wanted you to know any of that. God, what you must think of me.” Words, once again, failed. The next thing she said simply fell out of her mouth without conscious volition. “Do you hate me?”

“Hate you?”

“For what I did?”

Jill reached for her hand. “I can't imagine what it must have been like for you, keeping this to yourself all these years.”

“It was hell. But it would have been equally hellish to talk about it.”

“I've always known there was something in your past that was eating at you. I thought maybe you'd been molested—or raped. I couldn't imagine why you wouldn't talk to me about it. Now I understand.”

“I'm so ashamed.”

“You did a terrible thing, something I never would have believed you were capable of. But that's my naïveté talking. Maybe I
am
a backcountry yokel.”

“Never,” said Tessa.

Jill got up and began rummaging around in the closet. She took down two of Tessa's suitcases from the top shelf and spread them open across the bottom of the bed.

“What are you doing?”

“You can't stay here. It's all going to come out. We both know that. If you stay, you'll be arrested. It might not be tomorrow, but it will come.” She opened the dresser drawers and began packing up clothes. “You have to run. You did it before, you can do it again.”

“But what about you?”

“I'm coming with you.”

“No.”

Jill's head snapped up.

“If I get stopped, you'd go to jail right alongside me. I couldn't live with that. If I go, I go alone.”

Jill stared at her, her eyes filling with tears. “I'm willing to risk it.”

“I'm not.”

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Jill burst out crying.

“Oh, honey, don't. When I first realized I was in love with you, I should have called it off. You deserved so much better.”

“Shut up.” She scraped the tears away from of her eyes.

“The night Feigenbaumer died, I did make a run for it. Fontaine happened to see me drive past the community center. He followed my Volvo in his truck. Once we got out on the highway, he laid on his horn until I stopped. I was in terrible shape. He wouldn't let me get back in the car until we'd talked things through and I'd calmed down. He offered to go with me. Said we could ditch my car somewhere, that he'd protect me, he'd get a job somewhere to support us. I almost took him up on it.”

“You should have gone.”

She shook her head. “I never expected that Jane would notice that my car had been driven that night. I'm sure she concluded that I'd had something to do with Feigenbaumer's murder. I wasn't home half an hour when she and Cordelia arrived to give me the news.”

“She loves you, Tessa. That's why I asked her to help clear your name.”

“She may love me, but she knows I've been lying. Who knows what she's told Kelli?”

“That's why you've got to leave.” Without looking up, Jill returned to packing.

“I can't.”

“You have to.” She went to the closet and took down several sweaters from the middle shelf.

“I don't have any money.”

“I went to the bank this morning, took out five thousand dollars from our joint savings.”

“That won't last long.”

“I realize that. You won't be able to use your credit cards or your cell phone. You'll have to figure out how to buy yourself a new identity. I doubt it's all that hard, especially if you head to the Twin Cities. I'll see what I can find out on my end.”

“If I leave, I can't chance contacting you right away.”

With her back to Tessa, Jill said, “Well, not for a while. You can get one of those no-name cell phones.”