The Open Curtain (14 page)

“Is there a file already?”

“Linda, are you there? Can you hear me?”

Surging up: two faces to either side of her, the strange melange of their various aftershaves and respective fleshes wafting around her like webbing. Then fingers biting into her arm, her body propelled out of the police station, the sun bright in her face, a camera held toward her, her body spinning, strapped down to something, on the move.

Light, dark.
Bring me my robe,
she was sure a voice said. Needle in her somewhere upon the back of her wrist, an opaque tube looping away from it to a pole-strung plastic bag, swollen with pale fluid.

“Lyndi?”

She opened her mouth, felt over her lips with her tongue. Dry, cracked. Someone shining light into her eye. A hand resting on one side of her face, fingers holding eyelids apart.

“Lyndi?”

The light in her eye flickered off, the afterburn a significant fist in her head. She hooded that eye, opened another. Two dim-featured heads, indistinguishable, then slowly taking form, congealing into a doctor and a second man whose professional role wasn’t revealed through face or clothing.

Water,
she managed. The second man left her sight, returned with a cup he held to her lips. Water trickling from the corners of her mouth, prickings of cold on her collarbone. He removed the cup, daubed her lips with the corner of her sheet.

“How do you feel?” the doctor asked.

“I’m going crazy,” she said.

“Of course you are,” the second man said, smiling. “Metaphorically, I mean.”

“Now,” said the doctor. “This is nothing extraordinary. We’ve experienced a severe shock, haven’t we.”

He began again to shine light into her eyes.

“There’s a needle in me,” she said.

“That’s an I.V.” said the doctor. “Nothing to worry over.”

“I mean what’s in it?”

“In it?” he said. “Something to stabilize us, fairly mild. Look left, please.”

“Lyndi,” said the second man.

She tried to turn her head to face him, but the doctor held it in place. “Look left,” he suggested again.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Do you mind if I ask a few questions?” the second man asked.

“Questions?”

“Sure. You wouldn’t mind that, would you?”

“A moment, officer,” said the doctor. “Almost through here.”

“Right,” said the second man. “Beg pardon.”

“Officer?” she asked.

“That’s right,” he said. “As in police. Detective, actually.”

Then the calm voice of the doctor questioning her about things she didn’t see the point of: what the date was, whether she preferred eggs or cheese,
what portion of her forearm was he touching, whether she remembered how she had arrived there. She could not tell if she answered in a fashion he approved of. He kept posing the same questions and getting the same answers until finally he was stepping away from her, writing on his chart all the way out the door.

“Well,” said the detective. “Just you and me now.”

She regarded him a little more closely, his eyes unblinking. Pale face, dark hair, somewhat puffy-featured. “I guess so,” she said.

“About those questions,” he said. “Was there anyone who didn’t care for your parents?”

“Enough to kill them?”

“Your father, did he have enemies?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t you go camping with them?”

“I don’t know. I’m in college.”

He edged a little closer to the bed, regarded her closely. “Lyndi,” he said. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Did you kill them?”

“What?”

“Or arrange for someone else to do it?”

“I can’t believe,” she said, “that you—”

“Just between you and me,” he said, and muffled her hand within his larger own.

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

He offered a flitting half-smile, patted her knee through the sheet. “I believe you. I’m glad we got that out of the way,” he said. “Now let’s see what we can figure out.”

There was a police officer stationed at a door down the hall. Inside, a man in a bed, arms strapped down, I.V. plugged into the back of his hand, tube down his throat, neck packed in cotton. A heart monitor clicked beside him.

“What’s he called?” she asked.

“Rudd something,” the detective said. “Troyer, I think. Not that exactly, but it’s in my notebook. I could look it up.” He made no move to do so. “Only survivor. Recognize him?”

“No,” she said. “Not like this anyway.”

“Not a friend of the family? He wasn’t with your parents?”

“No.”

“You’ve never seen him before?”

“No.”

The detective shook her hand, held out his card. “You’re free to go.”

Pocketing the card, she thanked him. Her head still felt thick. She started for the door, came back to look at the man again. She got close enough to see both sides of his face. Not a man really, a boy, her age or nearly. The detective was still there, behind her, asking was he familiar after all? No, she had never seen him before. Certain? Certain.

T
he bishop came by and tried to talk to her about what had happened, tried to comfort her. She was both grateful and resentful. Some ladies brought over casseroles, which she thanked them for but which she somehow couldn’t eat. They sat on the counters until they fuzzed over with mold and she threw them away. She wasn’t eating much of anything, she found.

For reasons she could not quite fathom, she began to clip out articles on the murders. She stored them in a shoebox beneath her bed until after the funeral and then taped them above the washer and dryer. The Devil’s Kitchen killings they were calling it, though the bodies had been found east and south of Devil’s Kitchen. The newspaper accounts contradicted each other. One article speculated that her father had been attacked first, others that Rudd Theurer had been the first, with his attack stumbled upon by one or more members of her family. Her family had been dead seven hours before their bodies were found, according to the
Daily Herald.
Or was it, as the
Salt Lake Tribune
suggested, twelve? The murder weapon was variously described as a knife, a razor, a sharpened rock, a shard of glass. In some accounts, they had died quickly; in others, they had suffered lingering, agonizing deaths.

As the dryer rumbled, she stood reading them, staring into the grainy pixilated photographs—the bodies from the air, the police rolling a body (her father, she was almost certain) onto a gurney. Rudd all but dead, a crowd of paramedics around him, only his hand and forearm visible.

What to make of it she didn’t know. What she did know was that her parents had gone up to the mountains, had either had Rudd with them or had decided to pitch camp close to him. Then a person or several people had killed her parents and sister by slitting their throats and cutting
deep incisions from breast to breast, hip to hip. Then a person or group of people had carefully bent the bodies, arranging them on the hillside in a pattern that resembled the markings of the Mormon temple garment: the square, the mark of the compass, the navel mark, the knee mark. Too young to be allowed to enter the Mormon temple, she didn’t wear garments herself, and didn’t know their full significance. The markings were something sacred. The Church-owned
Deseret News
said they could not publicly speak of the symbolism of the marks but did state that a Mormon investigator on the team had the matter
under consideration.
The victims had all bled to death save for this Rudd, whose windpipe had been gashed opened but none of his major arteries cut. Still, he had been lucky not to choke on his own blood. Perhaps, the
Tribune
speculated, the killer (or killers) had been interrupted before he (or they) could finish the task properly.

Mormons came to her door, encouraging her to put her life back together—first two women from the Relief Society, then the Relief Society President.
How was she?
they asked, and she sensed in them a kind of hunger for any details that hadn’t been revealed in the papers. It showed as a gauntness to their faces, but yet they genuinely seemed to want to help her as well. Why wasn’t anything simple? They spoke about healing and God’s trials, and confessed their own trials to her. She both liked them and was repulsed by them. It was good she was going sometimes to church, Lyndi was told, but it would be even better if she attended every Sunday, especially at this time, especially now. There was comfort to be found there.

Most of the week, she was left alone to wander the empty house. She was drawn in particular, she found, to word of Rudd in the articles, since, though comatose, he was the only survivor. He was an only child, had lived alone with his mother until the accident. He was several months younger than she, still a senior in high school. He was described as solitary, as a reasonably good student with sometimes odd notions, afraid of heights, an unlucky boy who had apparently managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The articles reproduced a yearbook photograph in which he was at once smiling and trying not to smile, his teeth hidden, the resulting strained expression having the character of a death rictus. When she took out her own high school yearbook, she realized Rudd’s was the expression most students had. Her own photograph was the exception, all teeth. He was disturbed, his English teacher said of him, obsessed with death.
How
ironic,
the teacher was quoted as saying, stepping exuberantly into a parody of her professional role,
that the one obsessed with death would be the only one to survive.

Her aunt Debby from southern California showed up on the doorstep, sporting four designer suitcases. She had tried to call, she claimed: wasn’t Lyndi answering the phone? She was concerned, she claimed. Sure, certainly Lyndi was of legal age, but with the shock and all perhaps she would like company for a few weeks, perhaps even longer?

“Uh, well,” said Lyndi.

She knew how it was. Constant crying, state of shock, bags under the eyes, everything in disarray, feeling like you want to die, Valium. She was there to help her limp through the hard times. Lyndi could count on her.

Not knowing what else to do, Lyndi invited her in.

Her aunt entered, peeling off her gloves in the process, leaving her bags on the porch for Lyndi to lug in. She stood looking around the living room apprehensively.

“How delightfully quaint,” she suggested.

Then she plunged through the entryway and fully into the house, up the stairs straight to Lyndi’s parents’ old room, pushing her parents’ clothes all to one side of the closet and beginning, once Lyndi had brought up the suitcases, to unload her own things. She rearranged the drawers too, putting Lyndi’s father’s socks and underwear into the same drawer, then wedging all the rest of his things into her mother’s armoire. When Lyndi protested:

“My dear, you’ll have to face it sometime, you know. They’re dead. They’re not coming back.”

It was not that Lyndi wasn’t facing it, it was not that she didn’t know they were dead. It was the lack of respect her aunt was showing, the way she dumped her parents’ toothbrushes into the trash and emptied her parents’ half-full bottle of shampoo into the toilet so that when the toilet was flushed it foamed up and over the rim. She rearranged all the drawers in the kitchen—
it’ll be good for you, dear, you’ve got to let go
—so they matched her drawers in her house in California. But Lyndi had kept the drawers as they were, not as an homage to her parents but because she had grown up with them in a particular order. She could find things.

There her aunt was, peignoir-wrapped and sitting across the coffee table, or
the postum table
as she chose to call it in deference to Mormonism:
avoid the very appearance of evil,
her aunt would claim,
strong drinks should be banned
even from the names of household furnishings.
They were having a
chat,
something her aunt liked to
schedule
from time to time and which Lyndi suffered through. The chats involved her aunt reciting gossip about people Lyndi had never met and whose names she could barely keep straight. There was Rod Fuller, a used car salesman who secretly drank. There was her aunt’s next-door neighbor, accused of acting rudely, Lyndi’s aunt carefully ticking off grievances against her: coming to the door with her hair in curlers, playing the radio in her garden, hanging her bras on the outside line to dry. There was Mrs. Miller down the street who had been married five times despite what her aunt called “a colostomy situation,” and who was now sleeping with a boy half her age.

“I’ve got homework to do,” said Lyndi. “May I be excused?”

“Homework, Hell,” said her aunt. “You’re in mourning.”

She had been doing fine, Lyndi told herself. It wasn’t easy, hadn’t been, she loved her parents, she loved her sister, it had been difficult to lose them, but she had been wading through. Wading through her aunt, though, struck her as a more difficult proposition, one she shouldn’t have to face.

“Half her age,” her aunt was saying, “if even that. Some folk find a colostomy bag exciting, if you get my meaning, but I’m not one of those people. Still, it takes all kinds and thank God for that, else all the weirdos and sickos and nuts would be after you and me both.”