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Haunted
18.
In Miss America’s dressing room, in the gray concrete and bare pipes, kneeling beside the one twin bed, Mrs. Clark is saying how having a child isn’t always the dream you might imagine.
The rest of us, we’re in the hallway to spy. We’re all afraid we’ll miss some key event and be forced to take another person’s word.
Miss America curled on her bed, curled on her side with her face to the gray concrete wall, she doesn’t have any lines in this scene.
And, kneeling beside her, Mrs. Clark’s huge, dry breasts shelved on the edge of the bed, she says, “You remember my daughter, Cassandra?”
The girl who looked into the Nightmare Box.
Who cut off her eyelashes and then disappeared.
“When she disappeared is the first time I noticed Mr. Whittier’s advertisement,” she says. Tucked in a book, in the bedroom she’d left behind, Cassandra had written on a sheet of blank paper: Writers’ Retreat. Abandon Your Life for Three Months.
Mrs. Clark says, “I know Mr. Whittier has done this before.”
And Cassandra was here—trapped in this place—the last time.
Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain.
With the rest of us scribbling, you can almost not hear for the noise of our pens on paper. We’re all writing: either a liar or a fool.
From the Earl of Slander’s tape recorder, we hear, “. . . or a villain.”
All Mrs. Clark really knows is, after Cassandra was gone for three months, they found her. The police found Cassandra.
Kneeling beside Miss America’s bed, she says, “I agreed to help Whittier because I wanted to know what happened to my child . . .” Mrs. Clark says, “I wanted to know, and she would never tell me . . .”
Poster Child
A Story by Mrs. Clark
Three months after Cassandra Clark disappeared, she walked back. A morning commuter driving inbound on the state highway saw a girl limping, almost naked, along the gravel shoulder. The girl seemed to be wearing a dark loincloth and dark gloves and shoes. She had on some kind of bib or a black kerchief tied around her neck and hanging down to cover her chest. By the time the driver had turned his car around and phoned for the police, by then the sun was bright enough to see the girl was actually naked.
Her shoes and gloves, her loincloth and bib were just dried blood, dried thick and black and swarming, buzzing, busy with black flies. The flies crawling on her, thick as black fur.
The girl’s head was scraped and scabbed. Ragged tufts of hair sprouted behind her ears and around the crown of her bare head.
She limped because the two small toes had been amputated from her right foot.
The bib, that layer of blood on her chest, that fur of flies, at the hospital emergency room the doctors swabbed it with alcohol and found a game of tic-tac-toe carved in the skin above her breasts. The X player had won.
When they swabbed her hands, they found the smallest finger missing from both. On the rest of her fingers, the nails had been pried up and torn away, leaving the fingertips swollen and purple.
Under the dried blood, her skin was blue-white. The girl’s face was the bony knobs of her chin, her cheekbones, and the ridge of her nose. At the temples and above her jawline, the skin sagged into shadowed holes.
Inside the curtained walls of the emergency room, Mrs. Clark leaned over the chrome rails of her daughter’s bed and said, “Baby, oh, my sweet baby . . . who did this to you?”
Cassandra laughed and looked at the needles stuck in her arms, the clear plastic tubes stuffed into her veins, and she said, “The doctors.”
No, Mrs. Clark said, who cut off her fingers?
And Cassandra looked at her mother and said, “You think I’d let someone else do this to me?” Her laughter stopped, and she said, “I did this to myself.” And that was the last time Cassandra ever laughed.
The police, Mrs. Clark said, they found evidence. They found slivers of wood, thin as needles, embedded in the walls of her vagina. And her anus. The police forensics people dug slivers of glass out of the cuts on her chest and arms. Mrs. Clark told her daughter that not talking wasn’t an option.
They needed to know every detail Cassandra could remember.
The police said that whoever had done this would kidnap another victim. Unless Cassandra could face her fear and help them, her attacker would never be found.
In bed, in the sunlight from a window, Cassandra lay propped up on pillows and watched birds soar back and forth in the blue sky.
Her fingers wrapped big in white bandages, her chest padded with bandages, her pencil-hand only moved to draw the birds, flying back and forth. A sketch pad propped against her knees.
Mrs. Clark said, “Cassandra, honey? You need to tell the police everything.”
If it would help, a hypnotist would come to the hospital. The caseworkers would bring anatomically detailed dolls to use in the interview.
And Cassandra still watched the birds. Sketching them.
Mrs. Clark said, “Cassandra?” and put her hand over one of Cassandra’s white-wrapped hands.
And Cassandra looked at her mother and said, “It won’t happen again.” Looking back at the birds, Cassandra said, “At least not to me . . .”
She said, “I was a victim of myself.”
Outside, in the parking lot, the television news crews were setting up their satellite feeds, each van aligning the broadcast dish on its roof. Ready for the toss from the studio anchor. The on-location talent, holding a microphone and inserting an IFD in her ear.
For three months, the town where they lived had stapled posters to telephone poles. Each poster showing a photo of Cassandra Clark in her head-cheerleader uniform, smiling and shaking her blond hair. For three months, the police had questioned kids at the high school. Detectives had interviewed people who worked at the bus station, the train station, the airport. The local television and radio stations ran public-service announcements that gave her weight as 110 pounds, height five foot six, green eyes, and shoulder-length hair.
Search-and-rescue dogs sniffed her cheerleading skirt and followed a scent trail as far as a bus-stop bench.
State troopers in powerboats dragged every pond and lake and river within a day’s drive.
Psychics phoned to say the girl was safe. She had eloped and gotten married. Or she was dead and buried. Or she was sold into white slavery and smuggled out of the country to live in the harem of some oil magnate. Or she’d had a sex change and would be coming home as a boy, soon. Or the girl was trapped in a castle or some kind of palace, locked inside with a group of strangers, all of them cutting themselves. That psychic wrote two words on a sheet of paper and sent them to Mrs. Clark. Folded inside the paper, the shaky pencil lines said:
Writers’ Retreat
After three months, all the yellow ribbons that people had tied to their car antennas were faded to almost white. Flags of surrender.
Nobody paid much attention to the psychics, there were so many of them.
For every Jane Doe the police found, burned or rotted or mutilated beyond identification, Mrs. Clark held her breath until dental records or DNA testing showed she wasn’t Cassandra.
By the third month, Cassandra Clark was smiling and shaking her hair on the side of milk cartons. By then, the candlelight prayer vigils had stopped. The reward fund at the local bank branch was the only part of the case still drawing any interest.
Then—a miracle—and she was limping naked along the highway.
In her hospital bed, her skin looked purple with bruises. Her head was shaved bald. The plastic band around her wrist, it said: C. Clark.
The county medical examiner swabbed her for penis cells—which he said are long-shaped, unlike the round-shaped vaginal cells. They swabbed her for semen. The team of detectives vacuumed her scalp and hands and feet for foreign skin cells. They found fibers of blue velvet, red silk, black mohair. They swabbed the inside of her mouth and cultured the DNA in petri dishes.
Police counselors came and sat at her bedside, saying how important it was that Cassandra talk out all her pain. That she speak her bitterness.
The television and radio crews, the newspaper and magazine reporters sat in the parking lot, shooting their stories with her hospital window in the background. Some stepping back to film crews filming crews filming crews filming her window. To show what a circus this had become, as if that was the final truth.
When the nurse brought sleeping pills, Cassandra shook her head no. Just by shutting her eyes, she fell asleep.
After Cassandra wouldn’t talk, the police fell on Mrs. Clark, telling her about the total cost to the taxpayer for their investigation. The detectives shook their heads and said how angry and betrayed they felt, working this hard, caring this much about a girl who didn’t give a rat’s ass about the pain and hardship she was causing her family, her community, and her government. She had everyone weeping and praying. Everyone hated the monster who’d tortured her, and they all wanted to see him caught and put on trial. After all their searching and effort, they deserved that much. They deserved to see her on the stand, weeping while she described how the monster had cut off her fingers. Carved her chest. Shoved a wood stake up her starving ass.
And Cassandra Clark just looked at the detectives lined up alongside her bed. All their faces, all their hate and rage focused on her because she wouldn’t hand over another target. A bona-fide real demon. The devil they needed so bad.
The district attorney threatened to sue Cassandra for obstruction of justice.
Her mother, Mrs. Clark, among those glaring faces.
Cassandra smiled and told them, “Can’t you see, you’re addicted to conflict.” She says, “This is my happy ending.” Looking back to the window, to the birds flying past, she says, “I feel terrific.”
Still in the hospital, she asked for a goldfish in a bowl. After that, she lay propped up in bed, watching it swim around and around, sketching it. The same way her mother watched program after television program every night.
The last time Mrs. Clark went to visit, Cassandra looked away from the fish only long enough to say, “I’m not like you anymore.” She said, “I don’t need to brag about my pain . . .”
And after that, Tess Clark didn’t visit.
Haunted
18.
In Miss America’s dressing room, in the gray concrete and bare pipes, kneeling beside the one twin bed, Mrs. Clark is saying how having a child isn’t always the dream you might imagine.
The rest of us, we’re in the hallway to spy. We’re all afraid we’ll miss some key event and be forced to take another person’s word.
Miss America curled on her bed, curled on her side with her face to the gray concrete wall, she doesn’t have any lines in this scene.
And, kneeling beside her, Mrs. Clark’s huge, dry breasts shelved on the edge of the bed, she says, “You remember my daughter, Cassandra?”
The girl who looked into the Nightmare Box.
Who cut off her eyelashes and then disappeared.
“When she disappeared is the first time I noticed Mr. Whittier’s advertisement,” she says. Tucked in a book, in the bedroom she’d left behind, Cassandra had written on a sheet of blank paper: Writers’ Retreat. Abandon Your Life for Three Months.
Mrs. Clark says, “I know Mr. Whittier has done this before.”
And Cassandra was here—trapped in this place—the last time.
Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain.
With the rest of us scribbling, you can almost not hear for the noise of our pens on paper. We’re all writing: either a liar or a fool.
From the Earl of Slander’s tape recorder, we hear, “. . . or a villain.”
All Mrs. Clark really knows is, after Cassandra was gone for three months, they found her. The police found Cassandra.
Kneeling beside Miss America’s bed, she says, “I agreed to help Whittier because I wanted to know what happened to my child . . .” Mrs. Clark says, “I wanted to know, and she would never tell me . . .”
Poster Child
A Story by Mrs. Clark
Three months after Cassandra Clark disappeared, she walked back. A morning commuter driving inbound on the state highway saw a girl limping, almost naked, along the gravel shoulder. The girl seemed to be wearing a dark loincloth and dark gloves and shoes. She had on some kind of bib or a black kerchief tied around her neck and hanging down to cover her chest. By the time the driver had turned his car around and phoned for the police, by then the sun was bright enough to see the girl was actually naked.
Her shoes and gloves, her loincloth and bib were just dried blood, dried thick and black and swarming, buzzing, busy with black flies. The flies crawling on her, thick as black fur.
The girl’s head was scraped and scabbed. Ragged tufts of hair sprouted behind her ears and around the crown of her bare head.
She limped because the two small toes had been amputated from her right foot.
The bib, that layer of blood on her chest, that fur of flies, at the hospital emergency room the doctors swabbed it with alcohol and found a game of tic-tac-toe carved in the skin above her breasts. The X player had won.
When they swabbed her hands, they found the smallest finger missing from both. On the rest of her fingers, the nails had been pried up and torn away, leaving the fingertips swollen and purple.
Under the dried blood, her skin was blue-white. The girl’s face was the bony knobs of her chin, her cheekbones, and the ridge of her nose. At the temples and above her jawline, the skin sagged into shadowed holes.
Inside the curtained walls of the emergency room, Mrs. Clark leaned over the chrome rails of her daughter’s bed and said, “Baby, oh, my sweet baby . . . who did this to you?”
Cassandra laughed and looked at the needles stuck in her arms, the clear plastic tubes stuffed into her veins, and she said, “The doctors.”
No, Mrs. Clark said, who cut off her fingers?
And Cassandra looked at her mother and said, “You think I’d let someone else do this to me?” Her laughter stopped, and she said, “I did this to myself.” And that was the last time Cassandra ever laughed.
The police, Mrs. Clark said, they found evidence. They found slivers of wood, thin as needles, embedded in the walls of her vagina. And her anus. The police forensics people dug slivers of glass out of the cuts on her chest and arms. Mrs. Clark told her daughter that not talking wasn’t an option.
They needed to know every detail Cassandra could remember.
The police said that whoever had done this would kidnap another victim. Unless Cassandra could face her fear and help them, her attacker would never be found.
In bed, in the sunlight from a window, Cassandra lay propped up on pillows and watched birds soar back and forth in the blue sky.
Her fingers wrapped big in white bandages, her chest padded with bandages, her pencil-hand only moved to draw the birds, flying back and forth. A sketch pad propped against her knees.
Mrs. Clark said, “Cassandra, honey? You need to tell the police everything.”
If it would help, a hypnotist would come to the hospital. The caseworkers would bring anatomically detailed dolls to use in the interview.
And Cassandra still watched the birds. Sketching them.
Mrs. Clark said, “Cassandra?” and put her hand over one of Cassandra’s white-wrapped hands.
And Cassandra looked at her mother and said, “It won’t happen again.” Looking back at the birds, Cassandra said, “At least not to me . . .”
She said, “I was a victim of myself.”
Outside, in the parking lot, the television news crews were setting up their satellite feeds, each van aligning the broadcast dish on its roof. Ready for the toss from the studio anchor. The on-location talent, holding a microphone and inserting an IFD in her ear.
For three months, the town where they lived had stapled posters to telephone poles. Each poster showing a photo of Cassandra Clark in her head-cheerleader uniform, smiling and shaking her blond hair. For three months, the police had questioned kids at the high school. Detectives had interviewed people who worked at the bus station, the train station, the airport. The local television and radio stations ran public-service announcements that gave her weight as 110 pounds, height five foot six, green eyes, and shoulder-length hair.
Search-and-rescue dogs sniffed her cheerleading skirt and followed a scent trail as far as a bus-stop bench.
State troopers in powerboats dragged every pond and lake and river within a day’s drive.
Psychics phoned to say the girl was safe. She had eloped and gotten married. Or she was dead and buried. Or she was sold into white slavery and smuggled out of the country to live in the harem of some oil magnate. Or she’d had a sex change and would be coming home as a boy, soon. Or the girl was trapped in a castle or some kind of palace, locked inside with a group of strangers, all of them cutting themselves. That psychic wrote two words on a sheet of paper and sent them to Mrs. Clark. Folded inside the paper, the shaky pencil lines said:
Writers’ Retreat
After three months, all the yellow ribbons that people had tied to their car antennas were faded to almost white. Flags of surrender.
Nobody paid much attention to the psychics, there were so many of them.
For every Jane Doe the police found, burned or rotted or mutilated beyond identification, Mrs. Clark held her breath until dental records or DNA testing showed she wasn’t Cassandra.
By the third month, Cassandra Clark was smiling and shaking her hair on the side of milk cartons. By then, the candlelight prayer vigils had stopped. The reward fund at the local bank branch was the only part of the case still drawing any interest.
Then—a miracle—and she was limping naked along the highway.
In her hospital bed, her skin looked purple with bruises. Her head was shaved bald. The plastic band around her wrist, it said: C. Clark.
The county medical examiner swabbed her for penis cells—which he said are long-shaped, unlike the round-shaped vaginal cells. They swabbed her for semen. The team of detectives vacuumed her scalp and hands and feet for foreign skin cells. They found fibers of blue velvet, red silk, black mohair. They swabbed the inside of her mouth and cultured the DNA in petri dishes.
Police counselors came and sat at her bedside, saying how important it was that Cassandra talk out all her pain. That she speak her bitterness.
The television and radio crews, the newspaper and magazine reporters sat in the parking lot, shooting their stories with her hospital window in the background. Some stepping back to film crews filming crews filming crews filming her window. To show what a circus this had become, as if that was the final truth.
When the nurse brought sleeping pills, Cassandra shook her head no. Just by shutting her eyes, she fell asleep.
After Cassandra wouldn’t talk, the police fell on Mrs. Clark, telling her about the total cost to the taxpayer for their investigation. The detectives shook their heads and said how angry and betrayed they felt, working this hard, caring this much about a girl who didn’t give a rat’s ass about the pain and hardship she was causing her family, her community, and her government. She had everyone weeping and praying. Everyone hated the monster who’d tortured her, and they all wanted to see him caught and put on trial. After all their searching and effort, they deserved that much. They deserved to see her on the stand, weeping while she described how the monster had cut off her fingers. Carved her chest. Shoved a wood stake up her starving ass.
And Cassandra Clark just looked at the detectives lined up alongside her bed. All their faces, all their hate and rage focused on her because she wouldn’t hand over another target. A bona-fide real demon. The devil they needed so bad.
The district attorney threatened to sue Cassandra for obstruction of justice.
Her mother, Mrs. Clark, among those glaring faces.
Cassandra smiled and told them, “Can’t you see, you’re addicted to conflict.” She says, “This is my happy ending.” Looking back to the window, to the birds flying past, she says, “I feel terrific.”
Still in the hospital, she asked for a goldfish in a bowl. After that, she lay propped up in bed, watching it swim around and around, sketching it. The same way her mother watched program after television program every night.
The last time Mrs. Clark went to visit, Cassandra looked away from the fish only long enough to say, “I’m not like you anymore.” She said, “I don’t need to brag about my pain . . .”