Murder in Little Egypt (14 page)

She had been baby-sitting one evening and was making sure the boys were in bed when everyone heard noises down in the kitchen. Marian and Dale were home earlier than expected. Dale’s voice filled the house. There was no mistaking that tone.

Jewel went downstairs to see what was the matter, telling the boys to stay in bed; but they followed behind.

Through the kitchen door Kevin and Mark could see their father leaning against the sink, breathing hard. Marian stood with her back to him, coughing and clearing her throat. Her pearl necklace lay scattered on the floor. When Jewel spotted the boys, she said:

“Now, Dale, you’re not doing much of a job trying to fix that necklace. Look at that, you’ve let all them pearls fall down. You better pick them up. Now, Dale, you’ll never find them all if you don’t pick them up now. See, boys? It broke when he was trying to fix it.”

Kevin was not fooled, but he loved Jewel for calming things down as no one else could. Dale sank onto his hands and knees to search for the pearls he must have torn from Marian’s throat.

When Jewel was not there, anything could happen. One night Kevin was alone, asleep in his room. Mark was spending the night at a friend’s; Sean was with Peck and Noma, who enjoyed taking care of the baby once in a while. Marian and Dale had gone out to dinner, but Marian was coming home early to be with Kevin.

Kevin woke up suddenly to the sound of his father’s voice, a roar from his parents’ room. He was puzzled to see that his bedside lamp was on, the shade askew and dented. His desk chair was turned over, covers had been dragged from Mark’s bed, the room was a mess. Down the hall his father and mother were yelling at each other, worse than usual.

Kevin got up and crept along the hall toward the noise. He heard something being thrown against a wall, his mother’s voice begging Dale to stop.

The first thing Kevin saw was his mother lying on the floor in a black dress, one arm over her eyes, her lower lip bleeding.

Dale stood against the dresser in his dark suit, one hand on his hip, tie pulled down, chest heaving, sweating. Kevin’s thought was that his father looked as if he had just had a good workout. But Dale’s eyes were wild and a vein in his neck throbbed.

Kevin hesitated in the doorway, blinking, a small figure holding up his pajamas with one hand.

“He tried to kill me!” Marian blurted out and then covered her bleeding mouth with her arm.

Kevin looked up at Dale.

“Yeah. That’s right,” Dale said. He was breathing hard. “I tried to kill her.”

Kevin felt helpless. He had no idea what to think or do. He turned and walked back to his room, switched off the light and pulled the covers over his head.

Everything was quiet now. Kevin stuck his head out of the covers and stared at the ceiling.

Dale came into the room and bent over and hugged Kevin long and hard. It was the biggest hug Kevin could ever remember getting from his dad.

He watched Dale leave the room and heard him go down the stairs. Then he heard the sound of the glass door that opened into the garage.

Kevin got out of bed and went to the top of the stairs as Marian emerged from her room holding a cloth to her face. They stood together looking down the stairway, listening as the electric garage door opened and the car started.

At the upstairs window they watched as Dale’s car headed off down the street into the dark.

Marian put Kevin back to bed and told him that everything was all right now. She was holding her right arm with her other hand.

As he lay there, he tried to reconstruct what must have happened. Why had his room been all messed up? He figured that Marian must have come in to wake him, so that Dale would stop hammering her. Dale had dragged her out again somehow. I must have been in some deep sleep to have missed all that, Kevin thought. Something was telling me not to wake up.

What had they been fighting about? Kevin had often heard them quarrel about money. Would that have been enough for his father to get that angry? Kevin could not imagine getting that angry about anything.

The next morning Kevin got himself dressed and diffidently went downstairs. Marian had her right arm in a scarf she had made into a sling. Her lip was swollen and she had the beginnings of a black eye. Kevin wished she would tell him what had happened and where his father had gone and whether the fighting would ever stop. It seemed to get worse and worse.

But his mother brought him his cereal and chatted about what she had made him for lunch.

“What’s the deal with you and Dad?” Kevin asked.

“Everything’s all right. He did get mad and push me, and I fell. It was an accident, dear, it’s really nothing and I don’t want you to think another thing about it, okay? Have you got your books? Don’t be late for the bus.”

She did not look at him as she spoke. Kevin thought that she was ashamed, and he did not want her to feel that way.

“Dad didn’t really try to kill you, did he?”

“Of course not! That was just talk. You know what foolish things people say when they get angry. It’s all over now. Hurry up.”

There were other bad nights before Kevin and Mark began to understand that there was something else wrong between their parents besides money and arguments over how to treat the boys. One Saturday afternoon Marian agreed to drive Mark, Kevin and a friend of Kevin’s named Philip over to Harrisburg Lake to do some fishing. She would drop the boys off and pick them up before dark.

The route to the lake was through Dale’s Galatia property. As Marian turned down the gravel road, everyone noticed Dale’s car parked beside a trailer he had put out there, about a hundred yards ahead.

“I didn’t know Dad was here,” Mark said.

“I didn’t know either,” Marian said. “You know your dad. You never know where he might be.”

As they approached the trailer, Dale suddenly popped out of it, bounding down the steps and into the road, peering at them. He seemed to be wearing a white surgical smock and nothing else.

“That son of a bitch,” Marian said under her breath. Showing his bare backside, Dale made a dash for the trailer door.

Marian slid to a stop, rushed out and up the steps and started screaming:

“That bitch! What’s she doing in there?”

Marian tried to force her way into the trailer. Dale stood in the doorway, hands outstretched as if barring an intruder. Behind Dale, Kevin caught sight of a blond head appearing as if for the view and quickly withdrawing.

“Martha!” Marian shouted. “Why is Martha here? Let me at her!” Marian struggled with Dale.

The woman in question was well known to the boys, although they had not been aware of her new role in the family’s life until now.

The rest was chaos: Marian screaming, Dale trying to force her back down the steps. Mark, who always went wild when his parents fought, shouted, “Leave her alone!” and began heaving dirt clods and sticks against the side of the trailer.

Kevin, embarrassed in front of his friend, took Philip over to the edge of the woods and sat him down on a log. From there they watched Mark beating on the trailer and the adults shrieking and struggling. Mark grew hysterical, crying, pounding his fists.

“This is terrible,” Philip said, and he started crying, too. “I feel so sorry for you. What are we going to do? I want to go home. I feel so sorry for you. Oh, awful.”

“I’m sorry,” Kevin said. He was the only calm one—outwardly calm. “I’m really sorry about all this. There’s not much I can do, I guess. We better just sit here and let the storm blow by.”

Marian gave up and got the boys back into the car. She apologized to Philip, who asked to be taken home right away.

Kevin did not see his father for weeks after that. Almost every morning Dale would come into the house before anyone was up, take a shower, and leave. Sometimes Kevin and Mark could hear their mother ask Dale where he was staying.

“Leave me alone” was all that Dale said.

8

DISCOVERING DALE WITH ANOTHER WOMAN WAS DISTRESSING enough for Marian, but she was also pregnant again. Until his affair surfaced, she and Dale still made love amid their quarrels. After a heated argument, even after one of his outbursts of violence, Marian was so relieved, even grateful when things returned to what she had come to accept as normal—so anxious to banish hatreds—that she welcomed him back into her arms, trying to salve the wounds in the time-honored way.

That was how, she guessed, on some night near Christmas of 1965, the season when their fighting was always at its worst, that she had become pregnant again. She and Dale had never formally decided to stop having children, but she had stopped taking birth-control pills because they gave her headaches and depressed her. Dale seemed neither elated nor disappointed at the news.

And early in 1966 he surprised her by announcing her pregnancy at a dinner party. Everyone applauded. Dale came over to where she was sitting, bent down and kissed her. Marian thought that they had agreed not to break the news so soon, but she was pleased at his apparent pride.

Within another month, everything went to hell when she discovered Dale with Martha, a woman Marian knew well, out at the Galatia farm. Her fury ignited against the woman, the threat, not against Dale. She wanted to get at Martha and scratch her eyes out—only Dale had thwarted her charge into the trailer, and Martha had retreated. Then Marian heard Mark’s shouting and got the hell out.

Martha Culley was recently divorced from her husband, Duke Culley, whom Dale had professed to like so much that the two couples had spent much time together since their first meeting at a party a few years before. Dale took up with Duke as a golfing and drinking buddy and spoke of him as if he were the greatest Rudie in the world. Duke fit his name: six feet four, Mount Rushmore handsome, a college football player, a Washington University law-school graduate. Marian liked him. As for Martha, Marian had considered her amusing, warm, rather more flamboyant than was usual with southern Illinois ladies, a blonde who would appear to have been more at home wowing them belting out ballads at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville than trapped behind the prosceniums of Little Egypt—something of a Harrisburg Mae West, with her throaty contralto and head-swiveling wardrobe.

Had Dale not been so gone on Duke, Marian believed that she would never have been more than a casual acquaintance of Martha’s. Dale invited the Culleys everywhere, even loaned Duke money, or so Marian understood, so that the Culleys could go along on a golfing holiday to the Greenbriar Hotel in West Virginia. We need another couple, Dale had insisted, although Marian would have preferred to be alone with Dale. Had Dale really been after Martha all along, using his friendship with Duke as a cover? How long had Dale been carrying on with Martha, and could their affair have precipitated the Culleys’ divorce? Marian had no idea. Dale had taken Martha’s side, vehemently, when Duke walked out on her and their four children; but in Marian’s opinion Martha’s indifferent housekeeping and irregular cooking were nearly sufficient cause for the split. It did not seem likely that Dale would turn against a male friend without some ulterior motive.

Marian could recall only once having had anything like a personal conversation with Martha. Martha had dropped by for drinks one afternoon and had started bitching about Duke’s supposedly inadequate income and what she regarded as his laziness, in contrast to Dale’s work habits. To make her feel better, Marian confided that Dale was not exactly an ideal husband and father, no matter how much money he made. He was never home till late. Half the time she had no idea where he was.

What a mistake that moment of confidence had been! It was after Duke had left Martha, Marian now realized, that makeup and lipstick started showing up on Dale’s shirts. “Grateful patient” was all he had said when Marian questioned him, and she had wanted to believe him.

Marian tried to confront Dale, but he avoided her. He stayed away from the house, appearing only early in the morning to shower and change clothes, as Mark and Kevin had noticed. Marian kept doing his laundry. She knew he was with Martha because friends had spotted his car at her house in Harrisburg, but Marian was not ready to give him up. She still loved him, and what choice did she have? Where would she go? She had no mother to run to, no income of her own, three children and another on the way. Surely he would get over Martha like a virus. Maybe he had been temporarily deranged by the thought of having a fourth child.

Marian stayed home. Her pregnancy was making her queasy anyway, and as usual she had stopped drinking and smoking, was watching her weight, following doctor’s orders. She had no wish, reason, or excuse to go out, and she was embarrassed. Fending off the boys’ questions about their father’s whereabouts was bad enough—she assumed that they had figured everything out; but she could not bring herself to discuss it with them, and she made her excuses for Dale, the usual line about how hard he worked.

One evening she was alone, feeling sorry for herself and thinking how good a big drink of Scotch would taste, when a friend called and talked her into driving up to the Carmi Country Club to play bridge.

She had been playing with the three other ladies for an hour or so at the club when Dale walked in with Martha on his arm. Nobody said anything. Dale and Martha sat down across the room and began a game with another couple. Marian asked to be taken home.

When Dale showed up again for his laundry, Marian broke down. She had planned to let him have it, give him an ultimatum, but all she could do was ask him how he could be so cruel. Did he have to show up in public with that woman?

“You don’t understand,” Dale said. “Martha and I are just friends. She’s been going through a rough time since her divorce.”

The lie was so big: Here is a man, Marian thought, who doesn’t give a damn what his wife or anyone else thinks and who believes that he can do as he pleases and get away with anything. It was this bravado that had attracted her years before; now it was turned against her. Other women, Marian knew, had children to hold their husbands, make it impossible for them to leave. But you could count on Dale to do the opposite of the conventional. He prided himself on marching to a different drummer, one of his favorite clichés.