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Chapter Two

When the phone rang at five the next morning, Brontë snarled irritably from the foot of my bed. I knew that if I gave the attack signal she’d tear the phone out of the wall. It was tempting.

“Everything’s set for you to visit my sister at nine-thirty, phone ten,” Dan Crandall’s voice announced. “It’ll take them at least a half hour to bring her to the visiting area, so be there by eight-forty-five or it won’t work. You’ll be allowed ten or fifteen minutes this time, maybe more later, maybe not.”

“Phone ten?” I pronounced thickly.

“Yeah. The lawyer told me there’s a row of phones. You talk through plexiglass. They assign you a time and a phone. You’ll talk to her on phone ten.”

This set of instructions seemed unnecessarily concise for 5 a.m.

“Have you been to see your sister, Dan?”

“No.”

“So why are you doing all this?”

His sigh was more resigned than hostile. Like the sigh of somebody who’s been teaching introductory classes for too long. My kind of sigh.

“Just go talk to her. Incidentally, she won’t want to talk to you. Have you read the stuff I emailed?”

“Oddly, I don’t sleep with electronic devices,” I said, trying for a confessional tone. “There are others like me.”

“Ha,” he answered. “Call me when you’ve got some ideas.”

After leaving the number of a bayfront hotel in San Diego, Crandall hung up and I faced the rest of my life. At the moment it looked like one of those seventeenth-century Dutch paintings meant to emphasize the transitory nature of being. Wilted cabbage roses on a table with two dead birds and a snail. Except there are no snails in the desert, and my still life would be called Rumpled Sheets with Black Dog and Large Human Foot. Brontë had stretched happily across the width of my queen-size bed and was eyeing one outstretched paw as if contemplating a new shade of nail polish. The large foot was mine.

David and I are, for obvious reasons, fraternal rather than identical twins. He inherited Dad’s stocky frame and run-of-the-mill feet. I got our mother’s gangly height, topaz eyes, and feet for which the term “extended sizes” was coined. Fortunately Mom maintained a competent wardrobe. I was appropriately shod in her size ten double E black kid pumps for the all-stops-out funeral at St. Louis’s Anglican bastion, Christ Church Cathedral. A drunk driver had plowed head-on into her car as she left a meeting of the Sierra Club. My brother and I were thirteen.

Misha theorized that David began his transformation into a sleazebag criminal named Hammer when our mother died. But then Misha never met Mom or David, and for some reason couldn’t envision the relentlessly pleasant childhood that David and I enjoyed. I did describe this childhood to her. Often I marveled at odd details which, I thought, pointed to the day I would meet her. But either Misha’s own childhood, which had apparently been Faulknerian, or more likely her complete disinterest in narratives not involving the Flight of a Strong Woman from the Clutches of Patriarchy, rendered my stories meaningless. I remained strangely blind to Misha’s complete lack of interest in the details of my life for two years. Love, as they say, is like that.

Only after she’d been gone an entire year did it dawn on me that Misha, whose feminist concern for the most insignificant forms of female life rivaled that of God for sparrows, probably couldn’t have identified my hometown or remembered my mother’s name on a bet. For a while that made me feel funny, as if for the years I spent with her my own history had been lost in the mail. Pieces of it were still drifting in as I went outside with Brontë for her morning run.

“David hasn’t killed anybody,” I announced to a lone cottonwood that was probably there when the first stagecoach stopped to water horses at Coyote Creek. “But there will be similarities between his story and this woman’s. Criminology kinds of things. After all, they’re both in prison.”

As Brontë chased a black-tailed jackrabbit I recognized a certain flimsiness in this train of thought. I know a great deal about male primate proclivities, which, if not controlled, result in truly idiotic violence. But there was no precedent for what Muffin Crandall had done, or said she’d done, in the chemistry and subsequent social organization of female primates. Girl apes, as the song says, just wanna have fun. And babies. Although in the human ape the former urge usually dies almost overnight around thirty. That’s when estrogen levels begin to drop and the brain looks around, wondering where it’s been since fifth grade and where all these children came from. Female primates rarely kill except when defending their young or, more rarely, themselves. And the “self” being defended in the case of female humans is a more complicated entity than the mere physical body.

Muffin Crandall, I remembered, was sixty-one. Fifty-six when a man about whom I knew nothing was packed into a deep­freeze with sharks, tuna, doves, and mule deer. Muffin had been past prime for menopause, with its rotten reputation, at the time of the slaughter. Still, she might have been one of the late ones, one of the small, chagrined army of fifty-something women who secretly dread they’ll have to be buried with a feminine hygiene product. I threw rocks at a spindly ocotillo shrub and thought about that until Brontë loped back over the low hill which forms the eastern boundary of the gulch.

To my knowledge, the female chemical transition away from fertility and into wisdom had not been used successfully as the defense strategy in a murder case. Despite the Victorian mystique it still wears in some quarters, I was sure menopause could not cause women to start killing random strangers with paperweights on their way to the freezer. In my experience all it caused them to do was have parties.

As Brontë snuffled and growled at a kangaroo rat hole under a creosote bush, I thought about one of those parties and about the feminist icon, Eden Snow. The mythic author Eden Snow, resplendent on the only occasion that I’d actually seen her. The occasion after which nobody saw her again, or at least that was the story. Eden Snow more than four years ago, already well past sixty but ageless in that way peculiar to celebrity.

She had come to San Diego to give a lecture, to be the big draw for a symposium on Contemporary Feminism sponsored by the Women’s Studies Department of San Diego’s largest university. After the lecture there was a party at somebody’s house. Among Snow’s credentials were an impressive array of degrees, ten increasingly radical books of feminist theory, fluency in five languages, and the respect of women the world over. Despite those credentials I didn’t hear a single word Eden Snow said that night.

I had gone to the lecture and then the party with Misha, whom I knew in her capacity as program director for the Inter-Collegiate Women’s Studies Consortium. That is, I knew she arranged meetings and seemed to be everywhere. She also knew everybody, including everybody on the faculty at San Gabriel University where I was teaching. With her wiry body and strangely compelling eyes, she always made me think of the Little Match Girl. That bathos. Put her in rags on a street corner, and within eight hours she could raise enough money to fund a respectable day care center for a year. Actually, she had been a fund-raiser for some now-defunct runaway kids’ shelter before taking over the consortium directorship. I didn’t trust her.

There was, despite my mistrust, a jittery attraction between us that in her company brought a taste of hot metal to my throat and made it impossible for me to be near common household objects without harming myself or them. That night I had already splintered a chair rung and tripped over a perfectly flat expanse of carpet. Misha had spilled white wine into a toaster. We seemed to be riding some foreordained conclusion about to happen with or without our complicity. And it would happen that night. I did remember that. I do remember that.

By 2 a.m. the party had thinned to drying wheels of cheese, sesame-seed cracker crumbs, and fifteen or twenty women in turtlenecks drinking chardonnay from plastic cups near some pricey speakers. All night the background music had been foreign to me. Unfamiliar women’s movement music Misha explained was from before my time. Misha, ten years my senior, suddenly the only thing I saw in the stale, winey air.

Most of the others made a circle around Eden Snow, who sat in a wingback chair looking exultant as they belted out “Song of the Soul” for the third time. Snow’s wiry gray hair was tied back with a rumpled scarf, and she watched everything from lashless blue eyes that were at once brutally intelligent and too big. I remember that she was wearing beach thongs with a pair of baggy jeans and a silk kimono jacket so exquisitely designed most people would have framed it in an entry hall. From time to time she chewed thoughtfully on the kimono’s sash.

The women surrounding her were tenured professors, authors, attorneys, directors of grant programs pulling two hundred thousand a year in addition to whatever they picked up on the speakers’ circuit. They were remembering dark childhoods in which little girls were forbidden such futures.

One of the lawyers strummed chords on a guitar, and two women I didn’t know ran outside to their car to get balalaikas, they said. The music stopped, and somebody found an oldies station on the radio in time for the opening “sho-dote-en-sho-be-doe” of the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night.” The song prompted the second-“most memorable event of the evening. A sing-along with the radio.

Teenagers in the sixties, they remembered, they stood, and they sang. Perfectly. They sang to Eden Snow in four-chord harmony of feminism, of a time beloved and lost, its ghost alive again in that moment among them. A bunch of drunk, middle-aged women singing old doo-wop, or a choir in transcendent celebration of an idea, you choose. I was in tears by the time Misha and I went outside alone. Into the backyard, in the dark.

By then there was nothing else to do, nothing left but the in­evitable. I am certain that neither of us would have chosen anything quite as overwhelming if we’d been asked. But we weren’t asked. We were simply drawn toward some huge intention whose purposes demanded a connection between us so deep and fierce that I realized even then, my mouth on Misha’s hungrily on mine, that I might not survive it. I didn’t care.

Later there was some stumbling, urgent progress to a shed. Bags of peat moss and potting soil. A sense of there being no time left to do this. No time at all. The suddenly pointless yet stubborn presence of clothes, buttons, zippers. The impossible necessity of touch, the pounding vortex of orgasm. And all the while, over Misha’s ragged breathing and mine, the sound of balalaikas reaching out into the dark.

Much later, sometime the following morning, it would cross my mind that Misha was a woman and so this sexual cataclysm meant I could safely sneer at all further accusations of affectional ambivalence. I hadn’t been sure what the fuss was about either way. Now I was sure. Totally.

Misha would scarcely make the “A list” of potential romantic partners, but I was unmoved by such distinctions. Prone to disguising a Southern accent under fake “Hahvahd” pronunciations and telling people she grew up in Wellesley, Misha was the object of more than one raised eyebrow. Deland wasn’t her name, but that of a teenage husband long divorced, she said. Her real surname, she told various people at various times, was Carruthers. Or Hancock. Or McAdams. Names noteworthy for nothing so much as their presumed proximity to the Mayflower. Despite her ambiguous identity she wanted nothing so much as to be widely known, preferably admired. Misha never missed a meeting she could chair, and kept on her cell phone a contact list the size of the old Manhattan Yellow Pages. She wasn’t exactly a social climber, needing instead to be known by literally everybody. But none of it mattered to me. It would never matter.

What mattered was Dad’s response when I called to tell him I was really in love at last and with a woman. It had always been an option. Misha was not the first woman I’d made love with, just the first lover I’d been flung to infinity with. Dissolved with. Transformed with. All that.

Dad didn’t bat an eye until I told him about the balalaikas, about the unfathomable intent in me and Misha that seemed to come from somewhere else and have an agenda of its own. Then his voice broke and he whispered, “Oh, my God,” in tones trailing history, and secrets. Because of Misha I would eventually hear the story of my own existence, and be shocked. Later I would begin to know two people named Jake and Elizabeth, who had dealt with balalaikas of their own.

Brontë interrupted this train of thought by getting a half-dozen fire ants up her nose, requiring my immediate attention. I was already hot even though I was wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of ratty tennis shoes. The Muffin Crandall investigation, I decided, would be a test of my ability to return to the real world. The World Before Misha. A world in which people do not run around wracked by dead love affairs and inadequately clothed.

I was not brought up to walk dogs without first putting on a shirt. In fact, our two-story frame house in Waterloo was a veritable monument to those ordinary proprieties which make society possible. Dad was the rector at a little church called simply Grace, and our mother zealously cultivated at least the appearance of successful housewifery. David never noticed, but I’d often find Mom poring over women’s magazines, her high, tanned brow knit in concentration. Sometimes she jotted things in a small spiral notebook. Then, a few days later, we’d face the “Festive Ukrainian Borscht Compote” at dinner. Or we’d come home from school to find the front porch sagging under the weight of twenty-six pink geranium plants in wicker laundry baskets lined with calico. On these days there would be home­made cookies and Dad would read aloud from old children’s books about Abraham Lincoln or Clara Barton.

My parents sighed with relief at each successfully completed domestic vignette, each family outing and holiday. David and I were watched by glowing eyes that increased in wattage every time we succeeded, failed, or were merely average at anything. Our parents were terrified, but we didn’t know it. What David and I learned from them was that every humdrum event un-shattered by primal forces is cause for celebration. But we would find out about the primal forces later. Both of us. I pondered the fact that Muffin Crandall had obviously stumbled over them as well.

In my office/living room, actually the intended reception area for Wren’s Gulch Inn, I sat down to read Dan Crandall’s emails. Beatrice Crandall, I learned, had shortly after the earthquake, confessed to assaulting the man in the Roadrunner freezer. In a prepared statement distributed by her attorney, she admitted to hitting an intruder in her garage over the head with a paperweight on a Sunday night during July five years ago.

She awoke, she said, around eleven that night to the sound of her garage door opening. At first she thought it was an electronic glitch of some kind. Probably the door responding to a neighbor’s battery-operated door-opener. After all, the garage of her condo opened into an alley shared with fifteen other units, which meant fifteen identical automatic garage doors with identical electronic openers. But after she heard the door close there was a sound of someone “mucking around down there.” The garage, she said, was directly beneath her second-story bedroom. The windows were open because the night was warm. She could hear the intruder through both floor and windows.

Still, she wasn’t overly alarmed. “I thought there was some reasonable explanation,” she said. “Maybe a neighbor borrowing a ladder. I have a nice lightweight aluminum ladder that people are always borrowing. Of course nobody would do that, break into my garage in the middle of the night to get the ladder without asking me, but that’s what I thought when I was walking down the stairs. What I really thought was maybe he’d had too much to drink. I have a neighbor who drinks a lot at night. Everybody knows. You can’t hide much, living so close together. I really just thought it was probably him and that he’d be embarrassed and go away when he saw that he’d got me out of bed.”

On her way through the darkened living room, Crandall had grabbed a paperweight from her desk “just in case.” She hadn’t really intended to use the object as a weapon, the narrative went on. There were plenty of knives in the kitchen if she’d been thinking about a weapon. She just wanted something in her hand when she opened the kitchen door to the garage. Something heavy. She didn’t really know why.

But what she saw when she opened her kitchen door wasn’t her tipsy neighbor. It was a stranger. “A dirty, evil-looking man with his back to me,” she said, was pawing through some storage boxes containing items which had belonged to her deceased husband. “It didn’t make any sense, it was horrible,” she stated. “This disgusting creature touching Deck’s things there in the dark. He was squatting on the floor like . . . like an animal, opening those boxes. He was sickening, somehow. And then his face turned toward me and in the light from the kitchen I saw his hand reach toward one of the rocks I’d been collecting for a little rock garden on my patio. The rocks were stacked along the wall. I saw this look in his eyes, saw what he was going to do with that rock. He was going to hit me. I could tell. He was going to kill me!”

According to Crandall’s statement the subsequent events were a blur. “I hit him with the paperweight. I’m pretty sure I did that just as he turned back toward my little pile of rocks and started to stand up. It all happened so fast. I was so frightened. I knew he was going to kill me if I didn’t stop him, but I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing.”

Crandall went on to say that she did not own a gun. Her deceased husband, Roscoe “Deck” Decker, had told her that a gun is liable to be seized by an attacker and used against the victim. “In a surprise attack,” he told her, “you won’t be able to find and fire the gun before he sees what you’re doing and grabs it.” Prior to his death, Crandall’s husband had disposed of his own gun collection for her protection. And even if there had been a gun in the house, she explained, she wouldn’t have thought to get it before entering the garage. She hadn’t expected any of this. It was just some kind of nightmare.

When the man toppled over and didn’t get up, she thought he was faking. She thought that as soon as she moved, he’d spring up, roaring. She said she stopped breathing. She said she lost control of her bladder standing there, frozen with terror in the slice of light from her kitchen door. But the man didn’t move. Finally she kicked his shoulder. When he didn’t respond, she forced herself to feel his neck for a pulse. There was none. She knew he was dead.

I poured another cup of coffee and made a few notes. So far the woman’s story seemed implausible yet very familiar. It was every woman’s nightmare; the reason women fear noises in the dark. Rape, defilement, brutal death. This is the repetitive mantra bequeathed to us from hairy ancestors, cousins to chimps, gorillas, and humans. A glance at any chimp enclave, with the exception of the matriarchal bonobos, will reveal the source of the nightmare. Male chimps randomly batter females to ensure wholesale female subordination. And when she’s in estrus a female who refuses sexual penetration by a male may be beaten to death by him as his companion males hoot and whistle and hop about. A glance at any newspaper will reveal that the nightmare has not been extinguished in human enclaves, either.

It’s not hard to trace the primate archetype. It’s there. But humans are different from other primates in numerous ways. One of them is that the human female, unlike her chimpanzee sister, is not statistically likely to be bludgeoned and raped by a gang of strangers creeping across the landscape beyond her dwelling. That popular terror is the shadow of our past, although it can and does still happen. More often now, the human female will be bludgeoned, raped, and possibly killed by a male who is no stranger. A male she knows and may even like. A male who believes that he must control her, that he owns her.

Muffin Crandall’s story with its rock-wielding monkey ghost played to the old brain. I wondered whether she knew that. Then I wondered how she’d explain the heavy-duty trash bag and the years that had elapsed since that night in her garage.

“I don’t know why I did what I did then,” Crandall’s statement went on. “It was like I was in a trance or hypnotized. I don’t remember thinking anything except ‘Nobody can know. You’ve got to hide the body. Nobody can find out or you’ll die!’ ”

The remark brought me up short. I dreamed once that I had killed a man and hidden his body in a little-used closet beneath the stairs of an old house I shared with four other graduate students. The man looked strangely like Beethoven. And the dream bore that certainty of not being a dream, of being an absolute reality somewhere other than the waking state. I sat up drenched in sweat and locked in such agonizing fear that ten digital minutes traveled through my bedside clock before I could move. And there was a slurred chirping in my head, like a distant siren. I knew the sound meant the body would be found and I would be killed.

Muffin’s words echoed my dream, which I later learned is a common delusion in women at a certain stage in the progression of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. A terror of being put to death for killing a man may lie encoded in every female brain. It may be released by the neural plaques and tangles of brain disease or the nightly neurological housecleaning which results in dreams. Muffin Crandall’s narrative began to assume a particularly interesting framework. If it was the fabrication her brother believed it to be, it was brilliantly done.

“I tied him up with part of the clothesline I have in the garage for drying rugs and things I don’t want to put in the dryer,” her story went on. “I still wasn’t really sure he was dead, but even if he was I wanted him tied up. Somehow I knew I had to get rid of the body right away or I’d die. Don’t ask me how I knew that, or where the thought came from. I just knew that.”

Crandall’s story went on to describe her various approaches to removing the body. Getting it into the kitchen would be no problem, but cutting it up seemed too disgusting. Besides, the garbage disposal could not be employed out of fear that its excessive use at that hour would attract the attention of neighbors, or that “something would get stuck” and require a repairman.

Deck Decker had been a sportsman prior to his death at fifty-three from a massive heart attack two years before his widow’s encounter with a stranger in her garage. He maintained the rented locker near Borrego Springs for game he killed and stored for home use. At the time of his death the locker was only partially stocked. Muffin Crandall said she kept up the rental fees and made regular trips to the locker, both using the game left by her husband and restocking the space with bulk-buy bargains and gifts of fish and meat from her husband’s friends. She said she was used to making trips to the locker, and the idea of freezing the body “just seemed natural.”

Long before sunrise on that night five years in the past, she had trussed the body in a fetal position, gotten it into a trash bag, and transported it to the Roadrunner cold storage facility. Muffin said she may have spoken to friends on the phone the next day, but she didn’t remember. She said that no one was present at Roadrunner when she used the freezer’s hand cart to stash the new package behind boxes containing eighty pounds of chicken wings she’d purchased for a civic theater fund-raising picnic. She said the only thing she remembers from that time is terror, but after leaving the freezer, “it was as if none of it had really happened.”

“When I’d try to think about it, think about taking that bag out and getting rid of it someplace, the fear would come back,” she said. “It would just fill me up like black, cold ink in a bottle. My hands would shake and I’d want to throw up. I couldn’t even walk, it would be so bad. So I just kept paying rent on the locker and going out there with stuff, taking stuff out to use. I knew someday I’d have to do something, but I just couldn’t think about it.”

Diminishing the rest of Dan’s material, I opened a new file. “Crandall, Muffin—Initial Profile,” I centered in fourteen-point type. Then I typed a list of factors which seemed, even at this point, potentially significant:

1) Subject a fifty-six-year-old widow at time of the assault, uses her own surname rather than her husband’s.

2) Subject apparently living alone at time of assault, but maintains frozen food locker for bulk quantities of food. Why?

3) Subject does not mention children, friends, or family other than her deceased husband. Odd. Women typically refer to social cohorts in all narratives.

4) Subject displays a thorough comprehension of archetypal primate female fear in her narrative, leaving out no element but rape. Nowhere does she admit to fearing rape, only murder. This deletion from the usual fear profile is significant.

5) What was weight and physical condition of subject five years ago? Now?

6) What is estimated weight and physical condition of victim at time of assault?

7) Subject presents as self-sufficient and capable, yet permits herself to be called “Muffin.” Check origin of this nickname.

8) Subject mentions that bulk chicken wings in her locker were for a civic theater fund-raiser. What civic theater? How was she connected to it? Who else was connected to it? Does it still exist?

9) Subject’s deceased husband, Deck. Who was he, what did he do, what was the marriage like, and how did she cope with his death? Children of this marriage? Previous marriages?

10) What was/is her source of income? Education? Avocations?

After printing the list I took a cool bath, washed the woody, acorn-brown growth I call hair, and phoned for a haircut appointment near the prison at eight. My best gray linen suit with its long, straight skirt would make me look like an Edwardian nun, but that was okay. What wasn’t okay was that the only matching shoes I could find were the same black kid pumps I’d worn to my mother’s funeral twenty-two years in the past. Good shoes will last a lifetime if you take care of them, especially if you only wear them while in disguise. I wondered if Muffin Crandall would buy the act I was about to stage for her.