A Book of American Martyrs(193)
Big-shouldered, hostile, the woman shrugged.
“Do you know—when did they move away?”
Again the woman shrugged. Her gesture signaled not I don’t know when they moved away but Why should I tell you if I know when they moved away.
“Do you happen to know where they moved?”
The woman shook her head, no.
“Are there any other Dunphys in Muskegee Falls? Anyone I could speak with?”
The woman shook her head, no.
A large ungainly straggly-haired dog came limping out to join the truculent woman. A Labrador-terrier mixture, with a stump of a tail. Sensing the woman’s unease the dog bared its yellow teeth and began to bark at the girl in the baseball cap as if knowing very well the significance of the small black object in her left hand.
Obviously it was fraudulent on Naomi’s part. No one would be seeking one of the Dunphy children without knowing about Luther Dunphy. To pretend otherwise was deceit. Yet Naomi felt she had no choice but to maintain the awkward deception even as the woman stared at her unsmiling and the straggly-haired dog beside her growled.
“I wasn’t a friend of Dawn Dunphy—I mean, we weren’t close. But I heard she’s become an athlete—a boxer . . .”
How strange, the name Dawn Dunphy on her lips! Naomi was sure she’d never spoken this name aloud in her life.
“Nobody living here with that name—‘Dunphy.’ Not for years.”
The woman spoke in a loud voice. Clearly, Naomi was dismissed.
Yet she was staring at the house. She could not tear her eyes from the house. For it was so ordinary a house. And she had known that beforehand. A house in which the murderer of her father had plotted her father’s murder, and in which he’d kept his weapons. In the cellar perhaps.
Had she been allowed access to the house by the scowling woman, had she been allowed to film the interior, even the cellar where (she speculated) the weapons might have been kept—to what purpose?
“I said, miss—there’s nobody living here, or anywhere around here, with that name. OK?”
“Yes! I’m sorry.” Naomi smiled, inanely. The camera felt unwieldy in her hand, redundant. “Very sorry . . .”
Awkwardly turning to walk to her car parked at the curb beside the badly dented trash can. Glancing back she saw the woman unmoving in the driveway, standing her ground with the snarling dog beside her, staring at Naomi as if she’d sighted the enemy.
She is living in the murderer’s house. There is some shame to this. Of course she does not want to be reminded.
IN THE COMPACT rented car south on Front Street to Mason Street and so to Woodbind. Left on Summit. Another left on Howard Avenue. The route the murderer had almost certainly taken on his way to 1183 Howard on that morning.
She’d devised a timeline. It is always helpful to devise outlines, structures. From all that she’d learned over a period of years arranging the (probable) sequence of events, imagining parallel trajectories: Luther Dunphy leaving the two-story clapboard house on Front Street, approximately four miles from the Women’s Center, sometime in the early morning of November 2, 1999, in his pickup; Timothy Barron, Women’s Center volunteer, leaving his home in his minivan and arriving at Gus Voorhees’s residence on Shawnee Street, three miles from the Center, at approximately 7:10 A.M., to pick up Gus and to drive together to the Center . . .
She drove to Shawnee Street in another part of Muskegee Falls. This was a residential neighborhood of single-family houses, larger and set in larger lots than those on Front Street; at 88 Shawnee, which was the address of her father’s rented apartment, was a graceless foursquare beige stucco building with a sign advertising prestige condos 1-, 2-, 3-bedroom.
She wondered if the building had changed much in the past eleven years. She wondered if her mother had ever seen the inside of the apartment.
She recalled Gus saying that the rental was “temporary.” He intended to move to another apartment, in a building nearer downtown. Or had he said (Naomi had been a young girl then, and it was before the murder, she would not have remembered each precious word her father uttered) that he was “waiting to hear” if Jenna might change her mind about moving to Ohio—“In which case we’ll rent a really nice house. You kids can help pick it out.”
Shortly after 7:00 A.M. of the morning of November 2, 1999, with no knowledge that within a half hour he would be dead, Dr. Voorhees had emerged from this building to get into a Dodge minivan driven by Timothy Barron. Together the men drove to the Women’s Center.
By 7:30 A.M., both Gus Voorhees and Timothy Barron would be dead.
No one was ever to know what the men had talked about, en route to the Center.
Naomi hoped it had been a friendly exchange. She hoped the men had liked each other. She hoped they had not ever been in fear of their lives as they approached the Women’s Center where hostile demonstrators were beginning to gather.
Driving the route to Howard Avenue Naomi felt a mounting sense of unreality. For all that had happened years ago could so very easily have not happened.
There was nothing intrinsic in the geography of the place. There was no fatedness. Gus Voorhees might so easily have been elsewhere, including Huron County, Michigan. Luther Dunphy might so easily have been distracted by other matters in his life—a child’s illness, or his own. A change of heart. A change of mind. You had to conclude that it was purely chance, without meaning.