Devil House(107)

It was a weekday, I remember, and the kids were both in school, and my wife was at work; midmorning.

I heard everybody get home a little after three o’clock; only then did I understand that I’d spent all day in Gage’s book, sorting through the pages, and the footnotes, and the diagrams, and all the attached materials: the maps, the police reports, the newspaper articles, and the photographs; this outpouring of marginalia, this vast constellation of data floating atop a story Gage had been trying, for some time, to tell, all seeming to invite the reader’s attention now very forcefully in one direction, and now, just as insistently, in another.



* * *



IF THE WHITE WITCH OF MORRO BAY HAD BEEN a sort of anchor, Devil House was a great net cast into largely unfamiliar waters. The Milpitas about which Gage wrote was unrecognizable to me: I’d transferred schools in the middle of first grade, spent my second grade year basking in the light of a kind, old teacher named Mrs. Wyatt, and then we were gone. My range within the city limits had been largely confined to the street I lived on. I didn’t, I realized as I read, really know anything about the place.

In Gage’s reconstruction of the Milpitas of 1986, it had been a satellite of San Jose: a place where people might live quietly and work nearby, or, in the case of Anthony Hawley, a place where somebody whose chances weren’t panning out in the bigger town next door might try his luck. Satellites are sad bodies, ever beholden to the larger planets from whose shadows they spend half their existence emerging. Their solitude has its own gravity. This picture illuminated the oddly cloistered feeling I’d always associated with the three-block memory I had of the town: in a sense, my fragmented memory of Milpitas was accurate precisely because it was incomplete. It had been a place waiting to become something.

But his research had been meticulous, and his method was to increase the power of his microscope a little more each time he put a slide onto the stage. He loved to dwell on the details; I knew this from his other books. But the sources of these details were here physically attached to the manuscript by Scotch tape, jutting out past the edges of the page, sometimes obscuring the text to be read, sometimes interrupting the story for pages at a time: transcripts of interviews, whether conducted by Gage or by an investigating officer or somebody else entirely I couldn’t know, sometimes sporting only initials from line to line (D: So when was the last time you were in the store? S: You asked me that already; page after page of this), sometimes just summaries (Three former students, friends, phone only, character witnesses, great kid, just like everybody says, great kid). Clippings from local papers, from tabloids after the story went national, prayer intentions for the victims in church bulletins. Crime scene photographs, the real thing: they made me feel sick, though they were also so worn by this time that they hardly felt real.

It was fairly massive, and hard to take in all at once, especially given how many dozens of pages there were with giant Xs through the entire text: but I did my best; the margins of each page, including the ones that were evidently being redacted, had been crammed to bursting with handwritten notes in tiny script, which I was able to read only with careful effort. These notes were often peppered with question marks, sprouting up like dandelions on either side of the page: S family leaves immediately or later? D questioned and released? A directly involved? AG returns call or called back? Answering tapes in whose custody since ’86? MH knows? EG body disposition? MG disposition? DH disposition? SH disposition? AW disposition? AR disposition?

It all looked like somebody’s personal project, the sort of thing that gets exhumed from someone’s effects after they die and everybody’s surprised: I didn’t know he was working on anything, he never talked about anything of the sort, it must have been a private project or something. My errand, as I saw it, was to retrieve the story from the center of all this, which was, as far as I could see, either that a young person named Siraj had taken advantage of a disorganized situation to commit at least two murders, for which he had never been charged; or, just as possibly, that a group of teenagers squatting a former adult bookstore had conspired to murder the owner of the property and a developer trying to buy it, and had gotten away with it.

But the book seemed to be ducking the question entirely, which, to put it mildly, makes for odd reading in the field of true crime. Red herrings are common, of course—writers will milk a bad lead for fifty pages before it fizzles out. But this wasn’t that. Of the two stories it seemed to be telling, the “Alex killed two people and left town” one felt truest to me, but Derrick seemed a likelier suspect: he had skin in the game, and would have been the one most personally insulted by the sale. The damage visited upon the victims’ bodies felt like the mark of a person with a real grievance. I liked Derrick better than Alex for that. There was also Seth: I knew from my own past that kids like Seth were often placed on a pharmaceutical cocktail at an early age, and that they learned to tweak the recipe depending on the effects they preferred. I could believe, easily, in Seth defending his home away from home with extreme force. Castle doctrine. It appeals to unexamined but deeply held instincts.

The manuscript broke off abruptly, in the middle of a sentence; I searched to see if maybe there’d been pages out of order somewhere in the last chapter or two, but came up empty-handed, save for the stray documents that kept gumming up the works. Parking garage tickets, quarterly student evaluations, blurry printouts of police scanner transcripts.