Devil House(2)

The real-life White Witch, Diana Crane, had actually only killed two people, both students: high school seniors who, having arrived at her apartment unannounced, caught her in a headlock before attempting to drag her to her bedroom. She was shucking oysters when they showed up; in the struggle, she got her knife into the first boy’s eye, and then, looking up to find the coconspirator immobilized by the sight of his friend’s blood spraying out in jets, launched herself toward him and stabbed him in the neck three times. She continued stabbing until she felt sure that the present threat to her safety had been contained, which is to say, until both boys were dead; later, she dragged the bodies, in pieces, to the shore.

It was an ugly scene, and the jury sent her to the gas chamber; the prosecutors convinced them her tale of self-defense was a fabrication, something she’d made up to conceal her true nature: a crone-in-training who lived by herself in a seaside den, a place whose shelves and countertops boasted all manner of obscure arcana whose deeper meaning, they said, indicated that the downfall of young men had always been her goal.

Diana Crane’s story was that of a blameless schoolteacher who paid a terrible price for defending herself. Nobody involved in her prosecution, conviction, and execution had anything to be proud about. I still get mad thinking about it. One of the boys she’d killed had a track record with women; old classmates, now nearing retirement, told me stories as I sat listening in vinyl-upholstered recliners under fluorescent lights. They’d carried these burdens with them almost their whole lives. Diana Crane had done a service to society by ridding it of Jesse Jenkins and Gene Cupp; for her trouble, she’d been strapped to a chair and made to breathe poison until she died.

But the popular account omitted everything prior to the oyster knife, and from the resultant open question of what happened next, schoolchildren and bored night-shift workers crafted the White Witch, the one all schoolchildren knew and feared: a Bluebeard in reverse, her crime hidden by apartment walls and the moon above the bay. In the legend, she’d never even been arrested; Diana Crane fled the scene by night, carnage in her wake, and, for all anyone knew, was still living somewhere by the bay, lying in wait.

The movie they made out of my book later didn’t set any box office records, but I got paid up front. I’ve been writing about crimes ever since: the crimes people tell stories about, and the secret ones our stories seek to conceal.



* * *



I WAS THIRTY-SEVEN when I came down to Milpitas. I had five books out under my own name and, under a pen name that I still keep secret, three paperback serial killer mysteries that sold well enough to get stocked in airport bookstores. My life was comfortable, if lonely. Ashton, my editor—he has three names instead of the usual two, all of which he uses in correspondence: Ashton Williston Clark—emailed me a news clipping about some especially lurid murders. The little town where they’d happened was a familiar name to me, not only because of the much more widely known case that had briefly thrust Milpitas onto the national stage—River’s Edge—but because a childhood friend of mine had lived there once. Back in those days, we’d even kept up a halting correspondence for a while, some of the first letters I ever sent or received. “A proofreader was doing some fact-checking on a nonfiction book and she saw this,” Ashton wrote. “I knew you’d love it.”

I did love it, with a few reservations. It was a very small clipping and there weren’t a lot of details. The few choice bits were tantalizing enough—dead bodies atop a pyre of pornography, cryptograms in graffiti, the specter of teenage Satanic rites jolting a sleepy old town awake—but the story seemed to have fizzled quickly somehow, which suggested to me that there was perhaps less than met the eye of a Mercury News reader in the mid-eighties, when catchy copy still meant real advertising dollars. I’d been having ideas about something more baroque and gothic than another California suburb.

“I hear you, but I feel like you’re the guy,” he said when I called him up to see if he was serious, mentioning my misgivings up front. “You move down there, you do your thing, you meet all the people now that they’re grown up, you make your first really big book. You’re ready.”

“I’m tired of California,” I said. “It’s practically all I ever write about. I was thinking of trying to find something in the South. Louisiana, maybe.”

“The house is on the market,” he said. “These are your people, right? An actual self-made cult, grotto of the porno demons, teen devil worshippers in the Santa Clara Valley. You move in. Devil House. You move into Devil House. That’s the angle here.”

It felt like a joke. “I don’t want to buy a house just to write a book about it,” I said.

“It’s kind of a natural extension of your method, don’t you think?” Ashton has this way of talking about things as if they don’t have any consequences. It’s contagious. I try to be on my guard about it.

“Knocking on doors and buying houses are two pretty different things.”

“That’s what makes this a different book,” he said. “That’s how it gets bigger. You own the place. It’s yours. Past history suggests it takes you about eighteen months to get it together. You can turn right around and sell it when you’re done, it’ll be like a short-term lease with return on your deposit.”

“Did something happen I don’t know about? My advances don’t really cover down payments on houses.”