Devil House(36)

“‘More beneath the surface,’” echoes his counterpart, her cadence dark, suggestive, and inconclusive as she pivots to camera two to change her tone. “And you can be sure KSBY will be there to cover it. Meanwhile, more details on the historic agreement signed this week in Moscow, and, for those, we head over to Tom Brokaw at the national desk. Tom?”



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MOMENTS LIKE THESE are notoriously hard to reconstruct—the mundane aftermath of a signal event whose import isn’t yet clear, the muddy beginnings in which legends are conceived. Whole histories got wiped and recorded over by TV stations all the way up through the late 1970s. But I got lucky. Frank Haeny’d worked on missing-kids cases locally for years, and in the course of his work he’d learned that there’s no such thing as an insignificant piece of evidence. He Mirandized you personally through the grating that separated the front seat of the car from the back—and then he asked Quinn for a second outside the car.

“Get her processed, get her some food, tell her we can talk about all this later this morning,” he said. “I need to make sure nobody does anything stupid here.”

Quinn blanched; he didn’t want to be alone with this woman whose shining eyes gazed exhaustedly out through bangs plastered to her forehead by blood.

“I’ll be practically right behind you,” Haeny said, taking a reassuring tone. “Just dotting i’s here.” With that, Quinn nodded and got into the cruiser; the report indicates that a junior officer named Thaler rode along with you in case there was any need for corroboration of details later. Per Quinn’s report, neither he nor Lieutenant Thaler spoke to you during the ride down to the station. The sun would have been rising above the bay by the time you got there. The report indicates that you sat down in the first chair you saw inside the station, and that you slumped there, and were slow to respond when asked to get up.

At Oakside Court, Detective Haeny went back and forth between your apartment and the parking lot, keeping an eye on clean procedures in the one and the camera crews in the other. He knew it was better to make friends with them than to antagonize them; you never know who you might need to call for a favor later. When the crowd had thinned down to a few stragglers, he waved all the newspeople over to him; there were three of them left along with their crews, lighting rigs and fuzzy boom mics in hand. They’d been interviewing bystanders for at least half an hour.

“I know you have to get your broadcasts together,” he told them, “but when all that’s done I’d appreciate it if you could get all of what you just got here to me.” He made a circling measure in the air that indicated he meant the footage they’d just shot, and then he handed out business cards. “I’ll get it back to you.”

The oldest of the camera operators didn’t like the idea of just handing his footage over to the police; he never called the number on the card, and anything he shot is lost to history. The other two did as they were told. It was from this raw footage that I was able to assemble an account of the genesis of the White Witch. I got it from Detective Haeny, and I wondered aloud to him why no one had ever reported on it before. “No one ever asked,” he told me.

Neither the prosecution nor the defense used any of the unaired tape in court. Several of its principals were in fact called to testify, but their voices got lost in the squall. By the time you came to trial, the tales people told had, through repetition, assumed shape. Confusion gave way to conjecture; friends would ask one another how something like this could have happened, and would keep right on asking until they came up with an explanation that could be passed along. The cautionary tale that came to stand in for the facts of the case belonged to the familiar type of legend in which the greatest possible menace to a community lies just beneath the skin, its portents only readable, in retrospect, by those lucky enough to have survived its eruption.



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GARY LOGAN (NEIGHBOR): Well, I didn’t really know her much. At all, really, I guess. I live downstairs. She’s a lot younger than me. Most of the people here are younger than me but I like it. I’m retired, always wanted to live by the water. No old folks’ home for me! Anyway, we just said hello sometimes. One time she helped me with the groceries because she saw I had three bags. There was nothing really different about her as far as I could tell. She seemed nice.

MARY ZAVALA (NEIGHBOR): I don’t know her! But she was at the beach earlier, I saw her out there. I went out for a swim. What? No, over at the pool. Nobody ever swims out in the bay almost, you know? It’s too cold! But I have trouble sleeping and we have a pool key so I went for a swim and then I thought I’d just kind of, you know, you’re up late, just look at the sky a little while before trying to go back to bed. And I saw her out there! She had a wheelbarrow and she was standing in the water. I didn’t know who it was. I still don’t know. I live in the other building, right over there, it’s all the same apartments but there’s three buildings. Do you know what they say she did? I don’t really know anything but they sent all those police cars, you saw ’em. She doesn’t live in my building, I don’t think. I know pretty much everybody who lives in mine. But I knew something was wrong! Like I told you I have trouble sleeping and I’m awake a lot, there’s never anybody else awake but there she was. I wanted to go ask her: Is everything OK? But you never know with people. And then I seen her throwing things in the ocean and I said, Oh, I don’t want to know, you know? I went back inside, it’s not my business.