Devil House(79)
We both stand up; the formalities of the interview have a sacred rhythm almost everybody respects.
“Sorry if that was a sore question,” I offer as he holds the front door for me.
I’m on the sidewalk; he could let the door close, but he waits.
“I’m not sore,” he says. Seth is a very believable guy, and I believe him. “But when I start to see which way something’s going, I usually check out if I think I’m not going to be able to control it. I spent a lot of my life not being in control. Now I know that if I want control, I have to take it. You know?”
He gives me an extra second to study his face; I feel like if there were a murderer behind those eyes, I’d see him now.
“Good luck,” he says, as the door swings gently shut.
DERRICK
“It was different, but it wasn’t a gigantic shock,” Derrick tells me when I ask him what he thought of North Carolina at first. “Pensacola right after Milpitas, now, that was something else. Can you even imagine?”
He’s the spitting image of everybody’s favorite professor: easygoing, good-humored, insightful, inviting. But the tenure track, he decided somewhere along the path to a master of arts degree in maritime history, wasn’t for him. Once you’ve spent enough time inside the academy, it can be hard to imagine life outside of it; but Derrick Hall has never been short on imagination.
“I was working on my thesis, working really hard, when I had this realization: I didn’t want to be talking about all this stuff in the abstract. I wanted to be next to it. I’d be revising a section on distinguishing between two types of anchors and there’d be doodles all up and down the margins. I realized I was most interested in the stuff I could see with my own eyes, this stuff I could really get close to.”
We’re standing on the dock out in front of the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Beaufort, a wooden-shingled building on the Beaufort Sound; it’s just a week or so into the off-season, the middle of the week. Derrick looks out at the docked catamarans and cruisers gently bobbing in the water; the calm of the view is intoxicating,
“Can’t get much closer than this,” he says.
* * *
BEAUFORT IS MY THIRD STOP; my trek to the heart of Devil House enters crucial waters here. Derrick had arguably the closest connection to the property, having frequented Valley News before its decadent days, and worked inside the building when it was still a functioning store; he spent many long afternoons within its walls after Anthony Hawley abandoned it wholesale as a kiss-off gesture to his landlord. When I asked Angela and Seth for information, there were several limitations already in place: they only ever knew so much, and neither ever stood at the center of the storm the way Derrick did.
“I’m not sure that’s true,” he says when I suggest he’s the best authority I have encountered so far. “Seth’s memory is amazing. He calls me up once a month, we have it on our calendars, and his recall for details—you met him, right? So you already know.”
We both laugh; Derrick’s natural, easygoing manner is immediately comforting. I feel like success, on whatever terms he might define it, was always awaiting Derrick, wherever he ended up.
“But I know what you mean,” he continues. He pats the dock, dappled by the shadows of the pines; he has an office inside the museum, but it’s windowless, lifeless. Dockside, it’s peaceful. “I’m the man, right? They didn’t charge any of us, but I was the guy they wanted.”
There is a very long pause; there’s a shift in the tranquility of the water and the shadows on it, one that I think I see Derrick try to wish away.
“I was the guy they wanted,” he says again, and the mood lingers.
* * *
THE MOOD LINGERS because Derrick was, in every sense, the guy they wanted. The killings at Devil House hit Milpitas hard, resonating with a deep and menacing tone; River’s Edge, the movie dramatizing the murder of Marcy Renee Conrad just five years earlier, was due to hit theaters next year; it was already on the festival circuit, and, around town, people were talking. There was burgeoning local resistance to sensationalism of all stripes, and front-page images of the ratty storefront with caution tape around it provoked immediate and bitter resentment. “People felt like, Why should we have to go through all this again?” is how Derrick puts it. “Everybody wanted to fix the problem as fast as they could. Simple explanations are what people want when they’re scared.”
The simple explanation that would have scratched several itches was that a cabal of Satan-worshipping teens had sacrificed a couple of innocent victims to the devil for kicks. Stories like this had been generating high Nielsens ever since the Manson killings in 1969; a small industry had grown up around cult coverage: pockets of evil sewn under the skin of the suburbs. Hidden infections waiting for the right host. There’d been the Ripper Crew in Chicago, and the unsolved Jeannette DePalma case in New Jersey. Father Gerald Robinson in Toledo and Ricky Kasso on Long Island. Whole legacies of grief, texture-warping events in the life of a community. Milpitans, collectively, decided that one was enough, and the police department—with, Derrick suspects, the help of some outside advisors, though he’s unable to offer anything more concrete—developed a strategy to quash interest in the case beyond the city limits.