The Marsh King's Daughter(32)

People say my father got tired of being on the run and that’s why he reached out to me. I think he got lonely. He missed our life in the marsh. Missed me. Or, I liked to think so.

For a long time, I blamed myself for my father’s capture. My father trusted me, and I let him down. I should have been more careful, hidden the things he gave me in a safer place, fought harder to keep my collection out of the hands of the people who wanted to use it to hurt him.

Later, after I understood the extent of my father’s crimes and their impact on my mother, it didn’t bother me as much that he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, even though I was the one who’d sent him there. I was genuinely sorry that he would never again be allowed to roam the marsh or hunt or fish. But he had his chance to flee the area. He could have gone west to Montana or north into Canada and no one would ever have called him to account. Leaving me the presents that led to his capture was his mistake, not mine.

—

I PULL OUT the officer’s shirttail and wipe away the words my father wrote on his chest, then roll the officer’s body back onto his stomach the way I found him. I realize I’m tampering with a crime scene, but I’m not about to leave the message my father left for me on the dead officer’s chest, considering the police are already looking at me as a possible accomplice. As I climb back up the hill, I feel like I’m going to throw up. My father killed this man because of me. He left the body for me to find the way a cat leaves a dead mouse for its master on the porch.

For H. The words are gone, but the message is burned into my brain. My father’s ability to manipulate any situation to his advantage is almost beyond comprehension. Not only did he anticipate that I would come looking for him along this road, when he saw the cop car and concluded correctly that the driver was a lone searcher who had the right instincts at the wrong time, he drew him out and led him into the ravine for the sole purpose of staging this scene for me to find. I picture him darting across the road in front of the patrol car, letting the officer get a glimpse of the man everyone is seeking so he’d pull over and park. Maybe he stumbled so the officer would think he was wounded and therefore not a threat, then staggered like he was at the limit of his endurance as he led the officer into the bush, letting the man’s head swell with visions of the acclaim he would get for capturing the prisoner single-handedly before my father circled around and shot the officer in the back.

I wonder what else my father has in store for me.

Back at the road, I go straight to my truck. I open the passenger door and slip my hand inside and clip on Rambo’s leash. He whines and pulls. He smells the blood in the air, feels the tension coming off of me. I let him lead me to the bottom of the ravine to get a snoutful of my father’s scent and start back up the hill. I should call in the murder. Let the authorities take up the search for my father while I go home to my husband. But the message my father left on the man he murdered is for me.

I think about my mother, gone and forgotten by most. I think about my daughters. I think about my husband, alone and waiting for me. The killing has to stop. I will find my father. I will capture him. I will return him to prison and make him pay for everything he’s done.





12





THE CABIN

She was, indeed, wild and savage even in those hard, uncultivated times. They had named her Helga, which was rather too soft a name for a child with a temper like hers, although her form was still beautiful.

It was a pleasure to her to splash about with her white hands in the warm blood of the horse which had been slain for sacrifice. In one of her wild moods she bit off the head of the black cock which the priest was about to slay.

To her foster-father she said one day, “If thine enemy were to pull down thine house about thy ears, and thou shouldest be sleeping in unconscious security, I would not wake thee; even if I had the power I would never do it, for my ears still tingle with the blow that thou gavest me years ago. I have never forgotten it.”

But the Viking treated her words as a joke; he was, like everyone else, bewitched with her beauty, and knew nothing of the change in the form and temper of Helga at night.

— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,

The Marsh King’s Daughter


I was eight the first time I saw my father’s sadistic side. At the time I didn’t understand that what he did to me was wrong, or that normal fathers don’t treat their offspring the way my father sometimes treated me. I don’t like making my father out to be worse than people already think he is. But I’m trying to be honest in telling about how things were for me when I was growing up, and that has to include both the good parts and the bad.

My father claimed he chose to live in the marsh because he killed a man. He was never accused, and his involvement in the death of the mentally challenged man whose badly decomposed body was found in an empty cabin north of Hulbert, Michigan, was never proven. Sometimes when he told the story, he said he beat the man to death. Other times he said he slit the man’s throat because he didn’t like the way the man drooled and stuttered. Most of the time he was alone when the murder occurred, but in one version his younger brother helped him get rid of the body—even though I later learned my father was an only child. It’s hard to know if anything my father said about the murder was true, or if the tale was just something he made up to pass the time on a long winter’s evening. My father told a lot of stories.