monument to those ordinary proprieties which make society possible. Dad was the rector at a little church called simply Grace, and our mother zealously cultivated at least the appearance of successful housewifery. David never noticed, but I’d often find Mom poring over women’s magazines, her high, tanned brow knit in concentration. Sometimes she jotted things in a small spiral notebook. Then, a few days later, we’d face the “Festive Ukrainian Borscht Compote” at dinner. Or we’d come home from school to find the front porch sagging under the weight of twenty-six pink geranium plants in wicker laundry baskets lined with calico. On these days there would be homemade cookies and Dad would read aloud from old children’s books about Abraham Lincoln or Clara Barton.
My parents sighed with relief at each successfully completed domestic vignette, each family outing and holiday. David and I were watched by glowing eyes that increased in wattage every time we succeeded, failed, or were merely average at anything. Our parents were terrified, but we didn’t know it. What David and I learned from them was that every humdrum event un-shattered by primal forces is cause for celebration. But we would find out about the primal forces later. Both of us. I pondered the fact that Muffin Crandall had obviously stumbled over them as well.
In my office/living room, actually the intended reception area for Wren’s Gulch Inn, I sat down to read Dan Crandall’s emails. Beatrice Crandall, I learned, had shortly after the earthquake, confessed to assaulting the man in the Roadrunner freezer. In a prepared statement distributed by her attorney, she admitted to hitting an intruder in her garage over the head with a paperweight on a Sunday night during July five years ago.
She awoke, she said, around eleven that night to the sound of her garage door opening. At first she thought it was an electronic glitch of some kind. Probably the door responding to a neighbor’s battery-operated door-opener. After all, the garage of her condo opened into an alley shared with fifteen other units, which meant fifteen identical automatic garage doors with identical electronic openers. But after she heard the door close there was a sound of someone “mucking around down there.” The garage, she said, was directly beneath her second-story bedroom. The windows were open because the night was warm. She could hear the intruder through both floor and windows.
Still, she wasn’t overly alarmed. “I thought there was some reasonable explanation,” she said. “Maybe a neighbor borrowing a ladder. I have a nice lightweight aluminum ladder that people are always borrowing. Of course nobody would do that, break into my garage in the middle of the night to get the ladder without asking me, but that’s what I thought when I was walking down the stairs. What I really thought was maybe he’d had too much to drink. I have a neighbor who drinks a lot at night. Everybody knows. You can’t hide much, living so close together. I really just thought it was probably him and that he’d be embarrassed and go away when he saw that he’d got me out of bed.”
On her way through the darkened living room, Crandall had grabbed a paperweight from her desk “just in case.” She hadn’t really intended to use the object as a weapon, the narrative went on. There were plenty of knives in the kitchen if she’d been thinking about a weapon. She just wanted something in her hand when she opened the kitchen door to the garage. Something heavy. She didn’t really know why.
But what she saw when she opened her kitchen door wasn’t her tipsy neighbor. It was a stranger. “A dirty, evil-looking man with his back to me,” she said, was pawing through some storage boxes containing items which had belonged to her deceased husband. “It didn’t make any sense, it was horrible,” she stated. “This disgusting creature touching Deck’s things there in the dark. He was squatting on the floor like . . . like an animal, opening those boxes. He was sickening, somehow. And then his face turned toward me and in the light from the kitchen I saw his hand reach toward one of the rocks I’d been collecting for a little rock garden on my patio. The rocks were stacked along the wall. I saw this look in his eyes, saw what he was going to do with that rock. He was going to hit me. I could tell. He was going to kill me!”
According to Crandall’s statement the subsequent events were a blur. “I hit him with the paperweight. I’m pretty sure I did that just as he turned back toward my little pile of rocks and started to stand up. It all happened so fast. I was so frightened. I knew he was going to kill me if I didn’t stop him, but I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing.”
Crandall went on to say that she did not own a gun. Her deceased husband, Roscoe “Deck” Decker, had told her that a gun is liable to be seized by an attacker and used against the victim. “In a surprise attack,” he told her, “you won’t be able to find and fire the gun before he sees what you’re doing and grabs it.” Prior to his death, Crandall’s husband had disposed of his own gun collection for her protection. And even if there had been a gun in the house, she explained, she wouldn’t have thought to get it before entering the garage. She hadn’t expected any of this. It was just some kind of nightmare.
When the man toppled over and didn’t get up, she thought he was faking. She thought that as soon as she moved, he’d spring up, roaring. She said she stopped breathing. She said she lost control of her bladder standing there, frozen with terror in the slice of light from her kitchen door. But the man didn’t move. Finally she kicked his shoulder. When he didn’t respond, she forced herself to feel his neck for a pulse. There was none. She knew he was dead.
I poured another cup of coffee and made a few notes. So far the woman’s story seemed implausible yet very familiar. It was every woman’s nightmare; the reason women fear noises in the dark. Rape, defilement, brutal death. This is the repetitive mantra bequeathed to us from hairy ancestors, cousins to chimps, gorillas, and humans. A glance at any chimp enclave, with the exception of the matriarchal bonobos, will reveal the source of the nightmare. Male chimps randomly batter females to ensure wholesale female subordination. And when she’s in estrus a female who refuses sexual penetration by a male may be beaten to death by him as his companion males hoot and whistle and hop about. A glance at any newspaper will reveal that the nightmare has not been extinguished in human enclaves, either.
It’s not hard to trace the primate archetype. It’s there. But humans are different from other primates in numerous ways. One of them is that the human female, unlike her chimpanzee sister, is not statistically likely to be bludgeoned and raped by a gang of strangers creeping across the landscape beyond her dwelling. That popular terror is the shadow of our past, although it can and does still happen. More often now, the human female will be bludgeoned, raped, and possibly killed by a male who is no stranger. A male she knows and may even like. A male who believes that he must control her, that he owns her.
Muffin Crandall’s story with its rock-wielding monkey ghost played to the old brain. I wondered whether she knew that. Then I wondered how she’d explain the heavy-duty trash bag and the years that had elapsed since that night in her garage.
“I don’t know why I did what I did then,” Crandall’s statement went on. “It was like I was in a trance or hypnotized. I don’t remember thinking anything except ‘Nobody can know. You’ve got to hide the body. Nobody can find out or you’ll die!’ ”
The remark brought me up short. I dreamed once that I had killed a man and hidden his body in a little-used closet beneath the stairs of an old house I shared with four other graduate students. The man looked strangely like Beethoven. And the dream bore that certainty of not being a dream, of being an absolute reality somewhere other than the waking state. I sat up drenched in sweat and locked in such agonizing fear that ten digital minutes traveled through my bedside clock before I could move. And there was a slurred chirping in my head, like a distant siren. I knew the sound meant the body would be found and I would be killed.
Muffin’s words echoed my dream, which I later learned is a common delusion in women at a certain stage in the progression of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. A terror of being put to death for killing a man may lie encoded in every female brain. It may be released by the neural plaques
