Chapter 2 American Crow #9
There was always some way to blame a woman. “So you’re forgiven if you’re sorry?”
“In Proverbs, it says that a man who commits adultery destroys himself, and I am destroyed, at least professionally. If I
didn’t believe that living a pure life from now on could redeem me, then my life would be meaningless. Scripture says it’s
better to marry than burn in sin.”
“I don’t know anything about the Bible but if it says it’s better to marry, well, you must be fireproof because you did it
twice at the same time.”
Unasked, he said that the church council first considered letting him quietly make full financial restitution and go through
pastoral and traditional counseling, but when the news about Felicity broke, however, all bets were off. Apparently, a polygamist
pastor might hope for forgiveness, but the father of a courtesan killer? Poor Ruth, deserted by a bigamist and then this arrest?
I might go into hiding too.
“So Felicity deserves forgiveness too? Even if the worst is true?”
The reverend was quiet for a long time, maybe a full minute, which can seem infinite in the cold. He finally said, “We’re
all sinners.”
I said, “I won’t keep you any longer. I just have one question. I’ll ask Ruth too when I talk to her. Do you know why Felicity
did what she did? I don’t mean why did she kill someone, because I think that’s impossible. I just want to ask . . .”
“What, Reenie? I don’t have time.”
“Why do you think she became a sex worker? Did anything happen at home that might have caused her to do that?”
Roman Wild reached down and took a mittened hand from each of his little boys. He did seem like a devoted father. How could he be both things? And yet, wasn’t Felicity also? Were all of us two people, one facing outward, one facing in?
“You’d have to ask her.”
“She won’t talk to me.”
“That should tell you something,” he said, a trace of triumph tensing his dramatic chin. “My relationship with my stepdaughter . . .”
“Wait. You adopted her, right? So she’s your daughter, not your stepdaughter.”
“With Felicity. It wasn’t close at the end.”
I didn’t get the sense that Roman Wild was lying, unless he was a stone psychopath. He’d answered my questions. That didn’t
track with some horrendous abuse situation. Felicity left Starbright Academy, but she didn’t leave their house until she graduated.
I thought now, she could have come to us, but she never gave even me a hint of any real trouble, except taking off for Madison
one day after graduation.
To my shame, that was only something I’d heard by chance, not from her. After a month in upstate New York as a counselor at
a fashion journalism camp for high schoolers, I headed to Chicago to a restaurant and bar called Angel on the Rock, which
was owned by a college friend’s family, who also put me up at their house in Evanston. By night, I waited tables there and
learned to tend bar. During the day, I wrote copy for a teen fashion blog called Miss Lead. I was busy morning until night
until I left for Missouri. But that was no excuse for the fact that I never even texted Felicity a funny face with tears to
say goodbye. Why? Felicity and I used to talk or text daily. Was I ashamed of how well she knew me?
I was.
I knew why. I just couldn’t face her. In all honesty, I couldn’t face myself and the appalling truth she now knew about me.
Even now, in the bone-deep cold, I was pushed back to that June night, just days before we were set to graduate, the breathless wet heat, the flat black surface of the water, the loud, insistent shriek of the crickets.
For years, I couldn’t hear crickets, a sweet sound for the innocent, without breaking out in a scrim of sweat.
I’d let shame overrule love. Never, I decided on the spot, would I ever do that again.
“About Ruth?”
“Reenie, all I know is that she resigned from her job around Christmas. I wouldn’t have even known that except the school
called to ask me where to send her things. The boys are worried. I am too. I’m grateful she even wanted me in their lives
after everything. I can’t exactly call her parents. She used to go and stay there for weeks at a time. They have money, so
it was probably a nice setup for her. It didn’t help our marriage. I will say that.”
To my eyes, his own setup seemed pretty good, at least for a while. But in the end, they had nothing—less than nothing, the
house and even their car the property of the church. Rev. Wild would get a small pension from a fund for disabled clergy.
He said Ruth had some savings, but that money went for their debts. How unfair that Ruth, in her Mennonite cotton sack dresses,
had to share the burden of Roman’s spending.
Finally, he sighed and said, “Yes, Reenie. I’m fallen. Are you happy now?”
The question was a surprise. “Reverend Wild, I never wished anything bad for you. And I loved Ruth. Ruth didn’t do anything
wrong.”
Roman said, “No, she didn’t.”
“I must be like a Biblical prophet!” my father said that evening.
I was finally back at my parents’ house, having restored feeling to my wooden-block hands by sluicing them with warm water at the kitchen sink.
Nell pulled out a package of frozen vegetables and began to make rudimentary fried rice, heavy on the soy sauce and scrambled eggs, as I told my family about the soon-to-be ex-pastor.
My father said, “Was I right? I told you he was bent.”
All three of the women in his nuclear family ignored him.
“So you didn’t see Ruth, obviously,” my mom said.
“I’ll keep trying,” I said, adding that, on the drive back, I’d tried to call Ruth’s parents, but there was no answer and
no way to leave a message. “I know Hal and Alice were not fans of Roman. Once on Fourth of July? Alice said Ruth told her
about the Rapture and how everybody would go up to heaven on a big white horse. Alice said her daughter got that right from
the horse’s ass. That makes sense, they were scientists and they raised Ruth that way. But it was personal too.”
Other teachers who worked with Ruth at Thornton Wilder High surely would have had word of her. That night, I would try to
reach some of them.
Why would Ruth leave? Even if they lived with their father, you didn’t just up and abandon teenage kids. Surely, she would
come to stand with Felicity at the trial, no matter what? Or did the magnitude of Felicity’s sins preclude even her mother’s
presence? Would all her family so fully disown her? Was Ruth with her own parents, as Roman suggested? Or somewhere else?
“I think she grew up in the South,” Miranda said. “In Florida, if I’m not mistaken. Remember, Hal worked there, on the space
shuttle?”
Ruth had not been close to anyone, either on our block or when the family moved to the mansion at Starbright Ministry. She
was pleasant and pretty but painfully shy: People didn’t catch sight of her from one week to the next. It wasn’t as though
somebody reported her missing when she missed spin class.
“For the life of me, I can’t figure how Felicity’s arrest and the collapse of the Roman empire are related, except that they involve the same people at the same time,” I told my mom.
My dad came back into the kitchen, his hockey game interrupted by a loud and tedious seven minutes of commercials for dog
food and beer. At least, that was his excuse, but he was a horrible liar. We could tell he was eavesdropping. Dad was part
owner of a company that built mansions not unlike Roman Wild’s “rectory,” and in a business where lesser people sometimes
padded their pockets by padding your bills, he was known by his associates as Patrick the Pure. He was a little self-righteous.
He was actually a lot self-righteous, especially when it came to religious shenanigans. Dad was a card-carrying member of
the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the nation’s oldest organization of opinionated atheists, founded in Wisconsin. How
could he keep silent on such a validating occasion? He had the grace to at least pretend he was just interested in his next
cup of coffee. I was always afraid that my father would stroke out one snowy day from his competitive involvement with the
Blackhawks or the Packers and his six daily cups of high-octane coffee.
“She must have known all along!” Nell said as we ate. “She’s an intelligent woman.”
“Not the same thing,” my mother said with a sigh. “Roman was always off on TV or preaching at one of those revival things.
Maybe she didn’t suspect for a long time.”
My father snorted, and Miranda gave him the side-eye.
“So when Ruth found out about the other wife, she left him?” Nell asked.
“Well, he kind of left her first,” I said.
“He’s ruined as a minister but, you know?
He doesn’t seem all that torn up about it.
He’s got nine lives.” The sheer audacity of men was made manifest to me again.
Only some men, true, but at that moment, for me, Roman Wild’s was only the most extreme example of the everyday arrogance of the entitled white guy.
With the smug certainty of a second-year law student, Nell said, “Well, now he’s going to have to face the laws of the State
of Wisconsin instead of just the wrath of God. Dad’s right. He’ll do time instead of just his penance. He’ll be doing Sunday
services in prison.”
I wasn’t so sure. I still thought that Roman might have another trick or two up his sleeve.
“If this isn’t proof that Christianity is a racket to make people stop thinking and start obeying, then what is?” my dad said.
I suppressed a sigh. We’d all heard it before. “And this God they praise? Cruel? Merciful? Whichever suits Him. But always
demanding that people bow down for His glory. And pony up their money.”
My mother said, “Pat, settle down. Not all Christians are . . .”
“Sheep?” Nell said. “I believe they are, in the psalms anyhow. Lambs.”
“I’m definitely not surprised by any of this,” my father said. “Not too unhappy about it either, except for the sake of Ruth
and those kids.”
“And Felicity,” I added.
“Felicity, well, Felicity is . . .”
“What?” I said, biting off the word.
“Another matter,” my father concluded, but I knew that was not what he originally meant to say. If even Patrick the Pure was
so willing to judge her history, it might be a tall order to find really impartial jurors.
“People have a right to worship how they please, Pat,” my mom said.
“And I have a right to my beliefs. All that bloviating about the blessings the Lord bestowed is violating my right.”
“That’s not their intent.”
“If I say that you are fat and I don’t mean it as an insult, if I’m giving you a description, then is it okay? Or am I pushing it on you as a fact?”
“It’s not the same thing!” My mom had her Irish up now. “You are so tiresome!” Nell and I counted backward: five, four, three, two, one . . . for what we knew would come . . . Right on cue, my mother said, “And I’m not fat.”
We knew better than to get between them at times like these. They would turn on us like jackals, shouting, in unison, “We
are not fighting!”
Meekly, Nell and I went our own ways. I headed back toward my old room, carrying a warmed-up cup of atomic coffee I had tried
to tame with half a cup of cream, to muse on all the pieces of this narrative that did not fit.
At the turn of the landing, I looked down the hill of our block, the orderly descent of neatly lighted facades. How many of
them were hiding something? Were the people who did not bring shame on themselves the exception?
According to everything I could discern from the police file, which had a lot of inconsistent information, Felicity had been
nineteen years old, a sophomore, when she dropped out. The year wasn’t even over, which only sharpened the mystery. She gave
up pursuing one kind of wildlife to pursue another kind—all that, and she hadn’t even been old enough to drink.
My radio reporter friend Sally Zankow had slipped me the name of the so-called gentleman’s club where Felicity might have
met the men she was accused of killing. When Sally went there, the manager turned her down flat, as had the strippers she
tried to enlist for interviews. But maybe I could in fact do something like what my mother did. Maybe I could learn about
the world that Felicity entered—how many years ago? Two years? More?—from the inside. I wouldn’t have to work there very long,
and every place needs a licensed bartender.
I had to keep digging. I needed to follow the thread to the past, and to those people who knew about her present life.
I’d only begun to source this thing, and it would have been exciting—finally, a story that would demand all my skills, with all kinds of twists and dark corners!
—if it hadn’t been so close to my own heart.
All I could do was all I could do. I would use all the persistence and courage and style I had, and that would be enough.
But what if I pulled the thread and pulled it and it led to a terrible truth?
What if my own, my beloved Felicity, really had committed these crimes, for money?
What if she had committed these crimes for a more righteous reason, a reason like self-defense .
. . that only she knew? Even as I considered it, I knew that no such thing was possible.
If it were, she would say it now; she would have said it before.
She would be fighting for her life instead of throwing it away.