Crawford to glance out her window and see something strange going on at the house next door.
Nonetheless, there were witnesses of a type. George McFadden, an electrical lineman perched high above the street only a few yards from the house, saw Parks’s dark gray Mercedes pull into the driveway at approximately two that afternoon. According to McFadden, Parks had not gotten out of the car right away, but had remained behind the wheel, “as if waiting for some kind of signal” before entering the house.
A few minutes later, two young girls had come from the house, both of them moving toward the car. The smaller one, who must have been Constance, darted enthusiastically toward her father, while the larger one, Frederica, held back. Parks had already gotten out by the time they reached him, and, once again according to McFadden, he took each of them into his arms, hugged them for a long time, then, hand in hand, his shoulders slightly hunched, led them back into the house.
No one else saw or heard anything after that.
After reading the summation, I turned to the photographs. Arranged once again in the established order, the first picture showed Herbert Parks in a dark double-breasted suit. It was a professional photograph, done at a studio, and the smaller marks and blotches which must have been on his face had been air-brushed into oblivion. He had gray hair at the temples, but otherwise jet black, and for the purposes of the photo he appeared to have pulled a single curl down so that it dangled, slightly greased in fifties matinee-idol style, near the center of his forehead.
There were only two other photographs. The first, just under the studio picture of Herbert Parks, showed his wife posed beside the same dark Mercedes which George McFadden saw pull into the driveway on the afternoon of June 12, 1962. She was wearing a light blue blouse, its ends tied in a knot across her waist, a pair of jeans, rolled up to mid-calf, and white tennis shoes. She was holding a water hose and a red plastic pail, and seemed to be pretending to wash the car.
The last picture was from the family’s personal Christmas card of the year before. Both Herbert and Wenonah Parks were in the photograph, but the focus of the picture, its heart and soul, was the two little girls they held in their arms. Constance was clearly laughing, but Frederica seemed to stare pensively toward the lens, her tiny mouth firmly set in place, not so much frowning, as refusing to smile, her eyes oddly vacant, her arms wrapped tightly around Wenonah’s slender neck.
Rebecca noticed how my eyes lingered upon her, then spoke:
“He put her on top.”
“You mean, in the closet?”
“Yes. She was larger than Constance, but he stacked her on top, and folded her hands over her chest. The others were just sprawled across the closet floor.”
I remembered how my father had done something odd as well, how he’d washed my mother’s body and arranged it carefully on the bed while leaving Laura and Jamie to lie in their ugly, smelly pools of coagulating blood. And as I remembered it, my eyes drifted back to Frederica, and suddenly I thought I knew why she had clung so desperately to her mother in the Christmas card photo, why she had, as George McFadden had mentioned, “held back” from running heedlessly to her father on the day he had assigned to kill her.
“It was because she knew,” I said, almost to myself, but loud enough for Rebecca to hear me.
She looked at me curiously. “Knew what?”
That it was coming,” I told her, “that her father was going to kill them.” I looked at her pointedly. There must always be someone who knows what’s about to happen, don’t you think? Not everyone can be entirely in the dark.”
“Why not?” Rebecca asked.
“Because so much is going on,” I said. “In the family, I mean. Surely someone has to sense it.”
Rebecca looked at me squarely. “Did you?” “No.”
“Did Laura or Jamie?”
It was odd to hear their names again, to hear them spoken of as if they once had actually existed, had lived and observed the life around them, rather than simply as the faceless victims of my father’s crime.
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think so.”
“And your mother?”
It was strange, but at that moment, I suddenly suspected that somehow, through all the mists that must have clouded and thwarted and befuddled her, “poor Dottie” must have known that my father was approaching some dreadful line, and that if he crossed it, he might kill us all.
“She might have known,” I said quietly.
“What makes you think so?”
A memory invaded me, and I recalled how often she’d gone off to her bedroom, closed the door and remained there for hours, as if locking herself away from him, from us, from whatever it was she could feel heating the air inside the little mock Tudor house on McDonald Drive.
“She spent a lot of time in the bedroom,” I told Rebecca.
Even as I said it, I wondered what dreadful possibilities my mother might have envisioned while she lay alone on her bed. In her mind, had she ever seen him coming up the stairs, the shotgun in his hand? And if she had glimpsed such a thing, had she ever considered packing us into the car and taking us away before it was too late?
“But if she did suspect something,” I said, “she didn’t do anything about it.”
Except to let us drift, I thought with a sudden bitterness, let us slide into destruction because she was unable to summon up even enough will to throw off her red housedress, gather us into the station wagon, and take us away from him.
As all of this swept over me, I found that I suddenly blamed my mother as much as, maybe even more than, I blamed my father. The cool rancor and cruelty of my next remark amazed me.
