Katherine Addison's Blog, page 36

UBC: Olsen, Son

Son: A Psychopath and his Victims by Jack Olsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So far as anyone knows, Kevin Coe never escalated to murder, but Jack Olsen's narrative makes it clear it was only going to be a matter of time. Coe is currently incarcerated in a "Special Commitment Center"--a dreadfully Orwellian title for a facility that holds sexual predators; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's article about his attempt to sue the state of Washington makes it absolutely clear that he hasn't changed a particle since 1981 when he was first convicted; he's using the same arguments and the same language. That in itself suggests to me that he is where he belongs.

Son is an excellent book. Olsen has a sprawling story, a lot of people whose voices need to be heard, and some remarkable pieces of truth stranger than fiction, including Coe's mother in toto. Olsen doesn't rush, but there's no sense of wandering or rambling. He knows what story he's telling, and he balances it beautifully: Coe, his victims, his family and friends, the police, the city of Spokane (which is a character in this book in its own right). Olsen charts the damage done to Coe's victims but also to his friends, his girlfriend, his ex-wife; the book ends, in fact, with an oddly lovely and moving description of Jenifer Coe trying to put herself back together: "After twenty-eight months of self-imposed house arrest, she rode the bus downtown to look for work. She said she felt like Columbus sailing toward the edge of the earth" (570).



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UBC: Barthel, A Death in Canaan

A Death In Canaan by Joan Barthel

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Unfortunately, this book just wasn't very good.

I've been trying to figure out why; it's not just that Barthel doesn't have any sense of how true crime works as a genre--she's not really writing true crime. The problem maybe is that she doesn't know what she's writing, so that what comes across is "This thing happened and I was there and me and my really important friends Did Something About It." It's not a memoir, because it's not about her, even though she keeps putting bits of her personal life in it for no clear reason. It's not really about Peter Reilly, who remains a cipher at the center of the book (and there are some questions about him that Barthel doesn't even seem aware she might want to try to answer); you might say it's about Barbara Gibbons, the murdered woman, but she is perforce an absence, only reconstructed from the people who knew her. And it can't be about the solving of Barbara Gibbons' murder, because that murder remains unsolved to this day.

It takes a writer who is not an artist but an obsessive and intensely self-aware artisan to write a book about an unsolved murder and make it work. Barthel complains about all the unknowns and ambiguities in the case, but she makes no effort (at least, no effort that she discusses) to find the answers. She comes across as a dilettante, a sightseer at someone else's tragedy. I have no idea if this is a fair assessment or not, which is what I mean by needing a self-aware artisan at the helm of a book like this. Barthel doesn't show any awareness of the self she's presenting through her narrative, and fortunately or unfortunately, the narrator in true crime--or, more generally, in nonfiction books about ambiguous or uncertain events (cf the book I just reviewed, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster)--is vitally important. The reader has to trust the author, not necessarily to know the truth, but to be able to distinguish between that they do know and they don't know, and part of that, if the narrator is also a character in the book's events, is self-awareness. Which Barthel just doesn't demonstrate.

There's also no throughline--as I said, she doesn't really seem to know what story she's telling or why she's telling it. The thing is hopelessly open-ended, which in itself isn't necessarily a problem, but Barthel neither has a story to put within that open-endedness, nor the skill needed to make the open-endedness her story.

At this remove, I have no idea why this book was nominated for a Pulitzer--except that Barthel's original article did uncover a really spectacular miscarriage of justice.



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UBC: Krakauer, Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



If this book doesn't cure you of wanting to climb Mt. Everest, nothing will.

I say that not only because the book is the story of the disaster that befell climbing parties on Everest in 1996, resulting in the deaths of three guides and two clients, but because Krakauer's vivid description of the experience of climbing Everest makes it clear that it is miserable, grueling, and agonizingly painful--and that's if nothing goes wrong.

Krakauer writes about the tragedy very movingly. His technique is nothing new--the bifurcation between past!Krakauer, who doesn't have any suspicions of what's coming, and present!Krakauer, who can see all the mistakes and warning signs and, like someone in a nightmare, wants nothing more than to be able to yell at past!Krakauer, pay attention HERE! But of course he can't. His foreshadowing--and maybe this is what makes it work--is not characterological. He talks about his friends Andy Harris and Doug Hansen without pointing toward their deaths. Although Rob Hall and Scott Fischer's characters bleed into the situation because they were the expedition leaders, the decision makers, but Krakauer makes it very clear that you can't point at any decision they made or action they took and say, this is why five people died. To a large degree, the only reason any of the disaster happened was that all of these people had made a common decision to climb Mt. Everest. People die doing that because it's an extremely dangerous thing to do.

This is not to say that Krakauer doesn't think mistakes were made. He does, and he says so. But he starts with himself. His own (self-perceived) culpability is maybe the center of the book, the whole thing an exercise in Krakauer trying to figure out why he made the decision he did, especially the decisions he believe led in part to Andy Harris' death.

The book is also a meditation on why people climb Mt. Everest, from the explorers to the people who feel they have to pit themselves against the mountain to the tourists. He's never entirely explicit about it, but there's a sub-theme of the danger involved in the obsession with, not climbing Mt. Everest, but "summitting" it. Reaching the summit. The guided expeditions led by Hall and Fischer (and a whole bunch of other people) had as their goal summitting Mt. Everest, getting as many people as were willing to pay their $65,000 to the summit as safely and easily as possible. (Hall's idol Sir Edmund Hillary was contemptuous of this practice, which crushed Hall, but didn't change his mind.) Summitting is a very different enterprise than climbing Mt. Everest--in fact, as Krakauer, an avid climber himself, notes with some dismay, there's very little climbing-qua-climbing involved. One of the things Krakauer thinks went wrong was the culture, the relationship of guides and clients as opposed to the relationship of climbing partners: "Andy and I were very similar in terms of physical ability and technical expertise; had we been climbing together in a nonguided situation as equal partners, it's inconceivable to me that I would have neglected to recognize his plight. But on this expedition he had been cast in the role of invincible guide, there to look after me and the other clients; we had been specifically indoctrinated not to question our guides' judgment" (188). He acknowledges in other passages the reason for that "indoctrination," the fact that an expedition like that one cannot be a democracy, with clients arguing the guides' call, but in reading this book, I couldn't help feeling that both sides were correct: arguing on Mt. Everest is going to be pretty much synonymous with death, but there are so many things that can go wrong, so quickly, and so many of them have to do with oxygen starvation of the brain, that, yeah, Krakauer's right, the idea that guides are "invincible" is maybe just as deadly.

And Hall's boast that he could get anyone up Mt. Everest may have been, in the most Greek-tragedy-worthy style, the reason that he and Hansen were caught by the storm. Hansen had had to give up just short of the summit the year before, and Hall, having persuaded him to try again, was bound and determined that he would make it. Krakauer saw Hall talk Hansen out of turning back earlier in the day, and the last people to see Hall and Hansen alive saw Hall reaching the summit with Hansen's arm slung over his shoulder. Hall broke his own strict rules, and he and Hansen died for it.

This is a sad book and a horrifying book, a book that raises many more questions than it answers. In the end, Krakauer can't explain to his own satisfaction what happened. He can only leave this testament to the fact that it did.



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UBC: Rosenbaum, Travels with Dr. Death

Travels with Doctor Death by Ron Rosenbaum

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I first encountered Ron Rosenbaum with his excellent book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, which is a collection of investigative journalism essays about all the theories people have about what made Hitler into what he was (and in fact the last essay in this book bridges the two collections). This collection is not themed in the same way; it's just a bunch of essays Rosenbaum wrote in the '70s and '80s about a whole host of crazy things: JFK assassination conspiracy theorists, Watergate conspiracy theorists, the BATFUCK NUTS things the CIA was doing in the '80s, the cancer clinics of Tijuana, the phone phreaks, the extremely uncomfortable and awkward questions raised by nuclear deterrence theory, and some splendid true crime essays: the unsolved murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer (who was, among many other things, one of JFK's mistresses); a drug dealer's murder in Brooklyn; the very strange death of David Whiting; and the title essay, which is about Dr. James Grigson. Grigson was an expert witness Texas prosecutors called in basically on behalf of the death penalty. Grigson's schtick was pronouncing the defendant an incurable sociopath, guaranteed to kill again, based on nothing but the prosecutor's "hypothetical" reconstruction of the crime (in a Kafka-esque catch-22, the Supreme Court had judged it unconstitutional for Grigson to examine the defendant himself, because that violated the defendant's 5th Amendment rights). Grigson was a terror on cross-examination and he knew exactly how to get juries to believe him. A particularly perceptive defense attorney told Rosenbaum, "If you ask me, he's the sociopath [...] He's the one who, despite reprimands, goes around making pronouncements which have been condemned by his profession. He's the one who does it over and over again with no remorse [...] Just like a sociopath" (234). And Grigson tells Rosenbaum about the defendant he does get to examine, Gayland Bradford:

"And as I was leaving he pointed his finger at me and said, 'You're slick.'"

"You're slick?"

"Yeah, it was 'Hey, man, you're slick.' It's the sociopath's compliment. It's the recognition of the sociopath for somebody who appreciates what he really is."
(233)

Grigson doesn't quite say, "it's the recognition of the sociopath for another sociopath," but that isn't very far beneath the surface of his grammatically convoluted explanation.

(I notice that, while Rosenbaum doesn't mention all the testimony of future dangerousness listed by the site I found Gayland Bradford on (which, as it happens, is the Clark County Indiana prosecutor's website, which lists all the times the death penalty has been carried out since 1976 because, apparently, there haven't been enough of them), the Clark County website doesn't mention the testimony of Dr. Grigson. Further note, because irony is good for you, Bradford wasn't put to death until 2011--twenty-three years after he murdered Brian Williams, twenty-one years after he was sentenced to death, and seven years after Grigson died of lung cancer.)

It's probably hyperbole to say that Grigson was a sociopath--but is it more hyperbolic than Grigson's own on-the-spot "hypothetical" diagnoses of incurable sociopathy?

At this point, this collection is something of a historical artifact, but Rosenbaum is a smart, thoughtful, engaging writer, and beneath the dated topicality, what he's writing about is the weird, dark, twisted side of human nature, and that, my friends, is still extremely damn relevant.



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UBC: Rule, You Belong to Me

You Belong to Me and Other True Crime Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



"You Belong to Me": I-95 Indian River County FL 1990: The Florida State Highway Patrol was found not liable in Lorraine Dombroski Hendricks' murder, but the more I think about it, the more I think that judgment was itself part of the exact same failure that let her be killed: there was more than enough evidence that State Trooper Tim Harris was not fit to be out alone, much less in a position of authority--the problem was that the vast majority of the evidence was his behavior toward his estranged wife Sandy, and that evidence was consistently discounted because (1) it was considered Harris' personal life and not the business of his supervisors, and (2) his (male) supervisors preferred (again consistently) to believe Harris' version of the situation, which was that his wife was a cold-hearted bitch, rather than the truth, which was that she was terrified of her abusive unfaithful stalker of a husband. (Also (3) Sandy Harris had been conditioned to believe that the problem was her, even when it was manifestly him, and she had no confidence that her version would be believed, and that again is part of the same problem of not thinking that men need to be held accountable for their behavior toward women.) If Harris' supervisors had taken the situation seriously as what it was--mounting (and mountainous) evidence that Harris, sworn to uphold the law, believed with perfect sincerity that the law did not apply to him (it's the most ridiculously blatant double-standard I believe I've ever seen, or it would be ridiculous if the consequences hadn't become so dire)--or even if anyone, at any point, had looked at the way Tim Harris talked about women, treated women (including street harassment in front of other (male) law-enforcement officers), and behaved toward his wife, and simply said, Something here is not right, instead of letting it slide and letting it slide, Lorraine Hendricks would not have died in 1990. Because when you look at the pattern of evidence that Rule describes, the only surprise is that Harris' victim wasn't his wife. He used his authority as a Florida state trooper to find a proxy. I don't think--let me be clear--that anyone except Tim Harris is responsible for Lorraine Hendricks' death, because I am not prepared to accept excuses for him, but there is a certain amount of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? that, yeah, actually, I do think we need to be asking.
"Black Christmas": Seattle 1984: a lawyer and his family are murdered because a young man (who was judged legally sane, but I'm not convinced) fixated on Communists as the cause of all his problems and decided to start killing them, and because he read and confabulated an old story about the lawyer's father--and that story wasn't even what he thought it was. David Lewis Rice used a steam iron to bludgeon the lawyer, his wife, and their two little boys to death.
One Trick Pony": Yakima WA 1975: This is the obverse face of Why Buy the Cow?: Murder Is Cheaper than Divorce. Man murders his wife and fakes the scene to look like she was kicked by one of her horses; determined efforts on the part of the woman's sister finally get people looking at her skull who know a HAMMER when they see its shape in someone's skull.
"The Computer Error and the Killer": Burien WA 1974 (and several other dates and places): Here's another Kill Me Twice. Gary Addison Taylor should never have BEEN in Burien WA to abduct and kill Vonnie Stuth; he'd been judged psychotic--criminally insane and demonstrably a public danger--in Michigan in 1957. And then again in 1961. But our legal system has a really crappy memory, and in 1970 he was transferred to outpatient care (the director of the clinic said he believed Taylor "was no longer mentally ill and would be dangerous only if he failed to take his medication" (382)) and the blindingly inevitable happened. And at that point, as if this story weren't already beyond what a novelist could get away with, when he stopped showing up for his appointment in mid-1973, he wasn't reported as an escaped mental patient for three months and that report didn't get into the national law enforcement communication system, a mistake which wasn't discovered until more than a year later. And then, when Michigan authorities realized that mistake, their urgent bulletin which was supposed to be released on November 6, 1974 . . . wasn't. Gary Taylor's name wasn't actually entered into the national system until January 13, 1975. Vonnie Stuth vanished on November 27, 1974. King County law enforcement was forced to release Addison when they had him in custody on December 6, because they checked the system and his name came up clean. Which meant that more women in Texas would be raped and terrorized before Taylor was finally arrested in May 1975. He eventually confessed to four murders, including Vonnie Stuth, but investigators were pretty sure he wouldn't have told them about any murders they hadn't already connected him to. Which means the actual count of his victims is unknown.
"The Vanishing": Seattle WA 1979: this one's a mystery without a murder. Stacy Sparks disappeared without a trace in 1979. Friends, family, police searched and searched without success. She and her car were finally found by construction workers in 1981 where she had gone off the Lacey V. Murrow Bridge, one of many victims of the bridge's infamous "bulge." No one saw it happen and the accident left no evidence above the surface of the water.
"The Last Letter": Bellevue WA 1985: This case makes a horrible sort of ring composition with "You Belong to Me." Bill Brand, like Tim Harris, was a possessive stalker; Jackie Brand, like Sandy Harris, didn't recognize the difference between possessiveness and love until it was too late. In one way, Jackie was lucky; she never had to learn what Bill really thought of her.

Lorraine Hendricks' awful death, one part narcissistic sociopath, one part societal blindness, and one part malignant synchronicity, stirred into an cocktail of rape and ligature strangulation, just makes me heartsick.



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UBC: Rule, A Rage to Kill

A Rage to Kill and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Even if you don't want to read about this handful of sociopaths, go take a look at the Fremont Troll.


"A Bus to Nowhere": Seattle 1998: Silas Cool, who shot the driver of an articulated Seattle Metro bus just as it was starting over the Aurora Bridge (awesome and tangential sidebar: the Aurora Bridge may have my favorite public sculpture EVER: the Fremont Troll)
"The Killer Who Planted His Own Clues": Tumwater WA 1976: the murder of Sharon Mason by Charles "Buddy" Longnecker, who is the perfect stereotype of the sociopathic sexual predator.
"Born to Kill?": Seattle 1961, Walla Walla WA to McKees Rocks PA 1977: the dreadful career of Michael Andrew Olds, who shot Blossom Braham in a grocery story robbery in 1961 for no reason; convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, he was a model prisoner in the Washington State Penitentiary for thirteen years and was paroled in 1974. Sociopaths do very well in environments with external controls on their behavior. In 1977, he robbed his place of employment, murdered a taxi driver, kidnapped a series of elderly people, murdering one, as he veered on an erratic course across the US, and finally, having taken a seven year old boy hostage and missed shooting a police officer by a hair, was apprehended in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. This time, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
As Close As a Brother": Seattle 1969, Kent WA 1972: Bernie Pierce, kind and considerate and trustworthy . . . until he starts drinking. Murdered his girlfriend in 1969, raped and murdered a young woman he claimed to consider a sister in 1972.
"Profile of a Spree Killer": Miami FL, Coral Gables FL, Daytona Beach FL, Merritt Island FL, Tallahassee FL, Beaumont TX, Oklahoma City OK, Grand Junction CO, Las Vegas NV, Torrance CA, Gary IN, Victor NY, Colebrook NH 1984: the loathsome Christopher Wilder, who preyed on teenage girls by pretending to be a professional photographer--the list of his victims is probably a lot longer than just those raped and murdered during his last spree, but since he killed himself rather than letting police apprehend him, no one's ever going to know for sure. His seven million dollar estate was divided among the families of his victims. One of his probable victims, Colleen Orsborn, is the subject of Disappeared 4.9, "Spring Break Nightmare"; Wilder is also the subject of The FBI Files 2.1., "A Model Killer."
"The Lost Lady": Alderwood Manor WA 1979: the strange, strange case of Marcia Moore, heiress, psychic, astrologer, yoga teacher, ketamine "researcher." She disappeared in 1979; her remains were found in 1981 less than fifteen miles from her home. There wasn't enough left to determine how she died. Rule hints strongly that she was murdered by her fourth husband, although she clearly doesn't have enough evidence to present to a metaphorical grand jury. He certainly seems like a plausible suspect, but it also seems not improbable that Moore's long term ketamine habit finally caught up with her and she simply wandered out into the winter night and died of exposure.
"To an Athlete Dying Young": Olympic National Park 1979: Jane Constantino, in the wrong place at the cruelly wrong time, crossed paths with Dale Harrison on the day he was looking for a woman to murder.
"Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town": Des Moines WA 1974: the horrible truth that if someone is determined to kill his ex-wife (or her ex-husband or any combination of genders and relationships), he'll do it. This pseudonymous murderer, *Eric Shaw, is one of the most hateful people in this book, and that's saying something.
"That Was No Lady": Seattle 1976: file this under "that was another country and besides the wench is dead" for its clumsy treatment of transsexuality. The murderer in this case was a sociopath; that's why the victim ended up dead. Transsexuality or transvestitism (and whenever this story was actually written, Rule clearly didn't have a grip on the difference between a homosexual transvestite man and a male-to-female transsexual--her subject may not have had, either), that's not what was wrong, although it was very clearly what the murderer was hiding behind, just as other sociopaths hide behind other problems (Ted Bundy "confessing" the night before his execution that he was made into a serial killer by pornography and true crime magazines springs immediately to mind).
The Killer Who Talked Too Much": Seattle 1976: Another man raping and murdering a woman he claimed to consider a sister--and then raping and murdering another woman he barely knew, who happened to be his alibi for the first murder. He tripped himself up in talking to police by knowing about a split-leaf philodendron that his second victim hadn't been given until after the last time Jones claimed he was in her apartment.
I remind myself again that for every person like Longnecker or Olds or *Shaw, Jones or Wilder or Harrison, there are a dozen people like the police officers who caught them, people who can see outside themselves, whose empathy isn't broken off below the skin, who are as driven to protect as these men were driven to kill.



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UBC: Rule, A Rose for Her Grave

A Rose for Her Grave and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



"A Rose for Her Grave": Beacon Rock OR 1981, Lake Sammamish WA 1991: the abominable career of Randy Roth, who murdered two of his four wives for their life insurance--and a third escaped him by the skin of her teeth
"Campbell's Revenge": Clearview WA 1974, 1982: the completely preventable murders of two women and a child by Charles Rodman Campbell. Campbell raped Renae Wicklund in 1974. She had the guts to testify against him. He was convicted in 1976 and sentenced to thirty years with a seven-and-a-half year minimum, plus fifteen years with a five-year minimum on a completely different conviction. (Why he was at large to rape Wicklund at all is not clear to me.) So it looked like Campbell should have been neutralized as a threat for somewhere between twelve and forty-five years (a range from 1988 to 2021). However. Those two sentences ran concurrently, not consecutively, and due to what looks like both corruption and gross mismanagement in the Monroe Reformatory, Campbell started getting furloughs in 1982. When he was put in a work-release program very shortly thereafter, nobody bothered to notify either Wicklund or her local law enforcement. Campbell promptly returned to Clearview and revenged himself on his victim: he raped and murdered her, murdered her daughter, and murdered a neighbor who happened to be visiting. I am so very ambivalent about the death penalty; mostly I think it's wrong, but every so often there's a case like this where I think it's right. Campbell was hanged in 1994.
"The Hit Person: Equal Opportunity Murder": Seattle WA 1980: this one is just so weird. The murder of Wanda Touchstone by Cynthia Marler, MOST LIKELY as the result of a conspiracy by Touchstone's estranged husband, his daughter, and his son-in-law; it was cheaper to murder her than to let her go through with the divorce. Marler did not testify against Touchstone, and in return he left her hanging out to dry.
"The Runaway": Nile Country Club WA 1974: Malevolent chance put 13-year-old Janna Hanson in the path of Ken Burke on a day when he couldn't keep his homicidal insanity under control. Her body wasn't found for eight months, during which time her family's concern was of course rebuffed by authorities telling them Janna had just run away.
"The Rehabilitation of a Monster": Salem OR 1961, 1975: two more completely preventable murders, from what we might call the Kill Me Twice (Shame On Me) Department. Richard Marquette murdered and literally butchered Joan Caudle in 1961. He spent 11 years being a model prisoner and was paroled in 1973. In 1974 he murdered and butchered a still unidentified woman (he didn't bother to find out her name before he killed her and, since searchers were unable to find her head, her remains couldn't be matched to any missing persons report--if anyone ever reported her missing at all); in 1975 he murdered and butchered Betty Wilson. This time, he was sentenced to life without possibility of parole. He's 81 now and still in the Oregon State Penitentiary.
"Molly's Murder": Seattle 1986: Young woman raped and murdered by her upstairs neighbor . . . simply because he could. This case is also the subject of one segment of The New Detectives 5.4, "Natural Witness."
Dear men, If you ever wonder why women spend their lives being subliminally afraid, read this book.



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The Burgess Shale Revisited . . . in PLUSH

So in the comments to my review of Wonderful Life, an alert reader mentioned purchasing a plush Opabinia. I think I withstood temptation for about 18 hours before I just couldn't stand it any longer and had to Google "plush opabinia," whereupon I discovered that not only does such a thing exist, there's more than one. There's Opabinia in brown, blue and red, yellow and blue, yellow and orange, blue and purple, mottled green and blue . . . Anomalocaris also appears in plush, as do Hallucigenia and Wiwaxia and Perspicaris and Ottoia and Amwiskia and, I admit it, my absolute favorite, Sidneyia:

I love Sidneyia inexpectans with all my foolish weirdo heart. Can't even tell you why.

truepenny @ 2016-12-07T06:04:00

The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives by Katie Letcher Lyle

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



This book could have been so good. Lyle had all the pieces she needed: a fascinating story, comprehensive research into both the original crime and trial and into what had happened to the story in the intervening century., her own innate knowledge of the part of West Virginia where it happened. She's quite good as a historian/journalist, understands what her evidence does and does not prove; she even has an interesting theory about what "really" happened.

But she also has a fatal flaw. She didn't trust her material. "I am not the first to observe that fiction is, or can be, more real than truth. Thus I feel that the purposes of history, in this instance at least, are better served by a carefully documented account interspersed with invented scenes based on the best information I could find, than by an account so dry no one would have wanted to read it" (xv).

She could not be more wrong.

The parts of this book that are historiography are great, compelling and lively. The parts of this book that are fiction (and, credit where credit is due, she does delineate very clearly the bits that are made up) are terrible. They're not necessarily badly written, but they feel false because I was so aware, as a reader, that she was just making it up. She doesn't know how Zona Heaster Shue met her murderer. She doesn't know the story Mary Jane Robinson Heaster told about her daughter's ghost. And she doesn't know a goddamn thing about what was going on in Trout Shue's head.

Part of being a historian, it seems to me, is owning the parts of your story you will never find. She could have written a lovely chapter on the kinds of ghost stories that Mary Jane Heaster would have known as someone who grew up in the Appalachians (her endnotes indicate clearly that she did the necessary research into folklore and ballads)--and on that very interesting tidbit in the local paper, printed the same week as Zona's funeral, about a man in Australia who invented a ghost because he knew of no other way to convince people that the victim was in fact murdered. Instead, she makes up her own ghost story, with an endnote saying: "Mrs. Heaster must have told Preston something like this" (37). It's just wrong, and it's disappointing.



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Wacky hijinks ensue, wildlife edition

ROUND 1
1st BIPED1: What the fuck?
UNDERFOOT CAT: Is new toy!
1st BIPED: ... that's a mouse.
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA*: Kill it! Kill it!
UNDERFOOT CAT: Is toy! See! [bats at mouse softly, no claws]
1st BIPED: Seriously?
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Kill it! Kill it!
UNDERFOOT CAT: Is awesome toy!
MOUSE: [escapes]
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: D'oh!
1st BIPED: Where the fuck did it go?
UNDERFOOT CAT: I will find!
1st BIPED: I wish you wouldn't.
2nd BIPED3: [emerging belatedly from the study] Mouse?
1st BIPED: [brightly] Adventures with nature!

INTERLUDE, in which there is much peering under furniture by UNDERFOOT CAT and both 1st & 2nd BIPEDS

ROUND 2
2nd BIPED: [from under the piano] JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
1st BIPED: [dryly] Did you find it?
2nd BIPED: It's on top of the radiator. I thought the cat was just on crack.
UNDERFOOT CAT: Toy! I has finded you!
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Kill it! Kill it!
1st BIPED: [advances with makeshift mouse-capturing device] Cat, you are as much use as a trapdoor in a canoe.
UNDERFOOT CAT: [being dragged away] But! Is toy!
1st BIPED: [captures mouse]
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Biped! No interfering!
2nd BIPED: [gets door]
1st BIPED: [advances to suitable mouse-release point and lifts makeshift lid of makeshift mouse-capturing device] Fuck, I don't have it.
2nd BIPED: [facepalm]

INTERLUDE, in which CATZILLA scoots anxiously through the living room & completely and utterly fails to notice the mouse

ROUND 3
UNDERFOOT CAT: Toy is in radiator! Make it come out!
2nd BIPED: [attempting to pry mouse away from the radiator with a dowel] You're a strong little bastard, I'll give you that much.
MOUSE: [escapes]
2nd BIPED: FUCK.
1st BIPED: It's over here! Gimme the--
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Kill it! Kill it!
UNDERFOOT CAT: Where is toy?
1st BIPED: HA! [captures mouse in makeshift mouse-capturing device]
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: INTERFERENCE!
UNDERFOOT CAT: To-ooy! Where has you gone?
2nd BIPED: [gets door]
1st BIPED: [releases mouse at suitable mouse-release point]
2nd BIPED: This is not how I wanted to spend my Sunday morning.
1st BIPED: At least you're not the mouse.

CODA
UNDERFOOT CAT: [peering under bookcase] Toy? Is you under here?
2nd BIPED: Really, cat?
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, & MIRANDA: This is very embarrassing.
GHOST OF EMMA: Oh my god I can't even.
1st BIPED: I no longer wonder why he was found up a tree.
CATZILLA: ... Is something going on?


---
1Played by my lovely husband, mirrorthaw
2a.k.a. the Orange Creamsicle Dream Cat, the Elder Saucepan, and the First and Second Ninjas
3This would be me.