The Quarry Girls

by Jess Lourey

Specifically, according to Vronsky, while all American soldiers who fought in WWII were trained to kill, a small contingent used the cover of state-sanctioned violence to also rape, torture, and collect human body parts as trophies. Though most returning GIs successfully reintegrated into society, some brought the brutality of war into their homes, abusing their families behind closed doors. That abuse, occurring as it did in a culture openly promoting war, created the fertile ground from which the first major crop of American serial killers would spring.

Mary wanted to be a teacher when she grew up. They were both outwardly happy and had a stable home, which is why it was surprising that, shortly before Labor Day, Mary had written in her journal, “Should I die, I ask that my stuffed animals go to my sister. If I am murdered, find my killer and see that justice is done. I have a few reasons to fear for my life and what I ask is important.”

Despite the similarities between his crimes and the Reker murders, Herb Notch has also never been charged in connection with the latter. He died in 2017 without confessing.

The year before, 1976, had felt like a living thing. America standing tall in a Superman pose, his cape a glorious red, white, and blue flag flapping behind him, fireworks exploding overhead and filling the world with the smell of burning punk and sulfur. Not only was anything possible, we were told, but our country had already done it.

“Need a ride?” She jumped, hand over heart. She relaxed when she saw who it was, but then fear flicked her at the base of her throat. Something was off about him. “No. I’m good.” She tried to make her face pleasant. “Thanks, though.” She shoved her hands deep in her pockets, head down, intending to hurry home as fast as she could without it looking like she was running. He’d been sitting inside his car, windows rolled down, waiting for someone. Not her, certainly. The pinch of fear returned, reaching her stomach this time.

Junie was another thing in my life that was changing. Until recently, she’d been my baby sister, emphasis on “baby,” all Pippi Longstocking hair and freckles plus sass to the moon and back. But then like Maureen, she’d started to fill out early (and unfairly, if you asked flat-chested me).

We were having so much fun that I almost didn’t see the man behind the wheel of the car parked at the end of the street, still, his face shaded, seeming to stare at us. Almost.

She remained on the cool floor, splayed out, breath ragged, and probed herself gingerly. The left part of her forehead and nose were throbbing where she’d run into the wall. Her throat was swollen and pulpy, tender as an exposed tooth to her touch. Her hands kept moving, moving, anything to focus on the here, the now, the real.

Her skirt. She was still wearing it. She tugged it up around her hips. She still had on her underwear, too. She pressed. No soreness. The relief threatened to drown her. He hadn’t violated her yet. Yet. It was so dark.

Hawaiian fever was sweeping the Midwest, which meant most every dish contained pineapple. Fine by me. It left extra of the good stuff: bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, ambrosia salad, glorious, drippy cheese fondue.

I knew I’d made it two days ago. I also knew I could go the rest of my life without eating another plate of spaghetti. Junie loved it, though, and her and Dad sang that stupid “On Top of Spaghetti” song while they twirled their noodles, and so I sneaked it in as much as I could.

Maybe we could host one of those huge dinner parties again if I told Mom I would make all the food. I’d been in charge of it for a while. Nobody’d really asked me, it just came natural. It couldn’t be that much different to cook for a bunch of people at once.

“I love you,” I said to her as I left her bedroom. I didn’t expect an answer so it didn’t hurt when I didn’t get one.

“Ricky’s a bum,” I said. It was true. Even before he’d started hanging out with that Ed guy, Ricky had been getting weird. I was willing to bet he’d missed more school this past year than he’d attended. He hardly even showed up for church anymore. None of us Pantown kids wanted to go to Saint Patrick’s, but we did it anyway, everyone but Ricky. “No doy he’s a bum,” she said. “But he’s got the key to a friend’s cabin, out by the quarries. It’s for sure gonna be a good time.” “When did he tell you all this?” I asked. I recognized my mom’s suspicious tone in my voice. I didn’t like the jealousy chewing up my guts. First Maureen was hanging out with “sexy as hell” Ed, and now Brenda was getting invited to Ricky’s party without me. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to go. I still wanted to be invited, a real invite, not a dusty secondhand one rolled downhill from a friend.

“Ant.” Brenda paused like she expected me to respond. When I didn’t, she continued, sounding peeved. “Ricky said Ant likes you, Heather, that he thought you looked really hot at practice today.” “Gross,” I said, remembering how weird he’d acted in the garage. Anton Dehnke could grow up to become a brilliant brain surgeon or an astronaut, and I’d still only see the kid who ate paste in first grade. “And what’s Ricky doing calling you, anyhow? The way Maureen acted today, I figured they were a couple.”

When someone at church or a teacher asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d tell them a drummer, but sometimes—just to myself; Maureen had lectured me so much about feminism that I knew enough not to say it out loud—I dreamed of being a homemaker. Without wives, the world would grind to a halt, Mom had said. It felt good to picture myself as that vital, to have that role waiting for me to step into, the right hand to a strong, handsome man. I would know exactly how to act. Sometimes I even imagined myself the wife of this house. Not in a gross way, not like I thought of being married to my dad. I just fantasized that this was what it would be like when I was married. My husband at the table, appreciating the food I’d cooked, the clean house he’d walked into. He was managing the world out there, and at the end of the day, his reward was that he got to return to his castle, where I spoiled him.

“New case?” I asked. “Something like that.” He ran his hands over his face. “There’s a real bad guy operating out of the Cities. Name’s Theodore Godo. They’re worried he’s gravitating to Saint Cloud. They even sent down a BCA agent to help, been here a few days. Jerome is none too happy. Asked me to sit in on a meeting today, even though I don’t usually get involved until someone’s been charged.”

Dad’d run through his day with me over a glass of brandy, like he just couldn’t keep it in anymore. He’d make me promise not to tell anybody because all the stuff was confidential. I loved that he trusted me that much, but honestly, his stories all sounded the same. People hurting other people, stealing from them, cheating or beating them, and my dad swooping in to sort it all out.

Then he smiled that younger-Kennedy smile that had been good enough to land my fairy-tale-beautiful mom back when she was 100 percent alive, and we finished our dinner.

He’d visited the diner so many times. Sat in her section. She’d felt mildly flattered even while something about him made her uneasy, like whispers along the tender curve of her neck. But who do you mention that to? Who would listen without telling you to appreciate the attention? Be happy. The guy likes you.

I hid a smile behind my hand, my eyes traveling to Claude. He and I’d always shared the same sense of humor. We weren’t as close as I was to Maureen or Brenda, but that’s because he was a boy. I was surprised to find him staring grimly at Junie instead of sharing a smirk with me. I wrote his expression off to the rumbling storm. It made the air hot and uneasy, thick with that smell of torn sky.

A row of three men. No. Flashes of brightness then darkness scissoring them, illuminating only their waists to their knees, that same light slicing my chest, revealing the TAFT patch sewn into the borrowed fatigues. Elvis, singing. Well, that’s all right, mama, that’s all right for you. No no. A girl on her knees, her head bobbing at the waist of the center man. That’s all right, mama, just anyway you do. Her hair long and blonde.

I couldn’t hang on to a thought, my mind erasing what I was seeing while I was staring at it. Well, that’s all right, that’s all right. “Close it!” Brenda screamed, and the girl on her knees whose face I did not want to see was turning, her chin, her cheek, her profile appearing. In a second she and I would be staring straight into one another’s eyes. The door was slammed shut.

“Her reputation,” she said. “Swear it was too dark.” There it was. Not only the horror of what we’d seen, but what it’d cost Maureen if others found out. I heard Father Adolph like he was standing over us, smiling sadly that he even needed to say it: A good reputation is more valuable than costly perfume. I squeezed Brenda’s hand, then coughed, my throat tender from throwing up. “I swear.” The memory returned, Brenda, Maureen, and me at the Muni, three Musketeers against the world. That would never be again. In that handshake, a piece of Brenda closed off to me and me to her, and we both turned away from Maureen.

“Stupid bitch,” he muttered angrily, shoving his belt back into place. The lighting turned his eyes into sockets, but his shaking hands told the whole story. “You won’t be laughing next time,” he said, his voice thick. “Believe that.” He marched out of the room. She heard the sound of locks scraping tight. And she began to plan. She wasn’t going back to the Emptiness. Not now that she’d remembered who she was.

CHAPTER

I woke up feeling headachy and sad. It took me a few disorienting moments to remember why. I didn’t want to think about Maureen and what she’d been doing. It was none of my business. If she wanted to tell me about it, she would. Otherwise, me and Brenda had made the right choice, putting it out of our heads.

Thanks to the Columbia Record and Tape Club, my whole life had a soundtrack. “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” started piping through my ’phones. It was my favorite song on the tape. Too bad I was nearly at the Zayre employee entrance. I’d have to listen to the rest of it later.

“Gonna be a busy one,” he said, tipping his head toward the front. “We already have a line.” I punched in. “Who eats a hot dog at ten in the morning?” My stomach lurched as I remembered the meal I’d barfed up last night and washed off the lawn before I’d hopped on my bike. “It’s already seventy-seven degrees out,” he said. “People’ll eat a lot of hot dogs if it means they can stay in the air-conditioning.”

cocked my head. Here he was, finally, the Ed of legend. The man Maureen had described as sexy as hell. I felt a shiver low in my belly. He was short, his teeth smoker yellow, but he was attractive, despite or maybe because of the weird way he dressed, like he wasn’t afraid to be different. That sort of confidence counted in Pantown. Was that what Maureen saw in him?

I noticed he wasn’t taking shared credit for it anymore, not with Ed right there. Ed, who hadn’t taken his eyes off me, smiled slow and delicious, like a morning stretch. “All right, then,” he said. “You’re a friend of Maureen’s.” I nodded. I wondered where Ricky and Ed had first met because Ed was way too old to be hanging out with high school kids, even a brain-fry like Ricky. But it was hard to hold on to the question. Ed was exciting and terrifying and so out of place. His greased black hair and leather jacket against the soft, pastel Pantowners shopping behind him reminded me of a sleek jungle cat let loose in a petting zoo.

I didn’t want to be doing what Maureen had been, obviously, but I should be doing something, shouldn’t I? That’s when it had crossed my mind that she might be getting paid for what I’d seen her do last night. That would explain where she’d gotten the money to buy her Black Hills ring, its plump rose-gold grapes hugged by curving green-gold leaves. I hoped she wasn’t getting paid. If I won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, I would buy her all the Black Hills gold jewelry in the world so she never had to get on her knees again.

Maureen looked fearless peering over the crowd. She wore new earrings tonight, too, gold balls the size of grapes hanging off dangling chains. They looked expensive. We hadn’t been able to get ahold of her for practice earlier, so it’d just been Brenda and me in the garage, worried if Maureen would even show up tonight. But of course she had. She was hungry for these people to love her, and they would once they heard us play. After what I’d seen last night, I’d expected her to be off today, weepy maybe, but she acted just like her regular self, casual and confident, and she was dressed like a million bucks.

Given what Sheriff Nillson had just said about us not wanting to draw the wrong kind of attention, her comment became funny—ironic, not ha-ha—because at one point, I’d proposed we change the band name from the Girls to the Grannies. We could part our hair down the center, wear round glasses and shapeless dresses, and we wouldn’t have to worry much at all about how we looked, only our music. Brenda and Maureen had vetoed that so quick they nearly turned back time.

“Girls!” I turned toward a familiar voice. Father Adolph Theisen, our priest at Saint Patrick’s, was walking toward us. I’d never seen him out of his collar, and tonight was no exception.

“You okay, Mo?” I said into her hair. She was trembling. “I’ve always been after something,” she whispered. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. I pulled back, stared into her raw, beautiful face. “You know it, too,” she said, trying to smile and failing. Her voice was as thin as a spiderweb. “I’ll try anything. Food. Smokes. Pills. Anything. But I never feel full. Not even tonight’s show did it. It makes me so tired, Heather.” I had no idea what she was talking about. I dragged her close again. That last exchange would haunt me forever.

Besides those daytime trips to Dead Man’s, I suspected Brenda and Mo had also attended parties at the quarry. Ones they hadn’t invited me to. It stung to think about.

I thought I spotted Maureen, too. I’d ridden over with Ant and Ed, so she must have come in Ricky’s car along with Brenda. I was worried about her after the odd thing she’d said at the fair, but I couldn’t seem to pinpoint her even though it was a small gathering, spread out.

Across the fire, Ricky started hanging off Brenda, treating her different than I’d seen before. I didn’t like it.

“Do you believe in the death penalty?” Ed asked, still staring at me, his smile gone. I suddenly didn’t like his attention. “Sure, for really bad stuff.” “Like what?” I shrugged, ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth. It was dry even though I’d just had a drink. It felt like it was taking longer to blink, too, like the messenger between my brain and eyes kept falling asleep. “Murder,” I said. Ed’s mouth quirked, an ugly gesture. “Then you’re just as evil as anyone. The killer always comes up with a reason that makes sense to him, but killing a man is killing a man, whether you’re a cop or a soldier or some shitty hobo with a shiv. Tell your DA daddy that, why don’t you.”

Fleetwood Mac came on the radio, but I couldn’t tell which song. Noises had gotten plunky, like someone was cupping my ear.

Brenda’s eyes were glassy. Could it be from the pot, or had she and Maureen and Ricky taken something on the way over? We’d talked about trying acid together, but it always seemed like a future that was far off. Was that one more thing she’d done without me?

I’d never planned on kissing Anton Dehnke, but that’s what was about to happen. I was sure of it. I found myself grateful for the liquor and pot. I wouldn’t have had the courage to go through with this without it.

He dropped my hand. “No one likes the nice guys,” he whined. “Girls always want the bad boys, like Ed or Ricky. Don’t you?” “No,” I said. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be alone with either one of them. The thought made me shiver. But at least Ant saw through Ed, saw him for the danger he was. “Why do you hang out with him? Ed, I mean.” Ant twitched like something had bit him. “I dunno,” he said, glancing at a spot over my shoulder, his voice gone vague. “I spend so much time thinking I’m messing everything up. With Ed, I don’t have to think at all.”

“I meant it when I told you before how pretty you are,” he said, his voice husky. “Will you take your shirt off?” “Gross, Ant,” I said. He set the camera down and came over to the bed, dropping beside me. “It’s because I’m too nice, isn’t it?” I started laughing again. I didn’t think what he said was particularly funny, but laughing seemed easier than arguing. I stopped only when I saw Anton’s expression. He had a stony look. I scratched a bugbite on my arm. “What’s wrong with you?”

His hungry look made me feel powerful. I finally felt what Brenda and Maureen had been after, at least I thought I did, and I wanted more of that.

It wasn’t the queasiest thing I’d ever experienced. That was the time Mom took me to Dr. Corinth when I was eight and had a fever, and he told her the best place to check my swollen glands was the ridge between my leg and privates. Right beneath my underwear lines. Mom seemed to think he knew best, and I suppose he did. Kissing Ant wasn’t that bad, but it had something icky like that in it. While it didn’t feel good, I found I still liked something about it.

He leaped off the bed and had that camera in hand before I could change my mind. It was flattering, I supposed, and I felt loose from the whiskey and pot and warm from kissing, and I’d known Ant my whole life and felt okay with him, even though he was being a weirdo.

“That’s nice,” Ant said, encouraging me, his voice almost a snarl. “Sexy.” His cutoffs had gone solid in the front. I pushed through the mental fog, staring at his shorts curiously, and then all at once, I understood. Hot shame washed over me. “I have to go, Ant.”

My stomach gurgled. “I think I’m gonna barf, Ant. I want to go home.” “Show me your bra.” He didn’t even look like Ant anymore. I started crying, I don’t know why. It was Ant. “Fine.”