“I think I need to go to the nurse. But can I take that newspaper with me?”
“Of course. If that’s what you want. But wouldn’t you like to talk about it?”
After weeks of him gently circling the topic, I felt bad that this was the way it had come about. Even so, I shook my head, forgetting about Louise Hock’s insistence that I practice speaking my answers. I reached into the basket, feeling as if I were reaching down and down into our well to fetch one of those rag dolls by its fingerless hands. I grabbed the edge of the newspaper, a coupon section and the sports pages falling away, leaving me with the pages I wanted. I carried them with me as I left poor, startled Boshoff and his list of “Little Things” behind.
The direction of the nurse’s office—that’s the way I headed, even though I had no intention of ending up there. Instead, I took a detour down the industrial arts hall, where the smells were unfamiliar: sawdust and solder. At a water fountain, I splashed my face, because it was true that I didn’t feel so well, before unfolding the newspaper.
Dundalk—The killer shot Rose Mason, 45, leaving her to die by the altar in a small chapel in a quiet Maryland town twenty miles from the state capital. Sylvester Mason, 50, her husband, was killed a few feet away with a gunshot to the back of the head.
The younger of the couple’s two children, a 13-year-old girl, had been sleeping in her parents’ car outside the chapel when she woke to the sound of gunfire. “When I heard the second shot, I opened the car door and walked into the church,” she told police, though no further details of her account have been released to the press. Officers reported that they did not find the girl, who was crouched beneath a pew, until hours after the investigation had begun. “Her head was bleeding and she was drifting in and out of consciousness,” said Detective Dennis Rummel of the Baltimore County Police Force. “We got her out of there as soon as we could.”
In the weeks following the investigation, a lone suspect emerged: Albert Lynch, 41, a drifter, originally from Holly Grove, Arkansas. Since 1986 Mr. Lynch had been seek—
“Excuse me, young lady.”
I looked up to see a teacher I didn’t recognize. “Yes?”
“Do you have a pass to be out here loitering during class time?”
“I’m on my way to the nurse’s office.”
“Well, this is a roundabout way of getting there.”
I folded the paper, left the hall with its unfamiliar smells, and once more walked in the direction of the nurse’s office. But when I came upon an exit, I slipped through it. Rarely did I miss class, never mind skip out in the middle of the day, but I wanted to go someplace where I could read the article without interruption. Considering how often I took it, the path I first followed when Dot had been locked in our parents’ bathroom should have been well tread by then. But like some fairy-tale forest, it remained forever overgrown and unwelcoming. A maze of stone walls led me to the barbed-wire fence behind Watt’s Farm close to Butter Lane. Most of the year, the field there held no sign of life, but come fall it teemed with white-feathered turkeys. The way they arrived, all at once and fully grown, left me suspicious about how many were actually raised on premises, but nevertheless, mornings when I was early for school, I stopped at the fence and watched those birds strutting about on their scaly, bent-backward legs. The high-pitched warble that rose from their throats made them seem like nervous old women.
That afternoon, I stopped at my usual spot, put down my father’s tote, and rested a hand on the fence while I finished the article.
Since 1986 Mr. Lynch had been seeking counsel from the Masons—a couple who built a national reputation, admired in some circles, mocked in others, as demonologists. Those close to the case say Mr. Lynch was disgruntled with the Masons’ treatment of his daughter. Lynch admits to meeting the couple at the chapel on the evening of the murders, but claims to have left the church before violence erupted. To date, he has lacked a substantiated alibi, insisting that he was at the Texaco on Route 2 at the time of the killings. The station’s security monitors were not in service so no video exists to support his claim. Further weakening Mr. Lynch’s case, he asserted through his attorney, Michael Cavage, that after fueling his car, he paid with cash. The clerk on duty has no recollection of seeing Mr. Lynch that evening.