Chapter Seventeen
On May 28, Adora Crellin was arrested for the murders of Ann Nash, Natalie Keene, and Marian Crellin. Alan immediately paid the punishing bail sum so she could await trial in the comfort of her home. Considering the situation, the court thought it best for me to take custody of my half sister. Two days later I drove north, back to Chicago, with Amma beside me.
She exhausted me. Amma was wildly needy and afire with anxiety—took to pacing like a caged wildcat as she fired angry questions at me (Why is everything so loud? How can we live in such a tiny place? Isn’t it dangerous outside?) and demanded assurance of my love. She was burning off all that extra energy from not being bedridden several times a month.
By August she was obsessed with female killers. Lucretia Borgia, Lizzie Borden, a woman in Florida who drowned her three daughters after a nervous breakdown. “I think they’re special,” Amma said defiantly. Trying to find a way to forgive her mother, her child therapist said. Amma saw the woman twice, then literally lay on the floor and screamed when I tried to take her for a third visit. Instead, she worked on her Adora dollhouse most hours of the day. Her way of dealing with the ugly things that happened there, her therapist said when I phoned. Seems like she should smash the thing then, I answered. Amma slapped me in the face when I brought home the wrong color of blue cloth for Adora’s dollhouse bed. She spat on the floor when I refused to pay $60 for a toy sofa made of real walnut. I tried hug therapy, a ridiculous program that instructed I clutch Amma to me and repeat I love you I love you I love you as she tried to wriggle away. Four times she broke free and called me a bitch, slammed her door. Fifth time we both started laughing.
Alan loosened some cash to enroll Amma at the Bell School—$22,000 a year, not counting books and supplies—just nine blocks away. She made quick friends, a little circle of pretty girls who learned to yearn for all things Missouri. The one I really liked was a girl named Lily Burke. She was as bright as Amma, with a sunnier outlook. She had a spray of freckles, oversized front teeth, and hair the color of chocolate, which Amma pointed out was the exact shade of the rug in my old bedroom. I liked her anyway.
She became a fixture at the apartment, helping me cook dinner, asking me questions about homework, telling stories about boys. Amma got progressively quieter with each of Lily’s visits. By October, she’d shut her door pointedly when Lily came by.
One night I woke to find Amma standing over my bed.
“You like Lily better than me,” she whispered. She was feverish, her nightgown clinging to her sweaty body, her teeth chattering. I guided her into the bathroom, sat her down on the toilet, wet a washcloth under the cool, metallic water of the sink, wiped her brow. Then we stared at each other. Slate blue eyes just like Adora’s. Blank. Like a winter pond.
I poured two aspirin into my palm, put them back in the bottle, poured them back onto my palm. One or two pills. So easy to give. Would I want to give another, and another? Would I like taking care of a sick little girl? A rustle of recognition when she looked up at me, shaky and sick: Mother’s here.
I gave Amma two aspirin. The smell made my mouth water. I poured the rest down the drain.
“Now you have to put me in the bathtub and wash me,” she whined.
I pulled her nightgown over her head. Her nakedness was stunning: sticky little girl’s legs, a jagged round scar on her hip like half a bottle cap, the slightest down in a wilted thatch between her legs. Full, voluptuous breasts. Thirteen.
She got into the bathtub and pulled her legs to her chin.
“You need to rub alcohol on me,” she whimpered.
“No Amma, just relax.”
Amma’s face turned pink and she began crying.
“That’s how she does it,” she whispered. The tears turned into sobs, then a mournful howl.
“We’re not going to do it like she does it anymore,” I said.
On October 12, Lily Burke disappeared on her way home from school. Four hours later, her body was found, propped tidily next to a Dumpster three blocks from our apartment. Only six of her teeth had been pulled, the oversized front two and four on the bottom.
I phoned Wind Gap and waited on hold twelve minutes until police confirmed my mother was in her home.
I found it first. I let the police discover it, but I found it first. As Amma trailed me like an angry dog, I tore though the apartment, upending seat cushions, rummaging through drawers. What have you done, Amma? By the time I got to her room, she was calm. Smug. I sifted through her panties, dumped out her wish chest, turned over her mattress.
I went through her desk and uncovered only pencils, stickers, and a cup that stank of bleach.
I swept out the contents of the dollhouse room by room, smashing my little four-poster bed, Amma’s day bed, the lemon yellow love seat. Once I’d flung out my mother’s big brass canopy and destroyed her vanity table, either Amma or I screamed. Maybe both of us did. The floor of my mother’s room. The beautiful ivory tiles. Made of human teeth. Fifty-six tiny teeth, cleaned and bleached and shining from the floor.
Others were implicated in the Wind Gap child murders. In exchange for lighter sentences in a psychiatric hospital, the three blondes admitted to helping Amma kill Ann and Natalie. They’d zipped out in Adora’s golf cart and idled near Ann’s home, talked her into coming for a ride. My mother wants to say hi.
The girls putted to the North Woods, pretended they’d have a tea party of sorts. They prettied Ann up, played with her a bit, then after a few hours, got bored. They started marching Ann to the creek. The little girl, sensing an ill wind, had tried to run away, but Amma chased her down and tackled her. Hit her with a rock. Got bitten. I saw the wound on her hip, but had failed to realize what that jagged half moon meant.
The three blondes held Ann down, while Amma strangled her with a clothesline she’d stolen from a neighbor’s tool shed. It took an hour to calm Jodes down and another hour for Amma to pull the teeth, Jodes crying the whole time. Then the four girls carried the body to the water and dumped it, zipped back over to Kelsey’s home, cleaned up in the back carriage house, and watched a movie. No one could agree what it was. They all remembered they ate cantaloupe and drank white wine from Sprite bottles, in case Kelsey’s mom peeked in.
James Capisi wasn’t lying about that ghostly woman. Amma had stolen one of our pristine white sheets and fashioned it into a Grecian dress, tied up her light-blonde hair, and powdered herself until she glowed. She was Artemis, the blood huntress. Natalie had been bewildered at first when Amma had whispered into her ear, It’s a game. Come with me, we’ll play. She spirited Natalie through the woods, back again to Kelsey’s carriage house, where they held her a full forty-eight hours, tending to her, shaving her legs, dressing her up, and feeding her in shifts as they enjoyed the increasing outcry. Just after midnight on the 14th, the friends held her down while Amma strangled her. Again, she pulled the teeth herself. Children’s teeth, it turns out, aren’t too hard to remove, if you put real weight on the pliers. And if you don’t care how they end up looking. (Flash of Amma’s dollhouse floor, with its mosaic of jagged, broken teeth, some mere splinters.)
The girls putt-putted in Adora’s golf cart to the back side of Main Street at four in the morning. The aperture between the hardware store and beauty parlor was just wide enough to allow Amma and Kelsey to carry Natalie by hands and feet, single file, to the other side, where they propped her up, waited for the discovery. Again Jodes cried. The girls later discussed killing her, worried she might crumble. The idea was almost in action when my mother was arrested.
Amma killed Lily all by herself, hit her on the back of the head with a stone, then strangled her with bare hands, plucked the six teeth, and cut her hair. All down an alley, behind that Dumpster where she’d left the body. She’d brought the rock, pliers, and scissors to school in the hot pink backpack I’d bought for her.
Lily Burke’s chocolate-colored hair Amma braided into a rug for my room in her dollhouse.