Diana Crane’s story was that of a blameless schoolteacher who paid a terrible price for defending herself. Nobody involved in her prosecution, conviction, and execution had anything to be proud about. I still get mad thinking about it. One of the boys she’d killed had a track record with women; old classmates, now nearing retirement, told me stories as I sat listening in vinyl-upholstered recliners under fluorescent lights. They’d carried these burdens with them almost their whole lives. Diana Crane had done a service to society by ridding it of Jesse Jenkins and Gene Cupp; for her trouble, she’d been strapped to a chair and made to breathe poison until she died.
But the popular account omitted everything prior to the oyster knife, and from the resultant open question of what happened next, schoolchildren and bored night-shift workers crafted the White Witch, the one all schoolchildren knew and feared: a Bluebeard in reverse, her crime hidden by apartment walls and the moon above the bay. In the legend, she’d never even been arrested; Diana Crane fled the scene by night, carnage in her wake, and, for all anyone knew, was still living somewhere by the bay, lying in wait.
The movie they made out of my book later didn’t set any box office records, but I got paid up front. I’ve been writing about crimes ever since: the crimes people tell stories about, and the secret ones our stories seek to conceal.
* * *
I WAS THIRTY-SEVEN when I came down to Milpitas. I had five books out under my own name and, under a pen name that I still keep secret, three paperback serial killer mysteries that sold well enough to get stocked in airport bookstores. My life was comfortable, if lonely. Ashton, my editor—he has three names instead of the usual two, all of which he uses in correspondence: Ashton Williston Clark—emailed me a news clipping about some especially lurid murders. The little town where they’d happened was a familiar name to me, not only because of the much more widely known case that had briefly thrust Milpitas onto the national stage—River’s Edge—but because a childhood friend of mine had lived there once. Back in those days, we’d even kept up a halting correspondence for a while, some of the first letters I ever sent or received. “A proofreader was doing some fact-checking on a nonfiction book and she saw this,” Ashton wrote. “I knew you’d love it.”
I did love it, with a few reservations. It was a very small clipping and there weren’t a lot of details. The few choice bits were tantalizing enough—dead bodies atop a pyre of pornography, cryptograms in graffiti, the specter of teenage Satanic rites jolting a sleepy old town awake—but the story seemed to have fizzled quickly somehow, which suggested to me that there was perhaps less than met the eye of a Mercury News reader in the mid-eighties, when catchy copy still meant real advertising dollars. I’d been having ideas about something more baroque and gothic than another California suburb.
“I hear you, but I feel like you’re the guy,” he said when I called him up to see if he was serious, mentioning my misgivings up front. “You move down there, you do your thing, you meet all the people now that they’re grown up, you make your first really big book. You’re ready.”
“I’m tired of California,” I said. “It’s practically all I ever write about. I was thinking of trying to find something in the South. Louisiana, maybe.”
“The house is on the market,” he said. “These are your people, right? An actual self-made cult, grotto of the porno demons, teen devil worshippers in the Santa Clara Valley. You move in. Devil House. You move into Devil House. That’s the angle here.”
It felt like a joke. “I don’t want to buy a house just to write a book about it,” I said.
“It’s kind of a natural extension of your method, don’t you think?” Ashton has this way of talking about things as if they don’t have any consequences. It’s contagious. I try to be on my guard about it.
“Knocking on doors and buying houses are two pretty different things.”
“That’s what makes this a different book,” he said. “That’s how it gets bigger. You own the place. It’s yours. Past history suggests it takes you about eighteen months to get it together. You can turn right around and sell it when you’re done, it’ll be like a short-term lease with return on your deposit.”
“Did something happen I don’t know about? My advances don’t really cover down payments on houses.”
“Chandler,” he said. “This isn’t the city. There’s not even fifty thousand people there. You’ve got to have a decent enough credit history after your last few years. Besides, we get a cut of your movie rights. I know you’re not exactly starving out there.”
There was quiet for a few seconds.
“Even if you prorate for the down payment you’ll be paying less on the mortgage than you pay now on rent in the big city,” he said. “Come on. This has your name all over it.”
That call was five years ago, all the way back in December of 2001. This was a different place then; the cracks in the tech bubble were still fresh and raw, though property values would start to climb again soon enough. I’ve been hard at work ever since, but I haven’t turned the book in yet, in part because, while this is that book, it’s not the one that my contract obligates me to eventually write: DEVIL HOUSE, a work of nonfiction, between 80,000–120,000 words, about the multiple murders committed in the ADDRESS TK block of Main Street in Milpitas, California, on or about the night of November 1, 1986.
It is instead a book about restoring ancient temples to their proper estates. I got the idea from my grandfather, I like to say. I tried counting up the great-greats it would take to really get all the way back, but after a while you lose track and get lost. It happens every time. My grandfather, anyway. He lived in a castle but never forgot the grassy glades and wooded byways of his youth.
2.
THE OLD-FASHIONED GENERIC ANSWERING MACHINE was still holding its own against voice mail back in spring of 2002, even in burgeoning tech enclaves. I listened, with real pleasure, to the sound of moving parts forced into labor far beyond their intended life spans. On the outgoing message, a voice burbled through the warp and wobble of aging tape, managing to sound both bubbly and professional, a hard combination to hit: “Thank you for calling New Visions Properties. This is Whitney Burnett. None of our associates can take your call at this time.”
It was a woman’s voice, maybe someone in her twenties. I start categorizing people from the moment I first meet them; it’s a good habit to pick up if you’re going to try to put stories together from the messy loose ends of people’s actual lives. I imagined a young woman who, at some unfixed point down the line, intended to own her own business; a person whose ambitions were modest, and who had more drive than she really needed to meet them. “Please leave us a brief message telling us how we may be of assistance to you, and we will return your call. If you require immediate assistance, you may reach me on my mobile phone”—here she sounded out the number twice, area code included, in a cool, forceful voice that made me feel obligated to follow through.
“Thank you, and have a pleasant day.”
I left a clumsy message, talking for longer than I needed to and interrupting myself frequently, but when Whitney called back an hour later she cut directly to the chase.
“I would love to show you the property,” she said. “It’s actually a really nice old building. I should warn you, it’s kind of a mess right now, though. But it’s nice, you’ll see it. It’s had a lot of lives. In the fifties it was even a soda shop for a while.”