IN THE COMPACT rented car south on Front Street to Mason Street and so to Woodbind. Left on Summit. Another left on Howard Avenue. The route the murderer had almost certainly taken on his way to 1183 Howard on that morning.
She’d devised a timeline. It is always helpful to devise outlines, structures. From all that she’d learned over a period of years arranging the (probable) sequence of events, imagining parallel trajectories: Luther Dunphy leaving the two-story clapboard house on Front Street, approximately four miles from the Women’s Center, sometime in the early morning of November 2, 1999, in his pickup; Timothy Barron, Women’s Center volunteer, leaving his home in his minivan and arriving at Gus Voorhees’s residence on Shawnee Street, three miles from the Center, at approximately 7:10 A.M., to pick up Gus and to drive together to the Center . . .
She drove to Shawnee Street in another part of Muskegee Falls. This was a residential neighborhood of single-family houses, larger and set in larger lots than those on Front Street; at 88 Shawnee, which was the address of her father’s rented apartment, was a graceless foursquare beige stucco building with a sign advertising prestige condos 1-, 2-, 3-bedroom.
She wondered if the building had changed much in the past eleven years. She wondered if her mother had ever seen the inside of the apartment.
She recalled Gus saying that the rental was “temporary.” He intended to move to another apartment, in a building nearer downtown. Or had he said (Naomi had been a young girl then, and it was before the murder, she would not have remembered each precious word her father uttered) that he was “waiting to hear” if Jenna might change her mind about moving to Ohio—“In which case we’ll rent a really nice house. You kids can help pick it out.”
Shortly after 7:00 A.M. of the morning of November 2, 1999, with no knowledge that within a half hour he would be dead, Dr. Voorhees had emerged from this building to get into a Dodge minivan driven by Timothy Barron. Together the men drove to the Women’s Center.
By 7:30 A.M., both Gus Voorhees and Timothy Barron would be dead.
No one was ever to know what the men had talked about, en route to the Center.
Naomi hoped it had been a friendly exchange. She hoped the men had liked each other. She hoped they had not ever been in fear of their lives as they approached the Women’s Center where hostile demonstrators were beginning to gather.
Driving the route to Howard Avenue Naomi felt a mounting sense of unreality. For all that had happened years ago could so very easily have not happened.
There was nothing intrinsic in the geography of the place. There was no fatedness. Gus Voorhees might so easily have been elsewhere, including Huron County, Michigan. Luther Dunphy might so easily have been distracted by other matters in his life—a child’s illness, or his own. A change of heart. A change of mind. You had to conclude that it was purely chance, without meaning.
He killed them. They died. That is all there was.
Soon, before she was quite prepared, she found herself back at 1183 Howard Avenue. But the Broome County Women’s Center was gone and in its place the canary-yellow Peony Christian Daycare Center. That is all there is.
YET, SHE WOULD PERSEVERE.
Calling Madelena to leave a message—I am discouraged but I will not give up.
In a hoarse voice adding—I love you.
AT LAST, Thelma Barron consented to see her. But only for less than an hour, and only for a recording and not a video.
“No one needs to see my face in your video. It’s enough, you will use my father’s face.”
Thelma Barron spoke flatly, resentfully. The word use was inflected, scornful.
A middle-aged woman, with ironic eyes. An intelligent woman, doing her best to be courteous with a stranger.
Badly Naomi missed the solace of the camera. For a camera lens is turned away from us allowing us to hide behind it. There is the illusion of invisibility, innocence.
Instead, she would record the interview—the other daughter’s words. The two would sit across from each other at a weatherworn picnic table behind the Barrons’s handsome old Victorian house on Mercy Street, in a backyard in need of mowing and raking. Naomi’s cheeks burned to hear the other’s words that were alternately faltering and angry, wounded and incensed.
For a long time we could not speak of it. Your father’s name was bitter to us.
This grief we felt, that our father we loved so much had been killed because he had volunteered at the Center, and he had died beside Dr. Voorhees—and no one knew or cared except his family and a few others.
In the news stories always the headline was VOORHEES. Always the focus was VOORHEES. The name is terrible to us to this day, we cannot speak it aloud.
After they died, it was VOORHEES who was honored. It was VOORHEES’S picture you would see. It was VOORHEES that was the martyr. On the anti-abortion websites it was stated that Timothy Barron’s death was COLLATERAL DAMAGE and in a war COLLATERAL DAMAGE is to be regretted but not to be avoided.