“Mr. Haines,” Annie said, slowly and deliberately, “can you tell me where you were last night between seven-thirty and eight o’clock?”
“At the school,” Haines said. “The kids put the newspaper to bed on Friday night. That’s where I was. In the newspaper office at the Oak Ridge Middle...”
“What time did you leave here last night, Mr. Haines?”
“Well, actually, I didn’t come home. I had some papers to correct, and I guess I went directly from the faculty lounge to the newspaper office. To meet with the kids.”
“What time was that, Mr. Haines? When you met with the kids.”
“Oh, four o’clock. Four-thirty. They’re very hardworking kids, I’m really proud of the newspaper. It’s called the Oak Ridge...”
“What time did you get home last night, Mr. Haines?”
“Well, it only takes ten minutes to get here. It’s only a mile down the road. Actually, a mile and three-tenths.”
“So what time did you get home?”
“Eight o’clock? Wasn’t it somewhere around eight, Lo?”
“It was closer to ten,” Lois said. “I was already in bed.”
“Yes, somewhere in there,” Haines said. “Sometime between eight and ten.”
“It was ten minutes to ten exactly,” Lois said. “I looked at the clock when I heard you come in.”
“So you were in the school’s newspaper office...”
“Yes, I was.”
“From four o’clock yesterday afternoon...”
“Well, more like four-thirty. I’d say it was four-thirty.”
“From four-thirty to nine-forty. You said it takes ten minutes to get here, and you got home at nine-fifty...”
“Well, if Lois is sure about that. I thought it was closer to eight. When I got home, I mean.”
“That’s almost five hours,” Annie said. “Takes that long to put a newspaper to bed, does it?”
“Well, the time varies.”
“And you say you were working with the kids all that time?”
“Yes.”
“The kids on the newspaper staff.”
“Yes.”
“May I have their names, please, Mr. Haines?”
“What for?”
“I’d like to talk to them.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to know if you really were where you say you were last night.”
Haines looked at his wife. He turned back to Annie.
“I... don’t see why you feel it necessary to check on my whereabouts,” he said. “I still don’t know what you’re doing here. As a matter of fact...”
“Mr. Haines, were you in Isola last night? In the vicinity of 1840 Laramie Crescent between seven-thirty and...”
“I told you I was...”
“Were you, more specifically, in an alleyway...”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“...two doors down from 1840 Laramie Crescent...”
“I was...”
“...cutting and raping a woman you thought was Mary Hollings?”
“I don’t know anybody named...”
“Whom you’d previously raped on June tenth, September sixteenth, and October seventh?”
The kitchen was silent. Haines looked at his wife.
“I was at the school last night,” he said to her.
“Then give me the names of the kids you were working with,” Annie said.
“I was at the goddamn school!” Haines shouted.
“I washed your shirt this morning,” Lois said softly. She kept staring at him. “There was blood on the cuff.” She lowered her eyes. “I had to use cold water to get the blood out.”
One of the little girls appeared in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Is something the matter?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“Mr. Haines,” Annie said, “I’ll have to ask you to come with me.”
“Is something the matter?” the little girl asked again.
You want to know why, he said into the tape recorder, I’ll tell you why. I’ve got nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. If more people took the kind of stand I took, we wouldn’t be overrun by these goddamn groups trying to force their harebrained opinions on others. I didn’t hurt anyone by comparison. When you consider all the people they’re hurting, I’m practically a saint. Who did I hurt, can you tell me? I’m not talking about the two I had to cut, that was protective, that was self-defense in a way. But none of the others got hurt, all I did was try to show them how wrong they are about their position. How sometimes it’s essential to have an abortion. Something they can’t seem to get through their thick heads. I wanted to prove this to them decisively. I wanted them to get pregnant by a rapist. I wanted them to be forced into having abortions — would you carry a rapist’s baby? Would you give birth to a rapist’s baby? I’m sure you wouldn’t. And I was sure they wouldn’t, either, which is why I worked it out so that they’d have to get pregnant sooner or later. If I raped them often enough, they had to get pregnant. The odds were maybe sixty to forty they’d get pregnant. It was as simple as that.
You want to know something? Not any one of my kids was planned. The two little girls you saw? Both accidents. The one my wife’s carrying now, an accident. She’s Catholic, she won’t use anything but the rhythm method. You think she’d know by now that the damn thing doesn’t work — a kid sixteen months after we were married, another one two years after that. You’re supposed to learn from experience, aren’t you? I kept trying to tell her. Go on the pill, get a diaphragm, let me use a rubber. No, no. Against the rules of the church, you know. The rhythm method, that’s it. Or else abstinence. Great choices, huh? Rhythm or abstinence. I’m thirty-one years old, I’ve had children since I was twenty-three, that’s terrific, isn’t it? And now another one on the way. She told me about it in February. We’re going to have another baby, darling. Terrific. Really terrific. Just what I needed was another kid. I asked her to get an abortion. You’d think I asked her to drown herself. An abortion? Are you crazy? An abortion? Abortions are legal, I told her. This isn’t the Middle Ages, I told her. You don’t have to go through with a pregnancy if the child will be a burden to you. You just don’t have to. She said the church was against abortion. She said even a lot of people who weren’t Catholics disapproved of abortion and were working hard to change the law. She said the goddamn president of the United States disapproved of abortion! I told her the president wasn’t earning twenty thousand a year, I told her the president wasn’t out there busting his ass trying to clothe and feed and house a family, I told her the president wasn’t me, Arthur Haines, who didn’t want any more children! I’m thirty-one years old, I’ll be close to fifty when this new one is just starting college. She told me too bad, we’re having another baby, so get used to the idea.
I got used to the idea, all right. Not her idea, though. Mine. An idea I’d been thinking about for a long time. Get those goddamn women out there who are yelling no abortion, no abortion, put them in a position where they have to get an abortion, find out how they felt about it when it struck close to home. I wrote to Right to Life, trying to get a mailing list from them, but they told me I had to make my request on organization stationery, and I had to tell them how I planned to use the list. Well, I couldn’t do that. I mean, how could I do that? So I zeroed in on this local group, A.I.M. — Against Infant Murder, how do you like that name? — and I told them I was writing a magazine article in favor of pro-life, and I wanted to contact women supporters of the movement so that I could find out their deepest feelings about the subject, all that bullshit, and they wrote back saying they could not send the mailing list to anyone who did not first contribute at least a hundred dollars in support of the organization. I figured a hundred dollars was small enough price for what I planned to do, what I knew I had to do.