“Oh, allow me,” said Davies. “If you don’t come back tonight with a really boffo piece, you’ll be stuck reading Teleprompters and covering new mall openings for the rest of your career, right?”
Tanya said nothing.
Russell looked over at his boss. “Uh, look, Mr. Davies, if this is gonna be a problem, I can—”
“She’s lying, Russ. Her news director is all hot to trot for some shots of the inside of the house, and he’ll do anything for the exclusive pictures, won’t he? Up to and including having his most popular female anchor lay a sob story on us that sounds like it came out of some overbaked nineteen-forties melodrama. Nice try, though. Goddammit — it wouldn’t surprise me if you and your crew were the ones who tried to break in.”
Tanya looked startled. “What? Someone tried to break into the house?”
“Wrong reading, sister. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
The hardness in Tanya’s eyes now bled down into the rest of her face. “Fine, Mr. Davies. Have it your way.”
The officer in the cruiser walked up to his partner on the porch, and the two of them whispered for a moment, then came down toward Davies and Tanya.
“Mr. Davies,” said the officer who’d unlocked the door, “we just received orders that Ms. Claymore and her cameraman are to be allowed to photograph the inside of the house.”
Behind her back, Tanya gave a thumbs-up to the driver of the news van.
“What’d you do,” asked Davies, “have your boss call in a few favors, or did you just promise to fuck the mayor?”
“Mr Davies,” said one of the officers. The warning in his voice was quite clear. “Ms. Claymore can photograph only the foyer and one other room. You’ll all go in at the same time. I will personally escort Ms. Claymore and her cameraman into, through, and out of the house. She can only be inside for ten minutes, no more.” He turned toward Tanya. “I’m sorry, Ms. Claymore, those’re our orders. If you’re inside longer than ten minutes, we’re to consider it to be trespassing and are to act accordingly.”
“Well,” she said, straightening her jacket and brushing a thick strand of hair from her eye, “it’s nice to see that the First Amendment’s alive and well and being slowly choked to death in Cedar Hill.”
“You should attend one of our cross burnings sometime,” said Davies.
“You’re a jerk.”
“How would you know? You never come to the meetings.”
“That’s enough, boys and girls,” said Officer Lock and Key. “Could we move this along, please?”
“One thing,” said Tanya. “Would it be all right if we got some shots of the outside of the house first?”
“You’d better make it fast,” said Davies. “I feel a record-time cleaning streak coming on.”
“Or I could get them later.”
Russell had already walked away from the group and was setting his supplies on the porch. The front door was open and the overhead light in the foyer had been turned on, and he caught sight of a giant red-black spider clinging to the right-side wall—
He turned quickly away and took a breath, pressing one of his hands against his stomach.
Mutt and Jeff laughed at him as they walked into the house.
Pete Cooper shook his head and dismissed Russell with a wave of his hand.
The ghosts of the Leonard family surrounded Russell on the porch, Irv placing a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder while Miriam stroked his hair and the children looked on in silence.
Tanya Claymore’s cameraman caught Russell’s expression on tape.
It wasn’t until Jackson Davies came up and took hold of his hand that Russell snapped out of his fugue and, without saying a word, got to the job.
And all along Merchant Street, shadowy forms in their housecoats and slippers watched from the safety of front porches.
9
Even more famous than Francis Paymer’s phone call is Tanya Claymore’s videotape of that night. It ran four and a half minutes and was the featured story on Channel g’s six o’clock news broadcast the following evening. Viewer response was so overwhelming that the tape was broadcast again at 7:00 and 11:00 P.M., then at 6:00 A.M. and noon the next day, then again, reedited to two minutes, forty-five seconds, at 7:00 and 11:00 P.M.
It is an extraordinary piece of work, and I showed it to my students that day. I eventually received an official reprimand from the school board for doing it — several of the students had nightmares about it, compounding those about the Utica killings — but I thought they needed to see and hear other people, strangers, express what they themselves were feeling.
The ghosts wanted to see it again, as well.
As did I — and why not? In a way, it is not so much about the aftermath of a tragedy as it is a chronicle of my birth, a point of reference on the map of my life: This is where I really began.
10
The tape opens with a shot of the Leonard house, bathed in shadow. Dim figures can be seen moving around its front porch. Sounds of footsteps. A muffled voice. A door being opened. A light coming on. Then another. And another.
Silhouettes appear in an upstairs window. Unmoving.
The camera pulls back slightly. Seen from the street, the lights from the house form a pattern of sorts as they slip out from the cracks in the particleboard over the downstairs windows.
It takes a moment, but suddenly the house looks like it’s smiling. And it is not a pleasant smile.
All of this takes perhaps five seconds. Then Tanya Claymore’s voice chimes softly in as she introduces herself and says, “I’m standing outside the house of Irving and Miriam Leonard at One-eighty-two Merchant Street, where, as you know, four nights ago their son Andy began a rampage that would leave over thirty people dead and over thirty more wounded.”
At that very moment, someone inside the house kicks against the sheet of particleboard over the front bay window and wrenches it loose while a figure on the porch uses the claw end of a hammer to pull it free. The board comes away, and a massive beam of light explodes outward, momentarily filling the screen.
The camera smoothly shifts its angle to deflect the light. As it does so, Tanya Claymore resolves into focus like a ghost on the right side of the screen. Whether it was purposefully done this way or not, the effect is an eerie one.
She says, “Just a few moments ago, accompanied by two members of the Cedar Hill Police Department, a team of janitors entered the Leonard house to begin what will most certainly be one of the grimmest and most painful cleanups in recent memory.”
She begins walking up toward the front porch, and the camera follows her. “Experts tell us that violence never really ends, no more than a symphony ceases to exist once the orchestra has stopped playing.”
As she gets closer to the front door, the camera moves left while she moves to the right and says, “And like the musical resonances that linger in the mind after a symphony, the ugliness of violence remains.”
By now she has stepped out of camera range, and the dark, massive bloodstain on the foyer wall can be clearly seen.
At the opposite end of the foyer, a mop head drenched in foamy soap suds can be seen slapping against the floor. It makes a wet, sickening sound. The camera slowly zooms in on the mop and focuses on the blood that is mixed in with the suds.
The picture cuts to a well-framed shot of Tanya’s head and shoulders. It’s clear she’s in a different room, but which room it might be is hard to tell. When she speaks, her voice sounds slightly hollow and her words echo.