In the Onigara ceremony Jude said the Corn Maiden was slowly starved and her bowels cleaned out and purified and she was tied on an altar still living and a priest shot an arrow that had been blessed into her heart. And the heart was scooped out with a knife that had been blessed and touched to the lips of the priest and others of the tribe to bless them. And the heart and the Corn Maiden’s body were then carried out into a field and buried in the earth to honor the Morning Star which is the sun and the Evening Star which is the moon and beg of them their blessing for the corn harvest.
Will the Corn Maiden be killed we wished to know but we could not ask Jude for Jude would be angered.
To ourselves we said Jude will kill the Corn Maiden, maybe! We shivered to think so. Denise smiled, and bit at her thumbnail, for she was jealous of the Corn Maiden. Not because the Corn Maiden had such beautiful silky hair but because Jude fussed over the Corn Maiden so, as Jude would not have fussed over Denise.
The Corn Maiden wept when we left her. When we blew out the candles and left her in darkness. We had to patrol the house we said. We had to look for fires and “gas leakage” we said. For the world as we have known it has come to an end, there were no adults now. We were the adults now.
We were our own mommies.
Jude shut the door, and padlocked it. The Corn Maiden’s muffled sobs from inside. Mommy! Mommy! the Corn Maiden wept but there was no one to hear and even on the steps to the first floor you could no longer hear.
HATEHATEHATE you assholes Out There. The Corn Maiden was Jude O’s perfect revenge.
At Skatskill Day we saw our hatred like scalding-hot lava rushing through the corridors and into the classrooms and cafeteria to burn our enemies alive. Even girls who were okay to us mostly would perish for they would rank us below the rest, wayway below the Hot Shit Cliques that ran the school and also the boys — all the boys. And the teachers, some of them had pissed us off and deserved death. Jude said Mr. Z. had “dissed” her and was the “target enemy” now.
Sometimes the vision was so fierce it was a rush better than E!
Out There it was believed that the missing Skatskill girl might have been kidnapped. A ransom note was awaited.
Or, it was believed the missing girl was the victim of a “sexual predator.”
On TV came Leah Bantry, the mother, to appeal to whoever had taken her daughter saying, Please don’t hurt Marissa, please release my daughter I love her so, begging please in a hoarse voice that sounded like she’d been crying a lot and her eyes haggard with begging so Jude stared at the woman with scorn.
Not so hot-shit now, are you Mrs. Brat-tee! Not so pretty-pretty.
It was surprising to Denise and Anita, that Jude hated Leah Bantry so. We felt sorry for the woman, kind of. Made us think how our mothers would be, if we were gone, though we hated our mothers we were thinking they’d probably miss us, and be crying, too. It was a new way of seeing our moms. But Jude did not have a mom even to hate. Never spoke of her except to say she was Out West in L.A. We wanted to think that Jude’s mom was a movie star under some different name, that was why she’d left Jude with Mrs. Trahern to pursue a film career. But we would never say this to Jude, for sure.
Sometimes Jude scared us. Like she’d maybe hurt us.
Wild! On Friday 7 P.M. news came BULLETIN — BREAKING NEWS — SKATSKILL SUSPECT IN CUSTODY. It was Mr. Zallman!
We shrieked with laughter. Had to press our hands over our mouths so old Mrs. Trahern would not hear.
Jude is flicking through the channels and there suddenly is Mr. Z. on TV! And some broadcaster saying in an excited voice that this man had been apprehended in Bear Mountain State Park and brought back to Skatskill to be questioned in the disappearance of Marissa Bantry and the shocker is: Mikal Zallman, thirty-one, is on the faculty of the Skatskill Day School.
Mr. Zallman’s jaws were scruffy like he had not shaved in a while. His eyes were scared and guilty-seeming. He was wearing a T-shirt and khaki shorts like we would never see him at school and this was funny, too. Between two plainclothes detectives being led up the steps into police headquarters and at the top they must’ve jerked him under the arms, he almost turned his ankle.
We were laughing like hyenas. Jude crouched in front of the TV rocking back and forth, staring.
“Zallman claims to know nothing of Marissa Bantry. Police and rescue workers are searching the Bear Mountain area and will search through the night if necessary.”
There was a cut to our school again, and 15th Street traffic at night. “...unidentified witness, believed to be a classmate of Marissa Bantry, has told authorities that she witnessed Marissa being pulled into a Honda CR-V at this corner, Thursday after school. This vehicle has been tentatively identified as...”
Unidentified witness. That’s me! Anita cried.
And a second “student witness” had come forward to tell the school principal that she had seen “the suspect Zallman” fondling Marissa Bantry, stroking her hair and whispering to her in the computer lab when he thought no one was around, only last week.
That’s me! Denise cried.
And police had found a mother-of-pearl butterfly barrette on the ground near Zallman’s parking space, behind his condominium residence. This barrette had been “absolutely identified” by Marissa Bantry’s mother as a barrette Marissa had been wearing on Thursday.
We turned to Jude who was grinning.
We had not known that Jude had planned this. On her bicycle she must’ve gone, to drop the barrette where it would be found.
We laughed so, we almost wet ourselves. Jude was just so cool.
But even Jude seemed surprised, kind of. That you could make the wildest truth your own and every asshole would rush to believe.
Now she knew his name: Mikal Zallman.
The man who’d taken Marissa. One of Marissa’s teachers at the Skatskill Day School.
It was a nightmare. All that Leah Bantry had done, what exertion of heart and soul, to enroll her daughter in a private school in which a pedophile was allowed to instruct elementary school children.
She had met Zallman, she believed. At one of the parents’ evenings. Something seemed wrong, though: Zallman was young. You don’t expect a young man to be a pedophile. An attractive man though with a hawkish profile, and not very warm. Not with Leah. Not that she could remember.
The detectives had shown her Zallman’s photograph. They had not allowed her to speak with Zallman. Vaguely yes she did remember. But not what he’d said to her, if he had said anything. Very likely Leah has asked him about Marissa but what he’d said she could not recall.
And then, hadn’t Zallman slipped away from the reception, early? By chance she’d seen him, the only male faculty member not to be wearing a necktie, hair straggling over his collar, disappearing from the noisy brightly lighted room.
He’d taken a polygraph, at his own request. The results were “inconclusive.”
If I could speak with him. Please.
They were telling her no, Mrs. Bantry. Not a good idea.
This man who took Marissa if I could speak with him please.
In her waking state she pleaded. She would beg the detectives, she would throw herself on their mercy. Her entire conscious life was now begging, pleading, and bartering. And waiting.
Zallman is the one, isn’t he? You have him, don’t you? An eyewitness said she saw him. Saw him pull Marissa into a van with him. In broad daylight! And you found Marissa’s barrette by his parking space isn’t that proof!