The Corn Maiden: And Other Nightmares Read online

  Possibly they would want to examine the car. Would he allow a search, or would he insist upon a warrant?

  Davitt had moved out of his family home in February and lived in an apartment in Nyack, the very apartment Leah Bantry had visited on Thursday evening after her shift. Impulsively she had dropped by. Davitt might have expected her, it hadn’t been certain. They were in the early stages of a romance, excited in each other’s presence but uncertain.

  This apartment. Had Marissa ever been there?

  No! Certainly not.

  In a faltering voice telling the officers that Davitt scarcely knew Marissa. Possibly he’d met her, once. But they had spent no time together, certainly not.

  Leah had stayed in Davitt’s apartment approximately a half hour.

  Possibly, forty minutes.

  No. They had not had sex.

  Not exactly.

  They had each had a drink. They had been affectionate, they had talked.

  Earnestly, seriously they had talked! About the clinic, and about their children. About Davitt’s marriage, and Leah’s own.

  (It would be revealed, Leah had led Davitt Stoop to believe she had been married, and divorced. It had seemed such a trivial and inconsequential lie at the time.)

  Leah was saying, stammering, Davitt would never do such a thing! Not to Marissa, not to any child. He was the father of a ten-year-old boy, himself. He was not the type . . .

  The female detective asked bluntly what did Leah mean, “type”? Was this a “type” she believed she could recognize?

  Davitt forgive me! I had no choice.

  I could not lie to police. I had to tell them about you. I am so very sorry, Davitt, you can understand can’t you I must help them find Marissa I had no choice.

  Still, Marissa remained missing.

  “People who do things like this, take children, they’re not rational. What they do, they do for their own purposes. We can only track them. We can try to stop them. We can’t understand them.”

  And, “When something like this happens, it’s natural for people to want to cast blame. You’d be better off not watching TV or reading the papers right now, Miss Bantry.”

  One of the Skatskill detectives spoke so frankly to her, she could not believe he too might be judging her harshly.

  There were myriad calls, e-mail messages. Blond-haired Marissa Bantry had been sighted in a car exiting the New York Thruway at Albany. She had been sighted in the company of “hippie-type males” on West Houston Street, New York City. A Skatskill resident would recall, days after the fact, having seen “that pretty little pig-tailed blond girl” getting into a battered-looking van driven by a Hispanic male in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven store a few blocks from her home.

  Still, Marissa remained missing.

  . . . hours in rapid succession jarring and discontinuous as a broken film projected upon a flimsy screen she would not sleep for more than two or three hours even with sedatives and she slept without dreaming like one who has been struck on the head with a mallet and she woke hollow-headed and parch-mouthed and her heart beating in her chest like something with a broken wing.

  Always as she woke in that split-second before awareness rushed upon her like a mouthful of filthy water My daughter is gone, Marissa is lost there was a sense of grace, a confusion in time like a prayer It has not happened yet has it? Whatever it will be.

  HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

  Like a sudden bloom of daffodils there appeared overnight, everywhere in Skatskill, the smiling likeness of MARISSA BANTRY I I.

  In store windows. On public bulletin boards, telephone poles. Prominent in the foyers of the Skatskill Post Office , the Skatskill Food Mart, the Skatskill Public Library. Prominent though already dampening in April rain, on the fences of construction sites.

  MISSING SINCE APRIL 10. SKATSKILL DAY SCHOOL/15TH ST. AREA.

  Hurriedly established by the Skatskill police department was a marissa Web site posting more photos of the missing blond girl, a detailed description of her, background information. ANYONE KNOWING ANYTHING ABOUT MARISSA BANTRY PLEASE CONTACT SKATSKILL POLICE AT THIS NUMBER.

  Initially, no reward was posted. By Friday evening, an anonymous donor (prominent Skatskill philanthropist, retired) had come forward to offer fifteen thousand dollars.

  It was reported by the media that Skatskill police were working round the clock. They were under intense pressure, they were investigating all possible leads. It was reported that known pedophiles, sex off enders, child molesters in the area were being questioned. (Information about such individuals was confidential of course. Still, the most vigilant of area tabloids learned from an anonymous source that a sixty-year-old Skatskill resident, a retired music teacher with a sexual misdemeanor record dating back to 1987, had been visited by detectives. Since this individual refused to speak with a reporter, or consent to be photographed, the tabloid published a photograph of his front door at 12 Amwell Circle on its cover, beneath the strident headline LOCAL SEX OFFENDER QUERIED BY COPS: WHERE IS MARISSA?)

  Each resident of Briarcliff Apts. was questioned, some more than once. Though no search warrants had been issued, several residents cooperated with police allowing both their apartments and their motor vehicles to be searched.

  Storekeepers in the area of the Skatskill Day School and along Marissa Bantry’s route home were questioned. At the 7-Eleven store in the mini-mall on the highway, so often frequented by young people, several clerks examined photographs of the missing girl, solemnly shook their heads and told police officers no, they did not believe that Marissa Bantry had been in the store recently, or ever. “There are so many children . . .” Questioned about Leah Bantry, whose photograph they were also shown, the eldest clerk said, carefully, that yes, he recognized this woman, she was a friendly woman; friendlier than most of his customers; but he could not say with certainty if she had been in his store on Thursday, with or without her daughter. “There are so many customers. And so many of them, they look like one another especially if they are blond.”

  Detectives queried teenagers, most of them from Skatskill High, and some no longer in school, who hung out at the mini-mall. Most of them stiffened at the approach of police officers and hurriedly shook their heads no, they had not seen the little blond girl who was missing, or anyway could not remember seeing her. A striking girl with electric blue hair and a glittering pin in her left eyebrow frowned at the photo and said finally yeah she’d maybe seen Marissa “like with her mother? But when, like maybe it wasn’t yesterday because I don’t think I was here yesterday, might’ve been last week? I don’t know.”

  Skatskill Day School was in a stage of siege. TV crews on the front walk, reporters and press photographers at all the entrances. Crisis counselors met with children in small groups through the day following Marissa’s disappearance and there was an air in all the classrooms of shock, as if in the wake of a single violent tremor of the earth. A number of parents had kept their children home from school, but this was not advised by school authorities: “There is no risk at Skatskill Day. Whatever happened to Marissa did not happen on school grounds, and would never have happened on school grounds.” It was announced that school security had been immediately strengthened, and new security measures would begin on Monday. In Marissa Bantry’s sixth grade class children were subdued, uneasy. After the counselor spoke, and asked if anyone had a question, the class sat silent until a boy raised his hand to ask if there would be a search party “like on TV, people going through woods and fields until they find the body?”

  Not after a counselor spoke with eighth graders, but later in the day, an eighth grade girl named Anita Helder came forward hesitantly to speak with her teacher. Anita was a heavyset girl with a low C average who rarely spoke in class, and often asked to be excused for mysterious health reasons. She was a suspected drug-taker, but had never been caught. In class, she exuded a sulky, defiant manner if called upon by her teacher. Yet now she was saying, in an anxious, faltering voice,
that maybe she had seen Marissa Bantry the previous day, on Fifteenth Street and Trinity, climbing into a minivan after school.

  “. . . I didn’t know it was her then for sure, I don’t know Marissa Bantry at all but I guess now it must’ve been her. Oh God I feel so bad I didn’t try to stop her! I was like close enough to call out to her, ‘Don’t get in!’ What I could see, the driver was leaning over and sort of pulling Marissa inside. It was a man, he had real dark hair kind of long on the sides but I couldn’t see his face. The minivan was like silver-blue, the license plate was something like TZ 6 . . . Beyond that, I can’t remember.”

  Anita’s eyes welled with tears. She was visibly trembling, the memory so upset her.

  By this time Skatskill detectives had questioned everyone on the school staff except for Mikal Zallman, thirty-one years old, computer consultant and part-time employee, who wasn’t at the Skatskill Day School on Fridays.

  FEEDING MY RAT

  It was an ugly expression. It was macho-ugly, the worst kind of ugly. It made him smile.

  Feeding my rat. Alone.

  IN CUSTODY

  Alone he’d driven out of Skatskill on Thursday afternoon immediately following his final class of the week. Alone driving north in his trim Honda minivan along the Hudson River where the river landscape so mesmerizes the eye, you wonder why you’d ever given a damn for all that’s petty, inconsequential. Wondering why you’d ever given a damn for the power of others to hurt you. Or to accuse you with tearful eyes of hurting them.

  He’d tossed a valise, his backpack, a few books, hiking boots and a supply of trail food into the back of the van. Always he traveled light. As soon as he left Skatskill he ceased to think of his life there. It was of little consequence really, a professional life arranged to provide him with this freedom. Feeding my rat.

  There was a woman in Skatskill, a married woman. He knew the signs. She was lonely in her marriage amid yearning to be saved from her loneliness. Often she invited him as if impulsively, without premeditation. Come to dinner, Mikal? Tonight? He had been vague about accepting, this time. He had not wanted to see the disappointment in her eyes. He felt a tug of affection for her, he recognized her hurt, her resentment, her confusion, she was a colleague of his at the Skatskill School whom he saw often in the company of others, there was a rapport between them, Zallman acknowledged, but he did not want to be involved with her or with any woman, not now. He was thirty-one, and no longer naive. More and more he lived for feeding my rat.

  It was arrogant, was it, this attitude? Selfish. He’d been told so, more than once. Living so much in his own head, and for himself.

  He hadn’t married, he doubted he would ever marry. The prospect of children made his heart sink: bringing new lives into the uncertainty and misery of this world, in the early twenty-first century!

  He much preferred his secret life. It was an innocent life. Running each morning, along the river. Hiking, mountain climbing. He did not hunt or fish, he had no need to destroy life to enhance his own. Mostly it was exulting in his body. He was only a moderately capable hiker. He hadn’t the endurance or the will to run a marathon. He wasn’t so fanatic, he wanted merely to be alone where he could exert his body pleasurably. Or maybe to the edge of pain.

  One summer in his mid-twenties he’d gone backpacking alone in Portugal, Spain, northern Morocco. In Tangier he’d experimented with the hallucinatory kif which was the most extreme form of aloneness and the experience had shaken and exhilarated him and brought him back home to reinvent himself. Michael, now Mikal.

  Feeding my rat meant this freedom. Meant he’d failed to drop by her house as she had halfway expected he would. And he had not telephoned, either. It was a way of allowing the woman to know he didn’t want to be involved, he would not be involved.

  In turn, she and her husband would not provide Mikal Zallman with an alibi for those crucial hours.

  When, at 5:18 P.M. of Friday, April 11, returning to his car along a steep hiking trail, he happened to see what appeared to be a New York State troopers’ vehicle in the parking lot ahead, he had no reason to think They’ve come for me. Even when he saw that two uniformed officers were looking into the rear windows of his minivan, the lone vehicle in the lot parked near the foot of the trail, because it had been the first vehicle of the day parked in the lot, the sight did not alarm or alert him. So confident in himself he felt, and so guiltless.

  “Hey. What d’you want?”

  Naively, almost conversationally he called to the troopers, who were now staring at him, and moving toward him.

  Afterward he would recall how swiftly and unerringly the men moved. One called out, “Are you Mikal Zallman” and the other called, sharply, before Zallman could reply, “Keep your hands where we can see them, sir.”

  Hands? What about his hands? What were they saying about his hands?

  He’d been sweating inside his T-shirt and khaki shorts and his hair was sticking against the nape of his neck. He’d slipped and fallen on the trail once, his left knee was scraped, throbbing. He was not so exuberant as he’d been in the fresh clear air of morning. He held his hands before him, palms uplifted in a gesture of annoyed supplication.

  What did these men want with him? It had to be a mistake. . . . staring into the back of the minivan. He’d consented to a quick search. Trunk, interior. Glove compartment. What the hell, he had nothing to hide. Were they looking for drugs? A concealed weapon? He saw the way in which they were staring at two paperback books he’d tossed onto the rear window ledge weeks ago, Roth’s The Dying Animal and Ovid’s The Art of Love. On the cover of the first was a sensuously reclining Modligliani nude in rich flesh tones, with prominent pink-nippled breasts. On the cover of the other was a classical nude, marmoreal white female with a full, shapely body and blank, blind eyes.

  TABOO

  It was Taboo to utter aloud the Corn Maiden’s name.

  It was Taboo to touch the Corn Maiden except as Jude guided.

  For Jude was the Priest of the Sacrifice. No one else.

  What does Taboo mean, it means death. If you disobey.

  Jude took Polaroid pictures of the Corn Maiden sleeping on her bier. Arms crossed on her flat narrow chest, cornsilk hair spread like pale flames around her head. Some pictures, Jude was beside the Corn Maiden. We took pictures of her smiling, and her eyes shiny and dilated.

  For posterity, Jude said. For the record.

  It was Taboo to utter the Corn Maiden’s actual name aloud and yet: everywhere in Skatskill that name was being spoken! And everywhere in Skatskill her face was posted!

  Missing Girl. Abduction Feared. State of Emergency.

  It is so easy, Jude said. To make the truth your own.

  But Jude was surprised too, we thought. That it was so real, what had only been for so long Jude O’s idea.

  Judith!

  Mrs. Trahern called in her whiny old-woman voice, we had to troop into her smelly bedroom where she was propped up in some big old antique brass bed like a nutty queen watching TV where footage of the missing Skatskill Day girl was being shown. Chiding, You girls! Look what has happened to one of your little classmates! Did you know this poor child?

  Jude mumbled no Grandma.

  Well. You would not be in a class with a retarded child, I suppose.

  Jude mumbled no Grandma.

  Well. See that you never speak with strangers, Judith! Report anyone who behaves strangely with you, or is seen lurking around the neighborhood. Promise me!

  Jude mumbled okay Grandma, I promise.

  Denise and Anita mumbled Me, too, Mrs. Trahern. For it seemed to be expected.

  Next, Mrs. Trahern made Jude come to her bed, to take Jude’s hands in her clawy old-woman hands. I have not always been a good grandma, I know. As the judge’s widow there are so many demands on my time. But I am your grandma, Judith. I am your only blood kin who cares for you, dear. You know that, I hope?

  Jude mumbled Yes Grandma, I know.

  THE WORLD
AS WE HAVE KNOWN IT

  Has vanished.

  We are among the few known survivors.

  . . . terrorist attack. Nuclear war. Fires.

  New York City is a gaping hole. The George Washington Bridge is crashed into the river. Washington, D.C., is gone.

  So the Corn Maiden was told. So the Corn Maiden believed in her Rapture.

  Many times we said these words Jude had made us memorize. The world as we have known it has vanished. There is no TV now. No newspapers. No electricity. We are among the few known survivors. We must be brave, everyone else is gone. All the adults are gone. All our mothers.

  The Corn Maiden opened her mouth to shriek but she had not the strength. Her eyes welled with tears, lapsing out of focus.

  All our mothers. So exciting!

  Only candles to be lighted, solemnly. To keep away the night.

  The Corn Maiden was informed that we had to ration our food supplies. For there were no stores now, all of Skatskill was gone. The Food Mart was gone. Main Street was gone. The Mall.

  Jude knew, to maintain the Rapture the Corn Maiden must be fed very little. For Jude did not wish to bind her wrists and ankles, that were so fragile-seeming. Jude did not wish to gag her, to terrify her. For then the Corn Maiden would fear us and not trust and adore us as her protectors.

  The Corn Maiden must be treated with reverence, respect, kindness, and firmness. She must never guess the fate that will be hers.

  The Corn Maiden’s diet was mostly liquids. Water, transparent fruit juices like apple, grapefruit. And milk.

  It was Taboo Jude said for the Corn Maiden to ingest any foods except white foods. And any foods containing bones or skins.

  These foods were soft, crumbly or melted foods. Cottage cheese, plain yogurt, ice cream. The Corn Maiden was not a retarded child as some of the TV stations were saying but she was not shrewd-witted, Jude said. For these foods we fed her were refrigerated, and she did not seem to know.