The Marsh King's Daughter, page 3
The rest of the transcripts don’t offer much. My father’s parents kicked him out of the house after he dropped out of school in the tenth grade. He cut pulpwood for a while, then joined the Army, where he was dishonorably discharged after a little more than a year because he couldn’t get along with the other soldiers and wouldn’t listen to his commanders. The defense said none of this was my father’s fault. He was a bright young man who was acting out only because he was looking for the love and acceptance his parents never gave him. I’m not so sure. My father may have been wise in the ways of the wilderness, but I honestly can’t recall a single instance when he sat down and read one of the Geographics. Sometimes I wondered if he knew how. He didn’t even bother looking at the pictures.
Nothing pointed to the father I knew until I found his trout-fishing gear in a gunnysack hanging from the rafters in the basement. My father used to tell stories about fishing the Fox River when he was a boy. He knew all the best places to fish. Once he even guided a Michigan Out of Doors television crew. Since I found his gear, I’ve fished both the East Branch and the main stream of the Fox many times. My father’s rod has a nice, fast action. With a four- or five-weight floating line, sometimes a six if I’m nymph or streamer fishing, I usually come home with my creel full. I don’t know if I’m as good a trout fisherman as my father, but I like to think so.
I think about my father’s fishing stories as the news report plays on and on. If I murdered two men to get out of prison knowing my escape would generate one of the biggest manhunts in Michigan’s history, I wouldn’t go floundering around blindly in the marsh. I’d go to one of the few places on Earth where I was happy.
—
IT’S A QUARTER TO NINE. I’m sitting on our front porch waiting for Stephen and slapping mosquitoes. I have no idea how he’s going to react to the news that the escaped prisoner is my father, but I know it won’t be pretty. My mild-mannered nature-photographer husband rarely loses his temper, which is one of the things that attracted me to him in the first place, but everyone has their limits.
Rambo is stretched out on the porch boards beside me. I drove down to the Plott family breeders in North Carolina eight years ago to get him when he was a puppy. This was long before Stephen and the girls came along. He’s definitely a one-person dog. Not that he wouldn’t protect Stephen or the girls if the occasion called for it. Plott hounds are utterly fearless, so much so that fans of the breed call them the ninja warriors of the canine world, the world’s toughest dog. But if push came to shove and my entire family was in danger, Rambo would look out for me first. People who like to romanticize animals would call it love, or loyalty, or devotion, but it’s just his nature. Plotts are bred to stay on game for days at a time, to sacrifice themselves before they run from a fight. He can’t help what he is.
Rambo woofs and lifts his ears. I cock my head. I can discern crickets, cicadas, the shush of the wind through the jack pines, a rustling in the needles beneath that’s probably a mouse or a shrew, the “who cooks for you, who cooks for you” of a barred owl calling from the far side of the meadow between our place and the neighbors’, the cackles and squawks from the pair of night herons that nest in the wetland behind our house, and the Dopplered whoosh of a car whizzing past our place on the highway, but to his canine supersenses, the night is rich with sounds and smells. He whines under his breath and his front paws twitch, but other than that, he doesn’t move. He won’t unless I tell him to. I’ve trained him to both voice commands and hand signals. I put my hand on his head and he rests it again on my knee. Not everything roaming around in the dark needs to be investigated and chased down.
Of course I’m talking about my father. I know what he did to my mother was wrong. And killing two guards to escape from prison is unforgivable. But a part of me—a part no bigger than a single grain of pollen on a single flower on a single stem of marsh grass, the part of me that will forever be the little pigtailed girl who idolized her father—is happy my father is free. He’s spent the past thirteen years in prison. He was thirty-five when he took my mother, fifty when we left the marsh, fifty-two when he was captured and convicted two years later. This November, he’ll be sixty-six. Michigan isn’t a death penalty state, but when I think about my father spending the next ten, twenty, possibly even thirty years in prison if he lives to be as old as his own father, I think maybe it should be.
After we left the marsh, everyone expected me to hate my father for what he did to my mother, and I did. I do. But I also felt sorry for him. He wanted a wife. No woman in her right mind would have willingly joined him on that ridge. When you look at the situation from his point of view, what else was he supposed to do? He was mentally ill, supremely flawed, so steeped in his Native American wilderness man persona that he couldn’t have resisted taking my mother if he’d wanted to. Psychiatrists for both the defense and the prosecution even agreed on his diagnosis, antisocial personality disorder, though the defense argued mitigating factors, like the traumatic brain injury he suffered from being whacked on the head repeatedly as a boy.
But I was a child. I loved my father. The Jacob Holbrook I knew was smart, funny, patient, and kind. He took care of me, fed and clothed me, taught me everything I needed to know not only to survive in the marsh, but to thrive. Besides, we’re talking about the events that resulted in my existence, so I can’t very well say I’m sorry, can I?
The last time I saw my father, he was shuffling out of the Marquette County courtroom in handcuffs and leg shackles on his way to being locked up with a thousand other men. I didn’t attend his trial—my testimony was considered unreliable because of my age and upbringing, and unnecessary because my mother was able to supply the prosecution with more than enough evidence to put my father away for a dozen lifetimes—but my mother’s parents brought me over from Newberry the day my father was sentenced. I think they were hoping that if I saw my father get his just deserts for what he did to their daughter, I’d come to hate him as much as they did. That was also the day I met my paternal grandparents. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the mother of the man I’d always thought of as Ojibwa was blonde and white.
Since that day I’ve driven past the Marquette Branch Prison at least a hundred times, every time we take Mari to see her specialist, or bring the girls shopping, or when we go to Marquette to see a movie. The prison isn’t visible from the highway. All passersby see is a winding drive bracketed by two old stone walls; it looks like the entrance to an old-money estate that leads through the trees to a rocky escarpment overlooking the bay. The sandstone administration buildings are on the state’s historic registry and date to the prison’s opening in 1889. The maximum security section where my father was housed is made up of six level-five single-cell housing units surrounded by a twenty-foot-thick stone wall topped with a ten-foot wire fence. The perimeter is monitored by eight gun towers, five equipped with cameras to observe activity inside the housing units as well. Or so says Wikipedia. I’ve never been inside. I checked out the prison once using Google Earth’s satellite view. There were no prisoners in the yard.
And now the prison population has been reduced by one. Which means that in a few short minutes, I’m going to have to tell my husband the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about who I am and the circumstances surrounding my birth, so help me God.
As if on cue, Rambo barks a warning. Seconds later headlights sweep the yard. The yard light kicks on as an SUV pulls into the driveway. It’s not Stephen’s Cherokee; this vehicle has a light bar on top and the state police logo on the side. For a fraction of a second I let myself believe I can answer the officers’ questions and get rid of them before Stephen gets home. Then the Cherokee turns in immediately after. The interior lights of both vehicles come on at the same time. I watch Stephen’s puzzlement turn to panic when he sees the officers’ uniforms. He runs to me across the yard.
“Helena! Are you all right? The girls? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“We’re fine.” I signal Rambo to stay and descend the porch steps to meet him as the officers approach.
“Helena Pelletier?” the lead officer asks. He’s young, somewhere around my age. His partner looks even younger. I wonder how many people they’ve questioned. How many lives their questions have ruined. I nod and grope for Stephen’s hand. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about your father, Jacob Holbrook.”
Stephen’s head whips around. “Your fath— Helena, what’s going on? I don’t understand. The escaped prisoner is your father?”
I nod again. A gesture I hope Stephen will take as both apology and confession. Yes, Jacob Holbrook is my father. Yes, I’ve been lying to you from the day we met. Yes, the blood of this evil man flows through my and your daughters’ veins. I’m sorry. Sorry you had to find out like this. Sorry I didn’t tell you before now. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
It’s dark. Stephen’s face is in shadow. I can’t tell what he’s thinking as he looks slowly from me to the officers, to me, and back to the officers again.
“Come inside,” he says at last. Not to me, but to them. He drops my hand and leads the officers across our front porch and into our house. And just like that, the walls of my carefully constructed second life come tumbling down.
4
The Michigan State Police officers sit on our living room sofa, one at each end, like a pair of blue bookends: same uniforms, same height, same hair, hats placed respectfully on the middle cushion, and knees splayed because Stephen is not a tall man and the sofa sits low. They seem bigger than they did in our yard, more intimidating, as if the authority their uniforms give them somehow also makes them physically larger. Or maybe the room only feels smaller with them in it because we so rarely have visitors. Stephen offered to make coffee when he invited them in. The officers declined, which I was glad about. I certainly wouldn’t want them to linger.
Stephen is perched on the armchair next to the sofa, a songbird ready to take flight. His right leg is jigging and his expression says clearly that he’d rather be anywhere but here. I’m sitting in the only remaining chair on the opposite side of the room. That the physical distance between me and my husband is as great as the room will allow isn’t lost on me. Nor is the fact that since he welcomed the officers into our home, Stephen has been making an obvious and concerted effort to look anywhere but at me.
“When was the last time you saw your father?” the lead officer asks as soon as we’re settled.
“I haven’t spoken to my father since the day I left the marsh.”
The officer raises an eyebrow. I can imagine what he’s thinking. I live fifty miles from the prison where my father was incarcerated for thirteen years and I’ve never gone to visit him?
“So, thirteen years.” He takes a pen and notepad from his shirt pocket and makes like he’s going to write the number down.
“Fifteen,” I correct. After my mother and I left the marsh, my father roamed the Upper Peninsula wilderness for two years before he was captured. The officer knows this as well as I do. He’s establishing a baseline, asking a question he already knows the answer to so he can tell going forward when I’m lying and when I’m telling the truth. Not that I have any reason to lie, but he doesn’t yet know that. I understand he has to treat me as a suspect until proven otherwise. Prisoners don’t generally escape from a maximum security prison unless they have help, whether someone on the inside or someone on the outside. Like me.
“Right. So you haven’t spoken to your father in fifteen years.”
“You can check the visitors’ logs if you don’t believe me,” I say, though I have no doubt they already have. “Phone records. Whatever. I’m telling the truth.”
This is not to say I haven’t thought about visiting my father in prison many times. The first time the police caught my father, I desperately wanted to see him. Newberry is a small town, and the jail where he was held until his arraignment was only a few blocks from my school; I could have walked over after classes or ridden my bike anytime I wanted. No one would have denied me a few minutes with my father. But I was afraid. I was fourteen. It had been two years. I’d changed, and maybe he had, too. I worried my father would refuse to see me. That he’d be angry with me since it was my fault he’d been caught.
After he was convicted, no one was going to drive a hundred miles from Newberry to Marquette and a hundred back so I could visit my father in prison, even if I’d had the courage to ask. Later, after I changed my last name and got my own transportation, I still couldn’t visit because I would have had to show my ID and leave my name on the visitors’ list, and I couldn’t let my new life intersect with the old. Anyway, it wasn’t like I felt a constant longing to see him. The idea of going to see him surfaced only once in a while, usually when Stephen was playing with the girls and something about their interaction reminded me of those long-ago days when we were together.
The last time I seriously considered reaching out was two years ago, when my mother died. It was a tough time. I couldn’t acknowledge my mother’s death without taking the chance that someone would connect the dots and figure out who I was. I was in a witness protection program of my own design; if I was going to make my new life stick, I had to cut all ties with the old. Still, I was my mother’s only child, and staying away from her funeral felt like a betrayal. The idea that I could never see or talk to her again also stung me. I didn’t want the same thing to happen with my father. Maybe I could have passed myself off as a prison groupie or a journalist if anybody wondered why I suddenly showed up to see him. But my father would have had to go along with my plan in order to make it work, and there was no way to know in advance if he’d be willing to do that or if he’d refuse.
“Do you have any idea where he might be heading?” the officer asks. “What he’s planning?”
“None.” Other than the obvious desire to put as much distance between himself and the people who are looking for him as possible, I’m tempted to say, but I know better than to antagonize men with guns. Briefly I consider asking for an update on the search, but the fact that they’re asking for my help tells me all I need to know.
“Do you think he’ll try to contact Helena?” Stephen asks. “Is my family in danger?”
“If there’s somewhere you can go for a few days, that’s probably a good idea.”
Stephen’s face blanches.
“I don’t think he’ll come here,” I say quickly. “My father hated his parents. He has no reason to come back to the place where he grew up. He just wants to get away.”
“Wait. You’re saying your father lived here? In our house?”
“No, no. Not this house. This was his parents’ property, but after I inherited it I had the original house torn down.”
“His parents’ property . . .” Stephen shakes his head. The officers look at him pityingly, like they see this kind of thing all the time. Women, their expressions seem to say. Can’t trust ’em. I feel sorry for Stephen as well. It’s a lot to take in. I wish I could have broken the news in private, in my own time and way, instead of being forced into making a spectacle out of his ignorance and confusion.
Stephen watches me intently as the questions continue, no doubt waiting for the other shoe to drop: Where was I when my father escaped? Was anyone with me? Did I ever send my father a package when he was in prison? Not even a jar of jelly or a card on his birthday?
Stephen’s eyes bore into mine as the interrogation goes on and on. Accusing me. Judging me. My hands sweat. My mouth forms the appropriate answers to the officers’ questions, but all I can think about is how this is hitting Stephen, how my silence put him and my daughters at risk. How all of the sacrifices I made to keep my secret are worth nothing now that my secret is out.
At last, footsteps down the hall. Iris pokes her head around the corner. Her eyes get big when she sees the policemen in her living room. “Daddy?” she says uncertainly. “Are you coming to kiss me good night?”
“Of course, Pumpkin,” Stephen says without a hint of the tension we’re both feeling. “Go back to bed. I’ll be right there.” He turns to the officers. “Are we done?”
“For now.” The lead officer gives me a look like he thinks I know more than I’m telling, then makes a show of handing me his card. “If you think of anything that will help us find your father, anything at all, give me a call.”
—
“I WANTED TO TELL YOU,” I say as soon as the door closes behind them.
Stephen looks at me for a long time, then slowly shakes his head. “Then why didn’t you?”
There could not be a fairer question. I wish I knew how to answer. Certainly I didn’t set out to lie to him. When we met seven years ago at the Paradise blueberry festival and Stephen asked me out for a burger after he bought all my remaining stock, I couldn’t very well say, “I’d love to go out with you. I’m Helena Eriksson, and by the way, remember that guy who kidnapped a Newberry girl back in the late eighties and kept her prisoner in the swamp for a dozen years? The one they called The Marsh King? Yeah, he’s my dad.” I was twenty-one. By then I’d enjoyed three blissful years of anonymity. No whispers behind my back, no gossip or pointed fingers, just me and my dog, minding our own business, hunting and fishing and foraging. I wasn’t about to break my silence for a dark-haired, dark-eyed stranger with a suspicious fondness for cattail-blueberry jelly.
But there were other times I could have brought it up. Maybe not on our first date, or our second, or our third, but sometime after the getting-to-know-you train was moving down the tracks and before we stood at the rail of the Pictured Rocks tour boat, knowing without having to say it that we were now a couple. Definitely before Stephen got down on one knee on a rocky Lake Superior beach. But by then I had so very much to lose, and I could no longer see what I had to gain.
