Fear Collector

CHAPTER 26

A memory that could never ever be erased from Sissy O’Hare’s brain, no matter how much she would have preferred, came ten days after the ordeal began. It started with a phone call.

It was Harold Masters from the Tacoma Police Department on the line. Detective Masters had been handling Tricia’s case since the first real full day of her vanishing.

“Mrs. O’Hare?” the detective asked. It was immediately apparent that his voice was devoid of any hopefulness.

“Yes, it’s me,” she said.

The detective cleared his throat. “Mrs. O’Hare, can you and Conner meet me at the station?”

“This doesn’t sound good,” Sissy said, sliding backward into a chair, the air emptying from her lungs.

“We don’t know for sure,” he said, again as flatly as possible, without hope.

Sissy looked over at her husband, who had set down the News Tribune and was watching her face fall. “We can be there in twenty minutes,” she said.

Detective Masters’s sympathetic eyes were no longer as penetrating as they had been in all of his encounters with Conner and Sissy O’Hare. Indeed, when he met them by the front desk at the police department they barely landed on either of the missing girl’s parents. It was obvious before a single word was uttered that the detective was about to say something that he didn’t want to say and that the O’Hares most certainly didn’t want to hear.

From the outset, Conner was shaking. He put his arm around Sissy, more for his benefit than hers. She was oddly quiet, stoic.

“You found her?” he asked.

Sissy stood there mute.

“Let’s go in here,” Det. Masters said, gesturing for them to follow into the open doorway of an interview room they had visited two days after Tricia’s vanishing from campus. Tricia’s best friend, Carrie, had joined them in that interview, one that yielded very little new information and plenty more tears. Carrie kept saying over and over that it was her fault for wanting to have some alone time with the guy she had set her sights on.

“Tricia went to get something to eat or something… I never saw her again,” she said. “It was my fault. All my fault.”

Outwardly, the O’Hares didn’t argue the merits of her guilty conscience. They patted the teenager on the shoulder and tried to calm her to see if their daughter’s decidedly selfish best friend had a clue about what really happened to Tricia. Inside Sissy’s head, a refrain ran on an endless loop.

It is your fault! You stupid girl!

That had been more than a week ago. And with each day, as Xerox-copied flyers with Sissy’s smiling senior portrait went up all over Pierce County, hope faded. By the end of that eighth day, there wasn’t a bus stop or telephone pole that hadn’t been stapled, tacked, or even duct-taped with Tricia O’Hare’s photograph and the loud proclamation: REWARD. Search parties organized by Boy Scouts and search-and-rescue groups from as far away as Spokane methodically inched their way across a large empty field near PLU, turning up a dead cat and another woman’s purse, but nothing more. The police led by Detective Masters had worked around the clock, of course, but it was as if Tricia just walked off the face of the earth.

Now you see her, now you don’t.

The detective folded his dark tan hands and set them on the table.

“A body has been found,” he said, his eyes now gliding over both of the parents.

“Is it our Tricia?” Conner asked, his eyes already flooding.

“We’re not sure. We need to make an identification.”

Sissy spoke up. “So you don’t know.” She stopped herself before adding, if it is her?

“But you know enough to bring us here,” Conner said, fighting back tears.

Detective Masters nodded. “Yes,” he said, his voice so soft it might not have been heard in a normal conversation. This was far from normal. “I’m very sorry,” he said, “but we do think we’ve found your daughter.”

“Where? Where?” Conner asked, putting his arm around Sissy and holding her close as he finally let completely go and convulsed into tears. “Not our little girl.”

“A fisherman and his son found the body just up from the bank of the Puyallup.”

Sissy later told her victims’ families support group that she looked at the detective’s mouth as he spoke, trying to decipher what he was saying. It seemed like his words were coming at her in some strange foreign language. Nothing he said seemed to compute whatsoever.

She stared at Conner.

Why is he crying? What happened?

Later, Sissy learned, her experience was not so uncommon. She had shut down, a defense mechanism to stop her from experiencing the deepest pain a mother might feel. Nothing any mother could face could be worse than the realization that her baby was really gone.

“I’ll need a family member to identify the body,” he said.

“Where is she?” Sissy asked, now retrieving some of what was being said. Conner was a mess; she could see that she had to be the one. “I’ll go.”

“Are you sure, Mrs. O’Hare?” the detective asked, knowing that her husband was in no condition to do what needed to be done.

And that was the second memory, the trek in to the morgue, seeing her daughter while Conner waited in the hallway, his face in his hands. Tricia was laying on some kind of a table with wheels as she was pushed in front of a window, a light on, and an attendant in scrubs peeling back a pale green sheet. A light went on and the image of her daughter not as she’d been in life, but slightly bloated, a whitish gray pallor over her skin, came into view.

Sissy O’Hare looked over at the detective and motioned that she was going to be sick. She spun around and reached for the door, but there wasn’t enough time. Though it felt as if she hadn’t eaten for days, she began to vomit. At first it was simply that horrendous noise that accompanies dry heaves. It is the kind of noise that sometimes induces others to follow suit. A second later, a foul fountain came up out of her throat and splattered against the floor. In any other another time, Sissy would have been mortified beyond words by what had transpired. She was a woman in complete control. She was tidy. Her manners were impeccable. She was the strand-of-pearls-wearing gardener, for goodness sake.

“This isn’t my Tricia,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“A mother knows her baby. Yes, I’m sure,” she said, standing there crying, hunched over a coagulating pool of vomit, wishing that God would take her right then, too. The love of her life was gone. The baby she’d rocked since birth. Gone. Everything good. Gone.

Who could have done this?

It was a question that she’d later convince herself that she had to answer on her own.

Those two moments-learning her daughter was missing and the viewing of the lifeless remains of someone else’s little girl-could only be supplanted by the memory she wished for more than anything. She wanted to live long enough to savor the death of the man or men who were responsible for the cruelest deed. Before going to sleep each night, Sissy O’Hare found a private moment away from Conner, then later, from Grace, and said a silent prayer.

Dear God, it is wrong for me to wish harm to anyone, but please answer me and spare my broken heart by making the Tricia’s murderer pay for his crimes with his own blood. Forgive me for wishing another human being to suffer, but I cannot be a stronger, better person here. I want him to die a slow, painful death. I want him to feel whatever she felt times a million. God, please hear my prayers. Please show some mercy on my broken heart and release me from the torment of a killer walking free to cause more harm.

Sissy O’Hare knew it was distasteful and probably even wicked to ask God for harm to another human being, no matter how vile the individual. She thought somehow that it was possible that God, in his infinite compassion for her suffering, would understand and do what he could to help ease her shattered heart. She didn’t tell Conner what she was praying for, because vengeance was not something he could truly comprehend. His devastation was his alone. He told Sissy over and over that he wanted whoever had taken and probably killed Tricia to be punished when he met his maker.

“Justice,” he said, “will be done. It may not occur in our lifetime, but one way or another whoever took our girl will pay for it.”

The year after Tricia’s vanishing was the blackest time of the O’Hares’ lives. It was a pendulum, however, that lurched back and forth from hope to despair. Any crumb of hope was devoured; each setback brought tears, drinking, arguments. They joined a victims’ families support group the spring after their daughter died. Neither would say that it was something that didn’t provide some solace, yet Sissy in particular found it a little too emotional.

“It’s like a church potluck, but with tears instead of fruit punch,” she told her husband after a few months of going to meetings in the basement of the Lutheran church on Pacific. The fifteen other members seemed focused on the tragedy of their circumstances, something none would have denied. Sissy saw a different purpose. She wanted to two things-justice for her daughter and another baby.

She was forty, not ancient, but hardly a young mother. When she told Conner she wanted to get pregnant, he was overjoyed by the prospect. No child could take their Tricia’s place, of course, but Conner felt that they still had a lot of love to give. When she became pregnant just before the Fourth of July the year after Tricia was murdered, Sissy made her next move. She quit the support group at the church and formed her own. Hers would focus on the catching of the killer responsible for Tricia’s murder.