A Silence of Mockingbirds Read online

“What did they ask you?”

  “They wanted to know if I had any experience with money.”

  “Did you tell them you have a lot of experience with other people’s money?” I teased. Sarah laughed. Fiscal responsibility was not her strong suit. “Anything else they want to know?”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said. “They wanted to know what I’d bring to work with me every day if I got hired.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “I said I’d bring my purse.”

  I waited for Sarah to crack a grin, when she didn’t, I asked, “Really? Did you really tell them you’d bring your purse to work?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, clueless. “Why? Something wrong with that?”

  I was doubled over, laughing hysterically.

  “What is so funny?” Sarah’s dark eyes were filled with confusion.

  “Oh my gosh, girl, they wanted to know what assets you would bring, your personal strengths. They didn’t mean what would you literally bring!”

  The memory of that conversation makes me laugh still, but it also reveals something of Sarah’s character. She can come off guileless and very naïve. Sometimes she does it purposefully, other times it’s just Sarah.

  Wiping away hot tears, I removed the photos I kept inside that long-forgotten Mother’s Day card. One was a snapshot of Sarah sitting on David’s lap, cradling their newborn daughter. Karly wore a pink stocking cap and a bright-eyed expression. David was beaming; Sarah, smiling.

  In the hours after learning of Karly’s death, I could not get David out of my head. I knew without asking that Sarah had never told him about our ugly phone exchange in 2003.

  Since then, I’d had no contact with Sarah or David. While Karly’s death had been headline news in Corvallis, her connection to Eastern Oregon had gone underreported. Few people in Pendleton who’d been friends with Sarah knew her daughter had been murdered.

  David must have wondered why I didn’t show up when Karly died. Why I hadn’t been present for her funeral or for the trial. I had been totally absent, and David had no idea why.

  I did not Google Karly’s death as I had threatened to do in those moments before Tim told me she had been murdered. Not that night and not for several months to follow. I didn’t think I could handle what the news reports said.

  But I called David that very night. I wanted to hear everything from him, all of it. I told David I had just learned of Karly’s death. I told him about running into Sarah in Bend. I told him about the phone call in 2003, the one in which I pleaded with Sarah not to leave him. I told David that I had believed her doing so would put Karly at risk, and that I was afraid for Karly. Even so, I never imagined the terror Karly endured before dying.

  I asked David to meet me for coffee. He agreed. It’s a five-hour drive between my home in Hermiston and David’s in Corvallis. I got up before dawn and headed out.

  Driving west along the Columbia River Gorge, I thought how much more than distance in miles had separated me from David. I berated myself for not having kept in contact with him. I should have called. I should have told him sooner about that fight with Sarah. I should have assured him he could call, anytime, if he needed anything.

  Why didn’t I? It was very unlike me. I have friends from junior high school I keep in touch with: Jan Chaney Rabe in South Carolina, Sherri Davis Callaway in Georgia, Jerry Burke in Tennessee. I’ve cultivated friendships from Atlanta to Albuquerque, and maintained them over the years. I sent letters to Granny Leona in the hills of Tennessee as soon as I could pick up a fat pencil and write between the lines. The first thing I did as soon as I learned my daddy had died in Vietnam was to write a letter to Mrs. Eye, my third grade teacher. Mama helped me address it and send it to Oahu’s Helemano Elementary School.

  It was not like me to lose all contact with someone I cherished. What had happened?

  My trip to Vietnam, mostly. I flew out of LAX to Ho Chi Minh the week after the blow-up with Sarah. I’d spent eight years researching and writing about my father’s death in an unpopular war, how it had devastated our family. I sold that book, After the Flag has been Folded, to HarperCollins within a few months of my return from Vietnam. That propelled me into a role I’d never envisioned, as an advocate for a whole new generation of war widows and their children.

  But David didn’t know any of that. All he knew was that during a time when he could have used support the most, I wasn’t there.

  Chapter Eleven

  The mountains that make up Oregon’s coastal range were on my right as I drove into Corvallis. I can’t look at those hills without thinking of Agnes Ferngren, the woman who was the mentor to me that I tried to be to Sarah. As a college coed, I’d lived with Agnes. Her husband, Gary, an Oregon State University history professor, was on an educational cruise ship, touring and teaching. I needed a place to live and Agnes needed help with the couple’s three daughters, all preschoolers.

  It was Agnes who taught me the mothering skills I would later employ with my own four children. Agnes taught me how to bake bread, how to French braid a little girl’s hair—a skill I would later pass on to Sarah—and how to instill faith in a child.

  Agnes and I were standing in the kitchen, washing up the dinner dishes one evening, when she brushed back her red bangs and looked out the window over the sink.

  “Whenever I see those mountains I think of the Psalmist,” Agnes said. “‘I will lift up my eyes unto the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.’”

  Agnes died in the spring of 2006 after a battle with a virulent lung cancer. I hadn’t been back to Corvallis since her memorial service. I missed her terribly. I still do. Passing those mountains as I drove south into town, I asked God to help me, to give me the strength to write this story.

  I knew if David gave his blessing for such a project I would tell Karly’s story. I also knew doing so would enrage Sarah, and that troubled me deeply. I didn’t know how I would handle that. I still don’t.

  David and I met downtown at Corvallis’s New Morning Bakery. We sat at a back table. Slim as a seventh grader, David wore jeans and a navy Patagonia Henley. His fair hair was cut short. His brogue thick as the day he first came stateside.

  David retained his proud Irish citizenship up until 2008, when he finally took the oath and became an American citizen. Honestly, given all I learned of what the Oregon legal system put him through, I was moved by his desire to become an American citizen. It speaks volumes about the kind of man David is.

  David’s sky-blue eyes grew misty several times during our visit as he spoke of Karly. He recalled that he took his daughter to Ireland twice during her brief life. The first time was in November 2002, when Karly was ten months old. David and his baby girl made the trip without the benefit of a mother’s help.

  Sarah had moved out when Karly was six months old. She would move back in once more, taking yet another stab at marriage and motherhood, but David was perfectly competent as a single parent. So traveling across the oceans alone with an infant or a toddler did not terrify him the way it might some fathers.

  Father and daughter made their second trip to Ireland in July 2004. By then, Karly was on her way from potty-training toddler to full-fledged girlhood and she could talk the hind legs off a donkey. Karly displayed a verbal acuity that would make any Irish grandmother proud and any Irish grandfather exhausted.

  The toddler’s excitement about the trip could not be contained. She insisted on picking out her own carry-on luggage, test-driving a Dora the Explorer wheeled backpack in the aisles of a department store. She settled on that particular bag because it had a detachable pouch that Karly declared would be handy for the candy treats she’d need to sustain her on the long flights.

  David had finished his master’s classes at George Fox University on July 27, and the two of them flew out of Portland the next day. Any form of travel enchanted Karly, be it a boat, a horse, a bus, or a plane. David had taught his daughter the cho
rus to “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and the two of them sang it loudly like bar drunks as they packed bags and headed for the airport.

  Their first long layover was in Chicago, a place that would one day play significantly into David’s future—though, tragically, not Karly’s. They walked all over O’Hare, grabbed some grub, and lollygagged around the towering Brachiosaurus dinosaur in the B concourse. The four-story-high, seventy-two-foot-long skeleton was on loan from the Chicago Field Museum. Karly called it a “disonaur,” her own particular pronunciation for dinosaurs. Her quirky way with language tickled David. No matter how many times he corrected her, Karly liked her enunciation best, and truth be told, so did David.

  It was nighttime when they finally left O’Hare, bound for Heathrow, but Karly retained her good-natured disposition. Traveling might make others cranky, but not Karly. She loved the way her tummy flipped on takeoffs. She played quietly with her toys, and was thoroughly delighted by the plastic cow that pooped out jellybeans with a lift of its tail, a trick that elicited endless giggles. She finally fell asleep in David’s arms and they both woke bleary-eyed the next morning upon landing in London. After a short layover, they boarded the familiar green Aer Lingus for the short fifty-minute flight to Cork, where Grandpa and Grandma Sheehan were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the granddaughter they hadn’t seen since she was a baby, except in photos and in videos. It was good to see David, too.

  Having made the trip enough times himself, David knew that the best way to deal with the jet lag was to stay awake until the local bedtime. So he made the rounds, taking Karly to his grandmother, then to visit his siblings and the many cousins. Later that night, as David tried to put Karly to bed, he started to sing her a lullaby but was stopped abruptly.

  “Karly covered my mouth with her hand and said, ‘Hush! Daddy! That’s enough. You can never, never sing, and if you do, you must ask me first,’” David said. “I was astonished that my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter would say that, but then again Karly was very talkative. I laughed and laughed but Karly remained steadfast that I not sing, even after we returned home; she was adamant that I was not allowed to sing, although she did make exceptions if I sang ‘Ring of Fire’ or if I made up songs about her wearing striped shirts.”

  While in Ireland, David turned thirty. Doing her part to help with the celebration, Karly helped herself to the strawberries that adorned her father’s cake, while her cousins ate the chocolate chips sprinkled on it.

  Karly bonded easily with her cousins and the local kids, charming everyone with her laughter, her joy, and tales of her own imagination. She would boldly knock on neighbors’ doors to see if the kids inside wanted to come out and play. During the day, she would happily spend time with her grandmother or cousins, but when evening rolled around it was David she wanted. She would get clingy if David wanted to go for a beer with his father.

  “One evening I was able to reason with her to let me go out with Dad for a while, but Karly made it conditional, telling me that I had to run home, i.e. ‘Don’t be gone too long, Mister,’” David said.

  Karly and her daddy crammed in a lot of life during the few weeks they were in Kenmare. They made a trip to the countryside, where Karly borrowed David’s grandmother’s cane and turned it into a rifle, the better with which to shoot pesky goats. They took a trip to the beach, where Karly romped around with her cousins in the shimmering waters.

  As Karly and David held hands and walked through the town of Kenmare, where the streets are lined with buildings bright as Crayolas, the two chattered away, blissfully unaware of the dark clouds gathering back in Oregon.

  And later, when Karly discovered their flight home to America was aboard an Aer Lingus plane called the “St. David,” she was delighted. This thing Karly had suspected for a long time was true: her father really was a special man—he even had a big jet airliner named after him!

  Over our coffee that day at New Morning Bakery, I asked for and received David’s blessings to write this story. As far as I was concerned, he was the only person who had the right to ask me not to write about Karly. I didn’t want to see him victimized any further, so I told him if he didn’t want me to write this book, I wouldn’t. But David gave me his blessings and his full cooperation.

  There are many reasons why David wanted Karly’s story told, but one of the foremost is because David wanted people to know that his daughter wasn’t a tragic kid that nobody cared about.

  “Karly is more than a statistic, a subject, a patient, a case number,” David said. “She had many people that cared about her and loved her. She lived as full a life as a three-year-old can. She traveled to Ireland twice, charmed everybody she met, and made plans to buy a cell phone when she went to college.”

  Like most everyone connected to her death, David has his own regrets. “I did not do enough to protect Karly. I regret not standing up to the Children’s Services investigation by pointing out the obvious things that were blatantly missed. I placed too much faith in the system.”

  David’s naïve trust in Oregon Department of Human Services to help him protect his daughter did him far more harm than good. David was the primary suspect in the prolonged abuse case of Karly Sheehan.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sarah was not the first, nor the last, adolescent we welcomed into our home, but all came with the understanding that we had young children who would look to them as role models. Any potentially harmful behavior—smoking, drinking, or drugs—were taboo. Those who violated our rules were graciously asked to leave.

  If Sarah abused our rules while living with us, I never knew of it.

  Sarah adored our children. If not out of respect for us, then out of love for them, she tried to set a good example. I appreciated that about her.

  Sarah’s circle of associations was quite small, so I’m not sure where she had met her latest beau, Steve, but they quickly became a steady item.

  Steve was a plain fellow, orange-headed and bony thin, but he had a good job and money to burn. He came to Pendleton to help establish Wildhorse Resort and Casino. Steve was one of a slew of financial people who swooped into town to help the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) put their gaming business together. He pampered her with lavish gifts and elegant dinners out, spending as much time with her as his hectic schedule would allow.

  They would pop in and out of the house, coming from somewhere or going someplace else.

  He was a nice enough fellow and always at Sarah’s side, but, nonetheless, I was certain Sarah didn’t consider him a keeper. The pickings of singles were slim in Pendleton if a girl ruled out cowboys and ranchers. Steve was simply someone to keep her entertained until she moved off to greener pastures.

  At some point, perhaps while she was living with us, Sarah took up gambling in a bad way. Video gaming became her drug of choice, an addiction that would eventually lead to the break-up of her marriage to David. By the time the two divorced, Sarah had put the Sheehan household into tens of thousands of dollars in debt, most of it from gambling.

  An estimated 2.3 million Americans are pathological gamblers, and experts say another 5 million adults have serious gambling problems. Research suggests those who suffer from attention deficit or hyperactive disorders, as Sarah does, are more prone to become compulsive gamblers.

  Gambling is a socially acceptable behavior. For most, it starts out as harmless recreation. A compulsive gambler is expected to self-diagnosis and self-report. But the addict will resort to extreme measures of manipulations and deceitfulness, hocking possessions, lying, and outright stealing or engaging in other criminal pursuits to feed the frenzy created by their addiction.

  If a person is a meth addict, physical symptoms will make it difficult to deny there’s a problem. Their complexion gets bad. Teeth rot out. Muscle starts wasting away. It’s easier to mask a gambling addiction than it is to mask a meth addiction. While many of Sarah’s friends recognized she had an addiction to gambling, Sarah blamed her finan
cial woes on poor fiscal skills.

  “I’m shitty with money,” she told Detective Wells.

  That may have been the most truthful statement Sarah made in her numerous interviews with the police.

  •

  Money was one of the issues Tim and I addressed with Sarah during the time she lived with us. Sarah loved nice things. No sin in that, but there were times when the manner in which she obtained the things she wanted gave us pause. Sarah preferred easy cash to the hard-earned kind.

  I didn’t blame Sarah for trading off her looks and using them to her good pleasure. But over time, I came to question the extent to which Sarah capitalized on her physical attributes.

  My unease switched to alarm after Sarah made a trip to Corvallis for a weekend and returned to Pendleton on a Sunday night driving a spiffy new pickup truck, glossy white with lots of shiny chrome.

  Tim was driving around in a beater at the time, and he had a full-time job. Sarah was working at the bank part time. We were more than curious about how she could afford such a nice rig. But Sarah was twenty years old, and we respected her privacy.

  Not long after she arrived back home with that new pickup, I started receiving phone calls from a young man asking for Sarah. I took his name and number and passed his messages on to her. For some inexplicable reason, Sarah refused to return his calls. The calls continued, almost nightly.

  At first, I assumed it was some other poor schmuck who was smitten with Sarah, but there was something about the young man’s tone that nagged at me. I kept telling Sarah to call him back. She never did. Finally, one night, I up and said, “Son, it’s obvious to me Sarah isn’t going to return your calls. Is there something I could help you with?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said, sighing. “I loaned Sarah $5,000 of my school loan money to buy a truck. Now spring term is here and I need to pay tuition, but I haven’t heard from Sarah since she was down here.”

  Holy crap.