A Silence of Mockingbirds Read online

  “Well, not always,” Gina said. “Matt would watch Karly a lot. He is pissed at Sarah. He doesn’t think she should have gotten off scot-free. Sarah’s a good manipulator, good at getting her own way. Karly was at our house the week she died, running around crying, puking and shaking, ‘I want my daddy! I want my daddy!’”

  Hearing Gina quote the dead Karly punctured something in Pam. Holding back her corn-silk hair, she hunkered over the rim of her wine glass. A fierce thunderstorm gave way to tears. A fellow sitting nearby moved his beer and handed her a napkin.

  We all grew silent. There was no talk of Beaver basketball or what a beautiful day it was in the Valley. Gina placed a hand on Pam’s shoulder. There’s a time when tears are the only appropriate response. Pam’s shoulder-heaving sobs are what I would have expected from Sarah the day she told me Karly had died. How had she remained so calm about that?

  “That e-mail Sarah sent out after her trip to New York, that upset a lot of us,” Pam said.

  “Yeah,” Lee said, taking a draw from his beer.

  “Sarah is all about the money,” Pam added. “Anybody who knows Sarah knows she’s all about the money.”

  “You think she had anything to do with Karly’s death?” I asked.

  “We never saw any abuse,” Gina replied. “I mean it bugged the hell outta me when Karly showed up with all her hair missing. You don’t lose that much hair. It’s not normal. I told Sarah to take her to the doctor. You can’t tell me as a mother she didn’t know Karly was being abused. Toward the end, Sarah was spending much more time with Shawn’s daughter than she was with Karly. I didn’t know what to think.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Betrayal can only occur in relationships built on love and trust. The kind of relationship I had with Sarah at one time. The sort she had with David, briefly. The devoted kind of relationship that any child ought to be able to expect from her mother.

  I worry about how betrayed Sarah is going to feel reading these words. Several people have asked whether I fear Sarah. I don’t know the answer to that question because I no longer know Sarah. There are times when I wonder if I ever really knew her, if any of us ever did. Or was she betraying our affections the entire time we were loving on her?

  It’s the betrayal that Karly experienced that propels me onward. She comes to me in my dreams, not as the dead Karly, per se, but as a little girl distraught.

  The young girl cries in my dream, begs to be held, and to be comforted. She pleads with me not to leave her alone. She is eight or nine, close to the age Shawn’s daughter Kate was when Karly was killed, but it’s not Kate. When Sarah and Shawn first began dating, Kate was eight and Karly was two, almost three. I hold the girl in my dreams and comfort her. I hold her close and tell her I will never, ever leave her alone, not for one second. When I wake, I’m the one crying.

  When I began writing this book, I asked Jack if Shawn’s parents, Hugh and Ann Field, would be willing to be interviewed by me.

  Karen:

  Just wanted to let you know I talked with S’s parents about the issues you mentioned and they chose to stay with their original stance. They do not want to talk. I tried to explain the advantages but they politely declined.

  They want truth and at the same time are leery of the price they might have to pay in addition to what they have had to pay already. Good luck on the investigation and writing.

  Jack

  I’m not sure what Shawn’s parents want revealed, and as long as they refuse to speak with me I’m not likely to learn. But the one thing I do know from my years as an investigative reporter is that only those who have something to hide do the hiding. Everybody else talks.

  Hugh and Ann have been covering for Shawn for a very long time. As an adolescent, Shawn was a bad attitude sprouting. He was arrested at sixteen with a couple of buddies full of bravado gone sour. The three of them broke into several homes and took hostage one of the boys’ own mothers. They intended to steal Shawn’s brother’s truck and joyride to Colorado—to do some skiing—but local lawmen caught them before the trio could finish the chorus of “Ride Like the Wind” and then hauled their butts to juvie.

  Ann and Hugh can protest all they want that their son is too good of a boy to have killed a child. Oh, bless him, he wouldn’t pour salt on a slug, wouldn’t flick a fly from a watermelon. Shawn couldn’t possibly have hurt a child. But the evidence doesn’t support their view.

  Well, yes, Hugh told the courts, the boy-turned-man had stolen his credit cards, had forged his name, and run up a bill in the thousands of dollars without any way to pay for it. Shawn found working such a distasteful bore. Points of contention with his son are seen best in the clenching of Hugh’s jaw. Getting along with a son intent on not getting along with anyone can sap a good man, but that’s no call for airing dirty boxers on the public square. Nope. In front of God and everybody listening, Hugh and Ann declare their son has been wrongly accused.

  But I suspect that when they sit silently across the dinner table, they avoid looking into each other’s eyes and seeing the truth of their son. I bet Hugh and Ann have stood shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen pouring black coffee, peeling a banana and asking, “Do you think he could have done this thing?” And I’d bet they’ve howled against the bitter winds that delivered to them one son dead from an overdose and one imprisoned.

  Not long after Jack sent me his note that Shawn’s parents didn’t want to talk to me, I received another one from him saying Ann Field was worried that digging all this up would harm her granddaughter.

  Jack said he talked to Shawn’s mother and that she was suffering, thinking about the book. “Her fear is that Kate will be the one most likely to suffer when your book comes out,” Jack said. “She can’t understand how you can push ahead on this book when you know you are going to hurt people.”

  I hope to never know the kind of grief Ann Field endures. It is not my intention to add to Hugh or Ann’s heartache. Nor do I want to harm Kate in any way. David is concerned about her, too. He considers Kate, not Sarah, to be Shawn’s other victim. Kate is not her real name. I told Jack to tell Ann I wouldn’t use her real name.

  Not that it really matters. It’s not as if Kate doesn’t wake up every morning knowing that her daddy puts on his prison jumpsuit one leg at a time. It’s not as if she hasn’t sucked back salty sobs, thinking of how hateful her father had been that last morning of Karly’s life.

  I didn’t tell Jack but I came across some postings on an online forum discussing Karly’s death. I can’t be sure the remarks are Kate’s but that’s the claim made:

  “Im shawn fields daughter. He never abused me so i dont understand why he would abuse karly. She was like my sister and sarah was like a secind mom. PLEASE DONT ACUSE SARAH OF THIS CRIME. she had nothing do with her daughters death. She loved her more than anything. I was there so i know the BIG details. I was at school when karly died though.”

  If she had lived, Karly would have turned nine in January 2011, the date of the above post. Loving daughters are a delight at almost any age. Nine-year-old girls are all ankles and elbows, throwing back the covers on the day and running barefoot over our hearts. If Kate really did author that post, she might have been thinking about her own ninth birthday in 2005 and the trip she took to Disneyland without her father. He couldn’t go because he was in jail, awaiting the outcome of an ongoing murder investigation.

  I replied to Jack and told him I think Ann’s fear is misplaced. Kate’s suffering is going to be far more reaching than any book I write. The deceit we buy into is the belief that as long as we aren’t talking about our hurts, they have no power over us.

  Ann Field and I disagree over how one softens the blow for Kate growing up with her father imprisoned for murder. I don’t think such a thing can be “softened.” I think it ought to be dealt with, openly and honestly.

  Even during midday, when I’m wide awake, I hear the words of Judge Holcomb echoing: “Might there have been an intervention that
could have saved this child’s life?”

  Of course, an intervention could have saved her. Absolutely. Sarah, alone, could have offered her daughter salvation. Instead, she betrayed her.

  Karly’s death is not simply a tragedy— it’s an unforgivable shame. It takes the complicity of a community, and a nation, to stand by in silence as a child is tortured to death. That ought to give us all nightmares of children weeping.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Alarmed by troubling changes she observed in Karly, Delynn Zoller was the first person to file an official complaint of possible abuse. Delynn, owner of Rugrats Traditional Home Child Care, was required by law to call Oregon Department of Human Services Child Welfare if she suspected abuse. That first call was made nine months before Karly’s death and a few short weeks after Sarah started dating a man named Shawn Wesley Field. He was a nice-looking guy. Clean-shaven, lean, with expressive eyes. Dark mirrors that reflected shadows of things yet unseen.

  Sarah met Shawn in late September at Suds and Suds, a beer-only bar located inside Woodstock’s Pizza Parlor. Woodstock’s is a multi-purpose facility that caters to families and the college crowd. Sports jerseys and posters line the parlor’s high walls. On the building’s east side is a coin-operated laundry facility.

  Suds is a typical neighborhood bar, not unlike the one seen on the popular television series Cheers, only smaller, about a quarter of the size.

  “I thought he came from a good family,” Sarah said. By “good”, Sarah meant he came from a family with money. “He was driving a Volvo. His parents had homes in Corvallis and in Arizona. Shawn had a daughter. He presented this package that said, ‘Hey, you’re lucky you have me.’”

  Shawn’s neighbors would later describe him as athletic, like a runner or something, but Shawn’s classmates at Crescent Valley High knew him as a pudgy, awkward kid. Crescent Valley, the school on the north side of Corvallis, is generally regarded as the rich kids’ school. The Fields’ home bordered a golf course.

  On their first meeting, Shawn smiled disarmingly and introduced himself to Sarah. A flirt by nature, Sarah responded without reservation. They hooked up that very night. “We hung out at my place, playing cards,” Sarah told the court. “I consider that as when we began dating.”

  The M-word came up within a couple weeks of their first date. Shawn was the first to raise it. It wasn’t exactly a proposal but, as Sarah explained, it was close enough. “We were at Suds. I wasn’t working. I was there socially. We were sitting outside on the patio with some of my friends. Shawn picked up my left hand and said, ‘A ring would look really good there.’ Shortly after that we talked of moving in together.”

  Shawn was living in a duplex off Aspen Street, in a quiet, residential part of town, close to Hoover Elementary School, the kind of neighborhood college professors and Hewlett-Packard employees call home. An area where barking dogs are the most common complaint.

  Sarah, who had been sharing an apartment with a girlfriend, decided to move in with Shawn, though she barely knew him. She insisted they had this rare thing: chemistry, a connection, the kind that doesn’t come along every day.

  “I really liked Shawn at that point and was very interested in being in a committed relationship. Besides, I didn’t have Karly most nights; David did. It was Shawn’s idea, not mine, that I bring Karly for an overnight visit. He thought it was time that Karly and Kate meet.”

  Shawn’s first marriage, to a girl named Molly Church, was annulled in 1994. Molly’s father, Jim Church, a Portland attorney, told investigators it was out of concern for his daughter’s well-being that he sought an annulment on her behalf.

  If the annulment bothered him, Shawn didn’t mope around much. He met his next wife, Eileen, on a blind date shortly thereafter. Two weeks later, just like in Sarah’s case, Shawn raised the idea of marriage. When Shawn and Eileen married in 1995, Eileen was twenty-two years old and two months pregnant with the couple’s only child, the daughter I call Kate. According to Eileen, the marriage was fraught with violent outbursts. The couple divorced in July 2002 and shared custody of Kate.

  David forewarned me that Delynn probably wouldn’t want to talk to me. “I think she wants to put all this behind her,” he said. David was right; Delynn was reluctant. It was nearly a year after I first contacted her before Delynn e-mailed me.

  “I got your message but have had to pray about this a little so forgive me for not getting back to you sooner,” Delynn said. “Yes, this is a painful subject for me, but a happy one as well and I sometimes forget that.”

  In early 2008, I made a trip to Salem to the Court of Appeals office to look at the evidence that had been presented to the jury. At the time, I was teaching at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and preparing to head off to Fairhope, Alabama. The Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts had invited me to be their writer-in-residence, and I needed to gather as much information as possible before I headed south. I wanted to wrap up interviews and compile the information I’d spent the better part of the past year collecting. Delynn’s e-mail gave me some hope I could also meet with her face to face. But I was running out of time, and if Delynn didn’t meet with me now, I wasn’t sure when, or if, that meeting would take place.

  It was late afternoon on an unusually warm day in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. I’d left the Court of Appeals after spending the better part of the day holed up in a corner under the watchful eye of the court administrator, rifling through boxes of evidentiary materials. Bracing myself for a look at the post-mortem photos of Karly, I’d inadvertently pulled out a photo from a stack of 8x10s, and nearly collapsed in a heap when I discovered I’d grabbed hold of an autopsy photo.

  I was prepared, but barely, to see Karly as the police had found her that afternoon in June, 2005. I knew I would have to look at those photos in order to understand the documents I’d spent the past eight months studying. But I didn’t yet know about the autopsy photos.

  Tough as I can be, I don’t watch CSI, or any of those other forensic shows. I’ve been on the scene of all sorts of crimes, but I don’t want to see people carved up, even on television. I’d kept my act together while I was in the Appeals office, but as soon as I got to the car, I broke down sobbing. I called Connie, a dear friend in nearby Albany. “This is one of those moments when I think I might actually have reached my breaking point,” I said. “I’m not sure I can go on with this.” Connie calmed me with words of thoughtful encouragement. As soon as we hung up, my cell rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi. Is this Karen? This is Delynn Zoller.”

  No matter how many times it occurs, I continue to be amazed by such strong coincidence.

  Delynn agreed to meet me for dinner at New Morning Bakery, the same place where I’d met with David. We picked a table near the front window where we could talk freely, out of the eavesdropping range of others. The evening rush was in full swing. A steady line of people shuffled past the glass and chrome cases filled with spinach and mushroom quiche, fruit salads, hazelnut tortes, and lemon bars. Steaming soups, thick with tomatoes or white sauce, were ladled into heavy ceramic bowls. People called out to one another from behind the self-service coffee pots.

  A pretty woman, Delynn is bright-eyed. Her back is strong and straight. She sits erect on the edge of her chair, ready to move at a moment’s notice to put out whatever fire might need it. She’d be a ringer for the actor Julianne Moore if she dyed her brown hair red and put on a smack of red lipstick. Delynn is a reserved woman who lacks the self-confidence and the assertive attitude common among women who know they are pretty.

  Delynn began caring for Karly in June 2004. Providing childcare for over two decades has made Delynn a keen observer of children’s behavior. She knows when something is not right. Her intuition is sharp. Yet the daycare provider’s voice, as that of a high school dropout, may have been easily dismissed in a community where over half the population has at least one col
lege degree. Some may have tuned Delynn out simply because she was a born-again evangelical and openly expressed her faith in God.

  At her home, Delynn kept a framed photo of her deceased mother on a coffee table. Karly would point to it and ask Delynn about her mom, about heaven, about Jesus. “Karly talked more about God than any of my other daycare children,” Delynn said. “We talked a lot about Heaven, about what would happen there. I told her Heaven is the most wonderful thing. I told her how much God loves us, how much I love God. Karly said, ‘I love God, too, Delynn.’”

  When tussles broke out among the other children, Karly would often intervene. “She would referee,” Delynn recalled. “She understood what was right and wrong.” Karly was a peacemaker. She wanted everybody to play nicely, to get along, and to be happy. Much more verbal than other children her age, Delynn said, “Karly could carry on a conversation like an adult.”

  But Karly refused to tell others about the ongoing horrors she endured. Whether she did that because of threats from her abuser or because of her own tender heart is something we will never know.

  Picking through the grapes and melon of her fruit salad, Delynn paused her fork midair and said she regarded Sarah as a distant mother. “Sarah really had this unnatural way about her.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Karly would cry and this blankness would wash over Sarah,” Delynn said.

  “Like she was ignoring Karly or didn’t know how to handle her?” I asked.

  “Maybe a bit of both,” Delynn said.

  In October 2004, Karly arrived at Rugrats Daycare with her blonde, wispy hair tightly wound into an elegant French braid.

  I’d taught Sarah how to French braid. I’d spent untold hours on school mornings fixing my daughters’ hair. They’d come to me, hair ribbon or bow in hand, and ask me to put their hair in a ponytail, to crimp it, curl it, or to French braid it. Sarah would sit on the stool at the kitchen island and watch as I divided a head of hair into three strands, wrapping one end over the other. What I did for one daughter, I did for three daughters.