The Collector
Deedee Truesdale poured herself a cup of hot coffee, took it to her desk in the corner of her kitchen and woke up her computer. Ever since selling her exclusive catering business and embarking on a life of leisure, it was her custom each morning to check her email and then browse through the current goods being auctioned on eBay. For more than twenty years she had been collecting Sebastian Miniatures. Although the tiny figurines were one of America's oldest collectibles, dating back to 1939, they were not particularly well known and not easy to come by, especially outside the New England area where they originated. Thankfully, the auction website had a wide range of both new and vintage pieces.
After draining the last of her coffee, she put the Martha's Vineyard souvenir mug down on the saucer and began browsing through eBay. As she had many times before, she typed the name Sebastian in the box and clicked the search button.
While reading through various items featuring Sebastian the crab from Disney's The Little Mermaid, recordings by John Sebastian and Johan Sebastian Bach, NFL trading cards of Sebastian Janikowski and an assortment of Sebastian hair care products, she came across a rather bizarre item: a collection of scrapbooks containing thousands of newspaper clippings from the early 1800s to the mid-1900s of articles, all of which dealt with murder, suicide and tragic accidental deaths. Deedee, a rabid horror movie and mystery novel fan, was intrigued by the morbid collection and wanted to own it. She chose the BUY IT NOW option rather than run the risk of being outbid. After paying for the item with her PayPal account, she went back to searching for Sebastian Miniatures.
The scrapbooks, sent by priority mail, arrived two days later. There were six huge volumes, with the insides nearly bursting out of their imitation leather covers. The oldest of the books was in pretty poor condition. The paper was yellowed with age and was so brittle that chunks of it broke off in Deedee's hand as she turned the page. In all of the scrapbooks, many of the articles were loose since the glue, paste or cellophane tape used for mounting them had at some point dried up. Still in all, it was quite an impressive collection, and Deedee wanted to do her best to preserve it.
After dinner, the former caterer drove to the Staples store in Stroudsburg where she purchased several large three-ring binders, a few reams of cardstock, a large carton of polypropylene sheet protectors and half a dozen cans of spray-on adhesive. When she got back home, she spread her supplies out on the dining room table and opened the oldest scrapbook to the first page.
For the next three hours, Deedee carefully removed the articles from the old pages, remounted them on cardstock and placed them inside sheet protectors. Only after they were preserved in such a way did she read the articles and then file them away in one of the binders.
The deaths described in the clippings ran the gamut from simple, unimaginative murders, such as stabbings, shootings, stranglings and poisonings, to those that depicted more fantastic endings, such as a man burying his wife alive, a woman pushing her former lover in front of a subway train and a mother decapitating her child. Murder weapons included red hot tongs, chainsaws and Samurai swords. There were also news stories dealing with tragic disasters such as fires, mine cave-ins, train wrecks, capsized boats and flash floods.
Finally, as her grandfather clock tolled midnight, Deedee forced herself to put the cap on the can of spray adhesive, close the scrapbook and turn out the dining room light.
* * *
It took Deedee more than three months to transfer the assortment of newspaper clippings to the new binders and read all the articles. What started out as a mild curiosity blossomed into a full-fledged obsession. Morning, noon and night, she cut, glued, filed and read. Finally, three months, one week and four days after she received the old scrapbooks in the mail, the job was done.
Like readers who are absorbed in an I-couldn't-put-it-down novel experience a mild form of mourning when they get to the end of the final chapter, Deedee was despondent when her self-appointed task was at an end.
I feel like I'm going through withdrawal, she thought, as she stared at the binders neatly arranged on her bookshelf.
An idea then came to her that brought a smile to her face. She could expand on the compilation of articles by locating newspaper clippings printed since November 1, 1954, the date of the last article in the existing collection.
Again, Deedee drove to the Stroudsburg Staples where she bought more binders, cardstock, sheet protectors and spray adhesive. After leaving the office supply store, she stopped at Borders and purchased one of every newspaper they sold, spanning the country from the East Coast's Boston Globe and the New York Daily News to the Midwest's Chicago Tribune and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to the West Coast's Los Angeles Times and Seattle Press.
When she got back to her house, DeeDee again placed her supplies on the dining room table. Then she took the stack of newspapers into the living room. After putting a DVD of The Godfather into her home entertainment system, she sat back in her reclining chair with the stack of newspapers and a pair of Fiskars scissors. She made it through half of the papers and all three of The Godfather movies before calling it a night.
Rather than have to make a daily trip to Borders, Deedee went online and subscribed to those major newspapers across the country that offered subscriptions through the mail. Six days a week, the local mailman came to her house mid-morning and dropped off three mail pouches. She would spend all of her evenings and most of the weekends in front of her television, scanning these newspapers for stories on murders, suicides, accidents and strange deaths and then cutting out the articles and filing them away in her new binders.
Major as this task was, it was only half of what Deedee hoped to accomplish. She still had to fill the more-than-fifty-year gap between 1954 and the present. To find old newspapers, she began making the rounds of recycling centers, flea markets, garage sales, antique stores, libraries and, of course, eBay.
Soon Deedee was spending so much time on her unusual hobby that she was unable to keep up with more mundane chores such as laundry, cooking, grocery shopping and housework. Rather than curtail her scrapbooking activities, she hired a maid service so that she could devote her time to reading, clipping and gluing.
No one else knew about Deedee's strange preoccupation with death. Since she had no family and rarely saw her old friends, there was no one to worry that she might be taking her new-found hobby to dangerous extremes. There was no one to suggest she spend less time with her collection of morbid clippings, and even if there were, it is doubtful Deedee would have followed the advice. She enjoyed her quest for the macabre and, like any other addict, was not eager to kick the habit.
* * *
Deedee opened the large UPS box that had been left on her doorstep while she was in Stroudsburg purchasing more supplies. Inside were several old newspapers she purchased on eBay. The most expensive of the lot was a copy The Dallas Morning News dated Thursday, November 21, 1963, the day before President John F. Kennedy's fateful visit to the city. Although the paper had sold for only five cents when it was published forty years ago, she had to pay nineteen dollars for it, far more than she usually paid for old newspapers.
The headline on page one read TWO RED DIPLOMATS BEATEN IN CONGO. Deedee was not interested in foreign deaths, however. Heaven knows she had little enough time to properly document the domestic ones. Most of the news was routine since the reporters had no inkling of the momentous events that were to take place in their own backyard during the following days, events that would change the course of history. Of lesser importance than the deaths in the Congo, was an article that said, JFK VISIT IRES SAN ANTONIO LIBERALS. But Deedee wasn't interested in saving this article either. She continued turning the pages, looking for references to murder, suicide and accidental death.
"Here we are," she said, opening up the vintage newspaper to the local section. "This is much more interesting."
As she reached for her Fiskars that were on the end table beside her recliner, she read the headline: YOUNG COUPLE FROM PENNSYLVANIA FOUND MURDERED IN DALLAS HOTEL; CHILD MISSING. The body of the article went on to say that Mr. and Mrs. Lester J. McVey had stopped in Texas for the night on their way home from a cross-country vacation to San Diego. The husband and wife had been fatally shot, and their money, jewelry and credit cards stolen. Naturally, the Dallas police suspected robbery as the motive. The couple's nine-year-old daughter, Eileen McVey, was nowhere to be found. Detectives were not sure whether the girl had witnessed her parents' deaths and was wandering around the neighborhood in shock or she had been abducted by the murderers.
It was a heartrending story indeed, but Deedee Truesdale had become desensitized to human tragedy. To her, the loss of human life had been reduced to a collectible item.
* * *
Months passed and the number of binders continued to grow. Deedee still had not become bored with her unusual hobby. On the contrary, she was more obsessed than ever.
I guess I'll have to buy a new bookcase soon, she thought, hoping she could find a shelf that would match the existing one.
After a quick microwaved dinner, Deedee took a shower, popped Field of Dreams into her DVD player and began clipping. She had gone through The Baltimore Sun, the Kansas City Star and the Bangor Daily News before Shoeless Joe Jackson made his debut in the Iowa cornfield, and she was finished with the Las Vegas Sun, the Fresno Bee and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by the time Ray Kinsella met Doc "Moonlight" Graham. After perusing the Lexington Herald-Leader, she moved on to The Times-Picayune and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
It was her lucky day; it had been a time of the full moon, and violence was at a peak. There were three murders; two were victims of domestic violence, and the third was the result of a drug deal gone awry. There was also a plane crash, a deadly fire in a tire factory and the discovery of a skeleton buried beneath the foundation of a house that was being torn down to build a shopping outlet mall. The latter article went on to say that the skeleton was that of a young girl, probably seven to twelve years of age. The house had been built in 1965; so the child had to have been dead for at least forty years. The remains, the article concluded, were being sent to the state crime lab for possible identification.
Deedee, who read hundreds of gruesome stories each week, did not connect the discovery of a child's body in New Orleans with the disappearance of Eileen McVey in Dallas the day beford President Kennedy's assassination. Nor did she have any inkling of the impact the discovery of that skeleton would have upon her own future.
* * *
Autumn and winter passed, but Deedee took no notice of the brilliant foliage, the first snowfall or the early thaw. The coming spring meant nothing to her. She kept her focus on the growing pile of binders, the monstrous progeny of the six scrapbooks she had impulsively purchased on eBay.
The mail came just before noon one day, almost two hours later than normal. Since her usual mail carrier was on vacation, Deedee did not find the customary canvas mail sacks on her doorstep. Instead, two dozen newspapers were stuffed into her mailbox, and several plastic bins were stacked beside it to hold the overflow. It took three trips to carry them all inside. Once she placed the papers next to her chair, she returned the empty bins to their designated spot beside the mailbox.
Chevy Chase's Funny Farm was already loaded in the DVD player when she sat in her recliner. After pressing the play button on the remote, Deedee reached for the San Francisco Chronicle. Around three o'clock, she noticed that the room was getting darker, the sun partly obscured by dark storm clouds. She got up and switched on the living room light, and then reached for the next paper, The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Deedee skimmed through the first three pages. There was nothing of interest to her—just the usual political scandals, the slow economic recovery, rising health care costs and an impending sanitation workers' strike. As she turned the next page, a bolt of lightning flashed outside the window and a crack of distant thunder grumbled angrily.
On page four there was an article worth saving: STATE CRIME LAB IDENTIFIES REMAINS OF ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL. After checking dental records of children reported missing in the early 1960s, police matched those found in the skeleton with those of Eileen McVey, missing since November 1963.
One dedicated investigator spent a good deal of his own time and money to piece together the last two years of little Eileen's life. In the fall of 1963, the girl had been traveling with her mother and father, a wealthy businessman from Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. The family had stopped for lunch in Dallas and decided to spend the night in the city, hoping to catch a glimpse of JFK's motorcade the following day. Unfortunately for them, two petty thieves, Marco Rosetti and his girlfriend, Maybelline Truesdale, spotted the McVeys cashing some travelers' checks at a local bank. Rosetti and Truesdale followed the McVeys back to their hotel, where Rosetti shot the ill-fated couple and stole their money, jewelry and credit cards.
Truesdale, a mentally unstable drug addict who occasionally resorted to prostitution to finance her habit, had lost her six-year-old daughter to leukemia three years earlier. Rosetti had wanted to murder the child along with the parents, but Maybelline insisted on sparing the girl's life. Marco agreed as long as Eileen took the child with her.
Truesdale later parted ways with Rosetti, and for the next two years, Maybelline and the little girl, whom she treated as her own daughter, wandered around Texas, always keeping one step ahead of the police. Eventually, they wound up in New Orleans. With her share of the McVeys' loot added to the money she'd earned dealing drugs and turning tricks, Maybelline was able to buy a piece of property on which she planned to have a house built for her and the little girl.
Before construction began, however, Eileen was killed by a hit-and-run driver while she was jumping rope on the sidewalk. Maybelline was devastated. First, she'd lost her own daughter and then she lost Eileen. As much as she loved the little girl, there was no way she could give her a proper burial. The authorities might discover Eileen's true identity, and they would tie Maybelline to the death of the McVeys. So Maybelline held her own private ceremony for the dead child. Late at night, under cover of darkness, she buried her on the piece of property that was soon to be covered by Maybelline's new home.
As Deedee read the remaining paragraphs, the rain came down, beating steadily harder against her roof. The lightning got closer and more intense, and the thunder began to shake the house.
Maybelline Truesdale lived in the small ranch house built above the little girl's bones until she died of a liver ailment in August 2001. The house stood vacant until a developer bought all the buildings on the block and tore them down to build a shopping mall.
Neighbors claimed that Truesdale had been an alcoholic and suspected she was also insane.
One woman told the reporter, "She always talked about having a daughter, but if she did have a kid, none of us ever saw it. I once asked Maybelline why her daughter never played with the other kids in the neighborhood. She looked scared, but finally said, 'My little Deedee doesn't go out much. She prefers playing indoors.'"
A lightning bolt split the sky and struck a tree in the backyard. The wet branches crashed through the window as the thunder roared above and the living room light went out, but Deedee was oblivious to the raging storm around her. Her mind was too preoccupied with the horror of the article before her.
Maybelline Truesdale had an imaginary child who had the same name as she did: Deedee Truesdale! Maybelline had kidnapped Eileen McVey after her boyfriend, Marco, had murdered the girl's parents. Deedee's parents were dead, too, and had been dead a long time, so long that she couldn't remember much about them, not even their names. Just as the lightning outside was illuminating the slate gray sky so, too, did the names in the article illuminate the dark corners of Deedee's memory.
In her loneliness and grief, Maybelline had kept the memory of Eileen McVey alive in the form of an imaginary child. Similarly, Deedee Truesdale, the former Eileen McVey, preserved the life that had been stolen from her in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas, even beyond her death.
Deedee felt the cold rain blowing in through the broken window splatter on her face, but she sat still, numb to the world around her. The rain fell on the stack of uncut newspapers, and the wind blew the loose articles off the coffee table and onto the floor. Still, Deedee didn't move. She was too intent on trying to remember. Eventually, the lives of Eileen McVey and Deedee Truesdale blended into one and inevitably led to the obliteration of the troubled spirit.
"My body may have died in 1965," she concluded as he began her final journey, "but my soul died in 1963 when I witnessed my parents being murdered in a Dallas hotel room. Despite her pathetic, unselfish love for me, I was never happy living with Maybelline Truesdale. I preferred to imagine that I went back home to Pennsylvania, that my parents had later been killed in a car accident and that I had inherited the house and the money that belonged to them. I imagined it all. I ... I ... don't even exist."
The pounding rain continued to come in through the broken window, soaking the piles of newspapers. Eventually, the storm ended, and all that remained in the long-abandoned McVey house was a pulpy mess of saturated newsprint and a pair of wet Fiskars lying at the foot of Lester McVey's old reclining chair.
I got the idea for this story when I came across an auction for such a collection of articles on eBay while searching for Sebastian Miniatures.
I once tried to sell Salem on eBay, but the winning bidder returned him and left negative feedback!
