THE CALL
It was a humid June evening in 1978, the sky bright with stars, and forty-eight-year-old Ruth Finley was alone in her basement when the Poet made his first appearance. In the front yard, the wind rustled the leaves of the elm tree, and the plastic sheet covering the living room window flapped softly against the glass.
Ruth was seldom alone in her house at night. Usually after dinner she and her husband, Ed, sat in the basement working on their hobbies. Ruth knitted or worked on ceramic pieces—frogs, owls, bulldogs—at her kiln in one corner, while Ed painted landscapes at his easel. When the two took breaks, they sat on the couch, leaning in together, and watched television.
The large basement also held a pool table and an organ that Ed, who couldn’t read music, played by the numbers. A gun rack stocked with unused rifles hung on one wall.
*
Married for twenty-eight years, Ruth and Ed were comfortable with the long periods of silence that punctuated their evenings. They knew how to adjust to the contours of each other’s moods. Both of their boys, Brent and Bruce, were grown and out of the house, and Ruth and Ed were enjoying being empty nesters. They were best friends.
But that night, Ruth felt uneasy. She sipped coffee and watched television at a low volume alone in the basement, listening to the plastic sheet tapping against the upstairs window. Ed had hung the sheet earlier that week to protect the window from the cement he was pouring to patch up the front porch.
But that night, Ruth felt uneasy.The sound reminded Ruth of a tin sheet her father had once hung to cover the south side of their Missouri farmhouse after a tornado had ripped away the wall. The tornado had sprayed glass over her mother and sister and ripped off the chicken house roof, sucking the eggs right out of their chickens. Bundled in a terry-cloth robe, Ruth distractedly watched the ten o’clock news, feeling worried and worn out.
The previous night, as she and Ed had been watching television, Ed had tried to light a cigarette and the matchstick’s flaming head had flown right off. He’d lurched sideways to avoid it and felt a stab of pain in his chest. He gasped for breath, then rose from the sofa, clutched the front of his shirt, and collapsed on the floor.
Ruth and Ed were certain he had suffered a heart attack. Ed was a heavy smoker who rarely exercised, and he sported a growing paunch on his otherwise lanky frame. Preliminary tests at the hospital, however, had shown no indication of a heart attack. The doctor wanted to keep Ed overnight as a precaution, and so Ruth had returned home at 3:00 a.m. by herself, trembling as she walked from the car to the front door.
She felt afraid to be alone, although she knew that was foolish. That first night, she had barely managed to sleep.
Tests the next day revealed that Ed’s pain had been the result of an unhealed tear in his rib cartilage, an injury from a car accident the previous Christmas Eve. Lifting heavy blocks of concrete earlier that day had aggravated the injury. The doctors wanted Ed to stay in the hospital for another night, out of an abundance of caution.
As the TV news anchor cut to a commercial, Ruth yawned and rose from the couch. Fatigued though she was, she knew any attempt at sleep would be futile, so she headed up the stairs to make another cup of coffee.
The phone rang before Ruth had finished climbing the stairs. Friends and family had been calling all day for updates on Ed’s health, and Ruth was eager for a familiar voice.
As she entered the kitchen, Ruth could see her reflection in the sliding glass doors that framed the backyard. She tightened the sash of her robe and picked up the phone.
“Hello?” she said.
“Is this Ruth Smock from Fort Scott, Kansas?” an unfamiliar male voice asked.
The question startled her. Smock was Ruth’s maiden name, and she had not lived in Fort Scott for decades.
“Yes, it is,” she answered.
“I know all about that night,” he said, low and ominous. Ruth instantly knew which night he meant.
The caller began reading out loud from an October 15, 1946, article from the Fort Scott Tribune: “‘Branded on both thighs by a hot flatiron, apparently by a sex maniac, Ruth Smock, sixteen-year-old Fort Scott High schoolgirl…was resting today at the home of her parents…following an attack upon her early last night.'”
It had been almost thirty-two years since that night. The man on the line asked Ruth if she still wore her “brand.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ruth lied. Why was this stranger bringing up that terrible incident from so long ago?
The man told Ruth he worked for a construction company that was tearing down old houses in Fort Scott, and he’d found a number of yellowing newspapers in the walls. The article about Ruth was among them. If she didn’t give him money, he said, he would spread the news of her teenage attack. “I know where you work,” he warned.
Alarmed, Ruth slammed down the phone. Her temples throbbed, and she felt overwhelmed by exhaustion. Dragging herself to bed, she fell almost immediately into a lengthy slumber.
*
The Finleys lived in a single-level, yellow brick-and-wood house at 8125 East Indianapolis Street, a tree-lined residential block on the far east side of Wichita, Kansas. Their house resembled most of the others on the street—trim and modest, with a small, neatly kept front yard, a spacious backyard bordered by a chain-link fence, and a two-car garage. The similar architecture and the close proximity of the houses—just a few feet apart from each other—created a warmly familiar environment for residents.
Though two large shopping malls and a Hilton hotel occupied the busy intersection just one block north, East Indianapolis Street felt secluded. When traffic was light, Ruth and Ed could drive their black Oldsmobile to downtown Wichita in just ten minutes.
With a population of three hundred thousand residents, Wichita was the largest city in Kansas. The city was home to the Boeing Military Aircraft Company as well as Beech, Cessna, and Learjet. Offsetting this sleek modernity, the central downtown area was full of beautiful older buildings and scenic parks.
Wichita was first settled in 1863, when fifteen hundred Wichita Indians set up camp in the groves of cottonwoods and willows where two rivers, the Arkansas and the Little Arkansas, joined, and they still wound through its heart. But by the late 1970s, Wichita’s life had drifted to the perimeters, the inevitable outcome of a decades-long post–World War II economic boom. Towne East and its companion mall, Towne West, now anchored the city on either side and drew most of the shoppers away from its increasingly hollowed-out center.
On the far east side, where the Finleys lived, residents felt removed from any threat of violence. Ruth and Ed and their neighbors could settle in for the night without fear of anyone intruding on their peaceful turf.
*
Two weeks had passed following Ed’s return from the hospital and Ruth still hadn’t told him about her disturbing phone call. She didn’t want to add to Ed’s burden after his health scare. What if the news upset him enough that he ended up back in the hospital?
But, by the end of June, Ruth couldn’t hold it in anymore. Early one morning, she lay beside Ed in their four-poster bed and watched as the summer sunlight filled the room. Robins chirped in the backyard. What a nice morning, Ruth thought. She hated to spoil it, but she couldn’t keep things bottled up any longer.
Ruth tried to keep her manner casual. When Ed woke up, she mentioned, “If some guy calls, I want you to talk to him.”
“Okay,” Ed responded groggily. “Why?”
Ruth hesitated.
“I got a phone call,” she finally said. “The second night you were in the hospital. Some guy asked if I used to be Ruth Smock.” She could still hear the lascivious voice in the receiver. “Then he asked me about the brands.”
Ed, more awake, turned and watched his wife as she spoke.
“I didn’t say anything,” Ruth continued. “I just froze. Then he said he knew I still had them, and he asked me if I had any mental problems about it. He said he knew about the brands because he had the paper from Fort Scott. He said he’d send me the paper if I paid him some money, and he’d keep quiet about it.”
Ed tried to process this information. “How much money?” he said helplessly.
“Didn’t say. But can you imagine? Trying to get money to keep quiet about something everybody knows about?”
“Has he called back?”
“No.”
Ed wanted to be reassuring. “Probably just some crank,” he offered.
“It didn’t seem worth bothering you about, not with what you were going through—the hospital and all,” Ruth said.
“How about the police?”
“I don’t see any reason for that. Do you?”
“Maybe if he calls again,” Ed said.
“Maybe,” said Ruth. But privately she thought, No way.
They lay in silence for several minutes. In her mind, Ruth could hear the crude obscenities of a man in overalls, the sound of his knife blade slapping against her bare thighs. She could almost feel the man’s knee on her pelvic bone again and taste the handkerchief he’d shoved in her mouth.
Lying in bed in Wichita three decades later, she felt again as if she was about to gag. She rose quickly to get herself moving and to clear her head.
Ed was puzzled and disturbed. Ruth had never talked much about the attack, even though he’d met her in the boardinghouse where it occurred. When they’d first started dating, Ed’s friends had told him about the incident, which had received splashy publicity in Fort Scott, but the two times he had raised the subject with her she’d refused to discuss it. He’d never mentioned it again. There was no reason to, he figured. She never showed any signs that it bothered her. Their marriage was smooth, their lovemaking frequent and passionate.
How would anybody know where she was, Ed wondered, after all those years? Ruth had married, changed her name, and moved states.
Ed tried to tell himself that it was only a crank call. Some creep had taken a lucky shot.
He certainly hoped so. After twenty-eight years, Ed loved Ruth deeply, and he didn’t want her to ever have to think about the terrifying Fort Scott assault again.
*
Ed was nineteen years old and freshly out of the navy when he’d first met Ruth.
By 1978, Ruth and Ed’s life had settled into an inviolate routine. Ruth began the day by fixing cereal, juice, coffee, and English muffins while Ed read the newspaper. After breakfast she showered and dressed, and Ed helped her do the dishes.
Then the couple climbed into their Oldsmobile for the drive downtown. Ed dropped Ruth off at the Southwestern Bell building on North Broadway, where she worked as a clerk in the merchandising division, and then he drove to the Halsey-Tevis office.
When Ruth’s shift was over, she would walk two blocks south to Henry’s, a clothing store, where Ed would pick her up. After crawling home through the rush hour snarl, Ruth would fix dinner and serve one of her homemade pies for dessert.
Then she and Ed would descend to the basement to work on their hobbies. Ruth, an early riser, would often crash out on the sofa while Ed, a night owl, stayed up watching The Tonight Show or classic movies.
Ruth’s family had resettled in Wichita. Her sister, Jean, had moved to Wichita years after Ruth, and she had also taken a job with Southwestern Bell. They worked in the same building and met frequently for lunch and coffee.
Ruth’s mother, Fay, had moved to the city from Richards, Missouri after Ruth’s father, Carl, had died in 1974. She lived alone in a large white house on English Street, east of downtown. Ruth did Fay’s laundry every weekend and visited occasionally, but Fay always had the sense that her daughter didn’t want to open up to her. It was hard to ever know what was really going on in Ruth’s mind.
Habit had made Ruth’s and Ed’s lives serene and uncomplicated; it soothed them with its predictability.
But after that first call from the stranger demanding money, the telephone began to disturb their carefully curated peace.But after that first call from the stranger demanding money, the telephone began to disturb their carefully curated peace. Often, it would ring but go dead when they picked it up—something that had never seemed to happen before.
Other times there would be only silence on their end. Ed sometimes heard footsteps and voices echoing in the receiver, as if the call had been placed from a large hallway in a busy public building. Once, bursting with frustration, he whistled and shouted into the receiver for forty-five minutes, until a man came on the line and said, “This is the weirdest thing. I was just walking by and I seen this phone dangling here.”
Ed thought the calls were the work of some solitary crank who would eventually lose interest and find someone else to harass. The calls were annoying but, to his way of thinking, nothing to worry about.
He would soon change his mind.
***
