Zenith Man Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Jennifer Haigh

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542008235

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  This story begins with a 911 call.

  The first shock was that Harold Pardee’s wife was dead.

  The second shock was that he had a wife.

  It was a considerable secret to have kept anywhere, never mind Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a town with four traffic lights. Harold’s wife had lived among them thirty-one years, and yet, when a witness was needed to identify the body, the deputy sheriff could find only two people who’d ever seen her. One was Harold. The other was a local oddball named Cob Krug, Harold’s only friend.

  That one time in the repair shop. Harold had been, for many years, the town’s Zenith man, a whiz at fixing televisions. His shop was licensed by the Zenith Corporation—an electric sign hung out front, bearing the company logo—but Harold did not discriminate. He knew his way around a Sylvania, a Philco. The army had sent him to electronics school, which was two ways lucky: it taught him a trade, and it kept him out of Vietnam.

  That one time in the repair shop—decades ago, the year Pittsburgh won the Series—he and Cob Krug were listening to the ball game, Cob in his wheelchair, Harold on the high stool where he sat to fix TVs. It was game one of the Series. The Pirates were up when Cob heard footsteps on the stairs. Harold and his new bride rented, at that time, the upstairs apartment. Cob craned his neck—he could turn only a little in his chair—and saw a small, pretty woman in a blue flowered dress, her face in shadow. Supper’s ready, she said. Her exact words.

  The precise date of this encounter was easily determined: October 10, 1979.

  Supper’s ready. She might never have uttered another word in her life, as far as Bakerton could prove.

  The 911 call seemed, at first, to be the beginning of the story.

  I think my wife’s passed. She’s not breathing.

  In Saxon County, all 911 calls were recorded—a lucky break for the police and district attorney, supremely unlucky for Harold Pardee.

  I already tried that, he said, when the operator told him to perform CPR. It’s too late. She’s cold. He gave a peculiar emphasis to the last word. The way he said it gave the operator the willies, as she told anybody who’d listen. A day later the phrase was on everybody’s lips, repeated at lunch counters, in hair salons, around the bar at the Commercial Hotel.

  She’s cold.

  Harold’s insistence on this point, the temperature of his wife’s corpse, was unsettling. The district attorney, playing the tape at the preliminary hearing, would make much of Harold’s “flat affect.”

  The ambulance arrived quickly. The Pardees had moved, years ago, into Harold’s boyhood home, a low, shuttered rancher out in the sticks, at the end of an unpaved road. Upon entering the house, the paramedics identified certain odors: mildew, cat urine, the fruity smell of summer garbage. In the bedroom lay a blonde-haired woman in a pale-green nightgown. The gown was tucked carefully around her legs, as though someone wanted her decently covered. Both paramedics would remember this detail, though they’d disagree about everything else: the exact positioning of the body, the placement of the pillows, the husband’s peculiar attitude.

  “When a witness was needed to identify the body, the deputy sheriff could find only two people who’d ever seen her.”

  After the ambulance left, Harold rode his bicycle to the sheriff’s station. He arrived freshly shaved, in church clothes—a skinny, gray-complected man with a hangdog look, his hair back-combed with some fragrant pomade. He looked surprised when the sheriff offered him a seat. “That’s all right. I ain’t staying long.”

  When he woke that morning, she’d been lying beside him, as usual, facedown on her pillow. When he turned her over and attempted CPR, he told the deputy, he saw right away there was no point. She was cold.

  The men sat in silence, Harold having finished his account. He had woken next to a dead woman. He felt there was nothing further to say.

  As a guilty man would, he refused the autopsy.

  “It isn’t up to you,” the deputy explained. “We need to establish a cause of death. Mrs. Pardee died of something.”

  “She wasn’t well,” Harold said.

  What did an autopsy consist of? What exactly would they do to her?

  The deputy said, “You don’t want to know.”

  If the 911 call is the beginning of the story, the dead woman isn’t a character. She doesn’t matter at all, except as a cadaver, age fifty, with suspicious bruising and a faint pinkish tint to her teeth. There’s no point even learning her name, which at birth was Barbara Jean Shook, given to her by parents who’d never heard of irony and, if they had, would have called it a sin.

  For Barjean, at least, the 911 call was the end.

  The beginning was a church picnic near Fort Hood, where Harold Pardee was then stationed. The pastor had made a special effort to welcome soldiers, posting flyers around the base, inviting them to socials and the like. At the picnic Harold and Barjean shared a plate of fried chicken. She was seventeen, Harold twenty. A week later she invited him to a barbecue.

  The church, Barjean’s, was Full Gospel. Harold had been raised Catholic. “We all thought he was strange,” Barjean’s sister told the sheriff’s deputy who tracked her down, eventually, to that little town in Texas.

  The deputy had reservations about this sister, whose given name was Florence but who called herself Chevy. She seemed to be giving herself a lot of credit, as though she’d foreseen Barjean’s entire destiny, from a plate of fried chicken right up to death by suffocation (the state medical examiner’s ruling, based on the pinkish tint of the teeth and gums).

  The couple eloped on Barjean’s eighteenth birthday. They would have done it sooner, but her father refused to give consent. He liked Harold well enough; that wasn’t the problem. He’d have been leery about handing over his daughter, this particular daughter, to anyone.

  Barjean wasn’t ready for marriage.

  Barjean had her problems.

  I didn’t see any sense in waiting, Harold told the deputy, these many years later. We both knew what we wanted.

  Barjean’s problems were not her fault, having stemmed from an original problem that was also not her fault.

  The original problem was severe epilepsy, which formed her personality in unique ways. Her seizures were not infrequent. Chevy, the sister, described them like this: Barjean would get a dreamy, faraway look, as if gazing northward into her own future, across Texas prairie, over mountains, lakes, and rivers. The sister could not have prefigured where that future would end, a dim, dilapidated rancher in Bakerton, Pennsylvania, an Appalachian coal town that might have been anywhere, what did it matter, since Barjean never left the house.

  After the faraway look, the jerking began.

  Barbara Jean shook. The seizures were frightening to look at. Her family was too kind to tell her this, but her schoolmates were not. “Like a dog with rabies,” said Barjean’s only friend, a sweet-faced girl for whom casual cruelty was second natu
re. “You know, foaming at the mouth.”

  Barjean was taken to doctors, fed medicines. To varying degrees the pills made her dizzy, queasy, hyperactive, or numb. What they didn’t do was stop the seizures, not completely. There was always the chance.

  She wasn’t afraid to have a seizure. She was afraid to be seen having one. (That terrible day in the tenth grade, when she woke in a puddle on the cafeteria floor.)

  Eventually, inevitably, Harold witnessed a seizure. Her mother had told him what to expect. When Barjean came to, he was kneeling beside her, rubbing her shoulder.

  How did it look? she asked him.

  Harold answered truthfully. Not as bad as I thought.

  He married her a week later, in front of two witnesses they’d never see again, Barjean’s cousin and a buddy from Fort Hood. The newlyweds rented a little house a mile from base, where Barjean stopped answering the phone.

  A year passed. Barjean’s family wrote her letters that went unanswered. Her mother left homemade goodies at the couple’s door. When the cookies and pies elicited no response, Mr. Shook hired a lawyer and petitioned the district court, demanding to see his daughter, who had a serious illness and required medical care. But when Barjean appeared in court, on Harold Pardee’s arm, she looked normal. She told the judge she wanted nothing to do with her family—“the Shooks,” she called them.

  (She was tired of being pecked at, went Harold’s version of the story. They never let her forget that something was wrong with her, and that was no way to live.)

  “It broke my daddy’s heart. He did everything for her,” Chevy told the deputy.

  After Harold’s discharge (honorable), he took his bride back to Pennsylvania, to the apartment above the Zenith shop.

  “I’m surprised she was still alive,” said Chevy. “I figured he kilt her years ago.” She mentioned, again, that Harold was a Catholic.

  The deputy thanked her for her time.

  Between the paramedics were several points of disagreement.

  One remembered Mrs. Pardee lying facedown. The other claimed they’d found her on her back. No, they hadn’t taken any pictures. Why would they?

  The second pillow—the husband’s—was either right where you’d expect it to be, next to the deceased’s, or had fallen to the floor.

  No measurements, no pictures.

  When they loaded his wife onto the gurney, Harold Pardee had not spoken. Calm and cold, said one paramedic. The other called it a state of shock.

  There were no signs of struggle. The bedroom was cluttered, but no worse than most. It was the sort of death that happened every day, the lucky ones who went peacefully in their sleep.

  Had Harold Pardee killed his wife? In hair salons, at lunch counters, the question was posed. Such a death, in Bakerton, was without precedent. Hunting accidents, yes. Drunken car crashes, too many to count. A famous mine collapse in ’64, in which nine men were crushed. Ten years later, a rash of suicides following a different sort of collapse, also crushing, the coal company filing bankruptcy and calling off the game entirely, Ollie, ollie, oxen free.

  But no murders.

  In Bakerton a murder would not have been forgotten. The local memory was a powerful tool, an instrument so sensitive it recalled events that hadn’t actually occurred.

  Conscious of its new status as a place where things happened, Bakerton cleared its throat and commenced speculating. Rumors waxed and waned like biblical plagues. When the county coroner ruled the death suspicious, Harold’s arrest seemed inevitable. The deceased had had contact with only one person. There was literally no one else to suspect.

  How to prove a woman had been murdered if you couldn’t prove she’d ever lived? This was the district attorney’s plight. Barbara Jean Pardee had no driver’s license, no social security number. (She had never had a job, being sickly, so why in blue blazes would she need one? Harold wanted to know.) Her name had never appeared on an electric bill, an insurance policy, a bank statement. Except for her marriage license, there was no trace of her on the earth entire. She’d passed through life like vapor through a keyhole.

  At his bail hearing, Harold sat quietly.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said the judge when the district attorney requested remand. “Where’s he going to go?” The defendant had no money, a truck that wouldn’t run, an expired driver’s license. He had no known associates outside (or inside) the state of Pennsylvania. Harold Pardee was as close to a stationary object as a person could possibly be.

  If he objected to this characterization of himself, Harold didn’t say so. He sat studying the courtroom wall, bare except for a portrait of President Clinton, of whom he disapproved.

  “How to prove a woman had been murdered if you couldn’t prove she’d ever lived?”

  He was released on his own recognizance—an early victory for his court-appointed lawyer, a local kid named Matthew McCurdy, who’d passed the bar right out of law school and was made a temporary public defender. (His predecessor suffered a coronary while eating a funnel cake at the county fair.) The Pardee case was Matthew’s first murder. Crime in Saxon County ran toward domestics, meth busts, and DUIs.

  “A real case. An actual homicide,” he told Josh Fine, his buddy from law school. Both boys lived with their parents. They spoke by phone after work while Matthew drank a beer on the back porch in Bakerton and Josh rode a commuter train from Penn Station to Montclair, New Jersey, where his father owned dry-cleaning stores.

  “No way,” said Josh. “In Hooterville?” The one-horse town from an old TV show: Matthew had made the joke first, but it was Josh who kept it going. To Matthew, living in his childhood room, surveying his pathetic caseload (last month, a man charged with DUI while moving a farm tractor), it wasn’t as funny as it used to be.

  “How are things in the city?” Matthew said, to change the subject. Josh worked in midtown Manhattan, a junior associate at a great humming hive of young lawyers. “How’s Emily?”

  “She’s good. I’ll tell her you said hi.”

  Hanging up, Matthew felt himself falling behind, his future slipping away. His old buddy had this effect on him. Josh, having passed the New York Bar, had actual prospects. In law school they’d been roommates, best buds even after Emily chose Josh over Matthew. He’d been proud of that, of being a good sport. Why exactly, he could no longer say.

  The rumors mutated like a clever virus.

  Mrs. Pardee was a battered wife. X-rays would show that every bone in her body had been broken. For years she’d shuffled around the house like a punch-drunk prizefighter, addled by blows to the head.

  Mrs. Pardee had been Harold’s mother or daughter or sister, a prostitute he’d kidnapped, a man in female clothing. Had been one among many, a harem of aging crones he kept locked in the basement. Mrs. Pardee was found chained to the bed naked, gray hair down to her knees, her fingernails long and curled.

  “The rumors were problematic,” Matthew McCurdy explained to the judge, “because—”

  He had a disconcerting habit of not finishing his sentences, as though waiting for someone else to make sense of his thoughts.

  “Because what?” the judge said.

  Matthew McCurdy moved for a change of venue and was denied.

  Out on bail, Harold resumed his idea of normal living. For three days in a row, he was seen bicycling into town, where he opened the Zenith shop and waited for customers who did not come. On the fourth day, he stopped going to the shop. Closed Until Further Notice said a penciled note on the front door.

  On Harold’s fifth day of freedom, his attorney visited him at home. It wasn’t easy to do. Harold lived at the ass end of Carbon Township, a mile from a paved road. Matthew McCurdy bounced along the rutted lane, worried about his suspension. His tires raised a cloud of dust.

  From the lane Harold’s house was barely visible, screened by rhododendrons as tall as a man. In knee-high grass, on cinder blocks, sat a broken-down Dodge pickup, its front wheels missing. Rusted chain-link fence en
circled the property on three sides. The loop was closed by a rough wooden gate, hung with homemade signs: PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING.

  Matthew got out of his car and knocked at the gate.

  ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK. PROCEED NO FURTHER. YOU ARE BEING WATCHED.

  Harold Pardee wasn’t fond of strangers. His antipathy could be traced to two episodes—one involving a dog, the other a car.

  In the matter of the dog: Harold’s, a mangy shepherd mix named Duke, was kept chained outside regardless of the weather, because where and how else was a dog to be kept? This was Harold’s position, which he explained to the cop who’d come knocking at his door. Duke was no house pet. His entire purpose in life was to guard the perimeter.

  Which was located outside, regardless of the weather.

  It should be said that this is not, in northern Appalachia, an unusual life for a dog. Drive down any country road, past any scattering of houses or trailers, and an explosion of barking will ensue. The difference, in Harold’s case, was a nosy neighbor, a lonely busybody who called the law on him.

  After the cop came to his door in the matter of the dog, Harold took a hard look at his perimeter. He reinforced the fence with several rounds of chicken wire and fashioned a gate from scrap lumber, sturdy planks wide as railroad ties.

  The second episode involved a car, the Plymouth Satellite he’d bought when he came back from the service. He drove it around town for many years without ever renewing the registration, because why, in a free society, should he have to?

  To listeners of Open Mike, the local radio station’s call-in show, Harold’s opinions on a free society were well known.

  The town cop never bothered him about the expired registration, but in Altoona, where Harold traveled one day to buy a part for a Philco, the Satellite was impounded. It would cost him fifty dollars, plus the price of a new registration, to get it back. Harold told them to keep it. He didn’t want the Satellite back. The cops had ruined it for him.

  After several contentious phone calls in the matter of the car, additional signs appeared on Harold’s gate.