Lorene watches me as I look over Lauria’s belongings, stiff and of stoic ilk. Her yeses and nos are drawn out mm-hmms and uh-uhs, notes of observances and approvals with few words. There is a coldness to her, but it comes with understanding. The years against her haven’t been all that kind, and she’s adapted a tolerance to suffering. She talks about local events with her relatives as I sift through Lauria’s things, memories that are not mine.
Glasses of iced tea sweat on the counter; the low sounds of farming equipment rumble outside on this clear summer day. We are far away from the cold, and far away from 1999, but I want Lorene to take me back. She fastens her stare on mine as we sit together in the kitchen. She is dressed in the colors of springtime, but her eyes are hard like times in winter—there seems nothing bereaved about her. I will never see her cry, and she will never get choked up or trip over a word. She has talked about her daughter and told this story a thousand times over, so when I ask about the morning of the fire, she remains still and composed.
“I was already working that morning,” she starts, leading me back to 1999.
7
* * *
THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
* * *
December 30, 1999
The Morning of the Fire
News was spreading fast around the county, and the townspeople shifted their morning routines and steered toward the farmlands of Welch, where deputies continued to wait for the OSBI to arrive. Since the first few hours of the fire, no efforts had been made to search the trailer or the surrounding property for any person dead or alive, beyond the first, unidentified body in one of the bedrooms.
After the CCSO noted Lauria Bible’s car at the scene, CCSO deputy Troy Messick made the drive from Welch to downtown Vinita, where he knew he’d find Lorene Bible. Messick was young, what Oklahomans call a boy’s boy, and a newlywed. As he made the slow walk from his patrol car into McDonald’s, where Lorene worked, he slowed his breathing.
Lorene had just received a call from her son, Brad. He’d heard from his girlfriend, who lived in Welch at the time, that there was a house fire at the Freemans’. They didn’t know the severity and imagined only a small kitchen fire. Lorene immediately hung up and called the Freemans, but the phone just kept on ringing. A moment later, Deputy Messick walked in.
Messick and Lorene were already acquainted with each other; it was a small town and strangers were rare. “We need to go somewhere and talk,” he said. Lorene remembers that his face was blank. She took him back to her office; she had been promoted to regional manager several years prior, having climbed the ranks since 1987. “Lorene, the whole house is gone. It’s totally gone.”
It would be a life-changing moment for any mother, but Lorene Bible isn’t like most mothers. She is fixed in the Midwestern stoicism that reared generations before mine; in rural America, a save your tears for the pillow culture stands firm in the face of catastrophe. Crying is saved for the poets and the soft. More than once, I’d be embarrassed when getting teary-eyed for the victims in front of her. (One time I excused myself to bawl outside with the farm animals nearby, only to return to the house once I’d gotten it out of my system, for Lorene to watch me and say, “That’s OK. I’ll have my day. When I’m standing over the hole in the ground and looking down at my daughter, that’s my day.”)
Sitting with Lorene for the first time, a foreigner in her world, I feel confused when her reactions confound my expectations, or when her answers echo articles in the newspapers from years before. I struggle to understand what drove Lorene, what got her from one day to the next, how she resisted the draw of booze and hopelessness that has toppled so many parents in similar circumstances. But who am I to judge? If I had to describe Lorene in a single word, it would be “fearless.” And how can she not be? Her worst nightmares have already come true, so what is left for her to fear?
Deputy Troy Messick continued. “They found one body, in the front bedroom.”
Lorene knew that the front bedroom belonged to Kathy and Danny and said this much, assuming that the body must belong to one of them. Deputy Messick got on the radio and relayed to authorities still on the scene that Lorene had confirmed the room in which they found the body was the parents’ bedroom.
“I had to get there” was Lorene’s initial thought. There was no hypothesizing, no time for different scenarios to play out in her mind. “I just had to go and find my daughter.” This single-minded urgency and resolve characterized Lorene’s response to the tragedy in the weeks and years following the fire.
On receiving the news, Lorene called her husband, Jay, over at the auto parts store, just a fifteen-minute drive away. He picked her up in Vinita and, unable to get in touch with Celesta and Bill Chandler, the pair stopped off at the Chandler house and told Celesta that there had been a fire at her daughter’s home. Celesta broke down, screaming and hollering, and refused to leave until Bill returned from a church meeting he was attending that morning at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She insisted that they do nothing until her husband got home.
“I’m not waiting for Bill! If you’re coming, then let’s go. If not, we’re heading on without you,” Lorene shouted. And at that, they left—with Celesta in tow.
The three of them arrived in Welch at nine fifteen. Deputies stopped them halfway up the Freemans’ driveway. Jay and Lorene watched the scene unfold the best they could; the blackened remains of the home were still smoldering and townspeople gathered on the road, looking up with curiosity. A number of eyewitnesses confirmed that the deputies of CCSO were “just sitting on their laurels” and watching, along with the citizens, a smoking pit of wood cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. Once the CCSO made the choice to hand the scene over to the OSBI, they put their hands up and surrendered all responsibility.
Unofficial news quickly drip-fed from the home at the top of the hill and down to the citizens of the small town: that the body belonged to a woman. One fire department volunteer would tell me that he specifically remembered the body being facedown on the bed, that when he leaned the body over, he exposed a woman’s naked breast.
But the body was too destroyed to know which female it belonged to: if Kathy, if Ashley, if Lauria, if someone else.
It seemed as though every Welchan gravitated toward West of Welch, with rumors of the fire running through the town like a virus. It was an extended game of telephone, with details shifting and morphing with each retelling. Neighbors and friends began to show up with whatever they had to offer to help. But for Lorene, the only question was what the sheriff’s office was doing to search for the girls. Perhaps they had escaped and were hiding. Perhaps they were hurt and not far from the home … Perhaps it was something worse.
From behind the yellow tape, Welchans stood atop the beds of their pickups and the wheels of their tractors. With a snap of a finger, they could hightail it into gear and swarm the place if commanded to. Some even picnicked at the edge of the property, mouths wet with sweet tea and gossip. In the space of a few short hours, there wouldn’t be a person left in town who hadn’t heard about the fire.