THE MONSTERS
WE MAKE
A Novel
KALI WHITE
For my children:
Drake, Seth, and Gauri
My best stories.
So now the national media, the television networks and the national press are fascinated with an unlikely tale: terror in Des Moines, of all places. We are on display, each one of us bit players in a drama that examines what’s wrong in a place that’s supposed to be so right.
—James P. Gannon, Editor, The Des Moines Register,
August 15, 1984
SUNDAY, JULY 18, 1982
It started with a boy, and a wagon.
He left his spacious white brick home shortly before sunrise, in darkness. A humid Iowa morning. Dewdrops clung to blades of grass. Condensation ran down windowpanes in watery rivulets. The manicured West Des Moines neighborhood was still drowsy, quiet.
He towed an empty red Radio Flyer wagon with his faithful corgi, Lucy, trotting alongside him. He walked at an easy pace, occasionally passing through the pale-yellow circles of dimming streetlights. Sleepiness tugged at his eyelids.
Shortly before six AM, he reached the corner where he waited for his newspaper bundles to be dropped off. He was only twelve years old but took his paper route seriously. In a sales contest the year before, he’d finished second and won the red wagon. This year he wanted the grand prize: an eight-track tape player.
Within a few minutes the delivery van arrived, and the driver unloaded the boy’s bundles of the Des Moines Register. The van pulled away and the boy started rolling and binding the papers with rubber bands.
As he worked, a dark-blue car stopped at the corner. A man, asking how to get to the mall. Strange, the boy thought, because the mall wouldn’t open for several hours. But he did his best to give directions. It’s that way. He pointed. On Valley West Drive. The exchange lasted mere minutes, and the man in the blue car left. The boy returned to his task and finished rolling. He set out on his route pulling his now-full wagon, Lucy at his side.
Streetlights sputtered out against the rising sun. A car door slammed. An engine revved. Lucy barked for a few moments, then stopped.
The neighborhood returned to silence.
As the tip of the sun peeked above the horizon, the boy was gone.
In the blink of an eye. A brief turn of the head.
Only his red wagon remained, just a block away from the corner, where his father found it still full of rolled newspapers an hour and forty-five minutes later, after Lucy returned home, alone.
Matthew Michael Klein
“Matt”
Case #82–2745
By Sunday, August 12, 1984, when another boy disappeared under identical circumstances, Matthew Klein had been missing for seven hundred and fifty-six days.
CHAPTER 1
SUNDAY, AUGUST 12, 1984
One hour missing
In the early-morning darkness of a South Side Des Moines neighborhood, twelve-year-old Sammy Cox ran down Clark Avenue as fast as his short, thick legs would take him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that no one was following him anymore but continued running anyway. He clutched his empty canvas newspaper delivery bag to his side, and the keys hanging around his neck on a string bounced wildly off his chest. His heart hammered until it felt as if it were going to punch a hole right through his ribs, but he kept running. If he stopped, he might get caught again.
At the New Hope Baptist Church on the corner of Clark and Tenth Street he crossed the yard, the dry grass crunching beneath his sneakers, and ran straight to the east door of the church. The east door was always left unlocked on Sunday mornings by the pastor, who arrived without fail by eight AM to sit in his office and practice his sermon.
Sammy had hidden in the church before. He knew it would be safe.
He opened the door and soundlessly entered the hallway, tiptoeing by the pale shaft of light illuminating the bottom of the pastor’s office door, and let himself into the dark fellowship hall. There, he crawled beneath one of the linen-covered tables and waited.
He tried to make himself invisible. Stinging beads of sweat dripped into his eyes.
The fleshy skin of his upper arm was already starting to hurt where fingers had squeezed and pinched. Sammy gently brushed his fingertips over the tender spots, just below the sleeve hem of his shirt, and winced. He’d barely escaped this time by wrenching his arm free and making a run for it.
Sammy touched the fabric at the crotch of his shorts. He’d wet his pants again during the struggle.
He knew he was never supposed to run away, that he’d probably be punished for it later, but he didn’t care. Sammy hated Sundays, and he hated the Sunday paper route. He constantly begged his mother to let him quit, but she’d gently remind him that he needed the exercise to lose the weight he’d put on recently, that some extra responsibility one morning a week was good for him, that he should be grateful to even have the job.
She would just repeat what someone else had told her.
A door banged in the hallway, and Sammy tensed. He removed a pair of his mother’s orange-handled scissors from the bottom of his canvas bag and gripped the blades, ready.
He held his breath, straining to listen. A cough. It was only the pastor, moving around. The office door closed, and Sammy exhaled. He slipped the scissors back into the bag.
Sammy crawled out from beneath the table. The fellowship hall was still empty. He scanned the trays of cellophane-covered cookies the church ladies usually put out the night before Sunday services. The choices today: Fig Newtons, generic vanilla-cream sandwiches, and an assortment of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. A small platter of Keebler Fudge Stripes caught his eye. He lifted a corner of the clear plastic and grabbed a handful. He then artfully rearranged the remaining cookies to cover the bare spots.
Back beneath the table, he slipped his index finger through a center hole and began to nibble bits around the edges, the best way to eat a Fudge Stripe. He would eat his cookies and then go.
On several of the Sunday mornings before he’d begun to hide in the church, he’d considered trying to make a run for home but knew he couldn’t make it. He got winded easily and barely ran fast enough to make it to the church. His house was still several blocks away, and the streets on the South Side were hilly. His older sister Crystal was a pretty good runner, but Sammy was chubby and weak and slow. It wasn’t fair.
Sammy rubbed the tender marks on his arm once more. For a brief moment, he thought about knocking on the office door and asking the pastor for help. Telling him what had been happening since last fall.
He imagined the pastor calling the police. Or maybe even the FBI. There would be questions, interrogations, and Sammy would have to talk about it. He’d be forced to tell all the terrible details that made his stomach feel slimy just thinking about them.
Sammy wiped cookie crumbs from his chin and wrapped his arms around his belly.
No. He could never tell anyone again. It was a secret. He’d promised. Crossed his heart and hoped to die. And he didn’t want to die.
And besides, when he’d tried telling before, nothing had happened, nothing had changed. So, he would keep trying to get away whenever he could. He would keep carrying the scissors on Sunday mornings. Maybe one day he would finally be brave enough to use them.
Sammy slid another cookie over his finger and peeked beneath the tablecloth to check if the coast was clear. When he emerged, he noticed a long chocolate-milk stain bisecting the front of his white I’m a Pepper T-shirt from drinking out of the carton earlier that morning. His father used to drink out of the carton. He said chocolate milk somehow tasted better that way. Sammy agreed.