Helen Keller Really Lived: A Novel

Chapter Ten. “The Intelligence of Absence”

Helen Keller Really Lived 365 Not Okay: A True Crime Story, by Selina Van Staal Chapter Ten “The Intelligence of Absence” Most crimes have motives. But not always. Sometimes people commit crimes just to be mean. Sometimes people commit crimes just to be mean even though the experts would not agree. They say that the seeds for mean, seemingly unmotivated behavior are sown by earlier mistreatment. In one book, they referred to a study showing how young men who have been physically abused in childhood are more likely than others to acknowledge having threatened to hurt someone, having hit someone in a fight, and having engaged in illegal acts. But the experts 366 Elisabeth Sheffield are not always right. Plus there were only men in that study, not women. Selina was abused as a child, emotionally if not physically, but that did not make her mean. And Fritzi, from the sound of it, had wonderful parents. A seed is a seed, before it is sown, and sometimes seeds are simply not good, like in The Bad Seed, which Dolores Van Staal read and then put in a box in the basement of their Staten Island splitlevel because the shelves upstairs were reserved for Literature. When Selina retrieved The Bad Seed from the basement box (which also held Rosemary’s Baby), it smelled like mildew. For many people, that is an allergan. Mildew was not an allergan for Selina, who went on to read many a mildewed book, but it was for Fritzi. Of course, if a book is mildewed, you do not have to read it. You can always throw it away and find another copy somewhere. Particularly these days, when so many books are available on Kindle. With a house, it is another story. With a house it is another story, since sometimes you cannot simply abandon a house (even an already abandoned one): maybe you need to stay there because of the plot. What was the plot? In a nutshell, it involved a heist at HVFC followed by a hostage type situation at another, secret location. A hostage type rather than a true hostage situation because embryos are not legal persons, Fritzi emphasized. Grand theft, Helen Keller Really Lived 367 at worst. The embryos would be held at the secret location until what the silver haired embryologist called KEY CONDITIONS were met. Fritzi had spent months devising the plot, and had finally revealed it in full, except for said KEY CONDITIONS, the afternoon following the Ramada Plaza Inn sexcapade. Now we are truly partners in crime, she smirked, after they dropped Aiden off in front of his parent’s cape cod bungalow in Slingerlands, New York. The empty old limestone estate house with the boarded-up windows, on the grounds of HVFC, was a crucial element of the plot— the abovementioned secret location. After the heist, it was where the Embryo Incubator containing the embryos would be hidden. No one had entered the estate house in years, and no one would think to look there, Fritzi said. In her months of scheming, it seemed as if she had thought of everything, including the perfect place to hide the embryos. But no one can think of everything, no matter how smart they are, because people’s brains are stuck in their bodies. Or as Dean Van Staal used to say, everybody has to use the john sometime. Well the silver haired embryologist need to use the john like everyone else. She also had allergies. Fritzi scoped out the empty estate house in early September. Ragweed season. With her allergic response suppressed by Claritin, little did Fritzi know that the house was infested with mildew! Now that allergy season was over, she had stopped with the Claritin. 368 Elisabeth Sheffield That was a mistake, but again, little did she know. [An explanatory aside to the reader, just in case anyone is mystified by the progression from unmotivated meanness to mildew in this chronicle of true crime. First of all, both cruelty without cause and the capacity for a fungus commonly found in uninhabited structures to trigger an anaphylactic attack in a susceptible person bear upon how things turned out. Without one factor or the other, things would not have turned out as they did. Plus, when you are trying to remember a painful experience, you cannot separate the emotion from the event. The experts say strong emotion colors...