She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,146

made a phone call while the other watched me. When her eyes locked with mine, I knew it was time to leave that city.

It took me nearly six months to track down Penelope Maudlin, and during that time, I lost myself in the Pacific Northwest. Matteo regularly deposited my monthly allowance of two thousand dollars, but I quickly realized the money didn’t go very far. I imagined he still paid my rents at both Auntie Jo’s apartment and the one I shared with Willy Trudeau at Penn State, but I had to find my own housing on the road, and that proved to be difficult on my shoestring budget.

Two thousand dollars per month broke down to about sixty-five dollars per day. Subtract three cheap meals, and I had about fifty left. The Jeep loved its gas, and that was good for about twenty a day if I stayed on the move, leaving me with around thirty bucks. I found no shortage of cheap, fleabag motels along the backroads, which could be had for thirty dollars. Rooms at hostels, too, but I also needed money for alcohol, and in those early days when I still wasn’t of drinking age, obtaining a bottle came at a premium since I had to pay someone to buy it for me. I couldn’t sleep without it, though, and without sleep, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t do much of anything. The fog brought on by a nice bottle of whiskey (or the thick haze brought on by Thunderbird, when I was really strapped) got my mind to rest, silenced the screams.

I bought a tent and assorted camping gear in Medford, Oregon, and drove as deep into the mountains and forest of the Umpqua National Park as the Jeep would take me. I sometimes went days without seeing another person, and that was good. People who hiked the trails didn’t tend to wear white, either, and that was good, too. I’d venture into Medford or Roseburg or one of the other small towns at the base of the mountains only when it became too cold to camp, when I needed money or supplies, or to visit one of the six public libraries I found nearby. I was at the library in Canyonville on the day I found Penelope Maudlin.

The microfiche machines were located in the far back corner of the library, next to the storage room containing shelves upon shelves of boxes containing film. Aside from the librarian, a nice woman named Melda Dorrell who retired to Canyonville with her husband in 1989, I was alone. Most people were either working or at school in the early afternoon, and I was always careful to get back to my camp before those crowds started to arrive.

Penelope Maudlin was a unique name, and I credit her unique name as the sole reason I found her at all. Her Penn State file listed her home address as Crystal Springs, Illinois, but when I found the house about two months earlier, the windows and doors were boarded up, the roof was gone, and the siding was black and charred from a long-ago fire. From the next-door neighbor, I learned the fire had been electrical, ruled an accident and started in the basement. Penelope’s parents had been sleeping, and both perished, unable to get out in time. The fire had been in 1982, the year Penelope graduated from Penn State with a degree in geology. Her Penn State file contained her campus medical records. She first visited the infirmary in September 1978, and her visits increased in frequency up until her graduation. She suffered from acute migraines.

From the microfiche, I learned she took a management job with Brennen Oil in Waco, Texas. The Waco Tribune wrote up a short piece on account of her being the first woman to hold the position—notable, particularly at such a young age. She was to start in August 1982.

On her first day, August 8, 1982, she pulled into her assigned parking space at Brennen, got out of her Toyota Camry, retrieved a can of gasoline from the truck, and poured it over the car. As two of her potential coworkers watched in frozen horror, she climbed back inside and lit a match and tossed it onto the hood. The flames engulfed the car. They said she didn’t make a sound.

Shortly after learning about Penelope Maudlin’s fate, I found myself standing at the center of a blackened cornfield in the middle of Iowa, and