Do You Believe Me?
By Mary Taugher
I saw Patsy Lampson’s obituary the other day and it all came back to me, the day I met her, the day my life veered spectacularly off course. It was also the day Marvin Gaye was killed by his father in Los Angeles, April Fool’s Day 1984, and the story was all over the radio on my drive to work. But what I remember most were the Santa Ana winds, devil winds some people call them, lashing sand and dust, tearing fronds from palms, buffeting my tiny Toyota as if I were aloft in turbulence.
When I got to the newsroom, I felt a headache coming on, and I couldn’t get the refrain of What’s Going On? out of my head. It warred with the ringing in my ears, which I’d suffered from since college when I worked as a cocktail waitress in a bar with ear-splitting live bands. The sound of silence was something I yearned for like a lost love.
Somehow, despite the earworm and tinnitus, despite the din of ringing telephones, hum of voices, and clacking keyboards, I heard my editor Michael Gunn shout from the hub in the center of the newsroom, “Jamie, this can’t wait.”
I expected him to send me to cover one of the fires sparked inland by the winds, but instead he said, “We need something different on the molestation case at the preschool. Patsy Lampson. She’s out on bail. I want you to write a profile.”
He dangled a slip of paper with her address in front of me as if it were keys to a new car and grinned at me with an eagerness for the chase I’d lost somewhere along the line. Handsome, with a mop of curly black hair, square jaw, and tortoise shell glasses, Michael had hit on me once. He was ten years older with a wife and kids, but everyone in the newsroom joked that he had an itinerant dick.
“What’s with you?” he asked.
“Hangover.” I feigned indifference and looked at the address. “Yeah, okay, I’m on it.”
“That was a general question, not limited to this moment. Word is you’ve been hitting the bottle regularly. Is something going on?”
“You mean like am I contemplating taking a swim in a riptide?”
Michael gave me a quizzical look, before deciding to tack into his management mode. “Our health insurance covers therapy for addiction and depression and what not.”
“Nothing to worry about,” I said, flashing him my most convincing smile.
“Okay. After you file, why don’t we talk?”
“Yep, let’s meet for a drink at the Final, Final to chat about my drinking.”
Alcohol was what kept me going. Almost every night after work I’d drop by a bar near my apartment in Huntington Beach. I liked the place because someone always bought me a drink and tried to pick me up. I’d accept the booze and usually, but not always, turn down the come-on with a tale about my fiancé, a soldier stationed overseas.
If there were such a thing as the opposite of seasonal affective disorder—perpetual brilliance bleaching the life out of me—I was certain I had it. I’d lived in Southern California since I’d fled Michigan in the wake of my father’s death two years earlier, and I still had not adapted to the arid strangeness and glossy newness of the area, with its insistent sun and spindly palm trees, its tract houses and strip malls, nothing at all like the Midwest towns I’d lived in.
I worked for a mid-sized daily in Orange County, covering police beat after losing a coveted spot on the general assignment staff (not enough initiative or productivity, according the higher-ups) and the disturbing crimes I wrote about would snake their way into my dreams. Only days before, I’d awakened from a nightmare about a story I’d written—a man had set his seven-year-old son on fire in a motel room—and found myself standing on my bed, frantically pushing against the corner of my pale, yellow walls, which in my dream were stacks of newspapers encircling me, piled higher than my head.
Even an idiot could interpret that dream.
There were so many ugly stories: the elderly couple plagued by debt and illness who carried out a suicide pact; the 15-year-old boy who killed his mother with his Swiss army knife, angry because she’d eaten the last piece of lemon meringue pie; the woman who drowned her baby in a bathtub, where police found pet turtles swimming lazily around the tiny body, the mother insisting the turtles were the killers. Most of these stories hit the front page, but none of them rivaled the preschool scandal.
Patsy Lampson was one of seven teachers accused of molesting more than a hundred preschool children in Los Angeles County. The case was front-page news, luring national television and print reporters with the promise of dirt and titillation: the story of innocent children preyed on by malicious caregivers, of panicked parents in a besieged beach town picketing and demanding justice.
Heading north on the 405 freeway, traffic was slow and the winds raged even stronger. On the radio, details of Marvin Gaye’s murder trickled out. There was an argument, and his father, a fiery Pentecostal preacher, shot him three times at close range. I shut off the radio.
When I reached the beach town, I detoured past the charred remains of the preschool: caved-in roof, grey ash, and blackened pieces of wood, all splashed with pops of color, a plastic red truck, a rainbowed mailbox, trampled dandelions near the paving stones. Authorities said it was arson, likely set by an enraged parent.
Patsy Lampson’s home was a simple ranch house, white with green shutters. Ceramic angels romped with terra-cotta bunnies in the bushes, and two children’s bicycles leaned against a scrub oak tree where a tire dangled from a rope. I knocked on her door for what seemed like five minutes before she cracked it open and peered at me.
“Go away,” she said in a hoarse voice.
“I’m Jamie Redmond” I said, flashing her my newspaper ID. “I know this is an awful time for you. I’m hoping to get your perspective on what’s happened.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you.” The shade from the oak tree shadowed her face, but I saw fear and hesitation. And this ignited in me, for the first time in months, a competitive thrill. She was vulnerable.
None of the teachers had talked to the media yet. After months of rumor and fury, indictments had been filed, the teachers arrested. I wanted this profile. I could rework it as a magazine story, or get assigned to cover the case full-time then jump to a new job. A different beat, a different newspaper, a different milieu. I thought I could run away from the depression that had settled over me like smog in the Valley since my father’s death.
“Wait.” I placed my palm on her door, gentled my tone to a plea. “We can talk off the record. This whole thing has blown out of control. These charges sound so far-fetched.” I shook my head to convey disbelief.
Patsy opened the door a bit further.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Jamie Redmond.”
“I’ve turned the others away. Why would I let you in?”
Stepping respectfully back from her door, I said, “You’re a preschool teacher, a mother. I want to let people know who you really are. What you’re going through.”
My voice quivered, so badly did I want the interview, and I guess she read this as nervousness. She squinted at me, as if she were sizing me up, before she relented and let me in. Adrenaline fizzed through me.
In the faint light of the entryway, I saw that Patsy Lampson was a fleshy woman in her late thirties with tired eyes, dishwater blonde hair styled in a short perm, and a slight gap between her front teeth. She was barefoot, wearing a bathrobe, holding a one-eyed calico cat in her arms.
She led me to the living room and gestured for me to sit on a colonial couch, plaid and ugly, its base shredded by the cat’s claws. I surveyed the room for details for my story. There was a small piano gleaming like a newly waxed car, and against one wall a tall glass cabinet full of mug-sized porcelain heads of ladies from the forties and fifties, wearing hats and pearls and prim collars, their eyes wide with coquettish exuberance, their hair coiffed in sassy flips or delicate chignons.
“Those are lovely,” I lied. The ugly knickknacks gave me the creeps.
“I don’t know if I should be talking to you,” Patsy said as she dropped her cat and sat across from me in a wingback chair. “Maybe I should call my attorney.”
A whiff of cigarette smoke lingered around her. On the table between us were a half-eaten pastry and cup of coffee. One of the table legs, I noted, was wrapped in black electrical tape, and the image of a rudimentary bomb flicked through my mind.
“I’m sorry this is happening,” I said. “I know I’m intruding. Go ahead and call your attorney if you need to, but I’m not here to litigate your case. I’m hoping to write a profile of you, Mrs. Lampson. A sympathetic profile.”
This last bit was a stretch. The wretched details would be there too.
Neighbors and strangers and maybe even old friends were undoubtedly giving her sidelong glances, wondering and speculating, just like Mrs. Nutting, my eighth-grade homeroom teacher, had the day I saw her in the corner store, two days after my father died in a hunting accident. Rumors that he had committed suicide rather than face the shame of an affair with a close friend’s wife, embezzlement, drug addiction—it seemed nothing was off the table—were storming through our small town.
“We can talk off the record whenever you want,” I offered. “Just tell me when you don’t want to be quoted.”
By then I’d detected her faint accent—Southern California was loaded with transplants from the Midwest—and I resurrected the flat a’s I’d consciously scrubbed from my speech. I asked her where in the Midwest she’d grown up.
She seemed surprised, but answered simply, “Ohio.”
“I’m from Ohio, too,” I said with enthusiasm. I figured Michigan and Ohio were close enough.
“I should change,” she said, gathering her robe around her legs. Her ankles were fat, her toenails painted a cherry red. She straightened her posture as if to get up, but then slumped back in her chair. “I’m so tired. I didn’t sleep much in jail.”
Hoping she’d fill the silence, I said nothing, but neither did she. When I finally asked her what it was like being locked up, she shook her head, refusing to answer, and so I launched into my break-the-ice questions, like how long had she been teaching at the preschool and could she describe a typical day? When she seemed somewhat at ease, telling me to call her Patsy, I fired off my first tough question: “Do you remember ever thinking that a coworker had touched a child in a way that concerned you?”
“Never,” she said, pinching her brows in irritation. She leaned from her seat to pick up her cat, curled against her leg. “Of course, with little children skinning their knees on the playground, fighting, or refusing to go down for naptime, you often need to touch them. But I never saw anything inappropriate.”
Her answer sounded stilted, perhaps even rehearsed, but I let it pass and shot off another question. “I know this is hard, but what about the alleged pornography? Did you or any of the other teachers take pictures that might have been misconstrued?”
With a suddenness that startled the cat so that it rocketed off her lap, Patsy leaned toward me, her hands clenching the armrests. “I’m a preschool teacher, not a pornographer. There were no naked pictures.”
“The police must have them,” I pressed. “Or they must have heard about them if they’re asking about photos. You never saw any of the other teachers taking pictures of children even half-clothed?”
“No.” She glanced away, fingering the shiny polyester fabric of her bathrobe. Her neck and cheeks reddened, and this seemed to me a sign of discomfort, perhaps deceit.
“What about the male teacher? The young guy. Would there have been opportunities for him to be alone with children? Maybe something was happening and you didn’t see it?”
Wary now of my interrogation, Patsy crossed her arms and said, “I don’t know if my attorney would want me answering these questions.”
“Sure. Take your time.” I gave her a conciliatory smile, hoping she wouldn’t get up to call her attorney.
“I never saw anything,” she said after a long pause. “He’s a nice kid. Lost though. Taking care of children is something to do while he figures out life. But even if he did do something wrong, how do you go from molestation to all these ridiculous stories? The naked parade games and the Satanic ritual stuff. I mean, teachers sacrificing animals?”
I silently thanked her for bringing up the most bizarre accusations. “Yes, some of the allegations are really specific, so shocking. Did you—”
“Stop.” Patsy held out both hands like a traffic cop. “Those are vicious lies,” she said, her tone louder and annoyed. “You think I’m a monster? What happened to your compassionate profile?”
Her face hardened and I thought she’d change her mind, call her attorney, but she slouched back in her chair and began tapping on her knees.
“It must be so difficult for your family, watching you go through this.”
“And this must be hard for you,” she countered, mimicking my solicitous tone. “Walking into a stranger’s house, a stranger going through living hell, and asking all these personal questions.”
I glanced away, toward the kitschy porcelain ladies, and imagined Patsy smashing them against the living room wall, the shards of doe eyes, fancy hats, and coiffed hair mining the carpet with jagged edges. It was what my mother had done five days after my father’s funeral, when she finally ventured from her bedroom and destroyed the miniature glass sculptures my father had given her, elephants and dolphins, swans and teddy bears, one for nearly every birthday I could remember. She’d angrily pitched them against the tiled wall of her bathtub, where they piled up in a glittery torrent of pain.
No reporter is a completely unbiased reporter. Despite the cardinal rule of objectivity, all journalists carry with them their life experiences, beliefs, and biases. I reasoned the district attorney would not bring charges lightly. His office had been investigating the case for months and had hired psychologists and experts on sexual abuse to interview the children. I still didn’t know what to make of Patsy Lampson, but the charges had to be rooted in some wrongdoing at the school.
“Are you listening to me?” Patsy spoke like a teacher rebuking a student. “Do you ever think you’re taking advantage of people? I mean, it’s sort of like being a parasite, isn’t it? You don’t really care about me, right? You’re using me.”
Of course, she had a point. I wormed my way into strangers’ lives, often during times of desperation, gained their trust any way I could, then wrote the story as objectively as I could, all in the name of truth and the public’s right to know.
I decided to give her an honest answer, or least my imperfect version of it.
“You’re right. Sometimes it’s like walking a tightrope. I guess some people might think it’s opportunistic, but I try to be sensitive. And getting your side of the story out can only help.”
Patsy reached into her bathrobe pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, inhaled, and huffed the smoke in my direction, and this simple act, someone blowing smoke in my face, knocked me off balance, back to a rainy Saturday afternoon, to the ripped, blue-striped mattress on the floor, cotton spilling from it like bolls, to the telephone ringing insistently, the late afternoon light filtering into the bedroom of my boyfriend, the boy who smoked Marlboros and blew wispy rings above my head, who whispered in my ear all the ways he wanted to fuck me, the boy with whom I was doing just that when my mother called with the news that my father had died.
An expert hunter, my father was found alone in the woods during deer season with a bullet wound to his heart. The coroner ruled his death accidental; he’d tripped and fallen with his safety unlocked. I wanted to believe this, but now and then my father would tell us, sometimes jokingly, sometimes not, that he would be worth more to his family dead than alive, what with his life insurance policy and Social Security benefits. Curse of his family, my mother would say, depression.
“My girls are getting bullied,” Patsy said. “Ostracized by their friends, by the parents, too, who don’t want their children in my home. These are women I’ve known for years.” Her voice trailed off, she flicked her cigarette into her coffee cup, and left the room.
Patsy entered the kitchen so quietly I didn’t hear her. I turned from the refrigerator, filled with her students’ crayoned drawings and tempera paintings, and saw that she’d changed from her bathrobe into a pair of khakis and yellow short-sleeved shirt. Her face was blotchy from crying. I braced myself for her reprimand. I’d gone into the kitchen on my own, thinking I would tell her I needed a glass of water. But clearly, I’d been snooping.
Instead, looking at the artwork, she smiled and pointed to a finger-painting on manila paper, bright with the three primary colors, tacked above the others. It resembled a scarecrow, triangle body, stick legs and arms, circle for the head wreathed in yellow curly-cues. Next to it was a dog with floppy ears.
“Amy Harris painted that,” Patsy said. “That’s me and her dog, Bailey. Would you believe that someone left dog shit last week on our doorstep? In a pink donut box.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said, genuinely sickened. “You must have been so disturbed. Was there a note or threat?” I scribbled down this information in my skinny reporter’s notebook. It was a fantastic detail.
Patsy ignored my question and removed Amy’s painting from the refrigerator. She carried it to the table, where she sat down. I sat across from her. Hazy sunlight highlighted the lines around her eyes and mouth.
“Do you like cats?”
Her question felt like some sort of test that required the truth. “Ah, not really.”
“I thought so. You never asked her name. It’s Toodles.”
Patsy stood, herded her cat from the kitchen, and shut the door to the hallway. When she sat back down, she said, “I’ve seen the parents on TV picketing, carrying signs, ‘Believe Our Children.’ No one talks about how children like to make up stories. Some people might call it lying. But at that age it’s all about imagination. Do you remember being that young? Did you ever make up stories?”
I nodded, remembering how as a child I’d spun tales to perfect strangers, inventing an imaginary dog, an aunt who was a Broadway star, an older brother who’d won a Purple Heart in Vietnam. I’d been a talented liar. Over the years, I’d outgrown the outrageous stories, settled into half-truths and white lies.
“I grew up in a trailer park and when I was a kid I used to tell people I lived in a mansion on the riverfront,” Patsy said. “This house might seem modest to you, but it’s my dream house. And now…now we might lose it.”
Patsy looked at me beseechingly and patted her perm, tight as lamb’s wool. Then she sat up taller. “All I ever dreamed about was becoming a teacher. I never finished college so this is as close as I’ll ever get. I love every single one of those kids. Amy and Evan and even Marie who picks her nose and flicks snot balls. Harming any one of them is the last thing I’d ever do.”
Her eyes locked on mine.
“Do you believe me?” She looked bewildered, lost, like a woman who had hoped for the best in people and until then hadn’t been let down because she had refused to see the worst.
By then I knew in my gut that Patsy Lampson was innocent, and I answered her honestly, “I do.”
Beyond the dashboard of my car was a cloudless blue sky, a deep blue that at some point in my life might have been a heartbreakingly beautiful blue, but on that day looked like a plastic blue, the blue of a kitchen sponge or painters’ tape, artificial and unlovely.
The Los Angeles skyline seemed to seethe in the hot wind. Along the freeway were industrial brownfields, islands of warehouses, a weed-filled parking lot next to a boarded-up strip mall. A sense of desolation washed over me and a poem I’d once memorized flashed through my mind. Pablo Neruda’s Song of Despair. I tried to recall a verse, any verse, but all that came back to me were random fragments: pit of debris . . . black solitude . . . grief and the ruins.
Gripping the steering wheel, I dug at the edges of the masking tape I’d wrapped around a split seam. My heart rate soared along with the high-pitched ringing in my ears. I turned on the radio to blot it out, and the DJ introduced an uninterrupted hour of Marvin Gaye. Which would people remember more, I wondered, his remarkable music or his shocking death? And what would people remember about Patsy when she died?
Sexual Healing came on. I turned up the volume and began counting all the men I’d slept with in the two years since my father had died, brooding over why they stirred in me nothing more than a craving I needed to fill. I stopped counting the men somewhere in the middle, and silenced Marvin Gaye.
Silence. That was my family’s stoic way of dealing with my father’s death. We didn’t talk about him, the deliriously happy times or the bad. I sensed dimly, the way an animal picks up a distant scent, that my grief, repressed and unexpressed, was linked with my hunger for reckless sex, and somehow linked, too, with my distress over this story.
A few miles before I reached the newspaper building, I stopped at a liquor store. I didn’t make a habit of of drinking in the day, but I bought a fifth of vodka and a bottle of orange juice. Back in the car, I downed the mixture in a paper cup, appreciating for the first time its name. Screw me, I thought.
I was nothing more than media fly circling a sensational shitstorm. Tearing a piece of tape from my steering wheel, I remembered the black electrical tape around Patsy’s table leg, the imaginary bomb ticking away. I felt as if I might explode. I closed my eyes, saw blackbirds flying upside down and backwards, stars bursting like fireworks, a massive inferno twisting in the Santa Ana winds. At least that’s how I remember it all these years later. Back then, I’d been a lost twenty-something, who knew, but who was unwilling to accept, how unforgiving the world can be, how malicious accusations could shadow the truth all the days of your life, even follow you to your grave.
Mary Taugher’s short stories have been published in Narrative Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Santa Monica Review, Coolest American Stories 2022, Gettysburg Review, Prime Number Magazine, The Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. An Ohio native, she lives in San Francisco where she is working on a collection of short stories.