Chapter 3

My sister, Annie, was Dale's age, having just turned twenty in May. She was a nice girl, unassuming and pretty quiet. She wasn't a looker like my younger sister, Joan, but she was very dependable and would help anybody she could. After Margaret was brought back home by the Spicer brothers, Annie went out of her way to be friendly with her. It was unusual to see the two of them both outside and not be talking together. Annie worked the night shift over at Electric Boat. She worked in the tool shed, down in the dry docks area, checking out the big power tools needed only once in awhile, for certain specialized jobs, and seeing that they were returned after every use, in good condition. She would usually get home at around seven every morning and sleep until around noon. She never seemed to need much sleep. Annie had been engaged to a sailor based off the USS Fulton, a submarine tender tied up in New London, but he'd gotten cold feet and dumped her a month before their planned wedding. My father had had a few words with a couple Chief Petty Officers that he was friends with, that were also stationed on the Fulton, right after the split up, and the guy suffered a freak series of accidents soon after, these accidents didn't stop until he was finally transferred away to another ship over in the Pacific fleet. In those days the Navy was a pretty close knit society, and the Chiefs looked out for each other.

It was Annie that finally filled me in on what had happened from the time that Dale and Margaret had run off until the time that Margaret came back home with the Spicer brothers. I had made a couple innocent comments at the supper table about missing Dale being around for the summer. Dale had always been like a mentor to me, showing me the ropes about how to get around and how to get ahead. I was pretty good in school, too, not as good as Dale had been, but better than nearly all the other kids in my neighborhood. Dale was always helping me at the golf course and getting me in good over at the Griswold Hotel with his grandmother and some of the people at the bell desk and some elevator operators too.

"Jackie, you shouldn't look up to Dale as much as you do. He never helps anyone unless it helps him too. He isn't a very nice person." Coming from Annie, this was very unusual. I didn't ever remember her saying a bad word about anyone, not even that bozo who'd dumped her cold after promising he'd marry her. He'd lied to get into her pants and then just dropped her, and the worst she ever said about him was that a person has a right to change their mind.

"He's always been Jake with me, Annie. I don't have any complaints at all." Of course, even as I said it, I remembered all the times that Dale had taken financial advantage of me, had misled me, and how he sometimes used me to take the blame for things he had done or instigated.Overall though, I quickly rationalized, we had had a relationship where I felt I'd made out pretty well. Annie just looked at me and smiled her sweet smile.

"Jackie, one of your best qualities is you always see the best in people." Now if that wasn't a case of projection, I'd never seen one. I was cynical most of the time, looking for an angle or some way to profit from things that I'd learned. Annie was always the one who looked for the good in people, not me.

"Sure and the Pope eats steak on Fridays too." That earned me a sharp palm to the back of my head as my mom was walking behind me just as I said it. This was another weird thing in my family. My mother never sat down and ate with us. She would stand around in the kitchen, bringing us food, drinks and condiments, and serving us. If something was needed or missing, she'd run and get it and bring it to us. If one of us dropped a fork on the linoleum floor, she'd be right there with a clean one to replace the old one. After we were all done eating, and had gotten up from the table, she'd sit down and have her meal. I never could get her to tell me why she did that, she'd just tell me that it was her way, that's all. "Aw ma, that hurt." My dad gave me the look, the one that said you're lucky your mother hit you and not me. My dad wasn't even a Catholic, or in fact, religious at all, but that didn't mean he'd miss out on an opportunity to support my mother with her views. He just liked to enforce discipline, it didn't really matter to him whose discipline he was enforcing.

After dinner, I was sitting on the front stairs enjoying the air when Annie came out and asked me if I'd take a walk with her. That wasn't a usual thing since Annie usually stayed in her bedroom before she went to work, mooning over her lost love or something. We started walking away from the houses, moving in the direction of Judge Avery's apple orchard. After a few minutes of walking we came to this wall made of the boulders that are so common in New England. The glaciers left enough rocks strewn about so that even the poorest homeowner had plenty of free material to build a nice fence. Annie stopped and sat on a flat place on the wall and patted the spot next to her for me to sit.

"Jackie, we need to have a talk. About Dale. He's ruthless. He doesn't care about anything other than himself. He's been that way all of his life, near as I can tell. He puts up a good front, pretending to be helpful and all concerned, but down deep he just uses people and takes advantage. Jackie, when Dale and I were thirteen, he tried to rape me. We were out in the woods, supposedly picking some berries, but really just kissing and stuff. He just suddenly started attacking me after a little kissing. I managed to fight him off finally, but he tore my dress and slapped me around some, before I pushed him off balance and ran home, but he almost succeeded. I was afraid to tell anyone, and maybe ashamed too because I thought that I'd led him on by letting him kiss me and touch me a little too. But I never said anything, and he and I just avoided each other after that. I've become good friends with Margaret now. She's a little bit in the same situation as I am now, with the rumors and everything. She doesn't have anyone she can trust anymore.

"Margaret told me what happened to her, Jackie, and it sounds to me like she's telling the truth. She says that she had a bad headache when she went to pick up Billy from work. Dale told her he had pills for headaches that worked good for him and he gave her two to take. She said she took the pills right before they left and started feeling light headed and dizzy a few minutes later. She said she pulled her car over because she couldn't drive anymore, and Dale said he'd drive them to get Billy. Here's the part that might not make any sense to you Jackie, before Dale started back to driving, Margaret started making a pass at him. She said she had a plan to get Dale and Billy both jealous and fighting over her so that Billy would just call off the wedding. She wasn't sure how far she'd go with her plan, but she did say that maybe she was even going to have sex with Dale just to make sure that Billy would break up with her. She felt trapped and didn't want to marry Billy. She thought that she could marry someone rich if she could somehow get away from Billy. She starts kissing Dale and those pills were really making her feel funny. She liked the feeling, everything was slow and dreamy like. Dale got all excited and was feeling her up all over and she just let him do what he wanted to. She said it didn't seem real to her anyway, so why bother stopping him.

"Dale took her over to a roadhouse halfway up to New Haven and got them a room. The two of them had sex and spent the night in the room. The next day Margaret wanted to go home, but Dale convinced her that Billy would just kill the two of them now anyway and suggested that they stay in the room for awhile until he could think up some plan to save their lives. Margaret said that the two of them stayed in the room for two more nights, taking those pills and having sex. Dale came up with the idea of driving to Maryland and getting married. He convinced Margaret that if they got married they could later divorce, she would be free from Billy's control, she could go on after that and find herself a good husband. Once they were married, Dale thought that Billy would accept that she was lost to him forever and would just eventually forget the whole thing. While she was all high on those pills, Dale's idea made sense to her and so that is what they did.

"Right after they got married, Dale told her that they were running pretty low on money. They were someplace in North Carolina, staying in a rental cottage on a beach that Dale had rented for a week. Dale went out for awhile by himself, and after he came back he insisted she take three of his pills. She didn't need too much convincing by then because she liked the way she felt when she took them. Dale brought in two of his friends later and both of the men had sex with her. Margaret said she was barely even aware of what they were doing at the time, she was off in a little world of her own, thinking some pleasant thoughts. She only found out later that Dale's friends were two men he'd just met on the beach and offered Margaret to for $50.00 each. For the rest of the summer, that's how Dale and Margaret paid for everything. Dale would find a few guys every week and they'd come to his room and have sex with Margaret. He kept her in a steady supply of pills and she didn't make too many objections when he brought guys in for her to service. When Dale started back to school he sent Margaret home with a big bottle of pills and plans that she would come back to Massachussetts before the pills ran out. A week after Margaret got back home, she flushed the rest of the pills down the toilet and quit taking them anymore. She was a week in her bedroom getting those pills out of her system. She said it almost drove her crazy because she wanted them so bad. She told her parents that it was just the flu, but she stuck with it and was finally over the cravings and the withdrawal symptoms.

"After she and Billy got back together and moved to New London, one night she got up the courage to tell him about what had really happened, including telling him that she had a plan all along to avoid marrying him. Billy left her the next morning, telling her that he was through with her. He told her it wasn't the pills, and it wasn't the whoring that finished it for him, it was her deliberately using his own brother against him. He told her he didn't blame Dale for fucking her when he had the chance. He'd been wanting to kill Dale because he thought Dale had somehow seduced her. He left her there in that little apartment, with no money and no job. She didn't want to go back home so she started whoring from the apartment. In a couple days she had located a contact to get more pills and was staying loaded to the gills on pills and only going out to find some guys when her money ran low.

"Billy had some of his friends keeping a watch on her.After awhile he couldn't take what she was doing to herself, so he sent his friends to help her. John Spicer went over to her apartment one day and took all her pills and he and his brother and Herbert Martin kept her in that apartment, cleaning out her system and making sure she ate and slept. When she was over her addiction, at least the physical part, Billy had them bring her over to Groton and visit her parents. That night, when the boys left her at her parent's house, she told her mother and father what she'd been doing in New London, knowing they'd be finding out from someone else sooner or later. She didn't tell them about Dale, only about the pills and the whoring, and never told them where it had all started, so Mr. Tracy naturally blamed Billy.

"Jackie, I'm not saying Billy wasn't wrong about how he's treated Margaret all these years, but, at least he loved her. Dale just used her and exploited her to his own advantage. Margaret didn't use good judgement either in a lot of things, but mainly Dale was to blame I think." I looked at my sister after she was finished talking. I could tell how upset telling me all this had made her. I thought I even understood why she felt she had needed to tell me.

"Don't worry, Annie, I won't ever grow up to be like him, or dad, or Billy either. I like people. I don't think that Dale or Billy or dad do like people." She gave me a hug and we walked back home so she could get ready to go to work.

Shortly after my sister had told me about Dale trying to rape her, I went to my father and we had a talk. He drove me up to Worcester, Massachussetts in the middle of July. I already had Dale's address from letters that we'd exchanged. My dad pulled up to the curb a block away from where Dale's apartment was and I got out of the car.

"Yutch, this might be a bad idea for you. I shouldn't have let you talk me into it. It isn't your kind of thing. Why not get back in the car and let me handle it. You and Dale were always close." I just looked back at him and walked away. I walked the block to Dale's and climbed the steps to the second floor apartment and knocked on the door.

"Jackie! Isn't this a surprise, come in, come in. What brings you here, have a fight with your old man?" I walked in his little efficiency apartment and took a seat at the dinette table. Dale came over and took the other chair across from me. "Tell me, what's been going on back home. are they all still going nuts or what?"