Rosalyn Rossignol - My Ghost Has a Name: Memoir of a Murder

My Ghost Has a Name

My Ghost Has a Name

memoir of a murder

Rosalyn Rossignol

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS

2018 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

ISBN 978-1-61117-826-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-61117-827-2 (ebook)

Front cover design by Faceout Studio, Lindy Martin

Imagery by Shutterstock

For Nell

As, therefore, the storm that prevents a sailor from putting into port is more dangerous than that which does not allow him to sail, so those storms of the soul are more serious which do not allow a man to compose or to calm his disturbed reason; but pilotless and without ballast, in confusion and aimless wandering, rushing headlong in oblique and reeling courses, he suffers a terrible shipwreck, as it were, and ruins his life. Consequently for this reason also it is worse to be sick in soul than in body; for men afflicted in body only suffer, but those afflicted in soul both suffer and do ill.

Plutarch, Animine an corporis affectiones sint peiores

And let me speak to thyet unknowing world How these things came about.

Horatio, Hamlet, act 5, scene 2

Contents

Prologue

The Phone Call

Its one of those days when I am haunted. My ghost has a name but no local habitation, which explains how I could move from Iowa to Maryland and still see herhazel eyes, long blond hair parted in the middle, brilliant smilemostly in my dreams, but sometimes out of my eyes corner, filling my peripheral vision, a dark shadow against the sun. Until I blink and turn my head and she is gone. And I stop to wonder where she is, from what dimension her spirit occasionally obtrudes into this material one. I do not wonder if she is at peace. I know she cannot be at peace.

The last time I saw Nell she was pregnant with Sarah, who would be the oldest of her three children. Even though Nell was still two months from her due date on that January afternoon, her belly was colossal, much too big, I felt, for her slight frame. Still she was full of energy and optimism, happy with her husband, Joe Nickel, and her job as an x-ray technologist in Hilton Head, South Carolina. When she left, my mother said, That was sure nice of Nell to stop by. Im so glad you were home.

The next time I heard my mother say Nells name I was one thousand miles away from our childhood home in Augusta, Georgia. I was sitting on the secondhand sofa in the sunroom of our wood-frame house in Dubuque, Iowa. I had just come home from work at Loras College, two blocks away, where I taught English writing and literature. My son, Rich, answered the phone. I took the phone from him, making a face because I didnt really feel like talking to Mama. I said hello.

Did you hear about Nell? she asked, not bothering with her usual greeting and small talk.

What do you mean did I hear about Nell? What are you talking about?

Nell Crowley, she went on, as if I knew more than one. The one you used to go around with in high school. The one who was your maid of honor when you married Bill. She was murdered, they say its by her daughter, with a baseball bat.

I held the phone, my gut filling with horror. I was unable to speak, or even breathe for a moment. The sensation was so physical, I felt as if Id been punched in the stomach, hard. Mamas voice came back over the line. Are you there? Did you hear what I said? I managed to choke out a yes, furious that she could simply call me and make such a statement in such a calm voice. Swallowing my rage, I responded, I have to go now, and hung up.

Then the dreams startedright away, that very night. At first they were all violent: A zombie-Nell ambushing me from beneath a shadowy stairwell, trying to cut my throat, her own face livid and swollen with the blows that killed her. Or Nell alive again, whole and beautiful, inviting me into her room to listen to a new band on her stereo, then stabbing me in the chest. Was this survivors guilt, I wondered? Or some bizarre, atavistic fear of the dead? Was I being haunted by her ghost?

I called her mother, Julia, to express my sympathy for her loss. I asked about Nells father, Jack. Julia said that he had died, mercifully, of a heart attack the previous February. She missed him terribly but was so thankful he didnt have to live through this horror, which was, and would be always, unbearable. Julia felt that the entire incident had come about as a result of Sarah getting mixed up with the wrong crowd, and the wrong drugcrack cocaine.

Even though I didnt know Sarah, I told Julia I had a hard time believing Nells sixteen-year-old daughter had killed her. Julia said there were two other teens involved, both male, but that there was just too much evidence suggesting Sarahs participation to believe otherwise. Plus, Julia said, Sarah had written about hating her mother in her journal and told some of her friends she would like to kill her.

Although it took more than a year for Sarah to go to trial, I kept up with her case and read accounts of the proceedings in Beaufort County, South Carolina, newspapers. Claiming that she had had no part in her mothers murder, Sarah pleaded innocent. Sarahs journal, however, was more damning than Julias initial characterization of it had suggested. In one entry, composed almost exactly one year before the murder, Sarah had written, speaking of her brother and half sister, I love her and Willie to death and I would never let anyone hurt them but I know Ill end up hurting them both when I kill mom. She deserves to rot in the fiery pits of hell. Ill take her there myself. My God, I thought, she really did do it. Yet Sarah continued to assert her innocence, so vehemently and so convincingly that I was torn.

A memory: Mama stands at the door to my room, Kool Filter King in one hand, highball glass in the other. Nell and I sit on the white shag carpet that covers my bedroom floor, the butt end of a joint smoldering in an ashtray I had made in ninth-grade art class. We silently watch its smoke curl upward in a thin spiral. Mama says, Nell, you better make sure you have something to wear to church tomorrow if youre spending the night. Nell and I exchange looks; she says, Well, Mrs. Hunnicutt, we thought Rosalyn might spend the night at my house, if thats OK. Mama likes Nell, thinks shes a good influence because she gets good grades. Still she wants to say no, has always preferred saying no; I have no idea why and never will. But sometimes she says yes. Well, all right, but next weekend I want you to go to church with us. Mama bobs and weaves her way back to the kitchen, where she is playing cards with her sister and two of my uncles. We finish the joint, and I pack a paper bag with a change of clothes. If I could, I would never come back.

Following Nells death my son once asked me, Why was she your best friend? There were the usual reasons. I thought she was beautiful; I loved the way she moved her hands. I loved the fact that, although she was smarter than me in algebra and geometry, I could always best her in English. But mostly I loved her because she was my refuge. I grew up in a home with a widowed mother who had never wanted to have a child, but whose terminally ill husband had somehow talked her into the idea that I would be better than nothing. Nine months later he died, leaving her with a baby girl whom she saw primarily as a burden. As a child I escaped my sense of alienation in books and a rich fantasy life. But there were some things I couldnt escape, one being the sense that I was forever in the way, an unwelcome distraction in my mothers busy social calendar. As I entered my teens, my sense of alienation grew into a profound loneliness. That loneliness ended, however, when I changed schools and started attending John M. Tutt Jr. High