The Wig
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
Miss Yvette Bliss, or Miss Eva, as she wished to be called, if only by friends now deceased or by those who had long ago distanced themselves from her, and whose perennial dismay was to recall the beauty and touch of glamour she’d once possessed, could be seen most any fair weather day walking the same half-mile stretch of West University Avenue, seventy-eight years old and not in her right mind for the last fifty.
It made some of them wonder, as they drove past her for the hundredth time, if the impulsive recklessness that at eighteen had made her the kindling of every party might have been the nascent stage of the illness that devoured her life.
Wispy, desiccated if not quite frail, she moved with a slinking, sidling step that was strangely troubling. She held with both hands a grimy clutch purse of white sequined leather, and her secret half-smile hinted at an ongoing amusement at something, possibly everything, the whole illusory world, a joke unshared with its resident phantoms passing her on the street. And, in fact, she was never seen speaking to anyone, as if the only conversations she desired were with people whose addresses were not to be found in the here and now.
Miss Eva was always dressed in a faded yellow ensemble of knee-length skirt and a tightly buttoned top with half-sleeves that had no doubt been expensive and stylish when it was purchased back in 1960, white high heels and a matching pillbox hat, her look reminiscent of that era’s First Lady. Sometimes, for those very special occasions to which only she was invited, she added formal white gloves and even higher-heeled shoes, which exaggerated her gait to a sort of mincing creep.
Besides the dress, hat, tightly-held purse and badly-worn nylon stockings sheathing her bird-thin legs all soiled with sweat and street dust, she never appeared without a large auburn wig, atop which the pillbox hat was securely pinned, a towering beehive that overwhelmed her small head; in the heat of the Florida summer, it must have been torture to wear.
Miss Eva was far from the only troubled soul frequenting the streets of Taylor Creek, but she was certainly the oldest, and one of the few so consistently attired for her preferred historical period. That this period was not her prom queen days was a mercy. Her style was as dignified as it was aspirational: to clothe herself as the country club doyenne she might well have become had madness not intervened, and make her daily half-hour appearance on University Avenue, as if she’d been invited to high tea somewhere in the neighborhood, and having forgotten the address, had never ceased trying to find the house.
It’s possible that a few survivors of her graduating class — Taylor Creek High School, Class of ’23 — those who had stayed and grown old here, could detect a green flash of envy in their compassion for Miss Eva, for instead of the usual disenchantment of the latter years, with its lumber of old dreams stored in humid attics — mildewed ballet slippers, a football star boyfriend’s letter jacket, roach-eaten tempera paintings from senior year art class — Miss Eva had managed to wall herself inside a moated castle where Time was a frigidly tolerated guest.
Which isn’t to imply that any of her old friends, rivals, admirers and lovers would have traded places with her: no escape that way. Long resigned to sanity and slow decay, they rested as quietly in Time’s grip as domestic doves in the hand. Why even a particle of envy, then? Maybe because she was still, however damaged and pitiable, as she’d been in their shared youth, one of their number yet never really of them. Her old classmates had nothing to offer her besides the weak tea of sympathy and regret.
It wasn’t one great hurt or trauma that turned Yvette Bliss into “Miss Eva,” nothing so comfortingly gothic, although her adored father, a full professor of medieval European history at the University, died suddenly of heart failure when she was twenty, permanently changing for the worse the fortunes of the Bliss family. Most likely it was a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, which had afflicted one of her uncles and her grandmother on her mother’s side.
In her mother, the disease skipped a generation, but Mrs. Bliss’s upbringing was hopelessly old school, and her idea of transitioning to the role of breadwinner after the death of her husband was to rush into a second marriage with a life insurance salesman who spent most of her money and then deserted her for a younger woman three years later.
Yvette was at this time being courted by a most eligible doctor’s son, but the disease to which she was unfortunately heir tends to manifest in the prime of youth, and the marriage was called off after several incidents of alarming behavior in public. Luckily, Mrs. Bliss had preserved sufficient charms at forty-five to receive a third offer of marriage, this time from an older Lutheran minister named Milton Tunney, the pastor of her church and a recent widower, who won her hand after solemnly promising to make Yvette’s “restoration to sanity” his mission.
In those days, humane mental health treatment meant commitment to a private sanitarium while undergoing long-term psychotherapy, a choice that the newlyweds simply couldn’t afford, and since Mrs. Tunney wouldn’t hear of the state asylum in Chattahoochee, this left them with the less expensive but far more difficult option of home care.
Thorazine had only just arrived as the miraculous alternative to shock therapy and lobotomies, and having little choice of drugs, her doctor prescribed a regular dose, which left her a drowsy, overweight mess, if more or less easily managed.
It wasn’t long before Yvette began palming the pills and flushing them down the toilet and, after brief grace periods when her reawakened beauty and high spirits charmed her mother and stepfather and most everyone else in her orbit, she would careen into perilous zones of thought and feeling and more often than not end up spending days, sometimes weeks, in the psych ward of the county hospital.
This cycle, repeated throughout her twenties and lasting well into her forties, laid slow siege to her mother’s happiness and to Reverend Tunney’s promise, though his eventual withdrawal from the field was not through divorce but double pneumonia, which took him at the age of sixty-eight.
Just the two of them now in their big, drafty, 1890 Florida house, its upper rooms uninhabitable in the summer and icy in the winter, mother and daughter living slenderly on an acre of mosquito woods shaded by antediluvian oaks, the lower third of the property of which was a small cypress wetland bordering Taylor Creek itself, with azaleas, dogwoods, magnolias and elephant ears screening their indrawn lives from all but their cleaning lady and the mailman.
Aside from her third husband’s estate and what was left of her first husband’s insurance annuity, there was very little money. This state of affairs somehow continued for decades, and by the time these events took place, Yvette’s condition had, as it sometimes does in certain types of schizophrenia, partially remitted and, although she was far from even the most generous definition of eccentric, she had settled into a fixed, if distant, orbit and for many years had not seen the inside of a hospital.
Showing more than the daintiest of appetites was, in Miss Eva’s mind, un-lady-like, and keeping her sufficiently fed took the combined efforts of Mrs. Freeman, the indispensable, underpaid African-American cleaning lady, who over the years had become a kind of de facto nurse’s aide, and Mrs. Tunney, stubbornly alive at ninety-nine, if mostly dividing her time between bed and a wheel chair.
Though no one ever heard her say it, it seems likely that what kept this remarkable woman going was her nightmare vision of how quickly Yvette would end up on the street or in a hospital almost the moment she was pronounced dead. That her daughter spent at least an hour each day walking those dreaded streets was less important to Mrs. Tunney than knowing that the strange bird she’d brought into the world would have a safe, dry place to roost after she was gone.
On June 7th, 1983, a day too hot even for fire ants, Yvette Bliss did not return from her walk and, as Mrs. Tunney — ancient yet somehow youthful in her distress — reported to the police, her daughter always left the house at eleven and returned around lunchtime. The house was on Milliken Court, a shyly quiet dead-end street on high ground overlooking the swampy bottomland of Taylor Creek, and the round-trip distance Yvette covered each day was about one and a half miles. Both her mother and the investigating officers doubted that anything could have happened to her on the heavily trafficked University Avenue, especially since Yvette mistrusted the very reality of strangers and would never willingly climb into any vehicle.
The clock-like consistency of her walks and her unvarying route contributed to the opinion that unless she had become confused and gotten lost, she had most likely been assaulted and then abducted on one of the quiet streets between her home and 22nd Street, a fairly busy north-south feeder road intersecting University Avenue. Interviews with residents of both Milliken Court and Oakmont Terrace, however, yielded nothing useful. No one had seen or heard a thing.
This thunderbolt, unbearable for any mother, no less so for one nearly a century old, did not, as many assumed it would, break Mrs. Tunney’s spirit. She endured it with outward stoicism, listening patiently to the regular updates delivered in person by the detective in charge of the case, Lieutenant Roger Behrens, asking him lucid questions and always expressing gratitude for his efforts. Her hopes began to fade as the summer wore on, but it was still a rude shock when, in mid-August, Lt. Behrens reported that scraps of yellow fabric had been found half-buried in the mud and clinging to a willow bush on the north shore of Lake Helen, a large, spring-fed lake on the University campus, more than two miles south of Yvette’s usual route. It was home to numerous alligators, including one ten-footer often seen in the area where the cloth had been found.
After she agreed to help identify the evidence, Behrens handed her a sealed plastic bag. She stared for some moments at the bag, then shakily told him yes, the fabric was almost certainly from the dress Yvette had worn every day for the last twenty years.
The lake was dragged without result. Considering that two months had passed since Miss Bliss’s disappearance and the insistence of both college groundskeepers and naturalists familiar with the habits of the alligator in whose territory the scraps of clothing had been found that the animal was not aggressive to humans, in fact quite shy and elusive, there was considerable debate over the necessity of killing it. Yvette’s rigid adherence to her daily route argued against it, and the fact that even if the animal had consumed the poor woman, whether alive or dead at the time, any forensic evidence would have long since gone the way of all digestion.
One herpetologist consulted by the University plausibly suggested that the perpetrator might have killed Miss Bliss somewhere else and then, hoping the alligator would dispose of the evidence, had left the body floating on the secluded part of the lake where the beast was known to frequent. He reluctantly admitted that, although he considered it unlikely, the animal was large enough to have scavenged the corpse, which as far as the legal authorities were concerned, ended the argument. The alligator was captured, killed, and dissected, and as predicted, no human remains were found in the stomach.
Detective Behrens dutifully reported this news to Mrs. Tunney, adding that, in the absence of a body the case would continue to be investigated as a disappearance, not a murder. The lady, who Behrens had come to respect, accepted this scant hope in the spirit in which it was offered.
During a cold snap in mid-December, two young men on a several-night canoe trip on the Suwannee River, some forty miles west of Taylor Creek, came ashore near sunset at a clearing on the east bank of the river just south of Hart Springs, where a dirt road wound through a dank oak and cypress bottomland and a crumbling communal dock extended a few yards into the tannin-stained current. While pitching camp and foraging wood for a fire, they noticed a decrepit white van parked at the far end of the clearing and assumed it was another camper.
Walking past the van carrying an armload of wood, one of the men saw what he first thought was a large, stocky woman in men’s clothing facing the woods with her back to him, but as the figure turned he was startled to see that it was a man wearing a reddish-colored wig styled into a Sixties-era beehive hairdo, pulled down low on his forehead. The broad, jowly face was heavily stubbled and roughened by long exposure to weather, and his turbid stare, despite the absurd incongruity of the wig, was intimidating.
Affecting nonchalance, the young man nodded a greeting, which the man did not return, then rejoined his companion, quietly reporting what he’d seen while they prepared dinner over the fire. It was all a bit unsettling, and they began to wish they’d picked another campsite. The matter was soon resolved, however, when the man, no longer wearing the wig, climbed into his van and drove off.
At first light, the men continued their journey south to where the Suwannee empties into a vast salt marsh, beyond which lies the Gulf of Mexico, and four more days passed before one of them happened to mention the incident to a friend in the Levy County Sheriff’s Department. The unsolved Yvette Bliss case had been shared with all of the north central Florida legal authorities, and remembering the detail of the wig from the police report, the deputy asked his friend for a description of the man and his vehicle. A sketch was made of his face and an alert was put out for a twenty-year old Econoline van with Georgia plates.
About a week later, at four in the morning, a security guard at a nearly deserted rest stop on Interstate 75 in Marion County noticed that a “rust-bucket van” had been parked for more than an hour, its doors locked. After waiting several minutes for the owner to return, he concluded that the vehicle was abandoned, and had just reported this to the police when a burly man emerged from the rear of the van, apologized for “wearing out my welcome,” and quickly departed, heading south.
Knowing nothing of the statewide alert, the guard nevertheless described the man and his vehicle to the officer arriving minutes later, who called it in and then set off in pursuit. In less than an hour, the van was spotted in the drive-through lane of a package liquor store in Bevilles Corner, a crossroads in Sumter County, and the driver was detained for questioning.
A cursory search of his van revealed a number of miscellaneous items piled around a sleeping bag in the back of the van that, judging from the rank smell clinging to some of them, were the products of dumpster-diving. The name on his Georgia driver’s license was Asa Bradford Weems, aged 43, but the Atlanta address, it turned out, was his mother’s house. He had no fixed address at the present time and lived out of his van, calling himself “a merchant of used goods,” selling his foraged items at flea markets. While admitting that he was in the middle of a “rough patch,” he emphatically denied being a vagrant.
Copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Greene
