Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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I told him no male animal could ever be that nurturing.
Now my father's dead, and my hens have their nests.
And now it seems that both he and I were wrong.
POSTSCRIPT: The day after Holly Watson called me with the news, my brother was due to arrive from South Africa. He was coming to handle some regular bank and tax details; instead, we drove to Idaho to help identify a body the police said might be our father. The body was found shot, next to the body of a woman, in a burned-down garage in the mountains outside Kendrick, Idaho. This was the summer of 1999. The summer the Fight Club movie came out. We went to our father's house in the mountains outside of Spokane, trying to track down some X-rays that showed the two vertebrae fused in Dad's back after a railroad accident left him disabled.
My father's place in the mountains was beautiful, hundreds of acres, wild turkeys and moose and deer everywhere. On the road up to the house, there was a new sign. It was next to a boulder that lay beside the road. It said, "Kismet Rock." We had no idea what the sign meant.
Before my brother and I could find the X-rays, the police called to say the body was Dad's. They'd used dental records we'd shipped to them earlier.
At the trial for the man who murdered him, Dale Shackleford, it came out that my father had answered a personals ad placed by a woman who's ex-husband had threatened to kill her and any man that he ever found her with. The heading of the personals ad was "Kismet." My father was one of five men who answered it. He was the one she chose.
According to Latah County detectives, Shackleford claimed I was harassing him, sending him copies of the Fight Club movie. This was in January 2000, when the only copies were Academy Award screening copies.
This was the dead woman found beside my father, the woman who placed the ad, Donna Fontaine. This was only their second or third date. She and my father had gone to her home to feed some animals before driving to my father's house where he was going to surprise her with the "Kismet Rock" sign. A sort of landmark named for their new relationship.
Her ex-husband was waiting and followed them up the driveway. According to the court's verdict, he killed them and set fire to their bodies in the garage. They'd known each other for less than two months.
Dale Shackleford is appealing his death sentence.