Caller unknown, p.6
Caller Unknown, page 6
“Easy, boy,” the man said. Though he was wrestling with a supposed nine-year-old, the guy sounded out of breath as if barely able to cope with the boy’s sudden, frenzied strength.
The meeting in Principal Farmer’s office was attended by Stu and Bettie. The principal appeared unnerved. The teacher who had restrained Ed had reported how Ed had suddenly exhibited a berserk, homicidal rage. Reilly could have been killed.
“OK, Edward, perhaps you could explain to your parents and me exactly what happened in the playground this morning,” Farmer said.
Ed had been staring at the floor. His nose had a Band-Aid over the bridge, his knuckles were scabbing over. He shrugged without making eye contact.
Stu said, “Ed, the principal’s trying to give you a chance. Tell him what happened.”
Ed shrugged again. “I dunno. The kid hit me and then it all went blank.”
“That it?” Stu asked.
Now Ed did look up. “Like I said, I don’t remember.” There was something dark behind his eyes that none of the adults felt comfortable with.
“Alright, Edward, you can go now. I’ll have a separate word with your parents,” the principal said.
When he was gone, Farmer lowered his voice as if frightened Ed might overhear what he had to say next.
“Mr. and Mrs. Constance, I know there are mitigating circumstances here. Post-traumatic stress and all—we’ve read the papers—but I have to tell you the teacher who witnessed the assault was quite shocked at what he saw. It seems Edward literally went berserk. He said his face was transformed; monstrous, if you don’t mind me using that word. He could have killed the other kid.”
Stu glanced at Bettie, then back at the principal. “Listen, Mr. Farmer, I hope you can cut Ed some slack. As you say, you know his background. As far as we can establish, he was kept in some cabin in the woods all his life up to now. God knows what happened to him. Everything’s new to him. There’re problems, but he’ll get over them. You know, I’d be happy to settle the other kid’s medical bills if that helps.” He tried to fire up his winning smile, but for once it failed him.
Farmer eyed him dispassionately. “OK,” he said. “I’ll put that to Reilly’s parents. Meanwhile Ed is confined to the classroom during breaks until further notice. And if this incident is ever repeated, that’s it—he’s out.”
As it was, Reilly was hospitalized for the reconstructive surgery required for his nose and some dental prosthetics for his shattered mouth. His parents, however, refused to take Stu’s money for treatment. They seemed abashed that their son had been so badly beaten by a wimpy nine-year-old. As for Ed, being confined to the classroom during breaks suited him just fine. He got on with his reading.
But after a few weeks Farmer decided he had served his time and he had to go out to the playground again. He could have milked the adulation of the other fourth and fifth grader; after all, he had vanquished the fifth’s most notorious bully. But he didn’t encourage the popularity and shunned the other kids’ advances.
His fellow pupils decided this was not the way of heroes. After a while they forgot what had happened to Reilly. Every recess was now the same: the questions, the hectoring, the insults when he didn’t answer. Popularity turned to hostility: “Here comes the Freak from Outer Space,” he’d hear as he approached a knot of kids, or, “What happened to your brain in the Space Lab, weirdo?” Because of his olive skin some called him “spic” to his face.
The second fight was not long in coming. The same welling-up from the depths, the same red mist, the same blackout. Luckily the second kid wasn’t as badly injured as Reilly. Nevertheless, the principal delivered on his promise and Ed was removed from Pierce. The Constances arranged a place at a school a little further from Winthrop Road. But by now Ed’s reputation preceded him: it was inevitable that a kid at Pierce knew another kid at the school a few blocks over. And at the new school there was, of course, another Reilly intent on proving his superiority over this strange newcomer. So it happened again, and again. A succession of schools followed with another broken nose, broken fingers, some more scattered teeth…
Stu’s “and here we are thens” at each successive school gate became more and more tired. Neither he nor Bettie could bond with the strange, awkward, angry boy they had taken in. Each time he regressed, each time he and his parents were brought into a principal’s office, each time he cleared his locker, he clung to his failure as the only real thing. But despite the turnover of schools, his learning never suffered. He was always top, or nearly top, of his class. The other kids added the sin of “trick memory” to his other transgressions.
Gant ordered a police-certified hypnotist to be brought in. It was unclear whether the man had ever had a child patient before: usually his role was to coax evidence from forgetful or unwilling adult witnesses. He got Ed to lie on Gant’s couch and tried to get him into a state of deep relaxation. This proved impossible the first time and no easier over the next several sessions. On the one or two occasions Ed began to drift and regress, he would snap out of it with a sudden cry of terror. He claimed he remembered nothing of what he’d recalled in those moments. The sessions were eventually aborted.
Gant realized they were only scratching the surface of something big, dark, and evil. His colleagues were experiencing the same with the other four children: violent mood swings, black aggression.
In the end, some forgotten hostility in Ed transferred to Gant. When the shrink smiled, his red lips broke the fuzz of the beard in a way that reminded Ed of someone—someone he didn’t quite remember but had disliked. Gant tried to work on this cue, but, since the distaste was half aimed at him, didn’t make progress.
Gant confided to the Constances that Ed’s PTA was concerning him, and he wondered aloud if the child needed to be institutionalized again. Though Stu and Bettie regretted their decision to adopt Ed, they were at least resolved on this one issue; they refused to let Ed be readmitted to an institution. They would tough it out, somehow.
Gloria’s hospital visits had become house visits. As he grew distant from Gant the two of them became closer.
She visited Winthrop Road every week to begin with; less later on as other assignments took her away. She didn’t seem set on information gathering; she called her visits pastoral. She would sit with Ed in the large living room, her manicured nails red against the bone-white tea service. The exotic scent of Youth Dew and menthol cigarettes supplanted the habitual odor of cake and Bettie’s staid perfume. Ed got to admire her bright crimson lipstick and eyelash thickener close up. He guessed personal jewelry and heavy makeup were not encouraged by the Bureau. He liked that Gloria Gonzalez was a bit of a rule-breaker in that way. Perhaps this appreciation of her was a clue to the child he had once been but could no longer remember?
Either Stu or Bettie was always in attendance at these sessions. To keep an eye on things, they said, as was their right as parents. They sometimes intervened: the kid wasn’t ready to drag all that stuff up yet, they’d say, or he was tired. Gloria would just flash her smile then. Ed could read that smile: it was insincere, not the smile that Gloria saved for him. He knew she felt his parents were interfering. And yet, she never complained, just said “Another time” and picked up her purse and thanked Stu and Bettie. To begin with she would chat about nearly everything, anything bar the investigation. Once or twice she elicited a smile from Ed. When she smiled back it was like the sun to him.
However initially casual Gonzalez appeared to be, over time Ed realized there seemed to be method behind her approach. Later he wondered if there wasn’t some FBI handbook on the subject of interrogating traumatized minors. Questions and answers: never too forceful; wide-ranging but slowly funnelling down to specifics. Only when that moment was reached might she take from her purse some documents or pictures and lay them out on the coffee table and invite Ed to have a look. Her gold bracelet with a heart pendant trailed on the table between them as she gestured, making a pretty tinkling noise.
One day he summoned enough courage to ask her a question: “Gloria, will you tell me something?” he whispered.
“Sure, anything,” she answered.
“What happened to the other kids?”
Gloria looked around uneasily, but Bettie, who had been overseeing this particular session, had disappeared into the kitchen to take a call.
“They found homes, Ed, just like you,” she said.
“All of them?” he asked.
“Yeah, all of them,” she answered, but she looked away again and he wondered, for once, if she was telling the truth.
“There was a girl called Shannon—is she OK?”
“Yes, Ed, she’s fine. She was taken in by a family near here.”
“A family like this one?”
“Sure.”
“Did they give her a last name, like me?”
Again, Gloria didn’t look entirely easy with this line of questioning. “Look, Ed, I’m not meant to tell you this, but, yes, her surname is now Quincy; she’s named after her foster parents. They take in lots of kids without homes; give them a good life.”
“Can I see her?”
“No, Ed, you know the courts wouldn’t allow that.”
Ed held her gaze for a moment, wondering whether, if he held it long enough, she would relent and somehow spirit him out of the house to where Shannon now lived, but just at that moment Bettie came back from the kitchen and any faint hope of Gloria accommodating him vanished.
Gloria’s methods, whatever they were, were no more productive than Gant’s. Apart from the names of the other kids, Ed’s mind remained blank of any further details of what had taken place at Eriksson’s Lot.
He was in middle school when she was reassigned from the Boston Field Office. Gloria was not smiling when Stu ushered her into the living room for the last time.
“You OK?” Ed asked. Gloria glanced at Stu, who had gone to his armchair and seemed immersed in the Herald.
“Ed, I have news,” she said. “The Bureau are sending me to the El Paso office.”
Ed’s knowledge of geography was still short of what it should have been for a typical sixth grader. “Is that near?” he asked.
Gloria shook her head sadly. “No, Ed. It’s down on the border. Texas.”
“Texas?” She might as well have said the moon. Ed felt a big hole open in his chest and his eyes welled a bit. He was distracted for the rest of their half-hour. There was not much more to say anyway. There were no more questions, and no more answers.
At the end, Gloria rose and he did as well. His hands dangled helplessly by his sides. She took a step and embraced him in a wave of scent and softness. He felt the swell of her breasts against his thin chest, the press of her necklace crucifix in between them through his jumper. Her hand reached down to one of his and, with a little pressure, forced open his palm and placed there a scrap of paper. His hand closed on hers and then her fingers were gone, leaving the paper.
When the front door closed on her, he ignored Stu and went upstairs. In his room he looked at the message. It was a phone number. Area code 915. He pressed it to his face and breathed in the faint scent of Youth Dew.
No new agent replaced Gloria. The Apostles case, though open, was not being actively investigated anymore. Everyone involved was advised to get back to “normality.” Final theory? The kids had been trafficked over the border and were victims of a mysterious rapture cult.
For the first five years the Constances decided that their Maine vacation cabin was off limits to Ed in case it acted as a trigger. The house on Tranquility was rented out. Vacations were taken far from the Apostles’ discovery site, on the long strands of Cape Cod. These holiday trips didn’t soothe Ed: the large Atlantic rollers on the beaches were terrifying to him and the continuous roar of the sea and the shriek of seagulls assaulted his troubled mind.
When he was fourteen the Constances made a decision to give up on Cape Cod. They had, after all, a perfectly good holiday cabin in Tranquility, fully paid for and going to waste. It was 200 miles from the Lot and the dump site. Surely there was no risk in taking the kid there?
Stu invited the boy into his study at Winthrop in the early summer of ’75. There had been many conversations in here over the years, particularly after the successive incidents at the various schools. As usual the desk was littered with plans of shopping malls currently in development at Stu’s company. To Ed, who had been taken to each of Stu’s openings, the constructions were getting progressively uglier. Stu was tamping down his pipe. He gave Ed the fake grin. His teeth were yellowed by baccy.
“How you doin’, kid?” he asked
“Good, sir,” Ed mumbled.
Stu leaned forward and pointed his pipe. “Kid, I told you before. Call me Stu.”
Ed merely nodded.
“Ed, this July, Bettie and I have decided to go back to our place in Maine.”
There was a pause as Stu stared at him with the same benign but earnest owlishness as Dr. Gant. “So, what do you say?”
“Me?”
“Sure, you. What do you think, kid? Wanna go?”
Stu then launched into a lesson on why Tranquility would be good for Ed. Ed knew every detail of the speech already, having been subjected to it a half-dozen times before: there was everything they could ever want on the lake; as pretty a cabin as you ever saw, boats, fishing, swimming, why, you could even find knapped stone left over from the Native American tribe that once lived there—flints made into arrowheads and tomahawks. What could be better than that?
Ed merely nodded. It was finally happening—he was going back to where he had come from.
Stu broke into a broad smile. “Attaboy. You’ll have a whale, you’ll see.”
But by now Ed was far away. As he stared sightlessly past Stu, he heard a tiny sound in his inner ear. At first it was the distant song of the white-throated sparrow: Ah, te,e,e,te,e,e,te. But the song slowly morphed into a whine, like a mosquito whine, and he heard the faint sing-song of children, just like in Preston’s Hiroshima lesson. They were chanting:
“And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat…”
And the room spun and everything went black.
He woke with Stu and Bettie leaning over him.
“What happened?” she asked.
“He fainted. Overexcited about Maine, I guess,” Stu said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jim Dove was now thirty-one years old and, bar his time in the Marines, had lived by the shore of Lake Tranquility for most of his life. It had been good in his youth. Easy summer days: crewing the steamer on the lake that serviced the hotel; working at his father’s store; gassing pleasure craft at the dock; fishing; gardening for the vacationers; drinking beer and smoking reefer; flirting with and bedding some of the pretty girls who came to the cabins from away. It was a lotus-eating life, without ambition: he went through high school without any distinction.
Tranquility was faded now, the bait store he had inherited from his father less busy each passing summer. Some of the cabins around the lakeshore went whole seasons without visitors. The Sun Mountain Hotel ten miles away at the top of the lake, popular in the Fifties with presidents and gangsters, was derelict. Back in the day it had the finest suites of any hotel in Maine. The entrance featured a porte cochere, marble stairs, a belle epoque ballroom, and dining room on the lower floor, gilt fittings that would have done credit to the outfitters of the Titanic, and manicured gardens based on celebrated ones near Lake Como in Italy. The freshest seafood and produce were sent up from the coast to the railhead at Madison, along with the finest European wines. But the allure of foreign vacations and jet travel had slowly killed off the Sun Mountain in the Sixties.
Unlike the vanished vacationers, Jim Dove was content with Tranquility. He had gone to the West Indies once but the heat reminded him too much of the jungle in Nam. This cool green wilderness was his home. The Dawnland, the Wabanaki who had once lived here called it. The high mountain that caught the first rays from the east had a Native American name: Nakuset, Sun Mountain, after which the hotel was named.
There had once been a billboard on the access road to the hotel, advertising fireworks and a dinner dance with “Fred Geary’s Swing Band—Featuring Glenn Miller Classics!” on July 4, 1966. But the hotel had never opened that season. The poster had faded and then been shredded by the elements. The billboard followed: rotted through, it collapsed into the grass by the verge. In a few short years the hotel had become a wreck; shingles poured from its roof, its forecourt cracked and was overgrown with weeds. It had become another sort of attraction: a haunted house that summer teenagers went to for a dare. The floor of the ballroom was littered with burst mattresses, used rubbers and crushed beer cans.
Jim’s life had changed a year after the hotel closed, when he was twenty-one. The postman arrived with a buff government envelope. Inside was an Order to Report for Induction into the US Armed Services at the army recruitment office in Bangor. He had fallen foul of the draft pick. Of his age pool there was only a one-in-ten chance of being called up. He’d somehow drawn the short straw.
It was a two-year conscription. Among the raw conscripts, there was little chance of being drafted into the Marines, but that was what happened to Jim. The recruiting officer shrewdly assessed the lean, fit kid who reported that day in Bangor, asked him some searching questions about his outdoor skills and handiness with a rifle and assigned him for Marine training all the way to Pendleton: 1st Division, 1st Regiment. Even then he had only a one-in-three chance of actual deployment to Vietnam. But Jim’s luck with numbers was out again.
He got to Nam just in time for the Tet Offensive. He had fought at the ancient imperial capital Hue, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, characterized by savage street fighting and booby-trapped buildings and atrocities against civilians. His right cheek had been laid open by shrapnel from a deflected AK-47 round, giving him a permanent scar, but since he had not had the time nor the inclination in the heat of the combat to seek treatment from a medical officer, he had not been awarded a Purple Heart.
