Lost Boy Lost Girl

by Peter Straub

  “Let me make it easy for you, Tim. If you accept, I’ll guarantee you compensation in the amount of one million dollars. I’ll give you twice that if the book turns out as well as it should. This is irrespective of whatever advance you get from publishers. Your publishers are going to do cartwheels. Remember Mailer and The Executioner’s Song? I can do wonders for your career.”

  “I can’t stand this horrible bullshit anymore,” Tim said, looking over his shoulder at the mirror behind him. “I’m getting out of here.”

  Seconds later, Sergeant Pohlhaus strode into the room and said, “This conversation is now at an end.”

  When Pohlhaus led Tim out of the interrogation room, Philip surged forward. “What’s wrong with you? He was going to tell you where he buried my son!”

  “Mr. Underhill,” Pohlhaus said. The authority of his tone instantly silenced Philip. “It is extremely unlikely that Lloyd-Jones would have told your brother the truth. He would have fed him one story after another, having the time of his life.”

  “I’m sorry to let you down,” Tim said, “but I couldn’t agree to work with him. I couldn’t even lie about it.”

  “You did a fine job,” Pohlhaus said. “I’m very happy with what happened in there.”

  “I never saw anyone turn down two million dollars before,” Philip said. “Did you enjoy throwing all that money away?”

  Unable to help himself, Tim burst into laughter.

  “There isn’t any two million dollars,” Pohlhaus said. “The money was bait, like the CDs he promised to give the boys. Mr. Lloyd-Jones is aware that he’s going to spend the rest of his life in jail, and he was trying to arrange a hobby for himself. Plus whatever else he could get out of having your brother write about him. Let’s duck in here, okay?” He opened the door to the room in which he had met the parents of the missing boys.

  “I think we’re done here, Sergeant,” Philip said.

  “Indulge me, Mr. Underhill.”

  Once inside, they took their old places at the table, with Pohlhaus at the head and Philip and Tim seated on his right side.

  Pohlhaus leaned forward to look at Tim. “Did you notice when Ronnie lost his composure?”

  “When I asked if he’d ever gone into Philip’s house?”

  “And what was the purpose of that?” Philip roared.

  Pohlhaus ignored him. “It happened when you told him that Tom Pasmore discovered that he owned Joseph Kalendar’s old house.”

  “What did your men find at his house?” Tim asked. “Pictures of Kalendar?”

  “Pictures, articles, clippings, even clothes like Kalendar’s. . . . One of his rooms is like a Kalendar museum.”

  “You can’t convict someone on those grounds,” Philip snapped.

  “Conviction won’t be a problem,” Pohlhaus said. “We found photographs of boys who looked drugged, photos of boys tied up, and photos of boys who were obviously dead. It’s clear that Mr. Lloyd-Jones assumed his house would never be searched. He kept wallets and watches, articles of clothing.”

  “Did you find Mark’s clothes?” Philip asked.

  “At this point, we haven’t identified any of the clothing,” Pohlhaus said. “We will, and we’ll do it before long. It isn’t just clothing and photographs, either. Ronnie had the fanciest stereo system you ever saw in your life, and yes, he owned a thousand CDs. But the ones he kept next to his CD player had all been burned on a laptop equipped with a camera. They’re like home movies. The one I looked at showed boys pleading for their lives.”

  “Did he kill them at the house in Old Point Harbor?” Tim asked.

  “Yes. It’s nice and secluded.”

  “Which leaves the question, What made him so uneasy about our knowing he owned Kalendar’s house?”

  “Exactly,” Pohlhaus said. “I want to go over there and poke around. If you promise to behave, you can join me. Just don’t touch anything or get in the way.”

  “Now?” Tim asked. “Well, why not?”

  “You can’t be serious,” Philip said.

  “You’re invited, too, Mr. Underhill, under the same conditions.”

  “The whole idea is ridiculous.”

  “All right, then,” Pohlhaus said. “Drive yourself home. Your brother can drop in on you later, if there’s anything to report.”

  “Philip?” Tim said.

  “I don’t care what you do,” Philip said, already bolting from the room.

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 28 June 2003

  One of the strangest trips of my life, that drive to Michigan Street with Sergeant Pohlhaus. Ronnie Lloyd-Jones’s toxins had not yet fully left me, and I kept having the fantasy that the unmarked car was the size of a go-cart, and that Pohlhaus and I were like a pair of dwarfs hurtling through an underground tunnel. The man made me feel depressed and unclean, blocked in every way. I suppose that’s one way to define evil: as the capacity to make other people feel unclean and stifled. Philip scarcely made me feel much better, although then more than ever I saw him as the clueless little boy paralyzed by Pop’s aimless brutality.

  Pohlhaus pulled into the little half-drive, and we got out and walked around to the back. I thought of Omar Hillyard perched on his love seat, watching everything we did. His eyes were practically drilling into my back.

  Like Mark, we went in through the back door, but I felt nothing of what he had on first going into Kalendar’s house. It was almost disappointing. I had been half-expecting the ectoplasmic spider webs, the terrible smell, and the rejecting force field. Instead, all that happened was that the sergeant and I walked into an empty kitchen.

  “Ronnie didn’t spend a lot of time in this place,” Pohlhaus said. “He said he tried to scare the boys away, didn’t he? Why should he bother?”

  “Maybe there was something he didn’t want them to see,” I said.

  “That’s what I think.”

  “But Mark went all through the house,” I told him. “And he didn’t find anything except what Joseph Kalendar left behind.”

  “So let’s look at what Kalendar left behind,” Pohlhaus said.

  Unlike the boys, we began with the added room and what Mark had called “the giant’s bed.”

  “God, that’s nasty,” Pohlhaus said.

  “Kalendar had a daughter,” I said. “He told everyone his wife had miscarried, and he kept the child a secret from everyone outside the house. When she was three or four, she tried to escape, and he added this room and slapped this so-called bed together so he could torture her on it.”

  “Where does this stuff come from? There was no daughter.”

  “Not officially, no. But she existed.”

  “And we never knew anything about this daughter? That’s hard to believe.”

  “If you want to hear the story, talk to a man named Omar Hillyard. He’s lived across the street since 1955.”

  Pohlhaus gave me an interrogative glance. “I think I’ll do that.” He prodded the straps with a ballpoint pen.

  Mark and “Lucy Cleveland” came vividly to mind: they had coupled here to vanquish the memory of her torture; or to accomplish some darker, still restorative purpose. What you can’t convert, you can sometimes incorporate exactly as is, or so I found myself thinking. Either way, you make it yours.

  Together, we walked through every inch of that place. I saw exactly where Mark had been when he found the photograph album; I saw the hole in the plaster he made with his crowbar; like him I moved down the narrow secret corridors and staircases between the walls. In the living room, I saw their footprints in the dust, Mark’s and Jimbo’s, and some that must have been Ronnie Lloyd-Jones’s. I also thought I saw the small, high-arched traces of Lucy Cleveland’s lovely naked foot.

  Sergeant Pohlhaus was astonished by the hidden passages. All of this was new to him. The peculiarities Kalendar had added to his house had never figured in the official accounts of his crime, because they had remained undiscovered until Mark opened them up.

  In the basemen
t, a real warren, the old coal-burning furnace that had been original to the house stood next to an oil burner installed sometime in the fifties. The newer heating system was piped into the old flues.

  Here were the chute and the metal “operating table” Mark had described to Jimbo, the empty hampers and the trunk filled with women’s hair—the legacy of Joseph Kalendar’s insanity.

  “This is what turned Ronnie on,” I said.

  Pohlhaus nodded. He was moving carefully around the furnace, picking his way through the old stains as he stared down at the floor. I watched him bend down on a clear spot and look at a blackened feather of blood as if he expected it to sit up and talk. When he had enough of the old stains, he stood up again and went around to the front of the older of the two furnaces. He swung open its heavy door. From a jacket pocket he pulled out a flashlight the size of a ballpoint pen and shone it into the furnace’s maw.

  “Pretty clean,” he said.

  I thought he was acting exactly like a civil servant. I did my best to play along. “Didn’t Kalendar burn some of his victims in there?”

  “That he did.” Pohlhaus swung shut the furnace door and began to do his tiptoeing-through-the-tulips act again with the antique bloodstains. He turned his little pocket flashlight on the floor, and when the narrow beam of light fell on the stains, they seemed to turn purple, as if they were molten at the core.

  I said, “You wouldn’t think there’d be color like that in thirty-year-old bloodstains.”

  “They aren’t that old,” he said. “Some of them might be ten years old, but most of them were deposited more recently.”

  “How could that be?” I asked, still not getting it.

  “Joseph Kalendar didn’t spill this blood,” Pohlhaus said. “Your friend Ronnie did. This is where he brought some of the boys he abducted. Your brother suspected that we would find something like this. That’s why he couldn’t face the idea of coming along.”

  I looked at the floor in horror.

  “The next question is, Where did he bury the bodies?”

  The faces of dead boys stared up at me from a few inches beneath the concrete.

  “Not down here,” he said. “This whole surface is uniform and intact. We have to check outside.”

  I must have looked stunned, because he asked me if I was all right.

  we r 2gether, I remembered.

  He pulled out his cell phone as we walked up the stairs. Half of what he said into it was code, but I understood that he was asking for a crime-scene unit to be detailed to Michigan Street, along with two pairs of officers.

  “You look a little off your feed,” Pohlhaus said. “If you’d like to go to your brother’s house while I do this, I’d understand. Or if you’d like to go back to the Pforzheimer, I’ll have one of my officers take you there.”

  I told him I was fine, which was stretching a point beyond recognition.

  “I won’t send you away if you still want to help out here,” Pohlhaus said. “But your family was involved, and this might be hard for you.”

  “My nephew is okay.”

  “Your brother doesn’t seem to share your opinion.” Pohlhaus scanned me with his hunter’s eyes. I was sure that he had no doubt as to Mark’s fate.

  “Philip gave up as soon as Mark vanished. He couldn’t bear the anxiety of wondering if his son was still alive. So he quit wondering.”

  “I see.”

  “He buried his own son. I’ll never forgive him for it.”

  “If your nephew is okay, where is he?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  We were standing at the top of the basement stairs, just inside the door to the kitchen. Some of those footprints in the dust were Mark’s, and some of them were another’s.

  Pohlhaus said, “Let’s go out in back.”

  We went outside onto the broken steps. Insects buzzed in the tall grass. “We have dogs that can sniff out bodies, but for the moment let’s see what we can do by ourselves, all right?”

  “Look at those weeds,” I said. “Nobody’s been buried back here, at least not recently.”

  “You could be right, Mr. Underhill.” He stepped down into the waist-high tangle of weeds and grasses. “But he did kill his victims here, at least some of them. And given his reverence for Joseph Kalendar, I think this yard is still a good bet.”

  I stepped down beside him and pretended to know what I was looking for.

  The trail beaten down by Mark and Jimbo, then by Mark alone, straggled toward the wooden steps and the kitchen door from the lawn on the south side of the house. There were no other signs of passage through the backyard.

  “If he carried the bodies out here, there’d be beaten-down grass, there’d be some kind of trail.”

  “Don’t give up so soon,” Pohlhaus said. He loosened his tie and wiped his handkerchief across his forehead. In spite of this gesture he still looked impervious to the heat. My hair was glued to my head with perspiration.

  “Do you know how you can always tell if you’ve found a place where someone stashed a corpse?”

  I looked at him.

  “Push in a shovel. A stick does just as well. All you need is an opening. The smell builds up underground, waiting to jump out at you.”

  “Swell,” I said. “I still say he couldn’t have buried anything back here. We’d be able to see his tracks.”

  Pohlhaus began ambling along toward the back of the yard and the big fence. He was moving slowly and keeping his eyes on the ground. I shuffled here and there, positive I would find nothing. After a little while, I realized that Pohlhaus was moving in a straight line for about six feet, then turning on his heel and reversing himself along the path he had just taken. In effect, he was creating a grid, which then could be linked to other grids until every inch of the weedy ground had been inspected.

  “You can leave, if you want to. In another couple of minutes, we’re going to be drowning in cops here.”

  I said if he wasn’t going to give up, neither was I.

  The forensic team showed up, and after introducing me, Pohlhaus went inside to show them the basement and the bloodstains. The patrolmen rolled up and were organized to put up crime-scene tape and keep civilians away.

  “At this point, you’d better stand down, Mr. Underhill,” he told me.

  Two uniformed men I remembered seeing in Sherman Park divided the front half of the yard between them. They were wasting their time, I knew. I wanted to see Pohlhaus admit he’d been wrong.

  A criminalist named Gary Sung, who had been introduced to me as a trainee from Singapore, popped out of the back door, waved Pohlhaus toward him, and engaged in a brief conversation that required his pointing several times toward the wall. I had no idea what they were talking about, so I ignored it. I was leaning against the side of the house, just at the edge of the overgrown yard.

  The two officers I had seen in the park, Rote and Selwidge, looked at something and called for Pohlhaus. He walked up to them and stared down at whatever they had discovered. He waved me toward them. When I got there, I saw what the height of the grasses had until then kept from view. Someone, having decided to clear a long strip of ground about three feet wide and running the length of the property from fence to fence, had overturned the earth in that strip a thousand times, breaking up the surface, softening the ground, and leaving a nice fat stripe of brown earth, through which only a few weeds had begun to protrude. It had been cultivated, that little strip of land.

  “I wonder,” I said. “If that’s it, how did he . . . ?”

  “If I’m right about what Gary Sung told me, any minute now we’re going to see him pop up out of the ground right over . . . there.”

  He had just spotted exactly what he had been hoping to see.

  “Out of the ground?” I asked. Then I understood: I knew what he had known for the previous twenty minutes or so.

  There came a groaning noise, and the sound of earth and pebbles clattering into a hole. Exactly at the few square
feet of ground where the sergeant was pointing, a panel of weeds and grass swung up into the air and fell away, revealing the sweaty, smiling face of Gary Sung.

  “It’s dahk in there!” Sung crowed.

  I moved toward his head, which by stages rose out of the ground as he climbed up the steps built into the earth.

  “Do you believe this madman?” Sung sprang out of the hole, waving an entrenching tool. “He dug a tunnel and hid it behind a daw you can’t see!”

  Mark had not noticed the door in the basement wall; Sergeant Pohlhaus and I had failed to see it; only Gary Sung had seen it, and he was transported with pleasure. “So now we know,” he said. “Gotta be careful.”

  “Very careful,” Pohlhaus agreed. He looked at me. “Our Dangerous Materials Squad handles this kind of thing. I’ll get them out here. We’ll probably want to pull down that miserable wall, give us some room to maneuver.”

  He went up to the strip of ground that looked like temporarily neglected farmland. “Gary, give me that tool, please.”

  Gary Sung went across eight feet of ground and passed it to him, handle first.

  “Come over here,” Pohlhaus said to me.

  I moved up beside him. He hunkered down next to the wide brown stripe on the ground, slid the entrenching tool into the soft earth, and scooped away some dirt, then a little more. “Ah,” he said. I bent over and caught the stench drifting out of the little opening Pohlhaus had made; death and rot and ammonia, a smell of primal process. In a second, it seemed to coat my skin.

  I’ve been writing for more than an hour, and I can’t go on. Anyhow, some kind of earthmoving machine is coming up the alley, making a noise like a motorcycle gang.

  Tim put down his pen and thought about what he was going to do next. Dressed in his Principal Battley costume of gray suit, white shirt, and necktie, Philip had announced that he had no interest in “standing around” in his backyard and “gawking at” the police while they leveled the cement wall and excavated for bodies. While Tim had occupied himself with his journal, Philip had wandered around the house, snapping the television on and off, picking up magazines and putting them down again. Around three P.M., Philip clumped up the steps; he reappeared downstairs ten minutes later minus the necktie.