by P J Parrish
“Who took care of the boys?”
“Antero and I did,” Buddy said. “Father set up these retreats he called lock-ins where he would take all of us into the woods and we’d spend hours reading and talking about the Bible. But most of these kids were too stupid or screwed up to get with the program. I think my father got discouraged and just wanted to get back to his church, so he put Antero in charge of the lock-ins. He told Antero if he did a good job, he’d get a Bosco medal. So, Antero took over handing out the lessons, grading the papers and . . .”
Buddy paused and closed his eyes again.
“And what?” Louis asked.
“Giving out the discipline.”
“What kind of discipline?”
“At first it was just things like sitting in the corner or drinking castor oil. But it didn’t take Antero long to figure out he liked being the boss. By the end of August, he had made himself a cedar switch wrapped with electrical tape.”
“And you?” Louis asked.
Buddy opened his eyes, blinking slowly.
“I . . . I hated the lock-ins,” he said. “I hated seeing Antero whip those kids, but when I threatened to tell, he whooped on me. Then one night he told me he was sorry and that if I kept quiet, he’d help me earn one of the Bosco medals. There was nothing I wanted more than one of those medals, so I went along.”
“What about your father? Did he know what was going on?”
Buddy shook his head. “All he cared about was if the kids were clean and polite and could sing all four verses of Faith of Our Fathers. And at the end of summer, Antero got his medal. Just like father promised him.”
“And you?”
Buddy’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I didn’t get a medal. Father told me I had failed because I had limitations Antero didn’t have. He told me that was okay because ‘God knoweth our frame and he remembereth that we are just dust.’”
Buddy leveled his eyes at Louis.
“Do you know what it feels like to have your father tell you that you’re just a pile of dust?”
There was probably a part of the forty-two-year-old Buddy that understood that wasn’t exactly what Jonas was trying to say, but Louis doubted Buddy was hearing that voice right now.
“Then came Christmas,” Buddy said. “For the first time I could remember, the congregation got together and brought us over some presents. New stuff, not second-hand. I got a sketch pad and colored pencils and Antero got a red model car. But then Father drove us over to Ashland and made us give our stuff to the sick kids in the hospital. I cried all the way home and ended up doing basement penance for my selfishness.”
“What did Anthony do?”
Buddy looked at Louis. “Nothing. But that night, he snuck out. He was gone a long time, and when he crawled back into bed, he told me that since God took something from him, he’d take something from God.”
“What did he do?”
Buddy shook his head slowly. “He burned the church down.”
“Did anyone find out?”
“The police said some Christmas boxes caught fire and they told my father they found a broken kerosene lamp, but they couldn’t prove anything. Father didn’t even ask the other boys or Antero if he did it. He came right to me.”
“And you took the blame?”
“No, I denied it,” Buddy said. “But father didn’t believe me. He stopped talking to me. He wouldn’t even look at me. And then he started praying for me, right out loud in front of everyone else in the house. I wanted to die.”
“How did you end up here?”
“After the fire, we had to start over in a new place where they didn’t know us. The parish here in Ameek needed a minister. They didn’t pay father much, but they gave us a nice house and told us we could take what we needed from the church food bank. It was good for a while, because the other boys were gone, and it was only us again. A church lady started homeschooling Antero so he could get into Faithbridge in Racine. And I spent most my time in the woods, hunting and fishing. But then . . .”
Buddy fell silent and the seconds passed. Louis sat forward, and folded his hands, sensing that Buddy was about to enter a very dark place. The doors to those kinds of places opened slowly.
“Buddy?”
“Mother started getting sick,” Buddy said. “At first father accepted some help from the congregation, but then he decided we couldn’t take charity, that Antero and me had to take care of her.”
“That’s tough on a couple of teenage boys,” Louis said.
Buddy gave a small shrug. “Then around Thanksgiving in 1961, Antero and I come home from church one night and there’s two little boys in the house. Mother tells us their father couldn’t take care of them and asked my father to take them in.”
Finally, Louis could ask the question he’d been wanting to ask since he first opened the boys in the box file. It was a question only Buddy could answer.
“What were their names?”
“Toby and Eli. They were like four and six. Eli was the little one.”
“Last name?”
“Revel. Toby and Eli Revel.”
Revel . . . Louis had heard the name before. Somewhere in the case file? Someone he had met up here? No, it was on the receipt for the donation of an organ to the church, the receipt he had found in the hope chest back in Jonas Prince’s cottage. In exchange for some services . . .
“Did the church get a new organ about this time?” Louis asked.
Buddy thought for a minute. “Yeah, we did,” he said. “I think my father thought it would be some sort of miracle cure for my mother since she missed her music, and for a while it made her real happy. But a few weeks later, my mother was back in bed and Antero and I were . . .”
“Left to take care of Toby and Eli.”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
Buddy shook his head and said nothing. He was far away again, holding himself and rocking gently.
“Talk to me, Buddy,” Louis said softly.
“They . . . they wouldn’t behave,” he said. “They knew it pissed Antero off, but they would get in his room and mess everything up. So Antero got a lock. But Toby, he was real smart. He got a screwdriver and unscrewed the latch and he found . . . he found . . .”
“Found what?”
“He found some rubbers . . . you know, condoms. And they filled them with water and threw them out the window. Antero beat the crap out of Toby for that. He’d smacked them before but this time he left bruises, and mother saw them. She made Antero promise he wouldn’t hit them again.”
“So how did you keep them quiet after that?”
“We tried locking them in their room,” Buddy said. “But they’d bounce on the bed, so Antero locked them in their closet. But they broke the lock. So one day Antero came home with the candle box.”
Louis stared at the pendant light until it began to blur. He could feel his heart beating, slow but punchy.
“Antero called it the coffin discipline,” Buddy said. “He would strip them down to their underwear and make them lay in the box. And then Antero would sit on it. Sometimes, he would sit up there for hours in his bedroom, listening to them whimper while he read the Bible to them. He told me he was just listening to them to make sure they didn’t suffocate or something, but I knew . . . I knew . . .”
Louis didn’t make him finish the sentence. Anthony was about fifteen at the time, Louis knew, a boy who was learning what excited him sexually. And it suddenly hit Louis—that’s why Anthony had kept the bones in the organ bench in his home.
For a minute, he thought he might be sick. But he shut his eyes and swallowed back his revulsion because he wanted to hear the rest of Buddy’s story. He needed to hear it.
“Go on, Buddy, please,” he said.
“A few days before Christmas,” Buddy said, “the doctor told us my mother wasn’t going to make it too much longer and I remember my father just kind of broke. He stayed home a lot, spent hours with her in her dark bedroom
reading to her. On Christmas Eve, he carried her into the church so she could attend the midnight service.”
Buddy wiped his face and sniffled.
“January tenth was my mother’s birthday,” Buddy said. “It was snowing and there was this God-awful wind blowing in off the lake. Antero spent all afternoon in the kitchen making mother kringles. Toby and Eli found the kringles, and in ten minutes they ate half the pan. And when Antero found out . . .”
Buddy put his hands on the pew in front of them and leaned his head on his knuckles. Louis was willing to give him a few seconds, but the silence lengthened.
“Buddy, you made me a promise,” Louis said.
“I never seen him so mad,” Buddy said. “They knew it, too, and they took off up the stairs and he chased them. Then I could hear Eli crying and I went upstairs to try to calm things down, but Antero had already stripped them and was shoving them into the candle box. But this time, Toby was fighting him hard. But it didn’t do any good. Antero grabbed the lid and yelled at me to hold it down while he nailed it shut.”
Buddy stopped, breathing hard. His next words came out rushed.
“I just stood there. I didn’t want to help him but then he yelled at me that if I didn’t help I would be the next one to go in the box so . . . so I pushed the lid down and I could feel them pushing back and I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t . . . Jesus . . . I put all my weight on the lid and just closed my eyes while Antero hammered it shut.”
Louis was silent. His body felt like stone, hard and cold.
“God, they still wouldn’t be quiet,” Buddy said. “So Antero screams at me to grab my end and says we’re taking the box outside. We carry it downstairs and drag it through the snow and put it in the shed. I thought that maybe after fifteen minutes we would go get them, but then my father came home.”
Louis closed his eyes.
“He came home and he said he cancelled the evening service because everyone was going down to Calumet for a free showing of King of Kings. And then my mother says she wants to go. My father hated Hollywood, but he wasn’t going to deny her nothing at this point and Antero said he wanted to go, too. So he told Father that Toby and Eli were next door making cookies and . . . and, God help us, we . . . put on coats and left.”
Buddy was sobbing now, bent against the pew in front of him.
“I don’t even remember the movie,” Buddy said. “I just remember getting home and running out to the shed. I couldn’t get the door open because of all the snow and when I finally got inside, I pried the lid off the box with a hammer and when I touched them they were cold.”
Louis stood up and walked away from Buddy, stopping across the aisle. He tried to remind himself that Buddy wasn’t the real monster here, that he had been only twelve when he held down that lid and that he had endured his own gathering storm of neglect, abuse, and bullying. But knowing all that didn’t ease the sharp pain in his chest.
“That night in bed, Antero and I talked about it,” Buddy said, a little calmer now. “We knew we’d have to tell father the next day. Antero was so sorry. He told me it would kill mother, and maybe father, too, if they knew what he had done. All father ever wanted was that his sons serve the Lord as he had. Antero said he could do that by going on to be as good a minister as father, and since I would never be a preacher anyway, I could serve God by helping him do that. So I did.”
Louis looked back at Buddy. He had left something out, maybe the one thing he was more ashamed of than anything else.
“He offered to give you his Saint Bosco medal, didn’t he?”
Buddy sniffled and wiped his face.
“Answer me, Buddy.”
“Yes, and I took it. But after they found the candle box in 1979, I went back there and put it in the cave. I didn’t deserve it. I never deserved it.”
Louis walked back to Buddy and picked up the tape recorder. Buddy grabbed his wrist to stop him.
“I need to finish,” Buddy said. “I want the ending to be on that tape.”
Louis nodded, and Buddy let go of his wrist.
Buddy wiped roughly at his eyes. “A few weeks later, my mother died,” he went on. “A month after that, my father packed us up and left town. Down in Watersmeet, he pulled up to this house and told me to get out, that I was going to live with these strangers, the Lampos. I begged him not to leave me . . . I stood there in the yard and begged him to keep me but he just turned his back and walked away.”
Louis understood what Buddy was saying and knew that was the kind of moment that could break a boy in half. But right now, he couldn’t muster an ounce of sympathy.
“Are you finished?” Louis asked.
“Yeah.”
Louis reached down and turned the tape recorder off.
“Let’s go,” he said.
When Buddy didn’t move, Louis slipped a hand under Buddy’s arm and helped him to his feet. Buddy’s dirty face was streaked with tears. When he got to the aisle, he turned and looked back toward the altar. For a long time.
Louis’s first thought was to tell Buddy to get moving, that it was time to bring this miserable day to an end. But he didn’t say that.
“Do you need a minute?” Louis asked.
Buddy shook his head. “I told you, I gave up on God a long time ago.”
“Why?”
“Every day for the last thirty years, I asked God to forgive me for killing those boys. I even went and saw a priest once. But God never answered me. Nothing ever changed. The pain never went away. So I don’t see no sense asking again. Do you?”
Louis had no opinion on that and gestured toward the door. “Let’s go then.”
Buddy shuffled toward the open door, never looking up. Steele was waiting on the porch and Louis passed Buddy off to him. But before he stepped outside, he looked back. Over the long strip of faded red carpet, at the smooth backs of the wooden pews, at the gold cross at the far end and finally down to the small bones that lay beneath it.
Then he couldn’t help himself. He looked up. At the high, arching beams and at whatever was beyond. He felt a sudden urge to say something, but no words came.
Finally, he turned and followed Buddy out the door.
CHAPTER FORTY
It was funny where the mind went in the twilight moments just before it succumbed to sleep. With all the things Louis had to think about that night in his Marquette hotel room after Buddy’s confession, it was the memory of an old photograph that had jolted him back awake.
When Louis had first seen the photo, at the bottom of an old cigar box in Jonas Prince’s hope chest, he had assumed the boys in the photo were Anthony and Buddy standing outside a church, a church he now knew was the one in Ahmeek. But he realized now that by the time the Princes arrived in Ahmeek, the Prince kids were twelve and fifteen, and the boys in the photo were much younger.
Louis pushed back the covers and rubbed his face, trying to remember what he had done with the photograph.
He had intended to put it in the Prince case file, but he never had gotten around to it. He rose and went to the dresser, where his gun holster and wallet lay. He switched on the light, blinking, and grabbed his wallet.
The photograph was here, stuffed behind his insurance card. He pulled it out and turned it over.
My boys . . .
The handwriting was back-slanted and light. It wasn’t Jonas Prince’s careful, small style. Another man had written it—Thomas Revel, the man who had given Jonas a beautiful old organ in exchange for taking care of his two sons.
Toby and Eli.
Louis sank down on a chair, turning the photograph over so he could see the boys. Faces . . . they had faces now.
Louis rubbed a finger gently across the surface of the old photograph, then slipped it back in his wallet. He turned off the light and went back to bed, sliding between the cold sheets. It was a long time before sleep came. But when it did, it was deep and dreamless.
He spent the next three days in Keweenaw wrapping up some lo
ose ends with the case, then headed south. On his way back to Lansing, he made two stops. First, at a crime lab to get enlargements made of the photograph in his wallet. And then at Kmart to buy a frame.
It was near four in the afternoon by the time he walked back into St. Michael’s. The place was empty, but things looked different. The conference table was stacked with white evidence boxes that would be transported to the storage warehouse now that the Prince and Tuyen Lang cases were closed. Up on the altar, the Prince murder board was gone, flipped over to display the original cold cases they had been given on the first day.
Cam’s hookers.
Emily’s suicides.
Tooki’s gay bashings.
Each case now had new photos and timelines, which told Louis that his three remaining team members were already back at work on their cold cases. Louis’s section of the board was empty.
“Well, if it isn’t Spiderman.”
Cam emerged from the back holding a coffee mug. Emily and Tooki tailed behind, Emily popping the tab on a Coke can.
“So tell us about the Great Train Trestle adventure,” Cam said.
Louis wondered if the edge in Cam’s voice was good-natured ribbing or a snippet of resentment at being dispatched to the other end of the U.P. to hunt down sisu sightings while Louis and the boss grabbed the headlines.
“You all would’ve done the same thing,” Louis said. “And in retrospect, it was probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Was there a SISU sticker on his truck?” Cam asked.
“Yes, there was.”
Cam looked away. Louis knew Cam’s pique would pass as he and the others built own successes. But right now, he played it easy.
“Do any of you know if we have a hammer and nails in here anywhere?” Louis asked.
“In the utility room,” Tooki said.
Louis went to the back and found the hammer and nails. When he returned to the nave, the others were working at their desks and didn’t look up as Louis busied himself putting an enlargement of Toby and Eli Revel in the Kmart frame. He took the frame, hammer, and nails to the wall of confessional booths. He drove a nail into the old wood paneling and hung up the picture.