Freedomland

by Richard Price

  Lorenzo saw Brenda hauled to her feet, Elaine half carrying her now, using the broom handle as a staff, talking, talking…

  “Here, see that?” Karen pointed to a depression that seemed to be filled with dead leaves. Using her pole, she started flipping them aside, then saw that the ground at the base was the same color and texture as its surroundings—a natural sinkhole.

  A faint breeze wafted through the woods, cooling, then chilling the perspiration inside his suit. He began to sweat again, the combination of humidity and asthma so debilitating that the simple untidiness of nature—a dip in land, a felled, half-rotted tree—seemed to him an insurmountable obstruction.

  “And here.” Karen tapped a downed branch that lay suspended over the ground, each end resting on a rock. “Does that look natural to you?”

  “No way,” he said mindlessly.

  “Looks like somebody balanced it there, right? You look around, you see any other branches like that? Maybe somebody’s trying to establish a perimeter. Maybe it’s a little telltale trap to let the guy know his hideout’s been discovered. Guy comes back, sees the branch is off the rock—he knows it’s time to move on out. See what I’m saying? So you look for any unnatural symmetry, any patterns. This one bastard, he’d lay out twigs in a row like fallen dominoes, go out and do his thing, come back, see if anybody broke the line. You got to look for that.”

  “I got you,” Lorenzo said, then chanced a last hit of spray.

  There was a commotion far off to the left, white suits scurrying like snowmen in hell. She took a hand radio from inside her suit. “What’s up.”

  “We had a little bit of a personal meltdown out here, Karen,” a male voice answered.

  “OK.” She signed off.

  Through the trees they watched two snowmen transport a third in a fireman’s carry, followed by a fourth snowman with a shoulder-mounted Betacam.

  “See these here?” Karen pointed to a crater maybe twenty feet across that hosted weeds, ferns, and the ubiquitous arms to heaven. “You know what this is? This is from when they were digging around for that reporter thirty years ago. There’s something like fifty holes like this around here. Christ, talk about not dying in vain. The guy should be canonized. They closed this place down? It was like closing down Auschwitz. Do you have any idea of the generations of children, generation after generation of children that suffered in there?” Karen thrust her pole like a sword in the direction of the hospital grounds, which were not yet visible.

  “Thousands, thousands, that, that, died, that were abused, neglected, forgotten, that just, just, pined away.” Karen paused to brush some spittle from the corner of her mouth. “We find toys up there sometimes—old rubber dolls, a picture book, wooden blocks, forty, fifty, sixty years old.” Karen’s jaw locked at a slant. “Anyways, these craters? We don’t go in them. We leave them for you guys, because these suits are great for bugs but they don’t do shit against copperheads.”

  They worked their way through the woods, Lorenzo trudging after her like a hunchback, his booties totally gone from tramping through brackish rivulets and dry rocky soil. To their left, Brenda and Elaine plodded on, Elaine as taut and tuned now as she was before they had entered these woods, Brenda, like Lorenzo, careening from tree to tree. As far as reading the lay of the land, Lorenzo remained blind, but Karen tagged three possibles—two patches of deep green grass and a small cluster of cigarette butts—explaining to him that digging a grave does bring on a case of the nerves, and a pile like that in a contained space suggested the spoor of a chain-smoker out here in the middle of nowhere.

  The first of the institute’s ruined buildings were now visible about a football field’s length ahead, the cottages mostly camouflaged by vegetation but the more imposing children’s dormitories behind them rising above the tree line, high monolithic fortresses, shadowed and square, standing between the forest and the afternoon sun.

  “Look, see that?” Karen pointed out a scatter of boxes covering a sandy patch of the forest floor, maybe a hundred or more. “Marie,” Karen called, Marie coming over again, trailing Teenie and Jesse. Karen used her stick to flip the lid, revealing snug stacks of roofing tiles—brick-red, wave-patterned adobe-style shingles. “This used to be the pickup spot when the staff was selling stuff out of the institute.”

  “You should’ve seen what we found out here five years ago,” Marie said, her chin over Karen’s shoulder. “It was like a flea market. They must’ve run like hell when the investigators started showing up.”

  “Just left everything.”

  “Blenders, sneakers, aspirin, silverware, garden tools.”

  “You know who took it all?” Karen wiped her face.

  “The cops?” Lorenzo said reflexively hunched over again, bug-eyed, biting at the air, telling himself to be still, very still. From his crouch, looking up, he tracked Jesse’s distraught gaze to Brenda, sitting on yet another stump, hands on knees, Elaine leaning over her, rubbing her back, talking, talking, talking, Brenda starting to rock.

  “Why’d you say you put Elaine with Brenda again?” Lorenzo asked in a high wheeze.

  “Sympathy.”

  “Sympathy,” he repeated, waiting.

  “I never lost a child, Lorenzo. Did you?”

  “Not really,” he said quietly, thinking, Not exactly.

  “Anyways, the cops?” Karen continued. “Most of them, they’re friendly to us and all, but basically they don’t really like us because they think we’re all, like, adrenaline over procedure, you know? And we think they’re a bunch of lazy bastards. You know—they put out a poster, call it a day. Or, you know, they’ll like this one possible perp, so they go after him and if that doesn’t pan out they fade. So what we got to do is keep their interest up, you know, because otherwise … You got to keep it hot, you got to keep it in the news, you got to keep coming up with fresh stuff—a slipper, a brother-in-law, a jawbone. I swear, half the shit we come up with? We just make it up—new witnesses, new evidence—just to get it back in the news. But you know, some of those guys, the detectives? We know some great ones. These guys, they’re like you, Lorenzo.”

  “Oh yeah?” Not having heard a word, Lorenzo was striving for that one elusive gulp of air, the one that would only be acquired if he could just get his pectoral muscles to rise up a tiny bit more.

  “These detectives, there’s only a few, but they never give up, never.”

  He shaped his lips into a straw, just wanting a sip, settling for a sip. He had been told that, when his father died of an asthma attack, his last words, spoken to his wife, were, “This the one, baby.”

  “Doesn’t that sound like you, Lorenzo?”

  Vaguely aware that she was trying to hustle him in some way, he managed to cast a glance toward Brenda and Elaine, then back up at Karen. “You know something?” he gasped. “With this heat out here? Brenda. I don’t think she’s gonna make it…” Nodding in agreement with himself, he sank to his knees, then flopped facedown onto the forest floor.

  20

  Jesse stepped out of the woods and stood before Cottage 9, one derelict two-story crumble among a dozen similar buildings scattered throughout a three-acre bowl of brush and high weeds. The cottages were sunk into the junkyard foliage like pumpkins in a field. Karen, Marie, and Teenie stood silently a few feet away from her, and Jesse saw that other squads, too, were emerging from the tree line at various spots on the circumference, popping out in billowing white clusters to regroup tentatively in front of the other cottages. Their team leaders squinted in the bald heat, sizing up the structures that lay before them.

  Looking around for Brenda, Jesse spotted her in the distance, being marched around the circumference of the cottage clearing by Elaine. Brenda was leading with her knees, propelling herself forward in a fatigued duck walk. Jesse had yet to exchange a single word with her since they had left the parking lot; as soon as the search had begun, Marie and Teenie had hustled her away from Brenda, and Jesse quickly came to understand that
part of the mother-daughter team’s assignment today was keeping her distracted. They were trying to accomplish this with a nonstop stream of talk—a history of the group; tips on how to read the ground, the only items of interest that stuck with Jesse through the barrage of words; tidbits of information about Elaine, Brenda’s new best friend and the mother of an abducted child herself, half crazed with mission and therefore considered by the others as holy.

  After that initial swoop and shuffle, whenever Jesse would attempt to rejoin Brenda or at least to make it a threesome, one Kenter or another would quickly step up and whisk her away. This much was clear to her now: Brenda was with Elaine, and Elaine only, by design; something was shaping up out here in the jungle well beyond the hunt for Cody Martin.

  The closest Jesse had gotten to reestablishing contact was the moment Lorenzo collapsed, all four women rushing to his aid, leaving a stuporous Brenda standing there by herself. When Jesse made her move, Brenda snapped to, throwing her a hard stare that made Jesse hesitate, and by the time she regained her footing, Elaine was back in possession. Everyone looked on as Teenie fed Lorenzo a few puffs of her own asthma inhaler, wondering aloud why the big dope didn’t just say he was having trouble breathing from the beginning. Not only Teenie but Marie had packed prescription inhalers, to say nothing of the inhalers and even pure oxygen available at Chris Konicki’s first aid station, which was only a few hundred yards away, out on the main road.

  Cottage 9 was fronted by the remains of a gray wood porch, the painted-on number itself close to obliteration, fading into the weather-grooved handrail. The building was sand-colored, door-less, flanked by shatter-toothed window frames, yawning maws that even in the searing whiteness of the day revealed nothing of what was to be found inside.

  Marie, stepping around an encrusted metal lawn chair that lay on its side in the high weeds, approached the house, Teenie and Karen almost simultaneously stepping back as if to give her elbow room. She put a hand on the porch rail but didn’t step up on the weathered boards, just stood there motionless, the others waiting in silence until she finally turned to them.

  “Forget it. We’re not going in.”

  “Why not?” Jesse asked.

  “Something doesn’t feel right.” Marie picked her way back to the group.

  “What.”

  “I don’t know, it just doesn’t.”

  “If my mom says we don’t go in, we don’t go in,” Teenie said.

  “What…Why?”

  “She just knows.” Karen plucked a tick off Jesse’s sleeve.

  “There’s something in there, but…” Marie pinched and fluttered the front of her paper suit. “Get Louis to do the dog.”

  Karen hauled out her hand radio again.

  “Lou, where you at.”

  “What’s up?” Louis’s voice came through static, distant and minute.

  “We’re at Cottage 9. Marie’s got the willies.”

  “We did it this morning. Nothing there but rats. Don’t go in.”

  “How about Cottage 8.”

  “Nothing. Just do the grounds.”

  “OK.” Karen signed off, then gestured to Jesse. “Come here.”

  Taking Jesse by the hand she brought her to the edge of the porch. “Just…” Karen stood with her in silence. After a few seconds of acclimation, Jesse could hear the scuttling.

  “He was in here?”

  “The dog was,” Karen said.

  “So the place was searched already?”

  “Oh yeah, Louis did the whole field this morning like six, seven o’clock. Him and a few of the guys.”

  “And?”

  Karen shrugged.

  “So you know the kid’s not here.”

  “As far as the dog knows. There he is. You see him?” Karen pointed out Louis in the distance, the dog about twenty-five feet ahead of him. Louis was stepping high to clear the brush, the dog charging ahead. When it veered too far to the left or right, Louis whistled and the dog stopped, looking back. With an exaggerated sweeping gesture of his arm, Louis reined the dog in, keeping it moving in a straight line.

  “So the kid’s not here,” Jesse said, watching Brenda on her walkabout—a medieval mortification, Elaine’s heated words in her ear.

  “Probably not,” Karen said. “But you never know.”

  “You never know what?”

  “Well, it’s like this. We found a kid buried here… Christina Howell. When was it?” she said, turning to Marie.

  “Four years July.”

  “Behind Cottage 6. The guy who did it? He used to be an orderly back in the late sixties here, before they shut the place down. Guy’s out of a job, got no place to go, so he just moved into the woods, set up house. Guy had a whole elaborate system of twigs around his campsite that told him if anybody was nosing around.

  “But so anyway, he got ahold of this kid Christina—she lived about two miles from here—did her, you know, killed her, buried her. We found her—well, the dog found her. Anyways, he’s in Dannamora now for that, but we’re pretty sure he did some other kids out here, missing kids we know about. They’re buried around here somewheres—four, five kids, he won’t say. Guy’s name is Alex Rockwell, Alex…I write him every month, say, ‘Look, you’re not getting out of that place ever, no matter what, so square it with God. Where’d you bury the other kids. Their souls can’t go to the Father unless we can give them a proper burial. C’mon, Alex, let them go home.’ He never writes back but we know they’re here. He had a few campsites, hideouts, in the woods around? The cops found dolls buried vertically, headfirst, about a dozen of them, which is exactly how he buried that kid Christina—straight down, headfirst. So what I’m saying is, a search like this? There’s things to be found, Jesse. Maybe not what you think you’re looking for, but… Hey, we never give up our kids. Plus, they’re still looking for that reporter, right? So you never know.”

  Brenda was approaching that part of the perimeter closest to where they were all standing now, and Jesse was determined to hook up as they came around the horn. But before she could make her move there was a shriek from the forest: “I found him! I found him!” Someone else screeched: “His bones! Oh Jesus! His bones! His bones!” Then a babble rose from behind the trees, a few people breaking off from their groups in the cottage clearings. Some white-suited shooters hurdled the high weeds, their Betacams mounted like bazookas. “Jesus, Joseph, Mary Mother of God his bones! His bones!” The hysteria was rising.

  Taking her cue from her group, Jesse stood her ground, glancing anxiously from Karen and Marie to the frenzy in the woods.

  “Bones,” Karen said, then reached for her radio.

  “This is Karen. What’s up.”

  “Karen, this is Phil Caruso. We got bones here.”

  “OK.”

  “Stand the hell back,” Caruso barked at his people. “Karen? Give me a second.” A woman could be heard sobbing, “Oh my God, oh my God,” through a blizzard of static. “Karen, give me a second.”

  “Take two.” Karen looked off, shading her eyes from the sun, Marie and Teenie standing there quiet, waiting.

  “Yeah, Karen?” Caruso was back on the radio.

  “Go.”

  “Did the kid have hooves?”

  “That’s what I thought. Get everybody back with their group, OK?”

  “Got it.”

  “I’m going over to see Brenda,” Jesse announced.

  “OK,” Karen said. “We’ll all go.”

  Leading the pack toward Brenda and Elaine, Jesse almost wished that Karen would try to stop her, but neither Karen nor anyone else made that move.

  “Hey.” Reaching out, Jesse laid a hand on Brenda’s arm. Brenda threw her another of those icy glares, then moved on, Elaine holding her upright, holding her snug, an arm across the small of her back, fingers pressed into the far side of her rib cage. Jesse doggedly remained one step behind, observing Brenda, who was so physically gone that her head bobbed and lolled as if her neck was broken. Steering
Brenda off their circular track, Elaine now led her toward the looming remains of the children’s dormitories, Jesse at their heels, Teenie, Marie, and Karen bringing up the rear.

  “The thing of it is, Brenda…” Elaine spoke in a low, forceful mutter that Jesse was close enough to overhear. “The thing of it is, I know who did it. I know who took him. Karen knows, the cops know. He doesn’t know I know. I mean, he knows that he was a suspect, but he thinks he’s in the clear, and I swear to you, if I live to be a hundred and one years old, I’ll always be watching him. I’ll always have my eyes and ears open. This guy, every time he leaves his house there’s a chance he’s going to visit my son’s body. They all do. They bury in a place that’s familiar to them and that’s easy for them to get to, because they like to visit the grave, make sure everything’s OK. See, he can visit the grave, that sick, evil bastard, but not me.”

  Caught up in Elaine’s quiet rant, Jesse momentarily lost touch with the visual, and when she returned to the physical world, still a few feet behind the lead pair, it seemed to her that Brenda was floating along, her shoulders moving evenly despite the lolling of her head. And then she saw the veins standing taut and fat on the back of Elaine’s hand, saw the rigidity in the arm that snaked around Brenda’s back, and she realized that Elaine was literally carrying Brenda, the woman strong enough to power both herself and her charge through tangle and brush, the blinding sun irrelevant, the thickets no more than vapor and drift.

  “Now, this bastard, Brenda,” Elaine plowed on, “he lives six doors down the street from me. Anytime I see him leave his house, and I know it’s not the time for him to go in to his job? You know, like, it’s night? Or, like, 7:00 A.M.? And he’s the only one in the car? I’m right behind him. And we’re neighbors so we talk, small talk, we say hello, and he’s always uncomfortable around me, like, antsy, nervous, but that’s his conscience, because I never do or say anything to let him know that I’m on to him. My husband was, like, ‘Elaine, we got to move, we can’t live in this house,’ and I said, ‘You move. I’m not leaving my son behind. And I’m not leaving him.’”