The Shadow Box

by Maxim, John R.

  Brendan Doyle, once again, paid an unannounced visit to Martha's Vineyard. And again, he had the look of a man with something on his mind. It was a look he'd had, it seemed to Michael, every time they'd ever talked about his mother.

  Michael knew, in his heart, that she was dead. Whether she died out West, whether she never left New York alive, Michael didn't know. Maybe Rast had her killed, or maybe, like his father, she took her own life. Whatever the truth was, Doyle and Moon and especially Jake had been trying to protect him from it since he was twelve years old.

  “We need to talk, Michael,” said the lawyer.

  “Listen . . . Brendan . . .”

  “You better sit down.”

  Fallon shook his head. “Brendan, look. I told you that I trust you. I guess I want to say that if there's something you know . . . and you've felt that you shouldn't tell me...I can live without knowing it myself.”

  Doyle blinked. A look of confusion.

  “Brendan ... let it lie. Let's just go on from here, okay?”

  Doyle scratched his head. “You don't want to know about Megan?”

  Fallon felt his blood go cold.

  “She's alive, Mike. I think we found her.”

  Chapter 48

  He did not need to sit down.

  He had tried, these past weeks, to believe that she was alive. But afraid of the answer, he had not asked.

  “You have to understand,” Doyle was saying, “when you send out a skip-tracer, you can't expect him to hunt in the dark. He's got to learn all he can.”

  “Brendan . . . where is she?”

  “Because no one disappears completely. Sooner or later, they'll contact a relative, a friend, and you have to know who these people are.”

  “Brendan . . .”

  “We think she's in Mexico.”

  Doyle wanted him to hear how they traced her. Michael didn't care how.

  “You'll listen,” said Doyle. ”I have my reasons.”

  The tracer, in fact, had found only one relative. But Megan would not have called him. Nor did she seem to have any close friends. The tracer, Eddie Larkin, had come up empty.

  Finally, on a hunch, he checked with the telephone company. Given that the girl knew at least three of the victims who'd been taken to the hospital that night, and had practically lived with one of them, maybe she could not resist calling to see how they were. Maybe there was a record of a call from New London.

  There were two. One on Saturday, one on Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. There had been many such calls that weekend. Many people had suffered burns. The volunteer who worked the phones could not remember who called about whom. But she said that a woman had called several times since and as recently as a week ago. She had asked, each time, about the same three men. The telephone records showed calls on those days from Mexico. They were placed from a town called Campeche on the Yucatan Peninsula.

  ‘‘But . . . why would she go there?” Michael asked.

  “She's talked about it. The Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole, has been doing a series of digs down there. There's this comet that hit near where she's—”

  “She's with them? With a diving expedition?”

  “She's alone. The next dig's not until the fall.”

  “Well , what's she doing? How does she live?”

  “She's got an income, Mike. Not big, but enough.”

  “I'm going down there. I'll fly down tomorrow.”

  “Michael . . . there are things I think you should know.”

  Whatever it was, Fallon didn't want to hear it. Not from Doyle. He would go to Campeche. He would find her. She would tell him or not. It would be strictly up to her.

  “She'll run from you, Michael. And this time she might hurt herself.”

  “You don't know her that well. You don't know her at all.”

  Doyle only sighed. He raised his hands in surrender.

  “What if ... you just told me a little?”

  Michael asked this question as he packed a bag.

  “There isn't any little.”

  “Then never mind.”

  “Michael, this is dumb. Why should I know and not you?”

  “Then just . . . tell me the basics. Tell it slow. If I ask you to stop . . .”

  “That's fucking ridiculous, Michael.”

  ”I know. But do it anyway.”

  “Would you believe it ties in with drugs?” Doyle asked gently. “Not hard drugs. Drugs from drugstores and doctors.”

  Michael believed it. She hated when he took pills. She was glad when he stopped. He'd assumed that she might have been hooked at one time.

  “Ages twelve through twenty,” blurted Doyle, “she was in an institution.”

  Fallon blinked. “For substance abuse? At age twelve?”

  “It's a place in Virginia.”

  He waited for Michael to stop him. Michael didn't. Doyle threw up his hands.

  “Mike, there's no slow way to say this. It's a place for the criminally insane.”

  Doyle had refused to play the game any longer. He reached into his briefcase, a new one, and pulled out a nine by twelve envelope. He handed it to Michael.

  “Read it, don't read it, that's up to you. Just don't kill the messenger,” he said.

  The report was from Edward J. Larkin Associates. Its contents broke Michael's heart.

  Her name wasn't Cole. It was Anderson until she changed it. Cole had been her mother's maiden name. Sixteen years ago, her mother was murdered. She was hacked to death as she slept. Megan was charged with the crime and found not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed for an indefinite period.

  Her father, Warren Anderson, owned a small chain of drugstores based in Newport News, Virginia. He testified at the trial that his daughter had been almost totally out of control for the two years prior to the murder. She was a drug user at ten, perhaps even before that. A quantity of drugs, morphine in particular, and certain hallucinogen-ics and other psychoactive compounds had disappeared from his stocks. He was sure that she'd taken them. But he made a mistake. He tried to protect her.

  His daughter, he said, was an addict at eleven. She was sexually promiscuous, sleeping with grown men to get money for more drugs. She even, to his horror, offered herself to him if he would bring her what she needed from his pharmacy.

  The father was away when it happened. Mother and daughter were home. Megan claimed to have awakened the next morning and found her mother hacked to death. She got dressed and went to school. She mentioned to a teacher that her mother was dead. The teacher called the police. The teacher later testified that Megan seemed numb, detached, unaffected. The police had her examined. They found a multitude of drugs in her system. Megan denied that she took them. The examination also confirmed that she had indeed been sexually active. Megan denied that as well. She then accused her father of murdering her mother.

  Fallon had to stop reading. He could barely see.

  “It gets worse,” Doyle said quietly. “But then it gets better.”

  Fallon swallowed hard. “How does a thing like this get better?”

  “Give me. Give it here.”

  Doyle found a section he had marked.

  “These three pages,” Doyle told him, “say how she said she saw him do it. Her description of the weapon, the blows, matched the physical evidence exactly. Except her father had an alibi. He was way up in Richmond at his other store. So if Megan was right about where her mother got chopped and how many times, it had to have been her who did it, right? On top, they found blood in Megan's shower where she'd tried to wash it off and more on her bedsheets. She claimed it was there when she woke up.”

  Fallon couldn't look. Doyle poked him.

  “Anything I just said ring a bell?”

  “Brendan . . .”

  “She saw him do it, Michael. First she says she was asleep and then later she says she saw him do it. When faced with the contradiction, she said she saw him in her mind.”

  Fallon still didn't
get it. Doyle turned more pages. “Read what Larkin says there.”

  Eddie Larkin believed her. So, for that matter, had at least one detective and a psychiatrist at the Virginia asylum. But Megan, by the time she was committed, wasn't sure whether she killed her mother or not. For almost two years after that, she was essentially catatonic.

  Over time, the psychiatrist came to believe that the father, Warren Anderson, had been systematically drugging her, and then molesting her, unknown to her, for a period of at least three years.

  Fallon was stunned. Doyle took the document out of his hands.

  “This same shrink,” he said, “also asserted that she seemed genuinely clairvoyant. That's how she saw her mother being murdered. He didn't know whether this was something she was born with or whether it was some accident of circuitry caused by some combination of all the drugs she'd been fed.”

  “Who says she didn't take them herself?” asked Fallon.

  “That's the good news. The shrink said that she was unable to recognize any of the drugs she was supposed to have been taking. When deliberately left alone with them, she ignored them. Any junkie would have scarfed a few down but this kid, at that time, would not have known drugs if they bit her on the ass.”

  “Then why was she kept there eight years?”

  “You won't like the answer.”

  “Brendan, I don't like a single word of this.”

  “They wanted to study her.”

  “Study what? The psychic thing?”

  Doyle nodded. “And a couple of them, they—” He grimaced.

  “Finish, Brendan.”

  “It's not important.”

  “Brendan ... a couple of them what?”

  “They, um, saw that Megan was a nice-looking kid. They thought maybe her father had the right idea.”

  Michael now understood all those showers.

  And why sex, as she put it, was not her sport. He might well have been her first since she was freed. Her first, at least, in which she knew what she was doing.

  He began to understand, just a little, that first night when she came to the Taylor House. How she could be there, having sex with him, without really being there at all. Maybe, with all that damage, it was a thing her mind had taught itself to do. To just not be there when it happened.

  In the end, said Larkin's report, a lawyer got her out. The shrink had blown the whistle. The lawyer filed suit against the hospital and against the father who had remarried some Richmond bimbo within a year of his wife's death.

  “That bimbo was his Richmond alibi?”

  “You got it.”

  “His first wife, Megan's mother, caught on to what he was doing with Megan?”

  “That's what Larkin thinks. No way to prove it.”

  “What happened with the lawsuit?”

  “The father had already sold his drugstores. He skipped town but the hospital settled. Two male nurses went to jail. The settlement bought her that boat and a small annuity. The shrink taught her to sail it. He got her tutors to help her catch up. He even taught her how to dance.”

  “This shrink . . . was his name Sheldon Greenberg, by any chance?”

  “His name was Waxman. He passed away.”

  “Oh.”

  “Who's Sheldon Greenberg?”

  “No one. Never mind.”

  “Brendan?”

  “Yeah, Mike.”

  ”I want to hire Eddie Larkin.”

  “You already have. You think I'm paying for this?”

  “Fine. I want him to find Warren Anderson for me.”

  Doyle told him that Anderson was dead. An automobile accident, six years ago in Denver. And that the bimbo had already divorced him by then. Only the last part was true. Megan's father was very much alive and he had a new drugstore. He lived in a town just outside New Orleans.

  Doyle had shown the report to Moon. He wanted to know, in Moon's opinion, whether Michael could handle this right now or whether they should leave well enough alone.

  Moon said, “Don't keep it from him. He has a right. And he won't be mad that you know all this. But don't show him this last page, the one with her father's address. Leave that last page with me.”

  “Hey, Moon . . .”

  “Lena has kin down south. She's talked about wanting to see them.”

  “Moon, don't do this.”

  “Anderson's how old now ... my age?”

  ”A little younger. Middle fifties.”

  “I'd say he's lived long enough.”

  Lena Mayfield agreed to stay on at the Taylor House. But only if Moon stayed as well, and only if he promised to eat right and start acting like a gentleman his age. Moon promised that he would.

  But he also pointed out that Lena had been cheated of her Memorial Day vacation. He suggested a long quiet drive, just the two of them. Down to Selma, Alabama, for a start. He said it seemed only proper that a gentleman such as he should present himself to her kin.

  That done, he told her, he would like to push on to New Orleans. Lena liked that idea. She'd always had a yen, she said, to see the Big Easy, try some of the food it's famous for. Moon said he had a bit of business to see to in a town near there. After that, they'd have plenty of time to visit.

  Chapter 49

  Michael found her on the Yucatan in the town of Campeche.

  For three day's he only watched her. Except for the eye patch she wore, and her hair cut short because so much had been burned, she looked just as she did on the day he first saw her. Cutoff jeans, deck shoes, a loose-fitting blouse tied off at the waist.

  She had bought an old boat, it was small, too small to live on but it would do to sail out to the diving grounds. She had rented a room in an old Spanish house that offered bed and breakfast at a modest price.

  On the evening of the third day, he received the call he'd been waiting for. The next morning, an hour after sunrise, he walked to the waterfront where she kept her boat. With his right hand, the other still in a sling, he loosened both of her lines and set it adrift. The tide took it out and westward, roughly in the direction of Texas.

  He hurried to the little bodega where she stopped each morning to buy the bread and fruit that would be her lunch. It was not yet open. He stood at the door, touching his palms to the frame. He turned, walked a block away, and waited.

  At last, she came. She arrived as the bodega was opening. She waved hello to a sidewalk vendor and reached with that hand for the door. She stopped. She stopped cold. She stood there for ten seconds, twenty. And now she turned her head, this way and that. And there it was, for anyone to see. Megan knew that he'd been there, no doubt in the world.

  But now she seemed ready to run. She started back, not down to her boat, but back the way she came. No, Megan. Go to the dock. Go see what's down at the dock.

  One hand wiped her cheeks as if brushing away tears. She turned and slowly walked in that direction. He watched as she reached the old jetty where she'd tied up her boat. She saw it. It was nearly a quarter mile out. She stood there, frustrated, hands on her hips as a new and larger boat dropped sail and luffed into the space that had been hers.

  Two young men, deeply bronzed, stood on the foredeck. One of them had a bow line in his hand. He called her, asked her to catch it. She did. He hopped into the surf and approached her.

  “Are you Megan?” Michael heard him ask.

  She wiped her eyes. A tentative nod.

  “All yours,” he said. “Happy birthday.” He and his companion turned and walked off toward the town.

  She stood there, frozen, for what seemed a full minute. At one point, he saw that she was counting on her fingers, trying to figure the date. She stopped on four. The Fourth of July.

  Fallon couldn't stand it any longer. He kicked off his shoes and walked down to the jetty.

  “Nice boat,” he said.

  “Damn you, Michael.” She wouldn't turn.

  “Cheoy Lee ketch. Forty-four. They were out of thirty-fours.”

  “Who w
as that boy who knew me?”

  “He didn't. He delivers boats, that's all. He brought this one all the way from Miami.”

  She still didn't get it.

  “It's yours, Megan. The papers should be up on the chart table.”

  She said nothing. She didn't move.

  ”I picked a new name for her. Go look at the transom.”

  Nothing.

  ”I named it Fallon in Love.”

  That almost made her turn.

  “And I had them design a spinnaker with a big red heart and an arrow through it. It says, ‘Michael & Megan’ in letters eight feet high.”

  A disbelieving groan. “Michael . . . tell me you didn't.”

  “Okay, I didn't. You still have an unlisted boat.”