I said, “I’m looking for someone named Winifred Egret.”
Gator stamped on the brakes. The buggy jolted to a stop. He turned around. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” he asked. “But she doesn’t take visitors.”
Faye grabbed the goggles back.
Shit. I leaned back in the seat and stared at the few fuzzy stars that had managed to send their light through the humid air.
“Em has a letter of introduction,” said Faye.
The other guy picked up a two-way radio and spoke into it. “Hey Rolfe, Miz Egret to home in her chickee?”
I heard an unintelligible crackling in return.
The man with the radio made a gesture to Gator. “Let’s get moving again before the skeeters suck my last pint of blood, okay?”
Gator put the machinery back in gear, and we lurched forward. “Aw heck,” he said. “I was looking forward to telling you ladies some Seminole stories. You can’t get nothing good from Black Hawk there, he don’t know anything, he just wants you to think he’s real buff. He takes steroids. Wears three T-shirts under that khaki. And did anyone tell you that chickee you rented is haunted?”
The radio crackled into life again. I could make out, “Say who’s coming.”
The man with the radio said, “She’s got a letter.”
“Who from?”
Faye said, “Jack Sampler.”
The man with the radio relayed the name.
I wasn’t liking this. I grabbed the goggles back from Faye and stared through them, trying to convince myself I was somewhere other than where I was. I was dead tired, pissed off, and jangled from the strong coffee and sugar in the pie. I wanted to be in a bed, no matter how rustic. I wanted to roll over in it and find Jack there. I wanted to go home to Utah, or Wyoming, or wherever it was I was from. I wanted to be on a high Rocky Mountain lake at dusk with a fly rod in my hands listening to Townsend’s solitaires singing, not slopping around on a tourist buggy swatting mosquitoes in an unfamiliar terrain I could not see.
The radio said, “Okay. Take ’em on in.”
Gator cranked a hard left and headed into the trees.
– 27 –
We exited through a back gate from the game preserve. Beyond it lay a grove of orange trees and a dirt road, and on that road a Jeep was waiting. At the wheel of that Jeep was Leah Sampler.
I stood there staring at her for quite some time, mosquitoes be damned.
“Hello,” she said, managing to make it sound as if we’d just bumped into each other at the market. “Who’s your friend?”
I couldn’t find it in myself to take things that coolly. I said, “There are a few things you’ll have to explain to me.”
“I imagine so. But get in, will you? The insects are getting bad.”
Faye slipped Gator and Emilio each a tip. I think she slipped a little cake to the waitress, too, even though she’d already looked after her at a handsome rate back in the Swamp Water Cafeé. We both climbed into the Jeep and buckled up. It was an open model, the late descendant of the World War II item, all nicely done up with a roll bar and big tires for the swamp, and she got it rolling at a good clip very quickly.
“So where are we going?” I asked.
“To see Winifred Egret,” she replied. She managed to leave sarcasm out of her tone. I give her credit for that.
“And you obviously know Winifred Egret,” I said.
“Very well. It shouldn’t be too great a stretch that I, as Jack’s mother, should know her, too. In fact, I introduced Jack to Winifred.”
“Oh.” Now I felt kind of stupid. “It was just a shock is all.”
“No, a shock is a shock. You’re entitled.”
“So then you probably know whomever it is he wanted me to meet. His note said I should look Winifred up to meet someone else who was important to him.”
“Yes,” she said, to herself as much as to me.
Somewhere in there, Faye introduced herself to Leah, because I had not, and Leah said, “Ah, Tom’s wife. I’m so delighted to meet you.” We rumbled along the road in the dark with the motion of the Jeep blowing the insects off of us. After a while we turned off the dry land that bordered the citrus groves and headed back into the swamp. Leah gave a scant travelogue. “The higher, drier parts of the Everglades are called hammocks,” she said. “Win’s hammock is a bit remote. I daresay the directions Jack gave you would have taken you as far as her daughter’s house, and she would have screened you to see if you should be allowed to go farther.”
“Is there some reason things are secret here?” I asked pointedly.
“No. And yes. The Florida Seminole are the only American Indian tribe never conquered by the white man. They are very private people. But being able to win at war does not mean you can win as a culture. As a sovereign nation, the Seminole tribe has been giving way steadily to the pressures of white so-called civilization. The Seminole are falling faster from slot machines and alcohol than from bullets.”
“Someone back at the cafeé said each member of the tribe gets X thousand a month just for being alive.”
“That’s true. The tribe shares and shares alike, the pie gets split evenly, every man, woman, and child. Some blow the money on whatever our consumer society can serve up. Other, more traditional Seminoles like Winifred Egret prefer to bank the money and live farther from such influences.”
We splashed down through a narrow ford between two hammocks and rolled up onto the other side. We had turned enough times now that I had pretty much lost my sense of which way we were heading. That’s a hard thing for a geologist to admit, but it was totally dark under the spreading canopy of the swamp. I tried to identify the trees that tangled around us, but everything was new and alien to me.
Presently we pulled up in front of a small cluster of chickees that were standing on slightly higher land. Some were closed in. One was wide open, little more than just four tree trunks with the bark removed, supporting a thatched roof. A fire burned on the bare earth beneath it. An elderly woman sat by the fire. As I stepped down out of the Jeep and approached her, I saw that she was wearing the traditional dress of the Seminole woman, a long skirt and blouse made up of horizontal bands of delicate patchwork. She said, “You’re Jack’s friend Em, hm?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Welcome. He came to visit a couple months ago. Told me about you.”
He told you but not his mother, I noted. I took out Jack’s note and handed it to her.
“I can’t read,” she said. “I’m almost blind. Funny Jack, he knows that. That’s for the others. I don’t get so confused by people.”
I put the note away and waited.
Winifred Egret turned her ancient face toward Leah. “Take her inside and tell her what she wants to know. The pregnant one can stay with me a while. I like babies.”
Inside the chickee to the left, Leah offered me something to drink, which I refused. I was too tired to observe the social graces. We both sat down on low chairs carved out of stumps and looked at each other over the soft light of the kerosene lantern that hung from a wire hook above our heads. There was little else in the hut but two simple cots and Leah’s ancient suitcase.
Leah’s brows and nose threw deep shadows over the rest of her face. “You’re wondering why I’m here,” she suggested.
“I’m wondering why I’m here,” I parried.
She took in a deep breath, let it out. “I used to bring Jack here when he was little,” she said shyly.
It was my turn to sigh. “I’m sure that’s just a tiny little bit of a very big story,” I said. “We probably don’t have much time. Why don’t I just ask a few questions.”
“Okay.”
“Are you hiding here?”
“Yes.”
“Because of what Jack’s doing?”
She shook her head. “I hide whenever things get … like this.”
“Ah. Who did Jack want me to meet here? Was it Winifred ?”
“No.”
“I think you’d better ask some other questions first.”
I felt a deep fatigue settling about me, weighing me down into the hard-packed earth beneath my feet. “Alright, then. Who is Jack’s father, and where is he?”
Leah’s eyes closed. She became very still. It was a long time before she spoke, but when she did, her voice was faint, and yet hard as ice. “He was someone I barely knew. He … we … I became pregnant with Jack. He … Jack’s father was away when I found out, and I thought it better that he … stay away.”
“He was unkind to you?”
Leah drew her breath in sharply, an expression of deep emotional pain. “He was not a well person. He came back later—when Jack was three—and he realized that Jack was his. That he was the father. I was very young. I let him see Jack. He’d take him places. I thought it would be okay, or good, even. I didn’t know.” The last word twisted in agony.
“Know what?” I asked, keeping my voice as soft as possible.
Her eyes were still closed, and yet in the light of the lantern, I could see tears sliding down her cheeks. “He … hurt Jack. Not physically,” she said hastily. “There were never any marks …”
My mind raced, filling in voids in the mystery of Jack Sampler. “The abuse was emotional?”
“Yes.” The word was a gasp.
“I’m so sorry.”
Leah’s words suddenly came in a flood. “He would put him in a closet and leave him there, tell him he would only let him out if he played the game correctly. Then he put him in a deep, damp hole in the ground, in the dark. You get it? He was torturing him. Methodically. He was—”
“This was sexual?”
“No, it was worse than that. This was ritualized abuse. He was training Jack, training him to be just like him. He was … teaching him to lie, to split off, to become a … a …”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying, Leah. Was his father a—what did his father do? For a living.”
“He said he was in sales. God knows what he was selling,” she said, her voice suddenly stronger, anger breaking through the pain. “Do you understand what I’m saying? There is a network of people out there, and they are sick. Terribly, terribly sick. They train little children to be like them. They t-torture them until they learn to dissociate, to split their personalities into two, or three, or however many. And they give them nasty little jobs to do. They train them to become activated by a tap on the shoulder, or a phrase. Then they go and do whatever it is that’s asked of them.”
“Jack is a multiple personality?” I could not keep the shock from my voice.
Leah’s eyes shot open. “No! I caught it before that. No, he learned to split, but not into fragments. Haven’t you noticed? He’s a wonderful actor, our Jack.” She was speaking now with a fury, her hands wringing each other like battling dogs.
“Leah,” I said. “You must have been terrified.”
Her eyes focused on me for the first time since we came into the hut. “Yes. I was.”
“You ran.”
“Yes.”
“You got Jack away from him before his personality collapsed.”
“Yes.”
“You raised him well, Leah. He’s a fine man. I love that fine man you raised, all by yourself, from an infant.”
She lowered her gaze.
I said, “This man terrified you.”
Her voice came as a wraith. “Oh, yes. The threats were … when I told him to leave us alone, it started in earnest. He’d follow me through the town, always watching me. People would say it was because he loved me, or because a man needed to be with his son. He could be very charming, you see, and people believed him. Didn’t believe me. People want their world to make sense.” She drew in a ragged breath. “They told me I should marry him and do right for the child. But I said no. He—”
“You went to the police.”
“Oh, God yes, everybody always asks me that!”
“I’m sorry, I’m trying to understand—”
“The chief of police was his cousin. Do you get it? He was probably another … I told him to go away or I would. He told me he’d get the government to take Jack away from me.”
“You mean the courts.”
“I mean the government. That’s who he worked for, don’t you see?
“No, wait—”
“Our precious United States government! They—”
“No, wait, this is insane! I’ve heard of ritual abuse, but it’s Satan worshipers, crazy religious cults that—”
“Some of them are in cults, but not all. But the government is right in there harvesting a crop of smashed-up personalities to put to their dirty little purposes! Jack’s father was a p-professional k-k-killer.”
“No! He made that up to scare you, he—”
“How I wish that were true! He took us in the car one night and showed us!”
“So you ran away.”
“We left town and I changed our names, and we moved all over the place, looking for a town where we could live. Finally, we came here. Worked in Everglade City for a while. It has a long tradition of being a way station for people who have escaped from somewhere else. I got to know Winifred when her granddaughter … ran away once, and I helped. So we settled here in Florida. Moved to Orlando when Jack was twelve.”
“Sampler’s not your name?”
“No. It’s my grandmother’s maiden name. When Jack came of age, I figured he had a right to his birth name, but he’d learned to answer to Jack, so …”
“You never married.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t trust myself.”
“And you always worried that the man might come back, so you kept a bag packed, ready to leave at any moment.”
“I heard finally that he had died—or been killed—but I had no way of knowing how deep it all went. Maybe they’d come for Jack at some time. I had to be on the ready. I learned how to drive so I wouldn’t be followed. And no one comes to this hammock without Winifred’s knowledge, or the whole tribe’s, for that matter.”
My stomach was tight as a fist. “You did a great job with Jack. He’s an honorable, faithful man … .” Words began to evaporate in my mouth. Did I truly know this about Jack? I had trusted him originally because Tom Latimer trusted him, and until ten days ago, Jack had never wavered from Tom’s model of trustworthiness, so I had assumed … what?
As I sat there, hearing this horrible tale, bits of my world began to get up and float, like dust on the air. If there were people out there who would put small children into damp holes in the ground to force them into mental illness, then were any of us truly safe?
I thought again of the terrible instrument of destruction I had found buried in the sand a scant twenty-four hours before, and wondered: Did Jack go off to track that monster, or is he the monster himself? What frail membrane lies between the two?
Leah was speaking rapidly. “I took him to specialists, had him cared for as best I could. There was no one then who knew what to do. Nowadays at least I could take him to some kind of deprogrammer, or a specialist in posttraumatic stress. They’re getting better every day at dealing with these things. They know now that the nervous system holds a charge from trauma, a deep nervous energy that gets locked into our very fibers. It’s there in case we get a chance to run away. Lower animals know how to switch it off when the danger’s passed, but we have the cerebral cortex—the highest part of the human brain—and it can override that protocol. So the trauma hangs in us like a bomb. That’s the stress, all locked in there, banging around … . Jack did amazingly well. I think it was because he always took a part in helping us escape. They say that’s essential, that the victim take part in saving himself.”
I couldn’t believe what she was saying—didn’t want to—and yet the connections were finally forming. Jack, the child of trauma, had been raised by a desperate, stoic, intelligent woman. She had moved heaven and earth to get him
safe and keep him there … .
Leah’s words had run to a halt. She made both of her hands into fists for a moment, squeezed them, and then released them, flicking the fingers as if they held drops of water. “So now you know.”
“There’s more. Isn’t there?”
“What has Jack told you, Em?”
“He left a note saying I should come here if things didn’t go well for him.”
Very forcibly, she said. “We don’t know yet what’s happened, or will happen. Jack will be alright.”
I said, “This must be torture for you. I love him, and I’ve known him only half a year. He’s your child. You’ve worked so hard to raise him to be a whole man, and here he’s gone and done something terribly dangerous.”
“He’s always done dangerous things.”
I thought about that. The swamps he walked through with Brad. The Navy SEALs. Working for the FBI. “He seems okay with working for the government,” I said stupidly.
Leah’s laugh was derisive. “Some say he’s looking for a father, and a family. He had some good officers above him in the Navy. And Tom’s been good to him. Not all men are shits. He has a strong will to protect people, to do the honorable thing. I suppose he’s still compensating for what happened to him.”
“What do you do for a living, Leah?”
“I’m a psychiatric nurse,” she said, her voice heavy with irony.
As much to myself as to her I said, “I think Jack has a good spirit. I think he would have led an adventuresome life regardless of what happened to him when he was three years old.” Having spoken the words, I grabbed hold of them for dear life.
Leah focused on me, her lips twisted in abstract amusement. “I can see why he loves you,” she said.
– 28 –
Leah took Faye and me back to the chickee we had rented at the Swamp Safari, and we slept there that night, deeply exhausted and oblivious to the whining of mosquitoes outside the netting that draped over our cots. In the morning, the overhanging thatch and shuttered sides of the chickee kept us unaware of the daylight until Faye’s bladder moved her toward the bathroom. When she opened the door, we awakened to a world of sunshine so bright and cheerful that I was certain we had dreamt the entire experience of the deep swamp, the elderly Seminole woman, and the unexpected and gut-wrenching meeting with Leah Sampler. Surely her part of it had been exactly that, a bad dream.
Killer Dust Page 24