They took seats on the sofa across from their parents. They sat, quietly, waiting for the explanation.
Megan started in first:
“Girls, we don’t have a lot of information, but this is what we can tell you: Tommy and Grandfather were taken by some people. We don’t know where they are, or what they want. Not yet. They called Dad and spoke with him right before he came home. They said they’d get in touch again soon. That’s really what we’re waiting for.”
“Are they okay?”
“They said they were both fine. I don’t think they mean to do anything to Tommy or Grandfather until”—she hesitated—“Well, we just don’t know what their plans are. They want money.”
“How much?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Why don’t you call the police?” Lauren asked.
Duncan breathed in sharply. Here it comes, he thought.
“Well, they threatened us, or rather, they threatened to hurt Tommy and Grandfather if we called the police in. So, right now, I think we shouldn’t.”
“But the cops know how to deal with kidnappers—”
“You think the Greenfield police could help?”
“Well, no, but maybe the state police or the FBI—”
I should tell them everything right now, thought Duncan. He glanced over toward Megan.
“No, Lauren, we’re just going to wait first.”
“Just wait! I think that’s—”
Duncan interrupted: “No arguments.”
Lauren slumped back and Karen leaned forward. “This doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “The police could help us. Suppose we don’t have enough money for the kidnappers.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see.”
They were all silent, until finally Karen spoke again.
“Why, Mom, why did this happen?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
Karen shook her head.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
The room was silent.
Karen reached over and felt for Lauren’s hand. The two of them sat up in their seats. She felt stronger when she touched her sister. Lauren squeezed her hand in encouragement.
“It still doesn’t make sense. You think we’re just babies, and you can’t tell us, but Tommy’s our brother too, and we don’t understand anything. It’s not fair, and I don’t like it. You think we don’t want to know, but we do. You think we can’t handle it, but he’s our brother and we want to help, but how can we when we don’t know anything?”
Lauren started to cry then, as if her sister’s plaint had been her own. Karen’s eyes rimmed with tears, too.
Megan felt her own heart stricken. She went and sat between the two girls and put her arms around them each, hugging them to her breasts.
Duncan stood and sat down next to Karen, adding his arms to the entangled family’s.
“You’re right,” he said matter-of-factly. “We haven’t told you the half of it.”
He looked over at Megan.
“They should know,” he said.
She nodded. “I’m sorry—you’re right. We’ll tell them.”
She held the two girls tightly, but she could feel the stiffening of their muscles and their attention spinning toward their father.
“I hardly know where to start,” he said, “but I’ll give you a few answers first. The reason we haven’t called the police for help is because I, we, your mother and I—we know who the kidnappers are.”
“You know them?”
“It’s a woman we both knew eighteen years ago. Before you were born.”
“How?”
“We were in a group of radicals with her.”
“What?”
“Radicals. We thought we were revolutionaries. We were going to change the world.”
“You guys?”
Duncan stood up and paced about the room.
“You don’t know what it was like,” he said. “The war did it to us. It was so wrong and so evil, and the whole nation just went crazy. It was nineteen sixty-eight. There was Tet and pictures of the Marines being carted out on trucks, and sappers in the embassy compound and that picture of the Viet Cong being shot. And then Martin Luther King was killed, shot down while he stood on a balcony in Memphis, and there were riots in Newark and Washington and all over. They had to put machine guns on the steps to the Capitol building. It was as if the entire country was hanging by a thread. Then Bobby Kennedy was shot—right there on television, like some terrible television show—and it seemed there was no chance then for anything to ever happen without violence. And then there was the convention in Chicago. You can’t imagine what it was like, the police were like storm troopers and kids were bleeding in the streets. It was as if the whole world was crazy. Every night it was the same thing on the news. Bombs, riots, demonstrations, and the war. Over and over again. The war was everywhere. That was what no one realized. It went on here as much as it did over there.”
He hesitated, then he quietly repeated: “Nineteen sixty-eight.”
Duncan took a breath and gathered his thoughts and rambled on:
“And we hated it. We thought it had to be stopped. We tried to march. We tried to demonstrate. Still, it went on. Nobody would listen to us! Nobody! You can’t imagine how horrible it was. No one cared! It was as if the war came to symbolize the whole rotting society. Nothing worked. Nothing was fair. So then we thought society had to change. And then we thought we had to force society to change. And then we thought we had to tear down society in order to start all over again.
“And we believed that. I truly did. It seems so silly and puerile and antique now, but back then it was real and we thought we would have to die to bring about change. We were just slightly more than children ourselves, but we believed. God, how we believed.
“And so you have to understand, that was when we met Olivia.”
He paused, as if thinking.
“Olivia had plans. Great plans that appealed to the romantic side in us. Instead of getting beaten and tear-gassed, we were finally going to do something back to them! Worse, she was the sort that could persuade you to do anything. When Olivia suggested something, it just naturally seemed that it would work exactly the way she said it would. She was beautiful and smart and quick. She had us all wrapped up—except maybe your mother. She played every one of us differently. With me, she used sarcasm, shame, humiliation. She baited me into action. With the others, she used sex, argument, logic—everything she had.”
The girls had crept forward in their seats, watching their father as he twisted and explained before them.
“We did something with her,” Duncan said carefully. “We—no I, mostly, your mother was always against it—went along on what we thought was an act of revolution. A way of striking a blow at the heart of the society that we hated so much. Oh, I had myself pretty damn well persuaded that what I was doing was righteous and correct and appropriate. And surely not criminal. No, you couldn’t call us criminals. We were revolutionaries. It was a pure act of revolutionary zeal.”
He turned away, but continued:
“I was so naive. I was just a silly student with silly ideals and I got us caught up in something that was way over our heads.”
He hesitated.
“No,” Megan said. “No, you’re wrong about that.”
Duncan turned and looked at her.
“It was never silly to want to change things. It was never wrong to want to end the war.”
She took a deep breath. “We just followed the wrong leader, that’s all. We didn’t think for ourselves.”
“Olivia?” Karen asked.
“She was very persuasive,” Megan said. “You can’t imagine how much. Especially when you’re ripe to be persuad
ed.”
Lauren spoke: “I still don’t understand. Why can’t we call the police and have this woman arrested?”
Duncan turned away.
Megan took a deep breath.
“This thing we did, well, she got caught and went to prison. We got away. Eighteen years ago.”
“But—”
Megan started to quicken her own speech.
“She never told them who else was involved. If we went to the police, they would probably connect us to her.”
“But it was eighteen years ago, and now everything is different—”
“One thing never changes,” Duncan said abruptly.
The two girls looked at him and Megan looked away.
“Five people died.”
The girls stared wide-eyed at their father.
“Did you—” Lauren started.
“No. Well, not directly. Did I kill anyone? Not with a gun. But was I involved? Yes.”
“But what happened?” Karen asked.
Duncan took a deep breath. “We tried to rob a bank.”
“You what?”
“We tried to rob a bank. We were going to hit the bank right when an armored car delivered cash and receipts from a chemical plant. You see, the chemical plant was associated with the corporation that made napalm—”
“So?”
“You’ve got to understand. The napalm was used in the war and—” He hesitated. “It really sounds crazier now than I ever thought.”
“But why a bank?”
“To get money. To buy arms and propaganda. To put our group on the map.”
“We sure managed that,” Megan whispered bitterly.
“But, Dad—” Lauren started.
“Look! I realize all the explanations sound stupid, but there it is.”
“But what happened?” Karen asked quietly.
Duncan sighed. “It went wrong from the first minute. The bank guards didn’t throw down their weapons like we thought they would. They started shooting. Two of them died, three of the group. It was a disaster. I was driving the getaway truck. I saw what was happening and instead of going to help, I ran away. I was very lucky. I found your mother, and we just came back east, trying to forget it. We hid. We forgot. The world changed. And now here we are.”
“But why can’t we go to the police now?” Lauren asked again. Her tears had ceased, replaced with an insistent curiosity.
“Because I would have to go to prison.”
“Oh.”
The entire family was silent for a few moments. Duncan knew the girls were still filled with questions, but would save them for another time.
“Well,” Karen finally said with surprising firmness. “I guess that means we have to deal with it ourselves. Can we do that? Give them what they want and get it over with?”
Duncan and Megan nodded.
“I hope so,” Megan said quietly.
Judge Thomas Pearson opened his eyes and blinked at the light that filled the room. He was stiff; his neck felt as if it had been wrenched about by some great hand while he’d slept. He shifted position gingerly, trying not to disturb his grandson, who dozed on, mouth slightly ajar, with his head in his grandfather’s lap. The boy made a small complaining noise and moved his hands once in front of his face, as if trying to dispel a bad dream or knock away some vision from the edge of nightmare, then he rolled over and slid back into deep sleep. The judge extricated himself carefully, then went and placed a blanket over the boy, who sighed and slept on.
For a moment, the judge considered turning off the overhead light, then decided against it. He did not want the child to awaken in the dark and be frightened.
He glanced down at his watch. It was after two A.M.
I am an old man, who cannot sleep well at night, then catnaps in the day. It is as if my whole body is starting to run down. Things no longer work quite like they once did. He thought of himself as a favorite old clock, one with springs and levers and weights that meshed and rubbed together to guide the time, not like some modern quartz watch, with digital readout and precise movements governed by a computer chip.
He looked about the room for what seemed the hundredth time. Well, there are a few ticks left inside me.
He listened, but he could hear nothing within the house except the steady breathing of his grandson. He marveled at the child’s body; so scared, now restoring itself. The boy has been strong so far. But I wonder if the worst is yet to happen. I do not know how much tougher he can be.
He shuddered at the memory of the bathroom fiasco.
She showed me something, he thought. She showed me she can be cruel, that she knows how to play mind games. It was an impressive demonstration of control, one that effectively underscored how tenuous their position was. There probably isn’t any basement room, wet and dark and dank like she said there was, but the threat of it was as effective as the reality, perhaps even more so. He made a mental note to be alert for this sort of manipulation; let her deal in solidities, he thought. Force her to deal with real things. Don’t let her conjure up terrifying images that merely help her to weaken your resolve.
Judge Pearson shook his head. If it was just me, I would tell them to go ahead and shoot me and to hell with them.
He looked down at Tommy and without thinking ran his hand through the child’s hair. But it isn’t just me, and I cannot allow them to separate us. That would be the first battleground, he decided, even if they didn’t know it. I will not allow us to be put apart, not even for an instant—regardless of how many weapons they wave at us. You can win this little fight, he encouraged himself, and then, when you start to win some small victories, you can figure out how to win the largest one. They are after money. They won’t throw their bargaining chips away to prove some small point about control.
Making this decision strengthened him. He found his hand had inadvertently slid onto Tommy’s shoulder, feeling the rise and fall of the child’s breathing through the rough blanket. He smiled. It is virtually impossible, he thought, to see a child sleeping and not feel the overwhelming urge to stroke the child’s head and tuck the blankets around his chin a little more tightly.
Then he sat down on the other bunk and let his mind wander about, daydreaming in the early hours of the morning.
He thought first of his wife, which was natural, because he could see so much of her in the child’s appearance. He was glad that she wasn’t there to worry about them. That was a selfish thing, but there it was, and there was no stopping it. He remembered her funeral, and how silly he had felt, embarrassed to be alive, to be shaking hands and welcoming all their old friends. It had been an early fall afternoon, and the leaves were just turning, the slightest curl of brown on the edge of green. But the temperature had been hot and he remembered being uncomfortably warm inside his black suit. He had wanted to strip it off, and shout that this was all wrong, and that any damn fool could see that someone had screwed up. The judge hadn’t listened to the words from the preacher, or any of the steady stream of condolences from the guests. He had instead watched thick gray clouds form into a great thunderhead over the mountains in the distance, and idly hoped that the rain would move his way, breaking over his head and engulfing him in sheets of water. He smiled: The twins had been the ones who’d seized him by the elbows and taken him away from the gravesite, and he remembered the surge of their youth as it passed through him. It had not rained. The day had grown sunny and strong, and things had gone on.
Still, it had seemed absurd to him that he should survive her and it continued to bother him. He had never considered it a possibility throughout their years together. He had known with a surety born of some silly masculine arrogance that he would die first, and that it was important for her to be provided for. All their insurance payments were designed that way; their wills made on
ly the smallest concession to the idea that she might die before him. He remembered how dumb he’d felt, sitting in the doctor’s office, realizing that she was gone. He had looked across the desk at the white-jacketed doctor and thought: This is stupid; certainly this can be reversed upon appeal. He had not seen the absurdity in thinking death was simply another legal matter.
He smiled at the memory.
The problem with the law is that it forces you to see everything in life as precedents and opinions, all subject to review. It is such a cold thing, words and rulings, rigid, trying to force the infinite variations created by humanity into set regulations. She had always seen the impact of those legal words on people and that was what brought the law alive. All those decisions, life and liberty, those years of answering questions of guilt and innocence, and she’d been a part of each until she died and I couldn’t really go on anymore.
That was ten years ago, and I’m still here. I thought I was going to just fold up and die, but I didn’t and it still surprises me.
I wish she were here. She would eat that bitch alive.
The thought made him smile, even if it was untrue.
The judge lay down on the bunk and curled up under a blanket. It is cold, he thought. There will be a frost tonight and snow soon. It is cold in this room and that is because the walls are weak and the cold air pours through that one spot that I must remember.
He wondered what sort of house it was. Probably an old farmhouse, with two stories up in the center and wings on either side.
And probably isolated out in the goddamn woods with no neighbors and no traffic, he said angrily to himself.
Well, he thought, breathing in deeply, never mind. No place is so far away from civilization that it can’t be found. No place is so isolated that the law can’t reach it.
For a moment he pictured his captors and he grew angry. They don’t even have a guard on the door. They are so confident about what they’re doing that they’ve all gone to bed. They don’t fear Tommy and me, they don’t fear Megan and Duncan, they don’t fear the police who will come storming through the front door and blow their sorry hides straight to hell, if I have my wish.
Day of Reckoning Page 12