Flat Lake in Winter

by Joseph T. Klempner

  The only person Jennifer ever dared tell, over all the years, had been her friend Sue Ellen, whom she’d sworn to secrecy. Fielder was now the second person she’d trusted enough to confide in; and even so, he found the process of extracting the information from her somewhat akin to old-fashioned dentistry.

  She doubted that either Klaus or Elna Armbrust had known of Jonathan’s condition. As for her older brother, she couldn’t say. She’d had no contact with him since he’d moved out of the house a couple of years before she had, and they’d never discussed it before that.

  Still, Jennifer had presented Fielder with a veritable gold mine of information, and even as he held her tightly and kissed her goodbye, he needed to tell her how important it might prove to be.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “that what you’ve told me just may be enough to save your brother’s life. And I really mean that.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I should hate him, you know. I should want him dead. But for some reason, I’ve never been able to stay angry at him.”

  ARMED WITH HIS discovery, Fielder drove back to Big Moose in a state approaching absolute exhilaration. His thoughts raced off in all directions. He knew first off that he had a bunch of reading to do regarding both the scientific literature on sleepwalking, and its legal applications. He realized he’d have to go back to Judge Summerhouse to get more orders signed for experts. Earlier he’d gotten authorization for a mental-health expert; now he’d need to get a bit more specific. He figured he’d need both a psychiatrist and a psychologist - one to examine Jonathan, another to provide expert testimony. He also might want a neurologist to take X-rays and hook Jonathan up to needles and machines, to do CT scans and MRIs and EEGs and whatever other tests they had these days, in order to find out what strange things went on in Jonathan’s brain while he slept. He’d have to check with the jail, subpoena their records to see if there’d been any reports of unusual nighttime activity on Jonathan’s part. He’d need to have the Armbrusts re-interviewed, as well as P. J. down in Atlanta. He’d want to look into the 1989 investigation of the fire that claimed the lives of Porter and Elizabeth Hamilton, to see if it really had been an accident, or if the rumor Sue Ellen Simms had heard about Jonathan’s being responsible held any truth. And he’d need to try to track down Sue Ellen herself, to see if she could remember hearing anything about the sleepwalking from Jennifer, after all these years.

  Above all, it was time to sit down and have another conversation with Jonathan, time to introduce him to a part of himself he might not even know existed.

  OVER THE WEEKEND, Fielder got together with Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson, to discuss developments. They met at Lake George, which was pretty much the geographical midpoint of the triangle created by their homes, and they spent a long afternoon sitting on the deck of a restaurant overlooking the lake, picking at their food, sipping at their drinks, enjoying the sun, and bringing each other up-to-date on developments.

  Excited as Gunn and Munson were to learn of Jonathan Hamilton’s sleepwalking, they insisted that Fielder first tell them about Jennifer. They were investigators, after all, and it hadn’t been lost on either of them that Fielder had been gone from Wednesday morning to late Friday afternoon.

  “Must’ve taken you an awful long time to find her,” Gunn theorized.

  Fielder said nothing. He’d expected them to rub it in a bit, though not literally, until Hillary leaned across the table and ran the palm of her hand across the top of his head.

  “Aha!” she exclaimed. “Those antlers are history!”

  And even Fielder had to laugh.

  From Gunn came word that the state police had completed their preliminary testing of the evidence recovered from the crime scene, and how it compared to exemplars provided by Jonathan. The towels discovered in his vanity cabinet, as well as smears found on his bathroom walls, his flannel shirt, and his undershorts, contained a mixture of blood that, according to highly reliable RFLP DNA testing, was genetically identical to that of known samples drawn from the two victims. Ditto for the trail of drops leading from the main house to the cottage. Jonathan’s own blood sample was still undergoing DNA testing.

  Jonathan’s fingerprints had been found in various places in the main house, on the sheath that matched the knife, and on his bathroom wall - and there it had actually been left in the same mixture of his grandparents’ blood. The bloody footprints in the main house also definitely belonged to Jonathan - both the booted set and the barefoot ones.

  Several dozen human hairs had been recovered at the main house, including a number of blond ones that, upon microscopic examination, proved to be consistent with hair samples pulled from Jonathan’s scalp. Seven of the hairs had intact or partial follicles attached and, therefore, had been submitted for DNA testing. In the absence of sufficient genetic material, the PCR method would be used instead of the slightly more definitive RFLP method, and the results, when received, would likely point to Jonathan only to the exclusion of something like one-in-a-million odds, instead of one-in-a-billion.

  “Thanks for all the good news,” Fielder said.

  Hillary had begun receiving records in response to her subpoenas. Jonathan was, by all accounts, “borderline low-normal” in his intellectual capacity. Whether this level translated out as “retarded” was questionable, according to some experts, and doubtful according to others. And, under the death-penalty statute, retarded was the magic word. It still looked like a judgment call whether they should risk having Jonathan retested - it had been almost fifteen years since his last evaluation - or stick with the old scores. Fielder pointed out that the sleepwalking theory might make that decision unnecessary, at least for now. What it had done was provide them with an option, a new basket in which to put some of their eggs. In death cases, he reminded them, you generally had nothing to work with; now they found themselves confronted with the luxury of choosing between retardation and sleepwalking, or even both. In the most wretched of all neighborhoods, they’d suddenly been showered with an embarrassment of riches.

  Together, they parceled out new work assignments. Hillary would use her contacts to reach out to doctors who could examine Jonathan and provide expertise regarding sleepwalking; after that, she’d see if she could find Sue Ellen Simms. Gunn would check to see if there’d been any episodes since Jonathan had been in jail; he’d also re-interview the Armbrusts and P. J. - the latter, hopefully, by phone - and see if he could find out more about the origins of the fire that had claimed the lives of Jonathan’s parents. That would leave Fielder to read up on sleepwalking, get new orders for the experts, and conduct his sit-down with Jonathan. And, should he happen to find himself with too much time on his hands, there were always motion papers to keep him out of trouble.

  It was going to be a busy autumn for all of them.

  JONATHAN HAD BEEN locked up for six weeks - a blink of the eye in the life span of a murder prosecution - but to Fielder, it looked like it had been more like six months. His hair was unkempt and seemed less blond than before. He’d lost weight, and his prison jumpsuit hung on him, instead of fitting him. Most noticeably, his eyes - which earlier had been an arresting pale blue - were dull and lifeless. He reminded Fielder of an animal that was failing to thrive in captivity, or a plant that had been uprooted and moved indoors and wasn’t getting enough sunlight.

  Fielder greeted him with, “Hello, Jonathan,” once they were seated across from each other.

  “Hello, Mr. Fielder.”

  “Matt.” If Fielder addressed someone informally, he insisted on reciprocity.

  “M-Matt.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Are you sure?” Fielder asked him. “Are you eating enough?”

  Jonathan shrugged, the identical shrug Jennifer had used. The Hamilton family shrug. It was scary to Fielder how much, and in how many ways, Jonathan resembled his sister, and how much Troy resembled the both of them.

  “
The f-food’s not too good,” he admitted. “And I’m not s-sleeping so good.”

  “How come?”

  “Bad dreams. I saw the d-doctor yesterday. He gave me pills, said they’d m-make me sleep better.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  “Little ones. White.”

  Fielder asked what the dreams were about. He wanted to know whether Jonathan was experiencing flashbacks regarding the discovery of his grandparents’ bodies, or, possibly, even reliving the commission of the crime itself. But Jonathan replied that he couldn’t remember. If his subconscious was struggling with what he’d done that night, his conscious mind wanted no part of it.

  Their meeting lasted an hour and half. Not unsurprisingly, it was Fielder who did most of the talking. He wanted Jonathan to know how hard he and his associates were working, how much they cared about him, and how he shouldn’t give up hope. He tried hard to draw Jonathan out, coaxing him to talk about his fears, and inviting him to be an active part of the defense team. Though his motives were laudable, the extent to which he succeeded was questionable. Characteristically, Jonathan’s concerns were with little things: What time did they want him to wake up in the morning? When was he expected to brush his teeth? How could he keep track of which days were shower days? Who was taking care of the squirrels he’d been feeding each day back home? Why wouldn’t they let him have laces for his shoes?

  Toward the end of the session, Fielder decided to take a more active approach. “I met your sister,” he said.

  “Jennifer.”

  It was uttered as a statement, but Fielder treated it as a question. “Yes,” he said.

  “Baby.”

  That one took Fielder by surprise. Hillary Munson had understood Jonathan to say the word “Maybe” when asked if he had surviving relatives other than his brother P.J. In hindsight, it is likely that Jonathan had actually said, “Baby.” But Fielder caught Jonathan’s response quite clearly. He didn’t know for a fact if Jonathan had ever known of his sister’s pregnancy, let alone that she’d given birth after leaving home. But then he remembered having seen a photograph of a baby, stuck among the belongings seized from Jonathan’s cottage. He’d assumed at the time that it had been a childhood photo taken of Jonathan himself. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  “What baby?” he asked.

  But it was too late; Jonathan’s eyes had already glazed over. Whatever baby had visited his thoughts a moment ago was now far removed, well beyond the young man’s powers of recall.

  Fielder moved on. “Did you used to have any trouble sleeping when you were back home, at Flat Lake?”

  The question drew another shrug from Jonathan.

  “Ever wake up in a strange place?”

  A blank stare.

  This was getting him nowhere. He decided to take one good swing for the fences. “Jonathan,” he said, “do you remember ever walking around the house when you were asleep? Or hearing anybody talk about your doing that?”

  The same blank stare.

  “Anything like that?”

  Finally, the shy curl of a smile, as though Jonathan had belatedly caught on to the joke. “How c-can you be walkin’ around,” Jonathan asked, “wh-wh-when you’re asleep?”

  It was a pretty good question.

  THE ANSWER, IT turned out, was not quite so mysterious as Fielder first suspected. Or so he learned on the first of two full days spent holed up at the Cedar Falls Free Library. He actually hadn’t intended to start his reading so soon. He’d figured on taking a day off for tree-felling and log-splitting, activities that let his body take over for his brain, and served to rejuvenate him and remind him why he’d fled the city and moved up to the mountains.

  But he hadn’t counted on the rain.

  An unusually dry August and September had suddenly turned into a wet October. The day after his meeting with Gunn and Munson at Lake George, Fielder had awakened to a freezing rain. By nine, it had changed to a steady downpour. The radio told him it was here to stay for a while, and a look at his own barometer had confirmed the prediction. Operating a wet chainsaw wasn’t Matt Fielder’s idea of a good time, any more than swinging a twelve-pound sledgehammer at a rain-slicked wedge.

  So, the library it was.

  According to the scientific literature, nearly 1 percent of the adult population is said to suffer from some form of sleepwalking or “night terrors.” Most instances occur during the deeper, “slow-wave” portions of sleep, typically Stage Three or Four. Both children and adults may suffer from the condition. It is not to be confused with nightmares, which are simply a type of dreaming and more often take place during the earlier, first and second stages of sleep. In dream sleep - often called REM sleep, for the rapid eye movements that characterize the continued functioning of a limited number of the body’s smaller muscles - the larger muscles are literally paralyzed, and gross motor functions are shut down; hence, the individual is unable to talk, walk, or otherwise move about.

  But during non-REM sleep (or in those rare cases of persons suffering from a condition known as REM sleep behavior disorder), tests indicate that the potential for full locomotion is there. The recent use of a technique called polysomnography - the recording, by electrodes, of brain waves and muscle activity, and the mapping of the interaction between the two - confirms that a subject can actually get up and walk about, thus becoming a somnambulist, one who, in the very truest sense, can be said to be a “sleepwalker.” The same individual is fully capable of running, jumping, talking, kicking, throwing punches, wielding a knife, aiming and firing a gun, and engaging in all sorts of other physical activity - and all the while, recordings of his brain waves clearly establish that he is asleep.

  Fielder found the literature full of dramatic cases, some of them merely anecdotal, but others carefully and clinically documented. There was, for example, the tale of a retired detective recovering from a nervous disorder, who was asked to assist in a case of an apparently motiveless murder on a beach in southern France, only to realize from a unique four-toed footprint left in the sand that it was he himself who had committed the crime, while in the throes of an episode of sleepwalking.

  Or the story of a man, by all accounts quite happily married, who chased his wife from their bed in the middle of the night, caught up with her, stabbed her repeatedly as she lay in the middle of the street, and then - to the horror of onlookers - smashed her head against the pavement, killing her.

  Or the twenty-four-year-old Toronto man who arose one night and, still asleep, drove his car fourteen miles to the home of his in-laws, whom he reportedly loved deeply. Upon arriving, he savagely beat his mother-in-law with a tire iron and then stabbed her to death, before attempting to kill his father-in-law as well. Next he drove to the police station, where for the first time he noticed his severely cut hands, and told them he thought he’d just killed some people.

  Or the sixty-three-year-old Jewish refugee who, dreaming that Gestapo agents were breaking into his home in Cleveland, Ohio, got up in his sleep and fired a shotgun into the living room, killing his wife of thirty-five years.

  The stories went on and on, each more riveting than the one before it. Fielder had heard once that although you could hypnotize a person, you couldn’t make him commit some horrible act under hypnosis that he wouldn’t normally commit. He learned now that there were no such restraints placed upon the sleepwalker. Each of the cases he read dealt with individuals who were non-aggressive, and even gentle in their waking states, but who became aggressive and violent during their sleepwalking.

  By the end of a day’s reading, Fielder was convinced that the phenomenon was every bit as real as the chair he was sitting in or the books that lay in front of him. He’d learned terms like “sleep-related violence,” “non-insane automatism,” “sleep apnea,” and “psychomotor epilepsy.” He had twenty pages of notes on case histories, polysomnography studies, and other scientific data. He had statistics quantifying disorders by age, gender, education, and profession.
/>
  But while the experts were virtually unanimous in their acceptance of the phenomenon, there were disagreements when it came to the subject of causation. There were, to be sure, a number of clues that emerged from the studies. The vast majority of violent sleepwalkers were men. Typically they had irregular sleep patterns. Many were shift workers, whose schedules were constantly changing, requiring them to readjust their hours of sleep. Often they’d been through some recent traumatic or unsettling experience, such as the loss of a loved one, a marriage, or a job. A number of them had previously experienced other, less dramatic, sleep disorders. Some had resorted to the increased use of caffeine, nicotine, and other drugs. Many, when tested, demonstrated a greatly reduced ability to be roused during their deep-sleep stages.