Third, I’d like to thank my life inspirations: J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Crichton, Audrey Niffenegger, Suzanne Collins, Steven Spielberg, Chris Carter, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Alan Ball, Michael Bay, David Yates, Lady Gaga, and all the brilliant composers who wrote the film scores I listened to while writing this book.
Finally, I would like to thank you, Dear Reader, for giving me a chance, even if you ultimately decide I should have gone into finance, janitorial work, or anything other than writing. Please follow me on Twitter if you’d like, or feel free to contact me at [email protected] if you wish to share your thoughts on this book, your thoughts in general, or anything else you might have to say!
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Turn the page for a FREE PREVIEW of The Confessions of Jonathan Flite, Book 1 of Matthew J. Beier’s new Jonathan Flite series.
HERE’S SOMETHING folk attached meaning to, for a time:
In 2010, seven teenagers disappeared from Idle County, a place on the western edge of Minnesota that most people no longer know about. Their names were Molly Butler, Elijah Bryce, Lindsay Thorsen, Gabriel Creed, Pauline Gilbert, Clayton Graf, and Jillian Pope. Sometime during the night of July 4, 2010, they simply vanished. A local news anchor named Alice Winterblume, after their eighth night gone, first referred to them as the “Idle County Seven.” The name stuck.
Their story up to that point wasn’t exactly a mystery, at least for those who had read about them in local newspapers. They were a close-knit group of kids, brought together over the years by a curious mixture of coincidental circumstance and public scandal. There was Molly Butler and Elijah Bryce’s discovery of a human skeleton at Spinner’s Lake in 2005, the murder of Lindsay Thorsen’s four-year-old brother Drew three months later, the notorious Gateway Project run by Jillian Pope’s father, Max, and the gas explosion at the Sparks family household, where the hulking Gabriel Creed had been found at two o’clock in the morning, sobbing and screaming about the bodies burning inside. Had people from the outside taken more notice, they might have realized that Idle County was a quiet corner of the world where reality was often worse than rumor, where people had to lock not just their doors but also their minds, for some indefinite, unacknowledged reason simmering beneath the surface.
When those seven children went missing in 2010, however, Idle County briefly became a place of legend. It was the CNN news story everyone clicked on, only to feel prickles of unease on the backs of their necks. It was the place kids in Minnesota mentioned in tree-house sleepovers, with flashlights under their eyes, always in the direst of midnight tones. It was, when the police investigation finally unraveled into loose ends that couldn’t be tied, “the case that got away” for all those people who tried to crack it.
For many, the Idle County Seven eventually faded into obscurity.
For a few, they became an obsession.
WINIFRED FLITE KNEW NOTHING of the Idle County Seven when her son Jonathan was born. She also never predicted that his psychosis (as she called it, always with a smirk to cover the storm of panic in her chest) would last longer than a few good sessions of child therapy. In fact, she was barely thinking about Jonathan’s well-being at all when she went in for her cesarean section. He was simply a test—of her character, of her metamorphosis, of her ability to shed the cloak of worthlessness her own parents had slipped onto her so quietly over the years.
May 30, 2020, was a stormy morning in Newport, Rhode Island. Hoping to bid farewell to the chains of her youth, Winifred entered the hospital with almost bitter resolve. There was no father, she had already told everybody, just an anonymous donor. This lie became a secret that would eventually splinter her sanitized understanding of the universe, but on Jonathan’s birthday, it appeared there was no story set, no track to follow, just a trail to blaze.
He came out with blond hair and steely hazel eyes, almost the exact opposite of her own upswept black hair and the dark brown irises her childhood schoolteachers had always hesitated to look into. Jonathan cried, nuzzled against her, and slept the way he was supposed to, but on the first night he was home, when Clarette the nanny had taken over the after-hours formula feeding (Winifred was not going to let this baby prevent her from getting much-needed rest), she felt her life tilting in a way she had not expected. And sure enough, every step she took in the weeks, months, and years that followed felt like one on a crooked sidewalk.
JONATHAN DANIEL DIDN’T FUSS MUCH. He cried when he was hungry, remained quiet when he was not, and started sleeping through the night at four weeks. But when it came time for him to start smiling and engaging with the world around him, he kept cool, detached, silent. This went on for one year, then another, then another. He exhibited no other signs of being deaf, but he did show signs of a photographic memory at three and began reading at four. He was completing thousand-piece puzzles by the time Winfred swallowed her pride and took him to see Dr. Fred Ganzer, Providence’s leading child therapist.
That’s when everything began falling apart.
“Here’s something interesting,” Dr. Ganzer said to Winifred after his second session with Jonathan. He handed her a sheet of paper stained by waxy crayons. It depicted seven stick figures—children, judging by their sizes—and one larger figure behind them. They stood stick-hand-in-stick-hand under a canopy of pine trees. Surrounding them was a circle of light blue, scribbled in a mad ring with so much force that it had stiffened the paper.
“What do you think it is?” Dr. Ganzer asked.
Winifred could only stare at the picture. What on Earth had she done to put that image in Jonathan’s mind?
Drawing these figures became a theme. Sometimes, he drew what looked like a wooden table with two figures on either side, backed by a dazzling circle filled with every color in the crayon box. Other times, he drew what looked like a house on fire, often with a boxy looking figure sitting outside of it. On one occasion, he drew what looked like a lake with a fountain of water shooting upward, into the sky.
Winifred made a routine of folding up the drawings and bringing them home in her purse. At night, when wind rattled her bedroom windows and Newport Harbor chopped outside, she wondered who the boy sleeping down the hall from her really was. She had brought him into the world, and here he was, a silent mystery that the mothers around her—whom she had never quite warmed to anyway—were already whispering about.
“Lily and Danny are scared of him. He never actually plays,” Beth Eigor said to April Heisenberg at Starbucks one sunny winter morning, when they hadn’t yet realized Winifred was checking her voice mail in the coffee line behind them.
“I know, I’ve seen it,” April replied. “I feel like he’ll grow up to be a serial killer or something.”
Winifred, who hadn’t quite pressed the phone to her ear, felt mortification’s heat ensnare her heart, then rise to her face. April must have glanced at the floor just then, because suddenly her eyes were on Winfred’s new Chanel boots, the ones she had fawned over during their last coffee meeting. She clenched her mouth so tight that her jawline went pale. And then Beth saw Winifred, too, and her red curls bounced backward in shock. Winifred, never one to linger, turned around into the cold to find new friends.
OVER THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, Jonathan grew, started school, drew and painted pictures as always, but remained ever silent. Dr. Ganzer died of a stroke in 2026, and Dr. Glenn Coyle replaced him two months later. He offered nothing new. Even so, Jonathan’s eighth birthday brought a surprise. Winifred had asked Clarette the nanny to organize a party and invite Jonathan’s fellow second graders. Nine of them showed up with their parents close in tow. When it was time for cake, Jonathan blew out his candles as any good birthday boy would. Then he said, “EST-CE QUE QUELQU’UN V
EUT DU THÉ AVEC SON GTEAU?”
Only Clarette was able to keep from staring at him, agape. She went to the kitchen to boil a kettle of water. Only then did she realize Jonathan had spoken—in French.
In the weeks that followed, Winifred asked questions, and Jonathan answered.
“How long have you known French?”
“My whole life.”
“Because of Clarette? Does she speak it when I’m not here?”
“No, she always speaks in English.”
“Then how do you know it?”
“I just do.”
“And could you always speak English, too?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you? Don’t you know how worried I was?”
“Because I’ve been confused.”
“What confused you?”
“Molly and Elijah and Jillian and the others.”
“What do you mean? Who are Molly and Elijah?”
“The kids who went into the Moon Woods.”
“What are the Moon Woods?”
“A place I remember.”
“You’ve never been to a place called the Moon Woods. What on Earth are you talking about?”
Jonathan shrugged, then sauntered to the living room and grabbed his reading tablet. When he returned, he handed her a display of Google results for the search term “Idle County Seven.” Most of them were headlines dated eighteen years earlier, in 2010. Some were from a publication called The Circle Gazette, others were from the Wind Prairie Tribune, and yet others were from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
“Seven Idle County Teens Disappear Without a Trace.”
“No Clues Yet in Idle County Seven Disappearances.”
“Celebrity Victor Zobel Organizes Search for Missing Teens.”
“Police Find Evidence Teens Left Town.”
After confiscating the reading tablet and putting all of Jonathan’s internet usage under close monitoring, Winifred did her own research. Jonathan’s search history showed that, since learning to read at age four, he had visited at least two hundred web pages relating to the disappearance of these seven teenagers. Most were archived old news sources, but a few were conspiracy sites relating to unsolved FBI investigations. One site in particular outlined the history of Idle County, a small and isolated region in western Minnesota that seemed like a sordid place indeed. From what Winifred gathered, it consisted of four towns that lay scattered around a large, circular forest locals really did call the Moon Woods. Online maps showed that End Haven, the largest of the towns, lay about five miles due west of the forest; Stone Ridge lay two miles to the north; and Blue Hill and Deadwood were about eight miles apart, to the east and southeast.
According to the websites, Idle County had attracted the FBI more than once—first for an investigation involving a cult and two murders, then again for help with a kidnapping, then finally again when those seven teenagers disappeared, apparently into thin air. To cap off the ridiculousness of Jonathan’s sudden fixation with them, one of the teenagers, Jillian Pope, had been the stepdaughter of Victor Zobel, the founder of New Naturalism, a rebranded version of atheism that took society by storm in the late 2010s. Victor Zobel was one of the richest men alive, the ex-neurosurgeon son of an international real estate tycoon. He owned companies, ran charitable organizations, and spoke around the world about health, peace, the rationality of science, and the dangers of religion and blind faith. He had introduced his New Naturalism movement at a time when younger generations had widely begun to question the efficacy of organized faith structures, and within two decades, it had spread rampantly around the globe. Winifred proudly still owned a hardcover of his first manifesto, In God We’re Dust, released in 2005. Jonathan knew it was one of her favorite books.
Most disturbing, however, was a bread-crumb trail of website visits relating to reincarnation and past lives. As Winifred perused each one, the butterflies in her stomach transformed into flying dead weights. Jonathan was trying to manipulate her. He had to be. He had chosen to be mute for eight years and then, seemingly at random, thrown the charade in her face with a game of deception. After a week of it, Winifred stood in Dr. Coyle’s office, backlit by a dazzling orange sunset, dealing out what might as well have been the wrath of God.
“Is it normal for a kid to be silent for eight years, then suddenly spout off a bunch of lies?” She almost spat the words, because all she could think about were the drawings she had taken home in her purse years before. “And is it normal for a psychiatrist like you to be absolutely incompetent in finding answers?”
“No, not altogether normal,” Dr. Coyle replied, hot in the face.
“He’s not just talking about those seven kids who disappeared. He’s talking about ghosts. About stuff he can’t possibly believe in. I’m a New Naturalist, for Christ’s sake. I don’t fill his mind with that kind of garbage. But then, just yesterday, he started talking about quantum physics. Quantum physics! He can’t possibly know what that is!”
All Dr. Coyle had to offer were theories of parapsychology that would be nothing short of embarrassing. Yes, there were therapists out there using hypnosis to regress patients into so-called past lives, but that was pseudoscience. Mumbo jumbo. A treatment unproven.
As the year progressed, Jonathan grew quiet again but not altogether mute. He tried exactly nine times to tell them he had extra sets of memories in his head, that they were clear enough to be his own. But Winifred would have none of it, and Dr. Coyle’s fear for his own reputation led him to ignore Jonathan’s notions. He decided to chalk up the boy’s French skills to Clarette, who must have spoken the language around him secretly, and to blame his New Agey claims on articles he read on the internet. The boy’s stoic, matter-of-fact discussion of it all made Dr. Coyle decide (at least outwardly) that it was simply an attempt to make his atheist mother’s skin crawl. Jonathan was fiercely intelligent, with an IQ measured that same year at 145. If he had read all the hocus-pocus about past lives to coincide with his interest in these children—and the famous Victor Zobel—it would make for a perfect, elaborately planned manipulation. But why would he do it?
The question kept Dr. Coyle awake at night.
Guilt began keeping him awake a year later, when ten-year-old Jonathan, who finally seemed to have abandoned his story about the so-called Idle County Seven, put young Melinda Berry in the hospital with a severe brain injury. He had swung a board spiked with rusty nails into the girl’s head at summer camp, where Winifred had sent him as a last resort for her sanity. She had caught him reading about the Idle County Seven on her cell phone the Sunday prior, and it sent her into a rage. Summer camp had been a moment of her own weakness, a sentence on Jonathan for not being the child she had always envisioned. Winifred admitted it to Dr. Coyle on the phone the first night her son was locked in the Rhode Island Training School. She should have known, she said, that his asocial tendencies would have scared the other children, that he might act out against them for being normal. Dr. Coyle had spoken words of calming counsel to Winifred, but in his heart, he feared for Jonathan. His mother had created him for all the wrong reasons, and now, she wasn’t ready to handle the consequences.
He hoped Melinda Berry would be the last to suffer at Jonathan’s hand.
It didn’t turn out that way.
It was with a heavy heart that, a year after his retirement in 2033, Dr. Coyle learned Jonathan had been incarcerated for killing a woman named Ellen Graber. He was just thirteen, and she had been his nurse.
ELLEN GRABER’S FIRST IMPRESSION of Jonathan Flite was that he was a boy who had never been loved. His hazel eyes were both sharp with caution and heavy with knowledge, and when he arrived at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence with his lower left arm covered fully in a thick bandage, her first inclination was to rush to him, give him a hug, and say, “Chin up! I’m here to help you! I want you to feel at home here!”
But of course she couldn’t do this. Jonathan’s propensity toward violence had been not
ed on his chart, and she was a small woman; her white-blond hair hung over a frame not much bigger than a seventh grader. She was thirty-two and still got carded at bars, on the rare occasions she and her husband Craig were able to escape the kids for a date night. The Roman-nosed, thirteen-year-old boy easing his way down the hallway was taller than she was, looked strong in a ropy sort of way, and walked as if on eggshells, which was always a sign of constrained energy.
“He cut into his arms pretty deep yesterday morning,” Dr. Shivske whispered when she saw him in the hall just after the intake. “He’ll be in one of the single rooms. Private and family therapy over the next two weeks.”
Ellen smiled at Jonathan as he passed her. For just a moment, the sadness in his eyes flickered toward cordiality.
About ten steps behind him was a woman caked in makeup that her beauty didn’t require. She was on her phone, adjusting the tight, dark bun of hair atop her head, hissing like a snake. “Yes, I’ll be stuck here almost every day for family therapy. I had to cancel the Mykonos trip. I can’t fathom why he would do this to me right now. . . .”
Jonathan squinted as he eased into his bright hospital room, inspecting the spotless bedding and the shiny, tiled floor. Ellen watched, unable to help thinking how hugless the boy looked.
That night, just before the end of her shift, she trotted into Jonathan’s room with a beaming smile. “Do you mind if I change your bandages, Jonathan?” The boy shook his head and gave her a smile that wasn’t really a smile. It looked more like a twist of his face, perhaps just an effort to fit into the space he was occupying. Ellen thought of her own children, how happy they looked when they played on the swing set or pranced through the Atlantic’s sparkling surf. This boy had no such youthful exuberance. Despite his physical teenage appearance—that dirty-blond hair was at least a centimeter past tidy—he looked older than anybody she knew. His eyes shimmered with tears. She wondered how often he allowed himself to cry.
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