by David Downie
Saying he could set up multiple accounts for the purpose, he circulated the material, at my behest, to members of the legal and scientific community out of state, asking questions and leaving comments from his multiple “fake” accounts or aliases. I put the word in quotation marks because it has lost all meaning in recent years and stands for “anonymous” in this case. Feedback from coroners and marine biologists, about everything from the time it takes for bones in seawater to be stripped of all flesh and genetic material, to the growth rate of barnacles on stainless steel, will be welcome. Safety in numbers, I said, then followed with another cliché, the best defense is a good offense. I can’t help wondering if it is the concept of legal precedent that leads me to use so many shopworn phrases.
Maggie and Taz and I have instinctively avoided talking about these issues when we are together. For instance, I have not yet shared with them my speculations about Beverley’s outlier theories, or my own possibly fantastical worries that the old mill property was a site used in the recent past and possibly still used today by the disappearance squads, if such squads ever existed.
But they continue as the main topic of conversation each morning, when I go to Beverley’s to work in the garden. Often neglecting her duties, she tags along, a step behind me wherever I go, whispering and croaking and wheezing. I almost snipped off one of her fingers by mistake the other day when she grabbed the slender branch I was trimming off the flowering maple, the one leaning over the wood chip path to the lawn. It was only because the sun struck her pearl necklace at that moment and reflected into my eyes that I saw the imminent danger. Now, in another troubling twist, she says she hears voices, and that Harvey is waiting to spring something, she knows it in her bones.
Reminding her about the old graveyard and skeletons, I told her I thought the expression “knows it in her bones” seemed too close to the bone, and she ought not to use it. That got her coughing, wheezing, laughing, and shivering worse than ever—with a mixture of hilarity and fear. She won’t stop insisting that the motel’s premises, especially the cottages, were a staging ground for extrajudicial disappearances from the pier by boat, and are haunted, that the raccoons and skunks and hogs are reincarnations of the victims, and that the White Rhino has been urging her from his cookie jar to sell up and move out.
“I hear him in the night,” she croaked at one point, clutching her necklace and glancing side to side. I realize she is constantly joking in her morbid, sardonic way, unless this time around she really is having aural hallucinations or believes in ghosts. She may be on the edge of some kind of nervous breakdown or pulmonary crisis. She seems to be suffering from intermittent fevers. I think she should see Dr. Dewey. She and Maggie describe him as an “ally.” But she says there’s no use, that she sees plenty of him, if I only knew. “I’ve seen him seventeen times in the last year,” she quipped. I was about to question her further but sensed the tombstone firmly in place so backed off.
Speaking of tombstones, with access to the Internet at the mansion, I have been able to find, among other things, that there is no proof of the massacre of the Yono, now considered fake news from centuries past, or the existence of a pioneer graveyard on the property. So, either those maps are wrong and my memory is flawed, or someone has been actively scrubbing files and editing Wikipedia, purging the record and rewriting history.
As to the stolen skeletons from the college lab, there were no reports of that in any county or state publication of any kind that I could access. I went back eighteen years. Beverley says it’s worse than a farce, it’s a ruse or a lure. Harvey is still trying to find some way to trap me and Taz. I fear she’s right. Something tells me we’ll soon find out.
I have also been able to confirm that the abandoned Beachcomber Motel had been confiscated by the county for unpaid property taxes immediately after Mr. Egmont died. He left no heirs and no will. Apparently, the place eventually sold for a song at auction just over three years ago to Beverley and the White Rhino—his real name was Ronald Rossi. How the buildings managed to survive the vandals and firebugs in this remote location I cannot imagine—unless Beverley is right and the property was a staging ground. I’m guessing Harvey and his friends were surprised and dismayed when Number Three, the waterworks engineer, found the underground stream, all that is left of Greenwood Creek, meaning the land is very valuable.
Since Beverley also dropped a few hints about “skeletons in closets,” then left them hanging, this may be the place to note my fuzzy recollections of the pubescent Sally Murphy. Her name came up in conversation last week. She is Harvey’s younger sister, Tom’s mother, an old if dull friend of Maggie’s and the same age as she, two years younger than Harvey and I. When we were growing up, Sally seemed the typical kid sister. I never gave her a thought, other than to class her among the obtuse and pimply. As brother and sister, she and Harvey were very close, too close, some alleged. I knew those allegations to be well grounded because, not long after I arrived and befriended Harvey, he shared an unspeakable secret with me.
Pudgy, prickly, and spoiled, the young Harvey loved to hunt squirrels and gophers back then and wasn’t averse to trapping rats, either. He demonstrated great ingeniousness in figuring out how to lure and kill them, usually with his pellet gun. We were only fifteen or sixteen and he didn’t have a real gun yet, unlike his older brother, Jack. But a pellet gun of the right kind can kill, maim, and stun small animals, and Harvey, probably influenced by some movie he’d seen and egged on by his brutish father and brother, had strung up a large collection of the unlucky creatures, some wounded and unable to escape. They dangled, wriggling and hyperventilating upside down on fishing line or twine, dying or already dead, under a big fir tree in his backyard. They made a godawful noise and stench. It was a great privilege to be shown this gallery of horrors, I learned, so I pretended to be enthusiastic, telling him how my father hunted a great deal, mainly deer, raccoons, and hogs. Harvey said he wished my dad were his dad. That surprised me. I figured it was because my father had been a major in the army and was decorated with a Purple Heart. Then he said, “’Cause if he were, then Sally wouldn’t be my sister.”
I recall being puzzled by this and the logic it suggested. I told him I didn’t understand. Instead of revealing what he meant, he took me through the side door into the house and we climbed up the rickety servants’ stairs to his bedroom. It was a big old dark brown wooden house with a shingle roof and giant dormers and built-in closets and servants’ passageways behind the walls, like our miniature Victorian mansion on the cliff. The servants were long gone, but the whispers and secrets remained. Harvey showed me the closet in his bedroom, and how he’d laid an air mattress in a corner on the floor, under the hanging rod and coats. “That’s where we do it,” he boasted. “Now, don’t you tell anyone,” he added, pushing me out of the closet and across the room. I pushed back and we fell and began wrestling. It was the first time we’d fought and he bested me, largely because my heart wasn’t in it.
Harvey was always heavyset and powerful. But he never bested me again, I made sure of that. Somehow, for years afterward, I blotted out the memory of the air mattress and Sally. The truth is, I wasn’t sure what he was doing with her, I had no experience with girls and had no brothers or sisters to ask. My parents certainly never mentioned anything about sex. In fact, I was not initiated into the mysteries until late, when Maggie took me under her wing, so to speak. I never understood Harvey’s obsessive claims about me and girls when we were in high school. He was off the mark. Naturally I preferred to let him think what he wanted and never denied being a Don Juan, even if the significance of the term escaped me.
Harvey’s mentioning of Pete and Sally is what jogged my mind. This morning Beverley said something about Sally’s first child, the Tom Cat’s older sister, and how she was mentally retarded, and for some reason this awoke in me these unsavory and unpleasant recollections. They got me thinking.
I might as well admit here and now that Pete wasn’t
really a friend of mine. He was Harvey’s stooge and sidekick, like Gus, and all three were in the thrall of Clem. Pete and I played tennis and baseball together once in a while, and that was fine, but he always struck me as weak willed and slow-witted and, as I mentioned earlier, plagued by a nauseating fishy kind of body odor. I believe his family subsisted off seafood, which was very cheap at the time.
The more I recall the past, the more I realize that, beyond my friendship with Mr. Egmont and my love of gardens and butterflies, my life in Carverville was pretty miserable until Maggie came along. Our time on the high school newspaper with Professor Johnson was certainly one of the highlights of my adolescence. Exposing injustice and finding facts seemed like the most important of all jobs, and as current events prove, I wasn’t half wrong. I seriously considered taking a degree in journalism, but something held me back, perhaps, I now realize, it was the knowledge that Johnson had betrayed me.
I can now give a more detailed account of Maggie’s life during the lapse of four decades, when we lost sight of each other. She admitted to me several days ago that she left town with Professor Johnson shortly after I departed at the end of semester break. She had argued with her parents, she said. Though progressives, they were practicing Lutherans and disapproved of her behavior “with the boys,” threatening to cut her off and send her to live with her aunt in Philadelphia. But she was eighteen by then and strong willed. So, Maggie packed a suitcase and left with Professor Johnson, who was planning to leave town anyway, it seems. Her parents followed suit, moving away one semester later, saying Carverville was cursed, a place guaranteed to wreck families and render normal humans imbecilic. The truth is, Mr. Simpson had accomplished his job, the junior college was up and running after something like six years of monumental effort, and he and his wife were eager to get home to Virginia.
Finding herself in Little Rock with Professor Johnson, Maggie enrolled in a community college but dropped out soon after because she was pregnant—with twins. She gave birth to a stillborn boy, choked by his brother’s umbilical cord, and to her surviving son, Paul. It was a difficult, traumatic birth and she almost died. A last-minute caesarean saved her. That explained the foot-long scars on her abdomen I noticed when we made love again for the first time. Maggie named Paul for me. Professor Johnson knew it but she says he didn’t mind—he was easygoing, mature, and had “advanced tastes,” she added, whatever that meant. It’s worth recalling that, at the time, I went by the name J. Paul Adams, but most people called me Paul not James. Only a few friends like Maggie or Harvey used the acronym “JP.”
So, Paul Johnson, son of our former professor of English, was the father of Taz, or Alexander if you prefer. I must stop calling him Taz. But the nickname fits him, somehow, whereas Alexander and Alex do not.
Let me go back to Maggie for the time being, before moving to the tall, gangling, rawboned malcontent Paul and his unusual-looking son, Taz. Since I have limited time to show her life in Technicolor in this journal, I will have to content myself with telling what I can in a concise, telegraphic style. Maggie and Professor Johnson were married in Little Rock, moved into a big wooden house near the college campus where he had landed a professorship, and stayed married for about five years. But his “advanced tastes” turned out to be bisexuality. Eventually it matured into homosexuality, or perhaps it allowed him to discover his true homosexual self. While she had nothing against it, she wasn’t prepared to lead a celibate life while he carried on, sometimes bringing home his lovers, who were mostly students and fellow teachers.
She and the infant Paul wound up living separately from him under the same roof. But the relationship was untenable, and the weather in Arkansas was even harder to take than the climate she’d grown up with in Charlottesville, where she was born. With her parents’ help, she moved back home, enrolled at UVA and eventually took degrees in English, then psychology. That’s where she met Zack Hansen, professor number two, another father figure many years her senior, who adopted Paul and brought him up for the next several years. That’s why I’m not clear about what Paul’s last name is or was. Why can’t I bring myself to ask Maggie?
Their luck didn’t last. “It’s not that Paul was a bad seed,” she told me the other morning as we moved swiftly south on the deserted beach among the mounds of rotting seaweed, dead snipes, garbage bags, and driftwood, heading to Beverley’s. It turns out Zack Hansen had two children of his own from a previous marriage, a boy and a girl. No one got along. Zack never felt affection for Paul, who was a disturbed, needy, hyperactive, and disconcertingly intelligent child. Because Maggie was desperate for the new marriage to work, she unwittingly neglected Paul in favor of Zack and his children. This was the psychologist speaking. She told her tale in a detached way, almost as if the events had not happened to her but to someone else she knew.
By the time this second marriage failed, Paul was an awkward, gawky teenager, and that’s when he had started to smoke and drink and experiment with soft drugs, and then hit the road, running away, the archetypal rebel without a cause. “You can imagine what happened,” she said. Yes, I could imagine, having judged many cases in juvenile court and heard incontrovertible proof of the progression from cigarettes and marijuana to hash, crack, and opioids, with associated chronic delinquency. He fell under the influence of various gurus and preachers, was in and out of jail on misdemeanor and felony charges, but remembered to send Maggie postcards twice a year, on her birthday and Christmas—from distant places such as Afghanistan, Morocco, or El Salvador, plus Mexico, Alaska, and Montana. Then he disappeared altogether for a decade, only to return one day out of the blue, to leave Taz behind, and go underground again.
“If he’s still alive,” Maggie said in her quiet, detached way, “Paul is now almost forty, a confused, lost soul with a criminal record and little education.” She paused. “Some people speculate he came back four years ago, planning to get Taz, but if it was Paul, they ran him out of town before we saw him. Last year I talked to the woman who gave him a ride and shared his bed, and I showed her photos of him when he was a child and then a boy of sixteen, before he ran away, but she wasn’t sure, she’s not exactly a reliable witness, and the man she met had a beard and long hair.” Maggie paused and swallowed. “Part of me hopes he never comes back, for Alex’s sake.”
It was heartbreaking, another reason to resettle elsewhere and cover our tracks, we agreed, the sooner the better.
The list of incentives to leave is growing longer by the day. In practical terms, the choice might not be ours. One more record-breaking storm and the house might wind up on the beach. Maggie has already spent tens of thousands of dollars installing concrete buttresses and storm drains and anchoring the foundations with steel rods and cables—an “act of faith” she calls it. But if the land underneath gives way, what good would any of that do? Propping the house up from below with additional concrete trelliswork would cost more than the place is worth. Besides, if the economy ever recovers, and the refinery and northern bypass are completed, and if the Old Coast Highway is repaired, straightened and widened as planned, this last lost stretch of underdeveloped paradise will lose its magic. It feels like the time has come to roll out of Carverville forever.
Yet, for an equally long roster of reasons, we agree that it is impossible to leave for the time being. Maggie has professional commitments, for one thing. “If you only knew what goes on behind closed doors in this town,” she added, dropping her guard, lowering her voice and taking me by the hand as we stopped below Beverley’s staircase on Graveyard Beach.
Opening a practice as a child psychologist when she first returned to town ten years ago, she was confronted with the town’s impoverished economic reality combined with the hostility of the locals to mental health treatment, which had forced her to give it up and get a regular job. She still has a few clients and does pro bono consulting for the beleaguered social services administration, so she cannot simply pick up and leave. “The stories I hear,” she said, bu
t declined to provide details. They were too upsetting, she added, and professional ethics forbade her telling me more.
One sticky item on that roster of reasons for staying regards Taz’s nationality and birth certificate, or lack thereof. It’s the reason he has not been able to get a learner’s permit to drive. It’s also the main reason I am in touch with my counterparts in Missoula and San Antonio—their initial findings are starting to come in, but I am hesitant to share the unsettling news with Maggie until we have the whole picture.
Other than the postcards he sent his mother, for years no trace of Paul surfaced despite research by private investigators and police departments. Not even the FBI—at the time of his disappearance still a benign, law-based enforcement agency—had been able to find him. They speculated he had assumed one or more aliases, and that he might have been and still be linked to international drug trafficking or terrorism. How else had he, a felon, managed to get a passport and find the funds to travel all over the world?
None of this was surprising to me. The number of young men and women who vanish every year boggles the imagination. There are not dozens or hundreds but hundreds of thousands of them, and tens of thousands of unidentified remains stored in morgues around the country. I was about to ask Maggie if she ever wondered whether Paul had wound up in a feral hog trap, but, again, I decided against it. I will bring up that supposition once the reports come in from my colleagues, not that I have much hope in that direction.
“Harvey knows,” Maggie said out of left field, driving the nail into the coffin.
I pressed her. The only reason Taz hasn’t been deported, she explained, is he’s a minor in her custody, has committed no known crime, and might reasonably be supposed to have been born in America to a U.S. citizen, i.e., Paul, her son, whose birth certificate she obtained from the authorities in Little Rock. Maggie has sworn an affidavit to the effect that she is the grandmother and Taz is American. Technically, Taz is an alien from an unknown land, and therefore an illegal immigrant. Technically, Maggie is also liable to prosecution for harboring him and making false statements. Since there is no proof of the boy’s parents’ identity, or anything about the child’s origins, the case has stalled.