by John Gault
“Psychology is my major, Mrs. Benjamin, as I told you on the phone. If I’m accepted, I’ll be going into graduate school next year. I know that doesn’t mean all that much,”—better I say it before she thinks it—“but it should help a little.” Better try to change the subject. “How long did you say you and your husband would be away?”
Barbara’s coffee sat untouched, making Sandy feel guilty that hers was almost gone.
“A week, perhaps ten days,” Barbara said. “Tom—my husband—is going to a new job out there.”
“Yes.” Sandy already knew that. She even knew what Tom Benjamin did for a living—from the phone conversation earlier that day, when Barbara had called the college placement service and Sandy, filling in time until her real summer employment began July 5, had taken both the call and the job.
“Anyway, about Jamie,” Barbara resumed, apparently obsessed with the need to get all of it in the open. “He has problems . . . uh . . . relating to people. Especially other kids. You won’t see any other kids around here, so don’t worry about it. And I wouldn’t ask him about it either, but that’s up to you, of course.”
The hell it is, Sandy thought. “Has he seen anybody about . . . you know . . . these problems, Mrs. Benjamin?”
“A psychiatrist in Atlanta and a psychologist up in Maine. A few years ago. I don’t really know whether it helped or not.” The formality was starting to break down a little, and Sandy sensed that this woman, this perfectly coiffed and made-up and dressed woman in front of her was more than just some uptight bitch mother. She was worried about Jamie. Very worried. Ah, Sandy thought, not willing to go soft on this woman just yet, but how much of the problem is Jamie’s and how much of it is yours?
“Please don’t misunderstand me, Sandy—and please call me Barbara, it makes me feel not as old—I’ve just somehow lost touch with the boy. I don’t know when it happened or how it happened but even when he was a little baby, still in diapers, he was so . . . so strange. I’d pick him up and hold him, and he’d push me away—no, that’s not true: he just wouldn’t hold me back . . .” She was biting her lip, and for a moment Sandy thought she was going to cry. Then Barbara turned her head, and when she was looking at Sandy again, her composure had apparently fully returned.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “It just bothers me some times more than others. Can I get you more coffee?” Not waiting for an answer she replaced the cup carefully on the tray and went back out to the kitchen.
Jesus, Sandy thought, what have I got myself in for? If the husband’s as bad as she is, I’m going to fake a migraine attack and go back to the phones at the placement office. What does this poor kid do, anyway? Does he throw fits? Does he set fire to things? Does he pull the wings off flies?
She heard the screen door open and bang shut, and she assumed it was Jamie. But when Barbara returned from the kitchen there was a slim, well-dressed man with her.
“Sandy, this is my husband, Tom. Tom, this is Sandy O’Reilly, who’s going to stay with Jamie.” Tom Benjamin covered the space between them quickly and fluidly, taking her hand for just the right amount of time and exerting just the right amount of pressure. Up close he looked quite young, the gray hairs in his well-groomed sideburns making the face look even younger. He was not, as Sandy had first thought, handsome. He was more like a “good-looking guy” of her own generation. But he was thirty-five or forty—had to be—and that was too old to be a good-looking guy. His face had no character. Yes, that was it: no character. The mouth smiled, but the eyes did not. He’ll be a very handsome man, Sandy thought, when he gets a few lines.
“Tom,” Barbara said, forcing her smile, “I’ve just been warning Sandy here about the dangers of baby-sitting with the Benjamin brat.”
Tom hadn’t liked that, not at all. But he’d put on his own smile and tried to pick up the spirit of the conversation his wife was promoting. “He can be a trial, all right,” he offered, shaking his head mechanically. “But don’t you worry, Sandy, he’s not nearly as bad as Barbara tries to let on. She’s just hedging her bets, you know—making you expect the worst so you’ll be grateful when it never happens. Jamie’s okay, he’s just going through a difficult stage, that’s all.”
Tom excused himself gracefully and went upstairs, presumably to change out of his suit and tie. Barbara’s eyes followed him and didn’t return to Sandy until she was sure her husband was out of listening range. Even then she whispered, leaning forward with enough melodramatic urgency to prompt Sandy to do the same. Barbara licked the dryness from her lips.
“Tom doesn’t understand Jamie,” she said, eyes flicking toward the stairs. Sandy watched her trying to compose the right words, to avoid saying anything stupid or hysterical sounding. “Call it a mother’s instinct—though, God knows, I’ve never thought much of myself as a mother, at least not by my own mother’s standards or my younger sister’s—but I don’t think my son is just ‘going through a stage.’ If he is, then he always has been. There’s never been a time when . . .” A noise upstairs startled her. But, satisfied that it was only the shower running, she resumed. “There has never been anything but stages. The psychiatrists gave us explanations, but—and you’re the first person I’ve ever said this to, Sandy—I have my own feelings. Jamie is different. He’s beautiful and he’s bright and he’s a lot of other things that seem good and desirable. But there’s something missing, Sandy. People get to know him, and they don’t like him. Other kids don’t like him right away. They . . . they seem to know something. Older people take longer, but they don’t like him either. Tom won’t admit it, but he doesn’t like his son. And, God help me, neither do I.”
Exhausted, she slumped back into the leather chair, and her left hand went up to shade her eyes. She sighed deeply. “I’m sorry, Sandy,” she said in a weary, old-woman voice. “And I’m ashamed. I guess I told you because after next week I’ll likely never see you again, and I won’t have to look at you and know that you know.”
Sandy let a few agonizing minutes pass, as many as she could stand, before beginning to fidget out of her chair. Her body ached from the tension. She felt as if she’d just done an hour of calisthenics, except that it was not the righteous pain that follows good exercise. Blearily she collected her red canvas shoulder bag and headed toward the door, unescorted.
“I guess,” the woman in the leather chair said to Sandy’s retreating back, “you won’t be here tomorrow.” Damn it, Sandy thought. I wish she hadn’t asked. Now I have no choice.
“I’ll be here, Mrs. Benjamin,” she said, letting herself out quietly.
In the bushes by the open window, Jamie smiled to himself.
C H A P T E R
7
David Bentley was thankful that Chief Torrey—Chief Becker Torrey—was the better squash player, even though Torrey was giving away about twenty years and at least as many pounds. While David didn’t believe for a minute that Torrey would ever hold losses on the squash court against him, he was just as happy that the temptation had never arisen. On an average of three times a week over the past six years, he and Torrey had played four-of-seven series, and on an average of two and a half times a week Torrey had won. It wasn’t just on brains either, David had to admit. For a big, heavy man, Torrey moved like a panther—a black panther, in his particular case—and he was seemingly tireless, winning late more often than early.
They were sitting in the small, functional lounge above the courts of the Downtown Racquet Club, sipping Miller Lites from the bottle and feigning lack of interest in the two incredibly sensual young women working up lovely sweats in the court David and Torrey had vacated minutes before.
“David,” Torrey said, drawing lightly on his first post-game cigarette, testing to see if his lungs were quite ready to handle it, “do you think we can rule out foul play?” The chief had made the Reverend Morley matter David’s case. That’s how he preferred to operate. That’s what David’s father, his predecessor, had always done: unless the compli
cations proved to be too much for one investigator, the officer who started a case remained in charge of it until it was closed or until the law of diminishing returns took over. Under both Bentley Sr. and Torrey the twenty-four-man, thirteen-woman Jericho police force had been a model for the nation, and their morale had never flagged.
David shrugged. “I doubt it, Beck. Morley was kind of a crazy old coot by all accounts, always losing things, and sometimes he’d even forget how to get home. Pedersen says he once found the old man wandering around the middle of town at two in the morning and took him home in the cruiser. He was over eighty, Beck, and while he was apparently bright and okay most of the time, he had these lapses . . .”
David sensed that he didn’t have Torrey’s undivided attention, and when he looked back down to the court, he could understand why. One of the women, the taller, darker one, was sliding her fingers under her tight white velour shorts, pulling the material away from her thighs, adjusting them for comfort. “Nice,” David said softly. Erotic as hell, he thought.
“Um-hmm,” Torrey agreed. Then, “So you think that he lost his glasses in the clearing and wandered off blind and fell into the quarry, do you?”
“Seems the most likely explanation,” David said, sloshing the beer around absently and taking one last pull off the bottle. “The glasses were thick, very strong. He had to be almost blind without them.”
Torrey nodded. “So the hole is out?”
“I think so. As I told you—and I’ll put all the details in my written report later in the week—he apparently almost did fall down the hole. Or somebody did recently, because there were marks going down about twenty inches on one side that were probably made by shoe heels. But they stopped at an exposed tree root, and there was no evidence that he fell any further. And I did go down there.” He shivered at the memory, and he knew that Torrey had seen him shake and was probably analysing it at that very moment. No nervous movement was ever lost on a good cop, not on David himself and certainly not on Torrey.
“We’ve been dragging the quarry pond all day,” David continued, doing his damndest to push the hole out of the conversation. “It’s useless, I think, but I don’t have to tell you it’s important that we at least go through the motions, so the commission and the council and the media can’t say we left anything out.” He drained the last of his beer and shrugged. “To be honest, Beck, I think this one is a long-goner.”
Torrey raised his hand for two more beers and lit another Marlboro. “You will drag again tomorrow, though,” he asked.
“Might as well,” David replied. “The boat’s still there. Unless you think I should try to find some other leads.”
Torrey shook his head. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but it reminds me of a case your dad put me in charge of about twenty-odd years ago. A boy named Danny Trowbridge. Do you remember?”
“Not all that well,” David admitted. “But it’s funny, I was just thinking about Danny yesterday. I knew him some. We were in the same grade. And I seem to remember you and dad in our kitchen, talking about it late one night. I wasn’t supposed to, but I always tried to listen when dad had cops in the house, talking about investigations. It was exciting, better than television.” It was, too. Even if he hadn’t left university, even if he had gone on to get a law degree, he would have been some kind of cop, somewhere.
Torrey was staring again, but not at the women below. He had that look that David knew so well, the look of a man resurrecting and reconstructing a long-past event.
“I never believed,” he began, speaking slowly and choosing his words carefully, “that Danny ended up in that pond. I know that was the reasonable conclusion, and that’s what went on the final report, but I never believed it. And I’ll tell you something, I don’t think your dad did either. But it came to a point where we had to let it go, and that’s what we did.” He grunted as he shifted his weight in the captain’s chair, acknowledging that he could get as stiff as any other man from a strenuous workout.
“So what do you think happened?” David asked.
“I can’t answer that. I only know what I think didn’t happen.”
This was, David thought, as good a time as any to try to get out what had been eating at him most of the day. “When you were working on it, was there . . . was there anybody who said anything about the . . . uh . . . oh, never mind, Beck.”
“About the Whatelies?” Torrey asked.
“Yes.” David’s voice sounded very small, and he was now far less than sure that he really wanted to get into this.
“There were about half a dozen calls to the station,” Torrey recalled. “I took three or four of them myself—older people, who either remembered Old Man Whately and the rest or at least said they did. One old woman insisted that long after the fire, long after the Whatelies disappeared back in 1910 or ’11, she saw the old man in that clearing. Not only that, but he was dancing with the devil. That’s right, that’s what she said, ‘dancing with the devil.’ She said there were demons there too. They were chanting, she said, words she didn’t know in a language she didn’t know.”
“And?”
“She said there was a curse on Whately’s Copse. But then, every kid who ever grew up in Jericho knows about that, don’t they?” Torrey smiled. “Or was it the ‘bogeyman’s place’ when you were young?”
“You don’t believe any of that, do you?” Please say no, David pleaded silently. Because he was afraid that he did—at least a little bit.
“I’m not a superstitious man, David,” Torrey said almost gravely, “and I certainly wouldn’t ever draw conclusions without basing them on the facts at hand. But who knows? There are facts and there are facts . . . My great grandmother was an Obeah woman, David—did I ever tell you about her?—and she knew things and she did things that I cannot explain to this day. She knew when people were going to die, even people hundreds of miles away, and she knew when babies would be born—not just the month or week, but the day and hour, and what sex they would be. And she had cures, David, cures that made people well. Other things too, things that were not so nice.
“So in answer to your question, David, I just don’t know. I put it all out of my mind twenty years ago, as fast as I could, and I didn’t think about it again until Sunday. And,” his voice changed and a smile replaced the deep concentration, “if you mention this conversation to anybody you’ll be pounding a beat from midnight till dawn in perpetuity. Come on, let’s get a shower.”
David took one last look at the stunning women in the court below, signed the bar chit, and followed his boss down the stairs. The only reason he’d led Torrey into the conversation about Whately’s Copse was to get some kind of reassurance. He hadn’t counted on it resulting in the opposite effect.
“The snakes aren’t very hungry tonight,” Teddy said, his eyes, like Jamie’s, focussed intently on the activity in the terrarium. It was true; the two grass snakes were oblivious to the bugs that Jamie was dropping one by one into the large glass case. On the other hand the three toads more than made up for the snakes’ lack of appetite.
“Snakes don’t eat often,” Jamie explained without looking away from the toad feast. “We took that in school. I told you.”
“So are you going to tell me about her?” The button eyes were almost expressionless in the eerie light of the terrarium, the only light in the Benjamin basement at that moment.
“Who?” Jamie asked innocently, pretending a rapt attention to his pets’ eating habits.
“Don’t play games with me, boy!” Teddy snarled. “You know darn well who I mean. The baby-sitter. Sandy.”
“She was okay, I guess.” He refused to look at Teddy, but he could feel the rising impatience.
“Nice tits, I’ll bet.”
Jamie flushed. For some reason he wasn’t sure of, he did not want to discuss Sandy with Teddy. He wanted to think about Sandy by himself, to keep her for himself. Teddy always wanted to know everything about everything, especially about girls
and women. And he made everything sexy and dirty; with Miss Livingstone or Abergail or sometimes even Barbara it didn’t matter very much, but with Sandy it did. Sandy was just not the same. Sandy liked him. She’d smiled and held his hand for a long time. Jamie looked down at that hand and wished to himself that he’d remembered not to pick up all those filthy bugs with it. He should have used the other one or worn gloves or something.
“I didn’t look at her ti . . . I didn’t look there.”
“Sure you did.”
“She had nice eyes, Teddy,” Jamie enthused, counting on his friend to get caught up in the enthusiasm as well. “They’re green, almost as green as the grass. And in one there’s like a little brown wedge that goes from the white to the black part—the pupil. And she has a nice nose; it turns up a little on the end. And her hair is dark brown and curly and shiny, and . . .”
“Does she have big tits or little tits? Are they like Barbara’s or Miss Livingstone’s? What are they like, Jamie? And don’t tell me you didn’t look at them, because I won’t believe you.” It was an order. There was no mistaking that.
“How can I tell you what I don’t know?” Jamie pleaded.
“You’re talking too loud.”
“Sorry,” he whispered. They both looked toward the closed basement door, half-expecting it to be opened. Jamie sort of wished that it would and that Tom or Barbara would be standing there, ordering him upstairs. Teddy was getting more and more demanding lately, and his mind never got off of sex. Even when Jamie wanted to talk about his friends in the woods, in whom Teddy had once shown great interest, Teddy always steered the conversation back to tits and cunts (Jamie hated that word so much he was embarrassed to even think it, and he couldn’t say it; he was pretty sure he had said it, though, the time when he really blew up at Barbara, when he was what she called “berzerk” to Dr. Applebaum).