by Joey Ruff
“I told him if he squared away the bill now he’d never have to see you again.”
“That was smart.”
“Yeah, well, unlike the Emmerich kid’s parents, the Easters were satisfied with the results you presented, as unfavorable as they were. Still, if you’re going to keep taking me with you to deliver bad news, you have to learn to keep your mouth shut. It’s embarrassing. You think I like playing damage control?”
I didn’t say anything, just fell in to silence and waited until my head finally stopped spinning. Eventually, I looked at Ape, but not his face. His arm. “Did the Easters have dogs?” I asked.
“Not that I saw. Why?”
“Because I think you have a tick.” I pinched at his arm.
“Dammit,” he spat. “You didn’t have to pull out my hair, did you?”
Sure enough, in my hand were three long, reddish brown hairs. “Sorry.”
“Did you get it?”
I nodded. “I got it.”
I turned, looked out the side window, watched the trees and houses fly past us. I could feel his eyes on me. “What?”
“Just wondering what’s going on in that brain of yours.”
“Just a lot of bullshit,” I told him, and we drove the rest of the way in silence.
13
Nadia drove, and I filled her in on the details while flipping through the pages of Eric’s journal. She listened intently and then thought for a moment. Then she said, “So what was Adam given?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if Julie was given Toby’s bear…”
“Why would you assume he was given something?”
“It’s like they tell you, don’t take candy from strangers, right? A gift is a good way to win over a child.”
“I guess, but we don’t know, at this point, if they were given anything. The bear might be an isolated incident. I think maybe if Adam was given something, Eric would have mentioned it, either when we met or in his journal.”
She nodded. “Okay, fair enough. So what’s the plan?”
“Drop me off at the school and swing by the office, check the messages and pick up a fax for me. Detective Anderson sent over a list of names for missing children: all the cold cases for the past few months.”
She nodded. “You think there’s more?”
“More what?”
“This fax. Obviously, you think there’re more pieces to your puzzle, more kids with imaginary friends…”
“I’m leaning that way. Why?”
She shrugged. “It’s smart, that’s all.” She smiled. “Any ideas what’s behind it? This, what did you call it, under-ring of…”
“Underground ring of serial-kidnapping bums.”
“Right.”
“Different people, one agenda. My first thought is that it’s the same creature, body-snatcher maybe.”
“Like a demon?”
“That’s one idea.”
She was silent a moment before she said, “Maybe it’s one of Lorelei’s…?”
“What?!” I said. I didn’t mean for it to sound as defensive as it did.
“Easy. I don’t mean her, just maybe one of her kind?”
“No,” I said.
“Sirens use their mind control on these homeless….”
“That whole idea is rubbish. A Siren’s power works like a strong drink, amplifying the desire that’s already there. It’s a look they give or a pheromone they spray, maybe a specific tone in their voice.”
“Exactly….”
“No. Some vagrants might be pretty hungry, but they’re still not going to eat a little kid. If you’d have seen that fucker yesterday picking his teeth….”
“Okay. I get your point.”
“He wasn’t even really human. The fucking tramp threw me clear across the front yard. He was primal, like….”
“Like an animal,” she said. I glanced over at her and noticed the way Huxley’s amulet sparkled in the daylight, almost shimmering. “Magic?”
“Yeah, maybe. But if that’s the case, we’d only have more questions than answers.”
There wasn’t time to explore it further as she pulled up in front of Moreland Elementary. As the car idled, I noticed her frustrated look. “Give me forty minutes,” I said. “Then we’ll go by Toby’s place. We can talk about this more later.”
She nodded, and I stepped out of the car. As I looked over the non-descript, brown-brick building, I cringed a little. Maybe it was the thought of incessant chatter about transforming cars and talking-animal cartoons, the hanging macaroni art, the cardboard cafeteria pizza or the token fat kid with the bowl-cut who sat alone in the corner eating paste and picking his scabs.
Most people had problems with hospitals or graveyards, but I’d spent so much time in those places, they really didn’t faze me. What bothered me were elementary schools. It wasn’t so much the fact that they smelled like low-income housing projects or that the buildings themselves were hollowed-out shells painted up to look nicer than they were. It was the little shits inside.
I didn’t have a problem with any kid, singular. Especially these days, I made my living off of them. But put that many kids together, and you got a pack of lawless chimps that somehow thought I was a jungle gym. They kick, punch, bite, claw their way across my shoulders and face, lick hard candy and stick it in my hair, and use my tshirts as snotty toilet-tissue. Kids, plural, were the ultimate parasites, feeding off of each other’s energy and collectively sucking the life out of everything else around them.
I could do monsters or demons or cults of religious fanatics. I couldn’t do kids en masse. The only thing that allowed me to steel my nerves and pull the front door open, to actually enter the building, was knowing that the animals would be locked in their cages and I’d be free to roam the halls unscathed, no jolly rancher candies cemented into my hair.
The office was just inside the double set of glass doors, and I stopped in, signed my name and spoke with the receptionist. She was older than Moses, which was surprising. Her voice sounded elderly, but not ancient. She was wrinkled like a basset hound and spotted like a pair of dice, and she kept her teeth in a glass of clear fizzing liquid at her elbow on the desk.
Her eyes looked huge behind her thick-lensed spectacles, and with a bit of trouble, she managed to focus on me as she asked, “And whose parent are you?”
I glanced at the clock on the wall: 11:35. I was already late. I didn’t have time for this. I’ve never been a Zen master or Buddhist anything, but I summoned all the grace and patience I could muster and told her, “Nobody’s parent. I’m here to see Mrs. Brocklin. When we spoke on the phone, you said…”
“Oh, Mrs. Brocklin. Yes. Lovely woman. Are you James Skip?”
I bit my lip. “Swyftt.”
“Oh, good.” She flashed me a smile that was all gums, and the little wispy hairs on her top lip and chin waggled. When she smiled, the bags and wrinkles across her cheeks and forehead stretched taut and made her look like a catfish. Yet, there was somehow a real joy that seemed to show in her eyes, one that made her entire face glow and suggested there wasn’t a dark spot in her soul. For the briefest of moments, I felt guilty for being so annoyed with her, but was in a hurry and still had things to do afterward. “Mrs. Brocklin should be expecting you. You know, her free period started…” She held up a digital watch that she kept on the desk nearby, its strap broken. “…Seven minutes ago.”
“I understand that,” I said through clenched teeth. “If you could just tell me which room she’s in…”
“Let’s see…” She opened the drawer next to her and pulled out a spiral-bound directory. She set it down on the desktop and took the extra time to close the drawer back before turning to the directory and lifting the cover open with unsteady hands that trembled like someone had set her entire arm to vibrate.
She flipped three more pages painfully, and came to rest on an index. She leaned over the paper, staring at it for a moment. Her eyes couldn’t have
been more than a foot from the page. She licked her lips once and then again, adjusted her glasses, and said brightly, “Oh, here it is.”
“Great. You’ve been such a big help. What room number was that?”
“Page…seventeen,” she said absently. She looked up at me and smiled, and I had to look away in annoyance. “Just a moment longer, Mr. Skip.”
“Nevermind,” I told her and walked to the door, pushing it open, and said, “I’m sure I can find her.” Then I stumbled back into the hallway.
I suppose my thought was that if Kindergarteners could navigate the corridors of the old building, they couldn’t be too treacherous. I must have wandered past eight empty classrooms, two gymnasiums, a music room, an art room, a cafeteria, five bathrooms, and the library.
Somehow, I found the room I was looking for, tucked away in the back. There was a woman in her late thirties sitting behind a desk, her brown hair worn up like she was emulating the First Lady, ten presidents ago.
She was grading papers when I stuck my head in and didn’t look up until I knocked against the open door. “Mrs. Brocklin?”
“Yes?” she asked. “Oh, you must be Mr. Skip.”
“It’s Swyftt, actually,” I said, entering the room. “I think the lady at the front had her hearing aid a little low this morning.”
She laughed a little, nervously, and stood, came around to the front of the desk and leaned against it. She was strikingly pretty and wore a modest pink top and long gray skirt, and apart from the curves in her figure, nothing was revealed but her ankles and neck. She motioned for me to have a seat, but the chairs were built for people three-feet tall. I stood.
“My free period’s almost over,” she said.
“Right, sorry about that. Got a little lost in the halls and all that.”
“They didn’t tell you I was in the first grade hall?”
“I didn’t know the halls had names.”
She nodded. “What can I help you with?”
“Yesterday a boy came to see me, Eric Gables, said his brother’s been missing. The way I understand it, you were Adam’s teacher. I’m looking into the disappearance, wondered if you could tell me anything?”
She seemed to think for a minute. “Well, Adam was a good kid. He was quiet, mostly. He didn’t talk much to the other students.”
“He didn’t have many friends then?”
“No. I can’t remember him ever having a conversation with any of them. Some of the other boys pick on him a little.”
“And what happened then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did Adam lash out? Eric said something about an attack on another boy…”
She shook her head. “No, what happened with Clint Johnson was an isolated incident. Adam was very good, kept to himself, like I said.”
“So he didn’t react to the other kids when they teased him?”
“Well, naturally, but he seemed to withdraw more into himself.” She glanced at the clock. “I’ve spoken with the police already,” she said. “Detective Anderson.”
I nodded. “Yeah, they haven’t exactly found any leads.”
“And you’re a private eye?”
“Something like that.” I looked around. “Which desk was his?”
She pointed to the row nearest the window. “Second one back.”
I walked over to the desk, dropped Eric’s journal on top of it, and slid my gloves off. I put my palms down on the desktop and felt a pulse of energy shoot like a static charge from the tips of my fingers up my arms.
As the vision began, I saw a little boy with sandy-colored hair in a striped collared shirt. His arms were folded tightly across his chest. Head bowed, eyes closed, shoulders flared. He hummed loudly and rocked back and forth. Around him, children were standing on their chairs, boys and girls alike, taunting him, tossing crumples of paper, spitting through hollowed-out ink pens. Then there was a voice from near the classroom door, a young boy, “She’s coming! Quick!” And just like that, the taunts faded, the kids resumed their seats, books found their way to the desktops, and the clip-clop of high heel shoes on the hard tiled floor echoed louder and louder until Mrs. Brocklin stepped into the class. “Look at you behaving,” she said. Then, “Adam, what’s wrong?”
As I let the vision pull away, I heard the faint voice of one of the boys say, “We don’t know, he just started shaking like that.”
I took my hands off of the desk, slipped my gloves back on, and took Eric’s book in my hand. When I looked at Mrs. Brocklin, she regarded me with a curious expression.
“Did Adam often seem to slip into moods,” I asked. “Possibly unprovoked?”
“How did you…” She looked at me funny for a second. “You’re not that police psychic from the news a while back?”
I smiled. “If I were a psychic, I wouldn’t need to ask you any questions.”
Clearly, I made her uncomfortable. She considered me another minute and then turned back to her desk. “Sometimes.”
“You didn’t think it odd at all? You didn’t think other kids might have been doing things to him? Harassing him?”
She was trying not to look at me now, but I could tell her face was reddening. “I…I tried, okay. I talked with Mrs. Gables a couple of times, I told her what I suspected. I don’t know how much she understood or cared though. She would come in smelling like…I mean, she was…”
“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s a drunk. Eric told me.”
“And I tried to treat Adam like a normal student, but he would have these outbreaks, and it was disruptive to the class. I’d take him out in the hall and try to calm him down, but sometimes he would just yell and make this noise. I don’t know if he was crying or yelling, but it was kind of like a honk, when he’d get really worked up. But I couldn’t leave him in the hall, because then he would disrupt other classrooms. And sometimes…”
She fell silent and sat there a moment, hiding her face. I could tell she was ashamed. “I didn’t tell the police any of this,” she said. “I didn’t want them to think badly about me. I didn’t want the school board…”
“It was hard,” I told her. “I understand that. And it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or a bad teacher.” I didn’t say it softly or sweetly, I didn’t put a hand on her or try to comfort her. Hell, I wasn’t even consoling her, I was just playing the facts out on the table like a hand of cards. “Look at Mrs. Gables. Look at what it did to her.”
I heard quiet sobs, a sniffle, that told me she’d lost it, but she was trying to keep it together. “Did Adam have anything – a stuffed animal, maybe?”
She turned to me, the red still in her eyes. She looked a little confused. “No, of course not. We discourage children from bringing toys like that to school. Why do you ask?”
“Maybe something else, something important? Jewelry maybe or…I’m not really sure.”
“He didn’t have anything like that. Not that I’m aware of.” Then she said, “He did have a special pencil, and he couldn’t do his homework without it. Something like that?”
“No. Least, I don’t think so. Do you have any kids in the class named Dewey?”
She looked around the room, quietly surveying the desks. “No. I don’t think there are even any Dewey’s at the school. You can check with Mrs. Williams at the front desk.”
“I’m not sure I have three hours. Did Adam ever mention the name Dewey around you? Maybe in a story he wrote or in conversation?”
“I don’t…I don’t think so. No.”
“How about dragons? Did he talk about dragons at all?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “I guess. I mean, he was a boy. It didn’t raise any flags.”
“You ever hear the word Elensal?”
She thought about it, shook her head.
“It’s okay.” I looked around the little room, seeing chalk drawings of snowmen on black construction paper hanging on one wall. There was a collection on another wall of collages, magazine pictures cut
out and glued to a square piece of cardstock, and a banner over them reading, Things I Like. “Do you have any of Adam’s artwork that I could look at? His cut-out picture, maybe?”
She shook her head. “I gave them all to the police when…well, after…”
“Okay. I think that’s it.”
She nodded. “You don’t think less of me?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know you, lady. Apart from the tits and arse you keep hidden under that pilgrim outfit, I couldn’t care less.” I winked at her.
She shook in disgust, her hands moving to cover her chest, and she said, “Excus…”
“What time is recess?” I asked, cutting her off.
She looked quite embarrassed, not meeting my eyes, but there was something about her expression that looked almost relieved. “The kids go to lunch next. Recess after that.”
I nodded. “Can you point me in the direction of the playground?”
14
The playground, if that’s what you would call it, was down the hall from Mrs. Brocklin’s classroom and through the glass double doors. It was more like a theme park or a space museum than any school playground I had ever seen.
In the center of the dirt lot was a large, wooden castle, complete with monkey bars and swings, wobbly swinging bridges, tunnels, tubes, fireman poles, cargo nets, and balance beams. The thing was huge, and if trolls attacked, I liked to believe that the Moreland play gym would keep its inhabitants safe. In fact, the thing was so huge it had developed its own center of gravity and other playground equipment had gotten stuck in its pull.
Orbiting the wooden fortress were several smaller, yet equally impressive, units: a large sandbox filled with teeter totters, two Olympic-sized swing sets, maybe twenty-feet tall, a red metal fire engine frame with working steering wheel and ladders, a barbershop quartet of slides, and three large, hard plastic elephants, all hollowed out into climbing tunnels.
I felt better outside, more comfortable, more at ease. But I knew that in about twenty minutes’ time, the dormant kingdom would erupt in noise and clatter, so I set to work, moving quickly across the grass. I wasn’t entirely sure where I needed to focus my attention, but the journal said that Adam met Dewey at the school playground.