Then Arthur joined me. While he thanked the Christian Soldiers for their prayers and concern and subtly suggested they grant Miriam some peace, I slipped out the back of the house to circle around and accost Edward.
“You’re bothering Miriam,” I whispered.
“It wasn’t my decision—”
“It never is, is it? Where have you been? You haven’t been at their office.”
“They’ve been reorganizing,” Edward answered.
Defying Arthur’s wishes, the fundamentalists began a new hymn. Alicia was singing in a clear contralto voice only a few feet away, so I motioned for Edward to move into the driveway, so that a sculpture on the lawn, a sheet of tormented copper, blocked her view of us talking.
“Do you know anything about Chloe Hilliard’s disappearance?”
“Of course not.”
“This Golden One isn’t behind it?”
“How would I know?! Don’t use that tone on me.”
“Miriam’s daughter is missing. If anything happens to that little girl because of you—”
He stepped back toward the fundamentalists, who were singing “Abide with Me.”
I switched tactics. “Please. Meet me, I want to talk.”
He agreed, to get rid of me, to prevent my embarrassing him further.
“Nine o’clock tomorrow night, on the beach just in back of our office.”
Our office.
Chapter Twenty-nine
He actually showed up, on time, alone in the night fog. His wardrobe was suffering. Gone were the clothes he’d “borrowed” from Arthur, the flashy new things of his kept period, replaced by items culled from second-hand stores; tonight, a yellow shirt of something like cheesecloth and pants the drab green used for painting military vehicles.
The beach was empty, the fog thickening, so that it was like being in the center of a cloud, like heaven in old Sunday school pictures. Edward took my hand and squeezed it between his palms. I wondered, could he act this well? “Thank you for coming,” he said. “Thank you for coming to see me.”
This after I’d ordered him here. And I was coming for information about Chloe, about Ian, not a social visit with this man-boy of fragile loyalties. But there was no seduction in Edward’s manner, just the sexlessness of desperation.
He seemed eager to confide. “I knew the man in the museum.”
At first, I thought he meant Clarence Peever, the elderly guard who’d been stabbed, now recovering at his son’s house in Cotuit.
Edward clarified his remark. “I mean the man who was disturbed, the man who went crazy, the man who passed away in jail.”
We were sitting on the damp sand, dark as ash in the fog. We huddled against a seawall, partially hidden by a couple of dories, belly-up like dead fish.
“I knew the man who attacked those people…He was my brother.”
“What?” He said it again. I had thought they might have some sort of connection, but not this close. It took a second to register, then I assessed his features, comparing them with the madman with broken teeth and Biblical hair.
I’d had a brother who’d died too, I thought. Instinctively, I reached out to touch him, to comfort him as he began crying, but he flinched and drew away toward the rust-streaked concrete of the seawall. “We don’t look very much alike, I know. He—Clark—was schizophrenic. He was okay, manageable, when he took his medication. But they took it away, they wouldn’t let him have it. So he kept just the bag, the plastic bag for his pills. That’s what he swallowed to commit suicide.”
“Who are ‘they’?” I said. I knew, but wanted him to answer.
“The Circle of the Harmonic Peace.”
That wasn’t the answer I’d expected. “Who?” I knew it was wrong, but I said, “From your church?” To see if he’d dodge assigning the blame.
“Of course not. They’re tight-assed bullies, but they’re not murderers.” Then Edward pumped some asthma medication into his lungs and wiped his face with his sandy fingers. With vehemence he said, “I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon, like you and your buddy Ian.” He sneezed. “Bless you,” I said, and my blessing seemed to appease him.
He said, “I grew up in Vermont. In a shithole you tourists avoid.” Then he told his story—or the most I’d heard to date.
He grew up with Clark and his parents in a rickety wooden house with a metal roof, with a barn full of rats and rusting tractor parts, on a farm whose long-fallow fields were reverting to forest. His father drove milk trucks, those gleaming silver tanks you see on the road. It was strange, Edward said; they seldom drank milk. City people think rural families eat healthy, surrounded by rich earth to generate produce, by animals to yield eggs and meat, but Edward’s family “lived on Kool-aid and Spam.”
Their hardscrabble existence darkened as Clark became worse, as he heard voices, saw angels in cornfields and demons riding the backs of cows. “My mother was very religious,” Edward said. She joined a religious book club and began reading about the Essenes, about the Gnostic Gospels, about the Kabbalah. He described an exhausted woman, letting the macaroni burn on the stove while scanning the sacred texts of the world to see if any of them offered a reason, even an excuse, why her son was mad, in the barn, thinking the rats were whispering prophecies. Edward was an A-student, but Clark left school at fifteen, wandering the roads, nights, in all seasons, in the rain and sleet and snow, praying and seeing visions, almost getting killed by an oil truck near Cornish.
Then Edward’s father was laid off from work. He held a series of odd jobs, in a factory making boxes, in a quarry cutting granite for gravestones, then these too ended and he became restless and distraught. Like his eldest son, he took to the road, driving aimlessly in his rotting Oldsmobile, sometimes disappearing for longer periods than Clark.
Once, on a highway in western New Hampshire, he met a man who changed his life. He was a hitchhiker with a backpack of pamphlets about a group called the Circle of the Harmonic Peace. “It was ironic, after my brother’s visions and my mother’s reading, that it was my father who became the real religious fanatic,” Edward said. He’d been a lukewarm Methodist who’d come close to atheism when Clark was first diagnosed as schizophrenic, but, quickly, this group, this Circle, took over his life.
“What about the Golden One?”
“That came later.” Soon after his father began studying with the Circle of the Harmonic Peace, he found a new job. “Or the job found him, as he liked to put it. He believed everything was destiny. My mother wanted him to junk all the mysticism bullshit and become his old practical self again. She burnt her religious books in the incinerator, the day my father started spouting his God-speak. She said, ‘You can’t let this cult interfere with your new work.’” Edward didn’t specify what his father’s new job was, but from what I could gather, it was something manual, like construction.
But Edward’s father grew more and more enthralled with the Circle. He believed Clark’s illness was “punishment for harm done in past lives.”
Again, I asked, “Who is the Golden One?”
A beagle emerged from the fog, followed by a taut chain, then a woman, a brunette.
“They bleach their hair—”
“Some of them.”
“They pass themselves off as Scandinavians.”
“In Provincetown, at times.”
Eventually, his father left his new job, shuttling his family to communities in Maine and Massachusetts.
“In Truro.”
“No,” Edward stated. “My father never made it to Truro. He died of pancreatic cancer, with shame as an underlying cause. He died six months before the move to Truro.”
“Shame?”
“For breeding at all once he’d fathered a child like Clark. ‘A child with a blight,’ they called it, defective.”
Despite his humble wardrobe, he still retained a boyish beauty. “But there was nothing wrong with you.”
He laughed.
Then I realized these people
would of course consider his sexuality a blight.
Stoic, determined, his mother adapted to life in the group, becoming their chief bookkeeper. She had little choice; the medication for Clark was becoming more and more expensive, and her husband had sold their house and most of their possessions and given the money to the community.
“They trained me as a chef,” Edward said, “cooking expensive, foreign recipes for visiting dignitaries, people they wanted to impress, potential donors.” Edward added, “They called them ‘seeds.’ Then they got some bad publicity, in New York and out west, and the donors, the seeds, took a hike. So I became less useful.”
“Not much call for a good bouillabaisse.”
“I ran away. I hitchhiked to Provincetown. To the beach where Arthur found me.”
“Where does Ian fit in?”
“He was the Anti-Midas.”
“The Anti-Midas?”
“Everything Ian touched turned to shit.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was obnoxious. Like I need to tell you? You’re the guy who gave him the Budweiser shower.” He was cocky and coquettish again. “Hey, you could’ve killed him. You were the last guy in the nude section the day he got offed.”
Except for the Asian. “Did Ian know those people in Truro? Did Ian know those bogus Scandinavians? Or this Circle of the Whatever-You-Call-It?”
“I think so.”
“How did he know them? Why did he know them?”
“I really have to go,” Edward said.
“Did Ian know those lunatics in Truro? I want an answer!”
“Yes!” Edward bellowed into the fog so that even I became self-conscious that the Christian Soldiers might hear us.
“How did he know them?” I asked quietly, to calm him.
“Through some legal bullshit. I don’t know the details, so don’t ask me.”
“Did those people in Truro kill Ian?”
“It’s possible,” Edward said, using his Mona Lisa smile. “Unless you got him first.”
“You disappeared the morning his body was found—”
“That was just a coincidence, I told you that before. Arthur kept copping a feel.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police? About those people in Truro abusing your brother? Withholding his medication, that’s abuse. Then forcing him onto the street…”
“My mother is still there!”
The woman exercising her beagle was now returning.
“I have to go. They’ll miss me at the office.” He added, “To you, these Christian Soldiers are bogus intruders, annoying wackos. To me, they’re protection. They’ve saved my life. I mean it.”
How much of the rest of it did he mean? “Was Ian connected to the Christian Soldiers?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Do the Christian Soldiers know you lived in the Truro community?”
“Sort of.”
Getting a straight answer was like trying to bottle the fog. I took both his shoulders in my hands and he squirmed. “If those people in Truro had kidnapped Chloe, would you know about it?”
“No way, I’m out of the loop.” He brushed the sand from his donated pants, then scurried through the fog toward the rigid embrace of the fundamentalists.
Chapter Thirty
Although the theology books of Ian’s I’d gotten from Sallie Drummond contained nothing useful—Ian hadn’t scribbled any notes about his life or beliefs, just highlighted practically every paragraph in yellow—I had a 310-page clue I had yet to use: The Purity of Light, the tome I’d stolen from the Truro people. Though the book’s contents baffled me as thoroughly as any calculus text and no author, no Golden One, took credit for the dense prose, a publisher was listed on the title page: The Igneous Press in Rockport, Massachusetts. This was the town adjoining Gloucester, where I’d grown up.
The Igneous Press was located in a shabby part of Rockport, by an abandoned quarry full of water, junked cars, and, according to local legend, the tuxedo-clad ghost of Franklin Pearsall, the football star who’d drowned while swimming there, drunk, after his senior prom.
“No,” said the man at the plywood counter, catching sight of the book with the eye above the pyramid on its cover in my hand. “We’re not printing more until you pay for the last run.”
I put the book on the counter, next to a dish garden with snake-plants and china lambs. “I’m not one—”
“Take your business elsewhere. And take that book off my counter.”
“I’m NOT one of them!” I finally shouted.
“Are you from the police?” His voice was quiet.
“A friend has become involved—”
“Go to the police,” the man suggested. In a back room, machinery was rattling. “What makes me ashamed is the whole thing started here.”
“What thing?”
“The baloney in that book, their leader’s ideas. Lucas Mikkonen’s damned ideas.” He must have enjoyed the surprise in my expression, because he continued talking. “Their guru—Lucas Mikkonen—grew up right here in Rockport. His mother, Patricia, runs a shop on Bearskin Neck. She sells dolls.”
Bearskin Neck is a small peninsula dense with gift shops, crowded as closely together as barnacles on the jaws of an old whale. The shops are in shacks where fishermen once mended their nets and sorted their catches of mackerel and cod. Now, the buildings have been sanded, painted gray or russet or periwinkle-blue, and given gardens of begonias and petunias with beach-stone borders. They have carved wooden signs of old salts and pirates and lobsters and sell the same sorts of trinkets offered in Provincetown, but there’s less art here, fewer serious galleries. My mother remembers the Rockport of the Fifties, when first-rate antique stores flourished on the Neck, full of China-trade Buddhas with subtle bronze smiles and junks and minute armies carved out of elephants’ tusks. Now, there are cheaper foreign crafts around: abalone shell earrings, ebony elephants mass-produced somewhere in Kenya.
But Rockport lives up to its name. It has the granite headlands Cape Cod lacks, granite impregnated with mica, like the stone comprising the Provincetown breakwater.
You can look into Rockport Harbor from the Neck. It’s a small bowl of greenish water ringed at low tide by stone wharfs dark with limp wreaths of bladder wrack. The harbor is full of stubby fishing boats, presided over by the most famous fishing shack in New England. “Motif Number One,” the shack was nicknamed by the artists forced to paint and sketch it for generations. Barn-red, seemingly primeval, this building actually dates from the late Nineteen-Seventies, when its century-old predecessor washed apart in a winter storm. With its beaky roof and single window, it looks a little like an oversized outhouse, but it’s been reproduced literally thousands of times, the East Coast version of the famous lone cypress above the Pacific near Monterey.
Mrs. Mikkonen’s store had a view of this landmark, but it was down an alley on Bearskin Neck, back of a “lobster in the rough” restaurant, by a gravel townies-only parking lot. Not a prime location. The shop sold reproductions of antique dolls. Inside, there were dolls everywhere, still, glassy-eyed, making it look like a Victorian orphanage or an infirmary filled with children newly dead from some antique disease like diphtheria.
Mrs. Mikkonen was a sturdy woman, short, with blond hair surrendering to gray. Her cotton dress was decorated with teddy bears, and she wore terrycloth slippers, as if she should still be in her kitchen, frying the morning bacon. Unsure what sort of reaction her son’s book might inspire, I carried it in my pocket.
She looked me up and down, without letting a smile or any reaction alter her squinting pink face. I pretended to examine two dolls, as if undecided which to pick, a girl with braids or a boy in a velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, like the young Thomas Royall’s.
“Every detail is authentic.” Her voice was deep as Garbo’s. “All done by hand,” she said, of the female doll’s lacy bloomers. “By hand, not by machine.” I found this hard to believe, since I had seen similar
dolls advertised in women’s magazines I’d thumbed through in doctors’ offices.
“Who is the doll for?” Her voice was so stilted, so gruff, it was hard to tell whether she had an accent or not, whether she’d been born in this country or abroad. I balked at lying and saying it was for my wife, even though my whole visit was a lie; I wasn’t interested in her dolls, but in her son and his community. Was she one of his followers? I saw no Nordic clues that led me to believe this.
“It’s for a friend,” I said, not specifying the sex.
“How old?”
I was thinking the same question about her. Her face was as smooth as the heart of a cut potato, a wide peasant’s face, someone out of Brueghel. She could have been sixty-five, seventy, or older.
Then, in this shop of still children, I thought of Miriam and Chloe and her broken mermaid doll. “My friend is in her forties.”
She scuffed along in her terrycloth slippers. Her ankles were chafed and she exuded a smell of dough, of fresh bread or pastry. Standing on a stool, she reached to take down a strange doll from the top shelf. It was a child-soldier, a drummer boy. He had the stare, I realized, of those street kids in Provincetown, the same bright deadness in the eyes.
“How much do you want to spend?” She handed me the miniature drummer boy, and I realized I’d been sucked into this discussion too fast. Even if I bought this doll now, there was no guarantee she would discuss the community or her son, even supposing she knew anything useful. Cult members, even cult leaders, so often alienated their families.
“I’m not sure this is right. My friend is…very religious, anti-war.”
Frowning, she pulled the doll from my hands. She climbed back onto the stool, and, straining, placed the doll back on the top shelf. The doll teetered momentarily in its licorice-black boots, and I worried it might topple and smash, but she steadied it. Then she shuffled back toward the cash register, and, with a sweeping gesture of her blunt fingers, said, “Look around, take your time,” as if she wished I’d be on my way as soon as possible.
The Fisher Boy Page 21