The Fisher Boy

by Stephen Anable

  We blushed, Roberto and I. No wonder Almeida avoided this guy.

  “But I rescued a girl they’d tied to their Tree of Life. There were others I couldn’t help, that girl they found dead in the Province Lands the next morning. Killed by pesticide poisoning.” He shook his head. “They kept the worst things hidden. Even from their followers, even from me.”

  I remembered the blurry figures running behind the misty glass in the greenhouses.

  I said, “Despite all he saw, despite all he knew, Edward went back.”

  “When the chips were down, his first loyalty was to the cult. It was really…all he had.”

  “But it had driven his brother, Clark, insane.”

  “Wrong,” Jason said. “Clark was ill long before the family became involved with the cult. Their refusal to allow him access to his medication for schizophrenia undoubtedly contributed to his death, in that when he was expelled from the compound, he wandered into Provincetown, and, confronting the exhibit on Royall—with its photographs of familiar landmarks like the buildings and the pond and the rune stone—he went berserk. And the title of one picture didn’t help. He attacked the art and the museum staff, then he was arrested and killed himself in jail.”

  “Did you see Clark that day, the day I saw you going to Scents of Being, the day Clark went crazy at the museum?”

  “No,” Jason said. “I didn’t see Clark, and, as far as I know, he didn’t see me. Of course, Commercial Street, all of Provincetown, is awfully cozy.”

  “Did Edward know Ian before this summer?” I asked.

  “Possibly. Through the cult.”

  So Edward being in Ian’s bedroom might actually have been planned. At the St. Harold’s memoriam party. They might have arranged some sort of meeting that I’d unknowingly sabotaged.

  “You went to Ian’s funeral,” I said to Jason. “I saw you.” Thanks to Gaston, Suki Weatherbee’s Senegalese husband, outraged by Jason’s hair.

  “I was sent by the cult,” Jason explained. “They were worried about the Drummonds. They wanted me to listen, to see if the family connected the cult to Ian’s death. Given the bad blood between them.”

  “It was you at our show, too. Wasn’t it?” I said. “You were the guy posing as an agent. At our second show at Quahog. With just the two of us.”

  “Negative.”

  “So who was it? The Provincetown police?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You’re got a fan, Mark. Deal with it,” Roberto said.

  “And the fundamentalists had nothing to do with anything that happened here this summer?” I said.

  “Not directly,” Jason said, “other than sheltering Edward. But they set the stage for Alexander to murder Ian and be confident everyone would label it a hate crime. They shook things up, put everyone on edge. As did the street people, of course.” He smiled. “By the way, old Thomas Royall got his revenge of sorts. Against those pseudo-Vikings who despised him.”

  It was thanks to the brothers Babineaux and their mother’s penchant for wild mushrooms. Last year, Edward and Clark had been collecting wild mushrooms when they uncovered human remains in the woods, on the grounds of the Truro compound. The remains were skeletal, buried without clothing or belongings of any kind except for a small animal’s tusk set in silver on a chain. Foul play was obviously involved; the victim’s skull had been crushed. The cult instructed the Babineaux brothers to keep this secret, because, with an IRS audit and past troubles with the police about gunfire and shoplifting and so forth—a body on the premises was the last thing they needed. But Clark was always more rebellious than his younger brother: he telephoned the police, who kept his identity secret. The discovery of the body was the perfect pretext to get authorities into the compound and then invite the FBI to infiltrate the cult, via Jason posing as a drug dealer in search of enlightenment. “They were racist enough to buy the stereotype. Of course, the dreadlocks helped. We, the Bureau, were also investigating the group on kidnapping charges involving an Ohio girl. And there were allegations of child abuse long before, in those toxic dumps they had the nerve to call greenhouses.”

  It was ironic that DNA testing proved the skeleton had nothing to do with the site’s current residents. The victim had been murdered long before the Master was even born. “The skeleton was Thomas Royall’s,” Jason stated.

  I stopped drinking my orange juice. Mrs. Babineaux had mentioned this murder during our tour; I’d assumed it was slander, nonsense. I said, “But Royall supposedly drowned.” He’d become the target of anti-German hysteria on the Cape after the Kaiser’s U-boat had shelled Chatham. He’d supposedly killed himself because his colony was collapsing; his clothing—sandals, a robe embroidered with runes—had been found on a beach in Truro.

  It was planted there, they now believed. Jason said Royall’s utopia had been seething with resentment over the special treatment accorded their leader’s favorite, Gilbert Dyer, the model for The Fisher Boy.

  Eventually, Dyer became Royall’s companion in the physical sense, violating Royall’s own rule that the colony remain celibate. Dissension flared in the ranks, resulting in fights and acts of vandalism. Royall and Dyer clashed when Dyer seduced a sculptor. Royall clawed Dyer so severely he grew whiskers to hide the scars.

  Then the Chatham shelling occurred on July 21, 1918, and local thugs attacked the colony, destroying some kilns and looms. The next day, both Royall and Dyer vanished. It appeared that Royall had drowned himself, despondent that his utopia was unraveling. Dyer was discovered three weeks later, dead of a morphine overdose, in a flophouse in Boston. “Lost, it was thought, without his mentor. We now know better. Re-reading Dyer’s suicide note in light of discovering Royall’s body makes it plain that Dyer bludgeoned Royall to death.

  Pathologists were able to certify the skeleton belonged to Royall by matching DNA extracted from the bones with a blood sample taken from a relative of the painter in Wisconsin. The authorities had kept this information quiet so as not to alert the media and jeopardize their case against the cult. Jason added, “History repeated itself on that property. The theme of internecine warfare.”

  So why had he mentioned that body to me, that night at the Truro compound, in the chill room with the fire in the fireplace? Abruptly Jason lost his hipster cool, his FBI hubris. Like an actor losing concentration on stage. He mumbled something about “unfortunate” and “procedure” and “these things happen,” then at last bit into the burnt muffin he’d been toying with yet again. I gathered his confiding about the body had been an error. He changed the subject: “You remember when my beeper went off? That was the Provincetown police. With the news of Chloe Hilliard being kidnapped. At first we thought she was in Truro, in an outer building, hidden away. The cult had such an awful record with small girls.”

  “Why would anyone get involved with such crazies?” Roberto asked.

  “The cult offered answers to the lost, a sense of belonging, spirituality of a sort. Its message of eco-reverence coupled with Norse flavorings was not totally ridiculous. Not totally. Unfortunately, with its pesticides and stores of TB and Ebola, it violated its own theology. And creating that serf caste of abused female children, that was unconscionable, unconscionable.”

  “Some men in the cult were castrated,” I said.

  “And some women sterilized,” Jason said. “Anyone who’d earned a Nordic name who subsequently lapsed by breaking the rules forfeited the right to propagate by going under the knife. They were all made ‘clean.’

  “The cult had benign beginnings, in a yoga group in western Massachusetts called the Circle of Harmonic Peace. That’s what Theo Babineaux, Edward’s father, joined.

  “Lucas Mikkonen sought out the Circle after a nervous breakdown at MIT. He stayed involved with them right through earning his doctorate and starting a biotech firm with four of his classmates.

  “Mikkonen was fired from that company when he admitted he’d been falsifying data. Then the Circle became his life.
He sank more and more money into the organization, eventually assuming total control.

  “When he chanced upon the old Royall property, it appealed to his Norse heritage, hoax of a rune stone and all. It was the perfect place to become the Master—to isolate his followers and scheme against his classmates, now millionaires, biotech’s big wunderkinds.

  “Then Mikkonen met Ian at his mother’s shop, returning a doll Duncan Drummond had stolen. For Ian, ill with lymphoma, Mikkonen was a confidant spiritual mentor—and a convenient customer to buy some land at his old prep school. So Mikkonen bought the property, then discovered the bog lily prevented his bringing in the bulldozers. He felt cheated, he felt had. Ian probably had made an honest mistake. It doesn’t appear he knew about the plant.

  “Then things in the cult were going woefully wrong. Mikkonen’s health was breaking down due to diabetes and obesity. The IRS was auditing him, the red ink was flowing. Gradually, Emily Babineaux, his accountant, and Emmanuel Costa, her lover, took control of the cult in very elegant, very quiet palace coup. All but invisible to the Master’s flock.

  “By that time, Mikkonen was a virtual prisoner. Revered but imprisoned. Indispensable but immobile. Like the queen in a termite colony.”

  “Emily Babineaux began targeting a new enemy—not Lucas Mikkonen’s biotech rivals, but the HMO she blamed for her husband’s death. For misdiagnosing his pancreatic cancer. She earmarked the same germs for new enemies, on the date Master had chosen for his debacle, the autumnal equinox—the beginning of fall.”

  The Fall, of course, the day they all talked of.

  “Emily Babineaux was not known as the treasurer within the cult, although that was certainly what she became—and more. She’d been given a new nickname for her way with the dollar. And with the IRS agents conducting the audit. Before her marriage, she’d studied art education, so she could have suggested the nickname herself.

  “Her subjects in Truro called her the Golden One.”

  Chapter Forty-three

  Arthur Hilliard’s garden was flourishing. Thanks to his defying the ban on outdoor watering, it was thick with daisies, hollyhocks, and chrysanthemums, all competing for our attention. On the terrace overlooking the flowers and Provincetown Harbor, Arthur was grilling tuna steaks bloody as any beef while Roberto and I stood watching.

  “I don’t like chrysanthemums,” Roberto announced. “They’re too September.”

  “Labor Day happens,” Arthur said. He was elated, and with good reason. His Swim for Scholars, held yesterday and dedicated to Ian’s memory, had gone…swimmingly, raising $80,000 toward college scholarships for deserving students at Provincetown’s high school. Roger Morton was absent, a patient at Ashdown Farms, the exclusive Connecticut clinic, being treated for an eating disorder. It was this and not something organic that had been wasting his body all these months.

  “I’m donating my reward money for your finding Chloe to our Swim for Scholars Program, Mark,” Arthur informed me. “Didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Arthur wasn’t observant enough to know that I’d welcome his check. He just assumed everyone had money, that it was something you’re born with, like ears. So my reward that summer was staying alive, my new life with Roberto, and, eventually, recognition on stage. Reward enough.

  Standing in Arthur’s garden, I recalled his earlier parties, especially the one this past Memorial Day weekend, beginning a summer that would fill so many graves. I remembered the unlucky Vasa, the bone-white Swedish tall ship in the harbor, and Ian swilling his Heineken and Edward serving his fragrant tureens of bouillabaisse. Ian had been right about one thing: we live in an imperfect world, “full of mosquitoes and people who dump trash in national parks.” But that shouldn’t stop the rest of us from attempting to improve it, in our persistent, incremental ways.

  “When are they coming?” Arthur was asking. “They’re late.”

  Minutes later, “they” appeared: Miriam, Chloe, and, of course, Alicia. The anxiety of the summer had chiseled away Miriam’s weight so that she looked spare, rationed, even more intense—and she was choosing more conservative clothing, like this mauve silk dress. She gripped Chloe’s hand so tightly the little girl winced. You’re my niece, more or less, I kept thinking of saying; you’re the only Drummond I’ll ever love. But I left those words until much, much later.

  The greatest change the summer had wrought was in Alicia. Gone were the mohair sweaters and barrettes. She was wearing a dust-gray jogging suit for our little celebration, although she’d retained her mustard seed charm. She had left the Christian Soldiers, “left but not renounced.” With Miriam’s help, she’d recognized her relationship with Karl, the manager of their Provincetown office, as abusive and co-dependent, so, when he’d resigned his position to work for a conservative think tank, she’d used the occasion to cancel their engagement, deciding to think about becoming Unitarian. Or Catholic or Church of the Nazarene. The Christian Soldiers would linger in Provincetown until Thanksgiving, dispensing abstinence literature and Hollings Fair’s book on parenthood, Spare the Rod; then they would depart, having garnered as much publicity as possible, overshadowed as they were by Ian’s slaying and the maelstrom that followed. Hollings Fair decided to concentrate on anti-evolution crusades in the West. He sold his office on Commercial Street, which was occupied successively by businesses selling Cuban food, hemp hammocks, and pewter knickknacks—knights, Merlins, dragons. No business would last there longer than six months. Rumors persisted about supernatural phenomena driving tenants away, but a cable TV crew that staked out the building with psychics, cameras, and bugging devices came up empty.

  “Chloe!” I called to her. “It’s so nice to see you!”

  She didn’t answer. Like her mother, she’d lost a good deal of weight. Being woeful cooks, her kidnappers had fed her little but Ritalin-spiked Cream of Wheat, to keep her quiet.

  Miriam hugged me, whispering, “Thank you again,” as Chloe broke away to hide in a hibiscus bush. “Chloe,” Miriam called to her, “Mark is the good man from the boat, you know that. The bad man is gone and the police have arrested the bad woman.” Sallie was actually out on bail, under sedation herself, with her family in Gloucester.

  “Chloe, all my goldfish have been asking for you,” Arthur told her, as she peered between the stalks of the hibiscus bush like some frightened forest creature.

  “I owe you all the biggest apology in the world.” Miriam directed her attention toward Chloe, as if her gaze itself sustained the child’s very existence. “I just couldn’t tell the truth about…Chloe’s father because Ian was so dismissive after she was born. He’d just laugh and belittle the whole situation. ‘My little transgression,’ he called her. Empathic as always…The police told me they had the kidnap suspects under surveillance without specifying who they were. They were watching Sallie and Alexander for two days, the whole time they were living on that boat. The police were about to move when the Truro thing broke.” Miriam squeezed my shoulder, the sore shoulder, of course, and said, “Thank you for saving my little girl’s life…Uncle Mark.”

  A bee shopping through the hibiscus drove Chloe back toward her mother. She buried her head in the folds of Miriam’s dress. Then Arthur produced Chloe’s favorite beverage, a bottle of cold cream soda. Refusing it twice, she gave in the third time but didn’t want her Krazy Straw: “That’s for little kids,” she asserted. “She’s grown up a lot,” Miriam said. “She’s had to. But the psychiatrist says she’s coping as well as can be expected.”

  “No tall ship for this party,” I remarked to Arthur as I scanned the choppy water of Provincetown Harbor.

  “The Scandinavians have gone. All of them,” said Arthur.

  “I’m going too,” Miriam announced.

  “What?” several of us said.

  “I’m selling,” Miriam said, “my shop, my house. Everything I own in Provincetown.” It wasn’t just the traumas of this summer; it was that “Augustitis” was hitting her Junes, year after yea
r. “And Chloe won’t go near my shop, and I don’t blame her. She thinks every customer has come to take her away.”

  I pulled my present for Chloe from its recycled paper bag. “Look, Chloe,” I said. I tested the title: “Look what Uncle Mark has brought you.” It was a rubber crab that emitted wheezy squeaks.

  “Oh, honey, isn’t that crab adorable?” Miriam said.

  “It came from the ecology store,” I said.

  “I’ve seen those,” said Alicia, newly environmentally aware. “Those toys are manufactured from old bottles and wrecked cars.”

  Which did not endear the crab to Chloe at all, who took it gingerly, as if wary it might pinch…

  …The last guest didn’t come until after we’d eaten. She arrived in her “experienced” Cadillac, her “one bourgeois indulgence,” she always called it. Its battered bumper was adorned with a new sticker. “I’m a friend of Bill W.,” it read.

  My mother wore a shift the color of orangeade and a hat of matching Italian straw. To my surprise, she was not alone. “This is Subash,” she said of her solemn companion. “Subash Malik.”

  “From the meetings,” Subash said, as if all of us should know what that meant. He was a rotund man, probably from the subcontinent, with gray hair and a Wild West moustache waxed into ends as sharp as dental pics. “Your mother is a one-in-a-million lady,” he told me, pumping my hand exactly three times.

  It wasn’t really a statement I could repudiate, so I just nodded.

  “Subash teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard,” my mother said. “He just got tenure.”

  Subash beamed. “And what talent your mother has. Between her artwork and her musicianship, she’s just amazing, just incredible.” Lightly, he touched my mother’s arm, and I felt ludicrously possessive, like a jealous toddler. “What a view,” Subash said, loosening his Harvard tie. “It’s straight out of Joel Meyerowitz.”