by Bob Avey
After dinner, Elliot had walked Cyndi home. She lived in the Yorktown condominiums across from the square. He was out of his league all right.
When Elliot pulled into his driveway that night, he noticed someone sitting in a car parked at the curbside in front of the house. He considered approaching the vehicle’s occupant, but figured it could be anybody, and decided to wait. He drove into the garage and closed the door.
Once inside, Elliot left the lights off in the living area, then made his way to the bedroom, turning the lights on in that part of the house to attract attention away from the living room. With that done, he went back to the living room, keeping out of the line of sight of the car, and peered through the window. The car was still there. Elliot edged out of the room then went through the kitchen and breakfast nook until he reached the back of the house. When he reached the door leading to the backyard, he slid it open and stepped outside, thankful that Colorado the barking beagle was still at Joey’s place.
Elliot walked along the east side of the house and stopped at the gate. Between the boards of the stockade fence, he could see a silhouette in the car, but it was too dark to make out who it was. He closed his hand around the gate handle and slowly depressed the latch, gently pushing the gate open at the same time.
The stranger didn’t seem to hear the gate as it scraped lightly against the ground, and Elliot was sure he could get close enough to identify him without being seen. Just as Elliot got the gate open, a weight smacked the backs of his knees, and Colorado, apparently no longer at Joey’s house, began to bellow.
Elliot ran toward the car, but the driver had been alerted. He started the car and took off, speeding halfway down the block before turning on his lights. Elliot didn’t get the tag number, but he did hear something clank to the asphalt as the car drove away. There would be no use in trying to follow the guy. By the time he got his car out, the lurker would be miles away.
Elliot stepped into the street and walked along the south-side curb until he came upon the object that had fallen from the vehicle. He reached down and picked it up: a parabolic antenna with earphones attached. It was a listening device. They weren’t that hard to get. Anyone with an Internet connection could have one in a matter of days.
As Elliot walked back to his house, he wondered who the eavesdropper might have been. A lot of names came to mind—Wistrom, Holsted, Snub the bartender. They all had connections to the case. The question was: Why was he being followed? And why was listening in on Elliot’s conversations important enough to risk his tail’s being discovered?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Psychologist Gary Sullivan pushed away from his desk, got up, and went into the library, where he poured himself a glass of Merlot. It’d been a long day. Frank McKinley’s boy, Danny, had opened up, begun to talk about his involvement with Reverend Coronet. The reverend’s handiwork snaked through the town like a disease. But he would undo some of it, if he could. He slid a Dvorak CD into the sound system, then sat down in the leather chair beside the fireplace. The fire was dwindling. He thought about adding another log, but it had burned throughout the day and there was enough residual heat left in the room to be comfortable.
He closed his eyes, hoping the combined effect of wine and music would help him unwind. Drawing deep, diaphragmatic breaths, he guided his thoughts to a place of soothing nothingness.
Somewhere in the background he heard a sound that didn’t belong, a doorbell ringing. Setting the wine on the table, he opened his eyes and forced himself out of the chair. He suspected it was McKinley who’d dropped by to ask about Danny. He’d so much as said that he would, in his roundabout way.
Sullivan flipped on the outside light and peeked through the curtain, giving the stranger a once-over. Whoever it was didn’t look much like McKinley. He hesitated, but he unlocked the door and pulled it open. Frigid air swirled around his ankles. “Can I help you?” he asked.
The stranger wore a coat with a hood, which he had pulled over his head against the weather. He wasn’t a big fellow, but rather slender, Sullivan guessed. It was difficult to tell with all of the clothing he wore. “I was hoping to talk with you,” the stranger said. “It’s cold. Can I come in?”
The little fellow certainly didn’t look threatening. And it was cold. He nodded and stepped aside.
Once the visitor was in, Sullivan closed the door and offered to take his coat, which he promptly removed and handed over. The hood, Sullivan saw now, was attached to a sweatshirt. This the man did not want to surrender. “I’ve been out for a while,” he said. “I’m chilled to the bone.”
“Of course,” Sullivan said. The visitor had a problem and he sought Sullivan’s help. He asked him to follow him into the library. The library had been an extension of the office at one time, occupying the same large room, until he had the wall and French doors installed.
As Sullivan watched the stranger shiver, he offered him a glass of wine. It wasn’t standard practice, nothing of the sort, but his own glass was sitting there, and the man certainly looked as if he might appreciate it.
“Yeah,” the stranger said, “that’d be good.”
Finding a glass, Sullivan filled it halfway, and handed to the man.
Sullivan sipped the wine for a few seconds, then set it down. “Now,” he said, “what do you wish to talk about?”
Before the stranger could answer, the phone in the office began to ring. Sullivan didn’t feel as if he could ignore it. He had clients who often called at night. “Excuse me,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable. I won’t be long.”
Sullivan walked out of the room, closing the French doors behind him, and went to his desk where the phone was. He picked up the receiver. “Gary Sullivan speaking. How may I help you?”
The voice on the other end of the line was that of a teenager, looking for someone named Rachael.
When Sullivan got back to the library, the visitor had finished his wine. Sullivan refilled their glasses, and even before he sat back down, the visitor began to speak.
“I shouldn’t have come here, Doctor Sullivan. But I can’t go into that right now. And I do have a lot on my mind.”
Gary Sullivan sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. He wasn’t a doctor in the medical sense, but people often called him that. He was a psychologist with a PhD. Even so, he wasn’t sure what to make of the troubled young man that had come into his home. “Did someone recommend me to you?”
The stranger stared at Sullivan for a moment, as if their roles had been reversed and he was trying to determine Sullivan’s state of mind. “I guess you could say that.”
Sullivan studied the young man. There was something about his speech patterns, and the peculiar way in which he tilted his head while listening that was familiar. “Have we met before?”
“I hoped you wouldn’t remember me.” He leaned back and crossed his ankles. “Mother was never a warm person, Doctor Sullivan. She had trouble expressing her love for us, though I always suspected it was there. For all I know, her childhood could have been worse than mine, but I doubt that’s possible. I don’t think she actually intended to reach down into the earth and pull up a living hell for us, but she did. She married a sick person, a deranged lunatic. Of course, she didn’t know that at the time. I mean, how could she? And neither did we, because we weren’t around yet. We were waiting in our own purgatory to be born into it.”
“When you say we, are you referring to yourself?”
The stranger grinned. “No, Doctor Sullivan. I have a sibling.”
Sullivan took a drink of wine. The visitor’s reaction to his question and the way the word sibling rolled out of his mouth sent a chill up his spine. “Were you abused?” From long practice, he kept his voice even.
“Not in the usual sense of the word. Tormented would be closer to the truth.”
“And your father was the cause of this torment?”
“Yes. He allowed us only the clothes we wore. He believed we were born sinners, and
that we should live a life of suffering to pay for that.”
“So he was extremely religious?”
“You could say that. He made us learn Bible verses, and if we didn’t commit them to memory fast enough, he punished us. It wasn’t as bad at first. We just joined a church, that’s all. But then it started: This is how we want you to act, this is how we want you to dress, these are who your friends can be. Before long, we couldn’t even think for ourselves. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The good reverend had his desires. What do you make of that, Doctor Sullivan?”
“That depends. Are we talking about the church?”
“Bingo.”
“My God,” Sullivan said. He was aware of the inappropriateness of the words, that they had slipped out of his mouth in an unprofessional manner, but he wasn’t feeling right. He was, in fact, quite drowsy. He set the glass of wine on the table. The visitor’s story intrigued him, and he wanted to hear more. He’d known people much like the young man’s father. He wanted to help this young man come to terms with the abuse he’d suffered so that he could move past it. “Could you describe your father to me?”
The visitor seemed to be standing now, but Sullivan wasn’t sure of that. His eyes didn’t want to focus.
“He had red hair,” the visitor said, “and he always arched his back to make his chest stand out, and he wore cowboy boots and walked heavier than he was.”
Sullivan was tired, but an image of the man the visitor was describing formed in his mind. Sullivan didn’t see how that could be, it had been such a long time ago, but even as he tried to dismiss such a ridiculous notion, he began to realize who the visitor was. He was the boy, the one they called Justin. Now the phone call he’d received earlier that day, from a man calling himself Detective Elliot, made more sense. He had asked about the Stone family. The story, the description, it all fit.
The visitor began to whisper. “They’re dead, Doctor Sullivan. I’ve tried for years to get the image out of my mind, but it won’t go, and I can see them, hanging in his closet, like sides of beef in old man Johnson’s meat cooler.”
Sullivan’s interest was piqued, but he couldn’t snap out of the drowsy state he’d fallen into. Standing in his library was the kind of patient psychologists dream of, and he was still speaking. The patient’s words, however, seemed to be coming from a distance, and as Sullivan faded into sleep, he began to wonder if the events had transpired at all, or if they were only in his mind, an illusion brought on by an overworked imagination and the wine. He really shouldn’t have had that second glass.
“Old Abe hauled them off into the woods, Doctor Sullivan. Like so much trash that needed discarding. She thinks I don’t know.” He shook his head. “For my protection, I guess.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Detective Elliot was driving south on Highway 75 on his way to Donegal to meet with Gary Sullivan when Douglass Wistrom’s father returned his call.
“We decided it was time,” Howard Wistrom said. “I called the police here in Billings. I guess they patched me through to you.”
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you,” Elliot said.
“Yes, I’m sure you have. We’re good people, Detective. Maybe we didn’t go about it in the right way, but Maud and I still believe we did the right thing. We had a long talk about it, though. We’re tired of living with it. We want to get it off our chests.”
Elliot watched a red pickup truck speed past. “What are you talking about?”
“We didn’t adopt Douglass. We found him at Whiteside Park there in Tulsa.”
“You did what?”
“Maud and I didn’t have anybody, other than ourselves, and it had been that way too long. I got a job in Tulsa. That’s how we got there. We’d only been in town for a few weeks when it happened.”
“When what happened?”
“The miscarriage.”
Elliot paused for a moment, realizing Wistrom must be talking about the death of his natural son. “Go on.”
“We’ve always kept to ourselves. That’s our way. We had a small graveside service. Neither of us was ever the same after that, though. So when it happened, it was easy to convince ourselves that the Lord had finally answered our prayers. He’d brought Douglass back to us.”
“So, you’re telling me you found some kid in the park, and you took him home with you?”
“He asked for our help, said he was lost and hungry. What were we supposed to do?”
Elliot saw his exit coming up, so he moved to the right-hand lane and slowed the car. “Did it ever occur to you that he could’ve just wandered off from his family, and that they were probably looking for him?”
“No, he was alone, just like us, and he told us as much, but he didn’t have to. Maud and I both could feel it, the loneliness that hung around him like a cloud. Maybe it was because we’d been that way ourselves for so long.”
Elliot thought about the car parked in front of his house last night, and the listening device its driver had dropped. “Did he ever tell you...?”
“Who he really was?” Wistrom asked, finishing the question. “Where he came from? No. We asked him several times. But he’d get real sullen and wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even eat. After a while, we just quit asking. He was about nine years old when we found him. Maybe he couldn’t remember. We did right by him, though, raised him like he was our own.”
Elliot pulled into the unusual town of Donegal and brought the car to a stop at the intersection of Third and Main. Most small towns in Oklahoma lived and died with the oil boom, but Donegal was not a part of that. A lady wearing a long dress with long sleeves, and a bonnet that covered her face, walked across the street in front of the car. Elliot’s first thought was that she was part of an act, a school play perhaps, but he saw no one else dressed like she was. “Thanks, Mr. Wistrom. I appreciate the information.”
“You’re welcome,” Wistrom said. “Now, could I ask a favor of you?”
“Sure.”
“Find Douglass, Mr. Elliot, and send him home to us. He can seem a little odd at times. I know that. But there’s a lot of good in that boy, too. And he’s exceptionally bright, in his own way. We love that boy, Detective, just like he was our own.”
The pain in Howard Wistrom’s voice went right to Elliot’s heart, but at the same time an image of Brighid McAlister, splayed across the parking lot with blood puddling around her midsection, formed in his mind. “I’ll do my best.”
Elliot didn’t think it was going to play out like the Wistroms wanted. “But if you see him,” he said, “or hear from him first, it’s important that we talk with him.”
Wistrom agreed. Elliot disconnected and stuck the phone in his pocket.
The lady in the long dress disappeared into one of the old redbrick buildings along Main Street.
Traffic was next to nothing. A peculiar dead calm seemed to define the atmosphere of Donegal, and as it settled over Elliot, he was taken back to the streets of his hometown of Porter. It’d been equally lifeless that day, in Porter, when Rebecca Yoder, the Amish wife of Benjamin Yoder, and mother to their three children, walked five miles from her home to come into town and put a rifle bullet through the heart of schoolteacher Shannon Fitzgerald, a single woman with an eye for young men. One of them had been Rebecca’s son, Mathew.
Elliot had seen a lot of wrong by that time, and he respected Chief Charlie Johnson, the way he kept order in the town when things like murder came around. He’d wanted to be like him. He guessed that was how he ended up a cop.
The sound of a bell, ringing from the handlebars of a bicycle ridden by a boy wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, brought Elliot back to the town of Donegal. He slowed the car. As soon as the boy reached the opposite side of the road and was safely out of the way, Elliot continued east until he found the street he was looking for.
He turned north on Sycamore Drive, but even before he arrived at the address, a mixture of sorrow and frustration raged through him. He wasn’t s
ure what he’d expected to find here, but it wasn’t the smoldering remains of the bungalow where he was supposed to meet Gary L. Sullivan.
Elliot climbed out of the car and stared at a set of concrete steps, which led to the yard where the house had been. The bottom step showed, with black letters contrasting against a white background, that he’d found the address Sullivan had given him. He briefly wondered if there could be more than one street that carried the name Sycamore, one with a different designation such as avenue or lane, but he doubted someone who’d grown up in the town would make such an error.
The sound of an approaching vehicle broke Elliot’s concentration, and he turned to see a four-door sedan, with the words CHIEF OF POLICE emblazed across the door, pull to a stop behind his car. The patrol car seesawed under the big cop’s weight as he maneuvered out of his vehicle, stretching to a height of well over six feet as he closed the door. He looked unreal, unnatural, as he ambled toward Elliot, as if he, too, were an actor who’d just stepped off the stage of a local production. He stopped about four feet away, his feet slightly apart, and put his hands on his hips. “Morning, sir. Something I can help you with?”
Elliot nodded. “This wouldn’t happen to be Gary Sullivan’s place, would it?”
“Yes, sir, it would.”
“What happened?”
“Looks like a fire to me.”
“I can see that,” Elliot said. “I just spoke with the man last night. We were supposed to meet today, a nine o’clock appointment.”
The big man glanced at Elliot’s car, then turned back. “Are you a patient?”
Elliot showed his badge. “The name’s Elliot. I’m with the Tulsa Police Department.”
Keeping his position, the police officer took Elliot’s identification, examined it, then shoved it back at him. “Jed Washington. What would the Tulsa Police be wanting with a psychologist from time-bypassed Donegal?”
Elliot looked at the man’s name tag. “I’m a homicide detective, Chief Washington. Four days ago a man was found dead in Tulsa. He had in his possession a notepad, which contained the name and address of your Mr. Sullivan.”