by Jan Burke
I was glad for the darkness. I leaned back into the shadows. “The boys liked him?”
“Oh, yes. His name was Frank Harriman. He came by fairly often at first, until the news about Gene. He busted the guy who gave the police the information on Gene’s gambling problems. Sam — he was pretty upset. He started leaving the room when Frank came over. Bret must have reasoned with him, though, because that passed. Pretty soon Frank was helping him with homework again, playing catch and….” She frowned. “But I don’t know. For some reason, it seems to me that Frank saw less of them after that.”
“You’ve got it all mixed up, Regina,” Bernard said, coming over to us. “It wasn’t the news about Gene that caused the problems, it was that witch he almost married.”
“That’s right! I must have blocked her from my mind.”
“I don’t know how you could have.” He turned to me. “This woman called me at work, said the reason Frank came by to see the boys was to hit on Regina. I told her she was full of crap. I guess she didn’t know I had met Frank. The guy is working with Regina, spending time outside of work trying to get these kids to talk — I mean, I had seen how the kids responded to him. But this woman must have had him by the short hairs, because he stopped coming by not long after that.”
“I had forgotten about her,” Regina said.
“Bernard’s right. It was just after Bret’s tenth birthday. Frank bought Bret a magic kit, and I thought, This is going to be it. Bret loved it. He was such a smart little boy. He didn’t have to talk to perform the tricks, but the other kids started to admire him. He came out of his shell.”
“He started talking because of that?”
“No. Sam wasn’t coming out of his shell yet, and Bret wouldn’t leave him behind.”
“That’s when I came into the picture,” Bernard said. “Regina brought them over to my studio.”
“You’re an artist?” I asked.
“He’s a martial artist,” Regina said, smiling. “He teaches aikido.”
“Sam and Bret became experts in aikido?”
“No, Bret never tried it,” Bernard said, “he just watched. And Sam didn’t stay with it, but he made a start, and it improved his self-confidence.”
“And his trust extended to Bernard,” Regina said.
“That was a giant step forward. A lot of what we tried to do all along was build their trust, to help them feel safe.”
Not an easy task, I thought, given their experiences.
“The next thing we tried was a computer,” she continued. “A friend of mine had an Apple II+. She let the boys play on it. They absolutely loved it. They did their first ‘talking’ by writing things on the computer.”
“They weren’t writing before then?”
“No, they were writing in school — school assignments. Well… unless the teacher assigned anything personal, I should say. But if it was a history lesson, or an essay on another country — whenever they didn’t have to tell about themselves or their families — they completed it. Got A’s, usually.”
“What about answering questions in class?”
“The teachers soon learned that they just wouldn’t do it. In fact, the other kids started to sort of band around the boys, to protect them from adults. They’d learn the boys’ sign language, speak for them. We had to sit them all down and ask them to stop making it easier for the boys to be silent.”
“The boys were well behaved otherwise?”
“Yes,” Regina said. “Sam got in trouble once or twice defending Bret from bullies. But that went on before their fathers were murdered. They were both good students, earning A’s, studying quietly. Teachers didn’t find it hard to cope with that.”
“Were they in the same classroom? I thought Sam was older.”
“Yes, he is, but Bret skipped a grade. When he started talking again, he did even better. They both finished high school early.”
“So they started communicating with a computer, you said.”
“Yes. On the first day they used that old Apple, Bret wrote a note to me: ‘Can we do this again?’ It was the first time he had communicated directly with me in English. I was thrilled. So I typed a message back to him. I asked if Sam wanted to come back, too. I expected Bret to answer for him, but he looked at Sam and motioned to him to come over to the keyboard. Sam typed, ‘Yes, I like it.’ It was all I could do not to start crying.”
“How long before they started speaking?”
“Not too long after that. About three months later, as I recall. Francine bought them computers. They each said, ‘Thank you.’ Aloud. She did start crying. Not that I blamed her.”
“And they just started talking after that?”
“No. It was still very gradual from there. Sam talked to Bernard before he talked to me.”
I looked at Bernard, who had taken a chair nearby.
“He asked me to teach him to dance,” Bernard said. “Regina wouldn’t believe me at first.”
“Oh, only because you tease me about so many other things!”
He smiled. “Once I convinced her that it was the truth, she was mad that he hadn’t talked to her first.”
“You are such a liar,” she said. “I was thrilled. Besides, Bret walked into my office the next day and said, ‘Sam has a girlfriend.’ ”
Bernard laughed. “She’s not telling the whole truth. What Bret said was, ‘Sam has a girlfriend, but she’s not as pretty as you are.’ ”
It was too dark to actually see the blush on her face, but I could hear the embarrassment in her voice when she said, “Don’t you have a comet to discover or something?”
“He had a crush on you?” I asked.
“Not really. Bret was just feeling a little lonely, I think. Sam wanted to start talking to other people — the girl he wanted to dance with. Bret was a little younger, a little more reluctant to step out of this cocoon they had built around themselves. Once he saw that Sam wasn’t just going to abandon him, though, I think he was all right.”
“You still saw them after they started speaking?”
“For a time, yes. And we stayed in touch.”
“Did they ever talk to you about what happened when their fathers died?”
“No,” she said, then frowned. “Well, one day Bret stopped by, just before they moved. He was upset, shaky. I asked him what was wrong. He told me that while they were packing things for the move, Sam had cut his hand, started bleeding. Bret had passed out. He said Sam was fine — Francine took him to an emergency room and got him stitched up. Bret turned so white telling me about it, I was worried he was going to faint again. He kept saying it made him think of the basement. I didn’t need to ask which one. He calmed down, but just before he left he said, ‘I haven’t forgotten anything about that day. Not one single thing.’ I asked him if he wanted to talk about it, and he said, ‘You should be grateful we never did.’ ”
We sat in silence for a moment, then I asked, “Did they resent Frank Harriman for not visiting?”
“I don’t think so. He didn’t just cut them off, he just gradually stopped seeing them. They seemed pretty understanding about it. And they were spending more time with Bernard by then.”
I looked up into the sky, tried to quiet my sense of despair. The Szals were good-hearted people, an active, intelligent couple with wide-ranging interests — people I would have liked to form a friendship with under other circumstances. But that night I felt as though I had wasted my time talking to them. For all I had learned about Sam and Bret, I could see nothing in it that would help me gain Frank’s freedom.
“What’s your connection to Bret and Sam?” Regina asked.
“Frank Harriman is my husband,” I began.
They both exclaimed happily over this but quickly noticed I was having a hard time responding appropriately.
“How is Frank?” Bernard asked cautiously.
At another time I might have faked an answer. I couldn’t. “Not well,” I said. “He’s a hostage.”
“No,” Bernard said. “You can’t just say something like that and leave! Please tell us — Frank’s our friend.
We haven’t seen much of him since he moved to Las Piernas, but my God — a hostage?”
“Sam and Bret’s hostage.”
Regina sat stunned in wide-eyed disbelief, but Bernard moved over to my side, caught my attention by taking my hand. “Tell us what happened,” he said.
“Maybe we can help.”
“Yes,” Regina said, recovering quickly. When I hesitated she added with unerring insight, “I care very much about Sam and Bret, but I’m not blind to the fact that they were troubled. I won’t protect them at Frank’s expense. Bernard’s right. Frank’s our friend — a good man. Let us help. Please.”
So I began to talk, and they did all they could to make the telling easier. There was no point, I realized, in hiding anything from them. If they knew how to help, they would need to know about the policeman.
Regina sat silently. When I was finished she said, “It makes me so angry that they are using all of us like pawns!”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m angry about that, too.”
“Tell Detective Cassidy what I’ve told you,” she said. “And tell him to call us if he wants to talk to us about the boys. If he ends up negotiating with them, maybe it will be of use.”
“Do you know how to get in touch with Francine?”
“Francine died a year ago,” Regina said.
“Unless something drastically changed her financial circumstances,” Bernard said, “Bret has come into a lot of money. Maybe Sam, too, depending on her will. That’s what’s financing them — the Neukirk fortune.”
“Sam will know medicine, and he’s probably the one who recruited the fellows who knew about the explosives,” Regina said. “He was much more interested in that sort of thing than Bret. Bret could never stand any sort of violence — which is why it’s hard to understand how Sam might have convinced him to go along with this.”
“You think Sam came up with the idea?” I asked.
“Certain portions of it would be Sam’s way of doing things — the blood vial — Bret wouldn’t go near blood if he could help it,” Regina said.
“Sam’s always been the more dominant of the two,” Bernard said.
“Yes, but Bret’s not without a will of his own,” Regina said. “And the computer security breaches — that’s Bret. He did an internship at a company that supplied computer security systems.”
“Any idea who the woman might be?”
“Sam’s girlfriend,” Bernard said without hesitation. “Bret is more of a loner.”
“That’s true,” Regina said. “Sam can be very charming when he wants to be. Bret’s charm is more genuine, more a part of who he is. Sam can turn it on and off.”
“The last time we saw Bret,” Bernard said, “he complained about Sam’s attitude toward women. Said Sam didn’t really care about the women he dated, that he just wanted sex.”
“Do you think Bret was jealous of them?” I asked.
“No,” Bernard said. “I don’t think he has a romantic attachment to Sam. He talks about Sam the way one brother talks about another. And they knew we would have accepted them, gay or straight. That’s not an issue with us.”
“Any idea who Sam was dating lately?”
They considered, then Bernard said, “Didn’t he send us a picture from a ski trip?”
“Yes!” Regina said. “Wait here!”
She went downstairs, and I heard her go into the office below.
“Sam wrote to us around Thanksgiving,” Bernard said. “He had gone skiing with some friends. Regina kept the photo.”
“How often do you hear from them?”
“Not too often. Once or twice a year they’ll send us a card or a letter. Last time we saw them in person was about four years ago.”
She ran back up the stairs, trailed by Stan the cat, who apparently enjoyed the activity — he continued to run around the loft. Regina handed me a 4 x 6 photograph.
“Turn the lights on,” she said.
Bernard complied, and I found myself staring at a group shot of four young skiers.
“I don’t know who the others are, but that’s Sam,” Regina said, pointing to a young man in a blue ski cap. He looked more relaxed in this shot than he did in the driver’s license photo that was shown on the eleven o’clock news, but he was easily recognizable as the same person. There was a dark-haired woman standing next to him. I didn’t recognize her, but I knew the faces of the other two men in the photo.
“Lang and Colson,” I said.
22
IT WAS AFTER TWO IN THE MORNING when we pulled into Bea’s driveway. The reporters were gone, although once the story broke in the Californian, I expected them to be back before I left to have breakfast with Cecilia. I wasn’t too surprised to see Cassidy sitting on the front porch swing.
He was reading through some papers, apparently the latest faxes from Hank Freeman. Pete and Rachel murmured, “Good night,” and went inside. I sat on the swing and handed the photo to Cassidy.
“I think Lang’s and Colson’s neighbors might recognize her,” I said. “The Szals think she might be Sam’s girlfriend.”
Cassidy studied the photo. “She fits the description the neighbors gave us all right. This is terrific. What else did you learn?”
“What an M number is,” I answered, ignoring his puzzled look as I went on to tell him what the Szals had said about Sam and Bret. Not long after I started, Cassidy took out his notebook and began making notes — lots of them.
“This is great,” he said, far too enthusiastic for the hour. “This is the kind of information we can only get from people who know them. We can predict Bret and Sam a little better because of it — especially the info about how they work with each other. And this photo — these folks you talked to have done us a world of good.” Then he sobered and added, “I suppose it wasn’t too easy on them.”
“No,” I said “But it seems to be in their natures to be helpful. And they care about Frank. Fortunately for us, that prevailed over their loyalty to Bret and Sam.”
“Yes. I’m going to take them up on their offer for a talk.” He stood up and stretched. “Well, I better get this off to Hank while it’s fresh in my mind.”
“Don’t you sleep?”
“Had a short nap while you were working. I’ll be fine. You look like you’re all tuckered out, though.”
“I am,” I said. “I just don’t know if I can sleep.”
“Give it a try,” he said, and we walked in. I said good night as he went into his room, which was across the hall from mine.
I fell asleep almost as soon as I lay down but awakened at four-thirty. I could hear Cassidy talking, and although I couldn’t make out what he was saying, there was an urgency in his voice that was unmistakable. I put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and was reaching for my socks when I heard him fall silent. I listened and decided to forgo footwear when I heard him stumbling down the hallway at a hurried pace. I opened the bedroom door but could not see him. I heard the front door open and rushed to follow. By the time I reached him, he was standing on the front porch, gripping the railing, taking deep breaths.
“Cassidy?”
He whirled to face me, his eyes wild and unseeing, his face covered with sweat. My own eyes widened — Cassidy, frantic? What god-awful news had he received?
In the next moment, though, I understood what was happening. “Wake up, Cassidy,” I said quietly but firmly. “Wake up.”
He looked at me, and I could see the change in his eyes when he focused on me as something more than a voice invading a dream. Those eyes were quickly lowered in shame.
“God damn,” he said with feeling.
“Somebody
once told me that you shouldn’t be embarrassed about having nightmares,” I said.
“That guy is more full of horseshit than a rodeo wheelbarrow,” Cassidy said, still not looking at me, sounding none too steady. “Everybody knows that.”
“Yeah, but they like him anyway. Let’s sit on the swing until you get your land legs back.”
He went along with the suggestion, maybe because he wasn’t in any shape to move much farther. It takes a lot of energy to have a really horrific nightmare. They wear you out.
I set the swing in motion, and we rocked back and forth in it for a time.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he finally said, still not making eye contact.
“Who asked you to? You think I give a crap about your problems?”
He looked at me then and abruptly started laughing. Doubling over, wheezing laughter. He did his best not to wake the household, but it looked like the effort was going to give him a hernia.
“What?” I asked, too punchy from sleeplessness to keep myself from laughing in response.
Tears were rolling down his face. “Your hair,” he choked out.
I looked over the back of the swing into a picture window, where I saw my admittedly ridiculous reflection. I had slept on my hair funny, and now, on each side of my face, it spiked out in fantastic angles from my head. I looked like I had hired my hairdresser after a layoff at the circus.
“Glad you like it,” I said, trying to smooth it down. Hopeless. As hopeless as not laughing about it myself.
Eventually we wound down from it. I felt suddenly ashamed.
“You think Frank would resent you for laughing?” he asked, his accuracy annoying the hell out of me once again.
“You’re full of horseshit, remember?”