by Gerald Lynch
What volume! “Nobody’s making fun of you, Jake. Quiet down!… That’s better. Wy Knots isn’t on right now, Jake.”
“Go see Wy with Shawn, dumb-dumb. Go see Wy, go see Wy, go see Wy!”
“Okay, Jake, that’s enough now. Just go away, please.”
“Making fun of me …”
“Jake, go back into your house and tell Mrs. Thorpe that Dr. Thorpe says it’s time to come home.”
“My dad and your mom are in love. They didn’t see me take Oreos.” He opened his bud of a mouth to show me the black lumps of cookie he’d been carrying through his run, dangerously so. He sniffled: “Nobody hugs me.”
Still on my knees, I lowered my eyes. I had to. Jake’s white thighs were bursting like uncooked links from the casings of his tight green gym shorts. Lately I’d liked his hanging around Shawn less and less. I resisted the urge to call Owen to rescue me.
Having remembered that he had an Oreo to work on, Jake grew somewhat mollified. Until: “Can I do that for you, Mr. Thorpe? Can I please please? You don’t even have to pay me!” Oreo crumbs were bombarding me like black hail.
But I should clarify that I’ve been translating. I was fluent in the Troutstream idiom known as “Jake-speak.” What he actually said just now was: Aa eye oo aa oo, m-m or?
“No, Jake.”
He jigged from foot to foot: “Please, mister. I won’t tell Mom you didn’t pay me.”
“No, Jake.”
He flailed: “You made fun of me! I’m gonna tell Mom! You made fun of me!”
Jake’s foremost teeth were as crooked as a crashed picket fence. Long ago I tried encouraging Jack to have the dental problem corrected before Jake got any older, suggesting the name of a good orthodontist. But Jack, a car mechanic who’d succeeded locally with a small chain of lube stations, suspected I was trying to drum up business for one of my brother medicine men. Wiry Jack, always dressed in worker fatigues, suspicious of his upper middle-class neighbours, thought himself far superior in matters of the real world of business and money.
I was distracted from Jake by a school bus bouncing slowly along from the left, passing in heat haze, the shaded driver — not Debbie Carswell — turning to look straight at me in a nightmare’s extended moment. I stood, felt dizzy. The alcohol, the drugs. I steadied myself with my right hand on the hood. Then there was no bus. There’d been a school bus in the Museum of Science and Technology’s parking lot on Sunday too. On Sunday?… Then there was no bus. I must remember to tell…Kevin.
I palmed my brow. “Work’s all done, Jake,” I drawled. “And you’re getting yourself all worked up.”
“Where’s Shawn?” He was probably exasperated over Shawn’s being absent the past couple of days. “Shawn said me go see Wy with her!”
“Shawn said you, eh? Maybe tomorrow, Jake.”
He did his snort and purse, whipped up a fist and started smashing himself between the eyes. “Now now now …”
I grabbed his forearm and was fairly lifted off my feet. “Don’t do that, Jake. You’ll hurt yourself.”
He covered his face and cried into both palms. I reached a hand to the top of his hot head of flaky scalp. Poor Jake. What a throwback, such a hulking no-neck brute. Not allowed to be the idiot he was born to be, he must play his role for the correct rest of us with our impossible dreams of perfectibility, our intolerance. If he’d lived only half a century ago, he’d have been truly tolerated — the neighbourhood idiot, running errands, walking dogs and such — protected from the worst cruelty. You could see Jake’s potential for such repetitive occupations when he ran his perfect circles, as you could see he’d had to be trained by Trixie to take such wild offence. As things stood for Jake, though, his brainless mom was making his nasty, brutish and short life an even unhappier state. Oh, you are such a sad sad reminder to us all, Jake, of what we are: brutes too, brainier brutes, to be sure, but scarcely human, the lot of us, capable still of anything mindless, of every brutality. The more we think ourselves God’s gift to dust, the more we can’t tolerate the sight of you as you are. At least you’ll never grow up, dear Jake, never go missing as the child you were. I guess that’s one way to keep your children. I guess that’s another perfectly paradoxical caduceus. And I guess my brain was sizzling and spitting in a cauldron of alcoh-chemical grease.
So I stood there with Jake in the desiccating heat, my throat further parched from the booze and drugs, stroking his head and holding him, Jake sobbing. I think I was crying too when Veronica spoke.
“Jake, your dad wants you in now for a snack. Oreos! Daddy’s okay now, feeling much much better.” For all her good nature, Veronica spoke to Jake as one does to lost foreigners. Maybe she was right, though Trixie hated it.
Jake swung up his fat bat of an arm and knocked my hand off his head. When I turned, Veronica was looking at me only and with no little puzzlement.
I said secretly to her, “What’s up with Jake? Very agitated. He’s already stolen Oreos, by the way.”
She took in her shiny car, then back to me: “You washed the car?” She stepped closer, sniffed the air: “You’ve been drinking, Lorne, on top of the Valium?”
“Kevin wants me to go see Art Foster tomorrow. I’m helping with the investigation, dear. We’re not accusing Foster of anything, though he’s still a person of interest in the abduction case.”
Jake pointed at Veronica and made a stuttering, teasing noise, like a winter engine struggling to start (I expect he’d heard that nagging whine a lot; I suspect that strictly corrected kids rebound aggressively from enforced tolerance). “I’m gonna tell Mom when she gets home that you and my dad are in love and you made fun of me sixty-eleven times!”
We watched him take off running a small circle counterclockwise — the breadth of bum on him like an appliance! — arriving at his own front stoop, where he tangled with the aluminum door.
I shook my head and smiled at Veronica. “Don’t worry, dear, things haven’t been so bad with the media here, though you’d better be prepared to see your devoted husband on the evening news washing your car! And yes, maybe even a little drunk!”
“…Lorne?”
“Jake is sure revved up. Jack’s in bad shape too, eh? What’s the story there?”
“I’ll tell you about Jack inside, but it’s Jake I’m more concerned about. And right now, you. You’d better get out of the sun. Come in now and drink some water? Maybe you should take a cold shower, have a nap.”
“Me? I feel fan-tastic!”
She grabbed my wrists: “Have you heard something about Shawn?”
What a downer.
She was instantly crying and neither of us cared anymore.
She sucked it up and said, “Shawn must have promised Jake he could watch Wy Knots with her today. When Jake saw me he asked his dad if he could come over here, Jack shouted no and Jake went flying round the house, then out the door. When he gets like that, there’s no stopping him. Then Jack just broke down.”
“Trixie,” I smirked.
“We can never know what she’s been through with Jake, Lorne. And now Jack.”
Surly Owen stuck his head out the front door: “Da-ad, that detective’s been phoning for, like, an hour! He said he couldn’t get you on your cell either.”
I checked my cell. It had got turned off, probably from all the bending and crouching. I called Beldon from the front stoop. He wouldn’t tell me on the phone what it was about but apologized and asked if he could return right away. “But it’s not Shawn,” he said. “Not yet.”
We went inside. While we waited, too beat to be anxious about another visit from Beldon, Veronica tried to make me sympathize with the Kilborns’ most recent woes.
“Jack really loves Jake so much, but he’s lost without Trixie. They need our help, Lorne. How could Trixie leave them? She’s so self —”
“We can never know w
hat they’ve been through? For Christ’s sake! Have you lost your fucking mind, Veronica? Look what we’re going through!”
She set her unfinished iced tea on the kitchen island with little delicacy and fixed me with her determined browns: “It’s been two days. We may need to get counselling for Owen. He may need to talk with a professional.”
“What! Am I hearing things?”
“Lorne, think of your son, not your own crazy ideas for once. Owen’s been traumatized and he won’t let us help him get through it. He needs to talk with someone. I’d even settle for Jake!”
It was no easy matter recognizing disintegration in those deep browns, incipient madness. But I did and said sternly, “No.”
She walked away in a self-consciously self-possessed manner. I again had to hear the front door strain its spring…
I shouted after her, “You don’t walk like that!” Then to myself, “And I’m starving.”
I sat at the table and propped my head in a crotch of thumb and fingers.
She’d lost it, was giving up. Veronica? I was dumbfounded. I’d been looking for an opening to tell her about the threats to me the night before, not to hear about wacky Jack’s and tricky Trixie’s tribulations.
Something made me look up. It was Owen standing in the doorway from the hall, just staring at me.
“What do you want? Counselling?”
I laughed. He left.
Chapter 10
Trixie Kilborn had been arrested some half-year before for half-drowning Jake in the bathtub. There was no question it was not the first time, as Jake was well known for his respiratory emergencies, which had been attributed to Down’s Syndrome. Trixie was notorious for barrelling up to reception at CHEO’s emergency and pushing everybody aside and demanding immediate attention for the inarticulate Jake. She often invoked my name and was Art Foster’s biggest nightmare. When I asked Trixie to stop using me, she wouldn’t even deign to reply, just smiled indulgently from her statuesque height. Then ever-suspicious Jack caught her on hidden bathroom video apparently trying to drown Jake.
Trixie’s lawyer argued a recent innovation of the insanity defence. It turned out that Trixie wasn’t a criminal mom trying repeatedly to suffocate her challenged child. Trixie was the victim, suffering from Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, which is criminal psychobabble for extreme parental attention-grabbing, up to and including killing one’s own child. The more blatant were Trixie’s crimes against Jake, the more certain the diagnosis of her raging Munchausen’s-by-proxy affliction. As vicious a circle as was ever run, even by Jake, or in Dante’s hell.
But would I ever like to have seen the video of the aquatic struggle between those two behemoths of the deep, Leviathan Trixie and Moby Jake! For how could even big Trixie have held down the powerful idiot? To Jake, such awkward items as bicycles were as Frisbees, as flingable as the bodies of teasing kids who couldn’t avoid a lunging, surprisingly agile Jake. So the Munchausen’s drowning must have been a churning contest to rival killer whales in a mating frenzy!
Despite the damning evidence of Trixie’s damnable actions, spying Jack had been beside himself while she was incarcerated, split two ways to hell. Veronica had helped him out by looking after Jake while Jack managed his oil-and-lube franchises for the mere two weeks of Trixie’s lock-up over at the very regional detention centre that borders Troutstream to the south and now held Art Foster. Jack and Trixie never wholly made it up when she was acquitted. In fact, life at the neighbours’ deteriorated, audibly and visually, if mainly in the figure of unkempt Jake. Among Trixie’s followers (and thanks to her lawyer’s massaging of the media she had quite an entourage of the proactive, the neglected, and the vaguely victimized), Jack was to blame for her condition, which, thank the gods, was treatable with years of therapy. If patriarchal Jack hadn’t spent all his time at business, leaving Trixie to look after Jake on her own, this near-tragedy could almost have been barely averted, pretty much. So the stories went.
And then, just days before our own troubles began, Trixie had disappeared. There would be talk from the fan club of suicide, of murder, of half a botched murder-suicide (Jack the incompetent coward), until the collect call for Jake from a resort in the Turks and Caicos. Trixie was taking a much-needed vacation with the lawyer who’d got her off (so to speak). On the advice of her paramour, she would not talk with Jack. On advice of same, Trixie instructed Veronica to inform all media that she was planning to sue the City of Ottawa, the police, paramedics, the fire department, Jack and his business, Veronica herself — if she didn’t cease and desist meddling and execute these instructions to the letter — and Troutstream’s Izaak Walton Pool, where Jake had received self-evidently inadequate swimming lessons (though I believed Trixie had insisted at the time that Jake be certified and employed as some new thing dubbed “Lifeguard Enabler”).
A thought jolted me out of time-tripping reverie: How stable could the fairly tall, wiry Jack be? How envious of our normal family life next door? I must inform Kevin of that too.
Chapter 11
I said to Detective Beldon, “Want to hear a real suburban horror story involving my next-door neighbours? Could be relevant.”
“No. I already know all about the Kilborns. Developments there have nothing to do with what’s happened to your family.”
“Uh, okay.” Eyes front.
“You shouldn’t be drinking at this time. I shouldn’t be taking you along on this. Still taking the Valium?”
We were swooping round the crescents of Troutstream in Beldon’s maroon Crown Vic, which was making me at once nauseous and nostalgic for my Caddy. As we slowed near the address on Rue Poisson, I observed Beldon signal the lone occupant of an unmarked car.
“The Asian guy is your backup, right?”
“All unofficially. Frank Thu. My only friend in the department. He’s Homicide and officially he’s off duty.”
“Why’s that?”
“Lorne, I have to ask you to shut up. We’ll talk later.”
We pulled into the shaded circular driveway of the mansion the Lewis brothers had literally built for themselves. Troutstream’s only mansion, it bordered greenbelt land sloping to the stream that gave the place its name. Off to the south, about a kilometre distant, could be seen the regional detention centre’s communications tower.
“Are they expecting us?”
“No. You say nothing more unless I ask, you hear? Then you answer simply and directly.”
I shifted my jaw. I wanted to tell him to go fuck his badge. But Detective Beldon was in the zone, concentrated fiercely on the task at hand, my own surgery persona.
I stood behind him as he rang the doorbell, whose button centred a boat’s tiny steering wheel. A sound from inside like an organ’s bass key. He immediately rang again: yes, it was a two-tone foghorn sound. Kevin held the warrant in his left hand and now he smacked his right palm with it.
He fingered his cell and asked to speak to either of the Lewises. Waited. “No, I do not care to wait. Please inform Larry and Gary Lewis that the police are at their house, that we have a search warrant and that if they’re not here within ten minutes we’ll be forcibly entering.”
“Who’d ever have thought the Lewises capable of kidnapping?Just because I got Bob Browne the playground work? Then setting up Foster in my Caddy! I’ll have to apologize to Art for entertaining such thoughts about him. Bob, too. How’d you nail ’em, Kev?”
He didn’t even look at me: “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Dr. Thorpe. Sober up fast. Not another word. Do you hear?” He said to himself, “Big mistake.”
“Aye-aye, mon capitaine.”
Then he looked at me all right. And I did sober up some.
Larry and Gary Lewis sped up a few minutes later in a white pickup with “Twin Bros. Builders” emblazoned on it. Their logo was a beaver in overalls atop a dam and nailing a shingle into
place.
Larry didn’t even look at me. He said to Kevin, “What’s all this about? What’s Lorne Thorpe doing here? Does Lorne Thorpe work for the police now?”
Gary stood behind him, looking ready to burst into tears.
Kevin held up his warrant: “Dr. Thorpe is here as an official police consultant on this investigation. Can we talk inside?”
With Gary alongside now, Larry stepped past us, saying, “What investigation? We, uh, fully intend to pay the import duty on the tower crane.” He keyed a security pad on the door.
Kevin immediately showed disappointment, but said, “Relax about that, Mr. Lewis. I don’t care where or how you buy your company’s machines.”
We paused in the foyer. The Lewis brothers were nothing if not true-blue Troutstreamers. Every item of décor participated in the community’s nautical theme. The foyer itself was designed to resemble the bow of an old-fashioned sailing ship: a steering wheel was fixed to the railing of the stairway’s first landing, a bowsprit lanced overhead. Everywhere the walls were covered with pictures of ships, a couple of lobster traps were upended here and there, and a huge fireplace in the living room off the foyer was topped by a monstrous arcing marlin. One wall of the living room was a bar meant to look like a ship’s cabin, complete with portholes behind the colourful bottles of liquor, rum dominant, no doubt. I wanted a drink.
Larry moved towards the living room but stopped and turned on us. “Then what is this about?”
Kevin held up his traffic cop’s hand: “We can make this unpleasant and official, if you like, Mr. Lewis. I can read you your rights and you can call your lawyer. Or you can answer a few questions for me. If I’m satisfied with your answers, this need go no further.”
A standoff ensued, in which the brothers showed unexpected courage and discipline.
Kevin said to Larry, “Why did you and your brother threaten Dr. Thorpe last night?”