by Gerald Lynch
The man catches the camera out the corner of his eye and his monstrous paw covers his enraged face: “Turn that fuckin’ thing off!”… “Sorry, but I thought you wanted it as part of the —” “Thought nothin’, you stupid cunt! Turn it off!”
Auntie Alice, camerawoman.
It didn’t matter. I was in full body pain anyway. My hot head, in the sinuses especially, felt stuffed with an expanding bag of burning human shit. I just didn’t want to go on living. I had nothing to live for anymore anyway.
“Kevin,” I said, trying to un-house myself, dissociate, whatever. I couldn’t. “Kevin.”
Kevin picked up on my distress. “Listen, Lorne. In parts of the world right now, torturers are tearing the tongues out of children’s mouths to make their daddies agree to avenge the family’s honour. Popping out Phatma’s eyeballs to make Papa see that his only hope for a quicker death for both of them is to sign his confession on the dotted line.”
Satisfied that he had jolted my attention off myself — and he had — he went to the filthy window to do his gazing-out Beldon thing. Something in the stillness of his head made me know I now had to return the service and provide him distraction. I knew only one way to do that.
“Little Pepper wore enough makeup to make Lady Gaga gag, eh?” I laughed idiotically, then hurried: “Understandable, since all the blushing moms, their faces at least, looked like a cross between old Joan Rivers and that Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner character? There should have been a Super Skanky Mom trophy! But fat? Fat. Life lived off vending machines.”
His left hand rose to his face. He said, “I’ll bet those kids were abused in the womb already.” Flat voice, none of that hackneyed huskiness.
I kept trying. “Chubbiest Cherub notwithstanding, I heard one of the moms scold her daughter for gaining weight. The child had to be all of three, with thighs about the thickness of your wrist!”
He looked at his left palm, then with its forefinger drew a circle in the window dirt. Shook his head.
I picked up the pace: “In one of the articles, it says a girl who lost her baby teeth just before a competition was fitted with false teeth — false baby teeth!” I didn’t care about my dignity anymore; anyway, there was nothing I could do about the creeping hysteria. “I’ll bet they were already lying about age in the zero-to-twelve-months competition! Your Honour, I put it to you: Little Missy’s wrinkles were caused by amniotic fluid!”
With thumb tip he marked a spot in the centre of the dirt circle, spoke quite normally. “At first it reminded me of something, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then it hit me: wrestling, the WWF, the garish unreality of it all, the sick agreement to believe a whopper of an ugly lie. It doesn’t take Dr. Freud to see that the real action is in the parents’ gallery, with the moms, singing and dancing along in their cheapo extensions, the enabling dads like your good neighbour Jack.”
Perhaps a clinical question could distract him. “I know it’s already child abuse, but do you think it always leads to sexual abuse?”
“You saw what I saw.”
“But why would parents do it?”
“Mental illness, rising from the cesspool of their own childhoods. That and…well, evil. What else does the word mean if not this? And for money, of course, or the false hope of some.” He did a fair imitation of Auntie Alice: “What’s that smell?… For people who live from poor paycheque to no paycheque. They hand the kids over to some scumbag sugar daddy and tell themselves nothing bad is happening. It’s just another show. And the payoff is probably no more than a tank of gas to get to the next motel.”
I said, “That’s what they learned as kids. Mom says we do this for the money. Now we do this. In our TCA meetings Alice Pepper-Pottersfield was the only one who supported my arguments to pay Bob Browne.”
“Didn’t Freud or somebody say that money to a miser is shit to a baby? Little Pepper and King Robbie hit it perfectly with their routine. What’s that smell? Shit.”
“I find it hard to believe that money would make a mother who wasn’t starving to death pimp her own child.”
“Nothing made them pimps, they made themselves pimps!” He punched the centre of the dirt circle. The pane cracked hugely and spider-webbed like breaking ice, halting with a tiny sound like a distant braking train. When he spoke again he was choked up.
“It’s just, if we don’t at least half-believe we make free choices and act like we believe it, then nothing is worth living for. Nothing matters. Nothing’s worth saving. Nothing’s worth loving. Nothing is real.”
The delaying glass fell from the window in big geometric shapes — making him hop backwards — and crashed. Through the dust and dim some light shot in. He stood staring for a long while, breathing deeply. A very long while.
He turned in that shaft of dusty light and, looking down through both hands held sideways like blinkers, he lined up a cassette, took one step and with his left foot kicked the thing so well that it crashed high on the filthy pea-green wall.
I shouted, “Talk of tampering with the evidence!”
A voice came through the wall: I’m comin’ over there and tearin’ you a new A-hole, you runt!
When we turned to leave, there was a sleeveless T-shirt in the doorway, on an emaciated torso almost as white. Brown plaid slippers, grey dress pants whose cinched belt left about six inches of tongue, and the well-groomed head of a man with miles to go before the curse of holding his liquor catches him. He raised both hands and backed away, voice fading:
“I don’t know nothin’ about the little fella that lives here, nothin’ at all, I tell ya. He an’ his lady-friend visitor come and go as they please. He minds his business an’ I …” He turned and beat it.
I said to Beldon, “You will catch Alice Pepper-Pottersfield?”
“It should be routine. I’ll call this in now.”
He pulled his cellphone from his pocket and pressed numbers. “I’ll get a site-investigation team.” He waited. Talked tersely with a “Staff Sergeant Parizeau.” Waited again. Then spoke more respectfully to a “Superintendant Fortier,” apologizing that his cell must have got turned off somehow. He summarily explained the connection between the abduction of Shawn and the other children, the murdered Bob Browne, and Alice Pepper-Pottersfield and the apartment site. He asked me, “Would you please give a description of Alice Pepper-Pottersfield to Superintendant Fortier.”
I took the phone and without saying hello gave the description. I was thanked as “Dr. Thorpe” and told how grateful the police were to have my assistance. I returned the phone to Kevin, who said into it, “I hope to have her address in the next little while for you, uh, sir.”
He scrunched a confused face that intensified to irritation. He was being reprimanded. Then his eyes widened. He listened neutrally for a while, said, “Really?” Then a longer, more welcome listening. “It will, eh? I mean, uh, thank you, Superintendent. That is what I want and I have learned a lesson about proper procedure, and making sure my phone’s always in proper working order. I’ll have that information for you ASAP.”
When he finished I said, “Good news? Homicide?”
He didn’t respond, just locked the door from the inside and pulled it shut behind us. Coming quickly alongside he snarled, “Bad news. Something’s up at HQ, something about more missing children in Troutstream! The calls were coming in like hellfire as we spoke.” He passed me.
I hurried, “What? Plural? But that’s impossible! You’re making a bad joke, right?”
“No joke. I don’t know the details. Most likely a copycat, we’re hoping. It happens all the time.”
“But what copycat could have known about it, or this soon?”
“I don’t know. But my immediate assignment is to get Foster to divulge his contact for Alice Pepper-Pottersfield, and relay her address. Which should be easy now. Procedure. I’ll drop you off first.”
Chapter 19
Veronica’s Golf was not in our driveway or at the neighbour’s. From the front sidewalk I spied through the Kilborns’ window. All I could make out was a continual wild flurry of Jake in the front room. Where were my wife and wiry Jack that would allow such a performance?… After about five minutes I gave up looking.
The phone was ringing when I entered my house. Its red light was blinking so rapidly I couldn’t count the number of missed messages being signalled. Media. I came close to not picking up and immediately wished I hadn’t.
“Is one speaking with Dr. Thorpe?”
“Yes, Debbie, what can I do for you? I’m in a bit of a —”
“Well, Dr. Thorpe, perhaps I should be calling the police in lieu, because it would appear that a goodly number of my offspring have gone missing!” Her voice went up at the end. “The school phoned!”
“Wait a sec, Debbie. Didn’t you drop them off at school this morning?”
“Well, no, not precisely. That’s my point.” The British female-impersonator accent was replaced by the flat nasal of Ontario: “I was feelin’ sorta sick this morning and Alice said she could handle the route herself. I —”
“Alice? Alice Pepper-Pottersfield drove the bus by herself this morning? By herself?”
Some composure: “She doesn’t have an operator’s licence, true, and that’s proportionately why I’m calling you instead of the police. I mean…I didn’t know whom to turn to. I was taking a long morning bath with Maeve Binchy for company and the radio on, and my call display shows the police have been phoning me and I have all these messages! And just right now there are two police vehicles outside and I’m worried sick that an accident has hap —”
I hung up and called the direct number Kevin had given me. It took so long to get through that sweat was trickling down my sides. When I got him, the false calm in his voice didn’t fool me.
“Yes, a whole busload of Troutstream kids is missing. The calls here have been screaming. We’ve just now got hold of the school-bus driver, your Debbie Carswell. Dr. Foster didn’t hesitate — she was his first contact for getting in touch with Bob Browne.”
“Listen, Kevin, I’m pretty sure Alice bullied Debbie into being sick this morning and took the school bus herself. Sounds like Debbie was ordered to shut up and hide out in her bathtub. But someone’s already spotted the bus, right?”
“Wrong. I’ll be right over. But first I’m going to have a word with this Carswell lunatic. Sit tight, Lorne.”
I played my messages. The first was from the school, a computerized voice: “YOUR DAUGHTER — SHAWN THORPE — IN GRADE — SIX — IS ABSENT FROM SCHOOL THIS MORNING —”
On my way out I banged my hipbone on the corner of the kitchen island, then bounced off the door jamb.
I didn’t knock. Jack’s place was a madhouse. Jake was running circles around the bulky living room coffee table, roaring about going to see Wy. I didn’t dare approach him. I found Jack at the kitchen table, which was covered with empty bottles, beer and one Canadian Club. His baggy eyes were as dark as horror makeup.
“Jack?… Jack?”
He was as good as asleep, trying to bring me into focus with his Goth eyes. He was speaking just an intelligible cut above Jake:
“She loves you, you know that? I love her and she loves you. Lucky bugger.”
“Jack, shut up and listen. Is there any chance Shawn didn’t get on the bus this… Oh, fuck it. But at least listen to Jake in there!” I pointed. He tried to focus my finger.
Jake’s roaring came without letup: “Go see Wy, go see Wy, go see Wy …”
“Pull yourself together, Jack! This is a crisis!”
He smiled weakly and in folding his arms on the table knocked off a bottle, which didn’t break. He carefully pillowed his head, face to the wall.
Where was Veronica? Why had she taken off again?… What had drunken Jack said? She loves me? Of course she loves me, you sick piece of… No: thank the gods if she still loves me. Could this mean there was nothing between the two of them? Yes! Only in Jack’s drunken dreams! How could there have been anything?… Oh, there could have been, Dr. Thorpe. There could be.
I shouted and yanked on a fistful of Jack’s greasy hair. He cranked up his head and looked at me over his right shoulder from underwater eyes. Then smiled dissolvingly, put an empty bottle in his mouth and tried to bite it. I crammed him against the wall for safekeeping, where he immediately slumped into unconsciousness, his mouth working the bottle like a baby a breast. I thought twice, but removed it.
There was nothing to do but head back home and wait for Kevin. I slowed passing the dervish Jake now windmilling arms as he beat his circle around the big golden-oak coffee table like a lacquered tree stump. To interfere would be like stepping into a rotary plough. He was reduced to emitting one sound, a screeching “Wyyyyyyyyy …”
I waited on our front stoop. The maroon Crown Vic pulled into the driveway, but instead of heading for me Beldon turned to the Kilborns’. He shouted, “There’s no one home at your place, right? Shawn was picked up by Alice’s school bus, right? Owen takes a city bus, right? Veronica saw them off, she’s still at the neighbours’.”
“Yes — no — wait!” I hurried after him. “You won’t get any help there, Jack’s passed out drunk and Jake’s having a fit.”
“Where’s Veronica?”
“She went to bring the kids their lunches. She should be long back by now. Dear God.”
“Can Jack talk?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong with Jake?”
“Who knows? He’s been neglected. He’s raving about that Wy from the TV show.”
We entered and stood in the archway to the living room. Jake was no longer screeching like a stuck pig, if running even tighter circles around the coffee table, leaning dangerously inward.
Kevin said, “Watch me.”
“Watch you? Oh …”
He moved within a few feet of the whirling Jake. “Jake, stop!” But Jake merely recommenced windmilling his arms. Kevin timed his foot so that Jake crashed onto the brown corduroy couch by the front window. Kevin was on him, pinning his arms to his sides and dodging attempted head butts.
I leapt in and restrained Jake’s legs by lying on them — what riding a mechanical bull must feel like! Jake was now making hellacious noises and moving us both with his bucking… But his struggles subsided, though not his roaring. I glanced around Kevin. Jake’s face was flaming and covered with froth and snot.
Risking a butt, I moved my head closer and shouted into his face, “Shut up, dumb-dumb!”
And Jake went limp. I distinguished something intelligible, to me anyway.
Kevin, his face streaming sweat, asked, “What’d he say?”
“He’s going to tell his mother we made fun of him.”
Kevin seemed to hiccup. “Can you give him something? We need to know what he knows.”
I released my grip and backed off. Removing his hands from the powerful shoulders, Kevin sat Jake up. His whole head was redder than Kevin’s. He huffed and he puffed…but he settled down further. He gave Kevin his broken-picket-fence grin, did his swallow-the-nose face and shouted,“That was fun!”
Kevin looked at me and I translated, adding, “There’s no call for sedation. Whatever you think you can get from him, now’s your window.”
Kevin went blank, looked down, or inward, apparently gathering his resources. He tried to put a hand on Jake’s hand, but Jake batted it away and flailed, if not as wildly. Still, we had to wait for him to settle again. Precious time.
Kevin said loudly and slowly, “Jake, listen carefully. This is very important. I’m a policeman. Where did Shawn go this morning? To see…Wy?” Big mistake.
“Go see Wy, go see Wy, go see Wy …”
We were again both lying on top of the bucking boy. I managed,
“Maybe you’d better let me try.”
“What the fuck is going on here?” Also spoken slowly and loudly. “Get off him. Shawn’s whole busload of children is missing and you two are wrestling with Jake?”
Veronica. We got off. Kevin looked as sheepish as I.
“Sit still, Jake.” And he did. “Where’s Jack?” she asked no one in particular.
I said, “He’s passed out in the kitchen.”
I saw she’d not slept much in days: her hair looked in need of a wash and brush, and she was still in her baby-blue sweat suit. I had to resist a powerful urge to go and hold her, even if I was the one needed the holding. And I’m sure I looked much worse.
She watched Kevin only. “Detective Beldon, how did this happen? Every time, you assured me that things would be all right. You were going to get the man who abducted Shawn. Now people are dead and a whole busload of children is missing. They’re going crazy over at the school. And it’s that Alice Pepper woman who’s driving the bus! The police are saying she’s mad as a bat! How could you let this happen! She’s the one who kidnapped Shawn, isn’t she, dressed as a man?”
Kevin stepped forward and cupped both Veronica’s shoulders. “Mrs. Thorpe, Veronica, I have a pretty good idea how this happened, but I was unable to prevent it. Lots of things have to go wrong for something like this to happen, and things have gone horribly wrong. But I have absolutely no time now to explain. If you can talk with Jake, I need to know what Shawn’s been telling him about going to see this Wy character.”
The mere mention started Jake up again: “Go see Wy, go see Wy …”
Veronica delayed on Kevin’s eyes a moment, looked longer and harder at me, then sat on the couch. Without a word, she fearlessly took Jake’s swinging head in both her hands, held it hard, stared into his eyes and snapped, “Jake.” He stopped flailing and settled. She took tissues from her pocket and cleaned up his face. Then she held his hand in hers and began lightly stroking it, all the while holding him with her eyes.
“Shawn is your best friend, isn’t she, Jake? And best friends share, don’t they, Jake?”