Instead of birthday cake, the Doctor and Barbara brought out black cupcakes with steeples of white icing that everyone licked like ice-cream cones. I saw Barbara say “Happy birthday” when she gave Theresa hers, with a lit candle in it. “Make a wish,” she said.
“Can I wish you’d go away?” Theresa said, and my mouth fell open.
“You don’t even have to wish. Just ask,” Barbara said, and she retreated across the room.
“Happy birthday to you,” the Doctor abruptly started singing, and everyone else joined in. I did too, eventually.
When everyone was finished eating their cupcakes, Dr. Daughrety directed us to the dining room table, adorned with yellow pads and sharpened pencils. He pulled out his black notebook full of questions—all the questions from the last five years as well as this one. Spencer sat down, licked the last of the icing from his lips, and pushed my chair away from him.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You’re blocking my view of Dr. Strange and Strange Daughter.”
I looked at Theresa, found her staring back, and something shot through me that I had never felt before, not on Gunning for Gum Ball Days or in math class or even at previous Mind Wars. I was going to win today, or Spencer was. And Theresa seemed oddly resigned to it. An adrenaline ball the size of a fist engulfed my heart. I shuddered in my chair, feeling the hard wood grind against my shoulder blades. Theresa, I suspected, probably felt like this every school day of her life.
Barbara Fox sat at the Doctor’s elbow. She put her hand on his knee and drilled her eyes straight into mine until I looked away.
For ten questions, one entire round, Spencer and I ran the table. He’d answer, I’d answer, and all the while Theresa sat in her chair and chewed her pencil. Occasionally, she’d look up from the paper at us, or at least in our direction, which was the most you could expect from her at any given time, but especially in the middle of a Mind War. I imagined her father slipping toward the edge of his chair with every right answer his daughter didn’t give. Spencer and I were like battering rams storming the gates of his cathedral.
Even during the second round, we controlled the action, although the monster in Theresa was clearly awake by then. The game got faster, the answers quicker. So quickly did the three of us fling responses and reload, in fact, that we got a lot of answers wrong, which kept our scores lower than they’d been in years.
The speed round jerked past like pages in a flip book: Dr. Daughrety checked his watch and raced through questions; Barbara Fox kissed his earlobe while he shooed her away. Jon Goblin whispered something to Marybeth Royal, and she blushed; Theresa gnawed through the base of her pencil eraser and flecked her lips with yellow paint. Finally, the Doctor dumped his black book on the floor, grabbed the score pad out of Barbara’s hands, and stared at it.
We waited. At the other end of the table from me, Marybeth poked Jon in the arm.
“Some birthday,” Spencer murmured.
“This can’t be right,” the Doctor snarled.
Spencer glanced my way. I was watching Theresa. She had her hands over her eyes but her fingers were spread as if she was playing peek-a-boo, and she was smiling. I couldn’t see her mouth, but I knew she was smiling and I’m fairly certain she was smiling at me.
“Wow,” said Dr. Daughrety, “it is right. Okay, folks. We have an overtime round. Spencer and Theresa are tied at the top, Mattie’s three points off the lead. Everyone still plays. Ten questions, fifteen points each. Ready?”
He picked up his black book and opened it to the page where he’d left off. Then he stopped, looked at all of us, and grinned. I’d seen other grown-ups do that, my parents and grandparents and one or two teachers, absorbing us through their skin like sunlight. But I’d never seen Dr. Daughrety do it.
The first question he asked was about Commodore Perry opening up the Orient. ]on Goblin had just done his Nineteenth-Century Heroes report on him, so he got that one. Then Jon answered a sports question about the Red Wings. Out of the remaining eight questions, Jon answered five, either because Dr. Daughrety happened to hit on his areas of expertise, or maybe because those two right answers had triggered Jon’s own adrenaline burst, the one that fueled him on the soccer field, which was at least as powerful as Theresa’s. A couple of panicky wrong answers from Theresa, one each from Spencer and me, and it was over. Jon wound up winning by over fifty points.
From the pocket of his white cardigan, Dr. Daughrety lifted the Honor Feather and sat there a moment like a cat, staring in bewilderment at the remains of something he’d devoured.
“Jon Goblin,” he said, “your parents will never believe it.”
He reached across the table and dropped the feather over Jon’s pad of paper. We watched it drift down. Marybeth Royal actually kissed him on the cheek when it landed.
Barbara took us skating on the lake afterward. The Doctor stayed home. Theresa got so far out in front of us that she disappeared into the little outcropping of half-submerged trees and swamp grass we all called the Island in the dead center of Cider Lake. Jon Goblin and Marybeth Royal skated out there too, and they didn’t come back for a while. Theresa didn’t reappear until we’d stopped calling her name and yelled that we were going home. I was the one who caught sight of her gliding out of the tall reeds.
Back in the Daughretys’ living room, the heat seeped into our cheeks as we unlaced our skates and mercifully released our ankles. Theresa congratulated Jon Goblin but still avoided talking to Spencer or me. She almost sliced Barbara with her skate blade when Barbara tried to help her untie her laces. Barbara just straightened and shrugged and said, “You get the other one.”
Later, after my mother had driven Spencer home to Ferndale, I told her about seeing Barbara kiss Dr. Daughrety. She just nodded when I said it and then sat for a few moments, staring out the windshield while the wipers cut the blooms off the ice flowers forming there. When she looked at me again, she was close to tears.
“He’s a goddamn son-of-a-bitch,” she said.
Chapter 17 - 1977
Even before the woman realized what she’d seen, thrown up her dinner, and called the police, the Cory twins’ abduction was different. All of us had felt it coming, first of all. There was something about this particular snow—a gray vapor that lingered for days and stank like floodwater—that seemed unusually filthy even for Detroit.
That night, the nine o’clock Special Update returned to all three networks. It stayed on for hours, tracking the progress of house-to-house searches on a map, as though they were part of a storm front closing over the region. The woman who’d seen it happen told her story to the police, then to the networks, then to some private detectives who never revealed who had hired them but otherwise talked freely to the press, and then to a shadowy group of men who showed up at her door in the middle of the night in black turtlenecks and demanded that she tell them everything she knew for the good of us all.
What she knew was that the Cory twins, age eleven, had been standing in a parking lot outside a comic book shop in downtown Birmingham, talking to a long-haired man. The shop was less than a hundred yards from their house, and they walked there every day. She had seen the two boys climb—willingly, as far as she could tell—into the long-haired man’s car. One kid had held up the seat so that his twin brother could climb in the back, while the long-haired man stood on the other side of the car and grinned. The car itself was rusted almost all the way through along the molding. The police gave her photos of various models, and she identified one instantly: a blue Gremlin.
On the second night of the Cory twins’ disappearance, I had my first Snowman nightmare.
I slip on the ice, land next to a basement window. Peering through it is like looking in the lake. I don’t want to, and do. Through the snow-light glare, I see a long-haired man in a red down ski jacket and a baby propped in a high chair, gagged and stuffed like a doll. Only it isn’t a doll. The long-haired man keeps leaning over the baby and whispering, and
every time he stands, the baby looks shinier, less human. Right at the end, the long-haired man turns to me. His face is red and flat, like a STOP sign.
The next day, I saw the Snowman’s real face for the first time. It appeared on telephone poles, at the post office, in the newspapers, in people’s windows. The woman who’d seen him hadn’t been able to provide much description aside from the long hair, but the police artist had already come up with a face based on psychological profiles that bore a striking resemblance to her description: blurred charcoal eyes and a smeared indeterminate mouth. The face looked almost fetal, as if it were only now taking shape.
Mrs. Cory made a single public appearance, on the Saturday after the kidnapping. She had weird gouge marks in both cheeks, as though she’d been fitted for a bit. Her hair fell in a dark sweeping wave off one side of her face and was tucked in tight against the other. I don’t know whether it was sympathy or admiration that caused it, but within a week, dozens of women were wearing their hair that way.
Mrs. Cory did not cry. She stared at the camera from her own living room, ignoring Larry Loreno. Larry was on his first hard-news assignment, dressed in a dark blue suit instead of the jeans and Tigers cap he usually wore for his Eyeing Detroit feature. He kept shifting in his chair, as if he wasn’t sure where to place his hands. For what seemed like forever, Mrs. Cory said nothing at all.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Larry nervously, but the camera never left Mrs. Cory’s face. “We’d like to bring you this exclusive plea. Mrs. Cory?”
“What the hell’s an exclusive plea?” my father barked.
Mrs. Cory opened her mouth, closed her mouth. Finally—still without tears, her voice breaking—she cleared her throat, blinked, and said softly, “Goodbye, boys.” Then she stood up and wandered out of the room.
“Mattie, get to bed,” my father said, and my mother began to cry.
Until then the adults had seemed mostly scared, crouched in their houses or behind their work desks, clutching us to them at every opportunity. But now they were angry.
I remember one night, the Special Update crew suddenly cut away from their map of the suburbs to a live shot at the corner of Telegraph and Long Lake, where a circle of coatless women had erupted from their houses and ambushed a blue Gremlin at a stoplight. They’d yanked a college kid out of the driver’s seat, grabbed chunks of ice and gravel off the shoulder of the road, and begun stoning the car. This went on for forty-five minutes—with a few passersby pulling off the road and hopping out to join them—until someone stopped at Kroger and called the cops, who came blazing onto the scene and dispersed the women by waving nightsticks. Then they grabbed the college kid, who was protesting wildly, bent him over his blasted hood, threw on handcuffs, and broke into the trunk of his ruined car with a crowbar.
“You know what?” one of the women told a reporter. She was wearing no makeup, no shoes, just a bathrobe, and looked as if she had sleep-walked onto her driveway. “I didn’t even notice the kid. I wanted to kill the car.”
On the way home from school the next day, we all sat in silence on the bus and listened to a guy tell a talk-show host on WJR how he’d been stopped twelve times in sixteen hours the day before and ordered out of his Gremlin, which wasn’t even blue. And this morning the police hadn’t even waited for him to leave the house; they just showed up at 5 a.m. with a warrant to search his garage.
“Get new wheels, asshole,” the talk-show host said and cut him off.
The twilight forays into our front yards got shorter. Brent and I slipped out once, when we were supposed to be setting the table, and pelted each other with ice balls while the sun sank behind the pines and split them with white-red light. Cold air crawled along the mouths of our gloves and clutched our wrists. My brother generally demolished me in snowball fights, but that night I scraped up two fistfuls of snow and sprinted at him. By the time he recovered from the shock, I was in his face, driving ice into his neck. He crumpled to the lawn and gave. Then we snuck out of the yard and down the block, past the Foxes’ house, which was empty and lightless, and wound up hunched in the drainage ditch at the new bus stop on Cider Lake Road. We hadn’t seen much of either Fox for a while. I thought of Barbara in the Daughrety house and missed her.
“What would you do if it came?” Brent whispered.
A van churned past, followed by an old Camaro, deep blue and rusted, with a shadow driver behind the tinted windshield. From far behind us, startlingly clear, came our mother’s call. “Boys?” The call got clearer still, and louder. “Boys?”
Both of us heard the tone in her voice, the way the end of the question tailed upward in panic. Brent stood immediately. When I didn’t, he kicked me in the ribs.
I didn’t really want the Snowman to come. But I could imagine myself gone, could almost hear everyone at school, everyone I knew, talking. I wanted to hear what the Snowman said to get you to come with him. More, I wanted to hear his voice. I could almost hear it already, summoning me through the blowing snow: the Pied Piper, with charcoal for eyes.
Brent kicked me again, and I got up and kicked him back. Then we raced down the middle of the street, yelling and waving to our mother where she stood at the end of our driveway, ankle-deep in the drifts in her stocking feet.
Chapter 18 – 1977
It was that next weekend, just before they found the Cory twins, their bodies freshly laid and unmarked, on the putting green at the Maple Hills Country Club, that Spencer and I entered Theresa Daughrety’s house together for the last time. We came at six o’clock, and Barbara fed us macaroni and cheese at the kitchen table, under the twin dogface masks with the bared black fangs. Her hair swung in rings around her shoulders; random curls hung near her ears like seahorses. All through dinner, she smiled at me the way she always did, for no apparent reason. It was a tired smile, more eyes than mouth, but it made me happy to see it. Except for one moment, when she put her hand on my arm as she handed me my plate and asked what I’d been drawing lately, she didn’t speak to me specifically. She didn’t speak to Spencer either. Instead, to my utter astonishment, she spent most of the meal talking to Theresa. Last time I’d seen them, they’d been kicking skate blades at each other. And no one I knew had managed even a one-way conversation with Theresa in recent weeks. Even so, they weren’t saying anything much, as far as I could tell. Barbara talked about skating, a half-painted wall in the guest bedroom, Dr. Daughrety’s Jeep, an African book that she had given Theresa called Things Fall Apart.
“Hard man,” Theresa said through a mouthful of macaroni. I guessed she meant someone in the book.
Barbara responded with a nod and folded her arms across her chest. “Hard,” she concurred. Then she glanced my way and smiled.
The tingling sensation stole over me as I stood to clear my plate. I don’t know what it was—something about the way Barbara was smiling at me while conducting easy conversation with Theresa, or the memory of Barbara singing next to me on our front stoop, or maybe just the fact that she was making us dinner in that house—but suddenly I found myself saying, “He isn’t good for you.”
The statement did what I wanted, I suppose. It jarred her, got her looking straight at me. But her smile evaporated. “Which him do you mean?” she said. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
I started shaking, trying to figure out what I’d just done and how to take it back. Theresa and Spencer sat, their faces as frozen as the masks on the walls. The phone rang. No one moved.
On the fourth ring, I said, “Should I get that? Barbara?” I was fighting back tears.
When she still didn’t respond, I stood and pulled the receiver to my ear. “Daughrety house,” I said, sounding tired and sad like our school secretary.
“Mattie, is Barbara there?” my mother said. I blinked in surprise.
“Mom?”
“Mattie, put Barbara on the phone. Right now.”
I stretched the phone toward Barbara. From the look on her face, I thought she might swat the
receiver from my hands.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, my voice still shaking a little. “It’s my mom.”
Barbara took the phone, and just a little rigidity drained from her body. “Hello?” she said, in a deeper voice than usual.
For a long time, she stood, saying nothing, staring at the wall. Then she said, “Fuck him.” I gaped at Spencer. He was gaping too. Even Theresa flinched. “Fuck him!” Barbara yelled. Then she said, “Okay, okay, I’ll be right there.” She slammed down the phone and fled the room.
We could hear her rummaging through the living room closet. I wanted to go in there, but I was caught in another one of those chasms between my life and the lives of adults, and there was no one to yell to for help.
“They let her baby-sit you?” Spencer broke into my thoughts.
“Shut up,” I snapped.
“Well, what the hell?”
“I don’t know.”
As if someone had pressed on the back of her chair and ejected her, Theresa stood up, blew a breath, and walked out of the kitchen. I followed her with Spencer close behind. She stopped right behind Barbara and stared at her back. She didn’t speak. Barbara was putting on her coat and drawing the hood over her hair. Her face was red, her eyes wet.
“I have to go out,” she said to Theresa.
I couldn’t believe it. She was about to leave us alone. No one else said anything. “Where are you going?” I blurted.
Tears slipped from her eyes. “My dad, Mattie. My goddamn dad. He shot the windows out of our house. Now he’s wandering around the neighborhood with a gun, and I have to find him before he starts shooting someone else’s house, or the police decide he’s threatening someone and try to stop him. If they yell at him to put the gun down, I’m not even sure he’d do it. That’s how crazy he is. Can you guys take care of yourselves for a little while? The Doctor should be home any minute.” By now, Barbara had the front door open, and she was no longer looking at us. “Be good, kids. Please.” Then she was on the porch, pulling the door closed.
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