Suffer the Children

by Lisa Black

  “That’s okay,” Riley said as he positioned himself. “It’s nice to see a work space that looks like a work space. No crayoned stick-figure pictures stuck to your filing cabinet with magnets, though.”

  Dr. Palmer gave his own office a quick survey, as if only now realizing that for a man who had devoted his life to children he had nothing childlike there. Nothing breakable, nothing that could be hurled by an irate youth, though many texts appeared heavy enough to do real damage. “No, I guess not. Kids are never in here—they meet with their therapists and teachers and dorm parents, and those adults in turn meet with me. I guess you could say I’m once removed. My position here is purely administrative, and research oriented. I’m doing a study on early childhood outcomes, which has turned up some quite fascinating—”

  A knock sounded at the door and the slim young black woman they had last seen trying to keep Damon from escaping his dorm area entered. She spoke a bit breathlessly to Dr. Palmer: “Cathy said you were back. I can’t believe Damon’s gone. He wasn’t that sick. She said it was just strep.”

  Dr. Palmer stood and leaned across his desk as if trying to comfort her. “I know, it’s a great shock. Come in and sit down, my dear. This is Tawanna Cooper, one of Damon’s dorm mothers. She’s been a great asset to us for, what, about four years now?”

  Jack gave her his chair, which allowed him to both stretch his long legs and stand in the corner, back against the bookcase, the better to observe both the administrator and the social worker while Riley held their attention. Not that he expected to learn much. They both seemed discombobulated by the boy’s death.

  “He had been making progress,” Tawanna Cooper sniffed, dabbing her eyes with a delicate touch of tissue. “He actually wrote some of his numbers the other day. And he patted Mariana’s shoulder when she was crying over her spelling test. That indicated such a leap in his capacity for empathizing—”

  “Let’s go back,” Riley interrupted. “You—”

  “I took him to the infirmary on Saturday. He was lying around and picked at his food—usually he sucked everything down like a whirlpool. His forehead felt hot to me so I took him down to Cathy. She said it was strep. I think he picked it up from a day student—”

  “Possibly the one he bit,” Dr. Palmer mused, apparently to himself.

  “—because no one else in my unit had it. Anyway, that was … the last time I saw him.” Again she sniffed.

  “Why was he trying to get out of your room on Thursday?” Jack asked.

  “When? Oh, that was you—with Rachael’s body. Damon did that often, really. When he felt bored or particularly energetic. He would often throw himself at doors just to see if they’d open. Not surprising, really.”

  “Why is that?”

  The young woman and the old doctor exchanged a glance. Then Dr. Palmer took a deep breath as if about to begin a long story. Which, as it turned out, he was.

  “Damon came to us about two months ago, from Geauga County. They found him in a big old house in a fairly isolated location. No one knew that the woman had had two children, or that she kept them locked in the basement.”

  “Wow,” Riley said.

  “Damon and his brother. We don’t even know what the brother’s name is since there were no records of anything. We only guess at Damon’s name because the mother had written it on the calendar, then never flipped to the next month. When authorities entered, the ten-year-old calendar was still hanging in the kitchen. The brother had been younger. No record of the father or fathers, no indication of a man living at the house at all.

  “The woman died from some natural cause, heart attack, I think. A mailman noticed the mail piling up in the box, police did a welfare check, found her body in the kitchen and Damon in the basement. Its door, I guess, looked like something you’d see in a castle in an old movie—an inch-thick hasp and padlock. They found Damon and his little brother. The brother had been dead for at least a year, possibly three or four.”

  Hence the fascination with death, Jack thought. “Did he eat him?”

  Three heads swiveled to look at him as if he had grown three heads. “What?” Riley asked.

  “I mean, kid stuck with no food … did he resort to cannibalism? Is that why he bites?”

  “No!” Ms. Cooper seemed aghast while Dr. Palmer stifled what sounded like a chuckle, and said that all children bite.

  Ms. Cooper said, “No, no. Damon wasn’t starving. Underweight, certainly—he barely weighed over fifty pounds. But he wasn’t abused, physically, in the strictest sense of the word. He had no broken bones, no deep bruises, no internal injuries. She apparently threw food down the steps and water dripped from a faucet. Blankets in the winter, etcetera. He came here in fairly decent health even with the persistent malnutrition.” A frown puckered her perfect skin. “At least as far as could be told—who knows what was hiding in his body that wouldn’t have been found during a basic checkup.”

  “What killed the brother, then?”

  Another exchanged glance.

  Dr. Palmer said uncomfortably, “They can’t really be sure. So much time had passed and the body had mummified.”

  “But—” Jack prompted. Obviously, there was a but.

  Ms. Cooper said in a low tone, “There were broken bones in the face and chest.”

  “How old was he?”

  “About six months. Impossible to know how long he had been in the cellar with Damon.”

  “So the assumption—”

  “We can’t make any assumptions in that case,” Dr. Palmer said. “It could have been the mother. The fractures might not have been serious and the baby died of malnutrition. With a boy of about seven trying to feed a baby water and crunchy dog food, it would have taken a miracle for that baby to survive.”

  Jack said, “Or the seven-year-old got tired of listening to the crying and belted him a few times.”

  Dr. Palmer said, “Or the mother literally threw the baby down the stairs with the dog food and Damon did what he could for him. It’s impossible to know.”

  “Then why was Damon here?” Riley asked. “At this facility?”

  They seemed to find this a confusing question. “Where else could he go?” Dr. Palmer asked. “Obviously the average foster family wouldn’t be equipped to handle him.”

  “He attacked other children while he was here?” Jack asked. It seemed the kid had been dangerously off the rails but they couldn’t find a politically correct way to say so.

  Dr. Palmer admitted, “Well, yes. Aside from the biting and scratching, he threw a bowl of hot soup at a little girl in his group. He twisted a boy’s arm hard enough to sprain it. Lord knows he’s hit Ms. Cooper here enough times. So I guess you could say that.”

  “How else would you say it?”

  The doctor and the social worker took a moment to think, as Jack watched a group of older boys, big enough to be the sixteen-to seventeen-year-olds, gather on the rooftop basketball court. It seemed like any other pickup game, the boys talking, laughing, obviously teasing each other, dribbling a worn ball in an absent manner, the game only a cover story for the real purpose of forgetting their problems and issues for a half hour.

  Then Ms. Cooper said, “It’s kind of like how your cat can be purring and rubbing up against you one minute, and then the next it decides that your ankles are a cosmic threat and must be scratched to death. Unpredictable. Damon wasn’t dangerous, Detective—he was feral. Out of control one moment, quite docile the next, especially if you were giving him something good to eat.”

  “Why wasn’t he removed from the group?” Riley asked, somehow without making it sound like an accusation.

  Dr. Palmer said, “Because no one anywhere can—could—spare a staff member to be one-on-one with him twenty-four /seven. The only alternative would be to lock him in a padded room somewhere, and further isolation was hardly the answer.”

  Ms. Cooper added, “He had ten years of socialization to catch up on. We had to start somewhere.”
/>   “Did he have a problem with anyone or any aspect of the program in particular?” Jack asked. Damon may have died by misadventure or some bizarre medical condition, but it could easily be a case of homicide, so he might as well ask the usual questions. “Did he have any particular complaints?”

  Ms. Cooper said, “Damon didn’t speak.”

  Jack felt himself blink. “Not at all? Didn’t at least grunt, or scream?”

  “Nothing.”

  The cops digested this. Riley asked, “Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

  “Couldn’t,” Dr. Palmer said. “The brain isn’t all ready to go at birth. It continues to develop neurological connections and abilities—which if they’re not developed within the first two years will most likely never develop at all. In real life, Tarzan never would have learned to even say, ‘You Jane.’”

  Ms. Cooper said, “There were cruel experiments with animals that showed if their eyes were sewed shut for the first few months, they were permanently blinded.”

  “So Damon never learned to talk?”

  “No.” As if it had just occurred to him, Dr. Palmer said, “If the brother had been closer in age, perhaps they would have developed their own language. That would have been interesting.”

  Ms. Cooper said, “But by the time the brother came along Damon had already lost the ability. It’s also possible any sound made was met with punishment—we don’t know when in his development he was imprisoned. At any rate, even with normal physiology Damon became permanently mute.”

  Dr. Palmer said, “The brain needs stimulation to develop proper channels of functioning. This is why early childhood intervention is so important. Programs like Head Start are already too late—we need family counseling to begin the minute a woman gets pregnant. They don’t have to play Mozart to the baby in the womb—just talk to it once it’s born. Look at it, respond to it. Very basic, basic things that involved parents do automatically.”

  Ms. Cooper said, “We see this all the time in our family counseling and intervention services—these people aren’t bad parents because they’re bad people. They’re bad parents because they never experienced a good one. With a little guidance and support they can make great strides, and in turn so can their children.”

  Jack thought this all sounded quite logical, but he had spent most of the lecture watching the boys on the other side of the window. They had settled into an actual game now, the players focused on either making a basket or blocking the guy with the ball. The most assertive player appeared to be at least a hundred pounds overweight. Two listless boys hunched in plastic chairs, twitching and occasionally scratching—Jack guessed meth use. A tall kid with light brown skin and more enthusiasm than talent liked to celebrate his team’s scores by leaping onto the chain-link fence that separated the court from empty, open air.

  “So Damon couldn’t speak. At all,” Riley said, sounding a bit stunned—and no doubt wondering how they were ever going to find out what had been going on in the kid’s life without any sort of communication from him. No text messages, diary entries, past conversations to go on.

  Dr. Palmer was still on early childhood development. “Physical and mental abilities have to be stimulated after birth in order to develop. When a baby cries and its mother comforts it, eventually the baby learns to self-soothe and self-regulate their emotions. When the baby’s cry is ignored and as thoroughly as Damon’s obviously was, that isn’t learned. Given that he also didn’t have the greatest nutrition in the world, it’s no surprise that he had less IQ, less self-control and equanimity, and more extreme reaction to stimuli.”

  Ms. Cooper interrupted her boss. “But he could learn. With the lack of language, obviously, it was so difficult to teach anything. I usually had to resort to hand gestures, but his eyes would light up when he figured out what I was trying to communicate to him. We even did the house-tree-person test. Sort of. I had to leave out the tree.”

  “The what?” Riley asked.

  Again the glance from Ms. Cooper to the doctor, this one with a slightly pitying cast to it. She said, “It’s a tool developed by a psychologist named John Buck in 1948. It is designed to give us an estimation of the child’s intelligence and personality, though we use it mostly to identify possible problem areas. We give them a crayon and a piece of paper and tell them to draw a house. That’s it. They can take all the time they like and of course artistic ability is not what we’re looking for. Then we ask questions—there’s a large catalog of questions you can ask, but since we focus on possible trauma and abuse as well as the child’s history we ask things like, Who lives in the house? Who comes to visit? Where does everyone sleep? Are they happy? We look for what’s missing: Are there windows, doors? Or for what’s added: Is there a lump in the lawn that looks like a dead puppy? That gives us a direction to ask more questions. A child who was beaten in the garage every night might draw the garage and then scribble it out. An abused kid who grew up in apartment buildings might put windows for every apartment except their own.”

  “Okay,” Riley said. “Damon—”

  “Next we have them draw a tree. Does the tree have leaves? Is it a large, healthy tree or a few sticks? What’s around it? With Damon I just skipped the tree. With a child raised in a basement—I didn’t think I could get that idea across. I had to draw myself in my house, and had started drawing myself in our under-twelve unit before he understood that I meant the dwelling. He was actually quite bright, given the circumstances. Such a pity.” She nearly sniffed again. “If he had only had a normal existence I think he would have been a really smart kid.”

  The basketball kids had ended their game, the fence climber jumping down to give a teammate a friendly—or unfriendly, Jack couldn’t tell—shove.

  “So—” Riley tried.

  “The third part is the person,” she went on. She enunciated each word in a way that made Jack think she had spent a bit too much time talking to small children. “It’s okay if their person is a blob with stick limbs. We look for, does the person have hands? Hair? A mouth? Are they smiling? Then we ask, Who is the person? Do they have a family? And so on.”

  “And what did Damon draw?” Riley asked quickly.

  “I can show you,” she said, rising, her posture as perfect as it had been while seated. “You can see his cubby, too—I mean where he slept. Though it won’t tell you much. He didn’t have much of anything.”

  “What about the children?” Dr. Palmer asked.

  To the detectives, she explained, “Many of these children have been physically or sexually abused. They often find grown men intimidating—but I think a short visit that doesn’t involve them personally, and of course I’ll explain that you are helping us, might be good for them. One more step in getting them to accept the idea that not all adults will hurt them.”

  Dr. Palmer nodded his bow to her judgment, and the cops left the room.

  Chapter 10

  They followed the teacher to the opposite side of the building and down two floors to the under-twelve dorm area. School time had paused for lunch and about twenty kids clustered at round tables eating macaroni and cheese, overseen by a slender young man with sandy blond hair and a vaguely tense expression. The smell made Jack’s stomach rumble, wanting food, any food. They fell silent as soon as Ms. Cooper led the cops into the room and, staring back at them, Jack had the uncomfortable feeling that he could read each one’s history. None had a sweet bedtime story to tell. Some of them seemed wary but curious, more or less typical of energetic children. Some squirmed and shot hostile looks, waiting for the confrontation, waiting to have to fight their way out. One little girl looked at them appraisingly, almost seductively, her dark eyes sweeping them from hair to shoes. Many went still as stone, faces blank but eyes watching the cops’ every move from the door to near the tables where Ms. Cooper introduced them, to the open cubicle where Damon had slept his nights.

  “As I said, he didn’t have anything,” Ms. Cooper explained as Jack poked around in the rumple
d bedclothes and largely empty shelving. Exactly three sets of Tshirts, knit pants, socks, and little-boy briefs had been neatly folded. A newish but scuffed pair of tennis shoes sat under the bunk. A plastic cup, scratched and opaque with age, sat on the small table that served as a nightstand, next to a battered red cushion and a bracelet with large plastic beads. “To remove him from that basement, they had to trap him like a wild animal. They couldn’t ask what he wanted to take with him so they grabbed a few things that were by his blankets. He doesn’t show much interest in them, though, so I can’t—couldn’t—tell if they had any sentimental value.”

  Riley looked around. “And this is it?”

  “This is it. When a kid spends ten years locked in a basement, he doesn’t accumulate a lot of stuff.”

  A shout from the room outside distracted them, accompanied by the thumps of thrown items. Then a howl went up that raised the hairs on the back of Jack’s neck. He looked around the wall of the cubicle to see a book come sailing out of another one. A teddy bear, a pillow, and what looked like a dress followed.

  The blond man at the tables with the children stood up, warned the children to stay in their seats, and went to deal with the young ravager. The children at the tables continued to eat, while craning their necks to see the show. Some looked frightened. Some quivered with excitement at the commotion.

  A small girl of perhaps eight burst from the space, managing to throw a good-sized book at the closest table while running full tilt for the door at the same time. The book fell short. The man pursued her. She had dark hair in need of a comb and bare feet, a T-shirt and jersey pants covering her thin frame.

  She reached the door, turned the knob desperately. It didn’t budge, and she gave up in order to face the teacher/therapist. Unlike Damon, she was not remotely mute. “IhateyouI-hateyouIhateyou!” erupted, loud enough to rattle the high windows. She added a few choice curses with words a girl her size should never have heard, much less mastered.

  The teacher held out each arm to block her in, but quick as a sparrow she faked left, darted right, and went under his elbow. She plowed into a play area in the corner of the room, snatching every toy that came to hand to lob at the man. In the midst of this carnage came giggles, as if she were having a wonderful time.