by Caleb Carr
{i.}
She had been a voracious reader and an avid student from as far back as she could remember, she said, and this, combined with having a pair of verbally abusive parents—the kind that had made Lucas such a smart-ass, and that will either silence children or make them learn linguistic sparring as a means of defense and psychological survival—had apparently been responsible for her possessing, like her brother, such sharp conversational skills. But because of her also being a protective older sibling, she had what Lucas did not: that eerie sense of awareness, of understanding not only language but the motives of the people who spoke it.
She had also been heavy, in early adolescence; and by the time she was thirteen, her heaviness had joined her bookishness to make Ambyr the object of great derision. Such kids do not tend to become athletes, ordinarily, but Ambyr had been unable to withstand the pressure, and used her sprouting height in tandem with her weight to become an effective center for the girls’ JV basketball team. In an earlier era, the mockery might have stopped there, for Burgoyne County had once been full of heavy, even obese adolescent girls. But Ambyr had had the terrible misfortune of growing up in the age of the Internet. And under the influence of this “leveling” technology, American girls in villages far removed from anything that could reasonably be called a cosmopolitan atmosphere had nonetheless begun to model their bodies on what they saw, not only in the occasional magazine or television show, but on the nearly constant input that they received on their computers and phones, both at home and at school.
“I’m not sure any guy can ever really understand the difference,” Ambyr said to me, as we made our way around the rough border of the practice field, both of our canes seeking out safe spots in the close-clipped lawn of the soccer pitch.
“No,” I answered quietly. “I’m not sure any of us can.”
“I mean, the Internet, it’s everywhere,” she went on, trying to maintain her good-humored detachment, but not quite able to do so; not on this subject. “We were all supposed to have our learning rates sped up by having computers in our classrooms, but half the time the kids were just online. And even when they tried to take access away a few times, the phones were there. So, one way or the other, we always had access. And the bad stuff got to be pretty constant: we didn’t even need the God damned stuff in print and on TV—computers at home, computers at school, phones all over…We just got lost in it all. Some girls were figuring out ways to get skinnier and hotter, and some girls were giving up and just getting heavier and vanishing into fantasy lands where they could become some made-up creature or create a superhot avatar—and they took endless shit for that, on top of being overweight, and took it on the damned Web, because half the hot girls and boys started blogging and chatting about looks, weight, sex, who was in and who was—out…” She paused. “Sorry, Doctor. I know my language isn’t exactly polite, sometimes.”
“Then you’d be right at home among our merry band,” I said, already prepared to include her, if only informally, in the group. Indeed, I was instinctively certain that her participation would prove, in one way or another, vital to the solution of the case; for even more than Lucas, she had her hand on the pulse of Surrender. That—and more…
Ambyr quickly turned the violet eyes—partially shaded, as ever, behind a slight opacity—up and toward my own gaze. “Really?” she said, with an alluring sort of anxiousness that was surprising, to say nothing of arresting. “I was hoping you were going to say something like that. I mean, I don’t want you to be mad at Lucas, but—you know how excited he’s been, to be part of what you’re doing, and he and Derek and I have always been really close, so it’s been hard for him to keep all of it to himself. And I have to tell you, if what you’re doing really will help make sure that those dead kids get justice, then I’ll do whatever I can to help, too. If you’ll let me, I mean.”
“Well,” I answered after taking a moment with it, “I’ll talk it over with Mike, and we’ll tell you if and how you might fit in. Which I believe you will.”
“Good,” she answered happily. “Although I really could understand, with what happened in Fraser, and to Dr. Chang and all—not to mention with how things work, or don’t work, in this town and this county—why you wouldn’t be too anxious to include anybody else in on what you’re doing. But—well, I don’t guess it would do any good for me to tell you that you can trust me not to reveal anything. See”—and again the eyes seemed to meet mine, while her voice became scarcely more than a breathy whisper—“I’ve learned an awful lot about the damage that people can do with just careless talk. So I know. Oh, I know…”
“Indeed?” I answered. “Well, suppose you start by telling me about all those big, careless mouths around here. If you’re okay with it.”
“Sure. Just so long as you believe that I really do understand what you’re trying to do—I mean, the importance of it. You’re the only hope those kids have got for justice, you know that, right? Jesus Christ, so many people have gotten away with murder in this county—people I’ve even known—because of lost evidence, evidence that wasn’t collected the right way, juries that didn’t believe eyewitnesses because the prosecutors didn’t have the kind of scientific evidence that they see on CSI and those shows…unbelievable.”
“It’s not, Ambyr,” I answered. “There have been so many cases where juries have done exactly the same thing, all over the country…It’s outrageous, but not shocking.”
“Hmm,” she noised, taking in that fact. “Can you really get to a point where you’re not shocked by stuff like that? I wonder. Of course—” And then she smiled in that very coy way, again halting our progress to turn up to me. “If you’re the famous Sorcerer of Death, maybe you can.”
Sighing and blushing, I said softly, “I am really going to skewer that brother of yours…”
That made her laugh quietly, and place her cane hand on mine. “Oh, no, don’t, please, Trajan—I love that story, I love the whole idea of it—and Lucas is really so impressed by it, you’d crush him if you said anything. And who can blame him? There’s a lot of—romance in it.”
“Romance?” I scoffed lightly. “That’s about the last thing you’d expect to hear, in connection with the New York tabloids.”
“Maybe. But it’s true.” She turned so that we could continue on our way around the field. “Anyway,” she said, again using the word in just the manner that Lucas did, “there’s just been too many times that people have gotten away with murder in Burgoyne County, all because nobody really gives a shit what happens in towns like Surrender. And I don’t want to see that happen with this case. It’s so important that it doesn’t; so if there’s any chance that you guys can finally shine some kind of a light on this throwaway-children business—” Her grip on my arm became tighter. “I don’t know if you can really understand how important that would be. What you’d be doing for so many kids who’ve had to live through it. See, I’ve been looking after Derek and Lucas for a long time, now, really since way before our parents disappeared, and I think about what would’ve happened to them if I hadn’t been here—or if I suddenly wasn’t around. Who knows but that they wouldn’t have gone in exactly the same direction as Shelby and the others did. So I get mad, and scared, too, and just plain sad—sad for those kids. So this time, I want the people who are responsible to get caught. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” I said, my conviction that she was necessary to keep close to our effort again drifting, as it so often would, dangerously close to something else. “That’s quite a bit. I mean, from what I understand, taking care of Lucas and Derek wasn’t your idea.”
She shook her head hard. “No, it was not. Not that I don’t love them both, pains in the ass that they are. No, if it had been up to me…But it wasn’t. Things were just the way they were.”
The use of the past tense, I remember thinking; has she simply grown used to the burden, or…“Yes,” I answered, as I gave Marcianna—who had made the walk quietly, thus far, but w
as now checking the playing field for woodchuck and mole holes—a little more lead. “But suppose you tell me how your situation came to be. It might help, you know.”
She laughed again, without the sad edge, this time. “Are you offering to be my shrink, Trajan?”
“No,” I chuckled. “But, even though I’ve gotten a rough idea from Lucas about what happened with your parents, it would help to know more about the—mechanics of one throwaway case. Also, I don’t want you to think that Lucas has talked about the actual cause of your illness—about that, your brother is very careful.”
That brought an affectionate smile to Ambyr’s face, as she looked to the ground: Out of habit? I wondered. “Yeah, even my brother knows where to draw the line, I guess. And it’s not a really new or interesting story. People just think it is, because I went blind.” She took a deep, ambiguous breath, then glanced about the soccer pitch as if she could still see it all. “Yeah, when I went blind, look out…All these people suddenly thought I was so interesting, so perceptive about life. But the whole thing really isn’t that fascinating—people just need to believe it is, because of what happened. Isn’t there a name for that, in your part of the world?”
“It has a lot of names, in psychology and philosophy,” I answered. “But basically, yes, it’s the principle that says people need to believe that momentous events have momentous causes. It’s a logical fallacy, one of the very biggest.”
“That’s all I’m saying,” Ambyr concluded, very satisfied. “But you see for yourself if I’m wrong: you want to know what happened, and I’ll tell you—and you can decide if it was really such a strange or unique story. Deal?”
I murmured some vague sort of assent, and she began; and before long, as she proceeded to tick off the bare facts of her tragedy in a very captivating if somewhat weary way, I had to admit that she was right: it wasn’t a terribly new story, although it was indeed awful in its degree and consequences. The torment of her schoolmates, which had been merely heartbreaking in junior high school, had become unendurable in senior high. It wasn’t hard to see why: as she had already intimated, the drastically increased array of weapons—cell phones, instant messaging, e-mail, YouTube, Photoshop, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other marvelous weapons that information technology has put at the disposal of the young and vicious—had so revolutionized the kind of cruel jokes that were once merely verbal and slow-spreading that they could now be given vivid form, phrasing, and even animation, in a matter of minutes or hours. In my own youth, I had discovered that not even the magic word cancer could stop the cruelty of many such excuses for children; what they could and would have done to my spirit had they possessed such diabolical tools, I cannot say.
But for Ambyr, the solution had been horribly simple: she had stopped eating. Or, on those rare occasions when she could not get out of stuffing food down her throat, she had become expert at immediately excusing herself, finding the nearest bathroom, and vomiting it all back up. The weight that had been, in her young mind, the source of all her unhappiness began to come quickly off, given this combined program of anorexia and bulimia; but before she had a chance to enjoy her different appearance, she discovered that what had seemed a reasonable reaction to her lifelong predicament was in fact a compulsion—or, to use an applicable term that I have already employed in other contexts, she found that she had developed a cognitive bias that no longer allowed her to see her image in a mirror in anything like accurate terms. She could never be thin enough; and she simply could not stop starving herself.
It had been Lucas who had first realized what was happening, and who was the first to tell both the school nurse and his parents that Ambyr was sick; but not even her collapse on the floor of the school gymnasium one day had made them believe him. The physical education instructor, Mr. Holloway—whose name I vividly recalled because of his willingness to sexually exploit fourteen-year-old Shelby Capamagio—had of course attributed the collapse to overexertion. And this kind of stupidity had also meant that, after she awoke from that first episode, neither Holloway nor any of the crack health team at Morgan Central had realized that if the girl fainted in like manner a second time she might never wake up.
As, in the event, she very nearly had not. Her blood sugar had crashed through the floor as she sweated listlessly through a subsequent basketball practice, experiencing typical forms of auditory and visual hallucinations that had made her teammates, along with Mr. Holloway, believe that she might be possessed; and she had quickly entered a nondiabetic hypoglycemic coma that the doctors at Fraser’s small medical center had been almost powerless to counteract. Yet Ambyr had clung to life with what she had been able to identify, even in her deep state of unconsciousness, as determination: determination, above all, not to allow the younger brother who came to see her on every one of the five days that her coma lasted (and one can only imagine the contrivances through which Lucas had managed that feat), and whose was the only voice to which her body showed any sort of even minimal response during that time, to be abandoned to their parents’ and their school’s tender mercies. When she finally did awake, it was to the crushing news that she had lost her sight (her optic neurotransmitters had apparently been degraded past recovery, an infrequent but very established reaction to anorexic collapse); and once again Lucas had been the only person who had seemed able to offer her any consolation, during those first few weeks, when things like learning to walk with a cane and read Braille had become unavoidable.
The conclusion of Ambyr’s tale saw her brought home to begin life anew with a private tutor, paid for, as were all her subsequent special needs, by the state, which doubtless thought itself lucky to get off without a lawsuit, being as Ambyr had collapsed in a public school that had had ample reason to think that she might be in real danger. But the epilogue to her saga was perhaps the most horrifying part: for it was the story of just how the Kurtz and the Franco parents had not only made their escape to sunnier climes, but had managed to ensure that Ambyr assumed complete legal responsibility for everything they left behind: the house, the boys, and all that went with them.
“They were clever,” Ambyr told me, in a voice that indicated that she’d had time to absorb the experience pretty fully and gain some, if not complete, perspective. “They managed to keep me out of all the court proceedings, by getting their shitbag lawyer to plead that it was too soon after my ‘ordeal’ for me to be there—and when the judge asked if someone who’d been through an ordeal like that really wanted to assume legal responsibility for two boys, the lawyer told him that it was just a financial thing; just a way for my folks to avoid being any more liable than they already were for the debts they’d run up, so they could be sure to be able to take care of me. But what sealed it was that they all told the judge that I was perfectly happy to go along with the whole thing, and then gave him a signed affidavit of mine that said so—the only problem being that, at the time when I signed it, I thought I was finishing an application for a program for the visually impaired over at the Disability Center in Fraser.”
“Yes, I know the place,” I said. “And I have to say, that was particularly cruel of them—it would have been a good place for you to begin to adjust.”
“It has been,” Ambyr said. “After our folks disappeared, my cousin Caitlin and her dad kind of strong-armed the state into getting me in, on a non-boarding basis, and even into paying for a driver to take me there and back every day. But it was the stipend that really helped—they offered a pretty fair amount of money per month for me to use to take care of the boys, and at that point, Caitlin, her dad—that’s my uncle Bass—and me just said the hell with it. Best to get on with the rest of life, whatever it’s going to be.”
I studied her apparently placid countenance carefully. “That’s a pretty philosophical attitude to take, for someone in your position, and at your age.”
“I guess,” she answered evenly. “But I’d been taking care of the boys, even when our folks were around, for so long that it
all seemed to fall into place pretty naturally, once we knew we wouldn’t have to worry about money too much. Though you paying Lucas to make up for the farm work he usually does this time of the year is really going to help, and I wanted to thank you for that, Trajan.”
“It’s—only fair,” I said, suddenly and strangely self-conscious. “I only wish I could offer more. But I fear that we are teachers, now, not paid police or legal consultants—”
“Hey, don’t sell it short,” Ambyr rushed in to say. “It’s a huge help. And the state people have been really good about everything, about making sure we get what we’re supposed to get on time. And then there’s Caitlin, and Bass, and even some family people that I never knew about—they’ve helped out a lot. Yeah, everybody’s been really nice to the blind girl…” Her voice trailed off for a moment, until she seemed to shake herself, after which she turned her head up toward mine and smiled in a mischievous way. “At least nobody’s made any nasty cracks about me making ends meet by working in something like porn. That is, nobody had mentioned it—before…”
I stopped dead in my tracks, causing Marcianna to glance my way. “Aw, Jesus,” I said. “They didn’t tell you that part of the story.”
“Of course!” Ambyr answered. “They were under orders to tell me every part of the story, once they got back.”
It was a striking statement. “Hang on,” I said. “ ‘Once they got back’?” My forward steps resumed, but more slowly. “You said, ‘They were under orders to tell me every part of the story, once they got back.’ ”
She actually seemed pleased by this. “Yep. I did.”
“But that means—that means that you knew they were coming up the hollow…”