by John Philpin
My plane wasn’t leaving until a little after ten. I decided to call ahead, just to make sure that Sarah Humphrey would give me the time of day.
“I’m going to be in Florida a little later today,” I told her when I had her on the line, “and I’d like to stop by and have a talk with you.”
“You’re a cop?” she asked.
“Right,” I said.
“What’s this about?” she wanted to know. “Your brother.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. I decided to wait it out.
After several seconds, Sarah Humphrey asked, “What’s he done now?”
“Possibly nothing. I’m still trying to determine that. I’d like to stop by and ask you a few questions. Routine background stuff, that’s all.”
“Do I have to do this?”
“No.”
She sighed, then said, “Yes, I do. I’ve been expecting this call for a long time. I’ll be home all day.”
Before leaving for the airport, I left a message on Swartz’s voice mail outlining the Robbins angle. Then I dialed my home number and entered the remote access code for my answering machine. There were five messages: three from Hanson telling me to get down to his office, and one from Robert, saying that when they got through wringing the alcohol out of his liver, he’d like to take me out on a real date. “Somewhere nice, with linen tablecloths and a no-smoking section,” he said.
The final message was from Dr. Street. “I’ve found a little information on that Wolf case,” he said. “Give me a call at your convenience.”
I dialed Street’s office number, but got his service. I left a message saying that I had a plane to catch, but Dr. Street could fax whatever he had directly to Pop.
I saw Sarah Humphrey as soon as I pulled the rental car into the parking slot beside her mobile home. She was shaking the wrinkles out of a blue workshirt and pinning it to the umbrella-style clothesline in her side yard. She heard me walking toward her and turned to face me. There was no smile, just a vague look of resignation in her tired eyes.
At first glance, Sarah was like any other housewife surviving near the poverty line on a steady diet of carbohydrates and fats: bloated, even a bit obese, with the sallow look that can come from any number of evils (booze, cigarettes, stress, AIDS, a variety of cancers). But a closer look hinted at what had been there before, years earlier—softness, prettiness. She had probably been a beautiful child, a tempting teenager.
“I don’t see how I can help you,” she said, squinting against the brightness of the afternoon sun. “My brother and I aren’t close. He sends money every now and then, but doesn’t even enclose a note. He just wraps the cash in a plain piece of paper and sticks it in an envelope. He sent me five hundred dollars just a few weeks ago.”
“From where?” I asked.
She looked puzzled. “I guess he was at home.”
“Which is where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere in Vermont, I think. Like I said, we’re not close.”
Sarah went on to explain that Wolf owned a construction company.
When I asked to see a photo of her brother, Sarah told me that it was a family joke the way Paul was always just out of camera range at the few picture-taking occasions they ever had.
“But I do have one,” she said.
“About the money he sends you—”
“I don’t know why he does that,” she said. Then, in an almost inaudible voice, she added, “Guilt, probably.”
“Guilt?”
Her face reddened. “There were some incidents. When we were kids.”
With a wave of her hand, as if she were shooing flies, she said, “It was nothing, really. Just the usual brother-sister stuff.”
She continued pinning her laundry to the clothesline, not looking at me, working faster now than she had been when I arrived.
“Sarah,” I began, “I need to know about the sexual relationship you and your brother shared.”
She dropped the pair of jeans she had just pulled from the laundry basket and spun around to face me.
“Who told you that? Did he tell you that?”
“I’ve never met your brother,” I said, realizing that probably wasn’t true.
“Well, they’re wrong—whoever said it. There was never any sex, ever. Just—”
I waited for her to continue.
“You know how boys are. They get curious, do things—”
She turned away from me again, but just stood there this time, not moving, not even pretending to care about her laundry. “What are you going to do with this? Are you going to write it down or something?”
“I’m just going to listen,” I told her. “And remember.”
“Let’s go inside,” she said, leading the way. “I need some coffee.”
We sat down at her kitchen table with mugs of muddy brew before us. It looked like it had sat in the pot since dawn.
“My brother never had it easy,” she said. “You have to understand that, because it explains a lot. My father was his stepfather, not his real dad, and he never accepted Paul. Not really.”
“You were kind of stuck in the middle?”
“I always took my parents’ side—you know, trying to defend them. But I know it wasn’t right what they did, the way they treated Paul. My father would tell me how crazy Paul was, how worthless. But I know my father was a drunk, and he could be really cruel when he wanted to be. Like when he would send Paul down to the coal bin.”
“What do you mean?”
“Now that my parents are dead, I probably shouldn’t speak ill of them. I mean, they aren’t here to defend themselves. But Dad really was awful to Paul. He’d make him go down in the cellar, then he’d lock him in the coal bin—sometimes for the whole night.”
“As a punishment?”
She nodded. “I used to stand by the cellar door and listen to him crying. I could hear him talking—in a little child’s voice, like he was someone else. Then he would go silent. Sometimes after my parents went to bed, I’d sneak out there and stand by the door. But there’d be nothing, no sound at all. I think the silence bothered me more than anything.”
“What about your mom?”
“She was afraid of my father. Whenever Dad took a belt to Paul, Mom would go into her room and shut the door—to block out the noise. I never saw her take Paul’s side in anything. Not once.”
She looked down. “I was just a kid,” she said quietly. “What could I do?”
When she looked up again, there were tears in her eyes.
“You know what happened that first Thanksgiving when Paul came home from college?” she said. “When he opened his bedroom door, he saw that all his furniture was missing. My parents had sold it, like he wasn’t a member of the family anymore. The look on his face broke my heart, but Mom—she couldn’t understand why he was so upset. Stuff like that is why I wanted to get away from my parents. I couldn’t wait to get married. As soon as I did, I cut off all ties with them, just like Paul had done—although I did go to the funerals. Paul wouldn’t even do that. After he was in college, there were long periods when he didn’t come home at all. I’d hear that he’d been in town, but he didn’t come out to the house. That hurt a little, you know?”
“It sounds like you loved your brother,” I said.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “But I hated him, too.”
“Why?”
She looked down again, fidgeting with her fingers. After a long silence, she said, “He never forced himself on me or anything. I want to make that clear. I mean, he never touched me, okay?”
I nodded, but she wasn’t looking at me.
“Once I woke up in the middle of the night and saw him standing at the foot of my bed. He was just standing there, in the moonlight, staring at me and playing with himself.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I waited till he was through, then I went back to sleep.”
“What do you mean, ‘through’?”
/> “He ejaculated all over my bed.”
“He ejaculated and walked out, without either of you saying anything?”
She looked me in the eye. “Maybe you had to be there to understand it. I was always a little afraid of Paul, never quite sure what might set him off. It’s an understatement to say that he could be explosive.”
“I know a little about the incident with the knife.”
“That was a surprise. Paul had always ducked or cowered when my father came at him. I thought he was a wimp. Mom used to say that when he was a little kid, he wet the bed because he was too scared to get up in the dark and go to the bathroom. So I was really shocked when Paul pulled that knife. There was blood all over the place. I just froze.”
I could see in her eyes that she was reliving the scene.
“I never would have thought that he’d have the nerve,” she said. “After that, I never saw him act scared again. I think he was as shocked by the attack as I was. He was so insecure. He never knew how to get along with other people. When he was so interested in me, I think it was because he wanted a girlfriend—but he didn’t know how to go about it. He was good looking, too.”
“So when he jerked off on you, you thought it was safest to just keep quiet?”
“That, plus I knew that it was Paul’s nature to watch. It wasn’t unusual for me to catch him staring at me, and it wasn’t unusual for him to handle his privates while he did it. Like when he used to sit outside the shower and watch me wash my hair. That was one of his favorite things for a while.”
She seemed to be suddenly aware of me again. “You sure you aren’t taping this?” she asked.
“No tape,” I told her. “What I really need to know is if any of this activity between you and your brother ever led to violence. On his part, I mean.”
“There was only one time when I thought it might,” she said. “He was spying on me when I was with one of my boyfriends, making out. I didn’t have any clothes on. He chased the boy away, then came toward me with a broken bottle in his hand. I knew what he was thinking.”
When she saw the question in my eyes, she said, “He was gonna use it on me. Rape me with it. He didn’t say so, but I knew it. For some reason, he changed his mind. That night is when I first realized that my brother was capable of terrible things.”
“Do you think he’s capable of murder?”
“Sure,” she said—emotionlessly, as if I had asked her something benign. “Is that what he did? Murder someone?”
“We don’t know.”
“He was in Vietnam for a year. I think he spent the whole time in Saigon, not in combat. I don’t think he killed anyone over there. He wrote to me a few times. He was a clerk or something—did the paperwork on the soldiers who died, the ones that were being shipped back here. I think he had to help with the bodies sometimes, too.”
I wondered if that was where he fine-tuned his knowledge of physiology. He certainly knew his way around a carotid artery. According to the real Chadwick, Wolf had been a premed student.
“Did you know that he was listed as killed in action?” I asked.
“Why would they think he died?”
“It looks as if he wanted them to think that. He was drafted right about the same time he started using the name Paul Pease.”
“I know he thought some man named Pease was his father, but I didn’t know he used that name. I’d believe it, though. One time while he was in the service, I wrote to him, but the post office sent the letter back to me. I never understood that until right now.”
“To get it into his military records, he had to get his name changed legally.”
With a deep sigh, she said, “I guess I’ll never know my brother.”
“Is there anyone that Paul was close to?”
Sarah shook her head. “He was a loner. He loved to read, and he was real smart. I remember one book he must have read a hundred times—it was about mythology. Sometimes he told me the stories, but he changed them around. He said he was making them more interesting. I remember one story that he said was his favorite. It was about a guy who could fly. He never did tell me the real ending for that one.”
“What else did he do with his time?”
“He was fascinated with birds,” she said. “I mean, it wasn’t like a hobby or anything. It was just something else he talked about a lot. Birds could fly way above everything and kind of see a whole place all at once—that was part of it. And he said he liked how secretive they are—living out their lives in the brush, migrating thousands of miles to different places every year.”
Her face brightened, enlivened by a memory. “His big thing was ravens,” she said. “Because they could make all these different sounds, imitate other birds. He loved how smart they are. They know when someone means them harm, but they can be sociable, too. They come right up to people when they know they aren’t in any danger. I could go on a quiz show with all the stuff he told me.”
Sarah looked down again. Her expression changed.
“There was a sad part, too. There was always a sad part with Paul. The birds they carried in cages into the coal mines to test for poisonous gases—if the birds lived, it was okay for the miners to go in. Paul hated that. He said he used to think about those birds late at night when he was locked in the coal bin—said he felt like Dad had sent him down there to see if there were any poisonous gases.”
The cloud seemed to pass and Sarah brightened again.
“He always had to do things the same way. I thought it was funny, but he didn’t like it when I joked about it. If he had a ten-page paper to write for class, he’d open his notebook and number the pages one to ten before he even started writing. I’d say, ‘Paul, what if you can think of only nine pages to write?’ He’d get all upset. Or when he had to do the dishes—he’d spend four or five minutes just lining them all up beside the sink before he started. Then he always did the glasses first, then the cups, then the saucers, then the dinner plates—or something like that.”
Sarah Humphrey was lost in her thoughts, her memories. I reminded her that I wanted to see the picture of Paul that she had mentioned to me earlier.
She pulled a handful of loose snapshots out of a cabinet drawer and sorted through them until she found the right one.
It was a black-and-white photo of a young boy, snapped from behind, with his face turned away from the camera. He was outdoors, kneeling down in front of what looked like a miniature town.
“Paul built that, and he also tore it down—all those buildings that he spent so much time working on. He smashed the whole thing the same day he pulled the knife on my father. It was like he was trying to hurt himself.”
She glanced away for a moment.
“I remember what he did to the animals,” Sarah said. “It was so sick.”
I prompted her. “What animals? What do you mean?”
“All the boys hunted. They’d put on their hunting clothes and their boots sometime in October and I swear they lived in them until after Thanksgiving. At least it smelled that way in school. Paul never owned a rifle. My father would never have let him have one. There wasn’t any money anyway. But Paul hunted. He said all he needed were his hands, a knife, and a length of twine.”
Sarah seemed to slip inside herself with her memories. She was trembling.
“I went up to his place on the hill one time. I wasn’t very old. I was out playing, and I was curious. I knew that he spent most of his time up there. There was a path that led farther up the hill, beyond the clearing by the three old apple trees. So I followed it, going deeper and deeper into the woods. That’s when I saw them. Red squirrels, chipmunks, a rabbit, some woodchucks—they were strung up with twine, hanging from the pine trees. They hadn’t been shot or cut or anything. They were alive when he did that to them.”
Tears rolled down Sarah’s face, and I had to fight my own reaction. Twine in a secluded forest. Yellow nylon rope in my closet. Animals swinging in the breeze. Sheila swaying when I touche
d her.
“I don’t know why I kept going, but I did,” Sarah said, “and I saw him. He was down in a ravine, crouching over something. At first I couldn’t see. He was tearing at it with his knife. Maybe a twig snapped—I don’t know—but he turned around. The knife and his hands were soaked with the blood of a small deer. At first I thought that he had blackened his face. The kids sometimes did that. But it wasn’t face paint. It was more blood. It was even in his hair. He looked like a savage, like something primitive. When he stood, I could see that he was naked, and the blood was smeared all over his body. He didn’t see me. I backed away and went down to the house. When Paul came in for supper, he was clean. His clothes were clean. He was my brother Paul again, not whoever he was up there on that hill.”
She turned and looked at me. “Is that what he did? To people?”
I didn’t respond.
She shook her head, shuddering. “I remember something else,” she said. “That night on the mountain when I was naked and I thought he was going to do something? He cut himself on that broken bottle—kept digging at himself with it. It was as if he didn’t even know that he was doing it.”
Sarah’s eyes met mine. “It was as if he couldn’t feel any pain. His eyes were blank, like empty holes.”
I handed the photograph back to her.
“Mom snapped that one,” Sarah told me. “It’s ironic, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Even then, Paul was a builder. But when he created that little city out of scraps, none of us had any idea what he would become.”
BOOK THREE
Pop
I don’t do well with people. Never have.
As I crossed from Massachusetts into Vermont on Interstate 91, I wondered if there were still more cows than people in the Green Mountain State. Probably not. Politicians were killing farms to make room for malls and parking lots. Last I heard, Vermont, with its half million people, was the last holdout against Wal-Mart in the lower forty-eight—if elected representatives with IQs about equal to their belt size hadn’t given it up.