The Silent Gift

by Michael Jr. Landon

  Patrick pulled out a chair, and Mary lowered herself into it, carefully crossing her hands palms up in her lap. “Can you please tell me what this is about?” she asked, leaning forward slightly. “Is it about Jack? About my son? Did . . . did Jerry decide not to keep him?”

  “That’s right, sweetheart,” Charles heard Jerry grumble. “Blame me right away.”

  “Now that you’ve brought him up—let’s start with Jerry,” Nevins said smoothly. “Why wouldn’t Jack’s father want to keep him?”

  Mary shook her head. Tears were pooling in her eyes. “I keep telling everybody that Jerry doesn’t want Jack. He’s never wanted Jack. He was . . . cruel. To me, to my son. He doesn’t love Jack, and he’s got him now only to punish me. . . .”

  Charles angled his perspective so he could see Jerry in the periphery of his vision as he continued to watch Mary. He saw Jerry’s jaw tighten. “She’s a liar. He’s my kid, and none of her lies change that one speck!”

  “Define cruel,” Nevins was saying.

  Charles saw Mary catch her lower lip in her teeth.

  “You know, mean. Nasty and . . . and bad tempered, scary,” she said. Then tears spilled from her eyes. “Is Jack . . . okay?”

  Jerry muttered again from his vantage point behind the glass. “No, he’s not okay. You’ve got him gallivanting off with an old broad who coulda killed me with that poker!”

  Charles ignored Jerry and sipped his coffee, watching as Nevins pulled some notes from his briefcase. He flipped up a piece of paper and scanned it—likely purposely ignoring her and her question. Charles knew he had his next question at the ready and was simply extending her anxiety.

  Patrick now cleared his throat. “Nevins?”

  The man cut his eyes from the paper back to Mary. He put the sheet down and slipped his hands into his pockets. “How well do you know Agnes Meriwether?”

  Charles saw Mary frown. “Why are you—what do you mean?”

  “I’m asking the questions,” Nevins said. “How well do you know her?”

  “We live with her,” Mary said. “Jack and I do.”

  “In her house on Moreland Street?”

  Mary nodded slowly. “She took us in when . . . when we didn’t have any place else to go.” Her voice was barely audible.

  “You could’ve come home!” Jerry spat out with his mouth just inches from the glass. “You shouldn’t have run out. . . .”

  “Quiet,” Charles hissed.

  “Okay, let’s start again. How did you happen to meet Agnes?” Nevins continued.

  “We met in Chicago at the bus station,” Mary said. “There was a storm, and the buses weren’t going to run. She offered us a place to stay that night.”

  “So you were trying to leave town?” Nevins asked.

  “You don’t have to answer that, Mary,” O’Sullivan cut in. “It’s not pertinent right now.”

  “Fine. We’ll leave that for the trial,” Nevins responded with a thin smile. “Let’s get back to Agnes. How long ago did you meet her?”

  “I don’t understand why you need to know—”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Several months ago.”

  “Did you ever meet any of her relatives or close friends?”

  “Why? I don’t understand—”

  Charles could hear Nevins expel a loud, irritated breath. “This’ll go much quicker if you’ll stop answering my questions with a question and tell me what I want to know.”

  “She’s always been irritating like that,” Jerry muttered.

  “I never met any of her friends . . . or family,” Mary said.

  “Do you know what Mrs. Meriwether’s financial situation is?” Nevins asked.

  “No, I don’t.” Charles could hear the impatience in her voice. “What about my son?” “What about him?”

  “I want to know if he’s all right, if . . .” She paused.

  Charles saw Nevins and O’Sullivan exchange a glance—and he could see that Mary had noticed too.

  “What is it? What’s going on? Is Agnes okay?” The concern in her voice rose with every word.

  “He’s really gettin’ to her,” Officer Roark said. Charles had forgotten the cop was still in the room.

  Nevins rubbed a hand over his jaw before leaning on the table toward her. “I don’t know, Mary. She’s missing.”

  Mary looked from Nevins to Patrick—and back again. She shook her head. “Missing? Missing from where?”

  “Do you trust Agnes with your son?” Nevins asked.

  “Of course. She loves him.”

  “I hope you’re right—and I hope she treats Jack better than she treated your husband,” Nevins said.

  Mary sat up straight and looked at Patrick. “What . . . what does he mean?”

  It was Nevins who answered. “I mean that Jerry was knocked unconscious when he went to your house to pick up some of Jack’s things. He and Agnes had a dispute, and she hit him with an iron poker. When he came to, they both were gone.”

  “Gone?”

  Charles could barely hear her. All the color had drained from her face, and she raised a trembling hand to her mouth.

  “He’s missing,” Nevins said abruptly. “And so is Agnes Meriwether. We have every reason to believe Agnes took the boy and left town.”

  Charles didn’t realize he was leaning so close to the glass he too was fogging it with his breath. He watched the emotions playing across Mary’s face. She pressed her lips with her fingers, then wiped her eyes.

  “He’s not with Jerry anymore?” she finally asked.

  “You know darn good and well he isn’t,” Jerry growled.

  Nevins said, “No. Jerry doesn’t know where Jack is—other than he believes him to be with Agnes.”

  Mary shuddered as more tears rolled down her cheeks. “He’s with Agnes. He’s okay. . . .”

  “Why would she take the boy, Mary? Do you have any idea about that?”

  Mary sniffed, shook her head. “No.”

  “Maybe—just maybe—this really turns out to be good news for you, Mary. How about that?” Nevins continued.

  “The only thing I care about is Jack,” Mary said. “I want him safe—with someone who’ll take good care of him until I can be with him again.”

  “So you’re telling me you had no knowledge of Agnes’s plan—and you have no knowledge of where they might be?”

  Mary shook her head.

  If she’s acting, she’s good. Charles watched her search for composure— wiping a red, scarred hand quickly over her cheek to brush away new tears.

  “The day you met Agnes—at the bus station, you say—where was she going? To a friend’s or to some relatives, maybe?”

  “I . . . don’t know . . .” Mary shook her head.

  “Think about it,” Nevins pressed. “She must have said, ‘I’m on my way to . . . ’?”

  Mary didn’t hesitate and shook her head again. “No—she didn’t say anything like that. I have no idea where she was planning to go.”

  “And if you think real hard, you can’t come up with where Agnes might have run off to?”

  “No.”

  “Liar, liar, liar,” Jerry was chanting under his breath, then, “Make her talk!”

  Charles watched Mary tilt her chin up and look Nevins in the eye, but he could also see her trembling as Nevins leaned toward her.

  “If you are withholding information and are complicit in this, we’ll bring another kidnapping charge against you, Mary,” Nevins said firmly. “If you’ve got something to tell me, now would be the time.”

  “She said she doesn’t know anything,” Patrick insisted. Mary held her hands together in the folds of her dress and looked past Nevins to some point on the wall.

  Charles could tell she was done talking, but there was something different about her expression than when she’d first walked into the room. Something had changed.

  Chapter Thirty

  Rock River, Wisconsin

  A H
EAVY WOODEN DOOR OVERGROWN with lichen slowly closed, causing it to blend into the eight-foot hedge that grew around it. To the casual passerby, the door would be nearly undetectable, but to those employed by the Rock River Poorhouse it provided passage from the sane world to the insane—and back again. The covered labyrinth inside didn’t discriminate between day and night—in that sense it was timeless. But in every other way the silent tunnel magnified the loneliness, exacerbated the faint of heart, and mocked those with the fortitude to enter at all.

  Felix Stanhope wasn’t thinking of fortitude as he walked down the twelve steps and made his way along the concrete tunnel. He was planning his next turn in the maze—watching for the now-familiar graffiti scrawled across the wall: Despair breeds here— his landmark to veer left in another thirty steps. He moved through the catacomb, the only speck of movement or color in what seemed like a grainy photograph faded to gray with time.

  At six foot five, Felix had to duck when he came to one of the dimly lit bulbs hanging every fifty feet or so from the ceiling. A homely man by all accounts, Felix was not troubled at the sparse light down below the buildings of the Rock River Poorhouse. He preferred it to the harsh light of day, where his craggy complexion and nearly bald head drew catcalls and insults from the inmates—the ones who loosely called the facility home. Those who could form a sentence at all.

  Felix knew his shift had officially started when he entered the adolescent ward and the stale smell of vomit assaulted him. He pushed his wheeled metal bucket into the large room, windows barred, and automatically leaned to the left when a flat tray sailed right at him. It crashed into the wall behind him and clattered to the floor. He didn’t have to look for the small perpetrator—she stood in the center of the room, performing a little jig in her green hospital-issue pajamas— which she wore backward.

  “That was me! All me! Claps and whistles for me!” Eleven-year-old Louise grinned wickedly at Felix. “I’ll getcha next time.”

  “You can’t hit the broadside of a barn, Louise,” Felix said mildly as he scanned the room. Fourteen unmade beds, two large tables, someone’s breakfast overturned under a window. Children ranging from eight to sixteen were in various stages of dress, whether pajamas or day uniform consisting of gray pants and shirt—actually the day and night uniforms not all that different except for the color. An undercurrent of moaning, crying, and talking blended together in a cacophony that Felix had come to think of as normal. The staffers referred to the adolescent ward as the kids’ zoo—which meant he was the zoo’s janitor.

  He looked at the last bed on the ward—the one under the biggest window—where a dark-haired boy sat, arms wrapped around knees drawn to his chest, eyes staring up at the blue sky beyond the flat bars. Felix couldn’t help but be impressed. The new kid was in the same position he’d been in when Felix’s shift had ended the day before.

  “It’s medication time.” The steely voice of attendant Geoffrey filled the room. The big man entered with a tray full of small paper cups holding various pills. He breezed right past Felix as if he weren’t there.

  “Line up,” Geoffrey called over the racket as he put his tray on one of the tables. A few of the kids did as he asked—but most did not. Felix looked over at the boy at the window. He didn’t move—didn’t so much as turn his head at the instruction from the attendant.

  While Geoffrey tackled the job of getting the medication into, first, the cooperative, then the uncooperative kids, Felix dipped his cotton mop into the bucket of water, pulled it as dry as possible through the attached roller, and painted figure eights on the yellow linoleum. His mopping pattern would eventually render the floor clean for another twenty-four hours—or twenty-four seconds, depending on when the next accident occurred.

  “You’re a mean kinda ugly, Felix,” Louise taunted from the vicinity of his kneecaps. He looked down to see her scooting backward over the damp floor on her rear end.

  “Get up, Louise,” he said.

  “I’m drying the floor with my butt,” she announced, continuing her progress over the floor, “and you’re welcome. Ugly people don’t usually get any help—so you should be happy. Not happy that you’re ugly. Happy that I’m helping.”

  “Did you get your pills yet from Geoffrey?”

  She kept scooting. “He gave ’em to the other me.”

  Felix turned to see Laura, the mirror image of Louise, dutifully swallowing some pills while Geoffrey watched her.

  “It’s her today, not me. Tomorrow it’ll be me, not her,” Louise chanted as she braced her bare heel on the floor and spun herself around to head the other way. She scooted past a fourteen-year-old boy who sat on the edge of his bed, repeating the same mantra over and over: “I don’t belong here. I don’t—”

  “Yeah you do, Johnny,” Louise corrected loudly. “You’re nuts— wacko—crazier ’n a loon.”

  Louise jumped to her feet and grabbed Felix’s mop. He tried to hold on to it, but Louise was quicker and threw the dripping mop between her legs. Straddling the handle, she rode it over to Laura, and her twin climbed on behind her.

  “I don’t belong here,” Johnny continued in a monotone.

  Louise and Laura slid past Johnny on the mop, leaving water streaking on the floor behind them.

  “Yupper, you do,” Louise chortled. “You do, you do, you do!”

  “You surely do do do!” Laura joined in. And then Louise let out a scream, loud and long and at the top of her lungs.

  Never can get used to that. . . . Felix felt his heart rate returning to normal. He started after the twins. They were making a circuit of the room on the horse mop.

  “I don’t belong here,” Johnny said, hands folded together in his lap.

  “So I’ve heard,” Felix said, lunging for the mop as the girls came within reach. He snagged the handle, and the girls abruptly stopped, climbed off, and headed toward the bed in the corner.

  “I think that boy should be my new husband,” Louise said.

  Felix watched Louise and Laura link arms as they approached the boy, still hugging his knees and staring at the sky. “My old husband is dead. Deader than dead dead dead.”

  The two climbed onto the bed and took up spaces on either side of him. He remained absolutely still—as if completely unaware of their presence. Louise put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him toward Laura. He swayed away, and Laura mirrored her sister’s movement and pushed him back.

  Felix dipped his mop into the bucket and started to figure-eight his way toward that corner of the room.

  “I’m picking you to love me best,” Louise said loudly into the boy’s ear. “I’m pretty, not ugly, so it’s all right if you love me best.”

  The rule in the zoo was that Felix wasn’t to interfere with the inmates—he had neither the experience nor the desire to get in the middle of the frequent altercations. But for some reason, he couldn’t take watching the sisters push the boy back and forth.

  “Leave ’im alone!” Felix grabbed Louise under the armpits. She issued another loud scream, followed by her sister. The boy didn’t even flinch.

  “Stop it this instant!” The woman’s voice did little to end the screams from the twins. But when they looked toward the door and saw that the voice had reinforcements, they broke off the awful noise at the exact same moment.

  Felix hustled back to his mop, ducking his head but watching as Nurse Bess, with a handful of charts in her arms, walked into the ward with Dr. Horace Tanner at her side. The twins seemed to shrink into themselves, once more linking arms.

  “Good morning, Johnny,” Dr. Tanner said in a calm, soothing tone. “How are you today?”

  Felix had once attempted approaching a wounded deer in the woods, something he was always reminded of when Dr. Tanner pasted on his smile and so gently approached his ward charges. But like the wounded deer, they usually ran. Johnny was no exception as he scrambled back into his bed, pulling the covers up and over his head. His muffled voice came from underneath the blanket.

>   “I don’t belong here. . . .”

  If Dr. Tanner ever took offense at the rebukes he generally received, Felix had never seen it.

  “Who do we have here?” Dr. Tanner asked Bess, standing at his side like a general’s aide.

  She flipped open one of the charts in her hand. “Patient number four-twenty-four—we found a name tag sewn onto his shirt. It says he’s Jack.”

  Dr. Tanner reached for Jack’s shoulder and turned the boy to face him.

  “Diagnosis?”

  Nurse Bess scanned the chart. “A quick evaluation yesterday revealed profound deafness. And the boy’s apparently also mute.”

  “Any family?”

  Felix watched the nurse shake her head. “An anonymous party left him on the doorstep. No note—no nothing.”

  Dr. Tanner studied Jack for a few more seconds, then abruptly moved away toward the center of the room.

  The kids all watched with wary eyes. Felix knew the drill—knew that Dr. Tanner wasn’t leaving the room without one of them. He just didn’t know which one—none of them did, except the doctor.

  “And how might Anastasia be today?” Dr. Tanner asked, looking in the direction of a girl with bandaged hands and feet. She kept her eyes on the rubber ball on the floor. Dr. Tanner stepped closer.

  “I’d like you to come with me, Anastasia. Can you do that, please?”

  She shook her head. Dr. Tanner moved even closer as Nurse Bess suddenly appeared by his side with a wheelchair.

  “Come now, Anastasia. Be a good girl. You know what good girls get, don’t you?”

  She looked up—directly at the big white pocket on the doctor’s lab coat. Felix could see a half-moon of red above the top. Dr. Tanner reached in and withdrew the prize—a huge red-striped lollipop on a stick.

  “Good girls get the lolly—don’t they?”

  Anastasia nodded slowly. He held the lollipop out toward her as Nurse Bess pushed the chair in close. She put a hand under Anastasia’s elbow and helped the girl up.

  “Into the chair with you and off for a ride,” Dr. Tanner said in his hypnotically gentle voice. “And, of course—the lolly is yours.”

  Anastasia was guided into the wheelchair and held out a tentative hand for the sucker, which Dr. Tanner handed over with a smile.