“How could anyone do that, though?”
Zachary sucked on his straw, trying to focus on the cold, sweet, thick milkshake. If he could keep his focus on his senses and physical surroundings, he didn’t need to go back into the past. Isolation cells at Bonnie Best when he ‘acted up.’ Being locked in a closet for ‘cognitive time’ when he’d broken rules or done something to irritate his supervisors at one of his group homes. He hadn’t been forced to live in an unfinished basement, but he’d had enough experiences with isolation to empathize with Burton just a little too much.
He didn’t offer Burton another explanation for why his biological family had treated him like that. It was inconceivable to most people. But some adults needed power. They needed absolute power over those who were under their control.
A child who wet his pants or wouldn’t eat his peas simply couldn’t be tolerated. Such defiance was a slap in the face and had to be crushed in the strongest possible way. They had to show who was boss and make sure that the child had no way to fight back.
No way to express any more defiance or independence.
28
What they did was unforgivable,” Zachary said simply. “All that the state could do was to put them in prison. But that’s not justice. That doesn’t take away what happened to you or make you feel any better.”
Burton shook his head in agreement.
“Do you remember Allen?” Zachary prompted after a period of silent contemplation.
Burton raised his eyes and looked at Zachary in confusion. “I lived down there with him? You’re sure?”
“Someone wrote that name behind the furnace. Maybe you did. Maybe he did.” Zachary didn’t offer anything else, not wanting to plant any thoughts or false memories. Those things were indisputable facts.
“Maybe I wrote it,” Burton said. “Maybe… Allen was an imaginary friend. Someone I made up to keep me company.”
Zachary nodded. “Maybe you did.”
Burton put his hand over his chest like it hurt. He shook his head. His eyes glistened with tears. Zachary waited. He hoped that Burton wasn’t about to have a heart attack. That would put a definite crimp in the investigation. Burton was probably just feeling anxiety, like Zachary did when confronted with a truth he didn’t want to face or a change that seemed insurmountable.
“Take deep breaths,” he advised. “Nice and slow. Make sure you’re breathing the air all the way out.”
Burton’s hand closed into a fist. The lines of his face hardened. Putting on a mask and trying not to let his emotion show.
“It’s okay,” Zachary assured him. “This is hard. Do you want to take a break?”
Burton looked around the kitchen and into the living room. “To do what?” he demanded. “There isn’t exactly anything to do around here.”
“You could stand up and walk around. Look out the window. Check your email. Just get grounded again.”
Burton got up and left the table, left the rest of his food there and went to the big window in the living room. He looked down at the parking lot below. Zachary took out his phone and checked his mail, not wanting Burton to feel like he was under scrutiny. He clicked through a few of his emails. There wasn’t a lot that he could respond to on his phone. The ones that weren’t junk required some research or attachments. There was one from Lorne Peterson, his old foster father, and he made a mental note that he needed to call him. It had been too long since their last visit. Zachary needed to be more diligent about keeping up with him. He had little enough family; he needed to keep them close, let them know that they were appreciated. That Zachary didn’t just reach out to them when he needed something.
“I didn’t make him up,” Burton said from the living room, not turning around, still staring out the window.
“Do you remember…?”
“Allen,” Burton said, testing the name out. Rolling it around his mouth and considering the memories that saying it out loud brought back.
Zachary waited.
“He was… older,” Burton said. “I think he was older than I was. He knew things I didn’t. He was… my protector.”
Zachary’s own heart ached at the thought. The two little boys trapped down in the basement, Allen trying to protect five-year-old Burton. Allen probably wasn’t much older than Burton, but he had put himself between his little brother and the adults who had all control over him. There was no way that he could protect himself or Burton against the abuse. But he’d been heroic. He had tried.
“He was my brother.” It sounded more like a question than a statement. Burton turned around to face Zachary, and Zachary saw the deep creases between his eyebrows smooth out. “My… big brother?”
Zachary did his best to look sympathetic, but not to nod or to feed Burton any more information. Burton needed to remember and work out what he could on his own.
“What can you remember about him?”
“It’s so hard… it was so long ago.”
“Yeah.”
“He wrote the names. Do you think he wrote the names?”
“Is that what you think?”
“Yes. He must have written them. He was the one who could write. He knew… he knew things I didn’t know.”
“What things did he know?” Zachary wrote a few words in his notepad and waited for Burton to fill in the details.
“He was the one who knew about… dogs and cats. Other animals that he told me about.”
“Because you hadn’t ever seen them?”
Burton shook his head. “I don’t know. I must have seen them before. What kid hasn’t seen cats and dogs? I just… didn’t know very much about them. We didn’t have a dog.”
“Most kids still see them on the street. Read about them in books. See them on TV.”
“Must have,” Burton mused. “I must have… I just remember the bugs. They were the creatures I knew best. What I could catch in my hands or my jar. We knew some of them… the spider that built its web in the corner. We would see it come out, watch it working on its web. Eating other bugs. The flies in the summer…” Burton’s nose wrinkled. “There were so many flies in the summer, buzzing around us. Around…”
Zachary nodded. They would get a reprieve in the winter when the bugs were no longer flying outside the house and getting in through cracks in the windows or walls or through doors that stayed open too long. But during the summer, even in a cool basement, they would still be attracted by the smells of two little boys who were not properly cared for. Dirt, open sores, rotten food, excrement. Zachary could imagine how the flies would have plagued them.
“They get everywhere,” he agreed.
Burton paced back and forth, rubbing his temples. He probably had a headache. All of the emotional work on top of being hung over and not having more to drink to numb it.
“What things do you remember about when you first went to your adoptive family?” Zachary asked. “Things that you were impressed with. Surprised by. Excited about.”
Burton scowled. Maybe he was regretting that he had hired Zachary in the first place. It would be easier to just go home and not think about it anymore. Not to have to dig up and expose all of the old memories. “I don’t remember a lot of specifics. I liked them. Mom and Dad. They were nice. I remember… they had lots of good things to eat. When I look at it now, they weren’t anything special. But to me back then, it felt like… sort of like when you look at Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner. That there is just so much to choose from and everything looks, smells, and tastes so good. It felt like that. Like every day was another Christmas dinner. But when I think back to it now, it was just sandwiches. Oatmeal. Roast and potatoes. Not feasts. Not anything fancy. But it was all so good and made me feel… strong and healthy and like life was good because of it.”
“You were very skinny when you got away. Malnourished.”
“My mom says that’s why my legs are a little bowed,” Burton offered, looking embarrassed by the fact. “That it was from not having enough vitamins
those first few years. But I thought… it just meant I didn’t eat all of my vegetables. I didn’t ever understand that I had… really been neglected.”
“What else did you remember about living with your adoptive parents?”
“They had a nice house. Clean and sunny and everything neat and tidy. I had my own room. Nice soft bed with clean, white, fresh-smelling sheets. It wasn’t even like I had special sheets with Batman or cars on them. I don’t think they really had any idea about kids and what was popular. They were just clean, white sheets. And nice clothes. Whatever I wanted to eat.”
Food again. It was probably hard for someone who had been so starved to think of anything else. That had been the most important priority in his life after his experience. Getting the calories that he needed. Filling his stomach. Food had been limited in Zachary’s home, but he hadn’t been as malnourished as Burton had been. Skinny and small, but he hadn’t had rickets.
29
Zachary took a break from talking with Burton and called Aurelia Pace. He needed her input and confirmation before he could go back to the police department with any hopes of their getting a search warrant to look at the old house on Peach Tree Lane.
“Did you find him?” Pace asked immediately when she picked up the phone, and Zachary realized that she had been waiting for the call confirming that they had found the body of little Allen Weaver. He got a lump in his throat but tried to ignore it.
“No. We haven’t gotten in yet. The police didn’t have enough to go on. I’ve been interviewing Ben, and I have some more questions for you. I’m going to need your help if we’re going to get them to look into it after all these years.”
“I’ll help however I can. What do you need?”
“I need some information on Ben after he was rescued and went into foster care.”
“Yes?”
“Could he read and write?”
“What?”
“I want to know whether he already knew how to read and write when he went into foster care. Even a little bit.”
“No… not that I remember. I would have to talk to his foster parents at the time, or maybe you could talk to his adoptive parents and find out whether he could read and write yet when he was placed with them. But I don’t think so. He had been badly neglected. He didn’t go to school. Would his parents have locked him down there and then taught him his lessons? Tutored him in his schoolwork? I can’t see it.”
“A lot of people choose to homeschool because they don’t trust the state to do it. They may have felt like they had to teach him their beliefs and philosophies. That might have involved lessons in reading and writing.”
“Maybe. Like I said, I would have to follow up to be sure, but I don’t think so.”
“Then he wasn’t the one who wrote the names on the walls.”
Pace was quiet for a minute as she thought about it.
“No. If he hadn’t been taught to write his name, then he wasn’t the one who wrote it.”
That seemed obvious, and yet it had not occurred to her before.
“So someone else wrote it. That points to the possibility that another child did exist.”
“Yes, I agree with that. I thought we had already established that there was another child at some point.”
“You and I agreed… but the police say they need more. That maybe Allen is just a split personality or imaginary friend and never actually existed.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not the case.”
“Still, we need a way to prove it.”
“I suppose.”
“It helps if we can say that Ben wasn’t able to write his own name, and yet those names are written on the wall.”
“I wish I had my file notes from back then, but I don’t. If there were other things that he said or that we had concerns about, I would have written them down. But I can’t remember now. Did he ever mention the name Allen? I wish I could say that he had. But he obviously never told me that he had a sibling, or I would have looked into it. It’s very frustrating. It’s horrible that this is only coming out now. If he’d only told us years ago, it could have been investigated at the time. We could have torn up the floor in that place.”
“There’s no guarantee it would have made a difference. Allen could be buried in the back yard. Or he could have been dumped in a dumpster or in the woods. There are a hundred different scenarios. There’s no guarantee that we’re going to find anything if we get a search warrant. And even if we find his remains… that is no guarantee that we’ll be able to prove his cause of death or to charge his parents.”
“I would like to be able to get justice for Ben. And for Allen.”
“I don’t know if either of us will ever be able to do that. There’s nothing we can do to bring Allen back. Or to give Ben those first few years back. They were taken away from him forever.”
Zachary dropped Burton off at the Best Western after another exhausting interview. While Burton’s memories were getting closer to the surface, Zachary still wasn’t sure they were going to find enough information to convince the police to issue a warrant to search the house and property for any sign of Allen’s remains. All they had was Burton’s memory and, as Mario had said, he could be trying to pull a scam. Trying to get attention.
But the emotions that Burton was going through, the reactions he’d had and the pain and grief in his eyes, those were all things that Zachary was sure were genuine.
He looked in the rearview and side mirrors as he pulled out to go to Kenzie’s house for the evening. He was tired, but Kenzie would want to hear how things had gone, and he would sleep better if he spent time unwinding with her than he would if he went back to his own apartment and ping-ponged around it alone.
There was a motorcyclist stopped in the parking lot behind him but, as Zachary watched, he just sat there and didn’t pull out. Maybe he had stopped to talk on his phone or to get something out of his packs, but he didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Zachary pulled out and drove from the parking lot out to the main road. He turned the radio on to try to distract his busy brain from working on the problem of how to get a search warrant for the old Weaver home. He didn’t want to go back to Kenzie with problems on his mind. He’d be distracted and she’d feel like he wasn’t paying her any attention.
He resisted the urge to call anyone on the phone to discuss matters. Who would he talk to? He’d already talked to Pace and Burton. He didn’t have anything new for Mario. He couldn’t really discuss the case in any detail with anyone outside the case. There were confidentiality concerns, and he didn’t have Burton’s permission to share it with anyone else.
He glanced over his shoulder before changing lanes, then quickly corrected and slowed when he saw a motorcycle in his blind spot. The motorcycle shot past him, and he watched it weave through the traffic ahead of him. He checked the other lane, passed a stream of slower vehicles, and switched back again. The motorcycle was just ahead of him, holding its speed.
Zachary glanced at which exit he was at and noted the time. Ten minutes later, the motorcycle was still there, riding just behind him.
He was on a main thoroughfare. It was natural that other drivers would be going in the same direction as he was. But he had a bad feeling about the motorcycle.
He couldn’t swear that it was the same one that he’d seen in the hotel parking lot. But if it was, it had been keeping just ahead of him way too long to be coincidental.
Zachary hit the brake, slowing a little. His distance from the bike should increase. Bikers liked to go above the speed limit.
But the space between him and the bike stayed the same. The bike had also slowed.
Zachary didn’t like it. He sped up and blasted past the motorcycle and a few other vehicles, then settled behind a white van and watched the traffic behind him. Pretty soon, the motorcycle had also made its way past the cars that Zachary had. He didn’t pull right in behind Zachary, but sat a lane over and just behind Zachary.
Who would b
e following him? His mind flashed immediately back to the members of the trafficking syndicate who had followed him and ended up shooting Luke. Zachary had neglected to spot that tail. They had used the cell phones that Luke and Madison had been using to track their positions. This time, they didn’t have a cell signal to follow. Was it possible that one of them had spotted Zachary or had placed a tracker on his car sometime during the day and they were now moving in to deal with him?
He couldn’t lead them back to Kenzie’s house. Hopefully, they hadn’t been following him for long and didn’t already know about Kenzie and where she lived. He didn’t think the motorcycle had been on his tail for that long, but there might be several other vehicles in the tail. Or motorcycle guy might have only been on Zachary’s tail for one day, while someone else had been there previously. They wouldn’t take that long to act, would they? They would strike fast, like they had before. They weren’t patient enough to develop a longer-term plan.
Were they?
Zachary hit the Bluetooth button and called Kenzie. But what if they had put a tracker on his car and a bug inside where it could monitor his calls?
If they were that sophisticated, he was in trouble either way. They’d probably been on him for a while and listened to several other calls exchanged with Kenzie.
“Zachary. Running late?” Kenzie asked, upon picking up.
“Well, I wasn’t, but I’ve run into some problems. I… might have a tail and I’m going to have to do something about it.”
She didn’t respond at first. “A tail?” she asked finally. “Who would be following you? I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know. It could be related to an earlier case. I don’t want to take any chances.”
“You think it’s the guys that shot Luke?” she discerned immediately. “Zachary, those guys are dangerous. I thought you said that they wouldn’t be interested in you if they thought that both Madison and Luke were dead?”
He Never Forgot Page 16