Critical Mass (5 page)

“Can I talk to your grandson? Maybe he—”

“You leave Martin alone,” she said, her tone menacing.

“How old is he?” I asked, as if she hadn’t spoken.

“Old enough to know his mother is poison through and through.”

I got up and went to look at the framed photos. A young Kitty wearing a New Look suit, carrying a bouquet, stared sternly at the camera. The man next to her, in a U.S. Army uniform with his combat ribbons on his chest, black hair slicked away from his forehead, beamed with pride. They’d met in post-war Germany, Lotty had said. From the man’s uniform, I assumed they’d married there. It was a time when many women wore their best suits to their weddings, not a bridal gown. My own mother was married in an outfit not much different, but my dad had filled her arms with roses.

In another photo, the same man, considerably older, but still wearing a proud smile, was standing at a bima with a thin, serious boy. The grandson’s bar mitzvah. The two also appeared behind a complicated collection of glass tubes and coiled wires, with a “First Place” ribbon attached to the table. Same proud smile on Grandpa, same serious look
from the youth. The only other photo was a faded snapshot, three teenage girls and a plump couple. They all wore old-fashioned swimsuits and were grinning at the camera. Kitty was in the middle; she, too, was smiling.

“Are those your sisters?” I ventured, nodding at the snapshot.

Her face tightened further, but she nodded fractionally.

“Is it possible your daughter went to one of—”

“Oh!” Her cry was almost a scream of pain. “How can you? How can you be so cruel?”

My stomach twisted. I should have known, Jewish refugee from Vienna: her family, like Lotty’s, had likely been murdered.

“Forgive me.” I rolled a lace-covered hassock up next to her chair so that my head was lower than hers. “I didn’t know, I wasn’t thinking. Please talk to me about your daughter and your grandson. It’s he you’re worried about, isn’t it? If you can describe him to me, I may be able to tell you if he’s the person whose body I found yesterday.”

“That’s him you were looking at just now.” Her fingers twisted so tightly in her lap that the joints turned white.

“How old is he now?”

“He turned twenty in May.”

“The man I found yesterday was probably ten or fifteen years older than that,” I said, “although his body was so damaged I can’t be a hundred percent sure. When did you last see Martin?”

She scowled but didn’t answer. She was embarrassed: perhaps Martin had followed his mother in fleeing this musty house with its drawn blinds, its tightly sealed windows.

“Does he work? Go to school?” I asked.

“He takes a few night classes down at Circle, but he works for a living, like my family always has.”

“Ms. Binder, what is the problem? Is he doing work that you think will get him in trouble?”

“Of course not,” she bristled. “He’s nothing like his mother, which
just proves all that environment influence they throw at you is nonsense. If he could grow up here and be a decent, hardworking boy, then his mother could have, too, if she hadn’t had such a weak nature.”

“Then what are you worried about?” I asked.

She twisted her fingers into such tight knots that I couldn’t see how she stood the pain. “He took off ten days ago,” she whispered. “No one knows where he is.”

4

MARTIN’S CAVE

I
GOT THE STORY
out of Kitty in tiny pieces, as if I were prying gold from a rockface. Martin worked at a company in Northbrook as some kind of computer technician. He took a few night classes at the University of Illinois’s Chicago Circle campus, but he made good money at the place he worked: Kitty didn’t think he needed a college degree.

Martin hadn’t talked much about the job, but he seemed to like it, he often worked late even though he wasn’t paid overtime. “I keep telling him, they’re just taking advantage, but he says he learns so much he’s coming out ahead. Used to say, anyway.”

Then about six weeks ago, something upset him. He had always spent a lot of time alone in his room, but now he was either spending all his time there or disappearing for long hours after work. He stopped working overtime; he started treating the job like a job; Kitty thought this was as it should be, or she would have thought so, if he hadn’t become so moody.

“Did he say what was troubling him?”

“He’s not very talkative. Neither am I.” Kitty gave a bleak smile. “I guess we both relied on Len to talk to us and neither of us ever learned how. Anyway, this went on, him brooding, me having to remind him to eat, and then, about ten days ago, he went off in the morning, like he always does. Only he came home after a few hours. He stayed in his room for a bit, then around three he left again.”

That was the last his grandmother had seen or heard of him.

“Where did he go?”

“He didn’t tell me. He said he’d found something didn’t add up, then he took off. I started cleaning—”

She broke off as I involuntarily looked around the dust-covered sitting room.

“Yes, my grandmother would have slapped me for letting a room look like this, but since Martin disappeared I think, what’s the point? Why keep cleaning when people keep leaving?”

“Your grandmother would slap me every day if she saw the way my apartment looked,” I assured her. “‘Something didn’t add up.’ Could he have been going to the bank?”

She shook her head, her face pinched in misery. “I don’t know. He just said there was something he had to look into. Or look at? I’m not sure; I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t think it was anything special until he didn’t come home.”

“When did you start getting worried?” I asked.

“That night. Well, the next day. I thought, who knows, maybe he found a girl to spend the night with. Then, when he didn’t come home, I thought maybe he’d gone camping. He would, sometimes, just pack up a light tent and go down to Starved Rock or up to Wisconsin for a few days. He hadn’t taken a vacation since he started the job two years ago—he started right out of high school.”

“Would he go off camping without telling you?”

“He might. Since Len died, Martin doesn’t like to tell me what his plans are. But then when he still hadn’t come back, I thought he’d moved into an apartment. We used to argue about that: he could save so much money living at home, and he has his own nice little apartment down in the basement. I thought he’d moved out but didn’t have the courage to stand up and tell me to my face. Only—he isn’t answering his phone or e-mails or anything.”

“It should be pretty easy to check with his employer,” I said.

She started twisting the thick cables of her sweater around her fingers; her voice sank back to a whisper. “Last week his boss called: Martin hasn’t been to work since the day before he left here. He’s not answering their e-mails or phone calls, either.”

“That sounds really bad,” I said baldly. “What do the police say?”

“I haven’t told them. What would be the point?”

I tried not to shout at her. “The point would be that they could be looking for your grandson. He’s been gone ten days now. No phone calls, right? No postcards or e-mails? No? Then we need to get the police looking for him.”

“No!” she cried. “Just leave him alone. And don’t go calling the police, the police are worse than—never mind—but if you go to the police about my business, I’ll—I’ll sue you!”

I looked at her in bewilderment. It was hard to believe an elderly white woman might be the victim of police harassment. Maybe it was a residue of Austria under Nazi control, when police declared open season on Jews, but her ferocity made me think she was guarding against a more immediate danger.

“Ms. Binder, who are you afraid of? Has one of your daughter’s associates threatened you?”

“No! I don’t want the police involved. What if they—” She cut herself off mid-sentence.

“What if they what?” I demanded sharply.

“People like you think the police are there to help, but I know different, that’s all. We solve our own problems in my family. I don’t need police, I don’t need Charlotte Herschel’s condescension, and I don’t need you!”

I couldn’t budge her from that stance, even though I didn’t mince words about the danger her grandson might be in.

“How did he leave? Car?” I finally asked, thinking that with the plate number I might get state police to help look for him.

“Len bought him a used Subaru, when I—when we said—when Martin agreed that college would be a waste of time and money, but he didn’t take it; it’s still out front.”

She couldn’t imagine how he’d gone; she thought she would have heard a taxi. He might have just walked to the bus stop.

“What did he take with him?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I told you, I wasn’t really paying any attention.”

“Have you looked in his room to see what might be missing?”

She stared at me blankly, as if I’d suggested she sacrifice a sheep to predict the future. When she didn’t respond, I said, in the bright tone you reserve to mask your anger, “Why don’t we go to his room now, and you can tell me whether he took camping gear or a laptop, or what.”

After fiddling with her hands and her sweater for another moment, Kitty got to her feet and stumped off toward the back of the house. I followed her through a dining room crammed with sideboards and more lace into the kitchen. This was where she lived; it held a television, bookshelves, and stacks of unopened mail.

She opened a door to a set of open-backed stairs and led me down them, past the mechanicals, to a wall made of dark-stained wood with a door set in the middle.

“I did most of this work,” Kitty said. “My dad was a builder and you knew when something broke he could fix it. He taught all us girls the same. When I married Len—we met in Vienna; he was working in the army motor pool—I thought he might be like my dad, but Len wasn’t a builder. He was good with machines, but he couldn’t do carpentry. I ended up doing all those kinds of things.” The words might have been part of an ongoing plaint, but it was clear from the way she looked at her knobby fingers that she was proud of her skills.

She pushed open the door to her grandson’s room. A deep voice intoned, “Beware, mortal, you are entering Sovngarde, where Alduin has set a snare for your soul.”

I jumped back and flung a protective arm around Kitty, but she wasn’t disturbed. She even produced a faint smirk at seeing me knocked off balance.

“I’m so used to Martin’s gadgets, I don’t notice them. Martin is a clever boy with engineering projects, so if anyone besides him opens the door, they hear a warning. The message changes; he’s got five or six programmed in.”

Peering closely, I saw a small speaker and two tiny camera eyes mounted into the door frame. Martin must be a clever boy indeed to disguise their mounting so carefully.

When I walked into the room, I thought if Kitty had built this space, she was pretty clever herself. Soffits were set into the low ceiling, with three sets of recessed lights. One illuminated the built-in workstation, which held two computer monitors, a second an alcove where Japanese-style screens were open to show a carefully made bed. The third set of lights covered a separate little living area where Martin and his friends met—if he had any friends, poor guy.

The floor was tiled in a soft-colored stone. I opened a door and saw a bathroom, tiled in the same pale stone. An old tube of toothpaste and a dried-out bar of soap sat on the sink, but a trailing vine, its leaves still thick and green, covered part of the wall next to the shower.

I wondered if Kitty came in to water it, then saw that a little hose hung over it, attached to an electronic timer. “Was this your invention or Martin’s?” I asked.

She gave a half-smile. “That was one of the tricks we learned from my dad. Martin made the electronics for it, though. The last thing we ever did together.”

Back in the bedroom, I poked my head into a walk-in closet, where a lone sports jacket hung. Most of the closet was a storeroom for Martin’s overflow of electronics, old computers that he was hanging on to, a bassoon, some stereo speakers. His whole little apartment was
severely bare, as great a contrast as possible to the musty rooms above with their collection of junk.

Two rockets about a yard long, made with a painstaking attention to detail, stood on a shelf above the computers. In between them was a framed snapshot of Martin as a young teen, holding up a plaque that read “First Prize.” His grandfather stood next to him, beaming with pride.

The rockets and photo, with a poster-sized copy of a book jacket over the bed, were the room’s only decoration. The poster showed the laughing face of the author, Richard Feynman, positioned so that his eyes seemed to be looking at the pillows.

“He was Martin’s hero,” Kitty said, noticing me staring at it. “Martin read everything he wrote, which gave him the idea he ought to go to some fancy science school, like the one in California where Feynman taught. We fought about that.”

Feynman’s name was familiar. “A scientist, right?” I guessed.

“A physicist.” Kitty bit off the word, as if it were something despicable—a symptom of degeneracy, like her daughter’s drug abuse. “He won the Nobel Prize, so I guess he was smart, but what good does that do you? He’s dead like all the rest of them, but Martin doesn’t see it like that. Martin always says Feynman’s work made him immortal.”

Her jaw worked; she kept staring at the photograph. “Of course, Feynman died before Martin was born, but he started reading about him when he was still in junior high, and then he collected everything he could, books and so on. Martin’s first science project, when he was twelve, was trying to show how Feynman figured out what made the space shuttle blow up.

“Martin made six rockets, three with faulty O-rings and three without. He tested them; he wanted the faulty one to crash at the science fair, but he couldn’t make it happen because the atmosphere this near
the ground isn’t cold enough, as any fool would have known. So then he tried doing the experiment in dry ice, which Len thought was such a wonderful idea he went out and filled the garage with it. Toby Susskind, one of the neighborhood boys who came around to stare at the rockets, he passed out from the dry ice, and his father acted like I’d murdered him.”