The Devil's Analyst (32 page)

“Josh talked about that?”

“Completely,” Lopez replied. “He joked about how hard Danny fell for Oliver and how Oliver misused his infatuation. The conversation clearly made Oliver quite uncomfortable. To defuse the situation, I joked that I thought it sounded like the kind of twisted love story I’d write. Oliver was horrified at the suggestion and demanded I never follow through.

“But weeks later when Josh stopped by, he encouraged me to pursue the idea. He claimed that it would be good to force Danny to face the reality of that summer. He maintained that whatever happened, Danny needed to learn to talk about it. People get mistreated all the time, he said, and they just need to get over it.

“What can I say? I was intrigued by the idea. Once planted, the seeds germinated, so I took Josh up on his offer. He proved to be a man of his word, and provided the background, even reviewed the draft early on. It’s as much his story as mine.”

Cynthia vowed she would never let Danny find out. While she truly believed that Danny loved Josh, she often questioned if the reverse were true. A dangerous idea flittered through her mind—what if Danny discovered the genesis of
The Dumping Ground
and murdered Josh in anger? Maybe Josh wasn’t missing, but dead.

Lopez seemed compelled to seek some sort of absolution. “I tried to present the hidden side of a person like Danny in the novel because I think these quiet types are capable of anything. Danny is smart and wily. He’s also fiercely protective. I think there is every possibility that he is the monster within Premios. That’s why I’m encouraging you to leave.

“Can’t you see now why I didn’t want to talk to Danny?”

Cynthia felt soiled by even entertaining the possibilities of his claims. It was such utter nonsense. Only a man who wrote novels with themes and plots as horrible as Lopez’s could conceive such lunacy. But once stated, the idea burrowed into her mind like a parasitical worm, and she feared she wouldn’t be able to purge it.

Lopez stood up to leave. “Tell me, Cynthia, how well do you know your old friend Danny? Do you know that it was his suggestion to Chip that he meet with me that morning? And although I have no evidence to support this idea, I’ve always had the distinct impression that Chip was expecting Danny to pick him up that morning.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Beginnings

Josh missed Dr. Van Psycho
, the mannequin that he kept in the corner of his secret office. The figure always made it easier for him to begin his taped self-reflections. He could never have bared his soul to a real doctor, but he trusted his imagined movie psychoanalyst. While he never actually saw the Augustus Cambrian movie that featured the character, when the renovation crew discovered the hidden chamber that still contained a few of the old movie artifacts including the Van Psycho pieces, he found it oddly exciting and it gave him the idea. Apparently Cambrian sold off most of whatever else he stored in the room over the years, and Josh arranged to sell at a private auction what little remained, but something about the Van Psycho model with its deformed and scarred face spoke to him, and he kept it. Over time the piece almost became a companion. But his therapy sessions were over.

Josh found it an easy decision to restore Cambrian’s hideaway. He never thought twice whether he should inform Danny about the spot. Josh liked keeping hidden aces up his sleeve. One never knew when the going might get tough. As time went on what surprised him was how much an old movie prop could pull on him. Growing up as a single child, Josh knew his parents never appreciated his special nature, and he learned to keep a lot of his thoughts to himself, so it felt good to have someone finally who could listen and not judge. Josh never wanted to be judged. Who was good enough to do that? But he liked telling his story.

From a small child on, Josh always felt different. He wasn’t like other kids in school or for that matter like his parents. Other people always felt such a need to consider the feelings of those around them. He never understood that. What did it matter whether you were liked or disliked? What mattered was the game.

What Josh found enormously beguiling was testing the limits. He had a special knack for it. From an early age, he discovered the art of amusing others. No matter the situation, he could be funny when he wanted, charming as needed, even appearing as the perfectly behaved child when it was useful. Such skills came in handy when meeting new people. By the time he was in primary school, he sensed that Ma and Pa saw through his act. They stepped around his behaviors gingerly, almost afraid of what he might do, but they were never worried about what he might say to others. Every word he uttered was always appropriate. But in their eyes, his overall behavior was another matter. At first he didn’t care, but sometimes some of the teachers at school started to show that same look as his parents. He hated that look.

Maybe that’s when he first started testing people. He wanted to know how far he could push them in the direction he wanted before they rebelled. Often he didn’t even care about where he pushed them. It was enough to get the ball rolling and see what it might smash. Usually, people never caught on to his manipulations. They just weren’t that smart.

His games made life worthwhile. The truth was that there wasn’t much that was interesting on their worn-out farm sitting at the edge of the swamp. Pa tried dairy farming but the land wasn’t rich enough to host sufficient milk cows to make it worthwhile. Besides that, the twice daily milkings made for a damn hard life. As he got older, Josh realized that his father wasn’t particularly fond of hard work. At one point, the man raised enough money to dig out and flood some of his low grounds as cranberry bogs. But that didn’t turn out very well either. The freeze got the first crop. The second year, the market was glutted and the prices were low. The family survived only because Ma always worked in town and Pa knew how to be tight with money. When it came to avoiding dispensing cash, he had a powerful ability; the man just never learned to apply himself to earning it. Josh wouldn’t begrudge his old man for that. At least he always kept the life insurance up.

Most years there weren’t many chores for Josh to do. It left a lot of free time to amuse himself. He didn’t care much for reading and there weren’t any other kids within walking distance, so early on he experimented with his parents, pushing them to see what he could make them do and how they might react.

He probably started this behavior as a toddler, but Josh treasured a vivid memory of what he considered his first deliberate provocation. Ma loved her fresh raspberries. There was a thick bramble of the berries planted just past the clotheslines back by the wood patch. Come mid-summer the bracts would be thick with ripening fruit. Josh liked berries almost as much as Ma, especially when she used them to make a custard pie. It was his favorite dessert.

He was only six or seven that summer when Ma came home after a long day working at the hardware store in Thread. Josh no longer recalled where Pa might have been, maybe working back in the woods or out fishing. It was getting late in summer, and the raspberries were nearing the end of the run. But when Ma reached home a little after five there were still several sunlit hours ahead. She asked Josh to head out to the patch and pick whatever berries remained. In exchange, she promised him his pie. She equipped her boy with a plastic bucket and then headed into the kitchen to start preparations for supper. Josh still remembered how tired she looked that night, having worked all day, but yet determined to make a meal for her men that included a special pie.

Under the clouds of that afternoon, he wondered what it would take to break her. It was a strange thought for a little kid. Even all these years later, Josh looked back on his former self with a sense of pride at that early precociousness. He went to the berry patch and worked hard picking those raspberries. Ignoring the thorns pricking and scratching his hands, he found every last one of them. His filled his bucket; it was enough for a pie as well as plenty left to fill several bowls with fresh berries and thick cream for their morning breakfast.

Ma came out of the house to check on his progress. “How’s the berries coming along?” she asked.

“Fine,” he yelled back.

Then he walked toward her slowly—presenting the bucket before him, looking down with pride at that luscious fruit, and inhaling the beautiful smell of overripe fruit. Ma was smiling. He remembered that.

Just as he reached the gravel driveway to cross over to the kitchen door, he made a grand show of tripping. Anyone could tell he did it on purpose, and he insured that he flung that bucket in such a way that all the berries tumbled out into the gravel. He fell to the ground, rolled across the fallen fruit, crushed their red stain into his clean clothes, and destroying any chance for a pie that night.

And he stood up and smiled. Grinned, really.

So Josh didn’t
get pie that night, but he got to see the look on his mother’s face. That was almost as good. Ma had an expression of horror and fear . . . and resignation . . . and love. Even knowing what happened in that moment on the driveway, she still pretended to love him. She rushed forward to be sure he wasn’t hurt, checking if he had any knee scrapes that required an application of stinging Mercurochrome.

Josh felt satisfied. The afternoon stunt was better than eating a slice or two of raspberry custard pie, and it scratched his itch to see where he could lead people, what he could make them do, and how they would respond. He didn’t repeat such tricks often, not because he couldn’t nor because he thought there was anything wrong with his actions. But he was easily bored and he needed to continually find interesting new problems to solve. There was no satisfaction in doing the same thing over and over. It became harder and harder to invent satisfying and worthwhile new challenges.

As the growing up years went by, an uneasy truce took hold in the Gunderson household. When they thought he wasn’t paying attention, both Ma and Pa looked at Josh with suspicion, but what they never realized was that he was also always watching them. In his presence, they carefully skirted betraying any hint about what troubled them. At times he considered secreting a tape recorder in their bedroom, because he suspected that only in the twilight hours, alone in their bedroom, did they dare to whisper to one another their true thoughts about their son. But he never took that step. It was more intriguing to imagine what they might be saying than to know for certain. In the uncertainty he could think of them as both innocent and guilty. If he actually bugged the place, he would know for sure.

At school, he mostly worked his charms to make life easy. He was a good student, and if asked, the other kids would have said that they liked him. But none of them hung out with Josh. Maybe the other kids sensed that he didn’t really care about them.

At least the smart ones figured that out. There was a dim boy named Clarence who wasn’t quite so clever. About the time Josh was entering puberty, Clarence decided he wanted to be friends with Josh. Clarence, who had been held back in classes a couple of years, was already fifteen when he entered eighth grade, but mentally he was younger than Josh. Not having other friends, Josh let him hang around. They made an odd couple, but since Ma and Pa pretended not to notice that Clarence came by every afternoon, it didn’t really matter. At the small school in Thread, Josh avoided paying any public attention to Clarence, but Clarence didn’t seem to mind. Since they weren’t in the same classes and Clarence lacked the ability to recognize how he was being ignored, everything was good.

After school hours, they built a fort of hay bales in the loft of the barn. Pa pretty much ignored the little hay that was left in the upper reaches of the barn since they no longer had cows to feed. The hay fort was theirs alone. By his age, Clarence should have long given up playing cowboys and Indians in the haymow, but he still loved it. Then Josh introduced the dim boy to other kinds of games. They were ones that Josh found more interesting.

Just getting the first signs of pubic hair, Josh found his changing body especially fascinating, and it wasn’t long before he convinced Clarence to drop his trousers so he could inspect what that older boy looked like. Clarence had thick black hair around a long cock, and Josh wanted to touch it. So he did. Not long after he introduced Clarence into the art of jacking off. It was amazing that the boy hadn’t learned already, but he was slow, and once he did it, Clarence loved it. Their afternoons in the privacy of the hay bale fort became an adolescent frenzy of masturbation.

Over time, Josh began to consider the on-going hand jobs tedious, but he put up with it since the mutual activity turned Clarence into a virtual slave, letting Josh be the slave master. While he found that role interesting, it eventually became a burden because it always required Josh to monitor Clarence and keep him from ever discussing their activities in front of others. The kid was too slow to comprehend that some things couldn’t be talked about.

As autumn turned into winter, this afternoon play went on. When the weather grew colder, the boys branched out into smoking cigarettes and sipping whiskey. Josh had filched the drink from Pa’s limited alcohol cabinet. The barn’s temperature was too cold for getting naked anyway, although Clarence had a strong sex urge and was always ready for whatever Josh suggested. As hints of spring emerged, Josh came up with a different idea.

On a trip to Duluth with his Ma, he pilfered a copy of
The Joy of Sex
from a bookstore they visited. The book gave him a lot of ideas, especially when he read about this thing called auto-asphyxiation in which a person cuts off the flow of blood to his brain just as he’s about to climax sexually. He tried it once, and found the experience intense. He thought it would be a hoot to convince Clarence to give it a try.

Later he contemplated whether he should have been more careful in how he described the act. The kid didn’t always grasp all the implications or dangers of an action. But truthfully by spring Josh was finding Clarence tiresome, and he was ready to move on, and so he held no qualms in urging Clarence to try this new thing. He just counseled him to be sure to do it in secrecy, somewhere back in the woods where no one would possibly see him. He also said it would be better if Clarence tried it without Josh around since that would heighten the sense of danger and the reward of the thrill.

On a Saturday night when the senior play was about to open in the Thread high school gymnasium, the alarm was sounded in town to pull together the volunteer fire department. That annoyed Josh since it interfered with his evening’s plans. In a rather weak version of
The Music Man
, Josh was about to play the role of Harold Hill, con man par excellence. Josh was always good in any stage production, since he had the knack of assuming the right emotions. People were naturally drawn to him, and he liked to think he could display a certain light in his eyes.

But the alarm canceled the opening night. Clarence was missing and his mom was frantic. Divorced, raising the boy alone, and trying to do the best of a difficult job, she became frantic when he wasn’t home by mealtime. Everyone in town knew about Clarence’s limited abilities, so it wasn’t difficult for the only policeman in town to believe the boy was lost and to convince dozens to join him for a search of the local woods. So many people signed up, including several students from the cast that the high school drama teacher had no choice but to postpone the play.

No one found Clarence that night. In fact, they only found his body a week later, after it had been desecrated by scavenging crows and coyotes. While the evidence wasn’t all that clear, the coroner ruled that the boy had hung himself. He declared it a suicide, although Clarence’s mom refused to believe that her son could take such an act. She said he was always so happy.