The Fisher Boy (24 page)

Chapter Thirty-four

“I didn’t know!” Roberto kept repeating. “I didn’t know Chloe was missing, Mark, I swear!”

“It’s true,” Miriam said.

Seeing Roberto—in that silly T-shirt with the kissing lavender dinosaurs, with his gorgeous but slightly bowed legs—made my anger change to a subtle but growing, yes, happiness. He was here, and it made a difference. I was surprised and relieved.

Roberto was with his father. Professor Schreiber was a husky chain-smoker in a parrot-green silk shirt, so youthful he could’ve passed as Roberto’s rakish older brother. “It’s my fault,” Professor Schreiber admitted. He explained that he prized isolation while vacationing. The Owl Island house had no televisions, radios, or Internet access. “Peace and quiet are a fetish with me.” Just like his tobacco habit and clear fingernail polish, his way, Roberto had once informed me, of “deconstructing the MIT stereotype, you know,
Star Trek
fan—fashion victim.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” Roberto asked. “I’d left my number with Roger.”

“I was waiting for you to call us,” I said. “Chloe was on the news from coast to coast.”

Chloe had been gone eight days. And we were worried about Miriam too; her morale was deteriorating. She had unearthed her family Bible, a huge old book all but falling apart. She prayed for hours on her deck, with this Bible and a cell phone and a bottle of wine in her lap.

Alicia, the receptionist from the Christian Soldiers’ office, had insinuated herself into Miriam’s life, bringing an olive wood cross and a coconut cream pie one scorching morning six days after Chloe’s vanishing. Too tired to be anything but polite, Miriam had invited her inside, so, since then, Alicia had shown up every morning assuring Miriam Chloe was in God’s hands, holding Miriam’s own hand, and reading her passages from Hollings Fair’s condensed
New Testament.

Arthur and I accepted Alicia’s presence. She was doing some good, since, previously, Miriam had been refusing most food, subsisting on Graham crackers, tranquilizers, and chamomile tea. Alicia was able to stuff her with high-calorie desserts: the mousse, sheet cake, and brownies she cooked at home. “Home,” we learned, was an RV out by the beach, by Herring Cove. They were all staying together, the people from her office: she, Paul, and others. They had been living there for several weeks; it was “way nicer than some motel with TVs wired to all the pornography channels.”

Paul was “fine,” studying the
Book of Luke
and automobile racing magazines. “He comes from a horrific background,” Alicia said, but she was ignorant about specifics.

Nine days after the kidnapping, along with some trifle for Miriam, Alicia brought me a new chain for my olive wood cross. The chain was blessed, she said, by Hollings Fair himself, at an outdoor service in Bakersfield.

“Why don’t they contact me? Why don’t they ask for a ransom?” Miriam would moan. Even with Arthur’s generous reward offer, no real leads had developed that we knew of. Gemma, the girl minding Chloe when she’d disappeared, had been questioned again and again, but could recall nothing unusual happening that day, no suspicious person or persons loitering at the shop, just one man looking for a special kaleidoscope who tried and refused every model in stock.

Soon this man came forward, a day tripper, Howard LeClair of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. He wasn’t planning on buying a kaleidoscope, he’d only told Gemma that story to impress his girlfriend, a Kieran McKenna of Providence who was a stained glass artist. The police checked the backgrounds of both LeClair and McKenna, finding nothing but the occasional speeding ticket. So the couple wasn’t connected to Chloe’s kidnappers, they weren’t distracting Gemma so that someone else could quickly spirit Chloe from the premises. They were interested in Miriam’s kaleidoscopes, more or less. The police even investigated Carlyle Brackett, the Texan who’d commissioned the fire opal crown for his daughter, but he too was clean, except for some “misunderstandings” with the IRS.

On the day after he returned, I told Roberto what I’d discovered, I told him in Miriam’s driveway, by the copper sculpture where I’d cornered Edward. I told him more than the “everything” I’d told the police: about finding Ian and Edward’s history, about Clark and Jason and both my Truro visits, about Rockport and St. Harold’s and my speaking to Almeida and DeRenzi. Roberto stood there, his mouth a perfect “O” except when he’d mutter “Holy shit!” “And remember my mother telling me my father was in the Navy? Well, that was a bunch of crap. He was Duncan Drummond, can you believe it?”

“Do you?” asked Roberto, whose tan, in Maine, had become lacquer-rich. “You and Ian don’t look anything alike. You don’t
act
anything alike. Thank God.”

We could find out more, Roberto thought. Provincetown was full of youngsters from the Truro community, and they didn’t get here using bicycles or cars, they hitched. We could get information by giving them rides, rides
back
to Truro, after confirming their destination during the requisite small-talk. They were often drunk or stoned, so, with the two of us urging them on, they might talk.

So we became the Provincetown-Truro shuttle, traversing the shore road, past the cabins and beach roses and the bay. We ignored hitchhikers over thirty, and, sheepishly, those with pink triangle or rainbow flag patches on their backpacks. We picked up the scruffy ones, those with haircuts months old, with odd clothing or musical instruments. We picked them up, off the soft shoulders, among the sand and roadkill and rubber from blown tires, smiling, squinting in the sun. Casually, we asked, “Where you headed?”—and our hearts dropped when they didn’t reply, “Truro.”

Over a period of two days, we picked up: a genuine Swedish college student, studying international relations at Georgetown
;
an acupuncturist from Iowa; a houseboy who’d once worked at the White Gull; and a six-foot tall drag queen, Vanda Orchid. None had ties to the Truro community, and the Swede had never heard of the tall ship,
Vasa
—or of Dala horses, the folk art cliché Miriam swore all Swedes should know like their shoe size.

Discouraged, we detoured to Welfleet, buying ice cream at a store that also sold candy. Not just salt water taffy and barley pops shaped like stained-glass lobsters. Here, glass shelves tempted you with slabs of fudge, veritable sidewalks of white and dark chocolate, and with liquid cherries and half-dips and nonpareils. The selection was so complete it included dietetic candy and “gourmet treats for the canine connoisseur.” The atmosphere was decidedly upscale, with pastel figurines of milkmaids and shepherds and peasants with teams of ceramic oxen, so it was all the more surprising when a clerk in pearls and pink seersucker bellowed, “I saw you take that, and I’ve told you before not to come here!”

The accused shoplifter was in her thirties, at least, a fair-skinned person scorched almost mocha. She was smiling, pleased with herself, as though she’d just told some memorable joke and the entire shop was her adoring audience.

“I live in Truro, I know about you people,” the clerk continued, even louder.

The accused was standing on her toes, like a ballerina. She was barefoot, her legs so heavily tattooed they looked paisley. Her clothes—a dress the dark brown of mead, sandals with complex leather straps up to her knees—completed the illusion of someone fast-forwarded from the Dark Ages. Then she shattered all that by retrieving a cigarette from her fraying nylon satchel and lighting it with a Bic lighter. “Paranoid old fart,” she muttered, so that everyone could hear.

A young man in a sleek suit came striding out from an office and gently took the woman’s arm. “Let’s just say the candy is our little gift. A going-away present. But I’ve got to ask you to smoke outside, and request that you
not
visit us again.”

“I’ve seen the children from your community!” the clerk called to the woman.

The man in the sleek suit guided the woman to the door. Roberto and I followed, so fast our ice cream almost toppled from our cones.

“They sure are rude in that place,” I said to the accused, as she hungrily smoked her cigarette.

She smiled, she was missing several teeth. “Could you give us a ride?”

“Us.” Surely she was one of them, so the “us” made me expect street children or a giant might appear from nowhere.

“I don’t need to go far. Just to the next town.”

The next town was Truro. “Could we talk a bit?” I said.

The woman’s teeth had rotted, like styrofoam left out in the elements. “I don’t know why I bother patronizing that place. Especially when the food we grow is so superior. It’s almost like alchemy, what we do. Like the philosophers’ stone. Ever hear of that?”

“Wasn’t that supposed to turn iron into gold?” I asked.

“Damn fucking right.” She climbed into the back seat of my car. Discreetly, we tossed our ice cream cones into a trash barrel. I had Roberto drive so as to deflect attention from me; people usually focus on the driver of a car.

She rummaged through her satchel, which was full of, among other things, chocolate, peanut clusters, and caramels she’d stolen from the candy store, plus loose cigarettes, some flasks of expensive perfume—and a Buck knife. I flinched when I saw the knife. Smiling, she zipped the satchel shut. Like Edward’s brother, Clark, she exuded the rancid odor that can only be earned by weeks of abstaining from all hygiene. Luckily, the car windows were still rolled down.

“Hot,” I said, to jump-start the conversation. She crammed a caramel into her mouth, then, to my alarm, unzipped the satchel and took out the Buck knife. “Take this road until I tell you to turn,” she said.

She was holding the knife in her right hand, her cigarette in her left. She smoked the last of the cigarette, a half-smoked stub when she’d lit it, then pitched it, still glowing, into the road, ignoring any fire hazard, any drought. She began running her left index finger along the blade of the knife, stroking it. Was she going to rob us or slit our throats, like Ian’s? She delved back into her satchel and produced a dirty hunk of unwrapped cheese. Cutting a slice, she said, “The days are numbered,” very matter-of-fact.

Not “Your days are numbered…”

“Left or right?” Roberto asked when the road forked. “Left,” she answered. Roberto had seen her knife in the rear-view mirror and was visibly frightened. I wanted to touch him, comfort him somehow, but could not, could not alert her to his distress. She was armed, we were not.

“Would either of you like some cheese? It’s home-made.” The cheese was as grubby as her fingers, coated with lint and hair.

We both said No, we’d just eaten, so she put the cheese, again unwrapped, back into her satchel. The people in the community were under strict control, I thought. She smoked with the same hunger as Jason—and, like him, like the youngsters in Provincetown, she engaged in this behavior—using tobacco, sneaking candy—while away from Truro, away from the power of their leader. Yet didn’t these guilty pleasures also show cracks in the monolith, the fact that these people dared do these things at all?

“Stop!” the woman suddenly commanded, and Roberto hit the brakes so that we all lunged forward. Giggling, she pointed backward with the knife. “I should’ve told you. Turn left back there.” Roberto snapped on the signal that we were turning left and gave me a look that was equal parts fright and exasperation. Though the initial scheme was his.

Our passenger rested the Buck knife on her knees while running her fingers through her hair, which was reddish with outbreaks of blond and disorderly as Medusa’s. Wanting to revive the subject of her background, I asked a deliberately foolish question: “Do you summer in Truro?”

She threw back her head and laughed. “I summer, winter, spring, and fall.” She turned the Buck knife in her hands, taking tactile comfort from its presence, like a grandmother with a rosary. Then, with a crazy half-smile, she told me, “The Fall is coming very soon.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, then she went silent as we drove through the woods with the sunlight gilding the leaves. I said, “This drought is affecting everything,” wondering if she’d take the bait.

“It isn’t affecting
us.
It isn’t affecting us one goddamned bit.” She was pulling at her dress, as if a mention of the heat brought her back to reality so that it bothered her. “We have our own irrigation system.” She added, “I live with an engineer.”

She was impressed by the system set up by the Master.

She slipped the knife back into her satchel. “Right at the white post. We’re almost there.”

This was not the road I’d discovered on my own, where the girl and the Giant had confronted me. And it was not, from what I could tell, the road Jason took the night I’d accompanied him deeper into their property, to the strange white house with the fireplace blazing and the numbing air-conditioning. This road was unpaved, but was wider than the others; it might lead to their main entrance. A wilting forest of deciduous trees interspersed with pines flanked its sides, but the foliage didn’t sweep at the car as we passed. Here and there, someone had built cairns of stones, and, once, we encountered a large rock with the beginnings of human features, vague, like those forming on a fetus, carved into its surface.

With the knife away, our passenger became, paradoxically, more hostile. “Go faster,” she said, but the road was riddled with ruts and holes, and was nowhere near wide enough for two cars, should we meet another. “I’m going as fast as I can without breaking an axle,” said Roberto.

“Nothing breaks here,” the woman said. “Things get mended, parts become whole.”

We rounded a bend near an ancient oak with lichens and moss sheathing its trunk and its glossy foliage muted by dust from the road. “Who’s there?” a gruff voice demanded; the tree itself seemed to be speaking, the spirit of the wood, the Green Man with his face of leaves from old pagan Europe. We stopped the car. Our passenger replied, “It’s me, the wife Helga.” This was the name of Mrs. Mikkonen’s cat! She clutched her satchel, like a schoolgirl protecting her lunchbox.

From the woods in back of the oak came the Giant who’d ordered me away. Roberto, in the driver’s seat, and the woman, behind him, were closest to the Giant, who stood at the car’s left. Of course, the Giant might recognize my car, or notice me.