A Child's Book of True Crime (23 page)

Instead of guns we used stingrays. He threw one at me. I threw one back. He hit me, and then I hit him, and we both fell down. I thought I was dead, but I wasn’t sure. I got up, so obviously I was not dead. Then all the water disappeared, we sprinted in the little bit of water to the human body shop . . .

A branch scratched at my face and again I felt seasick. I imagined taking my number to queue, along with Veronica
and Thomas, at Lucien’s human body shop. All the people who’d most recently fallen off cliffs would also be in the reception, jostling for their appointment; a screaming tangle of broken bodies. We’d all be blind because, according to Lucien,
sand wears down eyeballs
. Our skin so wrinkled,
tearing easily like wet paper
.

It was hardly unusual for a child to fantasize about his parents being dead. Orphanhood was
the
great daydream of independence. All the stars of children’s literature roamed free. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn set their own agendas. Pippi Longstocking, Christopher Robin, James of
Giant Peach
renown—there was a stray elderly aunt lurking in the background, granted, although you never saw any parents. I wondered what had really happened to them. At the school fair, when the children stuck their hands into the horror table’s black boxes, whose severed ears and tongues did they imagine they were feeling? To the bystander all the little painted faces and pony rides might have seemed delightful, but a natural order had been inverted. Children’s desires were prioritized for the day and a chaos had emerged. The epic chaos of children touching their parents’ dead bodies.

Sir Henry Shark-Killer and I grabbed a heart each, and lungs, and a liver. Except there was just one problem: there were not enough heads at the human body shop. They had just sold the last one to him! He got a semiautomatic, and I just grabbed any gun not knowing what it was, and I pulled the trigger, and “Oh no!” It was a pop gun. He shot me and this time I was dead! I lay bleeding; “Et tu Brute!” I tried to call, but I had no mouth, just a hacked-off vocal cord!

Lucien had read out this epic tale, acting every line. The other kids had been in hysterics. It had been a huge hit, and all the while the boy had really been crying for help.

I watched Thomas: he was now standing in the large white room next to the stereo, holding his glass. Veronica was by the door, yelling at him. This seemed to be their standard pose and Lucien had been asking, “What about
me
? What about
me
in all this?” I had been so busy worrying for my own safety I had neglected his. Now I had half a mind to take him with me. When, in his strange story, he turned into a shark, killing his parents—and, yes, his teacher—could his logic have been that he would kill us before we killed him? His mother, with the crime photos pinned up around her study, acted as if the body in its most degraded, mutilated state were quite natural. After Lucien made the dream catcher to protect Veronica, I’d asked Thomas about her sleeping problem. “The only person who wakes screaming is Lucien.” No wonder if he was worried the human body shop had just run out of heads.

 • • • 

I knocked at the Marnes’ front door. A few moments later an outside light switched on and Thomas opened up. “Kate! Has something happened?” I shook my head, and he closed the door slightly. “Well . . .” His attempt at a smile failed, stuck in a wince, “can we go through it tomorrow?”

Behind him Veronica appeared. “Oh, Miss Byrne!” She shook her head. “Your timing is astonishing.”

“Only under extremely rare circumstances do I visit parents.”

“Is that so?”

“In this case, it would be unforgivable for me not to stop by.”

Thomas frowned. “This might have to wait.”

“Oh no!” Veronica pushed in front of him. “Please, Miss Byrne, do come in. We don’t want your conscience burdened.”

I cleared my throat and walked straight past her into their living room. There were no rugs, no books, no clutter. Rather than aesthetic, their minimalism seemed a clue that when they mobilized it would be swift. “Sit down,” Veronica ordered, pointing to the navy couch. She stamped in the opposite direction, wearing old socks. Her walk was both jerky and feline, practiced and unconscious all at once. Turning back to Thomas, she asked, “Could you entertain our guest for a moment?” She opened the door to what I assumed was their bedroom, leaving us.

“Please,” he said simply. “You have to go.”

I sat down, putting a finger to my lips. “Wait. Wait. I came to say good-bye.”

There was something in Thomas’s expression that almost made me stand and run. I’d asked Eliza once what it would be like to fall in love. “I think it would be really disgusting,” she’d guessed, “and after you’d kissed someone you’d vomit.” Thomas looked so sad. Then he shook his head and in that moment his face grew stern. He had such a regular demeanor, such perfectly even features that he could make himself completely opaque, resolutely adult.

A door slammed and Veronica reentered the room wearing a black dress. It had fine straps and showed off her pale neck and shoulders. Free from socks, her toenails were bright red. Carrying cigarettes and an ashtray, she sat down next to
me, making the couch rock. She sat slightly too close and lighting up, said, “You’ve been drinking, I gather. Another?”

“No.” I straightened my skirt. “I can’t stay long.”

“Just indulge us.” She looked over at her husband, who stood by the stereo turning off the music. “Darling, could you? A Scotch for me and also for Miss Byrne.”

“No!” I raised my voice. “I’m sorry but I have something to say.” I now had a mental picture of how their house was laid out. There was a small pair of sneakers sitting outside the room closest to the front door. “The main reason for my visit is to express concern for Lucien. I think he’s showing signs of strain.” Since there were so few furnishings everything echoed. “Is he asleep?”

“Did you want to say good night?” Veronica inhaled, then blew smoke toward me. “Listen, he’d love you to, but I think he’d just get overexcited. Are you sure you won’t have a drink?” She flicked ash. “I wanted to make a toast; to thank you for all the help you’ve given our son.”

I felt for my purse. “Obviously, Mrs. Marne, this is awkward for a variety of reasons, but I’m just going to jump in and say my piece.” I glared at her. “Lucien’s drawings are quite disturbing. He seems to feel he’s in danger.” The purse was nestled between the couch’s arm and my thigh. “It’s not unusual for children to think their parents, in the form of monsters, are trying to murder them.” Veronica smirked and I opened the clasp, putting my hand inside. “I think you have possibly subjected your son to information inappropriate for a child. I think it is indecent of you to have left murder photographs around your house.”

She laughed.

“If you had been responsible, Mrs. Marne, you would not have allowed him access to this graphic material.” She was laughing at me. “And I blame you too.” I looked at Thomas: if I started to cry would it arouse his sympathy or libido? Veronica kept laughing, and Thomas said nothing. I put my hand around the knife’s handle. “You probably fuck all your son’s teachers! You probably fuck all his caregivers to get better service!”

“The policy,” Veronica muttered, “hardly seems to be working.”

“You don’t understand! Your child has been yelling out to anyone who’ll listen, ‘What about me!’ He feels like an orphan. He feels like you are both trying to cut his head off!”

“Enough!” Veronica moved to stand.

“No!” I took out my knife, holding it forward, and she whimpered. “He just wants to be a child! Don’t you see that? A little kid; but you are both tormenting him!” I rushed toward Lucien’s room. I almost expected him to have his bags packed—he would be better off as far as possible from here. Throwing open the door, I found the walls decorated with posters of the planets. A mural of rocket ships, hand painted, hung from the center of the ceiling. To the right, there was a red bunk bed and bookshelves full of bright spines. To the left more shelves and a table, upon which the boy’s drawing equipment was carefully organized. “Lucien!” I couldn’t see him. “Lucien!”

The door of the built-in wardrobe opened. He walked out trying to muster the dignity of, say, a judge walking from his private chambers to the courtroom. Dressed, however, in
light blue pajamas and a maroon dressing gown he looked too young and, at the same time, too rakish. One expected the crack of doorway to reveal flappers dancing, a gramophone. Instead what flashed behind him were board games and socks. I covered the knife with my beaded purse. He pretended to be looking at “files,” blank paper he was holding. “Oh, hello.” Glancing up, he acted surprised. “Why are you here?”

“Darling, Miss Byrne just stopped by for a nightcap!” Veronica quickly told him. “She wanted to wish you a good night’s sleep.”

“Oh, thank you.” He held his head high, acting along. “Would you like a seat?” He gestured to a small chair.

“Sweetie, Miss Byrne has to be going!”

“Oh, I can stay a little while.” I sat down, my knees bunched in front. I sat with my back against the wall, between Lucien and his parents. “You’ve been drawing?”

“That’s correct.” His hands were shaking. “This is the space station I have been designing. And this is their light-speed shuttle.” On his table was a jar full of coins and paper scraps—IOUs all written in different colors by Lucien himself, as if he had a variety of commissions. He saw me staring through the glass and said, “For fifty cents I can draw you anything you want. Anything.”

“Miss Byrne, it’s really past Lucien’s bedtime.” Thomas’s voice was hard.

“Draw me a picture of life underwater.”

Lucien cleared his throat. “I guess I’ll need the fifty cents.”

“Oh yes.” I kept the knife covered, fumbling open the purse with my free hand.

“Well, this has been lovely!” Veronica started. “But it’s time . . .”

I put a dollar on the table. “And draw me a picture of yourself.”

“Underwater?”

“However.”

In the textbook they’d claimed that after the child stopped drawing fruit trees, and rainbows, if he trusted you, he’d draw the real story. They had shown a picture by an eight-year-old girl of her father hanging their family dog in a tree. They’d shown a drawing done by a seven-year-old boy, in the midst of a divorce; his mother and father were pushing him off a cliff. I’d read that once, when pressed by a psychologist on the police payroll, the daughter of a terrorist kept drawing bombs, “gift boxes” that her daddy had been making, eventually securing her father’s conviction.

Veronica was clucking. “It’s very realistic.”

“Yes,” said Thomas, “yes, it’s good.”

I watched on, disheartened: Lucien was drawing a shark in cross-section; he was humming to himself as he included the vertebrae, the heart, the gills, and then the stomach. “Mum and Dad, I’ll be quick so you guys should put in orders as well.” He smiled, playing the part of the child almost too convincingly. His room set the stage. The edge of his bed was lined with soft toys; the sheets were patterned with superheroes; stickers covered every spare surface. Smiling, Lucien goaded his parents: “I guess you could write IOUs.” He was taking charge as if there’d never been a problem—his mother and father had not been fighting and I visited every other day. Lucien noticed me looking around and,
in the shark’s gut, he added a red bunk bed and a wardrobe. He then drew broken furniture spilling from the shark’s jaws. “It’s vomiting tables and chairs.”

“That’s where tables and chairs come from,” Veronica said.

I gripped the knife. “I thought you were doing a self-portrait.”

“Oh, I am.” Lucien added a boy, limbless, floating with the furniture.

I stared at the drawing. All this gore was his equivalent of the fruit trees et cetera. I could have waited all night for him to draw the real story, but Veronica and Thomas were whispering behind me. “Tell me about your picture, Lucien,” I asked quickly. “Is this boy happy or sad?”

“Well, he’s not too happy I’d say.”

“Is he unhappy on the inside too?”

Lucien looked world-weary. “Probably he’d be bleeding a lot.”

I paused. “What is good about him?” There was silence. “What is bad about him, Lucien? Has he ever felt too sad to play?” Veronica stood between her son and me. “Does he ever feel too sad to sleep?” I was screaming now. “Does he ever have nightmares?” Thomas had put his hand under my arm, and was yanking me to my feet. I raised the knife.

“Kate!” Thomas growled. “Put it down!”

I stared at the knife’s blade; then at Thomas’s face, distorted like the money shot. His face was huge and angry in the second before he forced me into a headlock. I was gasping, struggling. “Let me go!” I felt I was inhaling water. “Let me go.” I needed to breathe, but he only held me tighter.

“Put the knife down!”

I dropped it. “Please don’t kill me!”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Thomas released his grip. “
Shut up,
will you?” I half-skidded, half-lurched toward the bunk bed. Then he took me by the hair, pulling me out of his son’s bedroom, through the room with no rug, to the front door. In seconds I was on the ground, tasting dirt. I looked up. Behind Thomas rose his white house. Each window was now illuminated; light rolled off the tip of every leaf. “Kate, not all things have to be so momentous!” Thomas yelled. Veronica stood watching from the doorway, her hand over her mouth. Thomas made a sound like a dog in great pain. Then, he stood up straight. His expression stunned me: in his secret heart he imagined Graeme Harvey knocking off this whining girl who’d started to make trouble for him with his family. Then, coming home, he’d seen his furious wife, and thought, Well, while I’m at it. He’d have gone to bed with blood on his hands, but woken up a single man. “Now go! Get away from here!” Thomas snarled at me. He turned and pushing Veronica inside he slammed the door behind them. I lay on the ground: I was the only one to see the small silhouette, standing watching from the window.

• MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT •