Greely's Cove (45 page)

Mitch nodded, bit his rashy lower lip, and just managed to hold back a flood of enraged tears. Jeremy rose from the bed to head for the door.

“I know that I can count on you, Mitchell,” he said with a confident smile. “I know that you appreciate your obligations. You
will
find a meal for my brother, and you will do so before the full moon wanes, which means that you have one more night. After tomorrow night, Mitchell, it will be too late, so please don’t waste any time in this matter—for your own sake.”

With that he turned and glided out of the room. A moment later Mitch heard the front door close.

The golden rays of morning flooded through Carl Trosper’s window and fell across his face, waking him. He rolled to his side and turned his back to the sun, craving the blankness of the dreamless sleep that he had sampled only in fits during the night. But awareness won out and wrested him away from his pillow, forcing the day upon him. He poked his feet into a pair of slippers and wrapped himself in a terrycloth robe, then steered himself into the hallway, where he lingered before his son’s closed bedroom, worrying. Hoping. Dreading.

He twisted the knob and pushed open the door, saw Jeremy mounded over with blankets in his bed and breathing in heavy, regular cycles. Carl’s innards relaxed a little.

Beyond the window of Jeremy’s room was a yellowing spirea that should have been atwitter with morning birds proclaiming a new day. But the spirea was dead and empty.

He stood a moment longer, scanning the stacks of musty tomes that lay around Jeremy’s bed, on shelves, on the little writing table that Carl had long ago expropriated from the freshman dorm at UW—books with unsettling titles like
The Magic of the Dark
and
The Protocols of the Magus.
For Christ’s sake, where were the posters of rock stars and NFL quarterbacks, the fold-out from
Sports Illustrated
’s swimsuit issue, the catcher’s mitt and the football, the plastic models of the F-16 and Ferrari Testarossa, the butterfly collection, and all the other appurtenances of a red-blooded American boy’s bedroom? Carl could have accepted that his son had too recently awakened from his sickness to appreciate the trappings of normal boyhood, if not for those eerily unwholesome, inexplicably worrisome, fucking
books.

Yes, Jeremy had come home, but not until midnight had come and gone.

And not until Carl and Renzy Dawkins had frantically telephoned every friend and acquaintance in Greely’s Cove, including Hadrian Craslowe out at Whiteleather Place, to ask if they had seen him or knew where he was.

And not until Carl had called the local police, only to hear that Chief Stu Bromton was not available. (Besides, a person isn’t officially missing for the first forty-eight hours, the dispatcher had said, absent some clear evidence of foul play.)

And not until Carl and Renzy had boarded the Roadmaster to cruise the moonlit streets for hours on end, creeping up and down alleys, circling the parking lots of every fast-food place in town, scouting school yards and playgrounds and video stores, reconnoitering parks and shoreline, climbing out of the car now and again to call his name into the darkness.

And not until Carl and Renzy had gone back to the bungalow on Second Avenue, exhausted and fevered with worry, defeated—

—had Jeremy come home. Looking no worse for wear, a smile on his beautiful face. A shrug in his shoulders and hands in his pockets. Ready for bed.

Carl had been too weary, too thankful that his son was safe, to stage the battle that must eventually erupt, a battle for explanation, for understanding and authority, for mutual respect—for all the prizes over which fathers and sons go to war with each other. Better to sleep awhile, to regroup. There would be time enough later for battle.

Renzy, bless his soul, had offered to stay the night in the guest room, just in case Carl needed his help and support. So they had all three hit their respective sacks with a minimum of fanfare and the thin pretense that everything was fine, that the universe was spinning along safely on its designated course.

And suddenly, morning.

“It’s about time you got up,” whispered Renzy from behind him, and Carl pulled the door closed softly.

“Hell, it’s only a few minutes after sunup,” he replied. “If I thought I could sleep, I’d go back to bed.”

“Yeah, but its winter, and sunup comes late in the winter, in case you hadn’t heard. It’s after seven already. You should be out there grabbing the world by the balls, shaking it around. Why can’t you be more like
me
?”

Carl came close to laughing at this, despite his weariness and distress over Jeremy. Carl was glad that his old friend had stayed over.

“In case you’re wondering,” said Renzy, who was dressed and ready for the day, “I used your razor, your soap, and your bottle of good-smell. But don’t worry, I didn’t use your toothbrush. I’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”

“I hope you didn’t use all the hot water.”

“Forget about the hot water, because you’re not taking a shower yet. I’ve got omelettes going in the kitchen. Take a whizz and pinch a loaf if you have to, and then report for breakfast.”

Which Carl did. Though he wasn’t really very hungry at first, the omelette tasted great. After the first bite he dug in and kept digging until he had devoured it, along with two slices of buttered toast and three cups of strong coffee. He and Renzy had missed dinner the previous night.

“My secret,” said Renzy after breakfast, lighting a Marlboro and leaning back from the table, “is mayonnaise—about a tablespoon whipped in with the eggs. Gives the omelette a nice, creamy texture, don’t you think?”

“Someday you’re going to make someone a great wife,” said Carl.

Renzy sipped his coffee and sucked a drag of smoke. “I hate to say this, but it’s not going to be
you,
Buckwheat. I never date people who already have kids. Speaking of kids, how long do you plan to let yours stay in the fart sack?”

“Until I can’t put it off any longer. I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to say to him.”

“Mmmh. Want to rehearse something?”

“I haven’t figured anything out yet. All I know for sure is that I miscalculated somewhere along the line, that I came back here with all kinds of rosy visions about being a father and having a son, and now all those visions are in the toilet.”

“So what did you expect?” asked Renzy, serious now. “A perfectly normal pubescent kid? I’ve told you before, Bush, and you’ve said it yourself: You can’t expect Jeremy to be like other kids, given his history. And you can’t expect yourself to be the good old all-American dad, given yours.”

But his expectations weren’t the problem anymore, Carl insisted. He had lived long enough to know that expectations were the main ordeal of life—giving them birth, coping with them when they don’t turn out, coping with them when they
do
turn out. The problem was—

He didn’t know. Something to do with those damnable books in Jeremy’s room. Or the boy’s capacity for maliciousness. Or his uncanny ability to get inside someone else’s head. Something horrible was happening to his son, Carl was sure, and he meant to find out what it was.

They sat in silence for a full minute, listening to a fresh pot of coffee perking. Renzy rolled his depleted cigarette butt into a little ball and hooked it into an ashtray. Carl rose from the table and paced the floor.

“After we went to bed last night,” Carl said, “I couldn’t sleep for shit, so I got up and stared at the sky through the window for half an hour. The stars were out, and I tried to find the constellations and remember all their names. I thought back to when I was a kid, about fourteen—and you might remember this, too, because I’m sure we talked about it—I read that the light from those stars has been traveling a long time before it ever reaches the earth. Years, hundreds or thousands or even
millions
of years. Ever since then, whenever I’ve looked up at the stars, I’ve always wondered if they’re still there—I mean, really
there.
Why couldn’t they have just given off their light and winked out, like somebody flipped off the switch? Or gone supernova or something? It might be millions of years before anyone would ever know about it here on earth, because the light would just keep on coming, even after its source was dead.”

“Seems to me I do recall you talking about some sort of garbage like that,” said Renzy, arching one eyebrow like John Belushi.

“Why is it garbage, Renzy? We see the light from the stars, but it’s light that was made long before any of us was born, most of it before there were even humans on the earth. The point is, what we see may not really be there. Maybe there’s nothing at all where once there were stars. Or maybe there’s something
else.
”

“I’m getting the message: You think there’s something more going on with Jeremy than what you think you see, or what you’ve been told.”

“Give the man a cigar.”

“And you intend to find out what that something is, right?”

“Bingo, you win a side of beef.”

“And just
how
, pray tell, do you intend to do this?”

Carl sat down at the table again, folded his arms and leaned on them, studied the sleeves of his terrycloth robe. He hoped that what he was about to say would not sound wild.

“Craslowe. It all has something to do with Craslowe, Renzy. I can’t tell you how I know this, but he’s hiding something from me. I’m going to find out what it is, and I’m going to start today.”

A flicker of shadow crossed Renzy’s green eyes as he lit a fresh cigarette.

The telephone call from Dr. Esther Cabaza came just as Lindsay Moreland was wrapping up a meeting with a new client, and she waited until the young man was out the door of her office before picking up the phone.

“Esther, hello. Sorry about the wait.”

“No problem. How’s your morning going?”

“Fine, so far—great, in fact. My first client of the day was a nineteen-year-old security guard who just won two million dollars in the Washington lottery. He wants to give a third of it to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, another third to a shelter for the homeless, and the rest he wants to invest with us. Can you believe it?”

“Does this mean there’s a smidgen of decency left in the world?”

“Yes—there apparently is some decency left. It’s good to get a taste of it now and then.”

“And how! Anyway, the reason I called: I heard back from my people in Olympia concerning your nephew’s shrink, so I thought I’d better get in touch with you right away. Lindsay, are you sure you got his name right?”

“Well, I think so. It’s Hadrian Craslowe—Oxford, Cambridge, some mental health institute in Switzerland.”

“No middle initial or anything else that might differentiate him?”

“Not that I know of. Is there a problem?”

“Listen to this: The state board of clinical psychologists licensed him to practice about fourteen months ago after he passed the board examination—which he did with flying colors, by the way. They’ve got copies of his diplomas, peer reviews, certifications, and some papers he wrote for the Royal Academy of Mental Health Consultants in England. Everything looks on the up and up.”

“Then I’m authorized to breathe a sigh of relief, right?”

“That might be a little premature, Lindsay. One of the state board’s staff guys telephoned Oxford University—let’s see, I think it was Trinity College....” Lindsay heard the shuffling of papers on Dr. Cabaza’s end. “Yes, here it is: Trinity College, Office of Academic Records, Oxford, England. The people there dug out the records of one Hadrian Craslowe, physician and surgeon
—not
a shrink, because there wasn’t any such thing as a shrink back then—who took his degree in medicine in 1754. Needless to say, it can’t be the same guy.” Esther laughed gustily.

But Lindsay did not. “And that’s
it?
No Hadrian Craslowe since then?”

“None on the record. That’s not the end of it, I’m afraid. The Royal Academy of Mental Health Consultants has never heard of him, or at least that’s what they said on the phone. They have no record of a Hadrian Craslowe or anyone with a similar name who wrote articles or conducted studies for them. The documents he gave to the Washington board must’ve been extraordinarily well-done forgeries.”

“Oh, for the love of...”

Lindsay’s mind started to race through a maze of absurd but harrowing possibilities, none of them rational, all having to do with the black tale that Hannie Hazelford had spun in Lindsay’s living room three nights earlier.

“Esther, there’s got to be some other explanation. I can’t believe Dr. Craslowe is a fraud.”

“It does seem hard to believe, and that’s why I wondered whether he had used some other name while attending Oxford and doing work for the Royal Academy. Even so, it wouldn’t explain why his present name is on the documents that he gave to the state board. If he’d changed his name for some reason and had updated his credentials, then the folks at Oxford should’ve known about it. They should have it in their records.”

“But how on earth could he have slipped forgeries by the Washington authorities? I thought they were in business to protect us from that kind of thing.”

“It wouldn’t be that hard to do,” answered Dr. Cabaza, “if the forgeries were extremely good ones. The state board relies primarily on the testing process to weed out the incompetents and the charlatans. For what it’s worth, your guy is probably qualified to practice, or he wouldn’t have passed the exam.” This, coupled with the fact that Craslowe had worked a veritable miracle with Jeremy, might have given Lindsay some reassurance, but for the apprehensions that Hannie Hazelford had planted in her mind. Lindsay had hoped that a check of Craslowe’s credentials would give the lie to Hannie’s ravings, but the opposite had happened.
Contradiction:
Hadrian Craslowe was a fraud who had worked a very authentic miracle. Lindsay’s apprehension sharpened.

“If you want,” continued Dr. Cabaza, “I’ll ask the board to keep checking, which they’ll probably want to do anyway, having found out this much. If you could recall the name of the institution in Switzerland...”