lost boy lost girl (16 page)
“This house
has
to have a really terrible history,” Mark said.
“Its present isn’t all that wonderful. I mean, Mark, the place really gives me the creeps. It’s almost like there’s someone else in here with us.”
“I know what you mean,” Mark said. “Let’s go downstairs and get it over with. I’ll do the real searching tomorrow.”
One floor down, the boys roamed through the living room and the dining room, exploring closets and cabinets and examining the floorboards for secret caches. Mark appeared to be observing architectural eccentricities he was not bothering to describe. He lifted his eyebrows, he pushed his lips in and out, he went through all these little gestures of thought and comprehension. Whatever he was comprehending he kept to himself.
Too soon for Jimbo’s comfort, they found themselves back in the kitchen. If anything, he felt worse about that extra room than he had earlier. A bad, bad feeling seemed to flow directly from it. As if in response, the door in the wall seemed to have grown larger, taken on increased density.
“I’m not sure I want to see what’s in there,” he said.
“Then don’t go in.”
Mark went to the door and pulled it open. He stepped back, making it possible for Jimbo, whose heart felt as though it were in free fall, to move up alongside him. Within, the boys could see only a flat sheet of darkness. Mark made a noise low in his throat and went up to the door, and Jimbo trailed a reluctant half step behind.
“We’re just going to do this,” Mark said. “It’s only an empty room, that’s all.” With a single step, he moved into the dark room. Jimbo hesitated for a moment, swallowed, and went after him into the darkness. Suddenly his face felt hot.
“I should have brought that flashlight,” Mark said.
“Yeah,” Jimbo said, without at all agreeing.
Their eyes began to adjust. Jimbo was reminded of that moment when you walk into a dark theater and pause before moving down the aisle. The featureless darkness faded to a grainy shadowland. Jimbo became aware of a faint but serious odor. Here, something animal and unpleasant had been added to the smell of emptiness and defeat exuded by the rest of the house. He realized that he was looking at a large object with a shape at once familiar and foreign.
“Shit fuck damn. What the hell is
that
?”
“I think it’s a bed.”
“That thing can’t be a
bed,
” Mark said. They moved closer to the object that dominated the room. It extended sideways under the slanting roofline and bore an initial resemblance to a bed—the bed of a cruel giant who nightly collapsed into it drunk. Thick, crude ten-foot timbers defined the sides, and sloppily assembled planks formed the rough platform on which the giant slept. They moved in closer, and without indicating anything in particular, Mark said, “Uh-oh.”
“I wouldn’t want to spend the night on that thing,” Jimbo said.
“No, look.” Mark pointed at what Jimbo had taken for a darkness in the grain of the long planks. In the center of the darkness, a pair of leather cuffs about three feet apart were fastened to the platform with chains. Another pair of restraints, a little farther apart, had been chained to the platform about four feet beneath them.
“The legs are bolted to the floor,” Mark said. His eyes shone in the darkness.
“Who was this
for
?” Then Jimbo noticed that the series of blotches, which seemed to be black, around and between the restraints were not an element of the grain. “I’m getting out of here. Sorry, man.”
He was already moving toward the door, holding up his hands as if to ward off an attacker. With a last look at the huge bed, Mark joined him. On the other side of the door, they glanced at each other, and Jimbo was afraid that Mark was going to say something, but he looked away and kept his thoughts to himself.
Feeling as weightless and vague as ghosts, they went out onto the broken little porch. Something had happened to them, Jimbo thought; something had happened to him anyhow, but he could not begin to define what it was. All the breath and most of the life had been driven from his body, as if by a great shock. What was left was just enough to float down the steps into the lush tangle of the backyard.
Jimbo remained silent until they were walking across the mown grass at the side of the house, and then he found he had to speak. “It was built to hold a kid—that bed-thing.”
Mark stopped moving and looked back.
“He strapped a kid, or maybe even a couple of kids, onto that bed-thing, and he tortured them.” He felt as though he were banging on a bass drum. “Because those were bloodstains, weren’t they? They looked black, but it was blood.”
“I think those stains on the mattress upstairs were blood, too.”
“Good God, Mark, what kind of place
is
that?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Mark said. “Unless you changed your mind about helping me. If so, tell me right now. Are you quitting?”
“No, I’ll do what you want,” Jimbo said. “But I still say we should never have gotten involved in this stuff.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” Mark said. “You know what? I feel like I was kind of
selected
. I agree with you, it’s terrible and it’s scary—but
it killed my mother!
”
“How? Explain it to me, will you?”
“I DON’T KNOW HOW!” Mark yelled. “What do you think we’re DOING here, anyhow?”
Then, for no reason Jimbo could see, Mark’s eyes changed. His face went slack and dopey. Mark looked at his empty hands, then at the ground. “Holy shit.” Still looking at the ground, he went four or five feet back the way they had come. “Jimbo, what the hell happened to that photograph album?”
Jimbo blinked.
“Did I give it to you?”
“No. You had it when we came down the stairs.”
“I must have left it in the kitchen.” Mark was nodding his head. “I didn’t take it in the room, did I?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I must have set it down on a counter so my hands would be free.”
“No,” Jimbo said, knowing what Mark intended to do. “Leave it. You already saw the pictures.”
But Mark had already set off back toward the undergrowth, and in another second he was following the path they had beaten.
“I don’t believe you’re doing this.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be right back.”
To Jimbo, it was inconceivable that anyone, even Mark, would be willing to expose himself a second time to the interior of 3323. He understood why the neighborhood had silently agreed to forget about the empty house in their midst, to let their eyes go out of focus when they happened accidentally to find themselves looking at it. There were things you
shouldn’t
look at, things better not seen.
He sat down and waited. The intense heat amplified the buzzing and clicking of insects hidden in the tall grass. Sweat dripped down the back of his neck and slithered over his ribs, cooling his skin. He kept his eyes on the back door at the top of the broken steps. His shoulders had become uncomfortably hot. He twitched at his T-shirt and rubbed his shoulders, still watching the door.
Jimbo moved around on the grass, searching for a more comfortable place to sit. He wondered if any dead chipmunks or squirrels might be decomposing in his vicinity.
Looking at his watch was a useless gesture, since he had no idea what time it had been when Mark went back into the kitchen. He looked at his watch anyway: 12:30
P.M
. Amazing. They must have been in the house for two and a half hours. It had felt much shorter than that. It was almost as if the house had hypnotized him. The thought made him glance again at his watch. Its hands had not moved.
Of course the second hand was in motion, sweeping in its inexorable, clockwise way around the circle of the dial. The little needle darted from 22 to 23, on its way to 30. Jimbo glanced across the top of the grasses at the back door. It looked as though it had never been opened.
The moving needle rolled across the finish line and without hesitation launched into a brand-new minute. Jimbo’s eyes lifted to the sinister door, and relief washed through him, followed by an intense flash of anger. Through the opening doorway stepped Mark Underhill, carrying the ugly photo album and signaling apology with his every glance and gesture. Jimbo jumped to his feet. “What took you so long?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mark said.
“Don’t you know how worried I was? Did you forget I was out here waiting for you?”
“Yo, Jimbo, I said I was sorry.”
“Your ass is sorry!”
Mark stared at him with a fixed glare. Jimbo had no idea what he was thinking. His face was still unnaturally pale. Even Mark’s lips looked white. “Didn’t you ask what took so much time?”
“Yes. What took so much time?”
“I couldn’t find the damn thing anywhere. I looked all around the kitchen, I even looked in the, you know.”
“The room with the bed.”
Mark nodded. “I went back upstairs. Guess where I found it.”
Jimbo gave him the only possible answer. “Back in the closet.”
“That’s right. It was back in the closet.”
“Well, how did it get there?”
“I want to think about that,” Mark said. “Don’t say anything, okay? Please. Any opinion you have, keep it to yourself.”
“Here’s one opinion I’m not keeping to myself—you can’t go back inside that place. And you know it! Look how scared you are. Your face is completely white.”
“I think I
could
have left it there, maybe.”
Around and around they went, Mark now claiming to be unable to remember if he had been holding the album as they went downstairs, Jimbo unable to remember if he had seen him carrying it. They were still arguing about it, though less heatedly, when they reached the bottom of Michigan Street. They turned the corner into the alley, and fell silent as if by mutual agreement. Before they parted, Mark asked to borrow the Monaghans’ Maglite, and Jimbo ran up the block and got it for him. He handed over the heavy flashlight without asking any questions.
18
From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 23 June 2003
It’s astounding. Philip had no idea of who used to live in the house across the alley from him. If he ever did know, he made himself forget it. Proximity to the home base of one of the nation’s livelier serial killers could induce denial in people a lot less prone to it than Philip. And Philip, of course, had the added incentive of being shamefully aware of being married to the serial killer’s first cousin. A share of his blood ran in her veins, a smaller share in their son’s. Can that be the reason for Philip’s dismissal of the boy? Philip loves Mark, I know that, but his love doesn’t stop him from constantly undermining him.
Thanks to Jimbo Monaghan and Omar Hillyard, I know that Philip bought the house directly behind Kalendar’s, but the purchase had to have been innocent. I don’t think he
could
have bought his place if he had known it was right behind Kalendar’s. And of course Philip bought it in a typical rush. He wanted to get out of the suburbs, where his neighbors made him feel outclassed, and he liked the idea of living in the old neighborhood, close to his school. He rushed in, thinking he understood everything, and if he ever picked up a hint about the previous owner of the house across the alley, he closed his mind to it on the spot.
When I learned about Kalendar’s house across the alley, I did not say anything to Philip until I showed him the two strange e-mails Mark had sent me before his disappearance, and even then I waited until we were in the police station with Sergeant Pohlhaus. It was quite clear to me that speaking of these matters with Philip alone would be a waste of effort. The first e-mail showed up in my Inbox two days before Mark vanished, the second the day before. Reading the e-mails only cranked up Philip’s suspicion that Mark and I had been engaged in some kind of conspiracy. Once Philip read the e-mails, he insisted on showing them to Pohlhaus, which was obviously the right thing to do. Pohlhaus read them, asked both of us a few questions, and put the printouts of the e-mails into a folder he kept in his bottom drawer. “You never know,” he said, but as he said it, he sighed. I did my best—I told them both about the connection to Joseph Kalendar, but I might as well have been talking to a couple of dogs.
From: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2003 3:24 PM
Subject: crazy but not that crazy
hi unc
wondering how u r these daze, been thinking abt u. it isn’t e z living here after what happened 2 mom. hard 2 concentrate, hard 2 keep myself in focus. now that i’m finally writing, i don’t really know what 2 say.
do u ever get some idea u think is totally messed-up mad crazy, and it turns out 2 b right? or good?
b cool
m
“Did you write back?” asked Philip; Sergeant Pohlhaus asked, “Did you respond to the boy’s e-mail?”
“Sure,” I said. “I wrote that it happens once or twice a week.”
Here is his second e-mail to me:
From: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: crazy but not that crazy
hi unc t—
deeper & deeper we go, and where we come out nobody knows . . .
so what I want to ask u is . . .
do u ever feel like u r in 1 of your own books? does the world ever feel that way 2 u?—like a tu book?
thanx,
m
“What did you tell him?” asked Philip and Sergeant Pohlhaus.
“I told him ‘never’ and ‘all the time,’” I said.
“I’m sorry?” said Sergeant Pohlhaus. He was a steely, whiplike man, and his question indicated that he was not amused.
So I showed him my e-mail:
From: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 7:45 PM
Subject: Re: crazy but not that crazy
Dear Mark,
>do u ever feel like u r in 1 of your own books? does the world >ever feel that way 2 u?—like a tu book?
Answer:
(1) Never.
(2) All the time.
What the hell is going on out there, anyhow?
Unc T
“He never answered,” I said. “But don’t you think that this mysterious project is probably involved in his disappearance?”
“Maybe,” Philip said.
Both Sergeant Pohlhaus and I looked at him. We were in a room crowded with desks. Plainclothes policemen were talking into their phones and typing up reports. When I asked Pohlhaus what the room was called, he gave me a funny look and said, “The bullpen,” as if that was something everyone should know.
“This so-called project obviously had something to do with the Sherman Park Killer,” Philip said.
“I think it was about something else,” I said. “I just learned that Mark and his friend Jimbo let themselves into that house behind yours, Philip, and after that I think Mark spent a lot of time there by himself. I think the house was his project. Or the project took place in that house. It used to belong to Joseph Kalendar.”
“That’s impossible,” Philip said. “My wife would have told me.” He looked at Pohlhaus. “This isn’t something I want everybody to know, but my wife and Kalendar were cousins.”
“That’s interesting,” Pohlhaus said. “It would have been logical for her to have said something about it at the time.”
“Philip,” I said, “did you let Nancy see your house before you bought it?”
“Why would I have done that? It was in the right neighborhood, and all the houses are pretty much alike. Besides, I had to act fast.”
“So she didn’t know until it was too late to back out. Once she realized where the new house was, I think she wanted to protect you.”
“To
protect
me? That’s . . . that’s . . .” He fell silent and seemed to ponder the matter.
“Mark was fascinated with that house,” I told Pohlhaus. “He was obsessed with it.”
“A kid would be,” Pohlhaus said. “There must be a lot of bloodstains in there. Probably a lot of other stuff, too.”
“Don’t you think you ought to go over there and take a look?”
“Hang on, maybe we already did.” Without explaining what he had just said, Pohlhaus took a little notebook from his pocket and flipped through it until he came to the page he wanted. “Is the address of that house 3323 North Michigan Street?”
I said, “Yes,” and Philip said, “How am I supposed to know?”
“It is?” Pohlhaus asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He looked at Philip. “Your son and his friend called us on the seventh of June. They wanted to inform us of their suspicions that the Sherman Park Killer had been taking refuge in an abandoned residence at 3323 North Michigan.”
“There you are,” Philip said. “That proves I’m right. Mark and that dummy were snooping around, pretending to be great detectives like your friend Pasmore. I should have known.” He looked as though he were going to spit on the floor.
“Did you know they called the police?”
“What, you think they’d tell me?” Here I got a flat, triumphant glare. “That’s why he was interested in the place. They must have seen someone in there.” He looked at Pohlhaus, whose impervious demeanor had not changed since Philip and I had come into the “bullpen.” “You guys checked it out, I’m sure.”
“We went over and had a look. The place was locked up. Had been for years.”
“You never got back in touch with my son?”
“He gave us a tip, we checked it out, and it went nowhere, like most of the tips we get from the public. We don’t follow up unless we find something useful.”
“It went nowhere, huh? Is that what you thought after my son disappeared?”
“Mr. Underhill, I am very sorry about your son, and we’re doing everything we can to find him.”
“You sit here and say that to me. Didn’t it occur to you that my son could have drawn attention to himself by his investigative efforts?”
“Not if our bad boy wasn’t there,” Pohlhaus said.
My brother looked back at me. “But that’s what all this garbage in the e-mails is about, isn’t it? These crazy ideas, and feeling like he’s in one of your books? He wants you to know he’s playing detective.”
“He could be talking about something else,” I said.
“I certainly hope you’ll let me in on whatever it is you have in mind.”
I glanced at Pohlhaus. “It seems to me that you should go back to that house and give it a much closer inspection.”
“Another country heard from,” Pohlhaus said.
The day after the break-in, Mark took the photograph album with him when he returned to the empty house. He did not want to leave it at home. His father was getting weird enough to start searching his room, and the album would be impossible to explain. Best to stow the album in its original hiding place, where it would be safe from parental discovery. Also, he wanted to consult the photographs, to go over them many times, dredging for whatever information he could pick up; since he planned to spend most of the day in that house, he more or less had to bring the pictures with him.
Late that morning, he and Jimbo had worked out the day’s schedule on their cell phones. They were both basically still in bed. Mark, having showered and dressed, was lying supine on top of the blanket while Jimbo was still prone between his sheets.
“Phase Two, I get it,” Jimbo said. “Let’s get together at the Sherman Diner around lunchtime and compare notes, okay?”
The Sherman Diner, two doors down from the former site of the old Beldame Oriental Theater, was an unofficial hangout for Quincy students. Jimbo’s mentioning it meant that he wanted to swap information with Mark but felt like seeing other people afterward. At this time, all the students in the area were constantly gabbing on their cell phones about the local murderer.
Mark said, “You go, if you want. I don’t think I’m going to be very interested in food, and I don’t feel like explaining myself to the kids who’ll be there. We’ll talk later.”
“When, like.”
“Whenever I’m done for the day, Jimbo. You have plenty to keep you busy.”
“I know.” Jimbo sounded a bit aggrieved.
He probably sensed that his best friend was holding out on him. Mark was indeed holding out on him, and he intended to keep on doing just that. While going through the house the day before, Mark had noticed many curiosities that he had not mentioned to Jimbo. In a sense, he had given Jimbo the key to understanding these oddities (if, that is, he was right about them, as he was almost certain he was), so technically perhaps he had withheld nothing. But Mark had known that Jimbo would not understand what to do with the key, or what it meant, or even that it was a key. The house, Mark had concluded, held an immense secret that had been
built into
it by the same madman who had added the ugly little room and created the giant’s bed.
After getting off the phone with Jimbo, Mark went downstairs and prowled through the refrigerator. Mark’s father shopped only when forced to do so, and he tended to buy unrelated items like bottles of olives, peanut brittle, pickles, lite mayonnaise, and Wonder Bread. On his first foray through the shelves, Mark thought he might have to go over to the 7-Eleven before getting down to business, but his next pass took in the sliding drawer, which yielded cheddar cheese, cream cheese, and some sliced salami that still looked edible. He made a salami and cheddar cheese sandwich with mayo and slid the gooey thing into a plastic bag. Then he put both the sandwich and the photograph album into a paper bag that already held a crowbar, a ripping hammer, and the Maglite, and went outside, rolling down the top of the bag to make it look smaller.
Out into the hot white sunlight he steps, our heroic boy, out into the oven the sun has made of these poor streets, moving like a jockey toward the winner’s circle, like a conqueror toward his mistress’s tent. For once in his life, he feels
locked in,
prepared for the first stage of whatever destiny will turn out to be destined for him. His fear—for he is actually filled with fear—seems to energize him, to increase his sense of purpose.
Such a manner invites rather than repels notice, and not long after he turns onto Michigan Street and begins his purposeful march toward the fourth house up the block, one Michigan Street resident inclines his head toward his living room window and immediately takes him in.
There’s that good-looking Underhill kid,
thinks Omar Hillyard,
on his way to the old Kalendar house again, I bet. Where’s Sancho Panza, the little Irish bulldog who goes everywhere with him?
God, what a handsome kid. Bold as brass! Look at him come cutting right up alongside that house . . . he’s breaking in, for sure. Little demon! If I were the Irish bulldog, I’d be wildly in love with him.
I bet he finds more than he bargained for inside the Kalendar place.
Enjoying the sensation of light warming his arms and shoulders, Mark moved onto the grass. His legs carried him along, stride after rhythmic stride. If he wanted to, Mark could walk to the Rocky Mountains, jump up one side, down the other, and roll on until he was standing ankle-deep in the Pacific.
He plunged through the tall grasses and parched weeds, bounded up the broken wooden steps, and after the slightest hesitation, opened the back door. Here was the giant’s house, and here was he, Mark the giant killer and his little bag of tricks. He had half-expected some form of resistance to his entrance, but his coming alone did not invoke the invisible spider webs and the emotional miasma of his first visit. He passed unimpeded through the door, and without bothering to check out the room containing the obscene bed, carried his laden paper bag up the stairs to the master bedroom.
An excellent carpenter had once lived in this house. The sloppiness of the addition amounted to a deliberate deception: anyone who saw it would be unlikely to guess at the extent of the adjustments its maker had made to the fabric of his house. The sheer monstrosity of the torture bed also had to be deliberate—the carpenter had built an object commensurate with the enormity of his feelings. However, when free to exercise the full extent of his skill, he had set in place a kind of builder’s tour de force. This was what Mark had not revealed to his best friend.