The Fisher Boy (20 page)

He rose, crossed the room, then took one of the swords down from its pegs above the mantle. He ran his fingers along the rust dulling its blade. “Did you know there was a murder on this property?”

“When?” Adrenaline sluiced through my system.

“When Royall and his false Utopia were in full bloom.” He held the sword between the tips of his fingers, as though it were a delicate thing, capable of being damaged by the oil from his palms.

“Who was killed?”

“I can’t say.”

“Royall disappeared. I thought the inquest concluded that he’d drowned himself. I know his body was never recovered.” I was emboldened by his evasiveness. “A friend of mine was killed this summer…” I would say it, it was only two words, and I wasn’t accusing Jason or his colleagues, not overtly. “…Ian Drummond.”

“Dwell on the positive, Mark,” Jason said. “Leave those matters to the authorities.”

Aren’t you all authorities here? I could have said. But it was time for me to compliment him about something. “Your preserves are so delicious. Do you grow the fruit here?”

“We grow a great deal here, fruit and corn and beans and herbs, using the most advanced technology available. We’ve also invested in aquaculture, raising flounder and oysters and clams. We’ve brought this place out of darkness. Once, it was unclean.”

“Why was this place unclean?”

“Because Royall defiled it. He defiled a sacred place.” Then worry confused his features as his beeper went off, and, cursing, he went scurrying from the room, without apology or explanation.

For a few moments, I sat still as though I were posing for my portrait, aware of the possibility of hidden cameras. This might have been planned, some sort of trick to get me to commit some infraction of their rules. But a paperback copy of the cult’s book—
Purity of the Light
—was tempting me. It was on the floor, almost within arm’s reach, half-hidden by a cushion, so perhaps Jason hadn’t seen it. On its cover, a disembodied eye loomed above a pyramid, like the design on the back of one-dollar bills. Surely this was their Bible, the teachings of their leader, but no author was listed on the cover.

I dared to pick it up; after all, reverence and curiosity are compatible. No author was listed on its title page or spine. I thumbed through the chapters, “Renunciation of the Self,” “The Shining Word,” “Germination,” and “Message from the Runes.” Runes—yes! —the Giant in the woods had first thought I was interested in runes. Royall had been attracted to this land by the granite boulder in the photographs at the exhibit. Flat like an altar, it was inscribed with designs that some argued were Norse and others, pre-Columbian Native American or a hoax. Obviously, it held significance for both Royall
and
these people. I skimmed the next few pages, but it was abstract to the point of meaninglessness, leavened with apocalyptic threats about something called “the Fall.”

Leafing through the book, I felt as self-conscious as actors in an improv skit going nowhere. So I mimed some distracting gestures with my papers, with my scripts, then I covered their book with a manila folder and tucked them both back into my briefcase. If caught stealing the book, I’d say I’d slipped it away by accident, or say I’d taken it on purpose because I wanted to learn more, that’s why I’d come…

I could hear nothing of any activity happening elsewhere in the building because of the white noise, the hum the air-conditioners in the windows were generating. But I wondered why Jason and this building were so clean, scrubbed, and the children in the woods and in Provincetown were so dirty, and why had Jason volunteered information about a murder, even a murder committed so long in the past? Why bring up the subject of murder, if these people were responsible for killing Ian?

Fifteen, twenty minutes passed. I wanted to leave this refrigerated building. If I’d brought my own car, I’d have driven away. Through the window, I could see Jason’s junky Mercedes parked in the long grass of the yard. If he’d left the keys in the ignition, I’d have stolen his car to escape. Of course, I hadn’t seen whether the gate had shut behind us…This room felt suffocating, even though it was bright and large. I was standing by the mantel, hugging myself against the cold, examining the swords on the wall, deciding they were too fragile, too rusty, to have caused Ian’s wounds…Then Jason barged in.

“We can go now.” He made no further comment. Since I was thrilled to go, I just said, “Okay.”

He hardly spoke the whole way back, but drove faster and faster, tailgating, passing on the right, using the breakdown lanes or soft shoulders of roads. All the while, I wondered whether I’d done anything to inspire his foul mood, been caught lifting the book by surveillance devices.

“I’m sorry you’re having such a bad day,” I finally muttered as he steered the car onto Bradford Street. “What?” he seemed surprised. “I’m fine, man.”

Getting out at the MacMillan Wharf parking lot, I said, “Thanks for your advice.”

He didn’t answer. He cut the engine and fished through some road maps in the rear of the car. “Yes!” he exclaimed, yanking his discovery out from the maps—one of those seat covers composed of fat wooden beads that always remind me of an abacus.

He draped this cover over the driver’s seat. “My fucking back, I’ve gotta get it X-rayed.” Then, he drove carefully through the traffic, away, ignoring my feeble wave.

Then the backrest made me remember, remember Edward and his hitchhiking story, of the man in the van who’d blared classical music, who’d taken him to the Province Lands to rape him. That rapist had used one of those beaded seat covers. Was this a coincidence? Was Edward telling the truth?

In my apartment, I pressed the play button and a tinny rendition of Miriam’s voice came quavering out of the speaker: “Mark, where are you? Please call me as soon as possible!” and “Mark, come quick, it’s an emergency! The police are here!” then “Oh, God, please call me! Please come! Somebody’s taken Chloe!”

Chapter Twenty-seven

Miriam was clutching a toy, a beige plastic horse. She wasn’t sobbing, but her face was flushed and swollen with grief. Police crowded the living room, incongruous amid the art books and bowls of beads.

She hugged me with a hunger, desperation. She told me Arthur was in Easthampton, visiting an old friend from Yale. Concentrating on me, the one face that wasn’t official, she related the horror of her day. She had been designing a special commission for a debutante from Houston. It was a kind of crown, a net, twisted wires of gold set with the girl’s favorite stones, Australian fire opals. These Texans, not oil or cattle people, their money derived from laundromats, had bought a place on the Vineyard and the father loved Miriam’s designs and commissioned this crown for his daughter’s coming-out party, a huge bash featuring jungles of orchids and holograms by engineers from theme parks in Orlando. Miriam had been driving to Hyannis to pick up the opals from the father; they were expensive, so he was reluctant to ship them.

Gemma, a girl from the high school, was minding both Chloe and Miriam’s shop while she went on this errand. Chloe was behind the counter with her favorite books and the mermaid doll Roberto had gotten at the fast-food place. Miriam began crying. “Chloe felt sorry for the mermaid because she’d broken her arm.”

A customer at Miriam’s shop who had been in the day before wanted a certain kaleidoscope with watery colors that reminded him of his favorite stained-glass windows at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. So he and Gemma had had to look through all the kaleidoscopes, while Chloe sat contented behind the counter. This could have been a major sale; these wood and brass kaleidoscopes were hand-made, some costing hundreds of dollars. So Gemma’s attention was focused on the bright, fracturing scenery inside them.

“Someone ducked behind the counter and just took her,” Miriam said.

“Or she could have wandered outside then been abducted in the street,” one policeman added.

Gemma remembered no one asking for Miriam, no one checking to be sure she wasn’t there at the shop.

Sergeant Almeida said to Miriam, “We really have to insist, Ms. Hilliard,
who
is the little girl’s father?”

“Her name is Chloe.” Like a child, Miriam ignored the question and wound the key in the plastic palomino’s stomach. It played a version of “Happy Trails to You.” “This pony was mine, when I was Chloe’s age. You can still see my tooth marks in the plastic. Chloe bites her toys the same way.” Deep, dry sobs interrupted Miriam’s speech. “She is afraid of the dark. Chloe is afraid of the dark…”

“Mr. Winslow, can you please tell Ms. Hilliard how important it is that she cooperate fully with this investigation?” Almeida asked.

I felt like a hypocrite. “You’ve got to tell them everything, Miriam.”

Almeida’s tone was tart: “In most instances when children disappear, the root cause is trouble between their parents. How can you be sure Chloe isn’t with her father? Who is Chloe’s father?”

“I was desperate, I’d tried everything.” Miriam put the plastic horse down on the coffee table, by a book about Cezanne and a dish of carob candy.

She’d been engaged long ago, just after graduating from Bryn Mawr. Her fiancé was a Philadelphia boy from an old Main Line family. They’d met during a teach-in at Penn, then joined the Peace Corps together. They were posted in different parts of Peru, she near Lima, he in a village in the Andes. “Brad Arkwright was his name.” The warmth of memory softened Miriam’s voice. “I called him Brad. My friends called him Mr. Right, and I guess he was.”

Miriam became pregnant in Peru, on one of Brad’s visits to Lima. “His uncle was in the state department. He smoothed my exit from the Peace Corps. I felt guilty about leaving those poor people I’d been helping, living in houses made from packing crates and cardboard—Lima’s in the desert, it hardly ever rains—but Brad and his family insisted I take an apartment in Miraflores, somewhere clean, with no fleas, for the baby’s sake. I moved when I was three months pregnant.”

“We were going to be married when Brad came to Miraflores.” There’d been trouble in his village, a land dispute, so they’d been forced to postpone their wedding, which was to be quick and intimate, just themselves and an Episcopal priest from the American colony.

Then, one winter night, Brad called from the Lima airport. He’d flown in from Cuzco, spur of the moment, giddy and eager, having notified the priest to perform the wedding the next morning. When Miriam drove to meet Brad at the airport, it was foggy; a grit-colored mist hung in the air. It was hazardous to pause, dangerous to stop, at red lights in certain districts of Lima: carjackers and thieves frequented some intersections. Miriam was driving fast.

“Brad was so happy. He was wearing this little clay charm a village elder had given him…” Her voice trailed away. “…To bless our wedding.”

“It was…a police car, of all things. At this intersection that was usually empty. It hit us broadside, on the passenger side of my car. Brad was killed instantly. I lost the baby. Almost every bone in Brad’s body was broken, but that little clay amulet was whole, on the cord around his neck.” She was crying softly, in a kind of moan. “I sometimes wondered if that charm…was some kind of curse.”

Miriam quickly composed herself. She’d had other relationships, but nothing special, nothing lasting. At forty, she’d begun placing ads for a known sperm donor in the alternative press. She attended meetings of Single Mothers by Choice.

When she was transitioning out of social work, taking a course at the Boston Center for Adult Education, jewelry-making, beginning to solder and set semi-precious stones, the start of the business that brought her to Provincetown, she met a man named Martin, just Martin. He was a claims adjuster at an insurance company in Copley Square.

Miriam said, “I was taking a terrible chance.”

After one class, they went to a Spanish restaurant for tapas—“rabbit, quail, and baby eels, I can still remember”—and a pitcher of sangria. The restaurant’s grille work and rough stucco walls reminded Miriam of Peru, and she kept remembering Brad and the accident. It had been her idea, choosing the place, but it had backfired.

“By dessert, I was a wreck, crying into my flan. Martin insisted on taking me home. What happened next was one-hundred percent my fault.” She arranged the things on the coffee table, so that the book, the dish of candy, and the plastic horse didn’t touch one another
.
“That was the last time I ever saw Martin. He dropped out of the class. Shortly afterward, I found out that I was pregnant.”

Almeida said, “He never tried to contact you, this Martin?”

Miriam shook her head no.

Almeida said: “So he knew where you lived, he’d been to your apartment. Did you keep the same Boston address? Or did you move?”

“The same Cambridge address.”

“So he could have contacted you, but he didn’t.”

“He just vanished. I checked with the people at the Center, but no Martin had ever officially registered for the course. He was just auditing it, apparently…illegally.”

“He never knew that you’d had his child?”

“No,” Miriam said, pleading for us to leave her alone.

***

Police and volunteers searched for Chloe. The news broadcast footage of men, women, and children scouring the underbrush, of dogs with trained noses sniffing at moss and at the roots of the stunted pines. Without success. A pond was drained in Welfleet. Just that thought drained Miriam’s strength, as if she were losing blood as the pond lost water. “But we can’t think that way,” she told me, husky with grief. “Chloe will be fine.”

State parks and forests were thoroughly combed. Missing-person posters were distributed throughout the Northeast, so that Chloe smiled from telephone poles and supermarket bulletin boards, on screens on the Internet.

A devastated Arthur hurried back from Long Island. We both kept close to Miriam’s side; Roger hired temporary extra help to manage things at the White Gull. Roberto, incredibly, stayed in Maine, without so much as a word of concern. I remembered his repairing Chloe’s broken mermaid, his improvising a doll’s hospital bed from scraps of old crochet. He had two sisters of his own, he ought to have had some compassion, some decency, even some curiosity, but kidnapping, I guessed, made poor comic material, so he wasn’t too interested in Chloe’s trauma. It wouldn’t pull laughs onstage.

Miriam became, alternately, hysterical then serene, sure Chloe was injured or dead, then certain some form of contact—a request, a ransom note, an explanation—would come. Miriam’s was a living hell where sleep and food were irrelevant. Overnight, exhaustion sharpened her features. She pulled out some old family albums, photographs from the Seventies, of Brad with his freckles and wooly sideburns: with the village mayor in the Andes, in a pen of llamas, swimming in Miriam’s pool at Miraflores. The color of the pictures was already fading, making them prematurely antique. Miriam was in the photographs too, resembling a younger, more adventurous sister. “I wonder if Brad would give me a second look today,” she said. “Why, I’m old enough now to be his mother.” Then the word “mother” made her weep.

My own photographs were ready, of Chloe and her sandcastle by Provincetown Harbor. I kept remembering her small, hot hand, holding it as we walked to the beach. A panic kept washing over me, a sensation that the goodness, kindness, the stability of the world, had come undone, that chaos at best, evil at worst governed all things.

Her helplessness was what tortured me most. Her utter dependence on the kindness of her captors—who would be people without kindness, of course.

Any harm to Chloe overwhelmed the hideousness of Ian’s death. I couldn’t imagine this little girl—the indulged only child of a middle-aged mother—in captivity.

Miriam had no enemies that I knew of, had had no fights with employees at her shop, or within her circle of friends. Arthur was her closest relative, except for elderly aunts in Scottsdale and Grosse Pointe, whom she seldom saw.

Lying at night on Miriam’s couch, I kept wondering where Chloe was at that very moment, in what frightening circumstances. Any fear I’d had this summer was dwarfed by hers. I thought too of Ian, in his grave with the granite sphinx, with the fumes from the fish plant wafting past the tombstones, and of the madman buried in a potter’s field.

Why had any of this happened? What chain of sordid links bound all these events together? Now, more than ever, I was determined to find answers. Not just for myself but for Chloe, for Miriam.