The Fisher Boy (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight

I had to be more open with the police, about what I’d discovered. So, the day after the kidnapping, without mentioning it to Miriam, I stopped by the station to tell Sergeant Almeida that if Miriam didn’t remember any possible enemies, I now did—the street children she’d caught stealing in her shop who lived on land once owned by Thomas Royall. That madman had gone berserk at the Royall exhibition…There had to be some connection to all of this.

Listening to me, Sergeant Almeida was as calm as though I were reporting a lost cat. “The commune is in Truro.”

Was he introducing the idea of police jurisdiction? I couldn’t believe it! “They’re panhandling in Provincetown, smoking dope on our beach—”

“We’re quite confident that Chloe Hilliard’s disappearance is unrelated to the Truro community.”

I remembered something from my visit with Jason that could prove him wrong: Jason’s beeper sounding the very evening of Chloe’s disappearance, while we were in that chill room with the fireplace and Royall’s swords. Something had shaken Jason that night; someone had phoned him with news that transformed his manner from ashram hipster to very worried man. I almost told Almeida this, but stopped with an account of my first visit to Truro, my meeting with the Giant and the girls in the Truro woods. I didn’t mention Jason at all, I couldn’t divulge how far my investigation was going without revealing my motive for doing all this—my finding Ian’s body and the suggestion that he was my brother.

Almeida scraped back his chair, signaling our discussion was done. “Mark, you’re not a policeman. Even if you play one on the stage.” He smiled at his joke, then, when I was halfway out of the room, he called, “Be careful. Don’t get in over your head. Leave this investigation to professionals.”

***

No one was suggesting the fundamentalists were behind Chloe’s disappearance. The third day Chloe was gone, they collected outside Miriam’s house. Like carolers lost in the wrong season, they were singing hymns and holding candles protected by punched-out Dixie cups.

“They think they have a monopoly on issues about children,” Miriam snapped. “They’re not going to co-opt my little girl.”

The singing seemed to grow louder. Arthur felt compelled to acknowledge them. “Perhaps that will drive them away,” he hoped.

But when he returned from the porch, he was more agitated than before, and the singers had failed to disperse. “
He’s
with them. That punk.”

Edward, of course.

“See for yourself,” Arthur told me.

Miriam stepped into her buffalo-hide sandals.

“Stay here, spare yourself,” I told her.

I recognized a few of them: Alicia, the receptionist from their office, and the Soldier who’d ordered Edward around, angry he’d bought chains from a “foreign” manufacturer. Edward himself was singing at the back of the crowd, in the shadow of a dogwood, outside Miriam’s fence. His candle, I noticed, had blown out.

On Miriam’s porch, I became the de facto center of attention. I waited while their hymn spawned verse after verse. When they finally finished, I spoke words as hackneyed as any I’d ever heard, ending with, “Thank you for keeping Chloe in your hearts.”

Then Arthur joined me. While he thanked the Christian Soldiers for their prayers and concern and subtly suggested they grant Miriam some peace, I slipped out the back of the house to circle around and accost Edward.

“You’re bothering Miriam,” I whispered.

“It wasn’t my decision—”

“It never is, is it? Where have you been? You haven’t been at their office.”

“They’ve been reorganizing,” Edward answered.

Defying Arthur’s wishes, the fundamentalists began a new hymn. Alicia was singing in a clear contralto voice only a few feet away, so I motioned for Edward to move into the driveway, so that a sculpture on the lawn, a sheet of tormented copper, blocked her view of us talking.

“Do you know anything about Chloe Hilliard’s disappearance?”

“Of course not.”

“This Golden One isn’t behind it?”

“How would I know?! Don’t use that tone on me.”

“Miriam’s daughter is missing. If anything happens to that little girl because of you—”

He stepped back toward the fundamentalists, who were singing “Abide with Me.”

I switched tactics.
“Please.
Meet me, I want to talk.”

He agreed, to get rid of me, to prevent my embarrassing him further.

“Nine o’clock tomorrow night, on the beach just in back of our office.”

Our office.

Chapter Twenty-nine

He actually showed up, on time, alone in the night fog. His wardrobe was suffering. Gone were the clothes he’d “borrowed” from Arthur, the flashy new things of his kept period, replaced by items culled from second-hand stores; tonight, a yellow shirt of something like cheesecloth and pants the drab green used for painting military vehicles.

The beach was empty, the fog thickening, so that it was like being in the center of a cloud, like heaven in old Sunday school pictures. Edward took my hand and squeezed it between his palms. I wondered, could he
act
this well? “Thank you for coming,” he said. “Thank you for coming to see me.”

This after I’d ordered him here. And I was coming for information about Chloe, about Ian, not a social visit with this man-boy of fragile loyalties. But there was no seduction in Edward’s manner, just the sexlessness of desperation.

He seemed eager to confide. “I knew the man in the museum.”

At first, I thought he meant Clarence Peever, the elderly guard who’d been stabbed, now recovering at his son’s house in Cotuit.

Edward clarified his remark. “I mean the man who was disturbed, the man who went crazy, the man who passed away in jail.”

We were sitting on the damp sand, dark as ash in the fog. We huddled against a seawall, partially hidden by a couple of dories, belly-up like dead fish.

“I knew the man who attacked those people…He was my brother.”

“What?” He said it again. I had thought they might have some sort of connection, but not this close. It took a second to register, then I assessed his features, comparing them with the madman with broken teeth and Biblical hair.

I’d had a brother who’d died too, I thought. Instinctively, I reached out to touch him, to comfort him as he began crying, but he flinched and drew away toward the rust-streaked concrete of the seawall. “We don’t look very much alike, I know. He—Clark—was schizophrenic. He was okay, manageable, when he took his medication. But they took it away, they wouldn’t let him have it. So he kept just the bag, the plastic bag for his pills. That’s what he swallowed to commit suicide.”

“Who are ‘they’?” I said. I knew, but wanted him to answer.

“The Circle of the Harmonic Peace.”

That wasn’t the answer I’d expected. “Who?” I knew it was wrong, but I said, “From your church?” To see if he’d dodge assigning the blame.

“Of course not. They’re tight-assed bullies, but they’re not murderers.” Then Edward pumped some asthma medication into his lungs and wiped his face with his sandy fingers. With vehemence he said, “I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon, like you and your buddy Ian.” He sneezed. “Bless you,” I said, and my blessing seemed to appease him.

He said, “I grew up in Vermont. In a shithole you tourists avoid.” Then he told his story—or the most I’d heard to date.

He grew up with Clark and his parents in a rickety wooden house with a metal roof, with a barn full of rats and rusting tractor parts, on a farm whose long-fallow fields were reverting to forest. His father drove milk trucks, those gleaming silver tanks you see on the road. It was strange, Edward said; they seldom drank milk. City people think rural families eat healthy, surrounded by rich earth to generate produce, by animals to yield eggs and meat, but Edward’s family “lived on Kool-aid and Spam.”

Their hardscrabble existence darkened as Clark became worse, as he heard voices, saw angels in cornfields and demons riding the backs of cows. “My mother was very religious,” Edward said. She joined a religious book club and began reading about the Essenes, about the Gnostic Gospels, about the Kabbalah. He described an exhausted woman, letting the macaroni burn on the stove while scanning the sacred texts of the world to see if any of them offered a reason, even an excuse, why her son was mad, in the barn, thinking the rats were whispering prophecies. Edward was an A-student, but Clark left school at fifteen, wandering the roads, nights, in all seasons, in the rain and sleet and snow, praying and seeing visions, almost getting killed by an oil truck near Cornish.

Then Edward’s father was laid off from work. He held a series of odd jobs, in a factory making boxes, in a quarry cutting granite for gravestones, then these too ended and he became restless and distraught. Like his eldest son, he took to the road, driving aimlessly in his rotting Oldsmobile, sometimes disappearing for longer periods than Clark.

Once, on a highway in western New Hampshire, he met a man who changed his life. He was a hitchhiker with a backpack of pamphlets about a group called the Circle of the Harmonic Peace. “It was ironic, after my brother’s visions and my mother’s reading, that it was my father who became the real religious fanatic,” Edward said. He’d been a lukewarm Methodist who’d come close to atheism when Clark was first diagnosed as schizophrenic, but, quickly, this group, this Circle, took over his life.

“What about the Golden One?”

“That came later.” Soon after his father began studying with the Circle of the Harmonic Peace, he found a new job. “Or the job found him, as he liked to put it. He believed everything was destiny. My mother wanted him to junk all the mysticism bullshit and become his old practical self again. She burnt her religious books in the incinerator, the day my father started spouting his God-speak. She said, ‘You can’t let this cult interfere with your new work.’” Edward didn’t specify what his father’s new job was, but from what I could gather, it was something manual, like construction.

But Edward’s father grew more and more enthralled with the Circle. He believed Clark’s illness was “punishment for harm done in past lives.”

Again, I asked, “Who is the Golden One?”

A beagle emerged from the fog, followed by a taut chain, then a woman, a brunette.

“They bleach their hair—”

“Some of them.”

“They pass themselves off as Scandinavians.”

“In Provincetown, at times.”

Eventually, his father left his new job, shuttling his family to communities in Maine and Massachusetts.

“In Truro.”

“No,” Edward stated. “My father never made it to Truro. He died of pancreatic cancer, with shame as an underlying cause. He died six months before the move to Truro.”

“Shame?”

“For breeding at all once he’d fathered a child like Clark. ‘A child with a blight,’ they called it, defective.”

Despite his humble wardrobe, he still retained a boyish beauty. “But there was nothing wrong with you.”

He laughed.

Then I realized these people would of course consider his sexuality a blight.

Stoic, determined, his mother adapted to life in the group, becoming their chief bookkeeper. She had little choice; the medication for Clark was becoming more and more expensive, and her husband had sold their house and most of their possessions and given the money to the community.

“They trained me as a chef,” Edward said, “cooking expensive, foreign recipes for visiting dignitaries, people they wanted to impress, potential donors.” Edward added, “They called them ‘seeds.’ Then they got some bad publicity, in New York and out west, and the donors, the seeds, took a hike. So I became less useful.”

“Not much call for a good bouillabaisse.”

“I ran away. I hitchhiked to Provincetown. To the beach where Arthur found me.”

“Where does Ian fit in?”

“He was the Anti-Midas.”

“The Anti-Midas?”

“Everything Ian touched turned to shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was obnoxious. Like I need to tell you? You’re the guy who gave him the Budweiser shower.” He was cocky and coquettish again. “Hey, you could’ve killed him. You were the last guy in the nude section the day he got offed.”

Except for the Asian. “Did Ian know those people in Truro? Did Ian know those bogus Scandinavians? Or this Circle of the Whatever-You-Call-It?”

“I think so.”

“
How did he know them? Why did he know them?”

“I really have to go,” Edward said.

“Did Ian know those lunatics in Truro? I want an answer!”

“
Yes!” Edward bellowed into the fog so that even I became self-conscious that the Christian Soldiers might hear us.

“How did he know them?” I asked quietly, to calm him.

“Through some legal bullshit. I don’t know the details, so don’t ask me.”

“Did those people in Truro kill Ian?”

“It’s possible,” Edward said, using his Mona Lisa smile. “Unless you got him first.”

“You disappeared the morning his body was found—”

“That was just a coincidence, I told you that before. Arthur kept copping a feel.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police? About those people in Truro abusing your brother? Withholding his medication, that’s abuse. Then forcing him onto the street…”

“My mother is still there!”

The woman exercising her beagle was now returning.

“I have to go. They’ll miss me at the office.” He added, “To you, these Christian Soldiers are bogus intruders, annoying wackos. To me, they’re protection. They’ve saved my life. I mean it.”

How much of the rest of it did he mean? “Was Ian connected to the Christian Soldiers?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Do the Christian Soldiers know you lived in the Truro community?”

“Sort of.”

Getting a straight answer was like trying to bottle the fog. I took both his shoulders in my hands and he squirmed. “If those people in Truro had kidnapped Chloe, would you know about it?”

“No way, I’m out of the loop.” He brushed the sand from his donated pants, then scurried through the fog toward the rigid embrace of the fundamentalists.