The Fisher Boy (29 page)

The weeklong, late-August extravaganza, our own Mardi Gras, a time when the spirit of Provincetown, sometimes summed up by Speedos and a Corona with lime, made room for some gender-bending whimsy, for rhinestones and rouge. A man in enough leather to have skinned a roundup of steers was escorting his partner in full geisha drag, face ghostly with rice powder, lips painted red and compact as a cat’s anus.

I noticed a scattering of fundamentalists, but nothing like their numbers in early- and mid-June, and their office looked closed. But Provincetown was mobbed. Carnival’s end-of-summer bacchanal, the last before Labor Day, filled the guest houses, bars, and shops with riotous crowds.

Edging into Arthur’s driveway, I scraped his picket fence and swore. To encourage me, Roberto squeezed my shoulder, the one I’d injured on the steam room door, so I winced.

“Thank God you’re here, we’re beside ourselves,” said Arthur, spent and trembling as he poured himself a Campari. Miriam was upstairs. He’d given her a sedative. “Will this nightmare ever end?” The phone was ringing constantly, media people making a nuisance of themselves. Arthur seemed vulnerable amid his material treasures, the Sandwich glass, the ormolu, the highboy Duncan Phyfe himself had constructed. He had been Chloe’s surrogate father, filling that absence to his benefit and hers. Now, the vision the busyness of driving had fended off asserted itself—a child dead in the underbrush, murdered and left to the elements.

“Is it…definite?” Roberto asked.

Arthur was making no attempt to hide the tears streaking his face. “Nothing is definite. The clothes on the girl don’t sound familiar, but she’s been held two weeks, so these butchers could have given her…” I thought of the killers in Truro, insisting we change into their garb.

Then the stairs began creaking just as the telephone—loud as a stone shattering plate glass—began ringing. “Don’t answer it, I forbid you to answer it!” Miriam said, gripping the banister with both hands for support as she descended the stairs, one slow and heavy step at a time. “The police said they’d come, not call. This has nothing to do with my daughter.” She began sobbing silently, as if her finite supply of tears for this lifetime had been expended.

She wore one of Arthur’s terrycloth robes, its pockets brimming with tissues. She was barefoot, like some desperate pilgrim on the loneliest of holy roads. “I saw Chloe in a dream.” She knotted the cord of the robe. “She told me she was fine and she’s never lied.”

“Thank God for the sedative, I’m so glad you slept,” Arthur said.

“What on earth do I have to be thankful for?” Miriam snapped. “Thankful some other girl was found dead in a ditch? What kind of monster would do such a thing?”

We all froze when we heard the sirens in the distance, knifing through the air. Was this the police coming with awful news? The room—the people, the furniture, our thoughts, the atoms comprising everything—seemed to pause on their journey through time. Then the sirens grew more faint, moved away.

“They sound like fire engines,” Roberto said. “They’re not coming here.”

It was nearing noon, so Arthur urged Miriam to join him in the kitchen for some curried chicken on a fresh baguette. Roberto followed. Alone in the living room, I punched on the television, keeping the volume low. Even though the police had promised they would visit, not phone, and be sure Miriam heard the first estimate of the dead child’s age, a sense of fear rippled through me as the picture bloomed on the screen. It was a bit before twelve, so I’d expected the cheers and bells of a game show. Instead, I saw reporter Doug Doherty, handsome with concern, against a burning hillside. Bat-like ashes flickered through the air as he spoke.

“There are fires now throughout the lower Cape. All of them started at approximately ten o’clock this morning, and the worst are in Truro. Police don’t think that is a coincidence. Two suspected arsonists have been apprehended by the Provincetown police. They have refused to answer questions, and, when asked about their identity, gave numbers instead of names in response. The suspects were discovered running through the woods of Cape Cod National Seashore, not far from the location where the child’s body was found. They tried to escape using this old van…” Footage of a Volkswagen, rusted through like a useless old muffler, was broadcast. The van’s steering wheel was sheathed in fake fur. “…The Provincetown police who arrested the pair were shocked to discover that their van was packed with explosives as well as what may be containers of deadly bacteria
.
Both suspects were tattooed with emblems of Norse mythology—and both men had been castrated.”

Then the camera cut to an anchorwoman at a desk, Marcia Haight, remarking how dry conditions were throughout Cape Cod, calling the fires “a disaster waiting to happen, with or without help from some very disturbed people.” Then she shifted so that her body moved but her jacket’s padded shoulders remained still. “Are there any new developments at the compound, Doug?”

The screen changed to a helicopter shot of woods, with a pond and greenhouses glinting like mica in the sun. In a voice-over, Doug Doherty said, “What we know at this moment is that the Provincetown arsonists were part of a cult centered around this commune and a mysterious leader called the Master. At eleven-fifteen this morning, after the arson suspects were arrested, two Truro policemen, Sergeant Reginald Colby and Officer Paul Driscoll, entered the compound grounds with a search warrant and were shot. Sergeant Colby, an eight-year veteran of the department and father of five, was killed. Officer Driscoll remains in critical condition.”

We had spoken to them just last night.

Doherty returned onscreen as the hillside back of him erupted in flames. Some fireman gestured for him to move. The camera panned a traffic jam as Doherty said, “Route Six is impassible. Provincetown, in fact, is now cut off from the rest of the world.” Behind him, cars shimmered in the heat, then a curtain of smoke obliterated the scene. “This just in, Marcia,” Doherty said, “I’ve just been informed that Officer Paul Driscoll of the Truro police department has just died.”

I ran into the kitchen, shaking. Roberto was eating some bread. Arthur was persuading Miriam to try his curried chicken. “You can eat
around
the meat. There are apples and raisins and walnuts in it too.”

“There’s trouble,” I said, there in the kitchen where Edward had concocted his bouillabaisse. “Hurry up, come into the living room!”

We stared at the television, at a still photograph of a chubby blond boy holding a basketball, then at scenes of Rockport, Bearskin Neck, and Motif Number One. “The cult leader, Lucas Mikkonen, grew up in Rockport,” Marcia Haight was saying.

I was next to the telephone when it rang, and, automatically, picked it up. I remembered we weren’t supposed to answer it, but, holding the receiver, I said, “Hello. Hello?” Then the caller hung up.

Doug Doherty, now away from the fire, spoke against a backdrop of a motorist tending to his overheated car, a casualty of the massive traffic jam. He said, “All summer long, residents of Truro, Welfleet, and Provincetown have complained about strange things happening in their communities, about hitchhikers, panhandlers, and shoplifters in odd clothing. When confronted these people claimed they were Scandinavian tourists, but it turns out they were just plain trouble.”

“In my shop,” Miriam said, “they’d steal anything that wasn’t bolted down.”

I had to ask her: “Did you ever meet them in Truro, Miriam?”

“
Never,” she said emphatically, picking a slice of apple from her curry then eating it.

“We were
there,
” Roberto said, as the helicopter shot of the compound filled the screen.

“You were what?” Arthur said.

“We were there, just yesterday,” I said.

Miriam and Arthur gave us quizzical looks, as if we were news groupies who were lying or at least exaggerating.

I thought of Jason, who’d saved our lives and of the girl they’d chained to the tree, I thought of Edward. But what about Chloe? Was she really the little girl they’d found in the woods, or was she still alive, under siege, at the compound? Of course, a motive for her kidnapping still eluded me, eluded everyone. If Ian had been killed over a real estate deal, over the St. Harold’s land by Lake Chiccataubett, why was Chloe targeted by the Master? Or Miriam? Surely it wasn’t revenge for catching street kids in her shop, catching them pocketing cheap amethyst beads. Yet the Master’s people were abusing children, and female children fared especially badly.

Doug Doherty was speaking again: “While purporting to be involved in organic farming, the group, police say, was amassing an arsenal of chemicals, for use in agriculture and in an Armageddon they refer to as the Fall.

“Police believe the community was divided by a rigid caste system, and that those at the bottom were sterilized, forced to submit to genetic experimentation and take part in tests involving biological weaponry.”

Marcia Haight took a turn: “Police believe today’s tragedy was triggered by the cult believing authorities were about to link them with the death of a young girl whose body was discovered in the woods of Cape Cod National Seashore early this morning
.
The young girl’s identity is not being released pending notification of next of kin…”

Arthur spoke up. “You can see the fires from the terrace. Truro is burning.” Miriam and Roberto ran to look.

“This could be a long stalemate,” Marcia Haight was saying, in a voice-over with the helicopter shot of the compound. “Police have cordoned off the property and are asking the Master and his followers to surrender peacefully, but their only response so far has been additional gunfire. A SWAT team is standing by or on its way, so we are told.”

But the stalemate died young. What happened next seemed to take place in slow motion. There was a choreography to it, like an exercise performed by masses of athletes in a stadium in some totalitarian country. Smoke began issuing from points around the compound, spirals of smoke. Then the smoke became flames, gray smoke bursting with sparks like some Fourth of July spectacle gone horridly wrong, until the compound was surrounded by a seething ring of fire. You could see it from the air, from the helicopter, this ring of fire that
seemed to burn inward
, as if following some pre-arranged route, devouring the woods and raging toward the compound, toward the greenhouses and the pond, which was like an eye gray with cataracts, blinking through the smoke and the heat.

“We’re outta here!” somebody said, apparently one of the helicopter crew.

“What on earth is going on?” Marcia Haight was asking. “What do you hear on the ground? Doug? Doug?”

The helicopter edged away from the conflagration.

“Marcia?” Doug was saying, as flames tore through the woods of Master’s world. “Marcia, we understand that the fire now raging on the compound grounds was started by people from their community. I’m some distance away, on Route 6, but I can see the smoke, there’s a virtual thunderhead of smoke.”

The helicopter view, the gray smoke with sparks and flames rupturing through it, resembled the shroud of ashes Edward’s lost brother Clark had prophesied before his death.

“Perhaps this is the Fall these fanatics have anticipated for so long,” Marcia Haight was saying.

I couldn’t watch any longer, I just couldn’t. I felt dizzy, sickened. Chloe was there, in all that horror, Chloe who’d worried about her sandcastle and doll’s broken arm.

I joined Arthur, Miriam, and Roberto on the terrace. I rubbed my hand against the wood, against the side of the house, to make sure this was real and not a nightmare. Through the big silver maple, across the water, you could see hills of Truro blazing, not the compound, of course, that was too far away, but one of the fires these Dark Age arsonists had ignited.

The sight mesmerized my friends. They kept shaking their heads, muttering to themselves. I thought back to the party on this terrace that inaugurated this summer.

“It’s all burned,” I whispered to Roberto.

“I can see,” he said, staring at the hills, not realizing I meant the Master’s compound. He moved off to join the others.

If Chloe had been unharmed, if Chloe had been being held by those demonic people, there was little chance that she was alive after this. For me, the flowers in Arthur’s garden suddenly had the dead smell of floral arrangements at a funeral.

The television was on, just out of earshot in the house, so the others would learn the news as soon as they returned to the living room. I was lacking the strength to tell them, I didn’t have the courage or heart now that I believed Chloe’s last chance was gone, incinerated, so instead of staying on the terrace or returning to the house to face the television, I decided to check the damage I’d done with my car, scraping against Arthur’s picket fence.

Walking the gravel of the driveway, I found that I was crying. Stale tears, long unshed, stored from earlier losses, were leaking from my eyes. Examining my front bumper, I saw that it was streaked with white paint, and that the post of Arthur’s fence was askew, battered by the impact of my car. I felt similarly battered, exhausted, spent with tension and grief.

I was trying to right the broken post when I saw someone at the edge of my vision. My back stiffened as my system went on alert. The police, after all, the Truro police, had warned us to lie low, to avoid our regular haunts. And those very officers were now dead, killed by the Master’s operatives in a shootout. But I had seen the conflagration in Truro; surely the Master’s followers were dead in their biotech Valhalla, or else in custody of the authorities. Of course their other community, at St. Harold’s, hadn’t been mentioned, but surely the police in Stark had those people under control; something had to be coordinated out there.

“Why Mark, hello!” the familiar voice said. “You’re still in Provincetown, I’m surprised!”

At first, I didn’t recognize the woman greeting me. Dressed in black denim pants and a white cotton blouse with tulips embroidered along its collar, she wore sunglasses obscuring half her face. Her hair was shorn short, like a boy ready for Little League, and a diamond dominated her wide tanned hand. “It’s Sallie, Mark, Sallie Drummond!”