The Glittering World (19 page)

The enduring trauma was plain in Maureen’s expression, her gray eyes so clouded that Jason reflexively glanced out the window at the fog milking over the cove. “Did the children say what had happened, where they’d been?” He asked the question in a near whisper, and she leaned in closer to hear.

“All they said was that they got lost. Didn’t say if anyone took them, or what they’d been eating for two weeks, nothing.”

“Was it true they came back naked?”

“There were rumors. No one really knew for sure, except Flora.”

“Why her?”

“She was the one who found them. Flora was baby-sitting for Michael and the girl, Gavina, who was the daughter of another Colony girl. The kids disappeared off Flora’s property, and came back to the exact same spot where she last saw them, like homing pigeons. Or so she said.”

“You didn’t believe her.”

“I did at the time. But then she and Yvonne started fighting over Michael. One time not too long after the kids came back, Flora had him over at her place for a visit but wouldn’t let Yvonne back inside to get him. His mama had a couple of the Colony boys kick Flora’s door in. When they broke into her basement, they found him locked inside a cage hanging from the ceiling.”

“Jesus.” Had Blue’s visit to the house that day set him off? So much so that he hit the road to parts unknown? And he convinced Elisa to go along for the ride . . . It did fit the police’s scenario, as well as the property agent’s account. “And that’s when Yvonne took off with Blue?”

“No. That’s when the custody battle started. On one side was Flora MacKenzie, an upstanding member of the community, and on the other her drugged-out, good-for-nothing daughter. That was the narrative, at least. Who would entertain the thought that this woman kept her grandson locked in a cage? It sounded preposterous! So at this point, the legal fight between Flora and Yvonne became a battle between the community and the Colony. In-fighting started dividing us. And then in the middle of all that tension, the Colony went up in smoke. Literally.”

“Sounds like it might have been arson.”

She peered in the direction of the darkened hallway. “No one knows exactly what went down. Lord knows there was enough conjecture. What else is new, right? The fact is it happened in the middle of the night, and no one saw anything. Fortunately we all got out, but with not much more than the shirts on our backs. We camped for a while, but as it got colder people started looking for real shelter, and real work. So began the Colony’s diaspora days. Eventually we got absorbed into the greater population. We’re all really lost souls at heart, and a
lot of us just kind of stuck around, trying to feel the old magic again. Since the fire, none of us have really been connected in the same way.”

Maureen waved her hand as if shooing an invisible fly. “But that’s all ancient history. Look at me, chewing your ear off! I must sound like my husband.” She dropped the last word to a whisper.

“I love listening to you talk,” Jason said. It came out sounding more flirtatious than he intended. “Like I said, this is what I do for a living.”

Her loneliness was written across her face. “What was I . . .”

“You were telling me about the Colony. We were up there our first week, actually. We ran into Donald out back.”

“He spends a lot of time there.” She spiked her coffee once more and took a quick slug. “Lots of memories. Some good, others . . . not so much.”

“That place is something. The murals of the animals, and angels and demons . . .”

“That was all Gavina Beaton’s stuff. She was the most precocious artist I’ve ever seen. She did all that work before she turned six.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“That’s when we really started getting worried about what had happened in the woods. Before they went missing, Gavina used to be Miss Congeniality. Always doing a little dance, putting on a performance. Girlie little showoff. But after, she was changed. She wouldn’t talk to anyone, wouldn’t look you in the eye, wouldn’t so much as go out on the porch unless Michael was by her side. It was like she’d become a deaf-mute, though I guess now you’d say autistic? That was when she started the paintings. She would sit inside all day and cover one wall after
the next. All those crazy scenes, violent and sexual. It was like she’d suddenly aged a thousand years.”

“And what about Blue?”

“He had always been shy. The timid type. In his case it was much harder to tell how he’d been affected. Flora, though, she was sure he was different when he came back.
Real
different. She had her old-world beliefs about good and evil, the kind that are near impossible to rid yourself of, once they’re entrenched. She convinced herself that her grandson was an imposter. That he was evil.”

“Did she think that he was—was what, possessed by the Devil?”

“Nothing that Catholic, no.” She took a long sip from her mug and stared out the window. “She thought he was a changeling.”

“Like a fairy in disguise?” He vaguely remembered the term from Fred Cronin’s newsletters.

“Fairies are said to swap out human children for their own kind, yeah? So changelings were an old-country way to explain problem children. Deformed ones, the mentally handicapped, crib deaths, even. People can reason anything away, can’t they?”

“It’s certainly easier than facing the truth.”

Blue and Elisa in bed together, sweat and semen and saliva.

The shrill cry of Elisa’s cellphone on her nightstand, the chipper voice of the doctor’
s receptionist.

Just make sure Mrs. Howard gets back to us.

Jason winced. “It’s no wonder the boy seemed different,” he said. “He’d been lost in the woods for two weeks and was traumatized by the ordeal. Why would his grandmother feel the need to create an entire fantasy around it?”

“Can’t say. But if you knew Flora, you’d know she wouldn’t let it be.”

“I don’t understand. If she thought her grandson had been replaced by an imposter, why in the world was she trying to get custody?”

Maureen leaned in, close enough to kiss. “She felt she had need of him. Flora was first generation, her folks over from Scotland. Fairy wisdom was ingrained in her belief system. According to legend, the only way to get back a child stolen by fairies is to trade back the changeling for the real child. Some lore says even worse than that. That you have to kill the imposter in order to make it right.”

She sat back in her chair. “Faith and family, they both make you do crazy things. Combine the two, and you’re in some really twisted territory. Yvonne was worried. Really worried. And then Gavina died. So she ran.”

“What happened to Gavina?”

“She drowned. Not too long after the fire at the Colony. At that point she was living with her family in a trailer parked at the beach, just down the road. Her poor mother only ran up the hill to use the telephone, left the girl by the water with her big brother. But he wandered off. I think that’s why Daniel eventually went into law enforcement. It was his way of dealing with the guilt over his sister. He had a hard life before he found the Mounties, got into a lot of scrapes. Became something of a vandal as a teenager, if I recall. I suppose that’s often the case, though. Cops and robbers, flip sides of the same coin.” She drained her coffee and set down the mug.

“I’m sorry,” Jason said. “Who are you talking about?”

“Daniel Jessed. He was one of the police officers who came
by the night Blue and Elisa went missing. He introduced himself, didn’t he?”

According to Maureen, Detective Jessed’s mother had taken off after Gavina died, leaving the boy on the doorstep of a convicted felon in North Sydney presumed to be his father. After the man was later arrested for drug trafficking, eleven-year-old Daniel was taken in by a local family, the Jesseds, whose name he eventually adopted. As a teenager, he ran into all kinds of trouble—underage drinking, disorderly conduct, breaking and entering—before he straightened himself out and joined the police academy.

Maureen wasn’t clear on the details, only that Gavina had been left in her brother’s care and had drowned. But what was Jason supposed to do about it? If there was anything he knew from being raised a black kid in New York, it was that messing with the police was never a winning proposition. The mere possibility of a connection between Jessed and his sister’s death—between the officer and Blue and Elisa’s disappearance—was enough to set him on edge.

Later that afternoon, he got tired of being alone in the house and sped off to the Gaelic College. Inside the main building and past an archway strung with a banner that read
Ceud Mìle Fàilte
—“A Hundred Thousand Welcomes” in Scottish Gaelic—he found the Great Hall of the Clans and its exhibits of Scottish clan history, as well as the stories of the first families that settled in the region. It wasn’t long before he found William MacLeod’s name on a set of artifacts, including the pastor’s yellowed and well-thumbed Bible. According to the display copy, MacLeod founded the once-powerful Christ Church and was a fanatical
religious leader who ruled over the community with unyielding tyranny, as teacher, preacher, and judge. There was no mention of his supposed disappearance into the woods, only that he was believed to have set sail for Australia with his infant grandson in 1826 after his daughter and her husband died in a fire. Nothing in the exhibits about superstition or changelings or missing children; this was the official record, after all.

The farther Jason walked inside the Great Hall, the closer the events recounted in the exhibits approached present day. Following the immigration of Highland Scots on the heels of the English came an influx of other settlers, including many Irish immigrants seeking better fortunes than their homeland could provide. It wasn’t until Jason reached one of the final exhibits, however, that he was brought to a halt.
The 1960s–1970s,
the accompanying placard read,
Back to the Earth
. Among the photographs reproduced behind the glass display was one of a gathering in front of a large brick building. The colors were so bold and deeply saturated that the print resembled an inked animation cel or a pop art canvas, and for a moment he wasn’t sure he was looking at a photograph in the first place, let alone one of the Colony.

But there it was. The Starling Cove Friendship Outpost and Artists Colony in the days before it was rendered uninhabitable by fire, its exterior brightly painted and bursting with Day-Glo color. Its front steps were still intact, wide pine planks leading to a carved archway. A pair of broad doors were decorated with an enormous image of a praying mantis, the tibiae of the insect’s forelegs curving around the iron door handles. Spread out along the steps in an insouciant sprawl were the commune’s two dozen or so denizens, most of them in their twenties with a smattering of babies and toddlers, Blue perhaps among them. Maybe
the black-haired one racing across the lawn at the bottom of the frame, rendered as a blur of motion. In the center of the small crowd and planted between two comely young women was a proudly smiling Donald, a good three decades younger but wearing the same familiar style of square-framed glasses, a book resting upon his knees.

It took Jason far longer to place Maureen. She stood in a second-floor window, her youthful face pressed to the pane so that her features were distorted, cheek mashed against the glass like an overripe tomato. It was her, wasn’t it? It had to be. Her eyes had that same hooded shape, her nose the same gentle curve, narrow and regal. He brought his face close to the display. The glare from the overhead track bulbs spotted the print through the glass so that it appeared as if stars were shining among the trees behind the brick building. Pinpricks of light dappled the leaves and branches, the photograph shimmering like one of those 3-D winking Jesus pictures that shifted depending on your perspective. He began to dizzy and had to turn away.

The Great Hall fell silent. Jason withdrew to find a bench on which to rest, the enormity of the room lending the impression of being inside the hull of a ship, accompanied by a resultant seasick sensation. He dropped his head into his hands and drew slow and deep breaths, performing the practice he had clients execute if they found themselves overcome by anxiety.

The whole intrepid sleuthing bit—canvassing the cove, hunting down Fred Cronin, questioning Maureen, even—it all seemed more futile than ever. None of these people wanted to help him, not really; possibly because they had something to hide. Certainly Daniel Jessed did. Learning of the detective’s personal connection to the case had triggered Jason’s paranoia, already uncomfortably heightened since Elisa and Blue first
went missing. Obsession and distrust were exactly the kind of red flags Jason had tried to ignore in his sister, Deirdre, before she was first institutionalized, almost twenty years ago. That he might share her same demons, and after all this time, was simply not allowable. Which was why he had rarely discussed his sister with Elisa, nor the circumstances behind his mother’s death. It was too much for him to share. He, whose entire profession was built on sharing, on excavating the events of his patients’ pasts in order to manage the present.