The Inner Circle (28 page)

We were still in the barn, the four of us, Graham sitting on the vinyl-cushioned lawn mower seat, Drew and me sitting on two upside down apple crates, Ronny leaning against the locked door that led into the closet we used to keep all our weapons.
 

As Graham spoke he stared down at his hands, lightly rubbing his fingers against his thumb.
 

“The call came in around midnight. Not the original call that Carver had placed to bring the police out to the house. I’m talking about the call the two officers placed to me, saying that there was a murder. I went out there not sure what to expect. I’d lived in that town for a good ten years or so, and I pretty much knew everyone there was. I knew of the man and his wife who had taken in all those children, but I didn’t know him well.
 

“And then I got there and I saw just what kind of mess we were dealing with. You have to understand this town was in the southern part of the country, and while a lot of people didn’t come out and voice their opinions on segregation, it was always there right under the surface. And now we had a black boy shooting a white man to death. A man who was a well-respected teacher, for Christ’s sake.”
 

Graham rubbed his fingers together a little more. His face looked as if it had aged five years in the space of only minutes.
 

“I guess that’s news to all of you too, isn’t it? That I was a detective. You have to understand, Carver and I never made a conscious choice to lie about our pasts. We just ... we figured our pasts were in the past, so why even bother bringing them up? And Carver, when he first came and told me about what was going on and then first saved you, Ronny, and then you, Drew, he never didn’t tell me I couldn’t be open about my past. But I sensed it. Carver ... he was a haunted man. He didn’t want anybody to know about what he’d been through. He only wanted to worry about the present, about the here and now. And maybe, if he could, worry about how the present would affect the future.”
 

“So what happened?” I asked. “When you first arrived at the house?”
 

Graham forced a distant smile and dipped his head, stared back down at his hands and started rubbing his fingers against his thumb.
 

“Believe it or not, it wasn’t the first murder I’d investigated. Our town was small but it wasn’t that small. We had a couple murders a year. But now we had a child murdering an adult, and again, even though it had nothing to do with the act, race was an issue.
 

“The two uniforms had already gathered the children upstairs. They didn’t want them coming down and seeing the mess in the living room. And so they started talking to them, asking each of them separately what happened. I was there for some of it. I could see how scared those kids were, not from what happened, but from a previous threat. They may have known the man was dead but for some reason this didn’t seem to make them feel any better.
 

“Eventually I came in and took over. I tried my best with all the kids. Even Carver. Carver was the only one who told us everything. He wasn’t afraid. And I’ll admit, it was strange watching this ten-year-old boy tell us what had happened in this house. Not the story itself so much as how he told it. He never hesitated, he never seemed to worry that we were against him. He knew what he had done was wrong, but at the same time he knew it was the only way. And because of that, he wasn’t scared.
 

“Hours passed and finally we got everything straightened out. It had been clear from the beginning what had been going on inside that house, but first we needed confirmation. Sure, the idea that all these kids were lying to us crossed our minds. But I just had this feeling, this feeling in my gut, and I knew these kids were telling the truth. Especially Carver.
 

“The thing was, we still had a murder to deal with. We couldn’t just wash our hands of it and forget everything. Something had to be done. And this ... well, this was where I could have lost my job—where the other officers could have lost their jobs, too. You see, in the next town over there had been a series of home invasions. Whoever was doing it would go in, wreck the place, steal some stuff, and leave. A few times the people who lived in those houses were home, and they were badly beaten. One man was even killed. The perps hadn’t been caught yet, so right then it made the most sense to blame what happened on them. If and when they were eventually caught—they weren’t, surprisingly—we would deal with it then. So I called my supervisor, explained what had happened—the truth, mind you—and then I explained about what I wanted to do, how I wanted to change the story. It took some convincing but he eventually relented, made the disclaimer that if anything were to come back and bite us in the ass, he had never been in the know.
 

“So here’s what we decided, the two uniforms and myself—the burglars broke into the house, not knowing the house was occupied. The man, hearing something downstairs, came down to inspect, and that was how he got shot. And the burglars? They disappeared into the night, took their gun with them, and were never heard from again. Like I said, if and when the perps got themselves caught, we would be in a world of trouble. The emergency call served as the only problem in the plan, but when Carver told us what he had said, how he had claimed he needed help, that ‘he’ was trying to kill him, it was enough for us.”
 

Graham went silent again, still staring down at his hands, which had gone motionless.
 

“What about the mother?” I asked.
 

Graham looked up at me, his face blank, like he had no idea what I was talking about. Then, slowly, he began to smile.
 

“Again, another thing that could have really messed things up. When we had decided on a story, when we had explained to the children what had ‘really’ happened, I went to the hospital. I found her and asked if I could speak with her privately. I could tell by her eyes she wasn’t an honest woman. That yes, on the outside, she looked honest and wholesome, but on the inside she was rotting. She thought my presence there signified a completely different outcome, and she had good reason to think that.”
 

Graham had taken the woman aside and looked at her evenly and said, “Your husband is dead. He was shot to death earlier this evening by an unknown intruder at your home.”
 

Tears stood in her eyes. Her face began to sink. She started to turn away, but Graham gripped her arm and pulled her back.
 

“Don’t shed tears for him,” he whispered coldly. “Your husband was a disturbed son of a bitch that molested the children you and he took in under your care. You can go and try to deny it as much as you want, but we both know the truth. And we both know the world isn’t going to miss your husband one iota.”
 

Tears still brimmed her eyes, but her face had begun to take shape again, reddening along the cheeks. He could almost feel the anger radiating off her.
 

“You realize too that you’re an accomplice. That even if you never touched one of those kids, you still allowed your husband to do with them as he pleased. In a way, you’re just as bad as him, if not worse.”
 

The woman tried to deny it, said that she and her husband had given the children a home when nobody else would, that they loved them and would never hurt them. But Graham could see the truth in her eyes, the denial she had been feeding herself all these years beginning to regurgitate. Before she had been denying what her husband had been doing all this time, and now it changed, denying the fact that she was just as guilty.
 

Graham left her there at the hospital. He had already decided she wasn’t going to be charged. That in the end it would only cause more trouble. That by charging her it would bring all the children into the picture, cause them even more pain than they had already suffered.
 

He went back to the station, filled out the proper paperwork, made some calls, got all the children taken away from the house to an orphanage two towns away.
 

He had no intention of telling his wife what had taken place—it was just too awful—but the next day she sensed something was bothering him and asked what was wrong. He told her, and she listened without comment, and when he finished the story she said, “So that boy has no home?”
 

Graham shook his head.
 

“Then we must provide him a home. Graham, we must save him.”
 

It wasn’t that easy though. Adopting was a long and arduous task. But it helped that Graham was a police officer, his wife a librarian. It helped that they had tried for years to conceive but were never able to, had even started going through the channels of adoption. And it helped that every weekend Graham and his wife went to visit Carver at the orphanage, that Graham’s wife would bring Carver books to read from the library.
 

Eventually the paperwork was pushed through, the papers were signed, and Carver became a part of the Fredrick household.
 

Graham said to us, “You have to understand, neither my wife nor myself were trying to make Carver our son. He was already ten years old by that point, and we weren’t that naïve. But he was a good kid. We saw potential in him. And we knew that for his potential to really grow, he had to be in a good, safe environment. I’m not saying the home we provided him was the greatest, but it was good enough. We made sure he was challenged, that he was respected, that he felt loved.”
 

Ronny asked, “What about his last name? How did he come up with Ellison?”
 

Graham beamed proudly.
 

“One of the books Carver read in high school was
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison. It became one of his favorite books. By that time he had been using Fredrick as his last name. We all understood that it wasn’t going to last. That if he wanted to keep it, that was fine, but that if he eventually wanted to change it, that was fine too. The truth was Carver had never really had a true last name. He had never had a proper identity. Just like the narrator of
Invisible Man
. So when Carver graduated high school he had it legally changed. And Fredrick? Well, I don’t think anyone ever questioned it, but Fredrick became his middle name. Carver Fredrick Ellison.”
 

A beat of silence passed, and I said, “So that’s it then. That’s the whole story.”
 

“That’s it, Ben. That’s all she wrote. You know the rest. Carver always stayed in touch with us. He even came to my wife’s funeral. And when I decided to quit the force and move away, move someplace where I could be alone, he was the only one I told. I never thought I’d see him again, but then years later he showed up and ... well, here we are.”
 

Silence then, and I realized Graham was watching me. I held his stare for several long seconds, then glanced down at my watch.
 

“I think we’re missing lunch,” I said.
 

Nobody moved. Nobody said a word.
 

Graham kept watching me, his face still blank.
 

“What?”
 

“You know that quote Carver was always talking about, the one by Edmund Burke?”
 

I nodded.
 

“He didn’t learn it in any of his high school classes. It was a quote I had up in my den at home, the words burned into a piece of wood. Carver was eleven the first time he saw it and asked me about it. He asked me, how could he become a good man? And I told him he didn’t have to worry, that he already was.”
 

Graham smiled, shook his head slowly.
 

“That’s what always drove him, I think. Seeing that quote when he was eleven. Or maybe it was something that had happened even sooner. Like killing that man. I don’t know, but every time I think of that quote now, I image a candle surrounded by darkness. And the darkness, it represents evil, while the candle represents good men doing something. But the thing is, good men can only do so much before they tire out and all their work is wasted.”
 

“What are you saying?” I asked. “That Carver was wasting his time?”
 

“Not at all. None of you have been wasting your time. But ... I think we need to accept the reality of the darkness around us. That’s something Carver never could accept. He always thought the candle would still be burning, no matter what happened. That no matter how heavy and thick the darkness grew, there would always be a speck of light left.”
 

Graham looked around at us.
 

“And while I respect all of you—I know all of you are good men—I’m almost glad the vote went the way it did. Because every day the world is growing darker. And I’m afraid that pretty soon whatever light is left is going to be extinguished, never to be lit again.”

41

For lunch Beverly had made the Racist a massive double cheeseburger, topped with lettuce and tomatoes and onions. Steak fries accompanied the burger, along with a long slice of dill pickle and a small plastic bottle of Heinz ketchup.
 

He took a large and hearty bite of the burger, chewed awhile, and said, “This is really good. She made it just like I’d asked.”
 

In less than twenty-four hours the man had become a completely different person. So much so that I had trouble still thinking of him as the Racist. Now he had graduated to simply Mason Coulter, forty years old, husband and father from a town in Arizona, just another hapless victim in Simon’s game.
 

He had changed out of his clothes and was now wearing the sweatpants and sweatshirt. He was sitting on his cot, eating the meal Beverly had provided. Apparently he’d eaten his breakfast too, because the plate I had replaced was wiped clean.