Flash and Bang

by J. Alan Hartman

  As Drayco now stood on that trail with Assistant Principal Jennifer Stott, who was also one of the music teachers, he saw how isolated the trail really was. Unfortunately, the staff and police who’d trampled through the area long ago obliterated any signs of Joey or his kidnapper.

  Drayco pointed to a door on the east wing of the school. “So Joey’s room was over there, and he’d use that exit to walk to the music room?” Drayco pivoted north, “Up there.”

  Jennifer nodded. “That’s right. Every day without fail.”

  “Why that time, at seven?”

  “That’s when I give the more hearing-abled students piano lessons.”

  “But not Joey?”

  “Most of my piano students weren’t born deaf, but developed hearing loss later. Children with congenital deafness like Joey have a much harder time. He tries to play, bless his dear soul, but he just can’t quite hear well enough. He really loves it when I play Beethoven. I don’t know if it’s the music, or the fact I told him Beethoven lost his hearing.”

  “Beethoven’s one of my favorites, too.”

  “Do you play?”

  “From time to time.” Drayco motioned toward the north wing and said, “Shall we?”

  It only took three minutes to walk the path, even littered as it was with slick red and orange leaves following a recent rain. The music room turned out to be in the corner of the north wing—the closest room to a two-lane road forming one of the school’s boundaries. Very convenient for someone wanting to grab the boy and whisk him away in a car.

  They entered the building and made their way into the music room. In one corner, castanets, triangles and drums jockeyed for position on a table. Along one wall, a row of tall shelves was crammed with instrument cases for trumpets, violins and flutes. The piano was front and center, like a maestro ready to whip the other instruments into shape.

  Drayco fingered the lid of the Steinway. “What can you tell me about Joey’s parents?” When he saw her biting her lip, he added, “Strictly off the record.”

  Drayco’s companion sank onto the piano bench, facing him. “I do believe Mrs. Jensen really loves little Joey. It’s just…” Jennifer sighed. “She’s clueless about how to be a mother. I suppose it’s to be expected, her being an orphan and all. Went through the foster system—not many good role models. But she does love him, I’m certain of it.”

  “And Joey’s father?”

  “Sometimes I think if it were a choice between his son and money, he’d take the money.”

  “Yet he paid the ransom.”

  “He had to, didn’t he? It would have looked bad, if he hadn’t.”

  “Mr. Jensen’s business seems a perfect motive-maker for people wanting revenge. Had there been threats against Joey you’re aware of?”

  “Here at the school?”

  “Especially here at the school.”

  “None I’ve heard.” She hesitated before adding, “But there was something odd.”

  The hairs prickled at the back of Drayco’s neck. “Odd in what way?”

  “It sounds like a child’s fancies. Most children are afraid of the dark, monsters under the bed, that kind of thing.”

  Drayco waited patiently, as Jennifer rubbed her shoe over a frayed thread in the checkerboard carpeting. “Joey said he thought someone was looking in his window at night. He’s on the first floor, so it’s not impossible. To humor him, we checked the ground under his window, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Then later, he thought someone entered his room and stood next to his bed. He was frightened, even ducked under the covers.”

  “So no description of this mystery visitor?”

  “If he exists at all. The school’s psychologist thinks it’s a cry for attention.”

  “Is this the same psychologist who thinks Joey ran away?”

  Jennifer frowned. “The same.”

  “You don’t agree, I take it?”

  “He’s an impressionable little boy, I’ll give you that.”

  Drayco recalled the box room and tried to stem the flash of anger that image aroused. “Seems like putting an impressionable little boy in the box room would be a bad idea.”

  She looked at the floor and kicked harder at the loose thread. “I’m not a fan of the box room. But I get out-voted every time the subject comes up about doing away with it.”

  “Whose idea was it?”

  “It was here before I came. This is only my second term, you see. I think it’s been used as punishment off and on for three years.”

  “Was Joey the only child put in the box room?”

  “Now that you mention it, I think so, yes.”

  Drayco stared at her. “Were Joey’s parents aware of this punishment?”

  “I’m not sure. They knew he’d been having some problems. I don’t think they felt it was anything to worry over.”

  Jennifer looked at her watch. “I hate to rush things, but I have an appointment in the office in ten minutes.”

  Drayco pointed to the piano on their way out. “You said Joey tried to play that piano but couldn’t hear well enough. Surely the cochlear implants helped.”

  “It helped some. But take one clumsy-fingered child who’s also partially deaf and you get a lot of ugly banging.”

  Drayco thanked her for her time and told her he was going to take a walk around the property. Beside the road border on the north, and the main building to the east, the school shared two borders with other landowners. One owner was a farmer who grew mostly hay and kept a few cows, while the other was one of the school’s English teachers. Both had fences to mark the property lines, and both fences were electrified. Joey couldn’t have climbed over, unless the juice was turned off.

  Drayco smiled at the thought of the little boy happily banging out music on the keyboard. And then the synesthete clues percolating just under his conscious mind bubbled to the surface.

  After hurrying back to his car, he hopped inside and pulled out his laptop. He listened to the copy of the original audio file from the ransom phone call again. Next, he opened the file in his forensic software. He’d already tried using some basic reverse transforms to I.D. the voice, but the end result was a garbled mess.

  This time, he paid closer attention to the banging. He slowed the audio down as much as he could, and made out not one bang, but a series of bangs. Four in all. The police thought it was car noises in the background, but he didn’t think so. The sounds were more like notes. Notes that sounded for all the world like the opening four iconic chords of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Da da da dum….

  Could that be Joey? The call cut off right after the bangs, so maybe the boy was trying to send out a message and caught the kidnapper by surprise. Or maybe the police were right, and it was all an elaborate joke on Joey’s part, with the help of an accomplice.

  Drayco scanned through the notes he’d made on Mr. Jensen’s business dealings. They included a list of the man’s “victims,” as many of the names of the desperate home-sellers Drayco could find. Then he cross-checked that list with the staff of Keirnes Boarding School he’d gotten earlier from Jennifer. One name matched both lists. It was an English teacher, the same one who owned the property next to the school.

  Drayco dialed Jennifer’s phone number. “I’m sorry to bother you in the middle of a meeting, but do you know if Bill Maddeaux, the English teacher, owns a piano?”

  The note of annoyance in her voice quickly turned to curiosity. “I’m not sure. I’ve never been over to his house.”

  “Can I speak with him?”

  “That’ll be hard, I’m afraid. It’s a bit of a scandal. He traveled to Colombia and was caught with a small amount of drugs at the airport on his way back. Our Headmaster thinks he’ll be exonerated, but meanwhile he’s stuck in a Colombian jail.”

  “When did he leave the U.S.?”

  “Around two weeks ago.”

  “Is his wife home?”

  “He’s divorced. And lives by himself. What’s g
oing on?”

  He evaded her question. “Thanks, Jennifer. You’ve been a big help.”

  Drayco closed up the laptop, scurried out of his car, and made his way toward the English teacher’s property on foot. He walked along the boundary fence until it ended at another road. Could he get to the house from here? One way to find out.

  He followed the road about a tenth of a mile until it branched off. One fork continued down the road, the other disappeared in the direction of the house, hidden from view by trees covered in kudzu vines. Drayco picked his way down that road until he hit the grass yard at the end of the driveway. The yard looked like a mini-jungle, not mowed in weeks.

  The house itself was dark and silent. He peeked in one of the front windows. Standard living room, standard furniture. He headed toward the back and pressed his face against the glass of another room. The gold curtain covering the window had a slight gap in the middle, enough that he could see a typical study, including floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. It also housed one other item—a gleaming baby grand piano.

  According to the school records, the English teacher, Bill Maddeaux, started working at the school three years ago. About the same time Jennifer thought the “box room” was put into use. The same box room that seemed to be punishment for only Joey.

  But would one of Jensen’s desperate home-sellers harbor such hatred toward the businessman they’d kidnap his son? Drayco recalled one newspaper account, where a seller likened Jensen to the devil since he singled out vulnerable homeowners without insurance. There were more articles, showing jobs lost, lives destroyed, families ripped apart. Families—maybe that was the key.

  Maddeaux had a son, according to Drayco’s research. William Maddeaux II. Perhaps the homeowner’s son was taking revenge on the man who’d hurt his father? An eye for an eye.

  Drayco pondered a little breaking and entering, but decided to check the exterior first. It was a big yard, about two acres, filled with more kudzu. It also contained the remnants of an old vineyard, fallen to the same opportunistic, choking weeds. Just like Mr. Jensen and his business practices.

  In the far corner of the yard, Drayco saw a smaller vine-covered building that looked unused. If there were once any windows, they were now covered over by the vegetation. Was there a door?

  Not only was there a door, some of the vines on the front appeared to be recently yanked away. He bent in closer, looking for the handle, when a voice from behind startled him. He whipped around to see Jennifer with an axe uplifted in her hand. A very large, very sharp axe.

  “Jennifer, I—”

  She pushed past him. “You think he’s in there, don’t you? I found this leaning against the house. Should make short work of those vines.”

  As she started whacking away, he put a hand on her arm. “It’s been opened recently. Let’s find the door handle.”

  She used the axe blade to pull more vines away from the door, enough that they could see the heavy padlock and chains keeping it shut. Wordlessly, Drayco grabbed the axe and hacked at the lock. One thwack, two thwacks, three, four…and the lock fell off.

  Jennifer reached over to open the door, but again, Drayco stopped her. “Let me go in first. Just in case.” Finding a body wasn’t something he’d wish on anyone. He’d gotten used to it, as much as one could, but a child…those were the hardest.

  He opened the door and stepped inside, as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light. The first thing he noticed was the lack of windows, just a few slivers through cracks in one corner of the ceiling. The other thing that hit him right away was the stench—an earthy rotten egg smell.

  The space was larger than the box room, but not by much. The wooden bench with the hole in the back was enough to tell that this building once served as an outhouse. Next to the bench sat a rusted bowl under an equally rusted faucet with a pump, likely leading to a well. He walked over to the bench to peer into the opening. Pulling out his pocket flashlight, he shined it into the hole—signs of recent use, including several apple cores and candy wrappers.

  He turned his attention to the rest of the small space. No furniture at all. Against one wall lay a blanket of leaves, but otherwise, no signs of Joey. Could he be buried inside the hole? The thought made Drayco’s heart sink.

  Then the blanket of leaves started to move. The head of a small boy appeared as he scooted back into a corner, away from Drayco, and clasped his arms around his knees. His wide blue eyes looked like desert oases set against his dirty, tear-smudged face. He opened his mouth, but all that came out was a squeak.

  Drayco didn’t move toward him, but knelt down and opened his arms to show he wasn’t a threat. He looked into those blue eyes and said slowly, “Beethoven.” Then he hummed, “Da da da dum.”

  Joey paused only a moment and then threw himself at Drayco, wrapping his arms around his neck in a bear hug. “Da da da dum,” he whispered into Drayco’s ear.

  Jennifer joined them and smiled at Drayco as she wiped her eyes. A gust of wind through the open door made the leaves swirl around, like a dance of joy. For a moment, Drayco allowed himself to think it was the spirit of Beethoven himself, and he hugged Joey tighter.

  Hugs now, food and medical attention soon. Joey had beaten the odds. Maybe that was why Drayco had a feeling this was one little music-loving boy who was going to be okay.

  A Day Like No Other

  Walter A.P. Soethoudt

  (Translation, Willem Verhulst)

  The gray skies promised yet more rain, plunging Antwerp into a mood of gloom. The British would call them “Constable skies,” after the painting Old Sarum by John Constable, which he had seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

  After seeing the painting, he had gone looking for Old Sarum and discovered it was a three-thousand-year-old settlement with a fort in the vicinity of Salisbury.

  Lieutenant Belloc walked past the Pollo Loco restaurant, run by a couple of whom it was said that she was the pollo and he the loco, but that they served the best garlic chicken in the city. At the Koningin Astridplein, Belloc checked the time on his radio-controlled wristwatch against that of the Centraal Station clock. He laughed to himself, because he checked it each time he passed this way, and each time he resolved to stop doing it. When he saw a scruffy old man with a dog sitting against the front of Billiard Palace, his cap in front of him containing a few copper coins, he could not help thinking of the bad time of year that lay ahead. And that there was bound to be another load of bullshit about the homeless. He laughed wryly. Homeless, indeed. If you wanted to offer them shelter, most of them did not even want to come. Either he or she had a dog, which was not allowed into the relief center, or another smoked, which was forbidden inside the relief center, yet another drank, while the relief center’s rules strictly prohibited drinking, or… He walked into fast-food restaurant Quick to see if he could get served quickly, which was the case, and within a few minutes he got his Giant and a coke.

  He sat down at a small table, opened his mouth wide and took a good mouthful of his burger. He had never understood why it was called a Giant, for its size did not differ from other burgers.

  He looked at a young couple with a baby and noticed the husband’s attentiveness toward his wife. He used to be like that, too—attentive, tender even. He did not have to chase after her long. She had certainly been no Merlene Ottey. He started to philosophize about how it used to be between him and his wife. How crazy they were about their son and about each other. Davide had been born nine months to the day after their wedding, which elicited questions and furtive finger-counting—albeit behind their backs—by his very religious in-laws. His wife had been religious, too, and he wondered whether this had caused her reserve in sexual matters. Sometimes Belloc remarked mockingly that he would have been better off had he entered a monastery, because there would have been a greater chance of sex in there than at home.

  When Davide appeared to harbor different thoughts about his own sexuality, things had started to go wr
ong. His wife had not accepted it and it did not take long for her to start reproaching him that their son was gay. It did not occur among the members of her family—although she would hide her disapproval from Davide. Eventually, all this led to her starting to refuse Belloc, saying that he should seek his pleasure with other women. Silently, he started calling her “Sister Clara.”

  He would never even have considered this, but he had been quite charmed when, at a convention of policemen and policewomen, he took the fancy of a Canadian commissioner. She reminded him of Deirdre Lovejoy, his favorite star from The Wire. When she made it clear—between the soup from boxes, the rubbery chicken and the grayish green beans—that he stood a chance with her, it did not take long for them to end up in bed.

  She was so happy that they hit it off sexually, that she secretly put her vibrator into his suitcase. Which proved to be the start of the misery, for when he arrived home his wife was unexpectedly waiting for him, suggesting they go out to a restaurant together. Belloc could not believe his ears and suspected that she wanted to end their marriage in a gentle way, to which in principle he had no objections. But when he put down his suitcase, it started to buzz and would not stop. He wondered what it could be and opened it to find the buzzing thing. His wife also looked, and he failed to keep the buzzing vibrator hidden from her. It ended in a quarrel he did not want to see repeated. And it turned into a nasty divorce, with fights and all. It took him almost a year to win Davide back, for the boy had resolutely taken his mother’s side.

  Belloc took big bites of his burger and realized that he had not eaten that morning. For a moment, he looked with annoyance at a punk girl who came in, clinking on all sides. She had turned up the sound on her portable CD player to such an extent that she would probably be deaf in no time. A little while later, he walked in the direction of the Carnotstraat. Just in front of him he spotted a girl who was as thin as a leaf. She was carrying an overfull backpack, a rolled sleeping bag in her right hand and a black leather bag in her left. When he saw a man rushing toward her, Belloc closed in behind her. The man spoke English and all he asked for was “change.” How stupid can you get? He quickly abandoned the attempt to help when the girl did not even look at the man and walked on unperturbedly.