The Snake and the Spider

by Karen Kingsbury

  But the pictures stopped there, followed by empty unfilled pages. Marian prayed with everything inside her that one day there would be more pictures. Daryl would come home and they could go on living like a normal family again.

  Things were no better at the Boucher home. In fact, if possible, they were worse.

  Jim’s younger brothers had begun to fall apart in light of their older brother’s disappearance. Timothy and Steven had started doing poorly in school and had begun moping about the house in a way that was completely uncharacteristic for them. Neither boy wanted to believe that something bad had happened to Jim. But by the end of September, they had trouble imagining any other possibilities.

  Then there was John, the first grader who idolized his older brother. John had been almost completely unable to attend school since Jim and Daryl disappeared. He was very aware of what was happening and knew how worried his parents were. As a result, he had convinced himself that Jim had been “hurt by bad guys” and that the bad guys, whoever they were, would try to get him, too. Each morning Faye would get John ready for school while he protested the entire time.

  “No, Mommy,” he would say, his innocent brown eyes filling with tears. “The bad guys will get me! I want to stay home and wait for Jimmy. Please! Mommy, the bad guys will be there!”

  And Faye would have to explain to him, despite her own fears and heartache, that there were no bad guys waiting for him outside his first-grade classroom.

  “You need to go to school, son,” she would say. “Let us worry about Jim. We’re going to find him as soon as we can.”

  But John would only cry louder until finally, with her little boy still sobbing, Faye would strap him in the station wagon and take him to school.

  The separation was another thing.

  “Don’t leave me, Mommy, please!” he would cry. And there wasn’t a day that went by when Faye didn’t leave John’s classroom in tears herself.

  Each day, about an hour later, Faye could expect a phone call.

  “John’s terribly upset,” the principal would say. “I think you’d better come and get him.”

  Finally, under advice from a counselor, Faye and Roy decided to take John out of school and keep him home. But even then the child’s torment was relentless. At night he would wake up screaming that the bad guys were coming or that they were in his room ready to get him.

  “Help me, Mommy! Help me!” he would scream and Faye would go running into his room.

  “It’s all right, honey,” she would say, holding him closely, trying to give him the security that had been ripped from his very existence the day Jim disappeared.

  Then when John had calmed down enough and was ready to get back to sleep, he would drag his pillow and blanket into his parents’ room and, still emitting tiny childlike sobs, he would fall asleep next to them on the floor.

  If Jim’s absence was seriously harming the mental health of his brothers, it was taking a tremendous toll on the physical health of his father. Roy Boucher was a diabetic and had always been able to control his disease through insulin shots. Roy knew that excessive sugar and a sedentary lifestyle contributed to the harmful effects of his disease so he exercised regularly and was always careful about what he ate. Those were the ways a person could control diabetes.

  But the most damaging risk factor for a diabetic was something Roy had no control over at all. Stress. When a person suffering from diabetes is forced into stressful situations, especially long-term stressful situations, that person’s blood sugar rises dramatically. That in turn plays havoc with the body’s pancreas, which in a normal person produces the proper amount of insulin to keep blood sugar levels normal.

  With elevated blood sugar, a diabetic must take more insulin to compensate; otherwise he could slip into a diabetic coma. But even when high blood sugar does not result in a coma, it weakens the body’s immune system, leaving the diabetic susceptible to an assortments of ailments. Worse yet, it is difficult for a person with diabetes to overcome these ailments because a diabetic does not heal as quickly as most people.

  When the weeks began to pass and Jim still had not returned home, Roy’s blood sugar levels began to rise. His son was missing and the idea of not knowing where he was, was actually killing him. Eventually his blood sugar levels began to skyrocket. At that time, Roy began to get sick and had to take a medical leave of absence from his job as foreman with G. P. Plastics.

  There was absolutely nothing the doctors could do to stop the ravaging toll diabetes was taking on his body. Stress was to blame. And there was just one thing that could eliminate Roy’s stress: his son’s return.

  Sick much of the time and battling his raging blood sugar levels, Roy said very little of how he felt about Jim’s disappearance. Obviously he was devastated, worried sick in a literal sense. But he never talked about his feelings, never screamed about the unfairness involved or the irony or the heartbreak. He remained stoic and quiet, while his body slowly destroyed itself.

  Faye, meanwhile, found herself in the position of counselor. She was the one who talked with her remaining sons when they had questions. Most often, she was the one who comforted John when he began to cry about the bad guys. But there were many times when she could no longer be the comforter, times when she could not go another minute unless there was someone to comfort her.

  Those were the times when Faye would sneak into the nursery, take Kristi from her crib, and hold her tight. What had started as a way to ease the pain that first night when Jim and Daryl hadn’t come home had become a way of dealing with life. Kristi, so new and innocent and unaware of all that was happening around her, would smile and coo at her mother, happy and peaceful in her mother’s arms.

  There, with the tiny baby close to her body, Faye would allow the tears to come. She would cry and cry, tears spilling onto her baby daughter as she tried to ease the pain and ache that Jim’s absence was causing her. Sometimes Roy would find Faye like that, rocking Kristi and crying soundlessly, and he would pause a moment and then shut the door, leaving her to deal with her grief in private. But he never spoke to her about it, never asked why she did that or if it helped any.

  And so, with each of them struggling individually to deal with the pain and frustration of missing their children and with none of them having any idea where to find the boys, they agreed on a plan. They had been in contact with the Michigan State Police Department daily and had learned nothing. For that reason, Faye made a decision to write to the governor, asking him to intervene. She had read once of a family who had done that and then received so much attention that their child was eventually found.

  One afternoon on a crisp day in early November, Faye took out a stack of stationery and wrote a letter to Governor William G. Milliken. The letter wound up in the hands of one Larry C. Burkhalter, a member of the Michigan House of Representatives. He read the words and thought for a moment that he could feel the woman’s pain. So he took an hour that same afternoon and wrote a letter to the governor detailing the circumstances surrounding Jim and Daryl’s disappearance.

  We have been requested by these families to do all in our power to see that this case be given all possible attention. Thus, I am requesting that your office contact the Governor of Florida to inquire as to what the law enforcement agencies in those states are doing to pursue this case. It is my hope that the state police and all local law enforcement agencies of that state will be made aware of this case and begin to participate fully its investigation.

  Thank you, in advance, for your assistance. I await your response.

  Sincerely, Larry Burkhalter.

  Then Burkhalter contacted the Bouchers and told them to remain posted. He was certain, being a friend of Milliken’s, that the governor would respond. When that happened, Burkhalter would let them know what happened next.

  Faye Boucher felt a sliver of hope after speaking with Burkhalter. By then she had sent duplicate letters to the Michigan State Poli
ce, the Daytona Beach Police Department, the Michigan House of Representatives, the state assembly, and the governor’s office. After that she took another leap and sent letters to the vice president and even to the Oval Office to be read by the President himself.

  Burkhalter’s phone call assured Faye that someone was listening to her. And that maybe, if the chains of command began to work properly, someone would find Jim and Daryl and take care of the bad guys—whoever they were—once and for all.

  CHAPTER 11

  The time had come for Bob to pay a visit to the Daytona Beach Police Department. He knew a report had been filed with the department, but now he had to see what work if any had been done on the case. Bob thought he knew the answer to that question. There were hundreds of missing teenagers reported each year in Daytona Beach and more likely than not this one hadn’t received any more attention than any of the others. But it was worth checking.

  Besides, in a case where Bob suspected criminal activity, he liked to keep the police apprised of what he was doing. He didn’t need their help to solve his cases, but he would need an officer who knew the details of the case on the chance that someone might need to be arrested. And Bob figured that before this case was finished there would be at least one arrest.

  With the file tucked neatly inside his briefcase, Bob climbed into his sedan and set out for Daytona Beach, an hour northeast of Orlando.

  AT ONE O’CLOCK THAT AFTERNOON, DETECTIVE WES Mikelson was sitting at his desk doing paperwork. He had been busier than usual, trying to catch up on an extreme workload that summer. While some people talked about Daytona Beach’s alarming crime and other people wrote about the statistics, Mikelson and his peers were busy handling it.

  At the top corner of his desk was a three-tiered document holder. The top section was overflowing with new missing persons reports. The documents that didn’t fit in that section were stacked beside him, spilling out of a cardboard box. The missing persons case involving Jim and Daryl hadn’t crossed his mind for weeks.

  So many other such cases had come his way that he wouldn’t have had time to think about the Michigan teenagers at all. Finding a missing person in Daytona Beach was, in those days, virtually impossible. Especially because there were so many other crimes for detectives like Mikelson to investigate.

  He was sorting through one such criminal case when Bob Brown entered the office, walked up to his desk, and pulled up a chair. The police in Daytona Beach knew Brown, even though most of them had never worked with him. Brown handled domestic cases and, not surprisingly, there were a lot of domestic problems in Daytona Beach. For that reason the police had crossed paths with Brown on several occasions.

  Bob pulled out a badge from his pocket and identified himself.

  “Right,” Mikelson said politely. “You work a lot of domestics out here. How can I help you?”

  Bob set his file on Mikelson’s desk and opened it. “I understand you’re working the Boucher-Barber case.”

  Mikelson’s expression was blank. “Who?”

  “Boucher-Barber.”

  “Uh,” Mikelson searched his memory. “Doesn’t sound familiar. What’s the case about?”

  “Missing persons. The boys came here from Michigan and never returned home.”

  Suddenly Mikelson remembered the case. “Oh, right, right,” he said. “The family’s been calling, checking everything out. Real worried.”

  “Is it your case?”

  “Yeah,” Mikelson sounded somewhat defensive. “Look, Bob. The kids are nowhere.”

  Bob raised an eyebrow. “Exactly how much investigation time have you put into it, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Mikelson shook his head in a way that suggested he was disgusted about something.

  “None. No time at all. It just hasn’t been possible,” he said. “You know how many missing persons we get out here along the beach?”

  “Well, this case is a little different.”

  “That’s what everyone says. Every case involves someone who would never disappear. Relatives call and they want us to put the entire department on hold while we find their family member. Same story each time. Listen, Bob. It’s just not possible.”

  “Okay, but let’s talk about it for a minute. You do have a minute, don’t you?”

  Mikelson threw up his hands. “Sure. Why not?”

  Bob opened the file and showed the detective the money sitting in Jim’s bank account and the brand-new motorcycle sitting in Daryl’s garage.

  “They had good relationships with their parents, lots of friends, jobs, and girlfriends,” he said. “And not one person has heard a word from them since August twelfth. Doesn’t that sound a little bit like something criminal may have happened here?”

  Mikelson sighed, closing the file he’d been working on and taking a closer look at the one Bob had brought in. After a minute he looked up. Bob could read the detective’s eyes and he saw that the man was greatly frustrated. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Well, first I thought you’d be interested to know that the governor of Michigan has contacted our governor. The big boys are getting interested in this one. Sort of using it as an example, a reason to tackle the criminal activity on the beach once and for all,” Bob said, leaning back in his chair.

  “Second, I want you to know that I’m not going anywhere until I find those boys. I’ll be in your office, walking your beaches, checking your flophouses. You’re going to get so sick of seeing me you’ll do anything to help solve this case. And finally, I want you to know that when I find out who’s responsible for the disappearance of those kids, you’re the first person I’m going to call. You’ll get the arrest, Mikelson, and that will look just swell on your track record, don’t you think?”

  Mikelson was looking weary as he listened to Bob. “Sure. Swell.”

  “So when I need a little assistance, you’re going to give it,” Bob was not looking for approval, but rather stating a fact. “Sound good?”

  “Sure,” Mikelson said. He was massaging his eyebrows and staring at a blank spot on his desk. As Bob got up to leave, Mikelson looked up. “Hey, Bob, just remember one thing. I can’t make any promises. My schedule is packed as it is and I can’t be taking time to find those boys.”

  Bob smiled confidently as he turned and left the office. “Don’t worry, Mikelson. You won’t have to.”

  CHAPTER 12

  If not knowing where their sons were was sucking the life out of everyone in the Boucher and Barber families, by the second week in November there was something that seemed even worse. There seemed to be nothing they could do to change their situation.

  Yes, they had a private investigator working on the case. But there had to be something else they could do to find their sons. Finally, that week, they hit upon an idea. They would contact the media, make a plea for publicity. And maybe then someone would know something and they could finally find their missing boys.

  For the most part they were met with indifference by various editors and television news producers. Two teenage boys take a trip to Daytona Beach and don’t come home as expected. It wasn’t exactly the type of story that drummed up sympathy and an urge to react on the part of readers and viewers. When the missing children were young and helpless, that was one thing. But when they were nearing their twenties, people figured they probably disappeared on purpose.

  So, despite the families’ efforts, the local newspapers and television stations ignored the story. With one exception.

  The K-Liner, a national newspaper for and about Kmart employees agreed to run a small story and picture on the front page of its October issue. The editor reasoned that since Jim had worked for a tremendous company like Kmart that past summer and had not yet reported back for work, something must truly be amiss.

  Jim’s picture ran alongside a three-inch article titled, “Jim’s Missing.” The article stated only the basics—the day Jim and his “traveling companion” had di
sappeared, the fact that Jim had worked for Kmart number 9088 in Lapeer, Michigan, and that he was about to start his senior year in high school. Then, in case anyone recognized him, the article listed a telephone number of the Michigan State Police in Lapeer.

  ONE WEEK LATER, IN EAST BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA, the manager of the local Kmart received the K-Liner newspaper and, as was procedure, tacked it up on the store’s bulletin board. The next day, shopper Margie Barrett saw the article and immediately recognized Jim’s picture.

  Jim was the same boy she had hired to help her around her farm sometime in the middle of August. She was positive. Immediately, Margie copied down the information in the article and returned back home. She checked her records to see what day she had hired the boy and whether his name was Jim Boucher or not.

  Her records showed the boy’s hire date as August 15. He had used the name Walter Alexander and had only worked for her a few days. She remembered that when he had left, he had said he was going on to work at a cement plant in Tarrant City, Alabama.

  Margie was certain the boy was Jim Boucher. She quickly dialed the number that had appeared in the article and was eventually transferred to Officer Ray Burnham. Burnham had dealt with the case since the missing persons reports were originally filed. Now, after listening to the woman and taking down her information, he needed to ask a few more questions regarding the boy’s attitudes and any other factors that might identify him as Jim Boucher of Metamora.

  “Now, you say the boy you hired looked like the boy in the newspaper,” Burnham asked.

  “Yes! I’m positive. It’s him!” The woman was excited and Burnham couldn’t help but feel the same way. He would love nothing more than to call the parents of those boys with word that their sons had been found.

  “Okay, fine.” Burnham was scribbling notes as he spoke. “The missing boy was traveling with a friend. Did you see another boy at any time?”