The Long Way Home

by Richard Chizmar

  “My name is Detective Crawford and this is my partner, Detective Logan.”

  We sat down across from him. Rutherford took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes with a fist. Up close, he looked exactly how I pictured a community college English instructor to look like.

  “This interview is being recorded by video,” I continued. “Do you understand that, Mr. Rutherford?”

  He nodded.

  “I need you to respond verbally.”

  “Yes,” he answered, not much louder than a whisper. “I understand.”

  “You also understand that you are not under arrest at this time?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you understand that you have turned down your right to have legal counsel present for this interview?”

  “Yes. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  Frank placed a manila file folder on the table, opened it and shuffled some papers around. Looking down at the folder, he asked, “You reside at 1920 Canterbury Lane, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How long have you and your wife lived there?”

  “Since I started working at the college. A little over eight years now.”

  “And you like it there?”

  Rutherford shrugged. “It’s fine I guess.”

  “Any problems during those eight years?”

  “Problems?” He looked confused.

  “With your neighbors. Any disputes? Feuds? Incidents?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. We…mostly keep to ourselves.”

  “How are you feeling today, Mr. Rutherford?” I asked.

  “I…I’m not well. I think I’m coming down with a bug of some sort. Or maybe a sinus infection.”

  “I understand you’ve called out of work the last few days.”

  His eyes flickered, clearly surprised. “Yes…yes, I have.”

  Frank looked up at him. “Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Rutherford?”

  “I…they think I had something to do with that missing kid.”

  “Bobby Evans,” I said. “The kid’s name is Bobby Evans.”

  Rutherford didn’t say anything, so I went on. “Robert Thomas Evans. Age twelve. Lives with his parents and younger sister at 1046 Canterbury Lane. That’s right at the end of your block. Do you know Bobby, Mr. Rutherford?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Seen him around the neighborhood? Walking down the sidewalk? Riding his bike past your house?”

  Rutherford glanced up at the camera mounted to the wall in the far corner of the room. “Probably. Many children live on our street.”

  “Never met Bobby before?”

  “Once. He knocked on the door and asked if we needed someone to rake the leaves in our front yard.”

  “When was this, him knocking on your door?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. Maybe two weeks ago.”

  Frank leaned an elbow on the table. “And what did you say to Bobby when he asked about raking your leaves?”

  “My wife…she did most of the talking. I don’t do well…with kids.”

  Frank leaned closer. “Explain what that means: I don’t do well with kids.”

  Rutherford took a deep breath. Looked down at the table. “I suffer from a rare condition known as pedophobia. Most of the literature neatly sums it up as the fear of children. But it’s more than that. At least for me. Fear is certainly a significant factor, but my primary symptoms are extreme aversion and crippling tension. If exposed to children for any period of time, I experience severe anxiety attacks. I crumble.” He glanced up at us, and then quickly back to the table. He was embarrassed.

  “How long have you had this condition?” Frank asked.

  “It started during my senior year in college.”

  “So you’re fine being around kids one day and the next day…” He left it hanging.

  “Unfortunately, that was pretty much the case.” Rutherford paused, then continued. “I never had many friends growing up. I was an only child. My mother and I moved around a lot. I was never popular or well-liked. I was the target of frequent bullying all throughout grammar and upper school.” He was looking down at the table again. I noticed a small bald spot growing at the center of his head. “My therapist believes my condition stems from those early negative experiences.”

  “Can you describe the first time you felt this…aversion to children?” Frank asked.

  “There was a daycare facility at one end of campus, an ugly brick building for the children of faculty members and older students. I used to see little kids running around on the playground and older kids playing basketball outside the building all the time. I was walking across the quad one day when I spotted a group of children led by one of the daycare workers heading my way. This was a fairly ordinary sight; they often took the kids on little field trips across campus. But that day something felt different. The closer they got, the more anxious I became.”

  Frank leaned forward in his seat, genuinely fascinated. I kept my eyes on Rutherford.

  “At first, it was just an unsettling feeling in my stomach. The same sensation I get whenever I’m on an airplane. Then, as the children drew nearer, I felt it whispering inside my head, that subconscious voice warning me to change direction, to avoid them…growing in volume and intensity as the kids closed to forty yards, thirty, twenty…until the voice was screaming at me to run, to run away as fast as I could. So, that’s what I did. Feeling like I was in the middle of a nightmare I had no control over, I dropped my knapsack and fled into some nearby bushes where I dropped to my knees and vomited my breakfast into the weeds.”

  Rutherford rubbed his eyes again. “It took me nearly fifteen minutes to clean myself up and regain my composure. When I finally returned to the sidewalk, my knapsack was gone. I went to Lost and Found every day for a week, but I never got it back.”

  “How long was it before the next incident?” I asked.

  “It happened again two weeks later at a shopping mall. Then, a few days after that, at the grocery store. That’s when I decided to go see a therapist.”

  “Still seeing the same one after all these years?”

  He shook his head. “The first time, I went to see someone on campus. The health clinic was free and I was poor. After I graduated, I found Dr. Mirarchi over in Fallston. Been seeing her ever since.”

  Frank took his cellphone from his jacket pocket and stared at the screen. He looked up at me and said, “They need us outside for a minute.”

  I started to get up from my chair, but sat back down again. “Something I’m curious about, Mr. Rutherford. What is the age range of the children you’re affected by? Babies? Toddlers? Teenagers? All of the above?”

  “My therapist and I examined dozens of incidents and came up with an estimate of children over the age of seven or eight and under the age of fifteen. Of course, it’s not an exact science but we feel pretty confident that we’re close.”

  “Bobby Evans falls right in the middle of that age group…” I said, trailing off.

  Rutherford nodded. “Exactly. That’s my point. I couldn’t have tolerated even being close to him.”

  Frank pushed his chair back and stood up. I followed him out of the room.

  ****

  Rickstad was waiting outside in the hallway. A burly plainclothes cop was standing behind him talking on a cellphone. “Good job getting him started.”

  Frank nodded. “I almost feel sorry for the guy.” He winked. “Almost.”

  I noticed the sheet of paper in Rickstad’s hand. “What you got for us?”

  He handed it to me. I studied it for a moment. “Is this what I think it is?”

  “They found it in the garage. Hidden inside an old cigar box.”

  I passed it over to Frank. He scanned the paper and looked up at me. “Oh, boy.”r />
  ****

  I used my thumb to slide the sheet of paper across the desk. “What can you tell us about this?”

  Rutherford started to reach for it, then pulled his hand back and looked up at me for permission.

  “Go ahead. It’s a photocopy.”

  He picked up the paper. His hands were shaking. After a moment, he put it back down. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  “It looks to me like a map,” I said. “With a number of houses in your neighborhood marked off. There are also two playgrounds and an elementary and middle school marked off.”

  Frank tapped the upper right corner of the map. “Can you tell us who lives here, Mr. Rutherford?”

  Rutherford leaned closer for a better look, and then sat back again. “That’s…the Evans’ house.”

  Frank and I just stared at him.

  “I’m telling you, it’s…it’s not what it looks like. It’s three or four years old, from back when my condition was at its worst. My wife and I…we drew this together so I could avoid any unnecessary run-ins. We tried to—”

  “Why was it hidden inside your garage?” Frank interrupted.

  “It wasn’t hidden. I got to the point where I didn’t need it anymore, but I was hesitant to throw it away. I didn’t want a reminder of that horrible period of my life inside the house where I could see it every day, so I tucked it away out in the garage.”

  Frank shifted in his chair. “Let’s go back and talk a little bit more about your childhood experiences and how you think they contributed to your phobia.” His voice was lower now, almost soothing. I had heard it like this before, and I knew he was on to something.

  Rutherford looked momentarily confused by the abrupt change of subject, but then you could see relief set in. He cleared his throat. “My father left us the day before my sixth birthday. He was supposed to be out picking up balloons and a birthday cake for my party, but he never came home. When my mother checked the closet and dresser drawers, all my father’s clothes and shoes were missing. So were the two big suitcases that were always stored in the cubbyhole under the stairway and the coffee can of emergency cash my mother kept high on a kitchen shelf.

  “A couple months later we learned that he had left us for another family, ‘a wife and son he could be proud of’ he told my mother on the telephone during the one and only occasion they spoke after he left. My mother never shared this information with me, but I had been listening to their conversation on the upstairs extension. My father was a difficult man. Emotionally cold and verbally abusive. He desperately wanted me to share his love of sports, but I was small for my age and more interested in comics and cartoons. I was only six. His favorite word to describe me was wimp. Pathetic was a close second. I had always had suspicions that my father didn’t love me at all, that he’d regretted having me as a son—I know how ridiculous that sounds considering everything I just told you—but I was just a little boy and it wasn’t until that phone call that I knew it had been true all along. I loathed my father after that, and even though I didn’t know the other kid’s name, his new son, I loathed him too.

  “When I was seven, we lost the house to the bank, and my mother and I moved in with her sister’s family in Aberdeen. I hated that arrangement even more. Aunt Charlotte was a hundred pounds overweight and mean as a hornet. My mother used to say that her sister was angry at the world, and I believed it. Aunt Charlotte had a teenaged son named Benny and a nine-year-old daughter named Sandy, and they tortured me from the day we moved in to the day we moved out. You name it, they did it. They nicknamed me Scary Harry, and I hated it. They played dirty tricks on me with only one goal in mind: to publicly humiliate me. Physical and mental bullying. Stealing my toys and books. Scaring me in the middle of the night. And, worst of all, spreading rumors about me in the neighborhood and at school. They lied and told kids that I wet my bed every night; that we had moved in with them because my father had gone to prison for molesting children; that my mother worked nights downtown as a prostitute. Needless to say, after all that, I became even more of a target outside of the house.”

  Rutherford stopped and looked up at us in a daze. “Am I talking too much? You probably didn’t want all these details…”

  “You’re doing great,” Frank said in that calming voice. He placed the file he’d been going through down on the table. “What happened next?”

  Rutherford’s shoulders relaxed a little more. This time, he looked directly at Frank as he spoke. “The summer I was nine, my mother got a factory job and we moved to a two bedroom apartment in Darby. For a while everything was better. My mother’s job was going well and she’d even started singing silly songs again while she washed the dinner dishes. It was a small thing, I know, but not to nine-year-old me. To that kid, it meant she was building a home again, she was happy again. Her singing meant…hope. I also relished not having my cousins around and being brand new in town, which meant I was largely invisible, and which was considerably better than being known as Scary Harry.”

  Rutherford sighed and for a moment I thought he might start crying. He cleared his throat and continued: “Then summer ended and I went to yet another elementary school, and everything changed again. It was like I had a target printed on my forehead: THIS PATHETIC WIMP WON’T FIGHT BACK. PICK ON HIM ALL YOU WANT. Even without my cousins there to stir up trouble, it was worse than ever before. I got picked on before school, during classes when the teachers weren’t looking, during lunch and recess, after school on my walk home. I couldn’t understand why it kept happening. I started having nightmares. My mother told me it was because I was small for my age and soft spoken, but that didn’t make sense to me. There were other kids even smaller than me and they didn’t get bullied every day.”

  He reached up and wiped at his eyes, and this time his fingers came away damp. “Couple years later, my mother got laid off and we had to move again. I started middle school in a new town and the whole miserable pattern started once again.”

  Tears were streaming down his cheeks now and the last couple of words came out in a muffled sob. Frank reached into his jacket pocket and handed Rutherford a folded handkerchief. That was new; I had never seen Frank offer his handkerchief to a suspect before.

  “Thank you,” Rutherford blubbered, wiping his face. He started to hand the handkerchief back, but Frank put up his hands.

  “Keep it. I have a drawer full at home.”

  Rutherford pulled it back and wiped at his dripping nose.

  “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Rutherford. Why don’t we step out for a second, give you some time to compose yourself. We’ll grab some waters for all of us, then come back in and wrap this up. Sound good?”

  Rutherford nodded his head and said in a small voice that could have belonged to a ten-year-old, “Okay, sounds good.”

  ****

  As soon as the door was closed, I asked, “What have you got, Frank?”

  I had worked with Frank Logan for almost ten years now, and I knew when he was zeroing in on a suspect. Most of the time, we knew what the other was thinking. Today wasn’t one of those days.

  He opened the file folder he was carrying and handed me the sheet of paper on top just as Rickstad walked up carrying three bottles of water.

  “What have you got?” Rickstad asked, echoing my question.

  Frank looked at him, then back at me. “A hunch.” He gestured to the paper I was holding. “Halfway down the page. Read what two of Rutherford’s neighbors had to say about Bobby Evans.”

  I read the witness accounts twice and handed the paper to Rickstad. He read it, then looked up at Frank and made a grunting sound. “Seems like a reach to me.”

  Frank shrugged. “Like I said, it’s just a hunch. But I think it’s a good one. We need to push him.”

  Rickstad handed back the report. “Which one of you is gonna do the pushing?”

  Before
I could say anything, Frank answered, “I will.”

  ****

  I walked into the interview room alone and sat down without a word. Frank came in a moment later, carrying all three bottles of water. He placed a bottle on the table in front of me and handed one to our suspect.

  “Thank you,” Rutherford said and immediately uncapped the bottle and took a drink. His face was all cleaned up. Frank’s handkerchief was nowhere in sight.

  “Can I ask you something?” Frank said in that same soothing voice.

  “Sure.”

  He sat down. “Why did you refuse legal counsel?”

  Rutherford’s face brightened. “Because I haven’t done anything wrong. If I’m innocent why do I need an attorney?”

  “You’d be surprised how many folks don’t agree with that reasoning,” I said. “Most people make the call just to protect themselves.”

  “Nothing to protect,” Rutherford said.

  I opened the file and pretended to read. “You’ve suffered from pedophobia for just over twenty years now. Have your reactions to children remained consistent throughout all those years or have they varied at different times?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  I closed the file. “I mean have you always reacted in the manner in which you described earlier? Fleeing the scene? Anxiety attacks? Severe emotional distress?”

  “Oh, yes, I have. The severity has varied. Like I told you, I experienced a particularly rough time of it for three or four years, but medication helped plateau that out.”

  “What was the worst reaction you ever experienced?”

  Rutherford looked over at Frank, then back to me again, deciding how much he was going to tell us. He decided to go all-in. “When I was in my late thirties, when my condition was at its worst, I had an incident while on vacation. I fainted and urinated in my shorts. It happened on a public beach in front of dozens of people.”

  “Ever react with anger? Violence?”

  Rutherford vigorously shook his head. “No, never.”

  I stared hard at him. “You’re sure?”