The Judas Child

by Carol O'Connell

  The printed message on her pager had been an odd one. “Urgent—boathouse—tell no one.” But that was Sadie’s style, the cliffhanger.

  Gwen broke through a tight line of speckled trees at the edge of the wood. Her flushed face was scratched, and her socks fell in loose woolen rolls around her ankles. Breath came with ragged tears at her throat, and the bones of her shins were going to splinters with every hard pounding footfall. She rounded the side of the old boathouse, her thick blond braid thumping at the back of a red parka.

  She stepped onto the wharf, and as she walked toward the boathouse door, her steps slowed. A rock lay on the boards amid the debris of splintered century-old wood, a rusted padlock and its crusty hasp. Well, perhaps the groundskeeper had changed the lock since Sadie mastered the combination.

  Or maybe not.

  The crude breakage would be an improvement on Sadie’s usual method of operations. Yes, that must be it. And Gwen approved. Now this was really scary.

  She pushed through the door and walked into the dark.

  No candles?

  She braced herself for the assault. Would Sadie be waiting behind the door?

  No—not this time.

  Gwen’s eyes had adjusted to the light streaming in the door behind her. And now she made out the small body, the familiar head of light brown hair and the purple down jacket. Sadie was lying at the center of the floor. Gwen was disappointed. After the big production of the broken lock, she had expected something more imaginative. She knelt down beside her friend and shook her.

  “Hey, I’m not buying it. Get up.”

  The child lying on the floor made no response. Gwen looked up to see the lock on the boathouse phone box had also been broken.

  “Sadie, it’s not funny. Sadie?”

  David stood up and stamped his feet. They had gone numb while he sat hunched and hidden in the bushes. Now his toes tingled as they came back to life. The air was growing colder. He pulled up the collar of his jacket against a sudden rush of wind off the lake.

  Sadie should have come out long before now if she expected to get home by dark. He walked out onto open ground, emboldened by curiosity.

  He hadn’t heard the dog bark for a very long time. If Gwen had not brought her own dog, then where had the animal come from?

  David moved closer to the boathouse, the better to eavesdrop. The window facing the shore was the source of all his Sadie trivia. He pressed one ear against the rough wood of the shutters, but there was no sound of barks, no giggles, nothing.

  The grass and the trees were all melding into the same gray hue, and the sky was darkening. The boy walked around the side of the building and stepped onto the wharf. He popped off the balls of his feet and hung there in the air for a moment, hesitating. If they caught him spying on them, what story could he give?

  Oh, sure. Like he could actually get the words out. Well, he didn’t need a story. He had the strongest right to be here as a boarder at the school. The girls were only day students, townies.

  David guessed it was close to dinnertime, and soon his housemother would be standing in the door of the cottage, calling out his name the way the real mothers did in the neighborhoods of Makers Village. But he couldn’t leave yet. He had to know what was going on in there, though he strongly suspected it was another one of Sadie’s traps set to scare him to death. He spotted the padlock and hasp on the wharf beside the door.

  That was odd.

  Sadie’s plotting had never been so elaborate. She always went for the swift shock. A slow build to terror, and now this violence upon private property—well, this was entirely too subtle.

  He pushed the door open and went inside. Though the interior was black, but for a few feet of bad light from the open doorway, he knew immediately that the boathouse was empty. But the girls could not have gotten past him. No way.

  David walked deeper into the darkness, memory leading him safely around the tarpaulined canoes, a sailboat and stacks of boxes. His two classmates were only impressions on the air. He sniffed the musty space to separate the smell of the lake water from the smell of dog hair and traces of girl in the faint residue of spearmint gum and talcum powder.

  The boy’s head snapped to one side.

  What was that?

  A queer, rude finger of ice stroked his spine. There it was again—a furtive shadow within shadows and the quick scratching of small feet. On some level, he knew it was a rat, but he would not believe in it. Although he owed his scholarship to a festering rat bite as much as to his IQ score, his brain was blind to vermin. They could not follow him here. They were all back there in the foster home. He had seen that place for the last time when a social worker had carted him off to the hospital. There were no more rats in the world. He would not believe in them.

  The wind banged the door shut behind him, and his world went black. David stopped breathing for all the time it took to cross the wide room, to bang his legs against a wooden box and find the knob for the door. And then the boy was swinging into the air, holding on to the door handle and dangling over freezing water. He had opened the wrong door, and his long legs had overstepped the shallow stairs leading down to the sheltered boat slip. The wider door beyond this one was standing open to the remains of daylight.

  David used his body, swinging his weight to bring the door close to its wood frame again. His feet, pedaling in midair, found purchase on the ladder, and he climbed back into the boathouse. With the dim light from the slip, he found the right door and stepped onto the solid planks of the wharf. He walked to the end of the building and stared at the lakeside doors. This was the only other exit—by water.

  That must be how they had gotten past him, paddling behind the rocks and foliage along the shore. He could count the canoes to see if one was missing. But no—he was not going back in there, not for anything.

  He walked out to the far end of the long wharf where it hung on stilts over the water. The lake had become a choppy agitation of whitecaps; wind-driven waves licked and slapped the pilings. There was no boat in sight along the shoreline. David turned back toward the massive redbrick building at the top of the hill, looming there like a great authoritarian parent, five stories tall counting the two narrow rows of dormer windows set in black shingles. His own cottage was left of the main building and farther back in the woods. He longed to go there; he was aching from the cold and very hungry.

  The girls were probably home by now. It was almost dinnertime. But still he hated to leave this riddle undone. He headed back through the woods to look for Sadie’s bike. She would not have left it behind.

  He found the gunnysack, but the bike was gone. So they had at least not drowned in the lake.

  Of course not, idiot.

  They were probably at Gwen’s house having a hot dinner.

  Passing through the wall of pine trees, he entered the Christmas tree lane near the public road. Sadie’s purple bike was parked by the bus stop, propped up against a signpost, and this made no sense at all—nothing did. First a canoe and now a bus? Why would they take the bus so close to dinnertime? What new game was this?

  David looked toward Gwen Hubble’s home at the top of the long cobblestone driveway. The lights were going on, one by one, as though someone were racing from room to room in a great panic, in absolute terror of the dark, turning on all the lamps in the house.

  The purple bicycle lay in the middle of Miss Fowler’s broken picket fence. She stood on the front lawn, shivering in a coat she had pulled over her nightgown at the obscene hour of two o’clock in the morning. She frowned at the damaged fence slats while three men screamed in a hellish concert. The uniformed policeman was loudest, almost hysterically childlike when he reached a high C on the musical scale. And now the other two men had ceased to shout foul words at one another. They stared at him with something close to awe, and so did Miss Fowler. This young policeman might be one of very few Americans who could sing the more difficult notes in the national anthem.

  The offic
er was holding each man by one arm, keeping them apart. He was calmer now, saying, “I want you guys to cool off, or I’m gonna start writing tickets.”

  “Tickets?” Miss Fowler’s voice had the effect of a gunshot. Three heads turned in unison to face the imperious seventy-two-year-old woman, five ten in her fluffy pink slippers. Not for nothing had she spent the last forty years terrorizing the young.

  “I don’t have any use for tickets, Officer. I want them arrested.” She looked from one culprit to the other. “Unless one of you pays for the damage to my fence—and right this minute. Do I make myself clear?” She turned to the young patrolman who had surely begun to shave only last week, and then only nicking a few whiskers his first time out with a razor.

  “It was his fault!” yelled the smaller of the young policeman’s captives, pointing one bony finger at the larger man, who squirmed out of the policeman’s grasp and ran down the sidewalk. The officer sprinted after the escapee and tackled him. Miss Fowler grasped the smaller man firmly by the arm, lest he also try to escape. And now she caught sight of a familiar car rolling slowly past them. One fogged window was half open, the better to see what was going on.

  It was Rouge Kendall, and he was out of uniform. No doubt he had just come out of Dame’s Tavern at the end of the street. He was probably planning to drive right by, to roll on home and into a nice warm bed and a long sweet sleep.

  Well, she would fix that.

  She called out to him, “Rouge, you better stop!” Her tone of voice implied that she could still make his life a living hell of extended piano practice, though he had not been her student since he was nine years old.

  He did bring the car to a guilty stop. Old habits died hard; he had always been a polite child, respectful to his elders. The car glided to the curb as the other policeman was marching his prisoner back to the broken fence. The uniformed officer turned to Rouge and waved him off. “I can handle it.”

  Miss Fowler thought not. She turned a stony eye on Rouge. He grinned at her and shrugged. Behind a long fringe of auburn hair, his slow roving hazel eyes took in the damage to her fence. He might be over six feet tall, but otherwise Rouge had not changed so much since the days when he had been her worst student. The general features of the boy hung on in the man—but for the eyes. She thought his eyes were too old for a youngster of twenty-five, almost a breach of natural law.

  Well, all of St. Ursula’s students had been a bit odd in one way or another.

  While the other policeman was flipping through the pages of his notebook, Rouge’s gaze was fixed on the purple bicycle. “Which one of them was riding it, Phil?”

  “Butt out,” said the officer in uniform, puffing up his chest like a blowfish imitating a larger fish. He spoke to the two men. “I’m going to issue tickets for disturbing the—”

  Tickets again?

  “It was that one,” said Miss Fowler, pointing at the larger of the two men. “I saw him fall off the bicycle.”

  She had seen his type before, a shabby dresser, an unshaven, wandering man. And by the smell of him, she knew the derelict was in dire need of a change of underwear. So she was hoping to pin fault on the smaller man, who seemed a more solvent prospect to pay for the broken fence.

  Rouge turned to the man in uniform. “It’s a girl’s bike, Phil. Top of the line racer—maybe three, four hundred dollars.” And now he turned back to the unshaven man with the secondhand clothes and the bad smell. “So what’s wrong with this picture?”

  Phil turned on the man squirming under his grip. “You stole that bike,” he said, as though this were his own sudden flash of insight.

  The derelict broke loose again and would have run, but Rouge extended one long, lazy leg to trip the man and bring him down.

  The uniformed officer sat down on top of the thief and handcuffed him. “Rouge, I can handle this myself.”

  Rouge was amiable, despite the rebuff. “The bike won’t fit in your trunk, not unless you throw out all the roadblock gear.”

  “What?” said the officer.

  Miss Fowler looked at the back end of the patrol car. The trunk latch was tied down with wire, and through the partial opening, she could see the blue wood of a barricade and the tips of orange cones used to divert traffic from an accident scene.

  “Phil, you can have all the credit for the great bike caper, okay? But now you’ve got two disorderly drunks and a bike to transport. And your witness, Miss Fowler? She doesn’t drive.”

  Phil was staring at his patrol car and working on the logistics of who would fit where. He nodded in defeat.

  Five minutes later, Rouge pulled his car away from the curb. The purple bike was in his backseat, and Miss Fowler sat beside him. She thought he took her criticism quite well, responding with a “Yes, ma’am” at every suggestion for turn signals. She graced him with a rare smile. Rouge was a strange one, and she believed he spent entirely too much time in Dame’s Tavern, but he was fundamentally a good boy.

  Rouge’s car turned left into the station house driveway, following the only patrol car in Makers Village. Once, the town had sported two cruisers, but the second one had disappeared into Green’s Auto Shop last summer and was never seen again. Some had believed the vehicle might be saved; others said no. The mayor had finally settled this debate, claiming the patrol car had gone to heaven to live with Jesus. Miss Fowler suspected that the mayor also drank.

  When they pulled into the police station parking lot, which was actually the library parking lot, it was hard to miss the bright lights of the camera crews and all the vans with major news-show logos printed on their sides. As she stepped out of the car, she also noted four New York State Police vehicles, one long black limousine and two rider-less motorcycles.

  Miss Fowler was first to reach the top of the stairs. She held the door open for Rouge as he carried the bicycle into the station house. The reception area was not much bigger than her own front parlor and crowded with so many people, it was certainly in violation of the fire codes. Before the door had swung shut behind them, a woman’s voice yelled out, “The bike!”

  A portly figure in a shapeless blue dress was walking toward them, a woman of average height and average features, even to the limp mouse-brown hair. She yelled again, “That’s my daughter’s bike!” A photographer blinded Rouge with flashes, and another man with a microphone was bearing down on him.

  What a lot of fuss over a stolen bicycle.

  Or maybe there was more to this, for the yelling woman had clearly been crying, and now she was caressing her child’s purple bicycle. Well, this person was obviously a professional mother. Miss Fowler knew the breed: the soft plump arms and ample bosom could comfort three children at once on a bad day, and the thick waist spoke well for her cooking. The woman’s face was full of mother terror, and there was a siren in her voice, teetering on the screaming pitch of a three-alarm fire.

  Miss Fowler was nodding in general approval of traditional motherhood when another woman stepped forward. This one was slender and smartly tailored, with suspicious highlights in her upswept ash-blond hair. No yelling from this one—only cool composure and élan.

  And doesn’t she seem familiar?

  This blonde had the classic good looks of a television personality, but when she spoke, her voice was laced with acid. “Well, at least someone on the force is awake and earning his salary.” The blond woman turned on the prisoners, looking from one to the other, as though deciding which man she would have boiled alive for her late supper.

  Miss Fowler made a moue of distaste as she recalled this woman’s face from a recent photograph in the Sunday newspaper. The blonde was Marsha Hubble, estranged wife of the reclusive Peter Hubble, whose family had lived in the same house since 1875. Oh, and she was also the lieutenant governor of New York State.

  And now Miss Fowler realized she had overestimated the lady politician’s composure, for Mrs. Hubble’s eyes were struck with fear. On the inside, this woman was screaming—silently, madly.

>   Another mother.

  two

  In the late afternoon, Rouge Kendall had ended his longest tour of duty, and now he sat on a bar stool in Dame’s Tavern. His eyes were red and sore; he had not seen his bed since yesterday morning. Finding that purple bicycle had changed his plans to sleep off last night’s liquor.

  A television set was mounted high on the wall behind the bar, and photographs of the missing children appeared on the screen in a pastiche of home videos and still shots. Mercifully, the bartender had turned off the volume. The silent pictures changed to coverage on the young boy who had spotted Sadie Green’s abandoned bicycle at a bus stop. Young David Shore had neatly backed up the bike thief’s story. The camera framed the thief with a jacket pulled up over his head to hide his face from the press as he was led away by state troopers.

  In the next shot, a camera zoomed in on ten-year-old David exiting the building with his guardian, Mrs. Hofstra, a willowy woman with iron-gray hair. The boy was tall for his age, handsome and graceful. There was much about him to inspire self-confidence, yet throughout the police interview, shy David had never said one word which was not whispered into Mrs. Hofstra’s ear and relayed by her larger voice.

  Now the television screen showed Rouge an event he had not witnessed from his post inside the building. The reporters were converging on the boy, their winter coats flapping in the wind like the wings of crows as they screamed out their questions and thrust microphones in the child’s face. David’s blue eyes rounded out with extreme fear as both hands rose high to fend off the assault. His guardian put one protective arm around the ten-year-old and guided him into the waiting car. Rouge couldn’t tell what Mrs. Hofstra was saying to the reporters, but he hoped it was obscene.

  A camera panned back to the door of the police station. Lieutenant Governor Marsha Hubble was standing at the top of the steps, an imperious blonde in a black leather trench coat. She was not as pretty as her daughter Gwen, but she did hold a man’s attention. She was flanked by the two male FBI agents who had questioned David at the station. These men might be taller than Marsha Hubble, but there was no mistaking where the power lay in this trio. The lieutenant governor was raising one fist in the air, and Rouge could guess what that was about. The bicycle at the bus stop supported the theory of runaways. But the lady politician preferred her own game plan of wall-to-wall federal agents, troopers, roadblocks and a tristate manhunt for a kidnapper. Her face was an angry hot flush.