The Judas Child

by Carol O'Connell

  Mr. Caruthers broadened his smile in approval of this gambit. “I can also put valuable resources at your disposal.”

  Okay, I’ll play. “Is there something I can do for you, sir?”

  The old man inclined his head, almost imperceptibly, and a deal had been struck. “I have a present for you—one of our teachers.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out another folder. “Though he’s probably not the man you’re looking for. This one only likes little boys. However, I want you to take him with you when our discussion is over. You only have to parade him past a few reporters. And if you can manage it, drop a few unfortunate slips to the press—mention NAMBLA a few times. You’re familiar with the initials?”

  “Grown-ups who want to date little boys.”

  “Close enough.”

  “You have proof?”

  “No, my boy. If I had proof, I wouldn’t need you. I’ve done a thorough background check and come up with nothing but glowing references. That’s not unusual—one school passing the problem along to another. If they can’t prove a charge of pedophilia, they want to avoid the lawsuit. And so does St. Ursula’s.”

  He pushed a résumé across the desk. A photograph was clipped to the sheets, a portrait of a pasty white, slack-faced man. “But this school doesn’t intend to pass Gerald Beckerman along. Of course I’d like to have him put away. But if you can’t pull that off, I’ll settle for a public crucifixion.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to fire him?”

  “But not nearly as satisfying. And Beckerman has a powerful protector on the board of trustees. I believe that protection will be withdrawn after the press has a turn at the little pervert.”

  Rouge scanned the top lines of the résumé.

  “You will note,” said Mr. Caruthers, “that he’s thirty-eight years old. A predatory interest in children doesn’t start so late in life.”

  “And you figure, somewhere there must be a history on him.”

  “I know you’ll find it, Rouge. Then you’ll be sure to tell Beckerman’s attorney that you uncovered the pedophilia in the course of your kidnap investigation.”

  So the director didn’t buy the story of runaways, either. “Sir, how did you find out about this man?”

  Caruthers hesitated, perhaps wondering how far to trust this former student. Tentatively, he said, “I wouldn’t like the school to be sued for reading his private mail. However, I will admit to reading his E-mail. The software to eavesdrop came with our computer network. Things have changed a bit since you were with us, Rouge. Every student has a personal computer, even the five-year-olds, so we monitor the children’s chat rooms on the internet. An interesting thing about computer communication—people tend to write the way they talk. Formal structure falls away. It’s not like writing a letter when they’re typing dialogue in real time. There was a pedophile in one of those chat rooms. He wrote the way Gerald Beckerman talked. You could say I recognized his voice, and it made my flesh crawl.”

  “If you can’t find any history on him, what makes you think I can?”

  “I know you can, Rouge. I know more about you than your mother does.” With a casual hand gesture, he waved these ominous words aside. “Now, what can I do for you? You have only to ask.”

  Rouge faced the casement window near his chair. Beyond the glass pane, a small moving figure captured his attention. David was walking down the sloping grass and heading toward the lake. “I understand David Shore has a scholarship.”

  Mr. Caruthers nodded. “I’ve heard the rumors in town. They think all the scholarship children were sold to us for science experiments. And of course, that’s true.”

  Rouge smiled, though it wasn’t always easy to tell when Mr. Caruthers was joking. He kept his eyes on the window, following David’s progress toward the boathouse. The foot of the wharf and all but the roof and the far edge of the building were hidden by a stand of evergreen trees. David disappeared behind this cover.

  The director continued, “Sadie Green is also a scholarship child, but she’s an exception. Her parents are rather attached to her, so it never occurred to us to make a cash offer.”

  Rouge’s smile was edging off. David had reappeared on the wharf beyond the point where it was obscured by trees, and he was slowly walking toward the end of the planks extending far into the lake. The boy stopped and turned to look back at the boathouse.

  “Most of our scholarship children are harvested from foster homes. The absentee parents are tracked down and paid off. Our attorneys nail down absolute custody for—”

  “Stop,” said Rouge. Now Mr. Caruthers had his complete attention again. “Back up. You really do this? You buy the scholarship kids?”

  “Oh, yes. Though, technically, the housemothers are the legal guardians. We can’t have the biological parents coming back and messing up the child’s future with poverty.”

  And what about the children? Did Mr. Caruthers think they didn’t miss their parents, that—

  “This is hardly a cold, impersonal orphanage, Rouge,” said the mind-reading director. “Each of the housemothers has one scholarship child in her care all year round. A very stable environment.”

  Rouge turned back to the window. David was gone again. The end of the wharf was deserted. Now the boy reemerged on the other side of the dense clot of pines, all but standing at attention and staring at the boathouse. Then he turned abruptly to look back toward the school. David was too far away for Rouge to guess the focus point of the boy’s eyes, but there was an unsettling feeling of communion.

  Without turning away from the window, Rouge said, “David’s high in the genius range, right? Are you planning to make him into a little scientist, sir?”

  “We don’t do that, Rouge. We never interfere with the child’s ambition. It wasn’t done to you or Susan, was it? No, of course not. That would be counter to our interests. We’re in the prediction business.” Mr. Caruthers swiveled his chair around to look out the window, and together they watched the child walk back up the hill toward the school.

  Rouge pulled out his notebook and pen. “What do you predict for David?”

  “I’d say he has a future in baseball. That’s based on his passion and physical aptitude. We never made that prediction for you, Rouge. Even though your case was marred by the loss of wealth, I believe our original prophecy will play out.”

  Mr. Caruthers moved his chair around to face his visitor, and there was a vague disappointment in the man’s eyes, perhaps because Rouge seemed not to care about this portent of his own future. The director went on in a drier recital. “Later in life, David will be drawn to a second career in physics. That’s based on his intellectual gifts.”

  Now the boy was standing on the grass under the window. Rouge looked past the child to the lake and wondered what that little scene had been about. David was also staring at the lake and nodding his head.

  Something was going on here. David turned his small face up to the window. Their eyes met, and Rouge was hardly paying attention to the school’s director anymore.

  What am I missing, David?

  “The personality profiles tell us much more interesting things,” said Mr. Caruthers. “And very early on. You and your sister for instance. By the time you and Susan were eight, we knew you were both destined for formidable careers in law.”

  David walked away in the direction of the cottage. Rouge looked down at his notebook and made a crude map of the wharf and the boathouse.

  Mr. Caruthers droned on, “Your own profile was matched with distinguished graduates over the past hundred years. But you were unique for the way you processed information. We always had a keen interest in your future.”

  “And my father’s money.” Rouge made a note on the stand of pine trees between the window and the boathouse.

  “The high tuition favors the student with money to exploit his full potential. Without that backing, the child might not reach the projected goal, and that would ruin our statistics.”

  “Like
I did?”

  “Did you, Rouge? It was regrettable that you had to leave Princeton, but understandable with your father’s death, all the family debts—and your mother’s health problems. Now that year in baseball was a fascinating quirk. But I found it more interesting that you became a policeman. And now with your recent promotion to BCI investigator, you seem to have found your calling. You were quite literally born to do this work.”

  Rouge shifted in his chair. He was feeling naked and not liking it at all. Though the director persisted in his Santa Claus persona, the doppelganger seemed darker now.

  “Surprised, Rouge? Did you think we’d lost interest in you? Oh, no. We’re always collecting data.”

  “I need to know more about the girls.” He turned to a new page in his notebook. “Could they outsmart the average adult?”

  “Don’t count on it. Gwen Hubble has the higher IQ—close to yours. However, she’s very literal—no good at subterfuge.” He sorted through the papers in her file. “Based on extensive psychological profiles, I predict that she will physically and emotionally shut down in any fearful situation. I’d say her prospects of finding her own way home are rather bleak.”

  “And Sadie Green?”

  “Completely different story. Sadie once managed to outwit the school nurse and the village police. She faked her own death with an arrow.”

  “That was her?” Rouge remembered the day, only three weeks ago: Two of the village cops had come back to the station at the end of their shift; one was laughing, and the other man’s face was red with humiliation. Chief Croft still tormented the poor rookie who had called for the county meat wagon. The town’s youngest officer, Billy Poor, had never suspected that the arrow in the child’s chest might be a prop decorated with fake blood—not until the little girl jumped up and ran away laughing. Patrolman Poor had sworn that the child’s eyes never blinked, and this had been his criterion for a corpse.

  Rouge made a drawing of an arrow at the top of a clean page in his notebook. “Is Sadie a good student?”

  “The worst. She daydreams in class, and she’s late with all her assignments. The child has a grisly imagination and absolutely adores bloody violence. But we’d still like to have her back.”

  “Could Sadie have engineered the disappearance? She seems to have a—”

  “Not her style, though she is a bad influence on Gwen Hubble. No, I’d say faking a kidnapping is much too subtle. Sadie only goes for the gold—the death scene. I think she needs the immediate gratification of scaring the shit out of people.”

  The word “shit” was not in this man’s vocabulary, and Rouge wondered if Sadie had also been a bad influence on Mr. Caruthers. “Exactly how smart is this kid?”

  “I’d say we were evenly matched. When Sadie and I lock horns over some disciplinary problem, she only beats me half the time.”

  “Didn’t you say she had a scholarship? That puts her in David’s IQ range, right?”

  “Not even close. Sadie won her tuition waiver with a comic book.” Mr. Caruthers reached out to the corner of his desk and opened another file. He handed Rouge a small homemade magazine of crayon drawings and little paragraphs carefully penned inside white balloon shapes. “I hope you had an early lunch. It’s gross. She was seven years old when she made it.”

  Rouge thumbed through the comic book of brilliant colors and outrageous pictures. All the bizarre cartoon characters had rather interesting ideas on how to kill one another with the maximum amount of mutilation.

  “I don’t know what goes on inside that child,” said Mr. Caruthers. “There’s no test for it.”

  Rouge closed the comic book and held it up to the director. “Are you saying this was her entrance exam?”

  Caruthers shook his head. “Sadie failed the exam. She’s very bright, but she missed the cutoff score by more than just a few points. Even if her parents could’ve managed the full tuition, we would’ve denied her a place in the school. However, Sadie’s mother doesn’t take rejection very well. The woman insisted on an appointment.”

  “Mrs. Green talked you into—”

  “No. I expected histrionics, but Mrs. Green outsmarted me. Never even said hello when she walked in. She stood Sadie in front of my desk, handed me that comic book and left the room. Neglected to collect her child on the way out. Interesting woman.”

  He slapped one hand down on the desk. “I read every single page of that incredibly gory, bloody—thing. And then I looked up at Sadie. It’s hard to describe her smile—I’d swear she was daring me to let her in.” Mr. Caruthers took back the comic book, handling it with great care, almost tenderness. “Now three years have gone by, and Sadie still takes prisoners—but that sweet stage won’t last long.”

  There was no window in the room, and she knew there was something odd about that, but the idea slipped away from her as she stared at the tray.

  Never enough food.

  Gwen Hubble had awakened to cocoa and a buttered roll this time. The juice and egg had been her last meal, so another day must have gone by.

  How many days now? Three?

  She had intended to flush her last meal down the toilet, knowing it must be tainted with the potion that made her sleep all the time. Though her dog’s medications were always put into his water bowl, she had eliminated the liquid possibilities by drinking her morning orange juice with no ill effects. Then weakness had won out, and she had eaten the drugged breakfast egg. With a clearer mind, she might have reasoned it out sooner, for liquid could be had from the water tap, and solid food would be the strongest lure.

  Now, with greater resolve, she crumbled her dinner roll into small pieces that wouldn’t clog the toilet. Her stomach was knotting up with hunger pains, and she was feeling another wave of nausea.

  Gwen worked by the dim glow of the night-light. It was not bright enough to see clearly, and it was by touch that she detected the soft, moist center of the roll. Perhaps the drug was injected into the middle of the bread.

  So hungry.

  She tested one of the dry crumbs of the outer crust, resting it on her tongue. There was nothing unusual in the taste, and so she swallowed it.

  Perhaps she wouldn’t have to flush away the entire roll.

  The child separated the suspicious center from the rest of the roll and set it off to one side of the plate. She continued to shred the dry section to make the tiny meal last longer. She ate another dry crumb and stared at the chained wall hamper. Then she stood up and walked across the oval rug to pull on its door. The hamper opened a crack, but there was not enough light to see what was inside, and her hand would not fit through the narrow opening. Gwen went back to the cot and sat down again, eyes fixed on the locked chain strung between the hamper’s handle and the towel rack.

  She was trying to remember something important about padlocks, but then her eye wandered back to the large armoire, so out of place in this bathroom. She tried to recall a train of thought that revolved around this massive piece of furniture, but like a dream, the harder she worked to remember it, the more it receded into the dark and fuzzy recesses of her mind.

  She ate another crumb.

  Now she moved slowly across the rug and onto the bare tiles, hands reaching out to the armoire. The doors were locked. She speculated on what it might be holding—or concealing.

  That’s it.

  There should be a window in this room, for it was not a closet, not a box room. And this was no modern building like Sadie’s house, with electric fans for ventilation. By the high ceiling and the molding around the tiles, she guessed it was as old as her own house, where each one of the numerous bathrooms had a window.

  One small hand squeezed between the back of the armoire and the wall. Her fingers found the wooden frame, and then the sill—a window. She pushed against the furniture with all her might, but it would not move. She went back to the tray on the table by her cot and ate more crumbs for energy.

  Oh, how dumb. She needed leverage, not muscle.

&n
bsp; Gwen picked at the remaining crumbs as she looked around the room for something she could use as a pry bar. The cot was a trove of levers in its legs and slats. And now her eyes were riveted to the tray. She could see more clearly—too clearly.

  She had eaten the entire roll, including the dangerous moist center.

  Oh, stupid Gwen! Stupid, stupid!

  Tears streamed down her face as her legs folded, and her small body fell to the floor. Her eyes were closing. And only now it occurred to her that someone might be starving Sadie too, and drugging her best friend’s eggs and rolls.

  Her hand went to the amulet with the magic engraving of the all-seeing eye, a gift from Sadie, a comfort in the dark.

  It was gone.

  Gwen sat up, resisting, fighting sleep. She spread her hands along the floor, searching with her fingertips, exploring all the ridges of the rug and the grout between the tiles.

  It was not here. She had lost her eye. The amulet was gone.

  And now her body was made of lead. She spread out flat on the tiles, and her soft rounded cheek pressed into the hard floor.

  First she whispered it as a question, and then with great effort, she lifted her face and screamed, “Sadie! Where are you!”

  The reporters were back in full force this evening, filling the short flight of stone steps leading up to the station house. Most of them were feeding on sandwiches and coffee. Some were stamping their feet to shake off the cold night air.

  Rouge opened the passenger door and roughly pulled out his gift from Mr. Caruthers. Gerald Beckerman was startled, mouth hanging open as he was dragged from the front seat. The English teacher had been lured into the car with the pretense of polite questions about his missing students. Beckerman had made amiable conversation all the way to the police station. But now he was being treated like a criminal. And then he began to act like one, eyes full of fear as he tried to pull away from Rouge’s firm grasp.

  One reporter’s nose went up. And then the rest of them were turning on the car, heads swiveling to watch the cop and his prisoner. The men and women were slowly moving down the steps. Some had already crossed to the parking lot, heading toward Rouge and the teacher, circling around them, watching, waiting.