The Judas Child

by Carol O'Connell

  Arnie Pyle was reaching inside his jacket. “I was going to share this with all of you when—”

  “Sure you were. Cut the bull, okay? Give it to me.”

  He pulled out a folded sheet of paper, and she ripped it from his hand. She read the scrawl of lines on the page and looked up at Captain Costello. “You’re right, it’s a fake. Sadie doesn’t wear purple underwear.” She crumpled the paper into a tight ball and delicately held it between her thumb and forefinger as she placed it in the breast pocket of Pyle’s suit. She patted down the bulge in the material. “I do have some control over my daughter. Not everything in her life is purple.” She smiled at the agent with overdone sympathy. “I guess you just got demoted back to the B team.” She turned to Captain Costello. “Right?”

  Captain Costello was smiling. Marsha Hubble put a stop to that when she walked back into the room.

  “Get a car to take me home. Now.”

  Rouge knew the lieutenant governor’s tone would have been more polite had she been talking to a taxi dispatcher. Captain Costello let the insult slide. “In a few minutes, Mrs. Hubble. There’s something I have to discuss with—”

  “I haven’t got time for this,” she said. “I have press interviews and citizens groups waiting to—”

  “No you don’t,” said Costello. “I’m sorry about the press command post—that’s over. I’m shutting it down. From now on the media will be channeled through my office.”

  “You can’t tell me what to—”

  “Well, yes I can—if you’re obstructing the case. And you are.”

  “This is ridiculous. You have no idea how to use the media. I do.”

  Captain Costello turned to Mrs. Green. “Is that how you feel too, ma’am?”

  “I wouldn’t know about any of that,” said Becca Green. “I wasn’t invited to the command post. That’s at Marsha’s house, isn’t it?”

  Rouge thought Marsha Hubble smiled with a bit too much condescension as she put one hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “Becca, I know what an ordeal this has been for you. That’s why I made a deal with the press. They get access to me anytime they want it, and all the FBI bulletins—as long as they leave you in peace. I didn’t want you and Harry to put up with those jackals calling day and night.”

  And perhaps she didn’t think Sadie’s mother would know how to use the media, either. Rouge watched the anger in Costello’s eyes as the politician went on with her performance, flashing her best public relations smile, her eyes radiating warmth all over Mrs. Green. Marsha Hubble’s tone could not have been more solicitous. “I can handle everything myself. You can trust me to—”

  Her mouth closed softly, and her eyes were quizzical as she stared at her husband. Peter Hubble was seated close to Sadie’s father on a bench facing the door. The two of them were poring over a road map heavily scored with pencil lines and ink. “What are they doing?”

  “They’re planning their day,” said Becca Green, matter-of-factly. “You didn’t know? They drive around all day long, looking for the kids. They used to do that at night, but I convinced them they could see more when the sun was out. In my experience, men often miss little details like that. They need direction.”

  “And what about you?” The concern in Marsha Hubble’s voice had the ring of the genuine article. Her arm circled Mrs. Green’s shoulders. “How do you spend the days?”

  “Me? Oh, early in the morning I make up sandwiches for the guys to take on the road. I’m afraid they’d forget to eat if I didn’t. Men—they’re children. After that, I make breakfast. I like to send them off with a good meal. And then I spend hours waiting for the phone to ring. It never does, but you never know.” She nodded toward the men and their maps. “When it gets dark, I start cooking a hot dinner for those two. I spend the rest of my time crying for the kids. And sometimes I cry for their fathers. It’s a lot of work, but it fills up my day.”

  The politician’s arm fell away to hang limp at her side. “I didn’t know—” Softer now, in the smaller voice of a mechanical doll, “Oh, God, no.”

  “So you don’t think God is moved by tears?” Becca Green seemed to be weighing this misunderstood opinion. “Well, maybe you’re right. But you gotta try everything—crying—everything.”

  The lieutenant governor was not standing very straight anymore, and Rouge worried that she might fall to her knees, for every bit of her energy was gone; the fight was finally over. A wet streak of mascara marred the careful mask of her makeup.

  “That’s the spirit.” Mrs. Green enfolded the taller woman in her big arms and held her close. The golden head slowly bent to Becca’s shoulder. “Then, later on,” Sadie’s mother whispered, “if crying doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”

  Gwen sat in the dirt a safe distance from the dog circle. She was surrounded by small stacks of journals and shaded from the bright light by the boughs of an oak. The journals were arranged by the order of their dates. She picked up one after the other, leafing through the pages, scanning the maintenance entries penned on the first day of every month. And now she understood why the cellar thermostat was registering 79 degrees, though no heat was coming from the steam radiators along the rear walls.

  “Sadie, the pipes aren’t for watering the trees—there’s an underground irrigation system for that. The rain lowers the temperature of the room. All those bulbs make it too hot, but oak trees need fabulous amounts of light. So she installed the—”

  “She? The Fly isn’t a woman. You saw him, you heard him.” Sadie broke another biscuit in half and yelled, “Sitting Bull!” When the dog backed away from the stuffed felt head, she threw him the piece of biscuit. Then she reached down to touch Gwen’s forehead. “You’ve got a little fever. So what is this she business?”

  “Okay, I’m not sure it’s a woman. That’s just a feeling, but whoever writes these journals is a different person.”

  Sadie seemed skeptical.

  “It’s the way she treats the dog.” Gwen picked up another journal and opened it to a page marked by a turned-down corner. “Here,” she said, one hand moving down the lines of writing. “She bought him from a kennel that was going out of business. Oh, and it turns out he is good at tracking scents. He digs up her truffles.”

  Gwen riffled through another journal, passing by all the entries for experiments on new cultures, until she found another turned-back corner. “Listen to this. ‘The dog was mean as they come, but in time, I taught him to be gentle. Now he licks my hand a hundred times a day and never leaves my side.’ ” She closed the notebook and pointed to the cart containing the dog’s food. “All those cans and bags are very expensive. This person doesn’t mistreat animals. This is someone else.”

  “Maybe he’s a split personality—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

  “Conrad Veidt, 1920.” There were many films by the same title, but this German version was a favorite because the butler was played by Bela Lugosi. “No, that doesn’t work for me. I think it’s two different people.”

  Sadie shrugged. “Find anything on the lock?” Turning back to the dog, she yelled, “Geronimo!”

  “Not yet.” Gwen raised her voice to be heard over the snarling. “But I know why there’s no ladder for changing the lightbulbs. There’s a crawl space between the ceiling and the top floor. She replaces the bulbs from up there, about three feet under the first floor.”

  “Sitting Bull!” Sadie tossed another biscuit. “So that’s why you can’t hear his footsteps when he comes into the house.” She turned away from the dog and hunkered down on the ground near a pile of dark clothing.

  “Right. So then she crawls around up there replacing the bulbs. And it really hurts her to do that. She has arthritis—that’s what all those pain pills are for—but she keeps going into that crawl space on her hands and knees.” Gwen bowed her head to read from the page, “ ‘All doubled up in agony, not caring about the pain, always for the love of the trees.’ ”

  Sadie looked up from her project o
f stuffing shredded magazines and plastic bags into a large black sweater, filling it out in the shape of an adult-size torso. She held up half a biscuit and yelled, “Geronimo!” And once again the dog attacked the stuffed mask, so like a human head.

  “Don’t let him chew on it anymore. He’s going to demolish it.” The dog had ripped away some of the stitches shaped like fangs. Part of the felt mouth hung open. With each biscuit, the dog grew a little more violent, more powerful.

  “Cool.” Sadie smiled her approval as he whipped the mask in a particularly vicious frenzy. “Sitting Bull!”

  The dog backed away and sat down, his eyes fixed on Sadie’s hand, from whence came all food.

  Gwen bit into a shiitake mushroom from the stand of logs by the wall. She had been tempted to eat the beautiful mushrooms that grew on the log bundle next to it, but she hesitated out of respect. According to the journals, she had guessed right about those gnarly logs; they had come from the dead tree with stumps for arms. The tree had a name like a person.

  Sadie knotted loosened threads from the sweater’s hem into the belt loops of the stuffed pants. Now she laid the headless body out on the floor. “Well, what do you think?”

  “Looks good, but you need his shoes.” Gwen put her thumb in the book to mark her place as she closed it. “The shoes have the strongest scent. Maybe you can tie them to the pant legs with the laces.”

  “Too bad Mark isn’t here. I bet he could make blasting powder with the chemicals in the white room. Then we could just blow the door open.” Sadie bent over the torso again. “You think Mark and Jesse ever got the gun to work?”

  “No way.” Gwen resumed her reading. She had found a pattern in the written lines, and now she reached into the stack of journals and went to the same dates in each one. “It was pretty dumb of Jesse to encode all the gun designs from the Internet. It was like flagging the file for Mr. Caruthers. He was the one who bought them the encryption program.”

  “Stupid boys.” Sadie had succeeded in fastening the shoes to the pant legs. All that remained was to attach the head. She turned to the dog, who seemed to like the head more than she did. He was holding his Sitting Bull pose, but drooled as he stared at the round dark object. “But suppose they do get the gun to work?”

  “Never happen,” said Gwen. “They always talk big. Make the dog hold that pose for a while. I want to see how long he’ll keep it.” In journal after journal, the same dates were panning out.

  Sadie’s eyes wandered from the dog to the head and back again. He really coveted that head.

  Gwen opened another book, scanning for a reference to the lock. “I think the boys are full of it—all talk.”

  “I don’t,” said Sadie. “I think they make Mr. Caruthers really nervous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I found the door problem.” Gwen looked up from the journal. “I know what’s wrong with it. The metal was too thick for a regular lock, so she had a special one made. But it broke down after twenty years. The knob on the other side will open the bolt. But the inside knob won’t turn at all—it’s fused. Whenever she’s down here working, she props the door open with that block of concrete by the wall. The door is set on an angle. That’s why it closes by itself.”

  “Why didn’t she just get the lock fixed?” Sadie was examining a handful of dog biscuits, perhaps with a view to a trade—biscuits for the head.

  After a few minutes’ reading, Gwen said, “She didn’t want to call a locksmith. Listen. She says, ‘All I need is for some fool to go to town and talk about the oak trees. They’ll put me away.’ ”

  “It is crazy—growing trees in the house.”

  “She needed the tree roots to grow truffles. She wanted a sample of every fungus in the—Wait.” Gwen picked up another journal and flipped through the pages until she found the date she was looking for. “Here. She wrote this when one of the trees died. ‘In the beginning, my work was all about the fungus collection. But now it is all about the trees. I must not lose any more of them. It is so hard to make new friends when you are old.’ She blames herself for the tree that died. Grieves over it like it was a person.”

  “Well, what does she want with us? And who’s The Fly?”

  “Maybe he’s a relative or something, but this woman probably doesn’t know we’re here.”

  “How do you figure that?” Sadie had turned away from the dog, and he crept a few inches closer to the head.

  “She’s not even in the house.” Gwen rested one hand on the stack of journals on the ground beside her. “Each notebook covers one year. Every year, she breaks off on the same day. I checked the dates for every journal. And she always makes an entry exactly nine days later. So she’ll be back the day after Christmas. If we just hold on till then, we won’t have to use the dog.”

  Sadie looked back at the animal, and he immediately stopped edging toward the mask. Gwen thought he looked shamefaced to be caught. Sadie turned away from him, and the dog crept closer to the mask again. Though Gwen was still watching, apparently he didn’t care what she thought of him, for she was no Alpha wolf, not even close.

  “You don’t think the dog can really do this, do you?”

  “He can. He wants to,” said Gwen. “When we were in the ground, I know the man hurt him, and—”

  “The Fly. Call him The Fly.” Sadie’s correction was gentle but firm, for this distinction between man and insect was very important to her—more than a movie title. In her own way, Sadie had already defeated the man—the bug, The Fly.

  “Right,” said Gwen. “The dog was already limping when I got here. The Fly probably mistreats him a lot. If you keep hurting an animal that way, he’ll turn on you.”

  “So we’re training the dog to do what he really wants to do.”

  “Yes. I don’t think that man—Sorry. The Fly doesn’t know anything about animals. The dog is the journal lady’s pet, not his.”

  “Why do you think she isn’t part of this? For all you know—”

  “She’s not mean enough, not mean at all. That dead tree over there?” Gwen pointed to the barren oak. Its arms ended in cruel flat cuts. “She feels guilty because she couldn’t keep it alive. This is the book she started when the tree died.” Gwen held up a journal and opened it to a turned-back page. “She says she’s in mourning. She named all the trees for people she loved. The dead tree was called Samuel. He was a soldier, I think. It says he died in a war.”

  Sadie turned to the dog. He had moved a bit closer to the black felt head, breaking the Sitting Bull pose again—cheating. A cross look from the Alpha wolf made him back up a few steps. “So she named a tree after a dead soldier? My family names kids for dead people. But a tree?”

  “Hmm. She kept it alive for more than twenty years.” Gwen ran one finger down the page until she found the line she wanted. “And when the tree died, she wrote, ‘I must have a penchant for grief. He went to war, he said, for my sake. And now Samuel is killed again. Forgive me twice, my love.’ ”

  Gwen was first to notice the silence. The plant misters no longer shushed fine sprays of water into the air over the mushroom tables, and the pumps had ceased to buzz and chug. The brilliant ceiling went dark, and all the table bulbs blinked off beneath each shelf of mushroom blocks.

  “This happens every night,” said Sadie.

  “But the lights—the heat.” The pills were wearing off. Pain was stealing over her, and Gwen could hear the fear creep back into her voice.

  “Don’t worry. The furnace will kick in when the temperature drops. You’ll hear the hiss of the radiators in a little while.”

  But for now it was dead quiet, and the only remaining illumination was from a single bulb over the door of the white room. It wore a halo of refracted light from the drops of moisture in the air, and it appeared to hang there as an independent thing, a floating disk, an electric moon.

  The girls sat very close together in the darkness and listened to the sound of the dog chewing
on the head.

  eight

  Dr. Mortimer Cray signed the paper acknowledging that his life was worthless should the inmates take him hostage; understanding that there would be no negotiation to save him; and agreeing that neither he nor his heirs would hold a harsh or legal grudge against the State of New York for his mutilation or demise. Then he deposited his keys in a plastic tray, for they might be used as weapons—or so the prison authorities maintained.

  The psychiatrist opened his arms and spread his legs for the man in the dark uniform. After probing all the forbidden zones, the corrections officer was satisfied that the doctor possessed no contraband. Finally, Mortimer Cray passed into a long room where the prisoner awaited him, shackled hand and foot, seated behind a table near the opposite wall.

  A guard was posted by the door, far enough from the table to prevent eavesdropping on a normal level of conversation. This was not the privacy the psychiatrist had hoped for, but it would do. He did not trust the telephones in the common visiting area, nor did he want a wall of glass to hamper intimacy.

  Mortimer adjusted his glasses as he approached the prisoner. He was about to turn to the guard and tell him this was the wrong convict; this hulk was not Paul Marie. The man he wanted was of slight, almost delicate build. Then the prisoner raised his head and Mortimer beheld the man’s eyes, large, dark brown and liquid—so beautiful. Once they had been the priest’s only truly outstanding feature.

  From the moment the psychiatrist sat down at the table, the prisoner began to grow in size. The doctor blinked, but the illusion persisted. The man’s shoulders grew wider, his thick arms more muscular. The chains seemed less substantial now. Mortimer glanced quickly over one shoulder to see the guard engrossed in his newspaper, taking no notice of this frightening metamorphosis.

  The doctor diagnosed his own delusion as a by-product of increasing tension over recent days—and all the long years of fear.

  “Mr. Marie,” the psychiatrist began, deliberately using the wrong form of address. But the prisoner did not correct him, nor was there any outward sign that he minded being stripped of his proper title. Perhaps Paul Marie no longer thought of himself as a priest.