by Tim Green
She paddled and steered blindly and madly until the horizon began to lighten in the east. She moved toward shore, and her toes soon sank into the muck. Up on the soft shore amid the tangle of cattails she burrowed as best she could into the warm dark mud and then fell into a shivering exhausted sleep.
The sun was high and burning when she awoke to the sound of a small outboard motor. She closed her eyes and curled up into a ball. The muddy headboard lay beside her, half in and half out of the dark water. Her heart raced frantically as the engine came closer; still she remained motionless. She was praying. The chugging grew louder. She shut her eyes tight. Her raw wounds began to burn anew. Then she heard a voice.
“What’s that?”
She opened her eyes. Two men in fishing gear stared in bewilderment down at her from their boat.
“It’s a girl,” one of them said.
“Is she alive?”
Her eyes spilled hot tears. She covered herself as best she could with her hands and nodded frantically that she was . . .
Jack bolted up from the sheets. They were twisted and damp. He wiped the sweat from his brow and looked around, blinking. His heart hammered against the inside of his chest.
After a deep breath he got up and drove to the airport. Inside the terminal he got a newspaper and sat down near his gate. He hid his face behind the paper, dropping it only to catch quick glimpses of the people who began to surround him. He felt naked sitting there and wondered if the sickness inside him would ever stop.
CHAPTER 12
Three days after the news of Strauss’s murder appeared in the upstate papers, Jack was able to see his daughter again. It had been exactly a month since they had allowed him his last visit. It was a cruel month and possibly the thing that had given him the final resolve to randomly choose and destroy Strauss. Since her admission into Crestwood, Jack had grown accustomed to seeing Janet every Sunday. His last visit, however, ended in a horrible scene of hysterical screaming. He was asked by the doctor to give Janet a month’s reprieve.
Crestwood was a gray stone mansion with dark green shutters and a slate roof. The hospital rested on a hilltop overlooking a spacious tree-covered lawn, shrouded on the other three sides by a stand of ancient and majestic spruce trees. Crestwood had been converted into an asylum shortly after the Second World War, when two wings were added, one on either side, that blended seamlessly with the original architecture. Then more recently, in the early 1980s, it had taken on the sole mission of treating children who were mentally ill.
Jack turned off the highway and wound his way up the private road leading to the old stone edifice. Halfway up, he slowed at the sight of a jogger. As he pulled alongside, he realized that it was Beth Phillips, Crestwood’s elementary education teacher. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail that bounced with her gait. Frumpy gray sweats covered her small athletic frame, but the expression on her face was anything but drab. Her high round cheeks were apple red, and she wore the indefatigable smile of a child winning a race. She waved and burst out in a happy hello as he passed. Jack felt compelled to lightly tap his horn.
He parked his car in the visitors’ lot and assessed the sky. The warm afternoon sun was now weighing battle with a collection of heavy clouds. He took a deep breath and strode up the walk through the tall green front doors and into the reception area. He stood for a moment in the towering marble foyer of the old mansion and looked around at the somber antique furniture and the grand heavily framed oil paintings that lined the walls. It smelled old and musty.
Anne Steinberg, Janet’s doctor, smiled warmly at Jack and buzzed the electric lock that allowed him to enter into the inner sanctum of Crestwood.
“It’s good to see you,” she said. Then her pleasant face took on a worried look.
“I don’t want you to have any expectations, Mr. Ruskin,” she said.
Jack swallowed hard. His stomach was already in knots. Dr. Steinberg stopped halfway down the hall and looked up at him through her silver-rimmed glasses with penetrating pale green eyes.
“As I told you before,” she said, “you were not to blame for what happened the last time . . .”
It was too late for that. Jack blamed himself for that and everything. It was he, after all, who was to have picked her up from soccer practice after school. That’s when Tupp got her. It was ten days before anyone else saw her again. His nightmare had filled in the details.
“Actually,” Dr. Steinberg said, “her reaction, to anything, I think gives us reason to hope.
“Please,” she said before continuing down the hallway, “be patient with her and be patient with yourself.”
Janet hadn’t spoken a word since her abduction. Dr. Steinberg said it was her mind’s way of insulating itself from the pain that she’d experienced. She had, in effect, shut down. The only difference between Janet and the victim of a traumatic head injury was that her injury had been psychological and not physical.
Dr. Steinberg turned to the door on her right and slowly swung it open. It was a small sitting room that looked out over a koi pond. Jack stepped inside. Despite the warm yellow walls, it was barren. Absent was any artwork or knickknacks, anything that could be remotely harmful.
Janet was on the couch, facing the glass doors. The white-and-orange-spotted fish writhed just beneath the water’s surface, gulping for food.
Janet sat motionless in the soft blue flowery material of the couch. Her pale legs stuck out like bare matchsticks from her lifeless cotton gown. Her feet were tucked inside pink terry-cloth Peds with dirty white nubs across their bottoms. Her beautiful hair had been cropped close and hung in blunt little blond bangs. Under her eyes were the dark puffy circles that came with heavy medication. On her rail-thin arm were the faded pink scars burned into her flesh by Eugene Tupp’s smoldering cigarette.
Jack’s stomach tightened and rolled. He felt his nails digging into the palms of his hands. Janet stared absently out the window. Then she blinked, just once, and turned her head his way.
CHAPTER 13
Jack took a step toward his daughter, just a step. He wanted to cross the small room, scoop her up, and press her whole body to his chest. His heart ached, and tears filled his eyes. Hold her tight. That was what he’d always done. He couldn’t think of any specific incident, only vague but powerful images of Janet in her room, sullen or wounded and needing love, needing him. Even as a teenager she would let him hug her.
Janet’s mother wasn’t like that. The nice word for Angela was reserved. And when there were problems—as there are with every high school girl, a boy calling too late, a poor mark on a test, a broken curfew—it would be his presence, his touch that would make everything right. That’s what he begged God he could do at this moment, to make everything right again.
He took another step closer and the pupils of her eyes seemed to widen. Then Janet emitted a low wailing sound. It was a single plaintive note, but it struck a chord so deep inside Jack that he swayed backward, sickened. It was the grievous sound of a small animal, trapped and helpless. Jack felt it somehow accused him. No, it convicted him of causing all this. A father too busy to remember his little girl.
Jack felt Dr. Steinberg’s birdlike hand lock onto his upper arm. She pulled him back toward the door. He felt his strength wither, helpless in her firm little grip. She was whispering some consolation to him, but the sound came to him as if through a tube. It didn’t matter. As he moved away, he could see the anxiety in his little girl’s face begin to diminish. He thought that nothing could have injured him more than her hysteria a month ago, but he’d been wrong. He took a deep breath and broke free from Dr. Steinberg. He followed the long, bleak hallway to the reception area and out the front door.
The sky was now a tumultuous charcoal gray, and the wind above had begun to howl through the treetops. Jack started for his car but saw two staff members emerge from the thick cluster of pines that surrounded the lot. They were talking and heading straight for him up the brick walkwa
y. Jack dipped his chin and headed in the opposite direction, ducking down one of the brick paths that led into the garden. He kept going until he came to a stone bench inside a decorative hedge. He collapsed there and buried his face in his hands.
The tide of agony came rushing back from some hidden place within and Jack cried like a child. There he sat, sobbing and shuddering for some time until he felt the touch of a hand, warm and tentative, on his shoulder.
“Mr. Ruskin, are you all right?”
Startled, Jack turned toward the voice. It was Beth Phillips. She spoke in a soft whisper that was barely audible over the sweeping wind.
Jack put his hand on hers and pivoted his whole body toward her. He clung to her desperately, soaking the large front pocket of her sweatshirt with his tears. She didn’t shrink from him. Instead she put her arms around his shoulders and rubbed the back of his head and neck with her open palm.
“It’ll be all right,” she said, whispering. “Mr. Ruskin, it’ll be all right.”
“I’m so alone,” he heard himself say. He knew he should be embarrassed, but somehow he wasn’t. “My God, I’m so alone.”
Jack didn’t know how long he held on to her. He was emotionally spent and his sense of time had come undone. The sky grew darker and fat drops of rain began to strike them intermittently.
“Mr. Ruskin? I’m sorry,” Beth said, “but I have to go. Mr. Ruskin? Are you all right?”
Jack shut his eyes and nodded.
After a moment, he looked up at her. She had let her hair down out of the ponytail, and as she turned her head it slowly revealed her face. Her blue-gray eyes were luminous and full of pity; he realized that it was a slight upturn at the end of her nose that gave her a youthful appearance. Instead of blushing, she smiled warmly and took his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. Between her two front teeth was a small gap.
Her hand was so warm, he hated to let go, but he did. He watched longingly as she disappeared around the corner of the hedge. She had some kind of inner light and strength that surged into him like electricity. The warmth was startling.
Angela never had that. Angela loved Jack the hardworking lawyer. Jack the successful husband. She loved the masks, the costumes of suits and jewelry. By the time it was over—when she’d moved on to an ex-fraternity boy with a double chin and thicker wallet than Jack had ever dreamed of—Jack realized she’d always been just an empty shadow in his life.
He wiped his face on his sleeve and stood up to go. The drops were less frequent now, and the air was filled with the musty scent of the warm rain. He stopped in front of the old mansion on his way to the parking lot. The vastness of the place was enhanced by the knowledge that inside its towering three-story stone walls was his little girl, drawn and thin and pale. Jack winced.
CHAPTER 14
The drive home in the rain seemed longer than the drive out. Jack’s mind was mostly blank. When he did emerge from his mental fog, he thought of Beth Phillips. His mind groped for not just the image, but the sensation of her holding him. He had no idea where she was in her life. She didn’t wear a wedding band or an engagement ring. Since his divorce, Jack found himself noticing those kinds of things automatically when he saw an attractive woman. Maybe that was a survival instinct as well.
At home Jack found a big blue can of Foster’s Ale in the refrigerator. He poured some into a glass, took the can as well as a backup, and planted himself in front of the television. Jack usually found some consolation in old black-and-white movies, and he found one starring Gregory Peck that had only just begun. He was halfway through the movie—Peck was a missionary in China—when Jack realized he’d forgotten to eat. Instead of doing anything about it, he reloaded with two more of the big blue cans of beer. At one fifty-two in the morning, he awoke long enough to shut off the television and find his bed.
It took Jack three cups of coffee but less than half an hour to drive to his office in the morning. The commute would take him three times that if he didn’t arrive every morning at six-thirty A.M., long before the traffic from Long Island into Midtown Manhattan became a disaster. He was working on a power-plant acquisition just outside Pittsburgh for an international power company called U.S. Fuel.
Some of the work had to be done in Pittsburgh. That aspect of these transactions was what allowed Jack to slip in and out of a community over a three- or four-month period without notice. After a morning of document review and conference calls Jack got back into his car and headed for LaGuardia. The gray gloom was beginning to break up, and the rain had stopped. As he crossed the Triborough Bridge, a beam of sunlight fell from the sky and illuminated part of Manhattan in a golden glow. It was enough to give Jack’s spirits a slight lift, which didn’t mean an awful lot since they were starting from the bottom.
The cell phone rang at his side. It was Dr. Steinberg, Janet’s doctor.
She was soft-voiced and hesitant and Jack knew something was wrong. He asked.
“We want you to take a break from your visits,’’ Dr. Steinberg said. “Janet had convulsions after you left.”
Jack remained silent. He heard the hum of the uneven asphalt drift past beneath his car.
“What did I do?”
“It’s all men,’’ she said. “She is the most frightened little girl I’ve ever treated.’’
Jack spoke to her for another ten minutes. She tried to console him. She urged him to be patient. But in the end what Dr. Steinberg really wanted was to put some distance and time between his next visit. She wouldn’t say how long.
He numbly agreed with the doctor’s wishes.
Her words stayed with him to the airport. He bought a sandwich and forced himself to chew it down during the flight while he worked on the U.S. Fuel file. He counted each swallow. There were fourteen.
In Pittsburgh he rented a car, got some directions at the desk, and went straight to police headquarters. On the fourth floor in an obscure office at the end of a long hall, Jack asked a frizzy-haired receptionist for Sergeant Tidwell. Moments later an enormous black man with a dark flat face emerged from the labyrinth of desks and cubicles behind her. He had bags under his big round eyes, giving him the sad expression of a basset hound.
“I’m Sergeant Tidwell,” he said in a soft but deep voice. “Can I help you?”
Jack extended his hand. Stepping around the receptionist’s battered gray desk, he began his well-rehearsed tale: “I’m Mark Kane.”
Jack had actually gone to the trouble of having business cards and a fake driver’s license made up in the name of Mark Kane in the event that these were ever needed.
“I spoke to you last Thursday,” he continued, “. . . about the subdirectory.”
“Oh, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right,” Tidwell said, the scowl of concentration suddenly disappearing into an uncomfortable smile.
“Trisha,” he said to the receptionist, who had busied herself with a Judith Krantz paperback novel, “number three is open, isn’t it?”
“Mmmm-huh,” she said without looking up.
“We can go right in here,” Tidwell said.
He led Jack into a small interview room whose faded wood door was marked with a brass 3. The number was missing one of the two small nails that held it in place so that it now hung upside down and backward. Jack sat down at the small decrepit table whose surface had been marred by years of use. Tidwell excused himself momentarily, returning with a large three-ring binder that he dumped down onto the table with a thud.
Jack looked at the sergeant apprehensively. Even though he had a right by law to examine the subdirectory, he felt the need to repeat his fabricated story.
“We had a problem in the neighborhood where we lived,” he said. “Nothing happened to our daughter, but our neighbors had a high school girl . . . I just promised myself and my wife.”
“Well,” Tidwell said, shifting his massive weight from one foot to the other, “there it is. Everything is in there. I don’t have to be here with you, but would you
make sure you tell Trisha when you’re done? You can write down any information you like, you just can’t take anything with you and you can’t use a photocopy machine. That’s all.”
“Fine,” Jack said, forcing a smile.
When Tidwell had gone Jack stared at the binder for a minute. It was innocuous enough looking, a dark blue plastic-covered binder with a small white label that read LEVEL 3 SUBDIRECTORY. But inside, Jack knew, was a cache of horrors that most people would find unthinkable. Inside was a collection of the most dangerous, violent, predatory criminals in the city of Pittsburgh. They were out there, roaming free, only biding their time until they committed their next crime. Jack didn’t believe in redemption for these people. Statistics proved that the rate of recidivism was nearly 100 percent. He was aware that many of them had also been the victims of sexual abuse. Jack felt badly about that, but it didn’t change his determination to put an end to the cycle. In his mind these people were better off dead than being allowed to destroy more lives.
His mouth turned down into a nasty frown. His face transformed into a mask of hatred. Jack opened the binder and began to leaf through the names, the faces, and the addresses of these real-life monsters and a chronicle of the crimes they had committed: unlawful imprisonment, kidnapping, sodomy, sexual assault, and rape. One crime was worse than the next. He flipped through the pages and looked at the victims: young women, occasionally boys, torn from their homes or the streets, taken to some hidden spot and violated.
The perpetrators came from all walks of life: bus drivers, clergymen, doctors, camp counselors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, salesclerks. Some looked like ordinary people, and Jack knew the stories of the guy next door, wolves in sheep’s clothing. He shook his head in disgust and felt his hands begin to tremble. Others were more conspicuous, deviant in their appearance, human trash inside and out.
