“What do you mean?” Her hand slipped away from him, then the blanket fell loose and he was sitting up alone.“How could he?”
“I don’t know. I’m just speculating,” he said into the darkness. “Supposing he was somehow drawn to the kidnapper, the old man, the Hermit, whatever he is.”
“That's ridiculous,” she said and thought about the meteor.
“Hey, did Danny spend any time around South Hill? Or Danby?”
“No. Never. We never had any occasion to go out there. Whenever we went out for trips and stuff it was usually towards Lansing or Freeville. Sometimes the lake.”
“Maybe you knew somebody who…?”
“No. I’m telling you. Never,” she said peevishly.
“Okay. Okay.”Tripoli fell silent, lost in thought.“He had many names,” he murmured.
“Huh?”
He turned to her.“That's what Danny said. Do you remember?”
“Aliases?” She pulled him back down, pressed closer to gain warmth from his body.
“He called him father…”
“A priest?”
“Or God.”
“Trip, get real!”
“John,” he uttered thoughtfully. “John…How many Johns do you know?”
“Hundreds,” she said. “Zillions!”
“The old man kept him,” he went on, still caught up in his conjecture.“Educated him. You’ve got to grant him that.”
“Infected him,” she injected.“Poisoned him so he couldn’t even go into a lousy department store!”
“But what were his intentions?”
“To steal my child!”
“Right. But at the same time the old man tried to give him something—”
“Hey!” She pulled abruptly away. “Who the hell's side are you on, anyway?”
“Yours. Danny's and yours, of course. I’m just trying to put myself in the old guy's head.”
“You’d better not, because I’d like to smash his fucking skull,” she said vehemently.
“I understand.”
“No you don’t understand. Can’t. Not quite. No one can.”
After Tripoli left, Molly headed directly for her bed. Restless in his sleep, Danny had kicked off his blanket and one of his legs hung half out of the bed. Molly gently slid him back into place, straightened the covers, and tucked him in tight. Immediately she fell into a deep slumber. Her dreams were jumbled. She was in the office and Larry was saying something. The next instant she was with Danny in the woods. There was snow on the ground, and he was standing in front of an outdoor fire warming his hands. A tall figure was lurking in the distance behind them, watching him, watching her. He began to move forward, his feet dragging through the snow with a shuffling, dragging, hissing sound. No, it was a scrambling sound. A rubbing. A…No, wait, it was real, not a dream.
Molly awoke with a start. It took her a moment to focus. Something was moving outside the trailer. Cocking an ear, she could make out a slight rustling, a faint scratching noise below the window by Danny's bed. The old man, was her immediate thought. He's come to take Danny back.
Crouching down on the floor where she couldn’t be seen, she quickly crept over to Danny's bed. He was tossing in his sleep, muttering and, when she locked her arms around him, she could feel his pulse racing. Her own heart was pounding, too. She hung by the bed, paralyzed in the darkness, straining to listen, afraid to move.
Then the noise was gone and all she could hear were the normal nighttime sounds of the trailer park, a door slamming somewhere in the distance, a baby whimpering. Maybe it was just a cat digging under the trailer? she told herself. Or one of those raccoons that were always raiding the dumpsters. Yet as she tried to calm herself, she could have sworn she still felt a presence hovering just outside the thin walls of her home, watching them.
Finally, she got up from her crouch, lifted Danny, and carried him back to her own bed.
“Huh? What?” he asked as she settled him under the covers close to her.
“Shhh,” she whispered under her breath, clutching him close. “It's okay. Just go back to sleep.” She stroked his cheek and in an instant he was back asleep, his body tucked warm against hers. His pulse was even now, and she could feel his little heart beating next to hers.
chapter ten
“He was here,” said Molly first thing in the morning when she got Tripoli on his cell phone. He was just driving into the office. The day was dark and drizzling and she was standing in front of the trailer in her bathrobe getting soaked. It always seemed to be raining, more than ever, more than she could remember.
“Who?” he asked.
“The old man.”
“You saw him?”
“No. No.” She told him about the sounds.
“Okay. Fine. But how do you know it was the old guy?”
“I could feel it.”
“Molly—”
“And Danny felt it, too. His heart was racing away and—”
“I had a guy posted right in front of your place. He didn’t see anything. And if you heard something, why didn’t you call him? He’d have been on your doorstep in a second. Or call me.”
“I was so scared,” she said,“I wasn’t thinking.”
“Next time you call me.”
“There better not be a next time. Anyway, I’m getting a gun,” she said.
“You know how to use one?”
“No.”
“Well, forget it. It's a lousy idea. You’re going to end up shooting someone. Could even be one of my guys. A gun? No way! You don’t want one. Not with a little kid in your trailer.”
Shortly after ten, Molly had an unexpected visit from Larry Pierce.
“Just thought I’d drop off a little welcome home present for our young friend.” He went back to his car and returned with a big, gift-wrapped box. Molly noticed that he had brought along his briefcase, too.
Danny came wandering curiously out of the bedroom.
“Oh, hello there young man!” exclaimed Larry. He turned to Molly,“Boy, he looks really wonderful!”
“Do you remember Mr. Pierce, Honey?” She rested both hands on his shoulders. “Larry's my boss at the magazine you were looking at yesterday.”
“Oh, yeah,” Danny nodded. “The one I read with that story about grapes.”
“Read?” Larry laughed.
“Larry's been a big help to me while you’ve been gone.” She moved Danny closer to him.“He's a good friend, too,” she smiled up at Larry, resting a hand on his arm. Danny's eye was on her hand.
“I brought a little something for you.” Larry plunked the package down on the floor.
“Maybe you want to open it, Honey?” suggested Molly.
“Come on, let's take a look.” Larry knelt down and unwrapped the carton. Inside was a metal box. He swung open its doors to display the contents.
Danny's face lit up.
“You know what this is?”
“Sure I do!” said Danny. “It's a thing to magnify very tiny objects.”
“Exactly! A microscope. And this is the deluxe model. I didn’t know if you were too young—”
“Oh no, I’m not.” Danny already had the microscope positioned on the floor, and he was angling the mirror, trying to catch the light.
“I heard you were really grown up now and—”
“Look, it's got just everything.” Danny opened the small drawers, examining the contents.
“Right. Slides. Stains here. Forceps and scalpels—you have to be very careful with this, though, it's sharp. And it's got some ready-made slides, like these? I think…” Larry held one up to the light, “…this is a sliver of a bird's feather, right?”
“Oooh,” cried Danny, squinting into the eyepiece.“You can see everything. All the little lines and…Hey take a look!” Molly hadn’t seen him this excited since he had come back.
“Well, I’ve got to run off.” Larry reached for his briefcase and headed for the door, then hesitated. “Look,” he tur
ned to face her. The gesture seemed a little too rehearsed. “I know things must be topsy-turvy for you right now…So I really hate to ask anything…” he sounded terribly reluctant.
“Well, go on,” Molly urged, “at least ask.”
“If you could just take a quick look at some things—maybe when you have a few spare minutes.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a thick manila envelope, then a bunch of files and laid them on the table. “We’re stymied. None of us can make heads or tails of these.”
Molly opened the envelope. Inside were stacks of bills, accounts payable, contracts, and requests for reprint rights. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” she said, and couldn’t help but note his smile of relief.
“And these files,” he pulled out some more from his briefcase. “They’re the writers’ fees for—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” she said.“Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon.”
Danny looked abruptly up from the floor, kept watching, his eyes still on the door as Larry gave his mother a peck and finally left.
“He's a nice man, isn’t he,” said Molly.
Danny chewed on his lip, then turned back to his new microscope, peering into the eyepiece. “I don’t really like him so much,” he said without looking up.
“What? Why do you say that? He certainly was thinking of you when he brought this nice present, right?”
“Yes.”
“So?”
Danny carefully adjusted the knurled focus knob back and forth. “I don’t think he tells the truth.”
“About what?”
Danny looked up at her and shrugged.
“And he's done so much for me. For us. Why, without the magazine job, I don’t know what we’d do. And your Mommy— Mother—needs to do things she likes, too. You want that, don’t you?”
“Sure.” He looked up and smiled at her.“Sure.”
Late that morning, the lab report came back from Albany. Tripoli was on the phone in his office when Sisler dropped it on his desk.
“Hey, what's this?” he asked, covering the mouthpiece as he leaned far back in his chair and continued to listen.
“Forensics,” said Sisler.
Tripoli popped upright. “Hey, Pete, let me call you back,” he said, snapping the receiver into its cradle.
He ripped open the envelope and quickly scanned it with Sisler hanging over his shoulder. Forensics had done a thorough job, examined everything. The boy's underwear. No pubic hairs. No signs of ongoing sexual abuse. The soil caught in the treads of Danny's sneakers. The lint in his pockets, the fibers and stains on his clothes. When they had eliminated all the knowns, they discovered lots of fibers from domestic animals—fleece from sheep, hair from goats. But they also detected filaments from the wilds—the unmistakable fur of rabbits and deer and squirrel. All his clothes contained significant amounts of charcoal and wood ash. The stains on his pants were vegetable in origin, the residue of native wild grapes, raspberries, blueberries; his shirt sleeves had spots of tannin found in the bark of trees. It might have come from a solution used to tan skins or simply from the outer coating of hickory and black walnuts. The sweater assay was just as Tripoli expected, made from hand-carded wool.
“Well?” asked Tripoli, turning to Sisler.“What does it tell you?”
“I don’t know. I suppose that the kid hasn’t been shitting us. He didn’t spend the winter hanging out in a ranchburger in suburbia— at least not one that had carpets and drapes.”
“And?”
“There really is a hermit out there somewhere?”
“Exactly!”
“Okay,” said Sisler. “Now how do we find him? Where do we start? Even if we’re sure it's south of here, there's one hell of a lot of land out there between Ithaca and Key West.”
Tripoli's officers did a good job of keeping unwanted visitors away from Molly's trailer, but almost every time she and Danny left home there was at least one reporter dogging her heels.
A camera crew ambushed them while shopping at Tops Friendly Market.
“We just want to talk to Danny for a minute,” said the TV reporter with her moussed hair and perfect makeup as she stood in the middle of the cereal aisles, blocking Molly's cart.
“Well, Danny doesn’t want to,” Molly tried to shield Danny from the cameraman.
“Where were you all this time?” the reporter persisted.
Danny peeked out from behind his mother, smiled, then scooted back out of sight.
“What did the old Hermit—”
“Please!” said Molly, taking Danny by the hand and abandoning her groceries. She crossed the parking lot and started her shopping all over again at Wegman's.
Given the amount of media focus, the whole town was abuzz with talk of Danny's return. There was hardly a living soul who didn’t have a theory about his disappearance.
Siddhartha, the Norwegian hippie cook in the kitchen of the Moosewood Restaurant, suggested to Dansingtree, the waitress, that Danny had gone off to be raised by wild animals. “You know, just like in the story of Romulus and Remus.”
“Yeah. That makes sense,” Dansingtree agreed. Especially since Romulus, New York, was just a quick thirty miles up the road.
“One of those cursed fanatical religious sects kidnapped him!” exclaimed the Reverend Glen Thorne, shooting an index finger heavenward as he stood at the pulpit, exhorting his followers to be wary of the danger of worshipping false prophets. As pastor of the United Society of Christ, an evangelical splinter sect that held services in an old garage at the edge of town, he felt it his duty to warn his parishioners of the evil lurking in their very midst. “They programmed that boy and then turned him loose to snare new converts for their satanic beliefs.”
Others were convinced that a large ransom had been paid to a gang of professional kidnappers, while still others who worked in construction and were less prone to wild speculation surmised that the father had swiped the kid. Those who had been screwed by Chuck in some business deal figured nothing was beneath him, even hurting an innocent woman like Molly.
When one of the weekly supermarket tabloids hit the stands, it confirmed what a small but vocal segment of the population had suspected all along:
“Danny was kidnapped by aliens!” said Mrs. Song Hong, reading aloud as the cashier at the P&C beeped her groceries through the scanner.
“Aliens?” repeated Annie Hubbel, swiping a carton of eggs past the intersecting red beams of light.“Does it say what kind of aliens?”
One late afternoon Wally Schuman from the Journal managed to talk his way through the police protection and stood in Molly's kitchen. After all the help he had given her, it was hard for Molly to turn him away.
“I don’t want him to be pressured,” she said.
“Of course not,” he responded emphatically.
“You start asking questions about where the Hermit is and he gets very—”
“I understand. Frankly, I’m really much more interested in Danny than the old man. Everybody is. I heard such wonderful things.”
“If you write a story, then there’ll be just more folks hanging around.”
Schuman took a long, thoughtful pause.“You’re worried about the Hermit coming and somehow taking the boy back, right?”
Molly guessed the tack he was taking.“So your story is going to help flush the guy out, is that it?”
“Well, yes, that's a distinct possibility.”
Molly looked at him. He had crow's-feet at his eyes and lines in his face that gave him a perpetual smile, a kindly face. “You know you’re pressuring me.”
“I’m aware of that. Unfortunately, it goes with the job.”
“If I don’t let you—” she started to say.
“Then the story becomes a lot of speculation, secondhand information.”
“Okay,” she said finally. “Just remember the ground rules.”
And she let him sit with Danny out on the stoop and talk without interference. Maybe, she told hers
elf, maybe he can elicit something that Danny hasn’t told me. She stood at the kitchen window watching Schuman, saw how he put his arm around her boy, the way Danny smiled and looked comfortable with him, and she finally relaxed.
“I heard,” said Schuman softly,“about that shooting star.”
Danny turned to him and smiled with a touch of pride.
“Your neighbor, Mrs. Dolph, saw you with your mother sitting out there that night.”
The boy didn’t in the least seem surprised. “Yes. I know. I saw her.”
“You see a lot don’t you?”
“Not really,” he said. “It's all there.”
“Let me tell you, what you did was pretty impressive. How did you do that?”
“Oh, just listened.” He got up, and starting poking his toe into the ground.“I’m going to make a garden right here.” he said.“I need to dig all this stuff up. Wanna help?”
“Well, maybe yes. But not right now…That man. The Hermit. He taught you that trick.”
“But it's not a trick. You could do it, too.”
Wally Schuman looked very surprised.“I could?”
“You just need to open your mind's eye.”
The newspaper man did a double take. “Is that what he taught you?”
“Everything is there. To see. To hear. You have a lot of powers in you.” He touched his own chest. “You just have to use them, that's all.”
“But how?”
“Just do like me!” said Danny and laughed.“You gonna help me dig?”
A half-hour later, Wally came back in. He stood in front of Molly, absorbed in thought.
“How strange,” he said finally, shaking his head. “Talking to him.…Well…I found myself at times completely forgetting that he's just a little boy. He sometimes seems so…” he struggled for the right words,“so wise beyond his years. He seems to see so much.”
“See what?”
THE LAST BOY Page 22
