by John Gault
I WILL NOT BRING ADULT BOOKS TO SCHOOL.
Oh, good, she’s found it. She was at the page. In a few seconds she would ask him about it.
“Jamie . . . ?”
“Yes, Mrs. Lynde.”
“There’s a page in here with, uh, with a woman’s body cut out of it. Her head is here, but her body has been cut out. Do you know anything about that, Jamie?”
“It was like that when I got it, Mrs. Lynde.” He spoke matter-of-factly, very consciously not adding an “honest” to his statement. He’d been ready for her question, and he lied well—although he tried to do so sparingly, saving his deceptions for when he really needed them the most. In fact, when Mrs. Lynde had asked him earlier how he got a book like White Women out of the library, he’d readily admitted to stealing it—not to keep but to look at and then smuggle back. No, Jamie only lied when he really had to. Like when he was telling his mother the things he sensed she wanted to hear.
He hadn’t stopped working. Three more lines to go.
Mrs. Lynde studied the defiled page again and concluded that yes, anybody could have done it. From all the dates stamped on the card, White Women was apparently a popular item over at Jericho Public & Lending Library. Besides, the cutout work was very precise, far more likely the work of an adult’s hand than a child’s. She’d take Jamie’s word for it, anyway.
Jamie was finished. Wiping his hands on his jeans he sauntered over to Mrs. Lynde’s desk and stood in front of her, waiting to be recognized and dismissed.
“Okay, Jamie,” she said, looking up from the book and flashing a smile that said everything was all evened up. “Just wipe the boards clean and you can go.”
“What about the book?” he asked. “I have to take it back.”
She was ready for that. “I’m going past the library,” she said. “I’ll take it back. I want to talk to Miss Livingstone about it, tell her about the page.”
Jamie hung his head and made himself look very worried. Mrs. Lynde took the bait. “Don’t worry,” she said kindly, almost reaching over the desk to pat his hand, but then deciding against it, on the grounds that it might embarrass him further. “I won’t tell her where it came from—at least I won’t tell her if you make me a solemn promise, right here and now, that you won’t go around bragging about what you did. And I also want you to promise that you won’t ever do it again. Do I have your word?”
“Yes, Mrs. Lynde,” he said softly, adding a little tremor to his voice for effect. This time she didn’t respond to his tricks. “Okay Jamie,” she said, “you can go. After you clean the blackboards.”
“Well?” Teddy demanded. He was sitting in the old corduroy armchair that had been part of Jamie’s parents’ first living room set, the one they’d had before Jamie was born. Jamie was on the floor in front of Teddy, sitting cross-legged and looking up at him.
“It was no big deal,” Jamie said.
“But the plan worked?”
“Some of it worked. All of the first part worked.”
“Okay,” Teddy sighed impatiently, “let’s get on with it. And don’t leave anything out; I want to hear all the details.”
Jamie ran through all the stuff that had happened at school as quickly as he could. He knew that Teddy had very little interest in that, and the bear did not interrupt until Jamie got to the part about the library.
“What was Miss Livingstone wearing today?”
“I was going to tell you that. First I . . .”
“I want to know now,” Teddy demanded.
Jamie had to think for a moment. If he told Teddy the truth, that Miss Livingstone had worn a straight black skirt and an ordinary, light-blue blouse, and that she had her glasses on all the time, and that her hair was up in a bun, Teddy’d just go into one of his sour moods and stay that way for the rest of the night. Teddy was always unreasonable when it came to Miss Livingstone; he kept insisting that she was the most beautiful woman in Jericho. Frankly, Jamie could not understand what his friend saw in her. To him, she was a crotchety, mean old lady—not as old as that frigging Miss Oliphant, not even as old as Barbara, but old—who was always following him around the library, spying on him, telling him to keep quiet, even when he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Besides, she was that rotten Abergail’s aunt, and Abergail always seemed more rotten when she was with Miss Livingstone.
Once, in the park, Jamie had eavesdropped on a group of older boys talking about Miss Livingstone. One of them said that she was “queer” and the others had all laughed a little bit; and then another boy claimed that his father had said that too. Jamie hadn’t known what “queer” meant, except for odd and strange and maybe weird, and when he’d asked Teddy about it, the bear had just said: “That’s bullshit, Jamie. Bullshit.”
Oh yes, Teddy. “She had on this silky blouse,” he began, deciding that he might as well make it good, “and when she bent over, you could see her tits. And her nipples were really hard, Teddy . . .” Teddy really got excited about nipples; Jamie always had to include anything about nipples in his stories. “. . . and she was wearing tight white pants, Teddy, and it didn’t look like she had any underwear on. And her hair was hanging down her back. She really looked sexy.”
“Did she touch herself?” Teddy was breathing hard.
“No. I . . . uh . . . I mean I’m not sure. Wait! She did touch herself down there once.”
“What did she look like then? Did it make her happy? Did her face get all red?”
Jamie just wanted to tell the story. It was tough enough trying to make up details as he went along. Why did Teddy have to be such a pain sometimes? All that really happened was that Mrs. Lynde had gone into the library and asked to speak with Miss Livingstone personally. Jamie crouched down in the bushes, had watched all that from the window. And he’d seen Miss Livingstone come out of her office, and Mrs. Lynde, whose back was to Jamie, had said something and handed over the book.
“Which boy?” Miss Livingstone had asked.
Mrs. Lynde must have said that she didn’t want to say who it was, because Jamie heard Miss Livingstone reply that she knew anyway, that it was “the Benjamin brat” who, to her way of thinking, wasn’t “quite right in the head.” But Mrs. Lynde had kept her promise and hadn’t said anything to Miss Livingstone after that except that she had to go.
When Mrs. Lynde had gone, Miss Livingstone had stood there clutching the book, and Jamie noticed that she was biting her lip and that her knuckles had gone all white. Then she’d opened the book and flipped through rapidly, stopping finally at the page. Then her face had got all red and her eyes had gone all cold and mean, and even though she’d whispered it, Jamie heard her words.
“Perverted, disgusting little bastard!”
However: “She opened the book, Teddy, and her face got all red and hot looking. Then she went back into her office, and I went around and looked in that window too, like you said to do.”
Miss Livingstone had placed the book on her desk and stood a few feet away, looking at it as if it was a snake or a spider. After a few minutes—at least it had seemed that long to Jamie—she’d opened it to the page again. Then she’d reached into a drawer and taken out the envelope. She’d started biting her lip again, and she was pushing her hands through her hair, and some of it had come loose and was falling in front of her face. Then she’d started walking very fast in short little circles.
“She took the picture, Teddy, and she held it up and looked at it really close, and then she undid some more buttons on her blouse and put her hand inside, and she was rubbing her tits—you know, breathing hard and everything.”
Miss Livingstone had taken the picture—the naked, kneeling woman from the book with her own face pasted on it—and crumpled it up. Then she’d opened the ball of paper and torn it into little shreds and thrown the pieces into the wastebasket. All the time she’d been muttering “creep” and “pervert” and “disgusting little bastard.” Finally, she’d hurled the whole book into the wastebasket and stompe
d out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Jamie had heard water running and guessed she must be in her private bathroom.
“She was really sexed up, Teddy. I could tell. Then she had to go to the bathroom, and I bet you I know what she did in there . . .”
“She was touching herself!” Teddy said triumphantly.
“I’m sure she did, Teddy. I know she did.”
“Then what happened?”
The library caretaker, Mr. Wasilewsky, had grabbed Jamie by the shirt collar and yanked him away from the window, yelled “no-good-son-of-a-bitch-kid” at him and aimed a kick at his ass that Jamie just managed to avoid.
“I had to leave, Teddy. I saw the caretaker coming, and I got scared, so I snaked along the side of the building and got away.”
The bear sighed.
C H A P T E R
4
Because he was a good cop, and because the Morley disappearance was his case, David Bentley tried to keep his mind on his work, which was to command the point position, seven men on his left and seven on his right, of the volunteer search team. But he was distracted by this place, this strange, rectangular clearing all covered with grassy hummocks. Even stranger than the place actually was the fact that he’d never been there before, either as child or man. And, he was certain, neither had any of the men who were with him today, marching from end to end. Whately’s Copse. The name was hardly used any more, but he imagined that the legend remained, that each new generation of Jericho parents was still warning each new generation of Jericho children to stay away from there. It was probably phrased a lot more scientifically now, though, with “seismic activity” and “unstable crust” replacing “bogeyman.” The world had grown up a lot in David’s thirty years and so had Jericho; the small town of his early childhood was now a city of eighty-five thousand and still eating up Wisconsin farmland at a heady pace. But some things never changed. Where else in the world would more than a dozen men take a day off from work—or play—to spend their time traipsing through muck and underbrush to help out the police? Not many places, he figured. It made him feel a little proud.
“Hey,” he heard, somewhere not far to his left, “I think I’ve found something!” Hank Denmond, the twenty-two-year-old kid who was already on his way to his first million thanks to a car restoration business he’d founded two years before, was holding something high in the air with his right hand, pointing at it excitedly with his left. David joined the growing circle of men and reached out his hand. They certainly looked like an old man’s glasses, David thought, just the kind that he’d have expected somebody like the Reverend Morley to wear. The lenses were almost round, the frames of worn-thin metal, and there was a safety pin securing the right armiture to the frame. The plastic ear pieces were well-chewed, and a too-heavy silver chain still hung from them.
“Anybody recognize these?” David asked, holding up the glasses. From the corner of his eye he saw a gray-haired man begin to move in closer. His name was Labonte and, like his father before him, he ran the two-chair barber shop just a block up Main Street from where it crossed Madison to form Jericho’s central intersection. “They’re his,” Labonte said without hesitation. “He was wearing them just last week when he came in for a haircut.”
Then somebody else said, “Hey, Dave, I think you’d better have a look at this.” In the top of the closest mound, and the largest in the clearing, was a hole. A man, whose name David could not recall, stepped gingerly to the crest of the mound and dropped to his knees. He brushed at the lip of the hole with his hands and announced, “I think something slid down here.”
“Can you see anything?” David asked, joining the man on the mound and copying his prone position.
“No. Too dark.”
“Hank,” David turned to Denmond, “could you run out to the road and get the big flashlight out of the cruiser?” He fished the keys out of his pocket and tossed them. Denmond fielded them easily and loped away from the gathering. “Hank!” Denmond stopped and turned his head. “There’s a coil of rope in the trunk,” David said. “Can you get that too?” Denmond waved and disappeared into the trees.
“Stupid old man,” David muttered.
When he was just a child, nine or maybe ten, one of the boys in his class, Danny Trowbridge, had gone into these woods on a dare one black Hallowe’en night. David and the other kids had waited by the road, laughing and talking and shouting at Danny. They thought he was just inside the trees, and that in a little while he’d come out and collect the $1.76 he’d earned from them for his feat of courage. But an hour passed, and there was no Danny. David and the others talked about going in after Danny, and they shouted for him and whistled and even lit a big bonfire so that he could see his way out; but they were too terrified to go in for him. After midnight David stood in the doorway of the police station, tears in his eyes—and fear—and blurted out to his father, who was then chief of police, about Danny Trowbridge. All that night and all the next day the police and the men from the town searched, but neither Danny nor any trace of him was ever found. The hole wasn’t there then, or if it was, nobody ever came across it. After a while, everybody gave up. There was no point in dragging the quarry pond, because in some places it was hundreds of feet deep. But Danny’s father and his older brother did it anyway. They hauled a rowboat by hand through the overgrown (even in early November) woods, and for a week or more they dragged. They returned every weekend after that until the pond was frozen over. Danny’s body was never found and that had been twenty years ago.
And, David recalled, Danny might not have been the first person to disappear forever in these woods. One blustering night, about a month after Danny had ventured into Whately’s Copse, David’s father had recounted the local legend. He didn’t believe in it, of course; he made that very clear. But it made sense to David. At least when he was nine or ten years old.
The land had belonged to a family named Whately, a very strange family by his father’s handed-down account. They had come to Wisconsin from the East Coast—some said Rhode Island, some said New Hampshire—sometime in the 1870s. Of the two hundred acres of land they purchased, about one hundred were woodlot. By the turn of the century Old Man Whately, who was by then a very old man indeed, had, with the help of his five sons, cleared all but the twenty-five acres that still remained, and which was thereafter known as Whately’s Copse. The central clearing, so the story went, was natural. Jericho had just been a farming village then, with a population of less than two thousand, and much of the modern city would be built on the land where the Whately holstein herd once grazed. One night in 1911, a vicious February night when the temperature dropped to forty-eight below, the Whately house and barn had both burned to the ground. The charred corpses of the cattle were found, but not those of the Whately family. Not a sign. Apparently, after the fire they had just packed up what they could salvage and had left.
Those were the facts, the bare bones. But there was more.
Hank Denmond had to say it twice before David really heard him, “You want me to go down?” Almost back in the present, Bentley reached out automatically for the rope, took it out of Denmond’s hand, and recalling the emergency-measures-training course he’d taken when he joined the force, quickly fashioned a body sling around himself. Without him having to give the order, five or six of the men formed half of a tug-of-war team behind him.
David was only a foot or so below ground level when his nostrils seized and his eyes filled with water and swelled into slits. He was gasping audibly, trying to suck enough air through his mouth to see him through. He looked up into half-a-dozen concerned faces but smiled weakly and waved the flashlight to indicate he was okay. “Allergies,” he explained. “Mold. Wet down here. ’Sall right. Just look around.” His feet were against one slippery wall: then in a controlled fall, he dropped in foot-and-a-half to two-foot stages to the bottom. He guessed it was about twenty feet below the surface.
“Anything?” a voice wafted down from the circle o
f light above.
“Don’t know. Don’t think so. Just a minute.”
Even the big flashlight didn’t make it a hell of a lot brighter down there. The moist black earth of the walls and floor seemed to absorb most of the light, returning virtually none in reflection. Before he even started looking for signs of the Reverend Morley, David noted the shape of the pit. The bottom was flat and about as wide across as the pit was deep; it was such a perfect cone, this hole, that for a fleeting moment David was asking himself it it could possibly be manmade. No. Ridiculous. He shook off the notion.
“Any sign of our man down there?” That was Hank’s voice.
“Not a thing,” David shouted back. “All I can see is what looks like animal scratchings in the dirt.” He squatted and began to run his fingertips over the surface of the floor, scooping up handsful every so often and letting the dirt sift through his fingers.
“Ohhh shit!” He yelled suddenly.
“What?” Three or four voices formed a chorus from above.
“Shit,” David said with revulsion. “Some kind of animal shit.” He tried to shake it off his fingers; some of it came off and some of it didn’t. Well, he was goddamned if he was going to wipe it on his uniform, even if the department did pick up the cleaning bills. He rubbed the worst of the rest of it into the dirt, careful not to acquire any more in the process.
“What kind of animal would live down there?” Hank Denmond yelled down to him. Before David could answer, one of the other men did it for him. “Badger.”
“So that’s where they all go after the Ohio State game,” somebody laughed. “See any of your old teammates down there, Davey?” Then everybody was laughing. Thirteen years ago, David Bentley, carrying Jericho’s honor with him, had gone off to the University of Wisconsin on a football scholarship. After two years of sitting on the bench, he decided that he just wasn’t cut out to be an outside linebacker after all. He returned home in the fall of his junior year, and against his father’s wishes but not his orders, he joined the police force. For lack of a better target, David took the whole town’s blame every time Wisconsin suffered another Saturday afternoon drubbing.
