I typed in John Mulvaney’s blog address (DoctorBehindBars.com) and watched as the computer thought it over and took me there. Doctor Behind Bars, indeed. John had always insisted on the title, nudging people to call him Dr. Mulvaney in even the most casual of circumstances. That single word—Doctor—had been his one claim to citizenship, his only ticket to any social standing at all, even in the drab, stiff, consolation-prize society of academia. He’d clung to that sad shred of identity with a closed fist and clenched teeth, convinced it was all he had.
I perused the entire site, steeling myself as I read every word, studied every photo. Whoever was doing the blog had posted a photo of John as a toddler—pudgy, pouty, his clothes askew, his expression vague and disconnected. A pair of genderless hands—a parent or relative, perhaps—held him awkwardly in a lap and offered him a lollipop. As though his childhood was populated by candy and hands, but no real connection at all. Shadows on the wall behind him suggested a woman had taken the picture with the sun behind her so that her shadow projected into the frame, shading part of John’s face. John squinted uncomfortably into the sun.
Other photos were of the SMU campus, overblowing John’s academic career, which was in fact undistinguished, though perfectly credible. The absence of graduation photos—by the time you get your PhD, you’ve graduated half a dozen times—suggested to me that there had been no one to take them. John was so narcissistic he’d certainly have included cap-and-gown photos of himself if he’d had any. The only other photo of John was one I knew well—of him and his junior-high girlfriend, Brigid, whom I had met last January and who had revered him as “Dr. Mulvaney,” her one missed chance out of trailer-trash purgatory. The caption under the photo read, “The professor’s first and only love.” The image was of two awkward misfits, their mismatched clothing and crooked, stiff smiles betraying the enormity of the social gap between them and their peers.
There were no photos of Molly Larken and, thankfully, none of me. No photos—but plenty of text. John’s was the only inmate blog I’d found that singled out individuals on his page. Probably the others, further along in the legal process, had more sense than that. Or better lawyers. Naming names made him look predatory and disturbed.
He’d mentioned me, Molly Larken, and Gordon Pryne, who had been the cops’ original suspect and who John was now claiming had committed the crime and framed him for it. Molly he claimed as his muse. Me he credited with maintaining his Web site. Profuse gratitude dripped in overwritten prose for both Molly and me.
I skimmed the site again. The rest of the copy was woodenly written and contained common but ignorant grammatical errors like the missing apostrophe in “professors,” “might of” instead of “might have,” “irregardless” rather than “regardless,” “regime” rather than “regimen.”
The copy had clearly been written by two different people.
One was surely John Mulvaney. My guess was that he’d written the drippy but grammatically correct part himself. The man had a PhD, after all. He had all the poise and social grace of a bucket of mop water, but he could at least complete a sentence.
I was just starting my research on serpents and the subconscious mind when Joan Carmichael returned my call and saved me the trouble.
“Dylan,” she said, sounding friendly but not warm. “It’s good to hear from you. I hope you’re well?”
“Yeah, I’m doing great. Thanks for asking. I really appreciate your calling me back.” I’d decided to shoot straight with her. I figured it would only handicap me to go in the back door, especially with the recent deterioration in my lying skills. She’d spot the deception a mile away.
“Listen, Joan, the reason I’m calling is—I know you may not be able to talk to me about this—but I’m calling about the Nicholas Chavez case.”
Silence.
“Joan?”
“I’m here.” She paused. “You know I can’t disclose—”
“Yeah, I know you can’t be specific. But it’s just that the little girl you interviewed, Christine Zocci, is a friend of mine.”
“You know her?”
“Pretty well. And I was there when the boy disappeared. They’d all been at my house that afternoon.”
“Do you have a release from the family?”
Why hadn’t I thought of that? I mentally bludgeoned myself and said, “No, but I can certainly get one and fax it over to you tomorrow.”
“That would be good. I’d feel better about talking to you.”
“Sure, I understand. But since I’ve got you on the phone, do you think we could do the hypothetical thing? Just so I can get a few things knocked off my worry list?”
“Sure. Shoot.”
“Well, I was wondering if she mentioned a snake to you. Anything at all about the kidnapper having a snake with him?”
“That’s not a hypothetical question.”
“Oh, right. We just said that, didn’t we? Okay, can you discuss, in general, the connection between snakes and the child psyche? I mean, I doubt any human person would be walking around carrying a snake with him while he’s out kidnapping children. It seems that perhaps a child who witnessed an abduction or some other traumatic event might insinuate that image into the scene somehow. I wonder if you think that’s possible?”
“Children do imagine such things in stressful or traumatic situations. My guess is that a child in the situation you describe could very well have done that. Perhaps she saw something that suggested a snake—a tattoo maybe, or an image on a T-shirt—and was unable to process the information in the heat of the moment, so to speak. She might then animate the snake in her mind, imagining it was real.”
Bingo.
“And what would such imagery suggest to you, Joan? I mean, child psychology is not my field. Adults, I know, associate snakes with subversion, with power, with subterfuge. And there’s the whole phallic Freudian thing, which I always thought was pretty misogynistic.”
“It’s a primal image in dreams for both children and adults,” Joan said, “suggesting the associations you mentioned. Jungian archetypes, of course, are more sophisticated than Freud’s. In the case of snakes, rather than being simply a phallic symbol or a simple power image, Jung suggests they’re symbolic of the conflict between conscious attitudes and unconscious instincts.”
“You mean, like the fight between good and evil?”
“I guess that’s a possibility. But an internal struggle. It’s a common phobia as well, one that develops in very early childhood, whether or not the individual has had any direct contact with snakes. This in itself suggests a universality of meaning.”
“The subterfuge thing is important, don’t you think?” I said. “Stolen power. If a child witnessed the kidnapping of another child, after all, what better, more graphic image of stolen power could you possibly construct?”
“I agree.”
“Do you get any sense at all that the snake was real?”
“That’s not a hypothetical question.”
“But it could be an image. An image of some kind.”
“Yes.”
“What about the color black? What if the child suggested the perpetrator was black, when it’s known he was white?”
“Hypothetically?”
“Yes. Hypothetically, of course.”
“Some children have an innate sense about people. They don’t see auras, per se—none of that drippy hippie stuff—but they might see a person as dark or troubled and associate that with a color. It shows up in their art, for instance. They’ll choose colors to represent feelings. Blue for sad, black for angry or sad, red for mean.”
“This child has an astonishing spiritual acuity. She sees angels.”
“Literally?”
“Yes. Literally.”
“Any other signs of psychosis?”
“I don’t think that’s a sign of psychosis.”
“You don’t think she really—”
“Yeah, I do. I know it’s strange.”
> “Very.”
“It’s like a radar. A spiritual radar.”
“So the spiritual images—”
“Make sense. For this kid in particular, yes.”
“You mean, in general. Hypothetically.”
“Right. Hypothetically. I’m also wondering, what sort of effect do you think an event like that might have on a child?”
“The witness or the victim of the kidnapping?”
“Both.”
“Trauma. Plain and simple. More for the victim than the witness, obviously. But you could expect PTSD symptoms for both children, varying in severity and duration according to the level of trauma and the sensitivity of the child.”
“Could that involve somatization? Sudden onset of asthmalike symptoms, for example?”
“Absolutely.”
I thanked her for her time. She’d gone way out on a professional limb by talking with me, even under the thin veil of a hypothetical conversation. We arranged to get together for lunch in a few weeks and hung up.
I’d just fired up an Internet search on snakes in Jungian literature when the rabbits came scuttling into the room. I looked up, startled at the speed they moved past me. Eeyore and Melissa are not exactly assertive pets. Or ambitious. They generally move one hop at a time unless a purple carrot is involved. Now, though, they bolted through the kitchen and scooted into the bedroom. I looked around the corner in time to see them both dive under the bed, then stood up to see what all the fuss was about.
I didn’t see anything unusual in the house, so I stepped outside and flipped on the light, illuminating the yard with the yellow glow from my GE Bug Lite bulb. (Moths swarmed the light immediately, of course.)
Summer sounds greeted me—sprinklers in my neighbor’s yard, katydids in the willow tree next door, and the occasional cicada or cricket. But otherwise the yard was quiet. I went inside and got a flashlight. The grass crunched under my feet as I walked the fence line, rattling bushes and shining my light around corners.
I got all the way around to the back steps before a sharp clap of thunder startled me just about out of my skin. I looked up as the rain began, thinking I needed to check my truck windows. And then I heard under the back porch a sound that stopped me dead in my tracks—a sound any corn-fed Texan knows by heart.
The unmistakable buzz of a rattlesnake.
Since I am not a complete idiot, I did not stop right then and personally search for the snake. I bolted back into the house, slammed the door, and locked it behind me, as though somehow that would make a difference. Like snakes have fingers or something.
I spent a few frantic minutes in the Yellow Pages, hands shaking, looking for a snake-removal service—which, by the way, does not exist in the Greater Dallas phone book. And then I came across the business card of an exterminator I’d used the last time Peter Terry showed up and let a bunch of unwelcome creatures into my house.
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me until that moment that Peter Terry had sent the snake. He loves to use vermin to torment me. It’s like a calling card. It had been flies the first time, then rats. Since he doesn’t play fair, he’d just about gotten the better of me both times. I’d had to reclaim my territory one kill at a time. Now that I was onto him, I had no intention of letting that happen again.
“Come on,” I said out loud. “Snakes and evil?”
I slapped the phone book shut. “You can do better than that.”
16
NOW, I REALIZE THAT any normal person would be scared at this point. With a snake rattling under my house and a demon floating around my kitchen, panic was in order, surely. Or at least a good, hearty scare. But to tell you the truth, I was just sick of the whole thing. Peter Terry had become a nuisance. A stalker. Like a one-date mistake who refuses to take the hint. The kind who won’t stop calling and then eventually starts screaming into your answering machine when you won’t pick up the phone. And then disappears for a while before he shows up at your office and lets the air out of your tires.
He was insufferable. Intolerable. Inexcusable. Incorrigible. And as far as I was concerned, he had to go.
Getting rid of beings like Peter Terry is no simple matter, unfortunately. I’d seen enough movies about medieval monks and chalices and crucifixes to know that. And it’s not as though I hadn’t tried. I’d stood my ground, run like a madwoman, stamped both feet, cursed the ground he walked on, and prayed repeatedly to the Good Lord Jesus Himself for deliverance. I’d done everything I could think of, in fact, short of grabbing a dagger and letting an exorcist paint sacramental oil on my door frames. It was going on two years now, in fact, and I wasn’t having any luck at all.
I had to wonder, once again, if it was me. Maybe I was the problem. Was I an easy target? Had my foul temper, poor mental health, solitary lifestyle, and lousy spiritual condition set me up for all this?
It was a reasonable conclusion, certainly. The truth is, if Christianity were a merit-based society, I would have gotten kicked out years ago. I’m terrible at it. I never go to Bible study, don’t keep a prayer journal or do the morning “quiet time” thing. (In Texas we say “quite tahm.”) I only remember to pray in emergency situations. The truth is, I really don’t have the time or energy for any of that checklisty stuff. Or the self-discipline, for that matter. I’m usually too busy alphabetizing my spices or searching for a good parking space to pay any sustained attention to spiritual matters.
I should probably convert to Catholicism. If I were Catholic, at least I’d have to go to confession. Maybe that would whip me into shape.
Whatever the problem was, I had to admit that none of my other friends seemed to attract this sort of attention. Well, except Liz and Maria. And Christine. Come to think of it, they were really my only friends. They were probably all just spending too much time with me. The thought depressed me thoroughly. I wasted a good hour obsessing about it before I remembered Maria had been targeted long before she met me. I’m embarrassed to admit how much that cheered me up.
I checked the clock, then picked up the phone and called her. “Any news?”
“None,” she said. “I’m resigned to it for now. I just have a feeling it’s going to be a little while longer.”
“What feeling? You mean, like he’s okay?”
“I think he is. Maybe that’s just a mother’s refusal to consider the worst. But I’m telling you, he’s out there. I can feel it. I almost hear him crying.”
“That sounds excruciating.”
“Maybe I’m kidding myself. I don’t really care. I need to believe it.”
I wasn’t going to argue with her. “What’s the FBI saying?”
“They were hoping it was a drug snatch.”
“What’s that?”
“Apparently, lots of children get kidnapped and ransomed for drug money.”
“Don’t they know Parkland doesn’t pay ransom wages?”
“They do, but they’re assuming the kidnapper might not. They also thought that maybe since I’m a doctor, someone had targeted me for OxyContin or something.”
“So is that what they think happened?”
“They told me today it’s not likely. There’s been no demand for ransom. Well, one, but it turned out to be fake. The guy had seen it on the news.”
“How do they know it was bogus?”
“They checked it out. It was just some drifter.”
“And they’re sure? Like, positive?”
“They seem quite certain.”
“And you believe them?”
“I do. They’re very good, Dylan. They know what they’re doing.”
“What happens to those kids—the drug-snatch kids?”
“If you pay up, they bring them right back. They’re usually home within twenty-four hours. Apparently it happens a lot. A lot more than you’d think, anyway.”
“I never knew.”
“Those cases never make the paper. Half of them never even get reported to the police. The kids are usually min
orities from crackhouse neighborhoods.”
“What now? Are the FBI guys still at your house?”
“They left this afternoon.”
“But they’re still looking for him.”
“Of course. They’re just not waiting by the phone. Whoever has him is not going to call—I really believe that. I’d rather have them out there looking for him than sitting in my living room, you know?”
“Are your parents still there?”
“I checked them into a hotel. I can’t take care of anyone but myself right now.”
“Good decision. Can I do anything?”
“Keep me company?”
It was only ten o’clock. I’d be up for hours anyway, in my state of mind.
Maria greeted me with a glass of red, and we sat in her living room listening to music and talking. An array of trucks and dinosaurs lay scattered under the kitchen table, where Nicholas liked to play. Maria was even tidier than me. Under normal circumstances, they’d all be in the bin in his room.
The wine was good. Round but not too fruity. I closed my eyes and let the flavor settle on my tongue. “How’s Bob?”
“The turtle?”
I nodded.
“He seems to be taking it okay,” she said. “Probably one of the advantages of being a cold-blooded creature. Escape from the curse of self-awareness. I should take him out in the yard, let him get a little exercise. Nicholas usually walks him.”
I told her about the snake in my yard.
“You have the worst luck,” she said.
“Everyone says that to me.”
She raised her glass. “To better luck.”
“For all of us.”
I told her about Christine’s tests and the tech’s pronouncement.
“He shouldn’t have said that.”
“But he’s right, isn’t he?”
“If she blew up the balloon every time, she doesn’t have asthma.”
“It’s maddening to not know what’s wrong with her.”
Maria tilted her head. “They may never figure it out. Nicholas went through something like this awhile back. We did the same routine. The whole rigmarole.”
My Soul to Keep Page 13
