But the Fletchers didn't see this article on Sunday morning, because they didn't have time even to glance at the paper in the hurry of getting ready for church. This was the last Sund ay before school started, and yesterday they had been so busy buying school clothes for Stevie and Robbie, who was starting kindergarten this year, that neither Step nor DeAnne had remembered to do a laundry and therefore the morning was spent fishing wearable clothing out of the laundry baskets and pressing them so they'd look presentable at church.
The boys were dressed; DeAnne was taking snarls out of Betsy's hair; and Step had the assignment of changing Zap's dia per and getting him dressed for church.
About the only time Zap was any trouble was when he was being changed. He slept a lot, and even when he was awake, he didn't interfere with the process of dressing or feeding. Step almost wished he would, to show some vigor, some real awareness of the world. He rarely even cried. And as for moving his body, well, he seemed to have no muscle tone, no firmness to him. Now and then he'd move in a jerky kind of way, but most of the time his arms and legs were fairly loose and springy. As if he didn't much care where his limbs went.
Zap's legs, though, always seemed to move back into a frog-like position, the knees widespread, the feet tucked up right under his buttocks. This meant that when his dia per was getting changed, his heels kept springing right into the midst of whatever was in his diaper. It made changing him a real challenge. Step would stretch Zap's legs out long and straight, and massage his thighs and calves, saying, "That's my long boy, see how tall you are when I stretch you out? Stretch out those legs, long boy." But it did little good. When the diaper came off, the heels moved right back up into place, and it seemed as though it took three hands to change him. Three hands or an extra couple of baby wipes to clean his feet.
Still, Step was becoming rather adroit at the challenges of dia pering a baby who thought he was a frog, and he soon emerged from the bedroom with Zap lying prone on his forearm, his head cradled in Step's hand, his little legs dangling- froglike-as they straddled Step's biceps. It was Step's favorite way to carry the babies when they were very small. DeAnne had been horrified at first, since it looked like a football carry, but they both soon realized that when Step held a fussy baby in that position, the fussiness usually subsided, at least for a while.
Step could hear, from the screeching in the kitchen, that Betsy was still getting her hair combed. So he stood wordlessly in the door of the family room, watching Robbie crash his Matchbox cars together and Stevie play a computer game.
Not that it looked as though Stevie was actually playing anything. From where he was, Step couldn't see the screen, but he could see Stevie's hands on the controller, and he just wasn't moving it. Oh, now and then a sort of lean to the left or to the right, but most of the time he was just watching the screen, his face transfixed. "Do it, Sandy" he whispered. "Come on, now, now, now. That's it!" And then, "No, Van, no, not like that, he's going to get you, do you want him to get you? You're too quick for him, if you just run." As usual, Stevie was naming the characters in the computer game after his imaginary friends. But what kind of game was this, where apparently some thing engrossing was happening on the screen and yet the player of the game had hardly anything to do? It couldn't be much fun, for the player to have so little control that he hardly had to move the joystick from minute to minute. Yet Stevie was completely involved in it. Step had to see the screen.
He stepped into the room, walking behind Stevie and looking at the screen. It was that pirate ship game again, thought Step. I never did find that disk.
"Hey, Daddy, watch me crash these guys together!" said Bobbie.
Step glanced down at Robbie and watched the two cars crash, as Robbie made an elaborate show of making the cars fly through the air and bash into the bookshelves and then rebound off of everything else in sight.
"Enough, enough," said Step, "you make me want to never get in a car again!" Robbie laughed uproariously.
Step looked back at the computer screen, but it was blank. Stevie had switched off the game and was standing up from the chair. "Why'd you turn it off?" Step asked.
"Time for church, is n't it?"
"Yes it is!" called DeAnne from the other room. "It would be nice if we could arrive on time for once, instead of parading up the aisle like beauty contestants during the opening hymn."
Step helped the kids pile out to the car and strapped Zap into the carseat in front while DeAnne got Robbie and Betsy to share the middle seatbelt in back so that she and Stevie could cram themselves in and use the seatbelts by the doors. "No doubt about it," said DeAnne. "We ought to start taking both cars to church."
"This still works," said Step.
"Only because you don't have to sit in back," said DeAnne.
Step immediately got out of the car and walked around to her door and opened it.
"Oh, Step, don't make a scene just because I-'
"I'm not making a scene-you are, my love. What I'm doing is playing Sir Walter Raleigh and letting you tread upon my cape. Please, let me sit back here with the kidlets and you drive. Maybe it'll convert me to the idea of taking two cars to church."
"Step, I really don't feel up to driving yet," she said. "It hasn't even been a month."
"I thought you were better."
"Mostly," she said. "Drive. I shouldn't have complained, and now we're going to be late."
"Sorry," said Step. "I was just trying to be nice."
They weren't late, though, and they got a good bench on the side. Step was singing a solo with the choir, and Robbie had a talk in Primary, and so it was a busy Sunday for them. When they got home, the kids were starving and Step fixed dinner while DeAnne nursed the baby, which was a grueling experience for her, since Zap had a way of clamping his jaws down hard every now and then, nearly pinching her nipple off, or at least that's what she said it felt like.
"I think you ought to switch to formula," said Step. "The next kid's going to resent it if Zap succeeds in biting the nozzle off the firehose."
"I'm giving him formula sometimes, but this really is better for him, and he likes it better," said DeAnne.
"I'll toughen up."
"Mm," said Step. "Calluses and scar tissue-very sexy."
"If he's still doing this when he gets teeth, Step, that's weaning day-cold turkey, I'll tell you."
If he's still doing it. If he learns. If he changes. If he starts sleeping on some reasonable schedule, instead of sleeping eighteen hours and then staying up twenty-four. If somebody figures out what all those scans and probes and measurements from the hospital mean. If somebody will just put a name on whatever it is that's wrong with Zap so we can start dealing with it-or not dealing with it. Whatever turns out to be appropriate.
The kids came in and ate the tuna patties that Step had made-a Depression-era recipe that his mother had raised him on. The kids seemed to like it well enough, provided that Robbie was allowed to pour six ounces of ketchup on his.
Then, finally, the kids went down for naps-or for lying in bed reading or staring at the ceiling, in Stevie's case-and DeAnne finally went out front and brought in the paper while Step sat down and idly looked among the disks lying loosely around by the Atari, trying to find something that might possibly be that pirate game. He got sidetracked, though, by the Lode Runner disk, which he booted up and began to play. It was a nifty little character-based game in which the eight-pixel player-figure has to run around collecting all the treasures on the screen while bad guys try to chase him. The way the treasures were arranged in the changing landscape made each level a new puzzle, and Step soon found himself addicted. This is a great game, even though it's so deceptively simple. No gimmicks like the ones I'm using in Hacker Snack. Just a fundamentally sound design that allows itself to unfold in new ways, over and over and over again. I need to learn from this.
He became aware that DeAnne was standing behind him. "Step," she said. "You need to come in and look at this story in the paper.
"
"In a minute," he said.
"Can't you pause the game or something?" she asked.
"If it's that urgent," said Step. He reached for the space bar to pause the game, but it took too long, and his player- figure died.
"Oh, I'm sorry," said DeAnne. "Did I make you lose?"
"I've still got eight lives left," said Step. "A real Christian game. Lots of chances for resurrection. But I'm bucking for the rapture at the end."
She didn't laugh, not even her courtesy laugh, the one that said I don't know why you thought that was funny but I love you. He followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the table. The headline at once caught his eye, and he read the whole story quickly, but not missing anything. He hadn't pored over a hundred thousand pages of Spanish-language newspapers while researching his dissertation without learning how to distill the essence from a newspaper story in a very short time.
"This is scary stuff," said Step. "I know you're already careful with the kids, and so am I, but I really think we shouldn't even let them in the back yard without being out there with them the whole time."
"Absolutely," said DeAnne. "But Step, didn't you notice?"
"Notice what?" he asked.
"You're going to think I'm crazy."
"Probably," he said. But his joking tone didn't fit now; he realized that DeAnne had sounded genuinely scared. She really thought that whatever she was about to point out to him would make him think she was crazy.
"Show me," he said.
"I was hoping you'd just see it yourself. Look at the pictures of the lost boys, Step. Look at their names."
He did. "Do we know any of their families or something?" That was absurd- if anyone they knew had had a child disappear, they'd have known about it before now.
DeAnne laid a list of names on the table. It was written in her handwriting. Step compared them to the names under the pic tures, since that seemed to be what she intended. Most of the names under the pictures were listed on the paper, or at least were similar. Scott Wilson matched the name "Scotty" on the list. "David" matched David Purdom. "Roddy" would be Rodd Harker. "Jack" could be a nickname for Jonathan Lee.
"Does the story say anywhere that this Jonathan Lee is nicknamed Jack?" asked Step.
"No," said DeAnne. "I hope he isn't."
"Well, then, what were you writing this list for?"
"Step, I didn't write this list today. I wrote this list back in June."
Step waited for the other shoe to drop. Then he made the connection. "That's a list of Stevie's imaginary friends. I remember Jack and Scotty"
"It's more than that now," she said. "I've heard other names since then. I know I've heard him talking about a Van and a Peter, and look."
Step looked, and two of the boys were Van Rosewood and Peter Kemeny. "Good heavens," he murmured.
"This is really weird."
"Is that all you can say?" she said. "That it's weird?"
"It scares the shit out of me," said Step. "But usually you prefer me not to talk like that. What does this serial killer thing have to do with our son?"
"I don't know," said DeAnne. "Nothing. It couldn't."
"Maybe Stevie's been reading the names or something."
"But three of the boys disappeared before we moved here. We never would have seen articles about them.
This article here is the first one ever to list all these names together. Think about it, Step. Stevie came up with almost the same list as these detectives did, and there's no way he could have done it. No way that makes any sense."
Step's hands were trembling as if it were cold. He was cold. "It's not just almost the same list," he said. "If Jonathan really is Jack, then this last one, Alexander Booth ..."
"He's never talked about an Al or an Alex," said DeAnne.
"But I watched him playing a computer game this morning and I heard him saying, like, Come on, Sandy.
Sandy's a nickname for Alexander, too."
DeAnne pressed her face into her hands. "This article already scared me, Step. But then when I saw this-what can we do?"
"I don't know," said Step. "I don't even know what it means."
"Remember that record we got in the mail? The anonymous one?" asked DeAnne. "The song about I'll be watching you?"
He hadn't thought about it in a long time. It was still on the radio a lot, but all the things that had happened since the record came had put that old scare far into the background. Now, though, it took on truly sinister overtones. "Do you really think..."
"What if this ... serial killer ..."
"Watching us," said Step.
For a moment DeAnne seemed to go out of control, uttering some high whimpering cries while she hid her face in her hands. Step wasn't sure how to deal with this, or what was happening to her; he put his hand on her back, as if to steady her, as if she were tipping and he was going to put her back upright. "Oh, Step," she whispered. "Oh, Step, I'm so scared. Who could it be? What if the serial killer has ... talked to Stevie?"
"Impossible," said Step. "You read the article. They say that this serial killer is extremely dangerous because he isn't leaving any evidence anywhere. They aren't even sure there's a serial killer anyway. Because they haven't found a single body. That's how these boys got on the list-their bodies haven't been found."
"But maybe he . ... No, Stevie would have told us."
"We could ask him. If anybody has ever talked to him."
"No," said DeAnne. "He's going to school tomorrow. There's going to be talk about this serial killer everywhere. They're going to be warning all the children about talking to strangers. He'll connect that with us asking him if somebody already talked to him. He's got trouble enough already without his own parents connecting him so personally to this."
"But he's already connected," said Step.
"Might be connected. This might just be a coincidence."
"Van and Sandy aren't such common names," said Step.
"Well, Sandy isn't Alexander and Jack isn't Jonathan."
"So what else do we do? Call the police? Oh, yes, Officer, we have a real lead for you in this serial killer thing. Our son, you see, has been hallucinating these imaginary friends, and they happen to have the same names as those lost boys. What? Oh, don't you have time to talk to us?"
"You're right," said DeAnne. "They'd think we were crazy." She fretted with the list, something she did when she was nervous, folding and tearing at paper until it was reduced to confetti. Step reached out his hand and put it over hers.
"Don't tear up that list," he said. "You wrote that before this article came out."
"Yes, but I don't have any witnesses of that."
"You sent a copy of it to Dr. Weeks, didn't you?"
. "Yes," she said. "Yes, that would prove that we had at least some of the names before. And we did get that record."
"I think you're saying that we should call the police."
"We should call somebody," said DeAnne. "We should do something. You don't find out that there's some weird kind of link between your son and a serial killer and then just fold your hands and say, How interesting."
Step looked again at the newspaper. "So, how accessible do you think this Doug Douglas is?"
They soon found out. DeAnne looked up the number of the police department and Step called. He asked the switchboard operator to connect him with Detective Douglas. "He isn't in on Sundays, but I'll try his line."
It rang once and a man picked it up. "Is this Mr. Douglas?" asked Step.
"No," said the man.
"Is he there? Can I speak to him?"
"Can I tell him what it's about?"
Step covered the receiver and whispered to DeAnne: "I think he's there." Then, into the receiver, he said,
"It's probably about nothing. It's something that doesn't even make any sense to us. But maybe it'll mean something to him."
"Can you be more specific?" asked the man.
"About the story in the paper this morning."
<
br /> "The serial killer story" said the man.
"Yes," said Step.
"I'm the one designated to take down all reports and informa tion, so you've already reached the right place."
"But we don't have any report to make," said Step. "And what we have might not be information. And- look, can't I just talk to Mr. Douglas? It'll only take two minutes and then I'll be out of his hair."
"You've got to understand, sir, we've already received more than two hundred calls today about this story, and if Detective Douglas took all those calls personally..."
"Fine, then," said Step. "We don't want to bother him. Let me just leave you my name and number and he can call me back when he has time."
"Wouldn't it be easier just to tell me your information?"
Yes, it would, thought Step. But you're the guy whose job it is to take down all the crank calls and the sincere but irrelevant calls and filter them out, and you would think our call was one or the other of those and so you'd never mention us to anybody in a serious way and then we'd never know whether we were even right that the names matched-or, more important, we'd never know if we were wrong, so we could breathe more easily.
Lost Boys Page 39
