by Jan Burke
I nodded.
“Let’s go out back,” he suggested.
We walked through a side door to the backyard, avoiding the crowd in Bea’s house. Cassidy told me that my sister-in-law had returned; Mike had stayed home with the kids.
I heard motors running and saw that the front yard was bathed in light.
“Local TV news,” Cassidy said. “Hoping to get a reaction from the family. I think they’re going to have to be satisfied with a shot of the outside of the house. Ol’ Bea is pretty tough.”
“Yes, she’s had to be.”
He waited, and when I didn’t say more, he kept walking. We sat down on a couple of chairs on the back porch.
He stretched out his legs and sighed. “So how are we gonna work this out, Irene Kelly?”
“Work what out?”
“You seem to be feeling a little fenced in,” he said.
“More than a little. But I understand. You’ve got your job to do, I’ve got mine.”
“As a reporter?”
“No. As Frank’s wife.”
He tapped the tips of his fingers together, then said, “The conversation with Mrs. Szal was recorded, you know.”
“Don’t you think she should have been made aware of that?”
“Probably,” he agreed. “Why don’t you tell her that you knew we were legally recording calls on this line, but you failed to tell her?”
The truth was, I had thought only in terms of incoming calls, although I should have known better.
“Well, now you know why I had a ‘hankerin’ for a NeHi,” I said.
He smiled. “You wake up cranky, don’t you?”
“You haven’t even seen the free preview for cranky yet,” I said.
“A chill just went down my spine,” he drawled lazily. “Look, how about letting Pete go out there with you? He doesn’t have to go inside the house. Just let him go along. That way, I don’t get shot at dawn for letting you wander all over Bakersfield on your own.”
“I’m supposed to be in mortal danger from someone who teaches people how to stop stuttering?” I asked.
“Someone who has been in communication with Ryan and Neukirk. Who speaks of them as her ‘favorites.’ ”
I sighed. “What’s the alternative? A patrol car tailing me?”
“Yep.”
“You’re a devious son of a bitch, Cassidy. You know I won’t refuse Pete a chance to feel useful. And you know I won’t try to give him the slip, because you know I won’t want him to… well, right now, he doesn’t need to feel like he’s failed at anything.”
The smile built up to a full-fledged shit-eating grin.
An hour later Rachel, who had come along for the ride, was laughing and congratulating Pete, who was gleefully ditching the last of the handful of reporters who had tried to follow us away from Bea’s house.
I was wondering what it would take for me to do the same to Cassidy.
21
THE SZAL HOUSE WAS OFF a small rural road, near a vineyard east of the city. It was a modest stucco home on a large lot. Pete pulled into the gravel driveway, took a look at the darkened house, and said, “Looks like they’ve turned in for the night.”
“No, they’re night owls,” I said. “They told me they might be in the backyard.”
“Cassidy said to let you go alone,” Pete said, “but I don’t know….”
“She’ll be fine,” Rachel said.
“This may take a while,” I said, not for the first time.
“We’ll find something to do. Don’t get worried if the windows are steamed up,” Pete said.
Rachel laughed.
“I’ll pound on the hood before I open the car door,” I said. I got out and walked to the front of the house. No one answered the doorbell. I walked to the back gate. Peering over it, I couldn’t see anyone, but softly glowing solar yard lights lit a path between the house and fence. “Hello?” I called.
There was no answer, but the gate was unlatched, so I opened it.
I followed the path, and when I reached the back of the house, I saw a softly glowing pink globe across the yard — a Chinese lantern hanging from a wooden post near a tall, rectangular building. The lantern light did little to illuminate the yard. I could not see the building very well, nor much of what lay between me and it. But the building was the tallest structure nearby — easily two stories tall. This, then, must be the tower Regina Szal spoke of.
I stood still, trying to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. The lantern bobbed gently in the warm breeze. The same breeze carried soft laughter from that direction. Wishing for a flashlight, I walked with uncertain steps along a paved path toward the sound.
As I went farther into the yard and my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the building was an odd wooden structure, about the width of a two-car garage and a little longer. Its roof was pitched like a house’s roof but seemed to cover only half the building. The other half was open and I could hear the murmur of voices through it, a woman’s laugh. There were no windows on the first floor, but the path led to a door. I reached it and knocked.
The conversation above me stopped. “Ms. Kelly?” I heard a woman call from above.
“Yes,” I shouted.
“Oh, darn! We missed the news! I’ll be right down, Irene,” she said. “Bernard, hit the switch so she doesn’t trip and fall.”
I heard the clumping sound of someone hurrying down wooden stairs, her voice calling up, “Well, I don’t want her to think she’s come across vampires out here.”
A light came on at a high window, then at the porch where I stood. I blinked in its sudden brightness. The door was thrown open by a woman wearing a plain white cotton shirt, straight-legged Wranglers, and dusty cowboy boots. She had straight strawberry blond hair cut bluntly just above her shoulders, and long, lean legs. She had eyes the color of brown sugar and a warm smile that carried just a hint of mischief in it. She extended a hand. “Hi, I’m Regina.”
“Irene,” I said, taking it. She had a firm handshake.
“Welcome to the Szal Observatory,” she said, grinning more broadly when a man’s voice complained, “Regina….” She glanced up and said, “Come on in, I’ll show you around.”
I entered a plain room with a concrete floor. There was a large concrete pillar at one end of the room; near us, the wooden stairway. On either side of us were other rooms. “That was going to be the darkroom,” she said, pointing to the room on the left. “But it’s just storage now. Bernard wants to get a CCD system.” Seeing my puzzled look, she said, “He could tell you more, but basically, it’s a way of using computers for astrophotography.” She pointed to the pillar. “The telescope rests on that, to keep it level and still.” She turned and pointed to a small, darkened office area, “That’s where the computers are. Come on upstairs. I’ll let you catch a glimpse of my husband before he makes us turn all the lights out again.”
She hit switches as we passed a landing, darkening the space below.
Waiting patiently above us was a big man holding a ginger-colored cat. The man had an athletic build, one that suggested he didn’t have a desk job. He was wearing loose trousers and a T-shirt that was stretched tight across big shoulders. The shirt had Chinese characters on it.
He wore a close-cropped beard and had tied his straight black hair into a ponytail. He stood on an elevated platform in the open-roof area, next to a large white telescope.
“This is Bernard,” Regina said, introducing her husband. He had gorgeous green eyes and a face that was otherwise made up of imperfect features — a slightly crooked smile, a nose that had been broken at least once in its lifetime, a small scar just below one cheekbone — features that nevertheless made an appealing combination. I decided it was the smile — he didn’t look as though he had to work hard to find it. I smiled back and shook his hand. I glanced down and was amused to see he was barefoot.
“Glad to meet you,” he said. The cat wriggled loose and headed downstair
s. “That was Stanley,” Regina said. “Stan for short. We used to have another one named Livingstone. Poor Stan outlived his partner in exploration.”
“Sorry we lost track of the time and missed the news,” Bernard said. “We’ve got great viewing tonight — better than anything you could see on TV, anyway.” He snapped out the lights. “Give your eyes a few minutes to become dark adjusted.”
I let my gaze travel upward and saw a sugar-brushed sky. A city dweller, I had become estranged from this bright and shimmering canopy.
“Have a seat, Irene,” Regina said, turning on a flashlight that gave off a red light. She guided me to a chair along a window-lined wall. Sitting in it, I could see for miles in several directions. The warm night air felt good. I looked back at the half roof.
“It’s a sliding roof,” she said. “It’s sort of a large, rolling skylight. We pull it closed when we aren’t up here.”
“You picked a good night,” Bernard said, keying some numbers into a handheld device that was about the size of a calculator. The telescope moved. He looked through the eyepiece. “Air is nice and dry, so the city lights aren’t reflected up very far from the horizon.”
“She didn’t come out here to see M objects,” Regina said, laughing. She opened an ice chest, reached in, and pulled out a Budweiser. She twisted off the top and handed it to me before I could decide if I wanted it. “One for you, Bernard?” she offered.
“Sure.”
“What’s an ‘M object’?” I asked.
“Messier object,” Bernard answered without looking away from the telescope. “Messier was a French astronomer. He started making a list of unusual blurry objects he saw through his telescope — this was back near the time of the American Revolution. Eventually, he compiled an astronomical catalog of over a hundred objects. He really was a great observer — his list is still used. M one, for example, is the Crab Nebula. M thirty-one is the Andromeda galaxy. Some of the most exquisite objects in the sky are Messier objects.”
Regina was looking at him as if he had recited love sonnets. “Bernard built this telescope,” she said proudly.
“Assembled,” he said, taking the beer she offered. He smiled at her and said, “Builders make the parts — including the lenses.” He bent to the eyepiece again. “This is a Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope,” he said. “It’s a reflector. Not as much resolution as a refractor, but better for deep sky objects.”
Deep sky. Maybe Regina was hearing poetry after all.
He beckoned to me. “Take a look, Irene.”
My eyes now adjusted to the darkness, I moved back to the telescope and bent to look through the L-shaped portion of the eyepiece. I saw what appeared to be a bright mound of light, concentrated at the center, blurring at the edges. Other, single round objects — stars — were nearby.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo. It’s called the Sombrero galaxy.”
I smiled, now seeing its resemblance to a hat.
“Didn’t expect to come out here and get a science lesson, did you?” Regina asked.
“No,” I said, straightening, “but I appreciate it all the same. Thanks, Bernard.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, already back to watching the sky.
I moved back to my chair, picked at the label on the beer. How to begin?
Regina began it for me. “How are Bret and Sam these days?”
“I’m not exactly sure how to answer that question,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me about them — back when you first met them?”
She tilted her head to one side as she studied me, then shrugged, as if deciding I could have things my way.
“Do you know how they came to be my clients?”
“I know what happened to their fathers, yes. And I’ve read the article in the Californian.”
“The one about elective mutism?”
“Yes.”
“So you know that I tried to get them to talk again, with the help of a team of people that were concerned about them. A school psychologist, a doctor, the boys’ teachers, their mothers, and so on.”
“When did they begin speaking again?”
“Not for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Three years.”
“Three years?” I repeated.
“The boys were — are — very bright. We tested their IQs. Sam’s scores were much higher than average — he’s definitely gifted. Bret scored even higher, very gifted. I rarely see scores as high as Bret’s. Kids who are as bright as Sam and Bret can be a handful. Given the severe emotional trauma they had experienced, their intelligence, their closeness as friends, it’s not too hard to see how they could sustain elective mutism over that period of time.”
“So how did they communicate?”
“With others?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Pointing, signs….”
“Formal signing? Like ASL?”
“No, these were very crude by comparison to American Sign Language, which really is a complex language of its own, with its own idioms and so forth. I’m not speaking of signs or language in that sense. But the boys had a secret code, we’ll say. Signs and a spoken secret code they used with one another — words they made up and understood perfectly.”
“Something like pig Latin?”
“Beyond that. Not just rhyming or mixing syllables. Out-and-out new words.”
“Didn’t other people grow frustrated with this?”
“Oh, they drove everyone nuts at first. Eva Ryan had no patience at all with it, and neither did Sam’s stepfather.”
“Stepfather?”
“Yes, didn’t you know? She remarried not long after Gene Ryan’s death. Another doctor. Gene left her with a pile of debts, so I guess she was lucky to land on her feet.”
“Was the stepfather… cruel to Sam?” I asked.
“Not at all. Sam basically left the family, joined the Neukirks.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You might say the boys decided it. They didn’t want to be separated. No one could blame them, especially in the beginning — the boys were so withdrawn and terrified in those early months. The mothers were friends, and had been widowed at the same time, so they stayed close at first.”
“What do you mean, at first?”
“Well, I think friction started arriving with the reversal of their circumstances.”
“The mothers’ circumstances?”
“Yes. Everyone always talked about what a great guy Gene Ryan was. His best friend in grade school was a poor kid. Gene’s family wasn’t the richest one in town, but they were upper middle class. Compared to Julian’s folks — who had moved here during the Dust Bowl migrations — the Ryans lived like kings. Gene was an only child, and he sort of adopted Julian as a brother.”
“But Gene went on to college, right?”
“Yes. Gene’s family could afford it, Julian’s couldn’t. So everyone talked about how kind Gene was, because even when he came back here to set up his practice, he was hanging out with his old buddy Julian.”
“Julian was a trucker?”
“He started out as a driver. To tell you the truth, I think he was the smarter of the two of them. He was making more money than Gene when he died.”
“As a truck driver?”
“He owned his own trucking company by then — and was managing it very well. He didn’t spend the way Gene did. He had a different attitude toward money.”
“So when the men died, Eva found herself poor—”
“And Francine found herself rich. Julian had a huge life insurance policy, all sorts of investments, and she got the trucking company to boot. She ran it for a few years, then cashed out and moved to Las Piernas.”
I sat up straighter. “Las Piernas? Why?”
“The boys wanted to go to school there. They were pretty young — too young to live in a dorm, as far as Francine was concerned, and I think she was right
. Bret graduated from high school when he was fifteen. Sam was sixteen. I’m not sure why the boys picked Las Piernas, except that Sam was accepted by the community college and Bret by the university there.”
“The boys,” I repeated. “Let’s go back to that — you said Sam left his family?”
“Yes. Francine — Bret’s mother — was the more nurturing of the two women. Sam started staying overnight at Bret’s house. Soon he was living there. Later, Eva was so embarrassed by the revelations about Gene, and so involved in her courtship with her second husband, I think she was happy not to have Sam around. And Francine loved Sam.”
“But was it good for them to be together so often?”
“I was against it, but Eva and Francine were the ruling parties in that case. They kept saying that the boys had already suffered enough loss and separation. A speech therapist can only exert so much pressure. And the boys proved quite obstinate. Neither one of them would give you any cooperation if they were alone.”
“Did they ever talk to you about what happened to their fathers?”
She shook her head. “No, that was taboo. Even when we got them to talk again, they made it very clear they wouldn’t discuss it. Bret once told me that their fathers’ murders had made them freaks — that even if they hadn’t been mute, the other kids would have looked at them differently. And Sam — until those articles about his father came out, I thought we were making progress. If not for Bret’s loyalty to him, I don’t know what would have happened to him.”
“So Bret was the leader of the two?”
“No, actually, I think Sam was. They had a remarkable lack of discord between them, though, and I wouldn’t say that Sam bullied Bret. Bret can assert himself. They each had different skills, and they weren’t jealous of one another.”
“How did you get them to start talking again?”
“Well, it didn’t just happen all at once. At first, we were just trying to get them not to be so frightened of the world around them. They were so scared. Francine told me that except for their secret language, the only time she heard their voices was when they were having nightmares. They didn’t have as much trouble with women as with men. Bernard stopped by the office one day to take me to lunch, and the boys ran and hid. Bernard felt so bad. Fortunately, the only man they ever allowed near them came by just then, and he was able to coax them out. He even got them to shake Bernard’s hand — you don’t know what a breakthrough that was. But this man was very patient. He was a police officer — the one who found them in the basement.”
