Bring Me Children

by David Martin

It’s only after the sheriff leaves that Lyon wonders why the call has to be made from another room. He notices one of the lights on the sheriff’s telephone blinking on. After fifteen or twenty seconds it goes off and then comes on a second time, staying on for over a minute. Why two calls?

  When Stone returns, Lyon immediately asks him, “Did you have trouble reaching the rescue squad?”

  “No.” Stone appears confused by the question until he returns to the chair behind his government surplus desk and glances at the row of lights on his telephone — then he looks up quickly at Lyon.

  Lyon is smiling at him.

  Stone acknowledges the smile with one of his own, then asks, “How’d you come to rent that particular cabin?”

  “It was recommended by a friend.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I didn’t say it was a woman.”

  The sheriff nods and Lyon understands for the first time how much Stone is enjoying all this cat-and-mousing.

  “You know I’m kind of surprised the network didn’t put you on medical leave after what happened right there on camera and everything. Why don’t you give me the name of someone I can call at the network, you know just to confirm you’re down here on official assignment — all right?”

  Determined not to be intimidated, Lyon replies, “Why don’t we go out to the cabin and make sure that woman gets safely to a hospital, then I’ll have my producer call you — all right?”

  Before Stone can speak, a rescue truck with various of its lights flashing pulls into the parking lot and stops near a window to the sheriff’s basement office.

  On the way to the cabin Stone tells various anecdotes about the adventures he’s had being a sheriff. “I have a deputy working for me,” Stone is saying at one point, “and, Mr. Lyon, if you had a stereotype in mind of a rural county law enforcement officer, I guarantee you that Carl fits it to a tee. I mean, we’re talking Deliverance material here. One time Carl stopped an out-of-stater for speeding on a county road. Guy was a businessman, going five or ten miles over the limit, but Carl approaches the car like it’s filled with Colombian drug dealers. Asks the businessman where he’s from and the guy says Chicago. Upon hearing that, Carl draws his sidearm and tells the guy to get out of the car and assume the position. The businessman, terrified, he asks what’s the problem, Officer, and Carl says, ‘You say you’re from Chicago, huh?’ Businessman tells him that’s correct. Carl says, ‘Okay then, asshole, what’s them Illinois plates doing on your car?’ ”

  When he turns to Lyon to get his reaction, Stone sees that Lyon has fallen asleep. The sheriff doesn’t awaken him until they’re pulling into the clearing in front of the cabin.

  Lyon apologizes. “Got no sleep last night, zero.”

  “No problem.” Stone stops the car, gets out, directs the rescue truck where to park, and then instructs the three-man medical crew to stay on the porch until he has had a chance to check out the cabin.

  When Lyon starts to enter the cabin with the sheriff, Stone tells him, “I want you to wait out here too, Mr. Lyon.”

  After Stone goes inside, the three rescue workers talk among themselves, occasionally laughing, keeping their distance from Lyon, who is sufficiently baffled by their thick country accents that he can’t follow what they’re talking about. If the three men recognize him from television, they’re acting pointedly unimpressed.

  When Stone returns to the porch his face is so grim that Lyon knows immediately what has happened: the woman’s dead. I should have brought her into town with me this morning! “She was alive when I left,” he tells Stone urgently. “Her pulse was strong, she was breathing just fine, I assumed —”

  “What did you do with the crate?”

  “The crate? I didn’t do anything with it, left it in the kitchen — why?”

  “And the woman was in the bedroom, right?”

  “Yes! What’s —”

  “Well she’s not there now. No sign of any crate or coffin in the kitchen either.”

  Lyon brushes past the sheriff and rushes into the kitchen. No crate. He turns and runs back past the front door, through the living room, into the bedroom.

  When the sheriff comes in he finds Lyon standing there looking at the empty bed.

  “Wait a second,” Lyon says. “I locked the front door when I left this morning but you walked right in. Someone’s been here, took the woman and the crate.”

  “Who? That little man you told me about, the one who was peeking in the window?”

  “Yes! I guess. I don’t know.” Lyon is becoming frantic. “Someone’s trying to discredit me and … did you look in the bathroom, the closets? Maybe there’s a —”

  Stone takes him gently by the upper arm. “I checked every-place, Mr. Lyon. No woman, no crate. You know, if you’re not used to these mountains, staying out here by yourself, your mind can play tricks on you. You’d be surprised the reports I get from city people who are camping and think they —”

  “There was a woman here, goddamn it! And some little guy with a weird face did look in through the kitchen window. He had this huge dog with him, some kind of fucking wolfdog —”

  Lyon is interrupted when one of the three rescue workers who are crowded in the bedroom doorway laughs.

  “I’ll check the county hospital,” Stone says softly. “See if a young black woman was brought in this morning. She didn’t have any identification on her?”

  “She was naked!”

  Two of the rescue workers laugh at that.

  “Come on then,” Stone tells Lyon. “I’ll give you a ride back into town.”

  As the sheriff and Lyon pass through the bedroom doorway, the rescue workers making way for them, all three of the men openly smirk at the famous John Lyon.

  CHAPTER 16

  On the way back to Hameln, Lyon pretends to be sleeping so he won’t have to talk to the sheriff, then as soon as they drive onto the county building’s gravel parking lot, Lyon “awakens,” thanks Stone, and gets out of the patrol car without further comment.

  He’s just reaching his rental car when the sheriff calls to him. “Hey, were you in a wreck? Looks fresh.”

  Lyon glances down at the dents and scrapes where he side-swiped a tree last night trying to get away from the staring eyes of that dog. “Hit a tree,” he tells Stone.

  The sheriff walks over and stands next to him, both men now examining the damage. “You do it coming in this morning?” Stone asks.

  “No, last night. When I was trying to get off that mountain.”

  “You didn’t tell me about that, John. Leaving anything else out?”

  Since when did it become John, Lyon wonders. And, yeah, he thinks, I’m leaving out the part where I fondled the woman while she was still in the box, while I was still thinking she was a corpse — I lied to you, Mike, when I said I knew the woman was alive all along, because for the longest time I assumed she was dead but I still fondled her breasts, kneeling there on the kitchen floor feeling her up with one hand and jerking off with the other like the true necrophiliac I apparently am. Lyon experiences a clenching deep in his gut, a sudden anguish.

  “John?”

  “No, Sheriff, I’m not leaving anything out.”

  “What’re your plans now?”

  “Get something to eat.”

  “There’s a diner just up the street. Why don’t you check back with me after you have breakfast, huh? I’ll give the state police a call, talk to the hospital, check with some local doctors — see if anyone has a line on a young black woman who’s been in a coma or has been reported missing, whatever. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Take care now.”

  Lyon bites back the impulse to break down and confess everything.

  The day’s already hot, Lyon sweating as he walks three blocks to an old-fashioned greasy spoon containing four booths and a six-stool counter. He orders the kind of breakfast he hasn’t eaten in more than a decade: fried eggs, sausage patties, home fries, buttered
white toast, a large glass of whole milk, and cup after cup of strong, black coffee. Looking at the breakfast when it arrives on the bone-gray oval plate, Lyon figures that if the food were scraped into a winepress and squeezed dry, it would easily yield a full cup of grease. But he’s so famished he eats the breakfast the way the four other men in the diner are eating theirs, leaning over his plate and forking it in without looking left or right.

  When he’s done, his stomach feels as if it’s been inflated like a basketball. Lyon looks around and notices that the four other patrons, finished with their breakfasts too, have lighted cigarettes and are openly glaring at him. Lyon is accustomed to being recognized of course, but these stares aren’t the usual ones, these are more hostile than curious.

  It’s easy enough to catalog the differences between Lyon and the four men watching him. In spite of the duress he was under this morning, Lyon took time to shave and then to comb his seventy-five-dollar haircut; the four men are all bearded and have long hair sticking out from ball caps displaying the logos of farm equipment and cattle feed. Lyon is wearing Dock-Sides without socks, chinos, and a hundred-dollar white shirt; they have on work boots made in Korea, jeans from Mexico, and Taiwan workshirts. Whether they recognize him from television is not the issue — John Lyon is a stranger from the city and, in this part of West Virginia, city strangers have always come here looking for something to take. They’ve taken these men’s land, the coal under their land, the timber growing on their land, taken their labor and their way of life. City strangers mean trouble from the law and from the government. The four men in that diner know instinctively that whatever has brought John Lyon here, it’s not going to do them any good.

  Lyon wants to leave — now even the waitress is standing behind the counter with her arms crossed, staring at him — but he hasn’t decided what to do or where to go next.

  Sipping his coffee, which has a grease slick over its entire surface, Lyon figures there are two ways of looking at what’s happened. First, assuming that Dr. Quinndell is behind the placement of that woman in the cabin and then her removal, this probably means Quinndell is guilty of something, is running scared, and it’s all going to make for a hell of a story when Lyon finally gets to the bottom of it. The second way of looking at it, however, is that the woman’s disappearance has effectively blocked Lyon’s investigation, because he can’t bring in the resources of the network until Sheriff Stone or some responsible third party confirms what happened last night.

  As he downs the last of his greasy coffee Lyon realizes there’s a third way of looking at his situation: that he’s lost his mind.

  When Lyon finally moves out of his booth, the diner’s four customers and the waitress suddenly find other places to put their eyes. The bill comes to under four dollars, tax included. Be lucky to get a cup of coffee and bagel for that in New York, Lyon thinks.

  As he waits at the counter for his change, Lyon notices a local telephone book, which strikes him as a child-size version of a “real” phone book, not big enough to list New York City’s podiatrists. He flips through the pages, finding three names under Q, the last of those “Quinndell, Dr. Mason, 650 S. 16th St.”

  After the waitress hands him his change, Lyon gives her back a dollar tip and asks, “Can you tell me where six-fifty Sixteenth Street is, can I walk there from here?”

  “We don’t go by street numbers.”

  “Dr. Quinndell’s house.”

  She looks momentarily panicked, glancing at one particularly hairy customer sitting three stools down from the cash register — then the waitress shakes her head and turns away from Lyon.

  He leaves the diner and stands out on the sidewalk looking for street signs, seeing none. When someone grasps his arm, Lyon whirls around to confront the heavily bearded, shaggy-haired man who was sitting at the counter. “Don’t put your hands on me,” Lyon says, unsure why he’s reacting with such hostility.

  The man immediately releases Lyon’s arm. “Sorry.” He seems to be about forty years old but it’s difficult to tell for sure with all that hair coming down to his eyes and then the bushy beard covering the lower part of his face.

  “What do you want?” Lyon asks, his voice still edged.

  “People in there ain’t going to help you. Quinndell’s got ’em buffaloed. You’re here from TV, right?”

  Lyon nods.

  “I’d like to see you hang that bastard out to dry. Hell, I was even rooting for the nigger woman to nail his ass. He raped my daughter.”

  “Quinndell?”

  “Yeah Quinndell. She had a job working for him, stopping by after school cleaning his house, and he got her cornered in a room one afternoon, ripping her clothes and getting her down on the floor. Then after he did it he warned her if she told anybody he’d ruin her. That’s the way he operates. She told her mom anyway and her mom told me. We’re separated. She was only fourteen.”

  “Did you bring charges?”

  “Well, first I went over to see him my own self and he came at me with a spoon.”

  “A spoon?”

  The man pushes back his cap and lifts the hair from his forehead to show Lyon a vivid scar just above his right eyebrow. “You wouldn’t think a spoon could do so much damage, would you? If you let him get close enough he’ll go for your eyes ever time.” The man releases his hair and pulls his cap down low.

  “Why didn’t you report this to Sheriff Stone?”

  “I did. But Quinndell got to Stone first, accused me of attacking him, said he had to defend himself. Stone never even arrested him for what he did to my little girl and then I was the one ended up doing thirty days on the county, lost my job and was out of work six months because of it. I say go get him, mister — put his ass on TV and make him sweat. His street is four blocks down, then hang a right and his house is that big three-story white job in the middle of the block, red shutters, you can’t miss it, only house in town with a fresh paint job.”

  The man turns to leave but Lyon stops him. “I’ll have a camera crew here in a few days, if you’d give me your name perhaps we could —”

  “I ain’t going on TV, not against Quinndell I ain’t. I got to live here.”

  “Let me ask you about something else then. Last night I was staying at a rental cabin about eighteen miles —”

  “Yeah, I know where you’re staying, everbody in town does. Man at the hardware store been talking about it for a couple of days now. That cabin was owned by the nigger nurse who went after Quinndell.”

  “Claire Cept, it’s her cabin?”

  “Used to be. She lost it when she went bankrupt, lost everthing when she and Quinndell was suing each other back and forth, hell he sued her black ass three or four different ways.”

  Lyon takes a moment to digest this but then speaks quickly when he notices that the man is nervously shifting his weight, eager to leave. “Do you know anything about a strange little man who lives out in those mountains? He —”

  “Randolph Welby.”

  Lyon is astonished. “Does he have any connection to Claire Cept or Dr. Quinndell? Can you take me to his house?”

  The man laughs. “Mister, you don’t want to be visiting that old hermit, guarantee you don’t. He’ll feed you to his dogs.”

  “But I think he might have been sent to the cabin to harass me — and maybe Dr. Quinndell was the one who sent him.”

  “I don’t know about any of that.” The man pauses, weighing a decision. “But I know who might know. Come on, Charlie’s place ain’t far from here, I’ll take you there.”

  “Charlie?”

  “Yeah,” the man replies, laughing, “he’ll tell you all about Randolph and the owl eaters.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The dirt yard in front of the trailer is populated with a wild variety of concrete figures: tiny deer with ears missing, garishly green frogs in decidedly unfroglike poses, somewhat realistic poultry (chickens, ducks, geese), and thirty different species of malevolent gnomes and evil dwarfs that l
ook like they might have been created by Walt Disney during a particularly nasty acid trip.

  To find this place, Lyon and the man from the diner walked down to a dry creek, following it for a hundred yards before making their way up the other side, through waist-high weeds, crossing several empty lots, coming finally to this tiny trailer set high on concrete blocks.

  “He’ll sell you anything in this yard,” the man tells Lyon, “except for them gnomes and dwarfs, which he collects for himself.”

  “And this man’s name again?”

  “Charlie Renfro. He’s an old fart and he don’t always make sense to talk to but he knows them mountains where Randolph Welby lives better’n anybody. Some people say Charlie is an artist in concrete, I don’t see it myself.”

  The man who opens the door to the small trailer is in his eighties, short and round and white-haired. He listens carefully — head tilted, eyes cast down — as he’s told who Lyon is and why he’s been brought here: to get information on the hermit Randolph Welby.

  The old man finally looks at Lyon and then nods to indicate that he both understands the assignment and is accepting it. After Lyon’s guide leaves, Charlie hauls two plastic-webbed lawn chairs out of the trailer, sitting in one of them and pointing to the other for his guest.

  But before Lyon can ask a question, the old man launches:

  “Randolph Welby! Yessir, I know him better than most. He’s a full-blood hermit. Lives so far back in them hills he has to have his sunshine piped in.”

  Charlie Renfro pauses, looking slyly at Lyon with a half-grin, the old man’s nearly transparently blue eyes glistening — Lyon finally understanding that he’s supposed to laugh at the witticism. He does.

  Charlie continues. “I expect you want to know about Randolph Welby and the owl eaters.”

  “Owl eaters?”

  “Randolph Welby is old enough that he knew Caesar when Caesar was a corporal.” Charlie waits for his laugh before continuing. “He’s so old and wrinkled and ugly and little that I could set him down in this yard here and tell him not to move and you wouldn’t be able to tell him apart from my art.”