The Night Visitors

by Carol Goodman

  I look over at Alice and see she’s leaning forward, her brow furrowed. I wonder if she’s put two and two together. The great seal of New York is the image on the button she found in the crawl space. I slip my hand in my pocket and rub the rough metal surface—

  “Hands where I can see ’em!” Davis barks.

  I take my hand out and lay both hands flat on the desk.

  “At first I thought, snore, what could be more boring than a bunch of old court cases—and they are old. They date all the way back to the early seventies. They’re all juvie cases, all tried by your father, the Honorable Matthew T. Lane, and guess what? Your daddy found every one of them guilty!”

  “He adjudicated them delinquent,” I automatically correct. “There’s no guilty verdict in juvenile court.”

  Davis sits back and makes an O with his mouth. “Well, la-di-da, look who knows her legalese. Why didn’t you follow your daddy’s footsteps into the law?”

  “I didn’t have the best experience with the legal system,” I say.

  Davis grins. “No, you didn’t! Your own father adjudicated you a delinquent for . . . let me see . . .” He picks up another file. “Public indecency, apparently for making out with one Frank Barnes in a stolen car.”

  “Isn’t that the name of that cop?” Alice asks.

  “What cop?” Davis asks.

  “The one Mattie’s friends with.”

  “The plot thickens,” Davis says gleefully. Digging through my family’s secrets has banished all thoughts of ghosts. The only ghosts here are ghosts of my benighted childhood.

  “I told Alice all this before,” I say, affecting boredom. “Yes, Frank’s father, the town chief of police, caught Frank and me making out in the backseat of his dad’s Dodge Dart. Frank got sent to Camp Maplewood—a boot camp—for six months and I got three months at the Hudson Training School.”

  “I thought you said you were away for a year,” Alice says.

  “I—I got more time for bad behavior,” I say. “So yeah, I was a bad, bad girl and my father was a draconian hard-ass—”

  “Who sent all his juvies to a place called Pine Crest Child Care after 1975,” Davis supplies. “Why didn’t he keep sending them to Hudson?”

  “Because Hudson closed down in 1975. My father led the fight to have it closed down.”

  “Because of what happened to you there.”

  “In part.”

  “Oh, I think in large part, Mattie. It says here”—he plucks a loose sheet of paper off the desk—“that you were raped by a guard there.”

  I don’t answer. I am gripping the edge of the desk to keep from shaking, but it’s making the desk shake instead. Lady Justice’s scales tremble and chime.

  “Is that true, Mattie?” Alice asks in a small voice.

  “Yes,” I say. “My father hadn’t counted on that consequence of my adjudication. Ironic, huh? They sent me away to teach me a lesson for making out with a boy and I get raped by a thirty-four-year-old guard.”

  “Your father had the place closed down. The guard was sentenced to ten to twenty. The next year Pine Crest Child Care opened up—a brand-spanking-new juvenile facility! I’m surprised he didn’t name it for you, Mattie. You must have felt proud!”

  “Hey,” Alice says, “I was at Pine Crest. It’s—”

  “Not as bad as Hudson,” I say, “but that’s not saying much.”

  “No, but your daddy sure thought it was great. He sent every one of his adjudications there . . . almost as if he had a financial interest in the place . . . oh wait . . .” Davis whips out a piece of paper from another pile. I’d be impressed with how he’s put the whole story together if I didn’t know how all the papers had been stacked in that bottom drawer. I’ve made it easy for him. “Look, he did! Pine Crest was built on land your family owned. Your father held a ten percent share of the facility, so every time he sent some kid there he made a pretty penny.”

  “It’s like that ‘kids for cash’ scandal in Pennsylvania,” Alice says, staring at me.

  “Exactly,” Davis crows. “Only Judge Lane never got caught—at least he hadn’t gotten caught. This here letter, though, from the federal prosecutor, says that they were gonna be looking into some irregularities and unorthodox connections between Judge Lane’s adjudications and his financial interests in Pine Crest. It’s here with all the other files.” Davis waves his hand at the stacks arrayed on the desk. “And here’s another thing I noticed.” He holds up another page, this one splattered with bloodstains. I know what’s on this one. It’s my father’s suicide note. It was on his desk when I found him.

  “Forgive me,” he’d written, “but justice must be served.”

  “Your daddy shot himself, didn’t he, Mattie? Because he knew the feds were coming for him.”

  “I thought your family all died from carbon monoxide poisoning,” Alice says, giving me a suspicious look.

  “He tampered with the pipes on the furnace so that the house would fill with gas,” I tell Alice. I don’t care about explaining to Davis but Alice deserves the truth. She’s too young to have been one of those kids my father sent to Pine Crest for a minor offense, but if she had ever been in my father’s courtroom that’s what would have happened to her. “I think he thought that the shame of the scandal would be too much for us to live with. He may have been right about my mother; she was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and would have been truly lost without him. I can even forgive him for including me in his plans. He thought I was ruined after what happened to me at Hudson. He blamed himself—that’s why he contributed to having Pine Crest built—but I once overheard him saying to my mother that it would have been better if I had been murdered. He said being raped had turned me into a promiscuous slut.”

  “Why didn’t you die that night?” Alice asks.

  “I wasn’t here. I was, true to my promiscuous nature, out with a guy. Frank Barnes, to be precise. Only we had a fight and I came back early. I came in through the basement and up the back stairs. I didn’t realize that there was gas in the house until I got to Caleb’s room. I could barely rouse him. I dragged him down the front stairs and met my father at the bottom.” I pause, as breathless as I’d been in that headlong flight from my home all those years ago. “He was coming out of this room, a bandanna over his mouth, waving his gun. I turned and pushed Caleb out the front door—I told him to run—and I was right behind him in the doorway when I heard a gunshot. Then everything went black. When I came to, Frank was here. He’d found me lying in the doorway, outside in the air enough that I didn’t asphyxiate, but inside enough so I didn’t freeze to death. The bullet had only grazed my scalp, knocking me out but not causing any real injury. Caleb . . .” I gulp air that tastes like blood and gasoline, the smells I’ve carried with me since that night. “Caleb wasn’t so lucky. Frank’s father found him in the barn, his head caved in. My father must have chased him out there and killed him. Then he came back in, stepped over my body, presumably thinking I was dead, went into his study, and shot himself.”

  I look away from Alice to Davis. “He was sitting where you are now, blood splattered all over the papers on his desk, those papers you’ve got out now, and even over that window . . .” As I look up at the window my voice freezes. Part of the window has been covered by the drapes to keep the cold and snow out, but the uncovered part is frosted by mist and covered with the same splatter marks I saw that night when I made Frank and his father show me what had happened.

  No one has to know he went like this, Hank Barnes had said to me. You don’t want the world to see him like this. They’ll drag his name through the mud and yours and Caleb’s along with it. It will bring up all that old business about your time at Hudson. That’s how people will see you, Mattie, like you’re tainted by your father’s deeds. Do you want that?

  No, I had told him.

  Then let me help you put this behind you. The medical examiner is a good friend of mine and your father’s. He’ll say they all died of carbon mono
xide poisoning. It’s what your father wanted. After all, the person who is guilty has been punished. I think your father would agree that justice has been served.

  That’s what the splatter pattern on the window looks like. The constellation of Virgo. Justice. The same pattern that has appeared on every window in the house, in the stars in Caleb’s room, written in the dust on my father’s desk. If justice has been served, then why is Caleb still demanding it? Is it because I hid the truth?

  As if in answer to my unvoiced question I see a figure rise up on the other side of the frosted glass—a specter coalescing out of swirling snow. But it’s not Caleb; it’s Frank Barnes. He has a gun in one hand; his other hand is clenched in a fist. When he’s sure that I see him he holds one finger up. This is a signal we had when we used to play war games in the woods with Caleb. He’s counting to five. I’m supposed to do something on the count of five. But what? Out of the corner of my eye I see that Alice is leaning across the desk looking at some paper Davis is showing her. That’s why she doesn’t see Frank—who’s put up a second finger and is pointing the gun at Davis. Oh. I nod, and Frank puts up a third finger. I brace my left foot on the ground and pivot slightly toward Alice while keeping Frank in my peripheral vision. Four fingers. I check that there’s nothing behind Alice that will strike her head. Then as Frank begins to lift a fifth finger I spring forward and tackle Alice to the ground at the same second that the window explodes.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Alice

  DAVIS IS SHOWING me a stamped certificate of some kind when Mattie tackles me to the ground. For a moment I think it’s because she doesn’t want me to see what’s on the certificate—it’s got one of those stamps on it with the two Greek ladies—but then I hear a gunshot and glass explodes over our heads. There’s a thump behind the desk, and when I open my eyes I see Davis lying on the floor, blood covering his chest. Thank God, I think, thank God he’s finally dead.

  But then his arm moves. The gun he’d been holding on us was on top of the desk, but I remember that it’s not the only gun he has. “He’s going for the gun in his back pocket,” I hiss in Mattie’s ear as I struggle to get out from under her.

  Mattie rolls off me and hisses back: “Run! Find Oren. Look in the attic.” She scrambles under the desk, trying to reach the gun before Davis does.

  I feel like a coward leaving her but I need to find Oren and I want to get away from Davis. As I run from the study I hear another shot and another explosion of glass. I don’t wait to see who’s shot; I sprint up the front stairs and into Caleb’s room, dive under the bed, and scramble through the panel to the back stairs. The attic, Mattie said, so I grope around until I find stairs that go up, wishing I had a flashlight. Anything could be on these stairs. Spiders. Mice. Ghosts.

  One particular ghost. A little boy whose own father killed him thirty-four years ago. Caleb Francis Lane. It was his birth certificate that Davis had been showing me—

  Something brushes against my hand. Spiderwebs, I tell myself, but then the spiderweb grows fingers that intertwine themselves with mine. Small fingers, ten-year-old boy fingers. The same cold hand that clasped mine in the crawl space and gave me the button. Caleb Francis Lane, born May 10, 1973, at St. Alban’s Hospital, and he wants to tell me something. Just like Oren wanted to tell me his secrets through the tin can phone that day.

  Part of me wants to wrench my hand away. But I don’t. I let this ghost boy lead me up the stairs, navigating the dark far better than I could.

  At the top of the stairs I can tell we’re in a lofty space because I can hear the snow pattering on the roof high above my head. As my eyes adjust I start to make out a glow too, swirling through the dark as if the snow has gotten in and turned into glitter. I turn to share the wonder of it with the boy at my side but my hand is empty. And then I have the sense that he is everywhere. That he is the glow that moves through the dark and the heart of the light coming from the center of the attic.

  I walk across the wide wooden planks toward the source of the light. It’s a lit snow globe revolving slowly on its base, playing a faint tinny lullaby. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” I realize as I get closer. In a circle around the globe is a battalion of toys: Ewoks and Wookiees, but also dinosaurs and Beanie Babies. They’re standing guard over the boy who sleeps, curled up in a Tauntaun sleeping bag, inside the circle.

  I kneel and brush the dark curly hair from his warm forehead. He opens his eyes. “Alice,” he says, yawning. “You found me.”

  “Of course I found you, buddy,” I say, wrapping my arms around him and drawing him into my lap. “We’re a team, aren’t we? And you left good clues.”

  Oren nods, squeezes me once tightly, then wriggles out of my arms. “Some of those were Caleb’s idea. Look”—he digs in a box next to the sleeping bag—“these were his baby things.”

  He takes out a pair of hand-knitted baby booties and a tiny baby hat. Then a blanket with the initials CFL embroidered on it. When he shakes out the blanket a picture falls out. It’s an old faded Polaroid of a woman in a hospital bed holding a baby. No, not a woman. A girl. A teenage girl. I peer closer at the picture. Even though she’s so much younger in the picture, even though I’ve only known her for hardly longer than a day, I recognize her. It’s Mattie. Fifteen-year-old Mattie holding baby Caleb. Caleb Francis Lane, born May 10, 1973, mother—

  That’s what the certificate Davis was showing me said. Mother: Mattea Celeste Lane. Father: Unknown. Mattie, who was raped at the Hudson Training School, got pregnant. And had the baby. What monster would make a fifteen-year-old rape victim have the baby?

  Judge Matthew T. Lane, that’s who. The same monster who sent kids away to juvie for kickbacks from the JD he sent them to. He probably thought he was teaching Mattie a lesson. She’d fooled around with a boy and look what it had led to.

  Poor Mattie. I look at the girl in the picture. She was hardly more than a child herself and yet her face is glowing. She loved that baby. Caleb. I think of the picture on her night table and the way she looked when she talked about him dying. She isn’t mourning a lost brother; she’s mourning a lost son.

  “Is this what Caleb wanted us to know?” I ask Oren. “That he was Mattie’s son?”

  Oren wrinkles his brow the way he does when he’s tackling a tough math problem. “I think there’s something else. I found this.” He holds out a button, identical to the one I found in the basement. I hold it under the light of the snow globe and examine it. It’s worn and corroded, so it’s hard to make out the pattern on it. Some kind of crest, like the fancy buttons on blazers. Scott had a blazer like that, only he said he was wearing it ironically. This has a crest with an eagle on top and two figures of women in drapes—

  Just like the seal on the judge’s folders and the birth certificate. It’s the seal of New York State.

  “Who would wear buttons with the seal of New York State on them?” I ask.

  “Policemen,” Oren says without hesitation. “New York State policemen. Like that policeman Mattie was talking to.”

  “Huh,” I say, turning the button around in my hand. “So why would there be a policeman’s button down in the crawl space behind the furnace—”

  Suddenly a terrible thought occurs to me.

  “Oren,” I say. “I have to ask you a question and I really, really, really need you to tell me the truth. I promise I won’t be mad at you no matter what the answer. Mattie’s life might depend on it.”

  “I understand,” Oren says with a solemn nod that makes him look like he’s grown years older since we arrived at this house. “I’ll tell the truth. I promise.”

  I hold up the button. “Did you put a button like this in the crawl space behind the furnace?”

  “No,” he says, shaking his head. “I haven’t been in the basement. I was too scared to go down there.”

  “Shit,” I say, forgetting that I promised myself to watch my language around Oren. “We have to get downstairs right now.”

&nb
sp; Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Mattie

  THE GUN—THE ONE Davis took off Jason—has slid underneath the bookcase and Davis is crawling toward it. There’s another explosion of glass and a concussive thud as half the desk shatters in a spray of woodchips and paper. Sawdust rains down on my head.

  I crawl under the desk, hoping that Frank will stop shooting. I hear glass breaking but no gunshot; Frank must be clearing enough glass to get inside. I wriggle toward the bookcase beside Davis. The floor is slick with his blood, which, disgusting as it sounds, makes me go faster. I reach under the bookcase at the same time he does, our hands touching over the cold metal of the gun, and before he can grab it away from me I slip my other hand in my pocket, take out the knife, and jab it into his arm, aiming for the open bullet wound.

  Davis lets out a howl that barely sounds human and lets go of the gun. I grab it and pull it out from under the bookcase. Something comes with it that scrapes and skitters across the floor but I don’t have time to worry about that. I roll away from Davis, out from under the desk, and come up in a crouch, bracing the gun with two hands. I take the safety off and point it at Davis. “All I can reach from this angle is your groin,” I say, “so you can either lie still or lose your balls.”

  “I’d listen to her,” Frank says as he steps across the sill and picks up Davis’s gun from the desk. He points his own gun at Davis’s head. “I’ve been calling her a ballbuster for years and I wasn’t being metaphorical.”

  I smile in spite of myself.

  “The cunt stabbed me right in my wound!”

  Frank kicks Davis in the stomach. “Don’t use that language around a lady,” he says as Davis screams and rolls into a ball. “Or I’ll stick this gun up your ass.”