by John Verdon
It immediately brought the Dollhouse scene vividly to mind. When he heard Tabitha’s voice he was struck again by her strange combination of formidability and deference—and by Angela’s explanation that she might be hoping they’d “buy another Barbie.”
He wasn’t able, however, to pinpoint the discontinuity he was looking for.
So he played the recording again.
It was during the second playing that he heard it. Just one odd word.
The word was “later.”
It wasn’t even the word itself, but the meaning it was given by the way Angela said it.
Gurney asked her what Pardosa had said about Hammond, and she replied that he’d said he was disgusting.
Then Gurney asked if Pardosa had told her about his nightmares.
She replied, “Yeah, but that was later.”
What struck Gurney was the way she said “later”—making it sound as though a relatively long interval had elapsed. But she’d also said that Pardosa told her about the nightmare the first time he had it, the night after he met with Hammond.
Presumably the earliest Pardosa could have told her that Hammond was “disgusting” was the afternoon of the day of the hypnosis session. And later that night, or first thing next morning, he told her about his nightmare. So, a gap of perhaps twelve to eighteen hours would have elapsed—hardly a long interval.
Gurney realized that he was getting pretty far out on a speculative branch, based on nothing more than the way a single word struck his ear. Before he proceeded further he needed to know exactly what Angela meant by “later.” He knew only one way to find out. He pulled off onto the shoulder of the road, found Angela’s cell number in his phone list, and pressed “Call.”
She answered in a small frightened voice. “Hello?”
In the background he could hear TV voices, laughter, applause.
“It’s Dave Gurney, Angela. Are you all right?”
“I think so. Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just curious about something you said, and I thought maybe you could help me. Are you free to talk?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can you speak freely? Are you alone?”
“Who else would be here? I’m in my room.”
“At the Dollhouse Inn?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Let me explain what it is that I need help with.” He recounted the exchange that had occurred between them, leading up to her use of the word “later” to separate Pardosa’s description of his nightmare from his earlier comment that Hammond was disgusting. “I’m wondering how much time passed between those two conversations.”
“I don’t understand.”
“At some point, Stevie told you the hypnotist was disgusting. And then, later, he told you about the nightmare he had. How much later was that?”
“God, I don’t know. I mean, I wasn’t like counting days or anything.”
“It was a number of days, not hours?”
“Oh, no, not hours. Days.”
“Okay. Am I remembering right that Stevie told you about the nightmare right after he had it the first time, the night of the same day he had his session with Hammond?”
“Definitely. I know that for sure. Because we were here when he told me.”
“At the Dollhouse Inn?”
“Right.”
“So that means he must have told you that Hammond was disgusting at least a couple of days before that. You said days, right? So that would be before you made the trip to Wolf Lake. He must have told you while you were still down in Floral Park. Is that right?”
There was a silence—except for the sound of the TV.
“Angela?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Did you hear my question?”
“I heard it.”
Another long moment passed.
“Angela, this is important. How did Stevie know the hypnotist was disgusting before he met him?”
“I guess someone told him.”
“The person who called him?”
“I can’t say anything about that.”
“Because Stevie warned you that you could end up dead if you said anything about it?”
“Why do you keep asking about it?” Her objection came out like a desperate whine.
“Angela, we could all end up dead unless you start trusting me and telling me what you know.”
Another silence.
“Angela, when Stevie used the word ‘disgusting’ to describe a person, what did he usually mean?”
“How could I know that?” She sounded panicky.
“But you do know, don’t you, Angela? I can hear it in your voice.”
Her silence at that point confirmed the truth, so Gurney continued. “You knew what he meant by that word, but it upset you, right?”
Her silence was broken by a sniffle. Then another. Then a swallow. Gurney waited. The dam was breaking.
“Stevie . . . was prejudiced about some things. Some people. You have to understand, he was a good person. But sometimes . . . well, he kind of had a problem sometimes with gay people. Sometimes he would say what they did was disgusting.”
“And that they themselves were disgusting?”
“Sometimes he would say that.”
“Thank you, Angela. I know it was hard for you to tell me that. Just to make sure I’m not making a mistake, let me ask you one more question. The person who called Stevie on the phone—the person who you figured told him he should go up to Wolf Lake to see Hammond—is that the person who told him that Hammond was gay?”
There was a long silence.
“This is terribly important, Angela. Is that who told Stevie that Hammond was gay?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ask Stevie why he was willing to meet with a therapist he knew was gay?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What did he say?”
“That I should stop asking questions, that it was dangerous to keep asking questions.”
“Did he tell you why it was dangerous?”
“He repeated what he said the night he got the phone call—that we could end up dead.”
CHAPTER 34
By the time Gurney reached the exit sign for Otterville, the cloud cover had thinned and pale winter sunlight was illuminating the landscape.
He debated whether to take the kind of steps he’d taken at Lake George to obscure his destination but decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. If the trackers on his car revealed that he was visiting an Otterville bungalow colony, so be it. There were good reasons to keep the whereabouts of Angela Castro a secret, but none of them applied to Moe Blumberg.
He drove through the “hamlet” of Otterville, which consisted of a derelict auto repair shop, a shuttered hot dog stand, and a two-pump gas station. A mile later his GPS directed him onto Brightwater Lane, a dirt road that brought him through the woods to an open area where a dozen or so cabins were spread out along the side of a small lake. In the middle of the clearing was a stone foundation and a few fire-blackened timbers of a building it had once supported. Parked next to it was a well-used Toyota Camry.
Gurney stopped behind the Camry. As he was getting out of his car, he heard a voice calling out. “Over here.”
It took him a moment to locate the source—a figure at a window of one of the cabins.
“Come around to the far side. The front door faces the lake.”
As Gurney reached the lake side of the cabin and was stepping up onto the covered porch, the door was opened by an old but sturdy-looking white-haired man wearing tan slacks and a blue blazer. The clothes, along with the two suitcases just inside the door, were consistent with the imminent departure Hardwick had mentioned.
“Mr. Blumberg?”
“You see, the lake’s the whole point,” the man said, as though Gurney had questioned the orientation of the porch. “So it makes sense for the cabins to face that way. You’re Detective Gorney, is that right?”
“Gurney.”
“Like the cow?”
“I believe that’s a Guernsey.”
“Right. Come in, come in. You understand I don’t have much time?”
“I understand you’re off to a warmer climate.”
“Fifties, sixties this time of year. Plenty of sun. Beats freezing my tuchus off here. Time was when the winters didn’t bother me, seemed silly all these old folks running off to Florida, places like that. Doesn’t take more than a few years of arthritis, though, before you see the sense in it. If your joints ache here, but they don’t ache there, hell, that makes the decision pretty easy, doesn’t it? To answer your question, yes, I’m Moe Blumberg. Might be confused about some things but still pretty sure about that.”
As they shook hands, Gurney took in the cabin in a few quick glances. The main room, which was all he could see from where he stood, was set up partly as an office, partly as a sitting area centered on an antique iron woodstove. The furnishings were a bit threadbare.
“Have a seat. The other detective wasn’t clear on the phone. What’s this all about?”
Blumberg made no move to sit, so neither did Gurney.
“A young man by the name of Steven Pardosa died recently in suspicious circumstances. You might have seen something about it on TV?”
“You see a TV here?”
Gurney glanced around again. “You don’t have one?”
“Nothing on TV worth the time of anyone with at least half a brain. Noise and nonsense.”
“So Detective Hardwick’s call was the first you heard of Steven Pardosa’s death?”
“He mentioned that name. But I still don’t get what this is all about.”
“Did he tell you that Steven Pardosa attended your camp thirteen years ago?”
“Something like that.”
“But you don’t remember the name, or the person?”
“I ran the camp for thirty-eight years, hundred and twenty boys every summer. The last summer was twelve years ago. You think I should remember every camper who came here? You know how old I am, Detective?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Eighty-two next month. I have trouble remembering my own name. Or what day it is. Or what I came into the kitchen for.”
Gurney smiled sympathetically. “You said that the last year the camp was in operation was twelve years ago?”
“That I know for sure.”
“And Steven Pardosa was here thirteen years ago. That would be a year before you shut down?”
“That’s plain arithmetic.”
“It sounds like the camp was successful for many years.”
“That’s a fact.”
“How did you come to the decision to shut it down?”
Blumberg shook his head, sighed. “We lost our customers.”
“Why?”
“There was a tragedy. A terrible event. Everything snowballed out of control. Stories, rumors, craziness. Like that phrase—a perfect storm. That’s what it was. One year we were pure gold. The next year we were shit.”
“What happened?”
Blumberg let out an abrupt, bitter laugh. “Answer that and you get the prize.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Nobody knows what happened.”
“You called it ‘a perfect storm.’ What did you mean?”
“Everything that could go wrong went wrong.”
“Can you tell me about it? It could be important.”
“It could be important? It was important enough to destroy Camp Brightwater—a camp that had been in business, for your information, for fifty years before the thirty-eight years I ran it. An institution. A tradition. All destroyed.”
Gurney said nothing. He waited, knowing Blumberg would tell the story.
“There was always variability—better years, worse years. I don’t mean the business, the financial aspect. That was always solid. I’m talking about the personality mix. The emotional chemistry. The spirit of the group. How the bad apples would affect the rest of the barrel. Some years the spirit was cleaner, brighter, better than other years. To be expected, right? But then, thirteen years ago, that one year everything fell off the wrong end of the chart. The feeling in the air that summer was different. Uglier. Nastier. You could feel the fear. Counselors quit. Some kids wrote to their parents to come and get them. There’s a phrase people use nowadays: ‘toxic environment.’ That’s what it was. And all that was before the event itself.” Blumberg shook his head again and seemed to get lost in his recollections.
“The event?” prompted Gurney.
“One of the boys disappeared.”
“Disappeared . . . permanently?”
“He was present at dinner. He was missing at breakfast. Never seen again.”
“Did the police get involved?”
“Sure, they got involved. For a while. They lost interest when it started looking like the kid just ran away. Oh, they searched the woods, put out those missing-person notices, checked the bus stops, put his picture in the local papers. But nothing came out of any of that.”
“Why did they think he ran away?”
“Homesick? Hated being here? Maybe was being pushed around a little? You got to understand something. This was thirteen years ago—before all the uproar started about the bullying thing. Don’t get me wrong. We discouraged it. But the thing is, bullying was part of growing up back then. A fact of life.”
A fact of life, thought Gurney. And, occasionally, a fact of death. “So once the police adopted the theory that he ran away, was that the end of it?”
Blumberg laughed again, more bitterly than before. “I wish to God that was the end of it. That was far from the end of it. A boy disappearing, possibly running away—that was the reality. The camp could have survived that. What the camp couldn’t survive was all the crazy bullshit.”
“Meaning?”
“The rumors. The whispers.”
“Rumors of what?”
“Every kind of evil thing you could imagine. I told you the spirit of the place that summer was nasty even before the disappearance, and it only got worse afterward. The stories some of the boys were spreading, even some of the parents—beyond belief.”
“For example?”
“Anything you could imagine, the more horrible the better. That the missing kid had actually been murdered. That he’d been used as a human sacrifice in a satanic ritual. That he was drowned and his body was chopped up and fed to the coyotes. Incredible shit like that. There was even a story that some of the boys, some of the bad apples, got it into their heads that he was a little fagelah, and they beat him to death and buried him in the woods.”
“Just because he was gay?”
“Gay?” Blumberg shook his head. “What a word for it, eh? Like it was some kind of happy way to be. Better they should call it ‘fucking warped’—be more accurate.”
Gurney couldn’t help feeling a little sick at the thought of the boy’s experience at a camp where the ultimate authority viewed him that way.
“Did the police follow up on any of the ugly stories?”
“Nothing came of any of that. So many wild ideas going around that none of them seemed real. Teenage boys have grotesque imaginations. My opinion? I’d have to agree with the police—that he ran away. No real evidence of anything else. Just crazy talk. Unfortunately, crazy talk is like electricity. Lots of dangerous energy.”
“The crazy talk killed the camp?”
“Killed it dead. Next summer we filled less than a third of our bunks, and half of those kids left before the season was over. The crazy talk came back, like an infection. The life of the place was dead and gone. Goddamn shame.”
“The bad apples—do you remember any names?”
Blumberg shook his head. “Faces, I recognize. Names, I’m not so good. I’m thinking some of them had nicknames. But I can’t remember them, either.”
“Can you recall the name of the boy who disappeared?”
Gurney made a note of it. “The fire that destroyed the main building with all the records of your campers’ names and addresses—was there an investigation?”
“An investigation that went nowhere.”
“But despite everything, you stayed here. And reinvented the camp as a bungalow colony. You must be very attached to the location.”
“Camp Brightwater was once a magical place. A happy place. I try to remember that.”
“Sounds like a good idea. How’s the bungalow colony business?”
“It’s shit. But it pays the bills.”
Gurney smiled and handed Blumberg a card with his cell number on it. “Thank you for your time. If you think of anything else about that bad year, anything that happened, any names, any nicknames, please give me a call.”
Blumberg frowned at the card. “Your name is Gurney.”
“Right.”
“Not like the cow.”
“No, not like the cow.”
CHAPTER 35
On the drive back to Wolf Lake, Gurney tried to relate what he’d learned from Moe Blumberg to everything else he knew about the case.
Homophobia seemed to be a common factor—which made him curious to find out if it had surfaced in Hardwick’s meeting with the Teaneck detective regarding Leo Balzac’s suicide.
He pulled off onto the shoulder, took out his phone, and called Hardwick’s number.
The man picked up on the first ring—a good sign.
“What’s up, ace?”
“Just wondering if you managed to get to your guy in Teaneck.”
“Got to him, sat with him, listened to him. Bottom line, the man is highly pissed off at the politics of the case.”
“The politics?”
“Unexplained orders from above. Orders serious enough that they damn well better be followed, but ambiguous enough to be deniable. Only clear thing is that they’re descending from the stratosphere where the flick of a finger can send your career into the toilet like a dead fly.”
“What does your new detective friend have to do to avoid the fatal flick?”
“Hang back, stay off the minefield, and trust that the situation is in good hands.”
