Scavenger

by Tom Savage

  Oh, yes, she thought. She’d just begun the service with the phone company, and the little white box had arrived a few days ago. She still wasn’t used to its presence. She pressed the button on the box to review the last few calls, and there on the electronic display was Mona’s name and number, followed by Richard Gaines’s name and number. The final display read, Out of Area, 504-555-4723.

  Telemarketers, she supposed. She’d already gotten a couple of similar numbers in the few days she’d had the ID service, and she’d called the companies and had her name removed from their files. She left a message for Mona, who was also not answering. Then she dialed the third number, preparing to make a polite but firm demand of whichever magazine or time-share offerer answered. She was not prepared for what she heard.

  “Mullins Guest House,” said a woman’s voice. An older woman, by the sound of it, with a distinct, musical Southern drawl.

  Guest house? Tracy thought. Then she thought, Mark.

  “Hello,” she said. “My name is Tracy Morgan. Someone at this number called me about two hours ago, but they didn’t leave a message. I’m returning the call.”

  There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. Then the woman said, “Hmm. I didn’t call you, so it must have been one of my guests. I’m afraid I don’t really—”

  “Do you have a Mark Stevenson staying there?” Tracy asked.

  Now the woman sounded relieved. “Oh, yes, Mr. Stevenson. Well, he’s out at the moment, but I can tell him you—”

  “No, thank you,” Tracy said quickly. He hadn’t left a message, had changed his mind, and she didn’t want him to think she was anxious, checking up on him. He’d only been gone two days. “No message. I—I’ll call him later. I know he’s busy there in Washington, and I don’t want to disturb him.” A lame excuse, but it would do. She was about to hang up when the woman surprised her.

  “Excuse me, did you say Washington? My dear, we’re in New Orleans. Mr. Stevenson is out to dinner, but—”

  “New Orleans?” Tracy whispered, staring down at the number on the box. The area code, 504, stared back at her. “Oh. Oh, well, never mind. I’ll just call him later. Thank—thank you.” She hung up quickly.

  She sat there for several minutes, wondering what Mark was doing in New Orleans. He’d said Washington. Well, he was now somewhere else, obviously, so his research must have taken him there. With a shrug, she stood up from the couch and went into the bedroom.

  Once there, she proceeded directly to the desk by the window, where her computer terminal stood waiting for her. She dropped into her padded executive chair, wondering where to begin. Carol Grant’s story over dinner had been a shock, but it was sketchy at best. Tracy was suddenly filled with an urgent need to know more, and that was where her job came in handy.

  Because she was a representative of one of New York’s biggest literary agencies, her computer was hooked up to the company’s mainframe. She’d never used the excess information in the past, but she and everyone else at the agency had been instructed in how to do so. They had been told the services would be good for checking nationwide reviews of their clients’ work. It took her only a few moments of scanning the various menus to find what she wanted. A few key entries, and she was in the newspaper morgue.

  She decided on the Chicago Tribune. It was that city’s newspaper of record, and it would presumably have the most extensive coverage of the Farmer tragedy. Summoning the window for subject requests, she paused, her hands poised above the keyboard. What exact subject did she want? Shrugging, she typed, FAMILY MAN.

  After a few moments of blinking and whirring, a listing appeared. She scrolled down the list, staring. There were more than four hundred references under that heading.

  She tried again. Erasing FAMILY MAN, she typed, FARMER, JACOB. Over three hundred references, nearly as bad. She wondered at that until she realized: Reverend Farmer would have been in the news a lot, long before his murder. He had been the local leader of a nationwide religious sect, and a celebrity on television.

  Tracy erased the name and sank back in the chair, sipping her tea. The solution, when it occurred to her, was perfectly simple. She leaned forward again and typed, FARMER, MATTHEW.

  Fifty-seven references.

  She stared at the list of dates and page numbers for a long time. Then she stood up and went over to the bedroom window. She gazed down into the dark street and the park across the way, thinking, FARMER, MATTHEW.

  FARMER, MATTHEW was Mark. Mark Stevenson. The man she loved. The man she was going to marry.…

  She stood there for a long time, staring down at Gramercy Park. She watched the occasional people straggling by on the opposite sidewalk in front of the park’s decorative iron fence, and the occasional cars in the street directly below. A woman was walking a large dog. A couple, well dressed, apparently on their way to or from some function. Two young women, laughing as they dashed across the street. Then a tall, blond young man strolled into view, paused under a lamppost, and lit a cigarette. He glanced up at her building, and for one odd moment Tracy thought he was looking directly at her. Then he looked away and wandered off, out of sight. He seems vaguely familiar, she mused. Probably a neighbor.

  She was aware of what she was doing. She was stalling, putting off the inevitable moment, and that wasn’t like her, not at all. Taking a long, deep breath, she went back over to the desk and sat down again. In a moment her fingers were racing over the keyboard.

  The first twenty-three references to FARMER, MATTHEW predated the tragedy. It was a mini-history of his childhood activities with the Church of the True Believers. She read slowly, getting a sense of his life. Revival meetings in Chicago, a local telethon, several appearances at nationally televised events involving the church. And on and on.

  The newspaper pages were exactly reproduced, and there were occasional photographs of the family. Little Matthew, age seven, dark-haired and unsmiling, with a smaller boy and girl, his brother and sister, surrounding their parents. Reverend Farmer was a tall, stout, imposingly fierce-looking man with Mark’s—or, rather, Matthew’s—dark good looks, and Mrs. Farmer was a pretty woman with a big blond helmet of hair, obviously not her natural color. There were other family publicity pictures: Matthew at ten, twelve, fourteen; the reverend growing stouter and more fierce; the mother’s false blond hair getting bigger; the family all in white, all in black. In one particularly obnoxious shot, the three children were dressed in choir gowns and carrying tambourines.

  It was horrible, obscene, that these beautiful children should be used so by the obviously self-satisfied zealot and his creepy-looking wife. That the Church of the True Believers, whoever the hell they were, would fall for this artifice. But what Tracy couldn’t help noticing, even as the bile rose in her throat, was that in every single photo, Matthew was the only member of the family who never smiled. He looked miserable. As well he should, she thought.

  Then came the next group of stories, the Christmas morning massacre. Tracy stopped at the first Family Man story, scrolling back up the list, certain that she’d missed something. No, she hadn’t. She was looking for references to Matthew specifically, not the rest of the family. But there was a gap in his reported history, a gap of nearly eight years, from when he would have been about fifteen until the Christmas morning when he had discovered the bodies of his family.

  Of course. He’d run away, lived on the street, gotten into drugs. Then he’d cleaned himself up and gone back to school, putting himself through college with a job. Something about market research for consumers.

  She scrolled quickly through the many entries about the murders, reading only snatches of stories and glancing briefly at the awful pictures. Stretchers being brought in a line out the front door of a big white house. A photo of the mercifully empty living room where they had been found, the garish Christmas tree and garlands providing a horrible counterpoint to the dark stains on carpets and furniture. Other, similar photos accompanying the story: a livi
ng room in New Orleans and a sundeck and swimming pool in Los Angeles, the sites of the first two assaults now linked to The Family Man.

  “Dear God,” she whispered as she clicked on the next newspaper entry.

  She froze, staring at the bold headline:

  SON QUESTIONED IN FARMER FAMILY MASSACRE

  Tracy blinked and read the words again. No, there was no mistake.

  Here it was, the part Carol Grant had not told her. Carol obviously had not known. Mark hadn’t told her about it.

  She read slowly through the next few entries, feeling her anger rising again. It hadn’t been enough that he’d stumbled on the scene that Christmas morning, found his entire family in that horrifying way. He’d then been taken into custody. Detained. Questioned by local police and an FBI agent named O’Hara. She read carefully: no, nowhere did it indicate that he had ever actually been arrested, charged with anything. He’d been taken to the police station for several hours, then released. After that, everyone apparently proceeded on the obviously correct assumption that it was the work of The Family Man.

  They had questioned him, the paper reported, because of his absence, his fall from grace. His well-known antipathy for his parents, his family, the Church of the True Believers. His arrest record for shoplifting and drug activity. His “antisocial behavior,” as the reporter called it.

  What shocked her most about the shocking story was the photograph accompanying the penultimate entry, under the headline:

  FARMER SON “NOT A SUSPECT” SAYS FBI

  In the picture, Matthew—Mark, she reminded herself again—was walking down the snowy steps of what was apparently the police station. The face was familiar to her, if younger, but that was the only resemblance the scowling young man had to the man she knew as Mark Stevenson. The young man in the picture was rail-thin, with spiky blond hair and a dark beard. He wore small hoops in both ears, a down-filled coat, and carried a bunched-up knit hat sporting a Chicago Bears logo. But most unsettling were his eyes: big, wide, glazed with shock. With fear. And with unimaginable sorrow.

  Tracy wondered that the market research people would allow this rather unkempt-looking young man to work for them. More than that, she wondered that he had gone home like that, to present himself, repentant, to his Fundamentalist Christian family. Most of all, she wondered how this rebel without a clue had ever, ever been transformed into Mark Stevenson, the award-winning author. Her lover, soon to be her husband.

  She almost turned off the computer when she remembered that there was one more reference to Matthew Farmer in the Chicago Tribune. She clicked on the final entry and stared at the headline, a small surge of satisfaction growing within her.

  FBI OFFERS FARMER SON A PUBLIC APOLOGY

  FBI Special Agent Ronald O’Hara had called a press conference two days after the murders and exonerated Matthew Farmer of all suspicion in the matter of the Farmer murders. The agent went on to say that Judy Barlow had stated she was with Matthew at the crucial time, and that there was sufficient evidence at the scene to prove that the crime was the work of The Family Man. He apologized to Matthew Farmer for any distress he or his investigators might have caused. All of which meant one thing to Tracy: Matthew had obviously consulted legal counsel and been advised to press charges against the police and the FBI. The apology was their way of avoiding a lawsuit.

  She turned off the computer, shaking her head in disgust. It took her several minutes and several more sips of the now-cold tea to realize that she was also relieved.

  She was tremendously relieved.

  Everything she had just learned about Matthew Farmer merely reinforced her love for him. He had rebelled against his obviously dreadful family, as she herself would have rebelled under the circumstances. His lost years on the streets and in the drug subculture were understandable, and his self-regeneration, education, and employment were admirable. His suffering at the hands of the bureaucrats was infuriating.

  But the most wonderful thing about Matthew Farmer was his rebirth, in New York City, as Mark Stevenson.

  Yes, Tracy decided. Now that she knew the whole story, all there was to know, she loved him even more than before. He was a strong man, brave and resourceful. Intelligent, too. And he was, to her, Mark Stevenson. Now and always.

  Still, she wondered why he was now in New Orleans, and why he was apparently carrying a gun with him, and when he would come home to her.

  26

  The scent of river water was strong on the night air as Mark drove west out of the city. There was also a tinge of something else, something he could actually see reflected in the headlights, the first indications of a rising fog. The mist rolled in off the Mississippi, gleaming in the darkness on his left. He maneuvered the car over to the exit and left the highway.

  He didn’t know exactly where he was, wasn’t even certain which parish he was in, but he found the riverside road with no difficulty. He drove on for several miles, crossing two bridges over the winding river and passing through a tiny, sleeping town. He glanced around at the dark buildings, thinking how different small towns were from cities. Here it was barely nine-thirty, and practically no lights remained on. As he left the town behind and drove on through the thick forest that gradually arrived on both sides of the road, he began to get the peculiar feeling that he was all alone in the world.

  Two white pillars loomed up, ghostly apparitions in the mist before him. They marked the entrance to the turnoff on the left, the drive that would lead to the house. He made the turn easily, looking over at the corroded brass plaque on the right column as it was briefly caught in the light: TENNANT HOUSE. He drove silently up the long, curving driveway, flinching as the dark overhanging leaves and tendrils of gray moss materialized in the headlight beam lighting up the fog. The longer strands slapped against the windshield and whispered across the roof of the car.

  The once-pristine asphalt drive had become rutted and potholed now from years of exposure and no maintenance, and he swerved several times to avoid the larger bumps. Sarah had said that nobody had lived here in a long time, and the drive was proof enough that this was true. Tennant House, like his own childhood home in the quiet North Shore suburb of Chicago, was haunted: a family had been slaughtered there, slaughtered by The Family Man. Who on earth would want to live there? People were now living in the townhouse in Brooklyn, but it was different in cities. A little renovation, a breakup into apartment units, and the history of a city building faded. New people constantly arrived, needing space, creating their own history. But for this isolated mansion and his family home in Evanston, the legend lived on.

  He still owned his family’s house, but he’d rarely been able to rent it. Adults shunned the pretty, three-story wooden house, and the neighborhood children dared each other to climb the steps to the front porch late at night and to throw rocks that smashed the windows. Then they would run away, laughing and screaming. Several years ago, after the third report from the surveillance company that guarded the property reached him in New York, Mark had hired a Chicago contractor to board up the place. He’d done this by phone: he had not gone back to Evanston, not once in twelve years.

  A final curve, a final caressing hand of moss against the windshield, and the big, pillared plantation manor house appeared in the distance before him. He braked, cut the engine, and sat studying the facade of the house in the glow of the headlights. The fog was thickening, causing the beams to appear contained, suspended: two finite, horizontal cones of light stretching out before him in the gray mist. He switched off the lights and got out of the car.

  As he walked the rest of the way up the drive, he noticed that the temperature had dropped sharply. It was chilly now in the late evening, and a breeze from the river beyond the house was moving the plumes of fog around, so that even the air around him seemed to be a shivering, animate presence. The rustling of the leaves in the trees created a low, steady background noise. Otherwise, all was silent. He came to the circle before the pillared veranda, where t
he drive curved off to the left toward the long, low building beside the mansion, now a garage but once a carriage house, and, still earlier, slave quarters. He wondered just how old this house was, and he wondered that the state had not offered to buy the place from Sarah Gammon and convert it into a tourist attraction, as so many other plantations in the area now were. Then again, perhaps they had. Perhaps Sarah simply refused all offers, holding on to the property in some misguided desire to keep others safe from her family’s fate.

  Mark stood in the fog at the base of the two steps to the veranda, gazing around as he pulled the big front-door key from his pants pocket. The windows were all boarded shut, as were his own windows in Evanston, and probably for the same reason. Malicious children would, no doubt, find this place hard to resist. Lizzie Borden, with an axe, gave her father forty whacks.…

  Then he noticed that the front door was ajar.

  The wind rustled the trees. The wet fog swirled silently behind him. A faint glow of light was visible beyond the crack of the door. And there was something else, a sound he now heard softly emanating from inside the house. Music: low, indistinct, at the very border of his threshold of hearing, he could just make out the tinny strains of a jazz band.

  On that night, that Mardi Gras thirteen years ago, The Family Man had come here, moving silently, stealthily from room to room, finding the sleeping Tennant family and cutting their throats one by one. The father, the mother, the twenty-year-old son, the seventeen-year-old son, and a basset hound named Huckleberry. They had all been carried down the stairs to the living room, where they had been arranged, posed, on couches and chairs, the dog on the carpet at Mrs. Tennant’s feet. Their dead faces had been covered with glittering holiday masks. Mr. Tennant’s severed head, also masked, was placed on the floor beside the dog. Then the room had been meticulously decorated, festooned with balloons and confetti, and long red candles had been lit and placed on every available surface, even the floor. As a final flourish, when everything else was just as The Family Man had wanted it, the home entertainment center in one corner had been put to use. When Sarah and her friends had arrived on the scene many hours later, their discovery had been orchestrated by the music that played over and over in the otherwise silent room. It was the unofficial theme song of Mardi Gras, of New Orleans: “When the Saints Go Marching In.” But the music that now emanated from beyond the open door was Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man Blues,” the song Mark had put in his novel. Scavenger was following Mark’s fictional blueprint, as he had done with the music in Brooklyn.