He Never Forgot

by P. D. Workman

  Zachary made a couple of notes. Who could help but feel sorry for the little boy who had been so neglected he didn’t even know how to eat properly?

  “He was very quick to make up for lost time,” Kathy said. “He was very curious about things and learned fast.”

  “So he couldn’t write his own name?”

  “No. Not when he came to us. It took a few days to teach him how, when he’d learned his alphabet and spent some time developing the fine motor skills for drawing and writing.”

  “Do you remember him ever talking about a brother?”

  “A brother?” Kathy looked puzzled. “No. I don’t think we knew about any brother.”

  “Allen,” Burton said.

  She looked at him, her brows drawn down. “Allen,” she repeated.

  They both waited for it to register, for her to access any memories she might have of the name. She shook her head slowly. Then, “Allen?” she said again.

  Burton nodded.

  “Let me think.”

  She got up from her seat and went over to a bookcase where there were volumes and volumes of large books. She ran a finger over them, looking at the spines. Then finally pulled one out. She sat back down next to Burton, and Zachary saw when she opened it that it was a book of photos.

  “Do you want to see a picture of you when you came to us?”

  Burton nodded wordlessly.

  Kathy flipped pages until she found it, then pointed. Zachary didn’t have a good vantage point, but he could see the small figure in the middle of the pictures. A little waif of a boy. All alone in the middle of the picture.

  “This is the day you came.”

  Zachary looked at the pages of pictures, and the volumes of books on the shelf. “You took a picture of every child on the first day?”

  “Once you’ve had a child run the day he’s dropped off… yes. You don’t ever again want to call the police and not have any pictures of the child you are trying to report missing.”

  Zachary nodded. Very practical. Kathy gazed down at the picture of little Ben. Except he’d been Bobby, then. Bobby Weaver, just rescued from where he’d been held in the cold, dark basement all of his life. Or at least, a good portion of it.

  “Allen,” she said again. “Allen was your brother?”

  Burton cleared his throat. “I think… he was.”

  “But he wasn’t with you when you… escaped that place. When the police went and arrested those… those horrible people.”

  “I don’t know what happened to him. I’m trying to remember. To find out. And if I ever mentioned him to you… maybe the police will agree to look.”

  She gazed at him blankly. “Look? Look where?”

  “In the basement.”

  “But they looked in the basement.”

  Burton looked at Zachary.

  “We… would like them to see if there are any remains. If he was buried there.”

  “Buried in a basement?”

  “There was a dirt floor.”

  “Oh.” She shook her head sadly. “Oh, I hope not…”

  Burton looked down at the picture of himself. So long ago. So small and forlorn.

  “What do you remember about him?” Kathy asked.

  “Not very much. He was there with me. He told me stories. Tried to protect me.”

  Burton touched the picture tentatively, as if doing so might help bring the memories back. Had they looked similar, as brothers often do? Maybe seeing his own face back then would help to trigger a memory, bring another fragment of it back.

  “We know that he could write,” Zachary said. “The boys’ names were written on the wall. Bobby and Allen. If Bobby couldn’t write them, then it must have been Allen.”

  “And he was older,” Kathy discerned. “Because he had been taught how and Bobby hadn’t. Maybe he even went to school at some point.”

  Zachary nodded. It was an avenue that he hadn’t pursued, on the assumption that neither boy had ever seen the inside of a school. But who had taught Allen how to write? Their mother? A woman who didn’t even seem to care about feeding her children properly? Why would she take the time to teach him his letters?

  And if he had gone to school, what name would his records have been in?

  “Do you know what their real name was?” he asked Kathy Anderson. “The name Ben went by was Bobby Weaver, but that wasn’t their right name, was it? They were just trying to stay below the radar, taking on a pseudonym.”

  “Oh, yes. You’re right. Bobby came into the system as Weaver, and we just left it at that. His birth hadn’t been registered before then, and we didn’t want there to be a connection between him and his parents. Particularly when he got into school. We didn’t want any of the other children making that connection.”

  “Do you remember what their name was?”

  “I might remember if you give me a few minutes.” Kathy put her fingers to her temples and rubbed them, closing her eyes and concentrating. “Oh… O’ something. It was so long ago, but of course we followed the story, because it impacted our family so directly.”

  Opening her eyes, she placed a tentative hand on Burton’s shoulder. He swallowed and gave her a forced smile. Zachary wondered whether he remembered her at all. He had lived with her only a few months. Did he have good feelings about her, even if he didn’t remember her clearly? Or had it been such a confusing, traumatic change that his feelings about that time had been negative?

  There was no telling how the woman, despite her appearance of kindly compassion, had treated him in the time he had been there. She might have been gentle and encouraging, or she might have been a strict hard-liner. Or both. Sometimes the ones who flip-flopped were the most difficult of all.

  “Dougherty,” Kathy said suddenly. “That was it. Doughertys.”

  “Did you know their first names? Were they the same, or had they taken on different first names too?”

  “I think they were the same. What were they?”

  Zachary didn’t answer immediately. “Do you want me to tell you? Or were you trying to remember?”

  “Elizabeth. And Sam?”

  “Then they kept the same names.” That would, at least, mean that Zachary could look them up at the courthouse and see what had come out in the trials. And he could check to see if there were a birth certificate or any kind of announcement or social security claim for an Allen Dougherty. It was highly unlikely that he had survived and was still alive out there somewhere. It was always possible that he’d been pawned off on another family and ended up in the system, but the chances that Zachary would be able to find any records of him were slim to none. Chances were, Allen had never left that basement.

  But Burton might have extended family out there who were decent people. Cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents. Just because his parents had been pieces of crap, that didn’t mean that everyone related to them was.

  34

  Zachary had worried that it would be hard to get Burton out of his old foster home. That he would be so happy to have some link to his old life that he wouldn’t be able to leave Kathy Anderson behind.

  But it had turned out not to be a problem. Even as Zachary was still asking Kathy more questions about what Burton had been like while he had been there and to ferret out any clues she might have that she didn’t even know she had, Burton was making noises about wanting to go. He wanted a drink, Zachary knew. He wanted to wash everything away, to forget about his former life, foster mother included, and not to have to talk about it anymore. He was no longer the little boy in the picture.

  Or maybe he was, and that was the problem.

  He stood and motioned to the door, hurrying Zachary along.

  Zachary rolled his eyes and followed him. “I’ll call you if I need anything else,” he told Kathy. Now that he had her information, he could circle back when he needed to. She had seen that Burton was fine with his information being shared with Zachary, and they could continue the conversation privately, without him sh
ifting around and breathing noisily, like a six hundred pound gorilla in the middle of the room.

  “Sure. Thank you for coming. It’s always good to see one of our old kids again…”

  Burton was hurrying out the door toward Zachary’s car. He shrugged at Kathy. “Sorry. It’s all been pretty difficult for him.”

  “Yes… I’m not surprised. We haven’t had many that have come from such terrible situations.”

  Not many.

  Just that phrase was shocking. It should have been ‘he’s the only one.’

  But Zachary had heard of and read too many stories about children being the victims of such horrific neglect or abuse it was almost beyond belief. Some of them survived. Some did not. And of the ones who did survive, how many were too broken to ever fully recover?

  Zachary followed Burton out to the car and clicked the key fob to unlock the door for him. Burton climbed in without a word and shut his door, isolating himself in a quiet bubble of space. Zachary took his time walking to the car and around to his door. Long enough for Burton to take a few breaths to steady himself.

  Or, as Zachary saw when he opened the door and slid into his seat, a few belts from his flask. He didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t act all judgy with me,” Burton snapped. “You’ve got no idea what it’s like.”

  Zachary knew how overwhelming his own issues were, how difficult it was for him to deal with flashbacks or to deal with reunions with his own family members. He didn’t judge Burton for how he chose to handle it. That was his own business. Was spending most of his time drunk better or worse than having a complete meltdown? Or attempting suicide? There were just some things that were too harrowing for people with normal, unremarkable pasts to understand. There was no polite, conventional way to deal with the cruelties that Burton had survived.

  Zachary was so deep into his investigations that he was barely aware that Kenzie was there. He should have put his computer aside and spent some quality time with her, but he’d felt like he couldn’t leave what he was doing. He was startled when she sat down next to him and touched him on the arm. He looked at her, then looked at the system clock on his computer.

  “Oh… sheesh, I’m sorry, Kenzie. I was… sort of focused on what I was doing.”

  “Sort of?” she teased.

  “Uh… have I ignored you all night? Did we eat?”

  “I ate.” Kenzie looked to Zachary’s side, and he saw a piece of pizza with a bite or two out of the tip congealing on a plate on the side table where he must have laid it down and promptly forgotten about it.

  “Really. I’m sorry.”

  She slid her arm around him and snuggled in close. “When I was in school and we covered learning disabilities, I never really understood what they were talking about when they said that ADHD wasn’t the inability to pay attention to something, but to regulate your attention in the usual way. It sounded like it was just semantics. They did say that people with ADHD sometimes hyperfocus. On things like video games or areas of particular interest. It sounded like an ADHD diagnosis was just an excuse for not doing your work, but playing games or doing what you liked instead.”

  Zachary nodded and rubbed his neck. He’d clearly been bent over his laptop in the wrong position for some time. He would probably have a stiff neck for days. “Hyperfocus,” he agreed.

  “You are the king of hyperfocus.”

  “I didn’t mean to ignore you.”

  “It’s a compliment. I know you’re doing work, not just messing around on social networks. Your ability to dig in like that… that’s what makes you such a good investigator. One of the things.”

  Zachary wasn’t used to having his dysregulation complimented. If it had been Bridget he’d ignored all night… even for just ten minutes…

  “So, have you made progress?” Kenzie asked. She reached around him to grab his plate and took a bite of his cold pizza. Then she handed it to him, and he knew he was supposed to finish it. He took a couple of bites. It was good; he just didn’t feel like eating.

  “I did find a birth certificate for Allen Dougherty. I think that, together with the fact that both the social worker and the foster mother agree that Burton could not have written the names Bobby and Allen on the wall, will be enough for the police to pursue a warrant.”

  “How much older was Allen?”

  “Four years older than Bobby. Or Ben. He probably attended a year or two of school before… before whatever it was that happened that resulted in Bobby and Allen being imprisoned in the basement.”

  “You think there was a… trigger? An inciting event?”

  “Maybe. Sometimes there’s a specific incident that makes people start treating their children differently. They probably weren’t great parents before that, but Allen knew how to read and write, and Bobby didn’t. I think… maybe something happened in between.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe it was just a gradual descent into depression, abuse, addiction.”

  Zachary shrugged. “Maybe. I’ve ordered copies of the court transcripts, but I don’t know how long it will take to get them. Maybe there will be something in there that will tell their story. They must have had something to say in their defense… some sob story. People like this don’t take responsibility for their own behavior. They always blame it on someone else.”

  “Yeah, I’ve met people like that.”

  “I’m going to see if I can work out a family tree, too. If they have family in the area. Grandparents might speak up if they are asked now about Allen. Even if it’s just to say that they don’t know when he disappeared or what happened to him. They can at least verify that he existed. That they had seen him at some time.”

  “Are you going to be able to do that?”

  “Dougherty is not a common name. Not uncommon, but if they have been in Vermont for a while, I might be able to find some obituaries or other information that will help me to build a family tree.”

  “How long did his parents serve?”

  Zachary had been looking at his computer again, going through the information he had been able to collate on Allen and the parents. It wasn’t much more than names and dates, but there were, at least, official records to back up the story that they had been trying to construct. He looked at Kenzie quickly.

  “What?”

  “How long did Ben’s parents serve in prison? How much time?” When he didn’t answer, she raised her brows. “What were their sentences?”

  Zachary blinked. In his mind, anyone who did what Elizabeth and Sam Dougherty had done deserved to stay in prison for the rest of their lives. But he hadn’t come across that detail yet. The news reports had been sparse to nonexistent, and neither the social worker nor Kathy had mentioned how long the Doughertys had been sentenced to serve, or even what they had been convicted of.

  Murderers got out of prison. Not the worst ones, maybe, but plenty of people who had served time for murder got out after twenty years and continued their lives. Burton’s parents had been convicted decades earlier. If they had killed Allen, no one had known it at the time, and at most they had been convicted of child abuse and negligence. Not likely to be life sentences.

  He swore under his breath.

  Kenzie sighed and nodded. “I doubt they’re still in prison,” she said gently.

  “After all they did to that little boy? People knew what they had done and they wouldn’t put them away for life? How could they be out when he is still suffering?”

  “Yeah. It’s not very fair, is it?”

  “No.” Zachary rubbed his fist against his forehead, fighting the impulse to beat it against his head. “No, no, no.”

  She put her arm around him and squeezed him to her. “I know.”

  Zachary leaned into her.

  He knew that there was no justice for kids who were abused. While he blamed himself for the fire that had burned the family home down, and for all of the things he had done that had driven his mother to abandon them, he knew that his parents had been abu
sive. It took a lot of years in therapy to finally accept that the abuse had not been his fault. He had not brought that on himself. They had drunk too much, and they had hurt each other and their children.

  The things that their mother had expected—for the older girls to look after the younger ones, for them to all stay out from underfoot, and for them to generally fend for themselves—had been unrealistic and unfair. Children didn’t raise themselves. And yes, they made messes and got into mischief and had accidents. Even if Zachary had gotten into more than his fair share of trouble, that didn’t justify beatings.

  And not buying food or feeding the children much of the time hadn’t just been a matter of poverty. There were programs available to help. But money had gone toward alcohol and other vices instead of food, food stamps had been bartered for other things, and if children were sent to bed hungry, they’d better not have the nerve to cry about it.

  His parents had never gone to jail longer than overnight, usually for brawling so loudly that the neighbors had called the police. They’d never gone to prison for abuse or neglect. While Zachary and the others suffered through hardships in foster care, his parents had… done what? They hadn’t stepped up to take responsibility.

  Zachary had never investigated to see where they had gone after abandoning the children. Had they stayed together and eventually killed each other? Gone their separate ways and started two more families? He didn’t imagine that they had reformed. That would not be consistent with the behavior he had observed as a child.

  So he knew there was no justice for children like him and his siblings. The system had failed them. He only hoped that the youngest children had fared better. Tyrrell had gone through some tough times, but he said that he had been able to stay with the younger ones until he was a teenager, at least. He hadn’t told Zachary much about Vince and Mindy, but he mentioned them now and then and Zachary knew they were still in touch through email. One day, maybe he’d meet them and find out their stories.