A Blind Eye (10 page)

D
ougherty put on her turn signal and wheeled the Ford Expedition into the far-left lane. The small green and white sign said Ramapo Valley College. She concentrated as she negotiated the long sweeping turn of the cloverleaf, turning them east on Ramapo Valley Road. As they rolled away from the highway and under a thick canopy of overhanging trees, Dougherty’s eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror just in time to see a Bergen County Police cruiser flip on its lights bar.

“Shit,” she said, and looked over at Corso. “We’ve got company.”

“Be cool,” he said. “We’re as legal as can be.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills. “Here,” he said. “Stash this. Anything goes wrong, this’ll get you back home in style.”

She didn’t argue. Just snatched the money and jammed it into the pocket of her jeans, then clapped her hand back onto the wheel.

Quarter mile up the road, she pulled into a paved turnoff. The cop left his lights blazing as he made his way to the driver’s side. Dougherty rolled down the window. Gave him her best smile. “Something wrong, Officer?” she asked.

“Could I see your license and registration, please?”

She dug around in her purse and pulled out her license. Corso found the rental agreement in the glove box and gave it to her. She handed both to the cop.

The cop was still studying the paperwork when another cruiser pulled in behind his own. The second cop got out, walked around to the passenger side, and stood three yards behind the passenger door with his hand resting on the butt of his gun.

The first cop leaned down and peered into the car. “You’d be Mr. Falco,” he said to Corso, who said he was indeed Mr. Falco.

“I see some ID?”

Corso produced a driver’s license and handed it over. “Is there some problem?” Corso asked.

“Stay in the car,” the cop said. “I’ll be right back.”

Corso counted thirty and then looked back over his shoulder. Cop number one was holding on to the paperwork and speaking into his radio. Cop number two left the passenger door open as he joined his buddy in the front seat.

“What’s he doing?” Dougherty wanted to know.

“His cop thing.”

“I wasn’t speeding or anything,” she protested.

“I know.”

“If he—” she started.

“Just stay cool,” Corso said. “You’re not wanted for anything. Even in the worst-case scenario, you walk out and go home.”

Another minute and the cops were back. Cop number two stood at the rear of the car while number one came up to the window. “You folks mind if we have a look through the car?” he asked.

Before Dougherty could open her mouth, Corso said, “Yes, we do.”

“Excuse me?” the cop said.

“Yes, we mind if you search the car,” Corso repeated.

The cop made eye contact with Corso and held it. Then straightened up and walked to the back of the car, where he conferred with the other officer before returning to the driver’s side window. He bent down again. “So you’re refusing us permission to search the car?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why would that be, sir?”

“Because it’s my right to refuse,” Corso answered.

The second cop was at the window now. “That kind of attitude might look like you’ve got something to hide,” he commented.

“How you decide to interpret things is none of my concern,” Corso said. “If we’ve committed some traffic violation, we’d like to hear about it. Otherwise we’d like to be on our way.”

Again the cops stepped to the rear of the vehicle and talked it over, this time for the better part of five minutes, before cop number one wandered back to the window.

“Can’t say I think much of your spirit of cooperation,” he said.

“Duly noted,” Corso replied, stone-faced, his eyes locked on the cop’s.

Nobody blinked. Their eyes were still boring into one another when the officer handed the paperwork back to Dougherty. “You folks drive carefully now,” he said.

They sat still. Watched as the two officers returned to their cars and drove off, one east, one west. Dougherty breathed for what seemed like the first time in an hour.

“You are such an asshole,” she said. “You could have gotten us—”

“Gimme my money back,” Corso said.

She pulled the wad out and dropped it in his lap. “God damn you.”

“Let’s go find this Rosen guy,” he said.…

“We went to the post office,” Corso said. “They said they don’t deliver mail to Smithville anymore. As far as they’re concerned, the zip code no longer exists.”

“Postmaster in”—she looked at Corso—“what town was that?”

“Suffern, New York,” Corso said.

“Said we ought to come over to the community college and ask you about it. They said you were the local expert on the area.”

His name was Randy Rosen. Assistant professor of history at the Ramapo Valley College of New Jersey. Fifty-something, with uneven skin and a nose that belonged on a much larger face. He’d mastered the needy academic look. Thick salt-and-pepper hair in need of a barber. Threadbare herringbone sports coat in need of dry cleaning. Cramped little office in need of a fire. “We’re not a community college anymore. We’ve outgrown our populist beginnings. We’re a”—he used his fingers to make imaginary quotation marks—“a full-fledged, full-service college these days.” His voice carried the tinge of bitterness and disappointment common to failed academics, people whose modest appointments and offices represented their final rung on the academic ladder, a station above which they were not destined to rise.

Rosen leaned back in his chair and looked them over. “If you’re talking Smithville, you’re talking Jackson Whites.”

“What’s that?” Dougherty asked. She looked at Corso.
Jackson Whites
was the same phrase the postmaster had used.

“Depends on who you ask,” Rosen said. “There are a number of myths and legends as to the origin of the people.” He took them in again, as if trying out a new pair of eyes. “You mind if I ask what your interest is?”

Corso told him. As the story unfolded, Rosen’s expression moved from detached amusement to rapt attention. “And you think this girl—” He stopped himself. “Of course, by now she’s a middle-aged woman…. You think she may have come from Smithville?”

“I think it’s possible,” Corso said.

Rosen leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers over his stomach. Corso watched the professor process the information. Didn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what he was thinking. Might be a monograph here. Maybe even a full-blown paper. Something that might get him out of academic purgatory, one last booster rocket for a fizzling career. Maybe even get him a chair somewhere.

“What year are we talking about here?” Rosen asked.

Corso thought it over. “I’m thinkin’ late sixties, early seventies,” he said. Rosen tried to hide it, but something about the dates added fuel to his inner fire.

“Where to start?” he asked.

“What’s a Jackson White?” Corso asked.

“Mostly it’s a polite way to say
nigger.
”

“I didn’t know there was a polite way,” Dougherty said.

“Actually,
Jackson Whites
is a bastardization of
Jacks and whites,
” Rosen said. “
Jacks
is what they called coloreds back in the sixteenth century.”

“So Jackson Whites aren’t white,” Corso said.

“They’re our local hill people. And most definitely racially mixed.”

Corso and Dougherty exchanged glances. Rosen smiled.

“I know what you’re thinking. Is this guy crazy? This is New Jersey. More people per square mile than any other state in the Union. What’s this talk of hill people living in isolation up in the mountains?”

They didn’t argue. “What they are,” Rosen continued, “is an extended clan of closely interrelated families living up in the mountains around here.” He paused for effect. “They’ve been up there since the Revolutionary War.”

“You mean…like hillbillies?” Dougherty asked.

“More or less,” Rosen said. “If anything, they’re more isolated than their southern counterparts and a whole lot more clannish.”

“What mountains are we talking about here?” Corso asked.

“The Ramapos.” Rosen got to his feet and started across the room toward the door. He gestured for Corso and Dougherty to follow.

They crossed the empty hallway and entered an unoccupied classroom. Rosen walked past the rostrum and pulled down a map. Corso and Dougherty stepped in closer. Northern New Jersey, southern New York. Rosen grabbed an old-fashioned pointer from the chalk tray and drew an imaginary circle around the area. “Right here,” he said. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Less than thirty miles from Manhattan, and it’s one of the most culturally isolated areas of the whole country.” He tapped the map with the end of the pointer. “A sixty-mile stretch of mountains wedged between the Hudson River and northern Bergen County, and almost nobody knows anything about it.”

“How’d that much property stay wild in a place like this?” Corso asked. “You’d figure some land developer would have screwed it up by now.”

“Way back when, it was too rocky and remote to farm,” Rosen said. “By the time anybody else wanted the property, the Jackson Whites’d been up there for a hundred years and weren’t about to be moving out.”

“How’d they get up there to begin with?” Corso asked.

“There’s a couple of stories,” Rosen said. “The basic legend tells how the area was first inhabited by the Tuscarora Indians, who’d moved from North Carolina to join up with their allies, the Iroquois, in about 1713. Seems they’d had enough of getting their butts kicked by the British in the French and Indian Wars and were looking for a place to hide. About the time they got settled, the sons of black freedmen from the plantations in the Hudson River Valley heard about the place and began to run away and join them. They intermarried with the Tuscarora and some of the local Lenni-Lenape Indians as well. That’s about the time their neighbors began to refer to them as ‘Jacks and whites.’ ”

“What’s the other story?” Corso asked.

Rosen leaned on the rostrum and went into his canned spiel on the subject.

According to the second part of the legend, during the Revolutionary War, the British Army command at New York contracted with a Colonial sea captain and trader named Jackson to bring thirty-five hundred prostitutes, recruited in the cities of England, to New York to service the garrison. Unable to recruit that many English working girls, the industrious Jackson sailed to the West Indies and picked up an additional four hundred black women to supplement his English recruits.

Upon their arrival in New York, the black prostitutes, known as “Jackson Blacks,” were separated from the rest of the women and billeted in a cow pasture in Greenwich Village called Lispenard’s Meadows. When the British were driven out of New York during the War of Independence, the women, fearing reprisals, fled Manhattan and wandered northward into the Hudson Valley where they heard, possibly from Hessian deserters, that the Ramapos were a haven for Tory refugees, Dutch adventurers, and every other kind of villain imaginable.

They were, of course, despised by their respectable lowland neighbors either for being Hessians or Tory sympathizers, or for their mixed blood, or for being black or Indian or outlaw, or any or all of the above.

“And you’re telling me these people are still up there,” Corso said when Rosen had finished. “Living in isolation…thirty miles from Manhattan.”

“Maybe five hundred people. All interrelated,” Rosen said. “Mostly with Dutch surnames like de Fries, van der Donk, and Mann. That kind of thing.”

“When you say interrelated,” Dougherty began, “you mean…”

Rosen nodded. “Genetics have not always been kind to the Jackson Whites,” he said. “Their isolation has produced some interesting genetic anomalies. Syndactyly and polydactyly were particularly common.” He used one hand to point at the other. “Webbed fingers or toes, or extra fingers and toes.” He counted on his fingers. “Also a lot of piebaldness, albinism, mental retardation…you name it, they’ve produced it.”

“How’d you become an expert on the subject?” Corso asked.

“Back in sixty-three, the state started making them send their kids to regular public school. I was a junior at Mahwah High School.” His face took on a look of longing. “There was this girl. Justine de Vries.” He shook his shaggy head. “The most exotic creature I’d ever laid eyes on. I started spending a lot of time up in the hills.” He showed his palms. “Years later, when I needed a dissertation topic…”Hespread his hands. “The rest, as they say, is history.”

“Where’s she now?” Dougherty asked.

Rosen’s face took on a somber caste. “Still up there somewhere, I guess.” He seemed to feel a need to explain. “I heard she married a guy named van Dykan. After that summer, we lost track of each other,” he said. “In those days it just wasn’t possible, you know, a Jewish lowlander and a Jackson White. It wasn’t…my parents were liberal and all, but I mean…”He swallowed hard. “I haven’t seen her in nearly thirty years,” he said. He made a face. “Probably for the best.”

The ensuing silence was finally broken by the sound of feet and voices in the hall as students began passing between classes. Rosen checked the clock on the wall: 10:30
A
.
M
. “I’ve got a class to teach,” he said. For a second, he looked as if he wanted to say something, but then changed his mind.

Corso and Dougherty shook his hand and thanked him for his time. Rosen began to leave the room. He stopped. “I haven’t been up there in ten years,” he said absentmindedly. “Not since Arlene died…” He stopped. “She was my wife. She…”

They were about to get the story of Arlene’s death and how happy they’d been together. Corso could feel it. “How do we get up there?” he asked.

Rosen thought it over. Checked the clock again.

“You want to go up there, huh? To where Smithville used to be?”

Corso nodded. Dougherty agreed.

“Be in my office at noon,” Rosen said.

F
rom overhead the road would have been invisible. Nothing more than an occasional black line among a maze of oaks and pines and Atlantic cedars whose gnarly branches soared above the road like ancient vaulted arches. Intermittent spots of sunshine created a stroboscopic effect on the eyes as the Ford rolled along.

Rosen was using the sound of his own voice for comfort as Corso wheeled the big Ford around yet another switchback. “We might as well start at the store. It’s more or less the center of the Ramapo universe.”

“There’s a store up here?” Dougherty said from the backseat.

Rosen threw his hands in the air. “A store and a fire-house…a church, a post office…even a liquor store. All the necessities of life. The store started out back in the 1830s as Van Dynes Dry Goods,” he said. “Went through so many owners the locals gave up on the proper name and just started calling it ‘the store.’ You hear one of them saying he’s going to the store…that’s where he’s headed.”

Corso dropped the Ford into low gear as the incline steepened. What had started as a two-lane blacktop road had, in the space of five miles, morphed into a well-worn goat track winding around the contours of the hill like a cracked asphalt bezel.

“These days the kids are much more worldly. They’ve been going to public school for three generations. The local demographic’s gotten a lot more diverse. They don’t stick out like they used to, so most of them leave and live down in the lowlands.”

“Where was Smithville in relation to the store?” Dougherty asked.

“Up north in New York State.” He pointed out the passenger window. “Maybe ten miles that way, up by the Rockland County line.” Rosen shifted in the seat so he could face Dougherty. “Even by Jackson White standards, Smithville was out in the boonies,” Rosen said. “Smithville was the extreme northern end of the area. Their kids went to school in Mahwah. I’ve heard it said that the whole town was one big extended family. Maybe forty, fifty people all with the same last name. Real clannish. Everybody said they were hostile to outsiders, maybe even dangerous, so she…Justine…” He appeared confused for a moment. “Justine…”He looked around the cab. “She was…”

“The exotic girl from high school,” Dougherty said.

The words seemed to snap Rosen from his reverie. “Yes. I was hot for going to Smithville. Would have been like discovering a lost Amazon tribe or something. But she never would take me up there. It was like her clan and the Smithville clan had a feud or something. She told me that all her life her family had told her to keep away from those people, like there was something wrong with them or something, but that nobody would ever tell her exactly what the deal was.”

As they crested a steep rise, the trees peeled back and the windshield suddenly filled with hazy blue sky. Instinctively both Dougherty and Rosen reached for the overhead handles as the front wheels briefly left the ground. And then they were bouncing, level again, a trio of bobbleheads staring in disbelief at the town before them in the clearing.

At first sight, Fredrikstown appeared smaller than it was. First thing you saw were the Sunoco gas pumps, the big green and red sign reading “Ramapo Variety,” and then the post office and the liquor store and, at the far end, the firehouse and the flagpole. Wasn’t until your eye finished taking them in that you noticed the six or eight clapboard houses set back from the road, fanning out on either side of the commercial buildings. Roofs green with moss, sides streaked gray and white by weather, the houses, with their neat little fences and yards, played counterpoint to the prevailing rural squalor, thus providing an air of respectability, which the scene otherwise lacked.

Wasn’t until Corso had gotten out of the car and had a chance to look around that he began to notice the other dwellings tucked back into the edges of the clearing. A three-sixty perusal revealed maybe a dozen houses and about half that many trailer homes wedged in among the trees. Allowing for houses he couldn’t see, Corso estimated that something like a hundred and fifty people lived in greater Fredrikstown. Nearly a third of the entire Jackson White community, if Rosen’s figures were to be believed.

“This is amazing,” Dougherty said from the backseat. “It’s like the Waltons.” Corso snickered as he stretched.

Rosen winced. “Make sure you don’t say anything like that to them, okay? Not only do these people not like to be thought of as quaint, but over the years, their dealings with outsiders have been something less than positive…so they tend to be a bit touchy.”

A trio of dusty pickup trucks were angle-parked in front of the post office. Ramapo Variety occupied the center of the block. The concrete stairs had been built wide, as if offering equal entrance to any of the five or six separate roads leading into the clearing.

They followed Rosen across the patched asphalt and into the store. Floor-to-ceiling shelves. Rolling ladders along each wall. Couple of those wooden arm extensions whose metal fingers plucked cans from overhead shelves and then dropped them down into waiting aprons. Kind of general store you only see in the movies these days. Friction tape and first aid. Butter pecan and barrel staves. Shotguns and shortbread. You name it, they had it.

Must have been a slow day. Except for a couple in their mid-sixties, the place was empty. Gospel music seeped from a white plastic radio. Behind the counter, the man and woman were stocking the shelves. The man caught sight of them first.

He’d lost most of his hair. Apparently the deprivation had encouraged him to maximize what he had left, as he’d grown his remaining halo of hair about a foot long. The fringe hung down to his collar like Spanish moss from a bayou tree.

“Ilta,” he said.

She finished fitting a can of condensed milk onto the shelf before she turned toward the sounds behind her. She looked from Corso to Dougherty to Rosen, where her eyes flickered for an instant. She was as gaunt as the old man was chubby. Long gray hair piled up on top of her head. Her hawklike nose pointed unwaveringly at Rosen.

“I remember you,” she said. “You’re the one was doggin’ after that girl from up by Hewlitt.” When Rosen didn’t deny it, she searched her memory banks. “Come back after that too, several times as I recall,” she said. “Studyin’ us.”

“He the one writes about us?” the old man asked.

“That’s the one,” she said.

“Randy Rosen.” He offered a hand to the old man, who turned away. Rosen swallowed once and made introductions. Ilta and Hiram Woolfe.

“What you up here for?” the old man asked. “You gonna study us like bugs again? That what you’re doing here?”

“No, sir, I’m not,” Rosen said affably.

“What you want, then?” the old guy demanded.

“Trying to get a little information about a Smithville girl,” Rosen said.

The answer seemed to relax them both. “It’s gone,” Ilta Woolfe said. “Been gone for thirty years or so. Nothing to tell.”

“One day it was there. Next it was gone,” the old man said. When he turned their way, his black eyes were defiant. “They was good people. Minded their own damn business. Didn’t talk about nothin’ wasn’t their own damn business.”

Rosen seemed momentarily flustered. Corso jumped in. “So how did this closemouthed little community go from something to nothing virtually overnight?” he wanted to know.

“Kinda started with the Parker fella,” the woman said. “As I recall, that was pretty much the beginning of the end for Smithville.”

Rosen turned to Corso and Dougherty. “You remember Richard Leon Parker?” he asked. Dougherty shook her head. Corso nodded.

“The serial murderer.”

“Killed a bunch of girls from this area,” Ilta Woolfe said. “All up and down the northern part of the state. Took a girl from Smithville. Velma de Groot was her name. Poor unfortunate thing, she was.” She swirled a finger at the side of her head. “Not all there, if you know what I mean. That Parker fella snatched her right offa the bus stop…so a lot of her kin blamed the government for what happened to her. Stopped sending their kids down to school.”

Corso remembered the name well. Richard Leon Parker had been the primary suspect in a series of grisly rapes and murders. Schoolgirls. Nearly thirty, as Corso recalled. Hung himself in his jail cell before they ever got him to trial, either in shame, so nobody could be sure about what he had and hadn’t done, or as a final act of cruelty, leaving the victims’ loved ones without even the cold comfort of closure.

“Never woulda happened if’n the state had left us the hell alone,” her husband added. “We was doin’ just fine without them and their damn laws and their damn schools.”

His wife rolled her eyes. “Soon as they stopped sending their young ones, the social workers arrived, and then they brought in the cops—”

“Same cops shoulda been lookin’ for whoever killed the poor little de Groot girl. That’s what they shoulda been doin’ instead of pokin’ their noses into what wasn’t none of their damn business anyway.”

Rosen wagged a finger at the couple. “That’s right,” he said. “Her name was de Groot. That was the big name in Smithville…de Groot.”

“That was the
only
damn name in Smithville,” the old man spat.

Rosen furrowed his brow. “When was that?” he asked.

Ilta Woolfe stuck out her lower lip and thought about it. “’Sixty-eight, ’69, someplace in there somewhere.”

“The old woman’s right,” the man said. “I remember ’cause that’s just about the time some of them lowland hippies decided they was gonna join us up here in the hills.” His mouth broke into a grin. “Found out damn quick,” he cackled. “Found out they was better off back where they came from.” He slapped his rounded side. “They surely did.”

“And there’s nothing left up there at all?” Rosen asked.

They both shook their heads. “Piles of trash,” she said. “Old broke-down fences.”

“That’n dead de Groots,” the old man said with a twisted smile.

“Graveyard’s about all that’s left. It was a shame,” his wife agreed.

“It was a damn mess is what it was,” said the old man. “Buncha people not doin’ nothin’ but mindin’ their own business, when all of a sudden they got cops all over the place tellin’ them what they gotta do, and the next thing you know they’s people going off to jail and the whole damn town is just gone.” He swept his arm in a circle. “Nowadays you can’t hardly find a de Groot nowhere in the Ramapo hills. Used to be one of the names you heard most, and now, ’cept for old Rodney, you can’t find hardly a one anywhere around here.”

His wife took the lead. “You want to know about Smithville, you go see Rodney de Groot. He’s about the last of them I know. Lives up next to Sterling Lake now. Right there on the south shore. If anybody’s gonna know anything about what happened in Smithville back then, he’d be the one. He was there when the whole thing come undone. He’s the one to know.”

“You sure he’s still up there?” Rosen asked.

The old man scoffed. “’Course he’s still up there. Where the hell else would he be?” He cackled again and went back to stocking the shelves.

“He was in a couple of weeks back,” the old woman said. “Cashed his check and bought a twenty-pound bag of rice. He’s up there all right.”

“Could you maybe draw us a map?” Rosen asked.

She jabbed a thumb toward the old man. “Hiram will help you out. I’m no good at directions. Been here all my life and I got no more direction sense than a lowlander.”

Hiram didn’t much like being volunteered but, after a bit of grumbling, led Rosen all the way across the store to a black-and-white Bureau of Land Management map that was tacked on the far wall. He pointed with a bony finger. “Now pay attention here, damn it,” he said, “ ’cause I’m only gonna show you this once.”

The old woman had turned back to her work. Dougherty stepped in close.

“You remember that girl Mr. Rosen was chasing?” she asked the woman’s back. The only sign that the woman had heard was that her hands stopped moving. She shot a quick glance across the room, where her husband was running a finger along the map while Rosen scribbled notes. She looked back over her shoulder. “Maybe I do.” She said it as if the mere acknowledgment of a person’s existence violated some unwritten mountain code.

“You know where to find her?” Dougherty asked.

The old woman’s eyes moved across the room and back twice and then stopped on Dougherty. “He still carrying that torch, is he? After all these years?”

“I believe so.”

She stared up into Dougherty’s eyes for a long moment. “Women can tell that kind of thing, now can’t they?” she said.

Dougherty agreed. Across the room, Rosen was pocketing his notebook and trying to thank the old man, who was having none of it. “Don’t be blaming me you get lost out there.” Hiram chopped the air with the edge of his hand. “Folks come up from down below…next thing you know…”

The old woman beckoned for Dougherty to bend over, then whispered in her ear.

“She died back in ’88. Cervical cancer.” She flicked her eyes toward the returning Rosen. “You gonna tell him?” she asked.

Dougherty shook her head. “Not me,” she said.