The Judas Child (15 page)

Rouge didn’t see what happened next. He was too far back in the crowd. Perhaps the woman had tripped on something, or maybe her legs simply gave out from the shock of identifying her daughter’s purple jacket. Mrs. Green fell to the floor. All the cops in the room were on their feet, moving toward her with outstretched hands.

“No, don’t help me. I don’t want to be any trouble.” She smiled wide and openhearted, and then she shrugged. “So pratfalls are not my best thing.”

Captain Costello knelt beside her, not touching her but wanting to, hovering in the manner of a parent supervising a child’s first steps. Becca Green found her legs and slowly stood up.

Costello’s voice was surprisingly gentle. “Mrs. Green, you said you remembered something.”

“Something important—yes.” She opened her purse and fished around inside with one hand. “My Sadie is an artist.” And now she had found what she was looking for and brought it out. “Here, look! This is Sadie’s eye.”

The agents and the investigators stared in horror as Mrs. Green held up an oozing, bloody eyeball speared on a fork. No one moved. No one breathed.

“She has lots of others,” said Becca Green. “But this is the good one for special occasions. Like when we have company for dinner? And they don’t know Sadie all that well? She palms it like this.” Mrs. Green pulled the eye off the fork. It made a small sucking noise.

Though it was obvious now that the eyeball was a rubber mock-up, a veteran BCI man shuddered, spilling coffee on his pants as he settled down to a chair. Spellbound, he didn’t notice the spreading stains.

Becca Green cupped the fake eye in her palm and covered her own blue eye with this same hand. “Then she pokes the fork through her fingers, like so.”

Rouge didn’t want to watch the woman stabbing the fork between her fingers and into her eye socket, but he couldn’t look away.

“And
voilà
,” said Becca Green, pulling the fork out again, still covering her socket with one hand to maintain the illusion that she was now half blind. She thrust the fork high in the air, so all could see. The rubber eyeball was once again stuck to the silver prongs. “Now
that’s
entertainment.”

She lowered her arm and looked down at the bloody, slimy thing on the fork. “Of course, you’re not getting the full effect,” she said, in a somewhat offhand tone. “When Sadie does it, she puts the eyeball in her mouth and chews on it—that’s her big finale. But I can’t do that.” She wagged the speared eyeball for emphasis. “I draw lines, you know?”

The nervous laughter began with an agent in the back of the room, and then it rippled forward, and Becca Green chimed in with her own heartier laugh as she dipped back into her little purse of terrors. “What a kid, huh?”

This time she produced a small red gargoyle. It crouched in the palm of her hand. Agent Pyle had come out from behind the lectern to stand beside her. She held the toy up to his face, and then she hurled it to the floor at his feet. The bounce of the rubber hind legs made the tiny monster appear to jump as though it were alive.

“So this is what I remembered,” she said, turning to look into all their anxious faces as one hand rose in the air, commanding their silence. “Listen.”

And they did. They were all listening, straining so hard it created a palpable tension in the room, a network of electric expectation.

“My kid spent her whole life in training to meet the bogeyman. She’s
alive
! You got that? But she’s so little. You’ve got to find her fast and bring her home.”

Arnie Pyle was nodding, staring at her with his great dark eyes, which conveyed compassion and sorrow with no effort at all, for they were shaped that way—just an accident of genes.

“You keep that!” Becca Green pointed to the toy at the agent’s feet. “A memento of Sadie—so you don’t forget her. Don’t you give up on my daughter. I won’t believe she’s dead until I see the body. And then I’d probably stick her with a pin—just to be on the safe side.” Sadie’s mother began to laugh again. And it was echoed here and there, spreading like a contagious, nervous cough.

She moved perilously close to the backdrop of smaller photos tacked to the front wall, images of dead little girls, eyes and flesh damaged by elements and animals. Rouge pushed and elbowed his way to the front of the crowd. “Mrs. Green.” He gently grasped her shoulders to prevent her from turning around, from seeing the wall. “Let me call your husband. He’ll come and—”

“No, not yet—
please
.” She danced away from him, back to the middle of the room, to the center of the stage. “You’ve got to see my Sadie the way she really is. She’s not just a short, unfinished person. I swear to God, you’re gonna love this kid.”

And now Captain Costello was ripping the brutal pictures off the wall and the easels, lest the mother should turn and see the decomposing bodies of small children. The photographs flew through the air, and investigators crawled on hands and knees as they collected the pictures and hid them away. Some were crying, and Becca Green was laughing high and shrill. Anyone entering the room at that moment might have believed they had all gone mad together, Sadie’s mother and the cops.

Rouge Kendall checked the rearview mirror
. There were no reporters pursuing his old tan Volvo, and that made him curious. The news crews were entirely too well behaved this morning.

Becca Green slumped against the passenger door, watching the storefronts and sidewalks slip past the side window. The woman was trying very hard not to cry, and he believed she tried for his sake. Today, all her energy had gone into fashioning an etiquette for dealing with the police. How many times had she apologized for some imagined transgression in the odd society of people with guns?

“Mrs. Green?”

“I’m sorry. You were asking about the boy—Sadie’s shadow?” She made a poor attempt at a smile. “My daughter calls him David the Alien—because he never speaks or consumes food.” And now the smile was more natural. “Every time he sees Sadie in the school cafeteria, he spills his lunch in his lap, turns bright red and walks away without a word.”

Rouge nodded, recognizing the symptoms. Captain Costello might have misread David’s anxiety. The boy was probably not holding anything back; he was simply in love. “So David Shore
never
talked to your daughter? They wouldn’t share secrets, anything like that?”

Becca Green shook her head. “Sadie’s not the most approachable kid for somebody as shy as David. One time, maybe a year ago, the school counselor told Sadie to stop torturing the boy. Two days later, David’s housemother shows up at my door.”

“Mary Hofstra?”

“That’s the one. Said she’d like to have a cup of tea with me. Well, we’re coffee drinkers in my house, right? So this woman pulls a little tin box out of her purse. Next thing I know, we’re sitting in the kitchen, drinking herbal tea. Not bad stuff—a little sweet maybe, but I buy it for Sadie now. Anyway, this woman is apologizing for what the counselor said. She told me David was depressed. He thought Sadie wouldn’t go near him anymore because she hated him. So Mrs. Hofstra actually
wanted
me to
sic
my kid on David. If Sadie promised never to pressure the boy into talking, she could torture him all she liked—that was the deal. You know, Sadie did her arrow trick just for David. He screamed out loud for the first time ever.”

“Why does Sadie do things like that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You think it might be a ploy for attention?”

Her sarcasm was light, and Rouge smiled. “She got a lot of attention when the cops turned out for the archery trick.

“Oh, Sadie even fooled the school nurse,” said Becca. “Consider the genius of putting the arrow over her heart so no one could check it for beats.”

Rouge pulled up to the curb. This end of the cul-de-sac offered a panoramic view of the lake. Though the surrounding structures were more than forty years old, this elegant street of gracious homes, green lawns and grown trees was still called the new housing development. The large gray-brick colonial was not what he had expected from the owners of a gas station.

Mrs. Green read his expression. “It’s a barn,” she said, apologetically, as they walked up the flagstone path. “You won’t believe how long it takes to clean the place. Harry wants me to have a cleaning woman come in, but house-work is practically the only exercise I get. And I’d feel strange having some other woman touching my things. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” he lied. Far into his teens, a staff of women had cleaned up after his own small family, cooked their meals, washed their clothes and run their errands. A personal secretary had handled the condolences on the death of his sister.

Mrs. Green opened the door and motioned him inside. He walked into a wall of warm air and the ripe, fruity smell of furniture polish and fresh floor wax. He followed her through a generous foyer and into a wide room where warmth was built into the environs with the leather bindings of books, the rich print of an Oriental carpet and the glow of honey-colored walls. This space was filled with good solid furniture, built for comfort, but expensive in its quality. And he knew at least one of the paintings on the wall was not a reproduction, for the Kendall family had once owned it.

He had never appreciated the art in his own house, except for its cash value. Piece by piece, he had sold all of it. And now he was staring at the old familiar painting by Arthur Dove. It was a small work by a minor artist, but it had brought thousands at auction. He looked at every frame on a neighboring wall of photographs. Each image of a renowned person had been taken by an equally famed photographer, and one of them was a Stieglitz portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe.

“Who’s the art collector in the family?”

“My husband.” She turned slowly, surveying her own living room, as if seeing it through the eyes of a stranger. “Doesn’t fit with pumping gas and fixing cars, does it? When we were students, Harry had aspirations of becoming a starving artist—a photographer. Then his uncle died and left him a chain of gas stations and a big wad of money. That pretty much killed the idea of starving.” She shrugged. “Life can be cruel.”

Rouge didn’t smile. He had a nodding acquaintance with cruelty and irony. None of the photographs in this room had been taken by Harry Green.

The house was so quiet. He had expected to see a federal agent camped out in the living room with wiretap equipment. Who was screening the crank calls? Where were the hordes of reporters who filled up every local bed-and-breakfast? Why were these people so alone?

“There’s a tap on your phone, right?”

She nodded. “I signed the forms. The FBI came out and rigged up some equipment in the basement. I hope they’re not too pissed off. All that trouble for a phone that never rings.” Her voice had gone listless as she drifted over to the staircase.

“It might take a few days before the newspeople get your unlisted number. Then your telephone won’t stop ringing.” He offered this as an excuse, as though giving a false compliment to a homely girl at the school dance.

How had the reporters been sidetracked? The lawn should be crawling with camera crews.

Mrs. Green was walking toward the staircase. “You want the tour? It only takes a few minutes. That’s how long it took the other cops. Sadie’s room is this way.”

She led him up the steps and down a hallway lined with photographs from another century, family groupings and portraits of properly laced-up women and starched-collar men. All civility and gentility ended at the door where Mrs. Green was waiting for him. It was decorated with a gory poster for a vintage horror movie titled
Freaks.

He turned to the woman beside him, who seemed so normal.

“You were expecting a poster for
Little Women
?” She opened the door. “Maybe
Snow White
?”

She stepped to one side, and he walked into a bright collage of Halloween masks, fake vomit and bottles of liquid the color of blood. Monsters stared at him from picture frames ganged on every wall. The only nonviolent bit of space was directly over the child’s bed. Here was a carelessly tacked-up array of champion blue ribbons.

“Those are for gymnastics,” said Sadie’s mother.

Pride was absent from her voice, and Rouge found that odd, for there was not one second-place prize in the collection. “Your daughter must be quite an athlete.”

“I don’t know,” she said, genuinely dubious. “Sometimes I think the blue ribbons are just a side effect of being fearless. You should see her on the parallel bars. She pushes off, flies through the air and never looks down. Cartwheels and back flips—she goes spinning across a room, and I keep thinking every second she’s gonna break her neck. Her father loves it. Harry goes to every single competition. Me? I can’t watch anymore.”

He moved on to the next wall with its large bulletin board and an amazing selection of long-legged rubber bugs perched on pins. Half a dozen fake eyeballs stared up at him from an open egg carton on the desk. He perused a bookcase stocked with film cassettes. Most of them were in the horror genre of the thirties and forties, almost quaint, and a few were familiar children’s classics.

Becca Green plucked out a tape which had one label pasted over another to read, “
Heidi
, original screenplay by Richard Hughes.” She peeled back the top label so he could read the screenwriter’s true title.

“
Eyeball Eaters From Hell
?”

“She marked it as a children’s film for my sake. My Sadie is not without compassion.”

“You let her watch that stuff?”

“
Let
her? Sadie is a full-blown person. She came that way—right out of the damn egg.” Becca Green was smiling again, obviously taking pride in this. “Seen enough?”

She made it sound like a challenge for him to brave a look into the dark of the closet, or, if he had the stomach for it, perhaps a peek under the bed.