The Remains (13 page)

With that worried expression still masking
her face, my partner turned and disappeared out the door.

Drying my eyes once more, I swallowed a
breath, tried my best to regain my equilibrium and my sanity.

“Franny,” I said. “It’s time you and I talked
the truth.”

AS I STOOD BEFORE Francis inside a studio
filled with easels, unfinished paintings, clay sculptures and
sketches, and not a soul around to work on them, I found myself
alone not with a man but a different creature altogether. But then
I also knew that this creature had to know something about me;
about my past; about Molly’s past. Even more frightening, he might
also know something about my future. In either case, I was
determined to get the whole story out of him.

A metal work table was set only a few feet
away from Franny’s stool. I sat down on top of it, letting my legs
dangle off the side.

“I need to ask you a few questions,
Fran.”

He rolled his eyes. I recognized the
reaction. It meant he was receiving me loud and crystal clear.

“Questions,” he mumbled. “Questions, answers,
questions…”

I inhaled.

“Why did you paint Molly and me, Franny? Why
did you paint the woods in back of my mom and dad’s home? Why are
you putting words in the paintings?”

His eyes, still rolling in their sockets,
never stopping to focus on anything, let alone me, for more than a
couple of second at a time.

“Molly and Rebecca,” he said after a long
beat. “Molly and Rebecca go into the woods. Molly and Rebecca go
into the woods where they don’t belong.”

My stomach dropped. Pulse picked up inside my
chest and temples.

“What do you know about Molly and me and
those woods?”

Eyes rolling rapidly inside their sockets,
Franny rocked back and forth on his stool. Chubby face grew redder
and redder, like a red balloon about to burst. I recalled what
Caroline had said about his heart. But it didn’t matter. Didn’t
matter enough.

“Molly and Rebecca,” he chanted, voice
growing louder. “Molly and Rebecca go into the woods where they
don’t belong. Monster man is in the woods. Monster man does bad
things to Molly and Rebecca.”

Body trembling, my blood shot through the
veins.

“Franny how do you know this?” I screamed.
“How can you possibly know?”

I was standing now, in the middle of the
studio floor. I stood over him, where he was seated on the stool,
left hand clutching his red T-shirt. I pulled the black and white
photograph from my jeans pocket, held it only inches from his nose.
I screamed in his face. “Did you put this on my parents’ porch? How
did you know I was going there? How did you know?”

But that’s when something stopped me.
Something invisible reached out for me, pulled me back. I let go of
him, collapsed onto my knees. Franny had been right here at the art
center studio while I made my stop-over at Caroline’s. Franny could
not have known that I would be visiting my childhood home. That is,
unless somehow he was able to intuit it.

What have I done?

I looked up at Franny, looked at him rocking.
I stood up and wrapped my arms around his barrel chest. When I
released him, I saw that his eyes were no longer rolling but
focused up at the ceiling. He was crying.

I whispered, “Franny were you there when it
happened all those years ago? Did you see Joseph Whalen attack
Molly and me?”

HE WAS CRYING HARD now, rocking so violently
on that stool I thought he might fly off. He was mumbling
something. But the words were impossible to understand. I hated to
see him like this, hated myself for causing him pain. I inhaled and
exhaled until I felt some calm enter back into my bloodstream.

I shoved the photo back in my pocket, went to
Franny, once more wrapped my arms around his bulk. I held him so
tightly I thought I might break my arms. He stopped rocking, but he
was shivering. I dried his eyes with my hands, brushed back his
thick hair, whispered, ‘shush’ the same way a mother might calm a
little boy.

I told him I was sorry; that everything was
going to be okay.

“Okay,” he whispered in a quaking voice.
“Franny’s okay.”

When finally he calmed down, I stepped
outside the room, called Caroline to come pick him up; that Franny
needed to go home. She was about to hang up when I stopped her.

“The painting Franny brought for me today.
Did you see it?”

Dead air oozed over the line.

“Francis didn’t show me the piece. Sometimes
he makes a point of showing the paintings to me. Other times he can
be very secretive. He’s a grown man and I must respect his
decisions, within reason of course.”

It struck me as strange: Caroline referring
to Franny as a “man.” Not the boy she spoke of earlier.

We hung up.

When I went back into the studio, Franny was
bundled in his old navy blue pea coat, sticker-covered portfolio
bag slung over the shoulder. He faced the door at the opposite end
of the room the same way a scolded child would stand in a corner.
He was awaiting his mother, even though it would be some fifteen
minutes before her arrival.

The new painting was laid out on my table.
Like rubbernecking at a bad car wreck, it hurt to look at it.
Still, I had to pose the one crucial question about its title. But
before I could open my mouth, he blurted out the answer to the
unanswered question.

“Taste,” he said not to me, but to the door
only inches from his face.

I RACED HOME AS soon as Franny and his mother
took off in their old truck. Michael immediately stopped what he
was doing when I came through the apartment’s front door. He looked
up at me, closed the laptop, as if my timing had been perfect.

“Don’t tell me,” he smiled warmly. “Franny
painting number three.”

“Sure.”

He got up and stared at the painting. After a
silent time he turned to me.

“You and Moll,” he said. “You and Moll at the
stream on the day it all happened.”

I nodded.

Like Robyn before him, he traced the letters
to the word ‘Taste’ which had been painted in blue-white letters
inside the stream water.

“I really see the word this time.”

Then I told him everything else. About my
morning get together with Caroline; about the basement art room;
about the painting Franny did of Molly and me many years ago—the
one that matched precisely a black and white snapshot I just
happened to discover on the porch floor of my parents’ home as if
somebody had purposely set it there for me; somebody able to
anticipate my every move.

“This photo,” I told him, pulling the
tattered snapshot from out of my jeans pocket, setting it on top of
the closed laptop.

While he turned his attention from the
‘Taste’ painting to the photograph, I told him about the jimmied
window; how someone had definitely tried to break into the house. I
told him about my confrontation with Franny; about how I didn’t get
a word out of him other than confirming my own suspicions. That,
number one, he’d somehow witnessed Whalen assaulting Molly and me
thirty years ago. Maybe witnessed it through a basement window. And
number two: he was trying to warn me of something. I also told him
that it was time I went to the police.

Michael looked at me with squinty eyes.

“So long as they believe you,” he said,
handing the snapshot back to me. “It’s the right thing to do. But
they’ve got to believe you.”

My portfolio bag was stored in the narrow
space between the couch-back and the far wall. I pulled it out,
unzipped it, reached inside and took out two of my own blank
canvases, setting them against the bookshelf. Then I slipped
Franny’s paintings inside. I zipped up the bag, slung it over my
shoulder and checked my pockets for my cell phone and car keys.

“I really want you to come with me,” I said.
“But if you’d rather keep out of it.”

He pursed his lips and shot me a wink of his
right eye.

“Let’s go make believers out of the cops,” he
said.

OUR DECISION TO DRIVE downtown to the South
Pearl Street Precinct had not been indiscriminate. According to the
info we’d found online, this was the very place in which Whalen had
been jailed after his arrest for the abduction and attempted rape
of an eighteen year old college freshman thirty years ago. That
single assault led to the discovery of at least a half-dozen prior
rapes when, after a photo of Whalen was posted on every local TV
station and newspaper, a small flood of brave, young women started
coming forward and pointing the finger—women with more courage than
Molly and me. Or maybe less to lose by telling the truth.

Being that my father had been a state
trooper, I wasn’t entirely a stranger to police stations. But that
didn’t make them anymore comfortable to be around. My cumbersome
portfolio bag slung over my shoulder, I followed Michael up the
granite steps, through the glass doors, across the vestibule
waiting area to the large bench. Seated on the bench was a
heavyset, gray-haired officer. Set before him was a desktop
computer, a phone and a small plaque with the words ‘Watch
Commander’ embossed in it.

“Help you?” he grumbled, eyes focused not on
us but his computer screen.

“We need to speak with a detective,” Michael
announced.

Behind the watch commander’s shoulder, I
could make out the not too unfamiliar inner workings of the wide
open station—the many uniformed and plain-clothed policemen and
women, the identical metal desks set out equidistant from one
another, each of them topped with a computer where typewriters
might have been back when Whalen was first arrested. Back when my
dad was ‘Trooper Dan’. There were the bright overhead
ceiling-mounted lamps, the ringing phones, the chiming cells, the
buzzing fax machines and at least a dozen voices competing with one
another.

“And why is it you need to see a detective?”
the watch commander smirked.

I took a step forward.

“I have reason to believe I’m being stalked
by a sexual predator.”

The old cop pulled his eyes away from the
computer for the first time since we’d approached the bench.

“Come again,” he said, looking up directly
into my face.

“I’m being followed.”

Behind his shoulder, I saw that two people
were taking notice. Police detectives, or so I suspected. An older
man and a middle-aged woman, both dressed in normal everyday, plain
clothes. They shot a quick glance in my direction.

“Do you have an ID of the supposed perp?”
asked the watch commander.

I hesitated, as though the question shot over
my head.

“He’s asking if you know for certain that
it’s Whalen who is stalking you?” Michael jumped in.

I nodded.

“Yeah, I can identify the man.”

“You mentioned a name,” the watch commander
added, eyes now on Michael.

“Joseph William Whalen,” Michael exclaimed.
“He’s registered with Sexual Predators and with ViCAP.”

“Oh, ViCAP,” the old cop smiled. “Looks like
you been doin’ your homework.”

“I write detective novels,” Michael said.

“Of course you do. Wait here a minute
please.”

He got up, made his way over to the two
plainclothes cops. He talked with them while they looked us over
again. More carefully this time. When the older of the two
approached, I felt my pulse pick up.

“My name is David Harris,” the tall, salt and
pepper-haired, black man confessed. “I understand you’re here to
lodge a complaint?”

“I have reason to believe I’m being
followed.”

“By Joseph Whalen?”

“Yes.”

“You’d better come on through,” he said. “I
know of Whalen. I know about what he’s done and what he might have
done to more than a dozen still missing young women.”

“How well?”

“I’m the guy who busted him thirty years
ago.”

THE WATCH COMMANDER BUZZED us in. But not
before making us sign the log book and issuing us laminated
visitor’s passes which we held onto instead of clipping to our
jackets.

Harris personally led us through the big open
room to his first floor office where he closed the door behind
us.

“Take a seat,” he offered, while making his
way around his desk, sitting himself down hard in his swivel
chair.

While I sat down in one of the two metal
chairs placed in front of the desk, Michael remained standing.
Leaning the bag against my knees I took a quick survey of the
office. It was square-shaped and small. It smelled faintly of
onions, as if Harris had just lunched on a submarine sandwich at
his desk. Subway maybe. Or Mr. Sub.

There was a coffee mug on his desk that said
‘I love my job’. When he picked it up and took a sip from it, I
could see the word ‘Not’ printed on the bottom. It made me smile.
Mounted on the windowless wall behind him was a calendar. Each day
that had passed thus far in the month of October had been X’d out
in ballpoint pen. In just a little while he’d be able to X out
another day.

Harris must have noticed me looking at the
calendar. He said, “I’m closing in on retirement. The
progressive-minded Empire State doesn’t have much use for its
detectives once we get past sixty-two.”

He shrugged, rolled up his shirt sleeves and
sat back in his chair.

“But to get back to the issue at hand,” he
went on, “I was a part of the team that tracked Whalen down and
eventually arrested him. That was back in ‘77 and ‘78. We’d been
tracking him for a long while. We were aware of his past as a
sexual predator and suspected him in at least a dozen abductions
and possible homicides. But we could never quite put the finger on
him.”