For Kathleen, Nathan, and David
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people for providing me with medical, forensic, and other technical information.
From Northeastern University: from the Department of Counseling and Applied Psychology, Carmen Armengol; from the Department of Psychology, Joanne Miller and Harry MacKay; from the Department of Sociology, Jack Levin.
For their very generous time and expert insights, a special thanks to James Stellar, Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and John F. McDevitt, Assistant Professor, the College of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University.
I am also grateful to Drs. Regis deSilva, Jason McCormick, David Urion, and Gary Fischer.
In addition, I am grateful to Dr. James Weiner, Associate Chief Medical Examiner of Massachusetts; Kenneth Halloran, Clerk Magistrate, Plymouth County, Massachusetts; Lt. Richard W. Sequin, Massachusetts State Police; Lt. Thomas J. Gelman and Chief John Ford, Bourne Police Department; Sgt. Peter Howell, Sandwich Police Department; and Dr. Carl M. Selavka, Director of the Massachusetts State Police Crime Lab.
Thanks also to Jean Hagen, Pamela and Malcolm Childers, Kemmer and Martha Anderson, George and Donna Megrichian, Alice Janjigian, and Kathryn Goodfellow.
I also want to thank Charles O’Neill and Barbara Shapiro for the brainstorms that made this a better story.
A very special thanks to my agent, Susan Crawford, my editor, Natalia Aponte, and my publisher, Tom Doherty, for their great support. You made this possible.
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
PROLOGUE
THREE YEARS AGO
CAPE COD
“Mom, do clams have eyes?”
“I don’t think so, hon,” Jane replied, without glancing up from her magazine.
Her three-year-old daughter, Megan, was on her knees a few feet away, digging quahog shells out of the sandbar. Her back was to her, but Jane could see the impressive pile she had collected. If they were a smoking family, there would be big, white ashtrays in every room in the house. Megan had even found three intact quahogs, which sat underwater in her yellow pail. Jane’s husband, Keith, now asleep under an umbrella, would use the guts for bait. He liked to surf-cast for stripers and blues. And August was the season.
“You sure?”
Jane looked up from the magazine. The only other people within half a mile were a man with some kids on boogie boards skimming across the flats in the wavelets. Otherwise, the place was an open stretch of empty sandbar and beach under an outrageously clear blue sky. Except for some sailboats out at sea, the horizon made an unbroken azure arc across her field of vision.
“I’m pretty sure.”
The vastness was a wonderful relief from the claustrophobic clutter of their lives, which seemed to be spent in a series of boxes—house, cars, trains, and offices. And far from the horrors of the world that filled the pages of her magazine. One article told of a Pennsylvania teenager who had committed suicide because he was unhappy with his SAT scores.
The water was warm, and the tide was going out and exposing the huge flats of smooth featureless sandbar—featureless but for bright white shells.
“Well, I think this one’s different,” Megan declared. “It has eyes.”
“It has?”
Sagamore Beach. One of the best-kept secrets on the Cape. Not only were there no bridge traffic jams to contend with, but the beach was a strip of cozy postwar cottages that hugged grass-swollen dunes above the beach, stretching five miles from the White Cliffs east to the Cape Cod Canal. Not a motel, clam shack, or self-serve in sight. Just five miles of white beach with rarely more than a handful of people. The public beach, at the canal end, drew a crowd on weekends. But the rest of the strip was always wide open, and Jane loved it like that. It was their one concession to private living. They rented the same cottage for a week each year.
Even more special was how the beach was growing. While the rest of the Cape suffered perennial erosion, Sagamore Beach had become a natural shoring area for what washed down from the north. With every nor’easter, countless tons of sand washed up, expanding the bar and burying the ancient granite jetties that used to segment the beach.
“It’s a special clam.”
According to the article, the boy had been an excellent student—straight As, his teachers reported. “What’s that, honey?”
“I said, this one’s
Jane glanced over her shoulder. Megan looked so cute in her pink twopiece and floppy pink hat. She was digging away with her hands now. Someplace behind them, a bunch of seagulls squawked over a dead fish.
Because of prevailing currents, the beach was a dumping ground of all sorts of “surf kills,” as Keith called them. Some mornings they’d wake up to find stripers and small sharks washed up with the night tide. About ten years ago, a forty-foot humpback whale was deposited in a storm down near the canal. Nobody was sure if it had beached itself or died at sea, but the Coast Guard had to come and haul it out to deep waters, because after four days the stench was unbearable.
“Guess I was wrong,” Jane said.
Apparently the pressure of college entrance exams caused the poor kid to underperform. His parents found him hanging in the garage. The sad irony was that his test scores could have gotten him into most colleges in the country.
“Does that mean they could see?”
The piece went on to argue that the growing number of student suicides can be linked to the pressure of standardized tests such as the SATs and AP exams.
“I didn’t think they could,” Jane said, half-consciously.
“I think this one is blind.”
“That’s too bad,” Jane said.
She yawned, as some child psychologist commented how the use of standardized tests was getting out of hand; how some top preschools even require admission tests for four-year-olds; how U.S. parents spend a billion each year for SAT prep courses.
