Dark Specter

then the situation was far more dangerous than I had ever imagined.

“OK, you’ve told me your story. Now hear mine. My child was kidnapped and apparently murdered. As a result, my wife killed herself. Sam now tells me that he masterminded the whole thing because, quote, I needed to be broken before I could heal, unquote. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. I only saw that boy for a moment, and from a distance. It might have been some other child, dressed up to look like David. Sam could have got all the other details from the newspaper stories at the time. I don’t know what to believe. I feel like I’m going crazy.”

Andrea gave a deep sigh.

“I’ll tell you what I know. Melissa left the island for a while, a couple of months back, I guess. I lose track of time. When she got back, she had a child with her. We were told he was her son, and that one of Melissa’s sisters had been looking after him all this while. No one thought anything of it.”

“Did you meet this boy?”

“Of course. He came to my classes.”

“How did he seem?”

She shrugged.

“Normal enough. He used to have coughing attacks, that was the only thing. Sometimes he seemed to find it hard to breathe. But after a couple of weeks here that stopped. Plus he used to ask when he’d see his mother and father again. Melissa told us that he’d been with her sister so long he thought she and her boyfriend were his parents.”

“And where is he now? With this bitch Melissa?”

“I don’t know. The day you arrived, he disappeared. When I asked why he hadn’t come to class, Sam warned me not to talk about it.”

“Well, I’m going to find out!”

I tried to push past her, but she blocked me with her body.

“No,” she said decisively. “I will.”

We stood there in the darkness, holding each other.

“They won’t tell you anything,” Andrea went on. “They might talk to me.”

She released me.

“You’d better go,” she said. “And be careful. If you’re seen leaving here, we’ll both be in serious trouble.”

“Do you have any children, Andrea?” I asked.

“I missed out on that.”

Her tone was flat, almost flippant.

“You must still be young enough,” I said.

“That’s not what I meant. I haven’t set foot off this island for what seems like a lifetime, and the breeding stock here doesn’t impress me. Now go. Tomorrow morning I’ll tell you what I’ve been able to find out.”

She accompanied me to the door. Outside, the darkness was now complete. I found Andrea’s hand, squeezed it one last time and slipped away toward the fringes of the clearing.

Back in my room, I began to have doubts about the wisdom of trusting her. For all I knew, Andrea might be reporting back to Sam even now. Or perhaps he had set up this meeting too, to gain time, or work on my emotions in a different way. But this, I knew, was what Sam wanted, what he stood for. He reveled in obscurities and ignorance, in dysfunctional behavior and doubt. If I allowed them to overwhelm me, he had already won. I had to have faith, not in his hallucinogenic theology but in my own experience, and in the irreducible reality of another human being. Losing on those terms would be less destructive than winning on Sam’s.

My thoughts turned to David. Was he warm enough? Had he been properly cared for? Would he recognize me again? How could I ever explain to him what had happened, and break the news of his mother’s death? Above all, I wished I could do something. I felt so helpless. Everyone on the island, except maybe Andrea, was my enemy. There was nothing to be gained by single-handed heroics. I turned off the light and tried to sleep.

I awoke shortly after dawn to find a figure standing beside my bed.

17

Kristine Kjarstad was in tears when Steve Warren brought in the fax. Oh fuck, he thought, wondering if it was too late to “eclipse himself,” as his mother used to say. She had a load of oddball expressions like that. People thought everything had been easy for Steve, that he’d been born with a plastic spoon in his mouth. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

His mother was a war bride with whom his father had spent a pleasant few days during the liberation of Paris and then returned after the armistice to discover, as he put it, that “there were two Battles of the Bulge, and we lost the second one.” The result was Steve’s oldest brother, George, with an optional s, who was born a few weeks after their marriage. Three months later, the newlyweds arrived back in Dick Warren’s hometown of Aberdeen, a logging community on the Washington coast.

The first month they were there, it rained nonstop for twenty-three days. Shortly afterward, Francoise (“Frankie”) Warren had the first of her spaz attacks. These took a variety of forms, all of them frighteningly unpredictable, from appearing at a wedding in what looked like a strapless nightgown and no bra, to serving dinner guests a boiled pig’s head with the snout and ears still on.

Steve’s siblings had dealt with this by copping out and acting weird themselves. Georges, who now insisted not only on this spelling but also the pronunciation that went with it, was a mainstay of the Blue Moon Tavern in the U District, where he gave recitations of his poetry. Annie lived in a cabin on Vashon Island, communing with the womanspirit of Puget Sound and “invoking her intercession for our sins against the environment.”

Only Steve had possessed the grit and guts to transcend his unconventional upbringing and seize the lackluster prizes which life has to offer those who do OK: a tract home in Bellevue he’d still be paying off when he was a hundred and ten, a car he could never find in a crowded parking lot because it looked just like all the others, a wife who could walk into a strange mall and locate the Hallmark store in seconds. Some men are born to mediocrity, some have it thrust upon them. Steve Warren was one of the very few who achieve it by their own unaided efforts. Despite the almost overwhelming handicap posed by his home environment, he could look back on his life and tell himself proudly, “I did it their way.”

As a result, he felt he had the right to demand the same high standards of others, and Kristine Kjarstad had never let him down before. She could be a little snippy at times, yes, but he’d never seen her in tears.

“You all right?” he said, trying for the New Man image, concerned but not wimpy, like one of those sporty house-husbands you saw jogging around Green Lake with the baby.

“All right?” she snapped, pretending to blow her nose so that she could dab the tears away. “Sure, I’m just fine. I just got through phoning the prosecutor in the Selleck case to tell him we can’t proceed after all.”

Steve Warren dimly recalled the case she was talking about, some fourteen-year-old who’d been raped while walking home from her aunt’s house. The victim had named a local kid who denied the charges, claiming that he had keen drinking with friends at the time. The friends had corroborated his alibi, but Kristine Kjarstad had been sure they would back off once the forensic results came through.

“You mean the tests showed it wasn’t him?” Steve asked in a solicitous tone.

“The tests never got done!” Kristine exclaimed. “They’ve got a backlog of hundreds of cases down at the labs. Nothing gets processed until a trial date is set. Meanwhile the swab we took from the victim’s vagina gets stored in a fridge down in the basement, right? A few months ago there’s a power failure, and pretty soon you’ve got a couple of dozen samples of assorted bodily fluids turning green, growing legs and heading back to the farm. Result, the suspect’s alibi will stand. We know he raped a fourteen-year-old, and he knows we know. And he’s going to get away with it, and there’s not a fucking thing that anyone can do. All right? Sure, I’m just fine. No problem.”

She passed a hand through her wavy brown hair and gave a long sigh.

“So what’s new with you?”

Steve Warren held up the fax.