Hocus (26 page)

“The boys,” I repeated. “Let’s go back to that — you said Sam left his family?”

“Yes. Francine — Bret’s mother — was the more nurturing of the two women. Sam started staying overnight at Bret’s house. Soon he was living there. Later, Eva was so embarrassed by the revelations about Gene, and so involved in her courtship with her second husband, I think she was happy not to have Sam around. And Francine loved Sam.”

“But was it good for them to be together so often?”

“I was against it, but Eva and Francine were the ruling parties in that case. They kept saying that the boys had already suffered enough loss and separation. A speech therapist can only exert so much pressure. And the boys proved quite obstinate. Neither one of them would give you any cooperation if they were alone.”

“Did they ever talk to you about what happened to their fathers?”

She shook her head. “No, that was taboo. Even when we got them to talk again, they made it very clear they wouldn’t discuss it. Bret once told me that their fathers’ murders had made them freaks — that even if they hadn’t been mute, the other kids would have looked at them differently. And Sam — until those articles about his father came out, I thought we were making progress. If not for Bret’s loyalty to him, I don’t know what would have happened to him.”

“So Bret was the leader of the two?”

“No, actually, I think Sam was. They had a remarkable lack of discord between them, though, and I wouldn’t say that Sam bullied Bret. Bret can assert himself. They each had different skills, and they weren’t jealous of one another.”

“How did you get them to start talking again?”

“Well, it didn’t just happen all at once. At first, we were just trying to get them not to be so frightened of the world around them. They were so scared. Francine told me that except for their secret language, the only time she heard their voices was when they were having nightmares. They didn’t have as much trouble with women as with men. Bernard stopped by the office one day to take me to lunch, and the boys ran and hid. Bernard felt so bad. Fortunately, the only man they ever allowed near them came by just then, and he was able to coax them out. He even got them to shake Bernard’s hand — you don’t know what a breakthrough that was. But this man was very patient. He was a police officer — the one who found them in the basement.”

I was glad for the darkness. I leaned back into the shadows. “The boys liked him?”

“Oh, yes. His name was Frank Harriman. He came by fairly often at first, until the news about Gene. He busted the guy who gave the police the information on Gene’s gambling problems. Sam — he was pretty upset. He started leaving the room when Frank came over. Bret must have reasoned with him, though, because that passed. Pretty soon Frank was helping him with homework again, playing catch and….” She frowned. “But I don’t know. For some reason, it seems to me that Frank saw less of them after that.”

“You’ve got it all mixed up, Regina,” Bernard said, coming over to us. “It wasn’t the news about Gene that caused the problems, it was that witch he almost married.”

“That’s right! I must have blocked her from my mind.”

“I don’t know how you could have.” He turned to me. “This woman called me at work, said the reason Frank came by to see the boys was to hit on Regina. I told her she was full of crap. I guess she didn’t know I had met Frank. The guy is working with Regina, spending time outside of work trying to get these kids to talk — I mean, I had seen how the kids responded to him. But this woman must have had him by the short hairs, because he stopped coming by not long after that.”

“I had forgotten about her,” Regina said.

“Bernard’s right. It was just after Bret’s tenth birthday. Frank bought Bret a magic kit, and I thought, This is going to be it. Bret loved it. He was such a smart little boy. He didn’t have to talk to perform the tricks, but the other kids started to admire him. He came out of his shell.”

“He started talking because of that?”

“No. Sam wasn’t coming out of his shell yet, and Bret wouldn’t leave him behind.”

“That’s when I came into the picture,” Bernard said. “Regina brought them over to my studio.”

“You’re an artist?” I asked.

“He’s a martial artist,” Regina said, smiling. “He teaches aikido.”

“Sam and Bret became experts in aikido?”

“No, Bret never tried it,” Bernard said, “he just watched. And Sam didn’t stay with it, but he made a start, and it improved his self-confidence.”

“And his trust extended to Bernard,” Regina said.

“That was a giant step forward. A lot of what we tried to do all along was build their trust, to help them feel safe.”

Not an easy task, I thought, given their experiences.

“The next thing we tried was a computer,” she continued. “A friend of mine had an Apple II+. She let the boys play on it. They absolutely loved it. They did their first ‘talking’ by writing things on the computer.”

“They weren’t writing before then?”

“No, they were writing in school — school assignments. Well… unless the teacher assigned anything personal, I should say. But if it was a history lesson, or an essay on another country — whenever they didn’t have to tell about themselves or their families — they completed it. Got A’s, usually.”

“What about answering questions in class?”

“The teachers soon learned that they just wouldn’t do it. In fact, the other kids started to sort of band around the boys, to protect them from adults. They’d learn the boys’ sign language, speak for them. We had to sit them all down and ask them to stop making it easier for the boys to be silent.”

“The boys were well behaved otherwise?”

“Yes,” Regina said. “Sam got in trouble once or twice defending Bret from bullies. But that went on before their fathers were murdered. They were both good students, earning A’s, studying quietly. Teachers didn’t find it hard to cope with that.”

“Were they in the same classroom? I thought Sam was older.”

“Yes, he is, but Bret skipped a grade. When he started talking again, he did even better. They both finished high school early.”

“So they started communicating with a computer, you said.”

“Yes. On the first day they used that old Apple, Bret wrote a note to me: ‘Can we do this again?’ It was the first time he had communicated directly with me in English. I was thrilled. So I typed a message back to him. I asked if Sam wanted to come back, too. I expected Bret to answer for him, but he looked at Sam and motioned to him to come over to the keyboard. Sam typed, ‘Yes, I like it.’ It was all I could do not to start crying.”

“How long before they started speaking?”

“Not too long after that. About three months later, as I recall. Francine bought them computers. They each said, ‘Thank you.’ Aloud. She
did
start crying. Not that I blamed her.”

“And they just started talking after that?”

“No. It was still very gradual from there. Sam talked to Bernard before he talked to me.”

I looked at Bernard, who had taken a chair nearby.

“He asked me to teach him to dance,” Bernard said. “Regina wouldn’t believe me at first.”

“Oh, only because you tease me about so many other things!”

He smiled. “Once I convinced her that it was the truth, she was mad that he hadn’t talked to her first.”

“You are such a liar,” she said. “I was thrilled. Besides, Bret walked into my office the next day and said, ‘Sam has a girlfriend.’ ”

Bernard laughed. “She’s not telling the whole truth. What Bret said was, ‘Sam has a girlfriend, but she’s not as pretty as you are.’ ”

It was too dark to actually see the blush on her face, but I could hear the embarrassment in her voice when she said, “Don’t you have a comet to discover or something?”

“He had a crush on you?” I asked.

“Not really. Bret was just feeling a little lonely, I think. Sam wanted to start talking to other people — the girl he wanted to dance with. Bret was a little younger, a little more reluctant to step out of this cocoon they had built around themselves. Once he saw that Sam wasn’t just going to abandon him, though, I think he was all right.”

“You still saw them after they started speaking?”

“For a time, yes. And we stayed in touch.”

“Did they ever talk to you about what happened when their fathers died?”

“No,” she said, then frowned. “Well, one day Bret stopped by, just before they moved. He was upset, shaky. I asked him what was wrong. He told me that while they were packing things for the move, Sam had cut his hand, started bleeding. Bret had passed out. He said Sam was fine — Francine took him to an emergency room and got him stitched up. Bret turned so white telling me about it, I was worried he was going to faint again. He kept saying it made him think of the basement. I didn’t need to ask which one. He calmed down, but just before he left he said, ‘I haven’t forgotten anything about that day. Not one single thing.’ I asked him if he wanted to talk about it, and he said, ‘You should be grateful we never did.’ ”

We sat in silence for a moment, then I asked, “Did they resent Frank Harriman for not visiting?”

“I don’t think so. He didn’t just cut them off, he just gradually stopped seeing them. They seemed pretty understanding about it. And they were spending more time with Bernard by then.”

I looked up into the sky, tried to quiet my sense of despair. The Szals were good-hearted people, an active, intelligent couple with wide-ranging interests — people I would have liked to form a friendship with under other circumstances. But that night I felt as though I had wasted my time talking to them. For all I had learned about Sam and Bret, I could see nothing in it that would help me gain Frank’s freedom.

“What’s your connection to Bret and Sam?” Regina asked.

“Frank Harriman is my husband,” I began.

They both exclaimed happily over this but quickly noticed I was having a hard time responding appropriately.

“How is Frank?” Bernard asked cautiously.

At another time I might have faked an answer. I couldn’t. “Not well,” I said. “He’s a hostage.”

At their looks of utter astonishment, I realized that anything else I might say would destroy their memories of two young boys they had helped. I set my untasted beer on the deck and said, “I should leave.”

“No,” Bernard said. “You can’t just say something like that and leave! Please tell us — Frank’s our friend.

We haven’t seen much of him since he moved to Las Piernas, but my God — a hostage?”

“Sam and Bret’s hostage.”

Regina sat stunned in wide-eyed disbelief, but Bernard moved over to my side, caught my attention by taking my hand. “Tell us what happened,” he said.

“Maybe we can help.”

“Yes,” Regina said, recovering quickly. When I hesitated she added with unerring insight, “I care very much about Sam and Bret, but I’m not blind to the fact that they were troubled. I won’t protect them at Frank’s expense. Bernard’s right. Frank’s our friend — a good man. Let us help. Please.”

So I began to talk, and they did all they could to make the telling easier. There was no point, I realized, in hiding anything from them. If they knew how to help, they would need to know about the policeman.

Regina sat silently. When I was finished she said, “It makes me so angry that they are using all of us like pawns!”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m angry about that, too.”

“Tell Detective Cassidy what I’ve told you,” she said. “And tell him to call us if he wants to talk to us about the boys. If he ends up negotiating with them, maybe it will be of use.”

“Do you know how to get in touch with Francine?”

“Francine died a year ago,” Regina said.

“Unless something drastically changed her financial circumstances,” Bernard said, “Bret has come into a lot of money. Maybe Sam, too, depending on her will. That’s what’s financing them — the Neukirk fortune.”

“Sam will know medicine, and he’s probably the one who recruited the fellows who knew about the explosives,” Regina said. “He was much more interested in that sort of thing than Bret. Bret could never stand any sort of violence — which is why it’s hard to understand how Sam might have convinced him to go along with this.”

“You think Sam came up with the idea?” I asked.

“Certain portions of it would be Sam’s way of doing things — the blood vial — Bret wouldn’t go near blood if he could help it,” Regina said.

“Sam’s always been the more dominant of the two,” Bernard said.

“Yes, but Bret’s not without a will of his own,” Regina said. “And the computer security breaches — that’s Bret. He did an internship at a company that supplied computer security systems.”

“Any idea who the woman might be?”

“Sam’s girlfriend,” Bernard said without hesitation. “Bret is more of a loner.”

“That’s true,” Regina said. “Sam can be very charming when he wants to be. Bret’s charm is more genuine, more a part of who he is. Sam can turn it on and off.”

“The last time we saw Bret,” Bernard said, “he complained about Sam’s attitude toward women. Said Sam didn’t really care about the women he dated, that he just wanted sex.”

“Do you think Bret was jealous of them?” I asked.

“No,” Bernard said. “I don’t think he has a romantic attachment to Sam. He talks about Sam the way one brother talks about another. And they knew we would have accepted them, gay or straight. That’s not an issue with us.”

“Any idea who Sam was dating lately?”

They considered, then Bernard said, “Didn’t he send us a picture from a ski trip?”

“Yes!” Regina said. “Wait here!”

She went downstairs, and I heard her go into the office below.

“Sam wrote to us around Thanksgiving,” Bernard said. “He had gone skiing with some friends. Regina kept the photo.”

“How often do you hear from them?”

“Not too often. Once or twice a year they’ll send us a card or a letter. Last time we saw them in person was about four years ago.”

She ran back up the stairs, trailed by Stan the cat, who apparently enjoyed the activity — he continued to run around the loft. Regina handed me a 4 x 6 photograph.

“Turn the lights on,” she said.

Bernard complied, and I found myself staring at a group shot of four young skiers.