Stone Maidens (23 page)

Under the glare of spotlights a deputy escorted seven men into the room. Each held a number card chest-high and was instructed to stand on a corresponding number painted on the dingy linoleum floor. The lineup faced a mirrored panel of one-way glass, the white wall behind them marked off with lines indicating feet and inches.

I can see them, but they can’t see me. I can see them but they can’t see me.
Joey repeated the words to himself like a mantra, squeezing his clammy fists as he gazed at the group. He was approximately the same distance away as he’d been when he’d ridden by the stranger over a month ago. He knelt, moving his hand over the glass, as an officer instructed each man to step forward, then back. The officer had to ask number four twice to step forward. Grudgingly he did.

A spotlight shadowed the hollows of the man’s eyes. Joey’s uneasiness escalated. He kept looking over his shoulder at his grandfather, who sat on a bench at the rear of the viewing room, then back at those sunken eyes. Something wasn’t quite right with the man’s mouth. Or maybe it was his chin, he couldn’t tell. Joey looked at his grandfather again, still not positive, and glimpsed a sudden movement above the old man’s white hair. Against the rear wall of the viewing room there was a large oneway glass, which adjoined a now-darkened interview room. In the glass the boy saw a reflection of number four wiping his nose.

Joey froze. His heart felt like it was about to explode in his chest. He spun around, facing the lineup again, then swallowed hard to clear his throat. In his mind there was nothing between him and number four, nothing stopping the man from reaching in and grabbing him, then stuffing him in the back of that rusty old pickup like he had Julie.

He spun back toward Elmer. “Oh my gosh! It’s him! It’s the man, Gran!” Joey cried, pointing at the reflection in the window behind his grandfather. “That’s the man I saw.”

Elmer was at the boy’s side in three quick strides. “It’s OK, boy. The man can’t see you.” He held his grandson close. “You did real well.”

The arrest of David Claremont for the malicious and wanton killing of Julie Heath seemed almost anticlimactic to most of those who had watched the boy. He had made a clear identification of Claremont. Joey Templeton was the man of the hour.

Shackled and surrounded by police, Claremont said nothing when read his rights. Hilda Claremont’s uncontrollable sobbing was the only sign of emotion in the crowded police station. Claremont’s father had his arm around wife, bracing her shoulder.
Claremont refused counsel, claiming he was innocent and didn’t need a lawyer.

Within minutes the news media descended. Vans with generators cranking power to cameras and portable satellite feeds soon filled the Weaversville Police Station parking lot. Scattered in clusters were cameraman–news reporter teams delivering updates. Grunts toweled off the sweat that poured down reporters’ faces in the muggy heat. Anyone exiting the station was accosted for information about David Claremont. One precocious up-and-comer from a CNN affiliate cajoled a day-shift janitor on a cigarette break, wagging a fifty at the man. The janitor took the money and said into the camera, “He’s a real nutcake, all right. Everyone thought he might flip his lid some day.”

Christine sat quietly with McFaron in a small interrogation room while the commotion continued unabated in the police station and the parking lot outside. She was playing and replaying Joey Templeton’s ID of Claremont in her head. She couldn’t dismiss the agitated certainty of it, but something about it wasn’t right. It didn’t add up—but what was it that didn’t add up?

His interest in the insides had started young. When he was seven a cat had made a mad dash in front of traffic and been run over. One eye had burst out several inches from its crushed skull, and the seeing part—a dark, perfect disk—had glistened in a way that intrigued him. He had thought about that cat, and that black shiny orb, for weeks, maybe months, and that was when he’d realized he was different. Special. He could see and appreciate things that ordinary people just didn’t notice or understand.

He got out to fill the gas tank. He ached from losing touch with these latest ones. They’d been fast—worthy prey—and luck hadn’t been with him. He figured they’d have tattled to someone at home by now, and he berated himself for his failures. Slowly, purposefully, he jabbed the tip of the well-honed number-six paring knife through his pants pocket and into his thigh.

The man gave the gas station attendant a rumpled twenty. Across the street a red, white, and blue banner hung above a hardware store, advertising that a weeklong Labor Day sale was still going on. He remembered that he was running low on supplies. He cruised the narrow aisles, past bins of number ten nails and quarter-inch, half-inch, and inch-long stainless screws to where the nylon and more expensive boar-bristle paintbrushes hung on hooks. He collected a half dozen of the nylon ones with broad heads good for staining barn siding and selected a three-pack of putty spatulas that would come in handy for edge work and trim.

“Help you with anything, sir?” A friendly store clerk approached him from behind.

He handed the brushes and putty knives to the clerk and gave the man an affable smile. “Need two cases of the extra-large canning jars, twenty-eight ounce, if you have any,” he said, adding, “Mom’s doing a big job today.”

The clerk returned from the storage room and placed two cartons beside the cash register.

“Will that be it then?”

“That’ll be it.”

He left in a hurry with the painting equipment and jars. It took him three more hours’ steady driving, staying off the major highways and interstates, to reach the industrial squalor where he had grown up among the smokestacks and pipelines.

Delphos was cloaked in the afternoon haze of an early fall heat wave. He passed the rusted-out hulk of the old battery plant where his mother had been laid off four years earlier. He drove by the facades of abandoned businesses and turned onto Second Avenue. There was no traffic here, only smashed-out storefronts, establishments ravaged when the economic tide had shifted overseas to Asia a decade ago.

At the corner stood a large billboard featuring an architectural rendering. The old neighborhood would soon be razed to make way for a mammoth inner-city multilevel mall complete with a waterfall and pond with real ducks and full-size trees growing inside a large atrium. All that money—a contractor’s wet dream of pouring fresh concrete by the hundred yard, drawing South Shore spenders to stroll and shop in his old stomping ground. Imagine that. No-man’s-land on the outskirts of Chicago was about to get a makeover.

Abandoned and in shambles though it was, the familiarity of the old neighborhood block brought him comfort. He closed his eyes for a beat. Felt himself as a boy kicking rocks into storm drains, running an errand at Wallacker’s Meat Market for his mother. In
the months since his encounter with the young hitchhiker by the Little Calumet he’d begun returning to the condemned walk-up. A gas stove in an upstairs apartment had been left connected, allowing him to properly boil and can as his mother had done. Stock a good supply for the harder times when luck was against him and the anguish grew too enormous to cope with.

The choppy surface of the creek came in and out of view between the boarded-up buildings. It passed under the street and dumped into the Little Calumet River. He pulled over near a burned-out storefront and idled the truck. He squeezed the charm stone around his neck, but it wasn’t enough to quell the losing feeling—an ache deep inside that stretched to infinity, shrinking him down to the size of a dust particle.

He shifted the truck into first gear and pulled away from the curb. His mind raced. Each rotation of the truck’s wheels brought him closer to home, closer to the sting of his mother’s heavily accented voice, closer to the ridicule that had once kept him sitting up all night in the wooden chair in his room, waking to the sound of his own dripping. But at least not another wet bed. As a boy, he used to ride city buses with his mother. Once, in broad daylight, he had soaked himself and her dress in a tepid puddle. She’d cursed him right then and there in front of the other passengers. Exclaimed out loud that he’d soiled himself deliberately, then squeezed his hand too tight in hers and tugged him off the noisy public transport two stops early. He’d left a trail of drips along the center aisle of the bus.

When they’d gotten home and she’d said, “Take your penance,” he’d obeyed her and opened his mouth, as he always did. As solemn as a Catholic receiving Communion, he’d received his stone, swallowing hard to get down the lumpy piece of gravel she’d collected from the back lot. There was an endless supply of the painful stones to match his endless accidents.

Without signaling, he cut down an alley and parked the pickup in the back gravel lot of the boarded-up tenement. Quickly
he entered the old building. Upstairs, he shoved open the small half door inside the kitchen and climbed the steep, narrow flight that led to the rooftop of the condemned building. In pitch darkness he brushed aside the loose chains he’d cut months before and swung open the fire door, wincing from the dazzle of the bright sunlight. Old roofing tar bubbled in the superheated air. The heat was bracing.

A moment later he retreated inside the stuffy top story, blinking until his eyes adjusted and he could make out the murky shapes in the small, dingy room that had been his since he was a boy. Entering, he inhaled the familiar dank odors. For a moment everything lay still in his head. He hunkered on the edge of the old stained mattress, gently bobbed up and down to comfort himself, and then donned the feather mask that was tucked inside his shirt.

A free ticket his mother had given him to the Museum of Natural History just before her death had changed things forever. Given new meaning to his fascination with the insides of living things. On the second floor of the vast cool building, an outrigger canoe hung suspended above a darkened passageway, heralding the Oceania exhibit room. In a large display case decorated with a jungle leaf motif, a row of carved stone figurines gleamed under the spotlights. The lights cast upon one of the stones produced a magnificent apple-green glow—as if the precious relic were endowed with a powerful light source of its own. Beneath the jewellike objects he read the words:
After eating the internal organs of the killed, the fierce New Guinea Highland clan would deposit charm stones into their victims’ bodies.

Sounding out the words had raised the hairs on the nape of his neck. Never mind where his mother had learned to feed him stones from. Those hard lumps of back lot gravel she’d made him scrape down his own throat finally made sense standing in front of the museum exhibit: stones were meant to be placed inside people after killing them.

The write-up next to the exhibit was full of anthropological observations and theories about religion and ritual symbolism that did not inspire. Whatever the particular significance to Papuan highlanders of placing carved stones inside the dead in honor of ancestral spirits was lost on him. Only the first words he’d read held true magic—this charm stone collection had sailed across the Pacific Ocean for him to see. Feather-masked human-eaters of the Papuan rain forests had given him his instructions. He had thought it was time to get the stones back inside where they belonged.

Yesterday, while paying a clerk for gas, an overhead TV broadcasting a report caught his attention. It had showed that pretty female agent’s face as the reporter described a forested location where the body of the amusement-park girl had been found. It was the same lady agent who’d fumbled so badly at the museum opening he’d made his way into—the one who’d been unable to speak and had rushed out of the exhibit room ceremony. He knew why. It had been the same for him the first time he’d seen the stone. Its power had silenced him, too. The thought of the secret they shared made him feel warm inside.

On the news report, the agent had described finding the body of Julie Heath, the turtle girl, similarly situated at the bottom of a ravine. This woman agent was good—what she’d said about him being a loner, traveling in an old truck, odd-jobbing, and maybe even living out of his truck. A regular smarty-pants she was, except she hadn’t said anything about the charm stones he’d stolen from the museum. That still had her stumped, he bet. And not a word about his truck stop girl last spring. What a sweet experience that had been. Gazing blankly through the mask’s eyeholes, he replayed in his head the young hitchhiker he’d encountered. She’d climbed down from the semi at the large lakeshore gas terminal and waved good-bye to the driver before slinging her duffel over her shoulder and sauntering off toward the dunes. Walking into the distance, she had been framed by the vibrant twilit sky.
A real museum piece. He grinned to himself. How wrong Mother had been to say no girl would have him if he wet the bed. What a beautiful evening it had been.

He lifted a small family portrait from a bookshelf. It was a five-by-seven snapshot in a cheap brass frame showing his then-young mother leaning against a railing with a woman friend. Each was holding a baby on a knee, mugging for the camera. He smudged his forefinger back and forth over the picture glass between the two infants and wondered vaguely what it would have been like to have had a brother, someone who could have stood up for him or taken the blame when necessary. Someone like him. Someone who appreciated the same things. Who could understand without him always having to explain.