The Judas Child (11 page)

Rouge made a drawing of an arrow at the top of a clean page in his notebook. “Is Sadie a good student?”

“The worst. She daydreams in class, and she’s late with all her assignments. The child has a grisly imagination and absolutely adores bloody violence. But we’d still like to have her back.”

“Could Sadie have engineered the disappearance? She seems to have a—”

“Not her style, though she
is
a bad influence on Gwen Hubble. No, I’d say faking a kidnapping is much too subtle. Sadie only goes for the gold—the death scene. I think she needs the immediate gratification of scaring the shit out of people.”

The word “shit” was not in this man’s vocabulary, and Rouge wondered if Sadie had also been a bad influence on Mr. Caruthers. “Exactly how smart is this kid?”

“I’d say we were evenly matched. When Sadie and I lock horns over some disciplinary problem, she only beats me half the time.”

“Didn’t you say she had a scholarship? That puts her in David’s IQ range, right?”

“Not even close. Sadie won her tuition waiver with a comic book.” Mr. Caruthers reached out to the corner of his desk and opened another file. He handed Rouge a small homemade magazine of crayon drawings and little paragraphs carefully penned inside white balloon shapes. “I hope you had an early lunch. It’s gross. She was seven years old when she made it.”

Rouge thumbed through the comic book of brilliant colors and outrageous pictures. All the bizarre cartoon characters had rather interesting ideas on how to kill one another with the maximum amount of mutilation.

“I don’t know what goes on inside that child,” said Mr. Caruthers. “There’s no test for it.”

Rouge closed the comic book and held it up to the director. “Are you saying
this
was her entrance exam?”

Caruthers shook his head. “Sadie failed the exam. She’s very bright, but she missed the cutoff score by more than just a few points. Even if her parents could’ve managed the full tuition, we would’ve denied her a place in the school. However, Sadie’s mother doesn’t take rejection very well. The woman insisted on an appointment.”

“Mrs. Green talked you into—”

“No. I expected histrionics, but Mrs. Green outsmarted me. Never even said hello when she walked in. She stood Sadie in front of my desk, handed me that comic book and left the room.
Neglected
to collect her child on the way out. Interesting woman.”

He slapped one hand down on the desk. “I read every single page of that incredibly gory, bloody—
thing.
And then I looked up at Sadie. It’s hard to describe her smile—I’d swear she was daring me to let her in.” Mr. Caruthers took back the comic book, handling it with great care, almost tenderness. “Now three years have gone by, and Sadie still takes prisoners—but that sweet stage won’t last long.”

There was no window in the room, and she knew there was something odd about that, but the idea slipped away from her as she stared at the tray.

Gwen Hubble had awakened to cocoa and a buttered roll this time. The juice and egg had been her last meal, so another day must have gone by.

She had intended to flush her last meal down the toilet, knowing it must be tainted with the potion that made her sleep all the time. Though her dog’s medications were always put into his water bowl, she had eliminated the liquid possibilities by drinking her morning orange juice with no ill effects. Then weakness had won out, and she had eaten the drugged breakfast egg. With a clearer mind, she might have reasoned it out sooner, for liquid could be had from the water tap, and solid food would be the strongest lure.

Now, with greater resolve, she crumbled her dinner roll into small pieces that wouldn’t clog the toilet. Her stomach was knotting up with hunger pains, and she was feeling another wave of nausea.

Gwen worked by the dim glow of the night-light. It was not bright enough to see clearly, and it was by touch that she detected the soft, moist center of the roll. Perhaps the drug was injected into the middle of the bread.

She tested one of the dry crumbs of the outer crust, resting it on her tongue. There was nothing unusual in the taste, and so she swallowed it.

Perhaps she wouldn’t have to flush away the entire roll.

The child separated the suspicious center from the rest of the roll and set it off to one side of the plate. She continued to shred the dry section to make the tiny meal last longer. She ate another dry crumb and stared at the chained wall hamper. Then she stood up and walked across the oval rug to pull on its door. The hamper opened a crack, but there was not enough light to see what was inside, and her hand would not fit through the narrow opening. Gwen went back to the cot and sat down again, eyes fixed on the locked chain strung between the hamper’s handle and the towel rack.

She was trying to remember something important about padlocks, but then her eye wandered back to the large armoire, so out of place in this bathroom. She tried to recall a train of thought that revolved around this massive piece of furniture, but like a dream, the harder she worked to remember it, the more it receded into the dark and fuzzy recesses of her mind.

She ate another crumb.

Now she moved slowly across the rug and onto the bare tiles, hands reaching out to the armoire. The doors were locked. She speculated on what it might be holding—or concealing.

There should be a window in this room, for it was not a closet, not a box room. And this was no modern building like Sadie’s house, with electric fans for ventilation. By the high ceiling and the molding around the tiles, she guessed it was as old as her own house, where each one of the numerous bathrooms had a window.

One small hand squeezed between the back of the armoire and the wall. Her fingers found the wooden frame, and then the sill—a window. She pushed against the furniture with all her might, but it would not move. She went back to the tray on the table by her cot and ate more crumbs for energy.

Oh, how dumb.
She needed leverage, not muscle.

Gwen picked at the remaining crumbs as she looked around the room for something she could use as a pry bar. The cot was a trove of levers in its legs and slats. And now her eyes were riveted to the tray. She could see more clearly—too clearly.

She had eaten the entire roll, including the dangerous moist center.

Tears streamed down her face as her legs folded, and her small body fell to the floor. Her eyes were closing. And only now it occurred to her that someone might be starving Sadie too, and drugging her best friend’s eggs and rolls.

Her hand went to the amulet with the magic engraving of the all-seeing eye, a gift from Sadie, a comfort in the dark.

It was gone.

Gwen sat up, resisting, fighting sleep. She spread her hands along the floor, searching with her fingertips, exploring all the ridges of the rug and the grout between the tiles.

It was not here. She had lost her eye. The amulet was gone.

And now her body was made of lead. She spread out flat on the tiles, and her soft rounded cheek pressed into the hard floor.

First she whispered it as a question, and then with great effort, she lifted her face and screamed, “Sadie! Where are you!”

 

The reporters were back in full force this evening, filling the short flight of stone steps leading up to the station house. Most of them were feeding on sandwiches and coffee. Some were stamping their feet to shake off the cold night air.

Rouge opened the passenger door and roughly pulled out his gift from Mr. Caruthers. Gerald Beckerman was startled, mouth hanging open as he was dragged from the front seat. The English teacher had been lured into the car with the pretense of polite questions about his missing students. Beckerman had made amiable conversation all the way to the police station. But now he was being treated like a criminal. And then he began to act like one, eyes full of fear as he tried to pull away from Rouge’s firm grasp.

One reporter’s nose went up. And then the rest of them were turning on the car, heads swiveling to watch the cop and his prisoner. The men and women were slowly moving down the steps. Some had already crossed to the parking lot, heading toward Rouge and the teacher, circling around them, watching, waiting.

When the media people were all together in one encompassing mob, Rouge made the promised announcement. “Gerald Beckerman is only here to assist the police in the investigation. This has nothing to do with any connections he might have to NAMBLA.”

One reporter stood out in the lead. “So, you’re saying he only does little boys?”

Two reporters converged in a flanking maneuver. “Hey, Beckerman, is that right? Or do you swing both ways?”

And now they were on the man, the whole pack, elbowing and crowding one another, jockeying for position, yelling questions, coming at Beckerman from every side and backing him up against the car—no escape now, nowhere to run.

Rouge stood at the edge of the fray and watched the teacher go down, figuratively and literally, for Beckerman was sliding along the side of the Volvo, tucking in his head as he sank to the ground. His hands were outstretched, flailing wildly in an attempt to stave off the cameras.

Behind him Rouge heard one of the reporters talking to Marge Jonas, addressing her as
doctor
. The secretary had just passed herself off as a cop-house shrink, and Rouge supposed this was closer to her true job description. He looked back over one shoulder to see Marge primping her blond wig in the reflection of a wide camera lens.

The reporter was saying, “Isn’t that the same cop who caught the guy with the purple bike?”

“Yes,” said Marge, winking at Rouge. “He’s as good as it gets. Real star quality, don’t you think?”

“So, Dr. Jonas, that’s two suspects for the State Police in two days. And what contribution has the FBI made?”

“None,” said Marge. “But the feds are real nice guys. They bought the doughnuts yesterday
and
today.”

A dour Captain Costello stood at the top of the stairs, hands jammed in his pockets and watching the carnage in the parking log. A woman with a microphone was climbing toward the captain in company with a cameraman. And once again, it was a reporter who delivered the rookie investigator’s arrest report.

The last thing Rouge had expected was Captain Costello’s broad grin.

The daily routine of St. Ursula’s had
been altered for the scholarship students who remained at school over Christmas vacation. The adults’ soft lies of “lost classmates” had percolated through the children’s conversations and were distilled into truth.

So the girls had been kidnapped, their lives interrupted—but boyhood was an ongoing thing. Defying the new rules confining them to the campus, two students had voyaged across the lake to conduct an experiment unobserved. They had taken a canoe, but not the requisite adult—another broken rule.

One twelve-year-old was fair and the other was dark, but beneath the cosmetic differences of skin and hair, they had been up to no good when they started out after breakfast; they were indistinguishable in this. And so it was predictable that they would be in deep trouble within half an hour of landing on the far shore.

Adding to the misery of guilt and impending doom, their shoes and socks were wet. The canoe had not been pulled far enough onto the rocky beach, and the constant lap of water had coaxed it back into the lake. The boys watched the craft glide away until it disappeared around an outcrop of rocks. They turned to face the sprawling old house. It had seemed so normal when they arrived, but now the building took on a sinister character. They read the weathered paint as disease, and the dark windows with drawn curtains were taken for deception and secrecy. A stiff, cold wind rushed off the lake and drove them to shelter on the shadow side of the structure.

Here, they took a closer look at their own recent violence of a broken window. A foul odor wafted through the shards of glass. Vomit was rising in the children’s throats, a second visit from this morning’s sausages and eggs—a taste of things to come. Wait till the adults found out about their science experiment, which had more power, greater velocity, and—best of all—it made more noise than the average child’s toy gun.

“We’re gonna catch it this time.” Jesse hid the modified pistol behind his back, as though they had already been caught in the act. “He’ll find out, whether we tell him or not. Sometimes I think Mr. Caruthers knows what we’re going to do before we do it.”

Mark lightly punched him on the arm. “You know why, you dork? When he said hello this morning, your face turned bright red. You think that didn’t tip him off?”