Authors: Koethi Zan
“No, I don’t think he was ill. He—he was so calculating. Everything he did required such careful planning, such controlled action. I asked Sylvia about him.”
He paused. I didn’t think he was going to continue. He looked away.
“Please, go on,” I said. “It would … it would help us understand.”
“Well, she only talked about him that once, when I asked. And afterward she begged me—begged me, I’m telling you—not to let anyone know she had spoken about him. I can’t betray that poor girl. I could never let her see her words in a book.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, squinting his eyes shut, possibly to push away tears.
“I won’t … I promise I won’t put anything in the book. But it might help us find her.”
Tracy jumped in. “Yes, Ray. Maybe, without realizing it, you know something that could make a difference.”
“Really? You think something she said so long ago could be useful? I do worry about where she is.”
“Please, Ray. We just want to help her too.”
Ray looked thoughtfully out the window and sat down in a recliner in the corner. We sat down on a small sofa along the opposite wall, shoving aside a pile of recent newspaper clippings about another missing girl.
“Sylvia told me Jack was a genius. That’s why she married him. Because according to her, he had a vision of how the world could be something special and rare. Something only a few could understand, those who would let themselves be open to the true possibilities of experience. But it was more than what she said—it was the way she seemed at once so joyful and so terrified by it. I have never seen an expression like that before. Her face seemed … illuminated.”
I looked at Tracy, trying to get a read on her. She was thinking hard, I could see. I wondered if, like me, she thought this didn’t sound like someone who had been entirely reformed. Someone who just wanted to get out of prison and live a quiet, ordinary life on a quiet, ordinary street. This sounded like a man with a mission. A terrible mission.
As Tracy drove us back to the hotel that evening, she switched off the radio, her constant emotional cover, and we sat in silence for a moment.
“So what do you think, Miss Rational Mind?” she finally asked.
“About what? Kind of a lot to digest in there.”
“I guess I mean the big question. Is Jack mentally ill? Or is he evil?”
“What mental illness could he have?”
“Well, at a minimum, the DSM-IV would tell you he is a ‘sociopath with narcissistic personality disorder.’ But what that means in terms of moral responsibility, I don’t know. Is he ill? Someone to be pitied, not feared? I think it makes a difference. A critical difference. In terms of, you know, ‘moving on,’ as they say.”
“Moving on?” I didn’t even know what those words meant. And I wasn’t ready to explain to Tracy that the whole purpose of this journey was to find that out.
“Yes, moving on. Not feeling those feelings anymore. Not being hardwired with whatever it was he did to us in there. Living a normal life. That kind of moving on.”
She paused and glanced over at me quickly before shifting her eyes back to the road. We sat in silence for a few moments.
Then she began again, more hesitantly this time, “Don’t you feel as if we have … almost an obligation … to understand this? To work through it? If we don’t, he’s still here, you know. Still in us. Still in control.”
The conversation was hitting a little close to home. I felt myself
shutting down, just like I had with Dr. Simmons. I didn’t want to get into this.
“I guess I don’t have many expectations in that regard. And I don’t really see how what I think about Jack matters to that equation.”
Tracy shook her head. “You are really not even out of the gate.”
She pressed her foot harder on the pedal, and as the car surged forward on the deserted road, she switched the radio back on and fiddled with the dial until she found something hard and fast and loud. We rode the rest of the way like that, the silence between us more deafening than the punk rock blasting from the speakers.
CHAPTER 25
The next day I decided to show up at the offices of the
Portland Sun
, in search of Scott Weber. I had put Tracy in touch with Adele, and they were going to meet later that day. I was hoping they might speak the same language, or at least be capable of translating each other’s academic jargon, and Tracy would learn something I couldn’t.
When I arrived at the newspaper offices, a chipper young man in his early twenties stopped me at the security checkpoint.
“Can I help you?” he said brightly, but with enough edge to make it plain I wasn’t getting through that gate without someone authorizing it.
“I’d like to see Scott Weber.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Not per se. But I—I have some information that might be interesting to him,” I said, hitting upon a sudden inspiration.
“Really. Hmm … well, unfortunately, he’s not here.” Then he winked at me. “But I will tell you that he just left the building about three seconds ago.” I guess I looked innocent enough.
I all but sprinted out of the building, and sure enough, a man with sandy blond hair and a ruddy complexion was crossing the parking lot. He looked about the right age and was disheveled, as if he’d been up all night to meet a deadline.
I followed him. “Excuse me, Mr. Weber?”
He turned at his name. We met in the middle of the lot. “Yes, that’s me. Can I help you?”
“Hi, my name is Caroline Morrow.” Again that name, though I managed to say it without grimacing this time. I was getting better. He looked at me expectantly. “I’m in the sociology department over at the University of Oregon, and I’m writing a dissertation on Jack Derber. I thought you would be a great resource for …”
Scott starting walking away, his hand held up as if to ward me off. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you with that.”
I pulled out what I hoped would be my trump card. A little white lie that might help me get his attention.
“One of my advisers, Adele Hinton, sent me. Said she knew you.” He stopped dead in his tracks but didn’t turn around. I wondered how far Adele’s name was going to get me, or if it was a mistake trying to fake it. I waited to see if he would turn around, counting to myself, one, two, three …
On seven, he turned around.
“Adele Hinton?” he seemed surprised. “Adele Hinton sent you to me?”
“Yes, remember her? Derber’s teaching assistant? You wrote a profile of her.”
He stood still, looking puzzled. “Yes, yes, of course, I
remember
her. Adele.” He looked down at his watch. “Why don’t we take a walk?”
He motioned toward a park directly across the road and pulled out his cell phone. Holding up a finger indicating for me to wait, he walked a few steps away and made a call. I could just make out that he was rescheduling another meeting. Adele was a bigger draw than I’d expected. He must’ve had it bad.
We walked along a neatly tended path over to an area with a half-dozen picnic tables. Scott sat down at one across from me. He seemed nervous.
“So, Adele. How is she? I haven’t heard from her in quite some time.”
“Oh, she’s great. Just great. You know she got tenure, right?”
“Yes, I heard that.” He blushed at his admission. So he kept tabs on her. “I guess she’s had a change of heart?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, about the Jack Derber situation. At first she seemed to like the attention it brought her, but then it became more or less forbidden territory. But that was a long time ago. I guess by now it’s all water under the bridge.”
This was getting interesting.
“‘At first’? So you had an ongoing relationship with her back then?”
He blushed again and seemed agitated. “She didn’t mention that?”
“No, she didn’t.” He looked disappointed. “Yes, we, um, dated for a bit. After that piece I wrote. Just a few months, but, well, she is quite an extraordinary woman.”
Yes, quite extraordinary, I was thinking. I wondered if Adele had had some ulterior motive with this relationship. She was becoming more fascinating by the minute.
“So that must have been a strange dynamic. You writing about it, and she being such a part of the story.”
He shook his head. “What can I say? It was my beat. But once
he was convicted, we were just running background stories anyway—you know, scraping the barrel for ancillary material to keep it alive. Interviewing his junior high school teachers, profiling the architect of his house, looking at his conference papers, that kind of thing. Just to keep it going. Portrait-of-the-villain-type stories.”
“His papers?”
“Yes, the last thing I was working on was a piece about his academic research.” He paused, looking uncomfortable.
“I don’t remember that one. Did it ever run?” I pressed, sensing he was hiding something.
“N-no. But it wasn’t a big deal. Not front page or anything.”
“It caused some trouble with Adele maybe?”
He shrugged.
“I see.” So apparently Adele thought Jack’s research
was
relevant to something. Relevant enough to keep people away from it.
He went on. “Anyway, it’s too bad it didn’t work out. She had a lot going on, especially with that group she was in.” He was obviously trying to change the subject.
“What group?” Now I was really interested. A group, I thought to myself, or a secret society?
“I don’t really know. Some kind of Skull and Bones–type of thing at the school. Mysterious, but that’s how she was. Maybe that was the appeal. The challenge.” He seemed to be getting lost in his self-revelatory moment, his look drifting off behind me into the distance.
“What do you mean?” I asked, loudly enough to get his attention again.
He snapped back into the present. He looked at me, apparently trying to decide whether to go on, perhaps realizing that confiding in me might not be his fastest track back into her heart.
Finally, he shrugged and continued. “I mean, I’d ask questions about her family, her past, even simple things like where she’d
grown up, where she’d gone to school, but she always managed to deflect me.”
He shifted in his seat, and his face reddened the way only a ruddy complexion can. I wondered exactly what he was remembering about Adele Hinton, especially because there was surely plenty to recall.
“Any idea who else was in that group of hers?”
“I don’t know. All I know is they met at odd times—all hours of the night, and sometimes on short notice. She took it very seriously, and if she had a meeting of that club, there was nothing I could do to keep her from it. That was her top priority.”
I thanked him and stood up to leave. Once again he looked confused.
“But wait, we only talked about Adele. Don’t you want to talk more about Jack Derber? For your paper?”
I had what I needed from him already.
“Let’s set up a call. I’m late for class right now, but I really appreciate this,” I uttered awkwardly as I eased away backward, waving to him.
“Oh, okay. Well, say hi to Adele for me. And, you know, if she wanted to get together … we could talk about your research or something. I can probably dig up some old notes …”
“Yes, I definitely will,” I called out as I walked quickly over to my car.
Of one thing I was now certain. Adele was a crucial piece of the puzzle. She was right there in it. And she knew more than she was letting on.
CHAPTER 26
I had been in the cellar nearly one thousand days when Jennifer went upstairs for the last time.
During each of the days she was there, I had spent hours just staring at that box, trying to imagine what she was going through. She maintained her absolute silence to the end, even though she was not gagged all the time, and even when he was not around. His control over her was total and absolute, her terror complete.
Early on I had listened for her, thinking that eventually she would try to communicate with me again secretly, as she had in those first days. I’d thought that somehow, surely she would break free of his control enough to try again, if only for the sake of her sanity.
When I’d hear her scratching inside the box, like a trapped animal, I’d listen for patterns, for anything that sounded remotely like a code. I’d drive myself insane wondering why I couldn’t make
sense of the random noises that would occasionally emanate from in there.
And I kept listening for a long time. If the rest of us were quiet, I could sometimes hear her chewing her food, slowly savoring whatever scraps he’d left for her that day. I would even wake up at night if she shifted suddenly in her sleep. Once I thought I heard her sigh, and I sat still as a stone for an hour afterward, waiting for her to repeat it.
But she never did.
In a way, she might have been better equipped than most for such solitude and reflection. She had always been pensive, hard to read, withdrawn. Always thinking and daydreaming, never focused. She had hardly ever paid attention in high school, her gaze drifting out the window to the clouds above, her mind floating somewhere out there with them, thinking God knows what. But we managed to make it through our classes together, just as we’d made it through everything else. At the end of each day she would copy my class notes down into her own impossibly neat script, and we’d use her version for studying.
I yearned for those days, when we had not been separated by ten feet of cold cellar space, a wooden box, and whatever impenetrable psychological force Jack held over her. Now I wondered if she even had enough good memories left to sustain her, or if, like mine, her very imagination had been invaded by the horrors we were living through, and her mind could produce only nightmares. I wondered if she sometimes wished she had died in that car accident along with her mother, all those years ago. I know I often wished I had.
It must have been that same day—at least it is in my memory—that Tracy was brought down early in the morning after a full night upstairs with Jack. She seemed to be unconscious as he half-dragged her limp body down the stairs. He threw her up against the wall.
She scowled and opened her eyes briefly, just long enough for me to see them rolling back in her head.