کتاب 05-08

8

Ben led the way. They walked on a bridge of pine planks set end to end across the snow. There seemed to be no light in all the world except for the white disk of Ben’s flashlight. Jamie Close followed behind. She had her rifle over her left shoulder and a broom handle in her right hand, cut short, one end wrapped in tape. She whistled while she swung it back and forth.

They came out from beneath the firs and proceeded to the House of the Black Star, the cottage where Carol had wintered with her father. It was a tidy one-floor place—gingerbread shingles and black shutters—named for the enormous iron barn star that hung on its north-facing side between a pair of windows. Harper thought it was a fine bit of decoration, ideal for any inquisitor’s dungeon or torturer’s crypt. Two Lookouts sat on the single stone step, though they jumped to their feet when Ben came out of the trees. Ben didn’t acknowledge them, but only stepped past them and rapped on the door. Carol called them in.

Carol sat in an aged mission chair covered in cracked, glossy leather. The chair had surely belonged to her father: it was a place to read Milton, smoke a pipe, and think wise, kindly, Dumbledorish thoughts. There was a matching love seat with creamy pale leather cushions, but no one was seated there. Carol had a pair of Lookouts with her, but they sat on the floor, at her feet. One of them was Mindy Skilling, damp-eyed and adoring before Mother Carol. The other was a girlish male, with close-cropped pale hair, feminine lips, and a big knife on his skinny belt. Almost everyone in camp called him Bowie, but Harper wasn’t sure if that was because of the knife or because of his resemblance to Ziggy Stardust. He watched them enter from beneath pink, drooping lids.

Harper didn’t expect to see Gilbert Cline there, too, but he was seated on the low stone ledge in front of the fire. Red worms twisted in the heaped coals, and the warmth didn’t reach far. Frost had turned the panes of glass to brilliant squares of diamond and made Harper feel as if she had entered a cave behind a frozen waterfall.

Jamie Close banged the door shut and leaned against it. Ben heaved himself down on the love seat with a great sigh, as if he had just come in from hauling armfuls of wood. He patted the space beside him, but Harper pretended not to see. She didn’t want to sit with him, and she didn’t care to appear as a supplicant at Carol’s feet. She remained close to the wall, her back to a window, winter breathing on the nape of her neck.

Carol’s gaze drifted to Harper, her eyes glassy and feverish and bloodshot. With her shaved head and starved, wasted face, she had the look of an aged cancer patient, responding poorly to chemotherapy.

“It’s good to see you, Nurse Willowes. I’m grateful you could come by. I know you’ve been busy. We were just hearing from Mr. Cline about how he came to be hiding by South Mill Pond, not a hundred yards from the police department. Some tea? Some breakfast?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Mindy Skilling rose without being spoken to and padded away into the darkened kitchenette.

“It seems Mr. Cline couldn’t plausibly have had anything to do with what happened to my father,” Carol went on. “And I’ve been interested to know something about who my dad risked his life for. Maybe gave his life for. You don’t mind, do you, Nurse Willowes? He was just starting to tell us the story of his escape.”

“No. I don’t mind,” Harper said. Mindy was already back, handing her a little china cup of hot tea and a plate with a thin slice of fragrant, nutty coffee cake on it. Harper’s stomach rumbled noisily. Coffee cake? It seemed only slightly less luxurious than a foaming hot tub.

“Go on. Please continue, Mr. Cline. You were saying where you and Mr. Mazzucchelli met?”

“This was in Brentwood, at the county lockup.” Cline gave Harper a lingering, curious look—What are you here for?—before turning to face Carol. “They’ve got a facility there to hold maybe forty prisoners. And they had a hundred of us there.

“There were ten cells, each about ten feet long, with ten men packed in each. They put a TV in a hall and played Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Pete’s Dragon so we’d have something to watch. All they had was kid videos they keep around for family visits. There was one guy who lost his mind down the hall. Sometimes he’d start screaming ‘I’ll be your candle on the water!’ until guys started hitting him to shut him up. After a while I started to think they were running those two videos to torture us.”

It jarred her, to hear about someone trapped and going mad with panic while singing that particular song. Gilbert Cline was, in some ways, describing Harper herself, when she got stuck in the storm drain.

“None of us were supposed to be down there longer than a few days. There’s only a couple reasons you wind up in Brentwood. Most of the men there were awaiting trial. In my case, I was down from the prison in Concord to provide testimony in an ongoing case, not my own. The Mazz had been brought in from the state prison in Berlin to appeal his conviction.”

“What was he in jail for?” Carol asked.

“He looks like a rough customer,” Gil said, “but they locked him up for perjury. I can’t tell you whether he hurt your father or not, ma’am. But the Mazz isn’t the sort of guy who buys himself trouble with his hands. His mouth has always been his problem. Can’t help himself. He doesn’t know how to tell a story without smearing a thick layer of bullshit on top.”

“One more reason to hear about your escape from Brentwood from you instead of him,” Carol said.

“And you can spare us the potty mouth while you’re at it, mister,” Ben said. “There’s ladies present.”

Harper almost choked on her last mouthful of coffee cake. She could not have explained to anyone quite why the phrase potty mouth bothered her more than the word bullshit.

She cleared her throat and morosely considered her empty saucer. She had meant to eat her slice of cake slowly, but there was only a little bit of it, and after the first soft dissolving mouthful of sugar and nutmeg she hadn’t been able to help herself. Now it was horribly, tragically, impossibly all gone. She put the saucer on an end table so she wouldn’t be tempted to lick it.

Gil continued: “I was only supposed to be in Brentwood until I testified. But they shut the court down. I waited for them to pack us up and send us back, but they never did. They just kept shoveling in more prisoners. A young man in my cell once approached the bars to say he wanted to lodge a complaint and meet with his lawyer. A state trooper walked over and popped him right in the mouth with his nightstick. Knocked in three teeth with one slug. ‘Your complaint has been noted. Speak right up if there’s anything else bothering you,’ this cop said, and then gave us all a look to see if anyone else was dissatisfied with their treatment.”

“That didn’t happen,” Ben said. “In my twenty years of police work, I’ve heard a thousand reports of police brutality, and only about three I thought held water. The rest was just sorry drug addicts, drunks, and thieves, looking to get even with the person who locked them up.”

“It happened, all right,” Gilbert said, in a calm, untroubled tone. “Things are different now. Law ain’t law anymore. Without someone higher to answer to, the law is just whoever’s holding the nightstick. A nightstick—or a dish towel full of rocks.”

Ben bristled. His chest swelled, threatening to pop a button. Carol held up one hand, palm outward, and Ben closed his mouth without speaking.

“Let him continue. I want to hear this. I want to know who we brought to our camp. What they’ve seen, what they’ve done, and what they’ve been through. Go on, Mr. Cline.”

Gil lowered his gaze, like a man trying to remember some lines of verse from a poem he had memorized years before, for a long-ago English class, perhaps. At last, he looked back up, meeting Carol’s stare without fear, and he told them how it had been.