Cast Of Shadows

– 50 -

Martha never pressed charges against Sam Coyne for attacking her. The only person with whom she discussed the incident in detail was a therapist she began seeing a month or so after. The therapist helped her some, and she always had felt that the therapy mandated by cloning regulations had helped Justin, and so, as she entered her mid-thirties, she began to think even her father could have benefited from a few sessions with an understanding professional. She directed her anger at Davis Moore instead, and tried to forget that the idea of suing him had originated with Coyne. She found a different lawyer to help her through it, of course.

By now, Justin was devouring the works of great philosophers in the least turgid English translations. His impatience in class had brought Martha to the school for a dozen or more teacher conferences, and his irritability (coupled with his obvious intelligence) eventually pushed his third-grade teacher into a conspiracy with the school’s fourth-grade teachers, and the result was a joint recommendation that Justin skip ahead.

He didn’t attract more friends in the fifth grade, of course. The older kids thought him an even bigger geek than the third-graders had, but none of this seemed to bother Justin. He received excellent grades in every class and even excelled in gym when the physical skills being rehearsed weren’t the team kind. He proved outstanding in gymnastics and he was faster than all but three or four of the older boys, which earned him a certain amount of respect. He was a bit smaller than most of his new classmates, but he was growing at an advanced rate and didn’t appear so out of place in the class pictures. Throughout the first semester of the fifth-grade experiment, Martha was certain she’d made the right decision.

Justin stepped off the bus every afternoon dragging a bag heavy with books, but his broadening back was able to manage the burden. When Martha unzipped it one evening looking for evidence to lodge a complaint over the mountain of homework being assigned, she discovered only a few slim textbooks. The rest were books Justin was reading on his own: not philosophy, to her surprise, but true crime.

In his room, under his bed, she found more books on Bundy and Berkowitz, Starkweather and Speck. Even Charles Ng, whose name, unappealingly, caused Martha to think of her mother. Shaken, she gathered them in her arms, a dozen or so volumes, and brought them to the kitchen table.

“Where did you get these?” she asked.

Justin seemed surprised at the accusing tone. “A boy in my class. James. I’m only borrowing them.” He said this as if he feared theft were her only concern. “His parents read them.”

“Justin,” Martha said, choosing words with care, not wanting to sound worried or judgmental, “why do you want to read these horrible books?”

Justin blinked a few times and touched her on the arm with a grown-up’s confidence. “The Wicker Man,” he said. “I want to keep us safe from the Wicker Man.”

Of course, Martha thought, expelling a relieved laugh. She leaned forward and hugged him. The Wicker Man was all over the news, and much of downtown was living in fear of him – dating in groups, loading up on pepper spray, even staying home at night. He had killed six people so far in the Wicker Park neighborhood on Chicago’s Near West Side, five women and one man. The police assumed there were more victims as well, better hidden, perhaps elsewhere in the city. The women had been sexually assaulted and stabbed. The man’s throat had been cut. They found fiber evidence, bloody shoeprints, but they had no good witnesses, no DNA, no links between victims, no evidence that could lead to a suspect. It horrified Martha to think her son had been getting such gory details from the news, but it was almost unavoidable. If the Wicker Man was the biggest local news story of the fall, then the second-biggest story was the degree to which talk of the Wicker Man had saturated the Chicago media.

“Justin, sweetie, the Wicker Man isn’t going to hurt us. He lives far away from here.”

Justin didn’t speak but implied with a disappointed expression, a flat smile, and puffy eyes that he didn’t believe her. That broke Martha’s heart.

“Can I go up to my room and play Shadow World?” Justin asked. Shadow World was a computer game her sister had bought Justin for Christmas. It was generally thought to be for grown-ups, but lots of kids played it too, and Martha had activated all of the strict parental controls.

“Sure, honey,” she said. As he padded toward the stairs, she tried to read his state of mind. The worst thing about Justin was that he soaked everything in, but the best thing about him was the way he bounced back. It wasn’t that Justin couldn’t handle the truth as much as that Martha couldn’t handle him knowing. She would talk with him about the Wicker Man, or Ted Bundy, or even goddamn Charles Ng, but she knew she would never be able to talk with Justin about what happened that night between her and Sam Coyne.