The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 18

I help Emma during the times when she gets slammed with customers – handing her cans of soda, restocking the backup cooler, minding the window while she rents out a board or sandcrawler. We talk during the slow periods. Between the roar of the surf, the roar of the generator, and the hum of the refrigeration machinery and air-conditioning, it’s so noisy inside the concession stand that we conduct our conversation at a volume just short of shouting.

By midmorning, we’ve each recited our basic stories. To me, there’s little question that the man who abducted her sons is the same man I think of as The Piper. But Shoffler was right. The parallels are broad. There’s no real detail, let alone evidence, to link the two cases.

We compare notes on what it was like to be suspected of responsibility for the disappearance of our own children. “With me, you can figure it would happen,” she tells me. “I mean, I’m a junkie – recovered, yeah, clean for three years now, but so what? You’re always this far from a relapse.” She pinches a tiny space between thumb and forefinger. “You gotta turn that space into – like – titanium. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“I like your chances.”

She shrugs. “The thing is – with me, it was like they thought it was a shakedown of some sort, I was trying to get money, that’s what was behind the kids’ disappearance. But with you? I don’t get it.”

“My wife and I were separated. Anyway, The Piper – he made it happen. He left this bloody T-shirt in the closet and for a couple of days, anyway, they thought I killed the kids.”

“Oh, that’s right – I remember that. The chicken blood.”

“And that bowl of water – that was part of it, too. I don’t know what they thought – I was keeping the boys locked up in the closet?” I shake my head.

“What bowl of water?”

“There was a bowl of water up on the shelf in the closet in the kids’ room. Way up high. I don’t know what it was doing there. It was the same closet where they found the T-shirt.”

It’s not really a gasp – it’s more like she’s stopped breathing – but there’s no way to miss the sense of alarm coming off Emma Sandling.

“What?”

“It really is him,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“What about dimes? Was there a row of dimes?”

“Yes. They were lined up on the bathroom sink. How…”

Emma puts a hand on my forearm. “There was a row of dimes right down the middle of Connor’s sleeping bag. I thought Con did it himself. But then Amalia – she lived in the tent next door – she took one look at those dimes and she freaked right out. I mean she practically turned white – and Amalia, she was very dark-skinned. She was the one who noticed the water, too – a bowl up on this little shelf I had, you know, rigged to the side of the tent.”

“Why did she freak out? What does it mean?”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to know, but Amalia – first she tells me not to touch anything, she’s like too hysterical to explain anything. Don’t touch the water, she says, don’t move the coins. And she is serious about this, like it’s life and death, you know? And I don’t get it. I’m like – what’s this about? She tries to explain it to me, but her English isn’t all that good. What I get out of it is that it’s some kind of voodoo thing, and the bottom line is I should not mess with it. Did I say she’s from Haiti? Hang on.”

She waits on a contingent of teenagers, ringing up Cokes and chips, a tube of sunscreen, a Life’s a Beach T-shirt. A girl giggles and says, “Come on, Kevin, stop it!” Kevin. The name, just the sound of it, transfixes me. Kevin. Sean. Where are you?

There’s a lightness, an uneasiness in my chest. It’s because the police removed the water and the Liberty head dimes as evidence. In view of what Emma just told me, I can’t get over the feeling that this could hurt the boys. And maybe it has.

Emma slides the window closed, comes back, sits on the stool, pushes her bangs back away from her forehead. The air-conditioning inside the van can’t quite keep up with the heat, and we’re both covered with a film of sweat.

“So this Amalia – you still in touch with her?”

Emma shakes her head. “Never saw her again. Right about then is when the cops came and they cordoned off the tent with police tape. I wanted to stay there – I was still thinking the boys might show up – but they took me down to headquarters. They started questioning all the other people in the park, too; they blocked the exits. Amalia and her guy Bertrand – they were illegals, you know. She worked in the Comfort Inn. He was a roofer. Lots of people like that live in the parks. You know – the working poor. Campsites are way cheaper than rent. Anyway, Bertie and Amalia – they sure didn’t want to talk to the police. Amalia just clammed up. Didn’t see anything, hear anything, know anything. When the police came back to her about those dimes, because I mentioned it – and this was, like a week later – Amalia and Bertie were long gone.”

“So you never found out what she was talking about?”

“Well, I found out it was some kind of curse – which I’d already figured from the way Amalia acted. But that was about it.”

“She told you not to move them, not to even touch them?”

“Right.”

“The police seized the bowl of water from my house. And the dimes. As evidence.”

“Oh, me, too. In fact, they just about destroyed everything in my tent – including the tent – testing for blood and all. You should see what I got back when they finally returned my worldly possessions. They made a list, you know, when they took it all. I guess they have to.”

“The search warrant inventory.”

“Right, yeah – that. Well, some of the things I didn’t get back at all. It was marked down on the list: tested to destruction.” She makes little quotation marks in the air, then shakes her head. “The dimes were in a little baggie. I threw them in the ocean, afterward, you know, when I got the boys back. One by one.”

I take over the window while she goes outside to sign out two beach umbrellas. I sell two ice-cream sandwiches and a rocket pop.

“I don’t get the voodoo connection,” I tell her. “The guy who took my kids is white.”

“That’s what my boys said – the guy wasn’t black. I couldn’t really figure it out, either. One of the detectives told me they were thinking maybe it was a child-kidnapping ring.”

“Emma?”

“Please try to call me Susie.”

“I’m sorry. Susie?”

She’s sitting on the stool, her legs crossed, swinging a leg from which one flip-flop dangles. I notice that her toenails are painted five different pastel colors, like tiny jelly beans.

“Can I talk to the boys?”

“Oh, Jeez,” she says. “I knew it would get down to this.”

“I just think maybe there’s something – I don’t even know what – but something they know that might help me.”

She sighs. “I just don’t want to revive it all, you know? What if they tell you something and you want to tell the police? And then the police question them again – and it leaks out.” She sighs again. “I really don’t want to move and have to start all over again.” She tilts her head back and stares at the ceiling. Behind the roar of the generator, the wind kicks up outside. A spray of sand ticks against the van. Above us, the balloon-rabbit snaps against the guy wires. When Emma looks back at me, I see the glitter of tears.

“I guess I shouldn’t ask.”

“How can you not ask?” she says. “I know that.” She balls up her hands and rubs at her eyes with her knuckles, like a child. She takes a deep breath and fills her cheeks with air, like a cartoon depiction of the North Wind – then exhales, all at once, a tiny explosion. Compassion finally overwhelms her instinct for self-preservation. “Okay,” she says, pressing her eyes shut as she says it, as if she doesn’t want to witness her own assent.

Emma sets the ground rules and makes me swear “on my children” that I will adhere to them. I will call the boys by the Florida names (Kai and Brandon). I won’t press them too hard if they don’t seem to want to answer. The session can last only fifteen minutes and whatever they say is for me only. And so on. It amazes me that after all she’s been through, she still places so much value on someone’s word.

We meet the following night. My first sight of Kai and Brandon almost takes my breath away. It’s not that they look like my boys. They don’t. But they share the habits of twinship, the way they look at each other, play off each other, interrupt one another, finish each other’s sentences, check to the other with their eyes for assurance in the midst of speaking.

I’m braced for a horror story, but what they tell me is almost reassuring.

“Where were you?” I ask them, first of all, looking from one to the other. “What was the place like?”

“It was a big house.” Brandon looks at his brother, who gives him a little nod.

“Really big.”

“With a humongous lawn.”

“Lotsa trees. Like in a forest.”

“What kind of trees?”

Kai looks at Brandon and shrugs. “I think pine?”

“Yeah,” Brandon agrees, looking at his mother. “Like in the Grand Tetons.”

“We stayed there for a couple of months,” Emma explains. “I worked in Jackson at a restaurant.”

“They had buffalo burgers,” Kai says, knotting up his face in disgust. “Gross.”

“Were there other people there, at this big house, I mean – mowing the lawn or doing the chores – or just the man who took you into his car at the McDonald’s?”

“Just him. I mean there were other people sometimes, but we couldn’t meet them. We had to stay in the big room. Doc told us.”

Doc. I don’t like the sound of that. Doctor Mengele. Papa Doc. Baby Doc.

“But we didn’t have to be quiet or nothing.”

“Or anything,” Emma corrects.

“Or anything. We could play Nintendo even.”

“Why couldn’t you meet anyone?”

“’Cause they might tell, and then Mommy” – he shoots a look at Emma – “might get into trouble and we’d never see her again.”

“When the man approached them at McDonald’s,” Emma explains, “he told them that he was a friend of mine, that I had to go back into treatment, that I couldn’t stand the idea of telling the boys-”

“Doc told us she had a relapse,” Brandon says.

“He told the guys it would break my heart to say good-bye,” Emma explains. “He said I was staying in the ladies’ room until they left. He told them I’d come for them as soon as I was better. But if anyone knew they were staying with him, he wasn’t authorized – so they’d have to go back into foster care and child services would never let them live with me.”

“Ever again,” Kai says in an earnest voice. “That’s what he told us.”

“Now we have a code,” Brandon elaborates, “so we know if it’s true from Mommy or not.”

“Don’t tell him!” Kai warns.

Brandon glares at his brother, then turns to me with an apologetic smile. “We can’t tell anyone or someone might find out and then they could trick us.”

“That’s a good plan.” I can feel my fifteen minutes ticking away. “So what did you do all day? Play Nintendo? Watch TV?”

“Nuh-uh. No TV. We played Nintendo a lot. And Ping-Pong.”

“Uno and Yahtzee, too.”

“Mostly we did training.”

“Training?” I look from one to the other. “Like what?”

“Exercises,” Kai says, and begins to list them in a kind of singsong rhythm as he counts them off on his fingers. “Push-ups, sit-ups, stretching, gymnastics-”

“Both of you?” Dr. Mengele jolts into my head along with phrases like muscle biopsy, cardiac development, VO max.

“Uh-huh.”

“Did he test you – like on machines or anything?”

“Nuh-huh.”

“We had contests sometimes, though,” Kai says. “Mostly I beat.”

“Not every time,” Brandon protests.

“We did gymnastics a lot,” Kai says. “You know, somersaults and stuff.”

“And backwards somersaults. Want to see?”

“Alex doesn’t have time for that,” Emma cautions. “Apparently, they did this for hours every single day,” she adds. “Balance beams, vaults. It made me wonder if Doc was some kind of crazed would-be Olympic coach.”

“We climbed up ropes, too,” Kai says, with some animation. “Right to the ceiling. We did that a lot. It was hard. It was for making you strong.”

“What kind of ropes?”

Kai and Brandon look at each other and shrug. “Just ropes,” Kai says. “They were thick and they hung down from hooks in the ceiling.”

“The knotted ones were more easy.”

“Yeah, the plain ones were really hard to climb at first. ’Member, Bran? – we could just about get a couple feet off the floor.”

“We got better.”

“So this was… where, in a gym… in this big house?”

“Yeah – it was in the basement. It was a really, really giant room.”

They nod earnestly. “Yeah. Like the Y or something.”

“How high were these ropes?”

They look at each other. “Real high.”

“As tall as this ceiling, or…?” The rooms in Emma’s apartment might have eight-foot ceilings.

“No,” Brandon protests. “Much higher… like really high.”

“Hunh. So, did this man… did he… do anything to you?”

“Like what do you mean?”

I’m not sure how to put it, and Emma dives in. “No,” she says. “None of that.”

“None of what?” Kai demands.

She hesitates. “You told me he didn’t hurt you.”

Brandon shakes his head. “He didn’t hurt us. He liked us.”

“He liked you. So… was he… friendly?” I ask.

Emma shoots me a look, but lets it go. The boys shake their heads, bored now, beginning to fidget. “Nah,” Kai says, “he was just… he was just…” He looks at his brother, but Brandon shrugs. Neither one of them seems able to characterize their captor’s manner. “He was just kind of regular,” Kai says finally. “Mostly, he left us alone except when we were training.”

“So what made you stop trusting him?” I ask Kai. “At the mall. What made you try to call your mom’s friend?”

“I don’t know,” Kai says, frowning. “He just – I don’t know.” He shakes his head.

“Kai’s very intuitive and a little wary,” Emma says with a wan smile. “Brandon’s more of an optimist.”

“What’s that mean, Mom?” Brandon asks.

“It means you hope for the best, sweetie.”

“Is… tootive good, too?” Kai asks.

“Intuitive. Yes, K-man, it means you’re smart and alert, not to what people say, but to the way things feel to you.” She turns to me: “They’ve been in care a lot, and there’s a lot of BS in the system. It doesn’t exactly foster trust.” She shrugs. “Brandon’s the exception.”

“Ooooooh,” Brandon says. “Mom said BS.”

The fact that their captor didn’t exploit the boys is a huge relief, but I can’t get any kind of fix on his intentions toward them. Did he kidnap… a family? Sons? What kind of a relationship did they have with him? “This guy Doc – did he eat with you?” I ask.

“Nah – we got our own cereal and stuff for breakfast, and for lunch we made our own sandwiches. He made dinner – stuff in plastic boxes that he heated up in the microwave.”

“It was okay,” Kai says. “The food. Healthy stuff. No junk food.”

“And you never saw anyone else?”

Brandon swings his head back and forth. “Nope.”

I’m trying to think of what else to ask when Kai volunteers something. “Sometimes he did tricks for us, remember, Bran? In the beginning?”

“Tricks?” Emma frowns. This seems to be new to her. “What kind of tricks?”

“Yeah, with cards and stuff,” Brandon says. “You know – magic tricks.”

“And coins.”

Coins.

“Did he… line up the coins?” Emma asks.

Brandon makes a face. “Noooooo. He like… pulled them out of the air, made them disappear.”

Kai claps his hands. “Like that.”

Emma taps her watch. The reminder propels me into the kind of question I never ask as a reporter, an open, expansive question that almost always draws a shrug.

“Can you think of anything else… about the house or the man or… I don’t know… anything that happened while you were there?”

“We told the police,” Brandon says, really bored now. “Over and over and over.”

“I know, but if there’s anything that might help me find the man again – could you tell me?”

“He lied,” Kai says. “Mommy never told him to take us. She was just in line getting our food.”

“I know. So if there’s anything-”

Kai heaves a sigh. “Okay. Concentrate, okay, Bran?”

They both shut their eyes and screw up their faces in exaggerated expressions of deep concentration.

Kai opens his eyes and shrugs.

“I think that’s enough,” Emma says.

Brandon opens his eyes and turns to his brother. “Did we ever say about the dogs?”

Kai shrugs.

“Dogs?” I ask.

“Skinny ones,” Brandon says. “You could see the bones. But they weren’t hungry. He said they were supposed to be like that.”

I thank Emma at the door, so profusely that she’s almost embarrassed. “I don’t see how it helped much,” she says. She bites her lower lip. “I hope it helped. I hope you find them.”

I can hear the boys in the room behind us, and the sound of their voices sets off a throb of loss. I can’t seem to move and there’s a kind of awkward silence. Emma clears her throat. Obviously she doesn’t want to close the door in my face, but she’s got homework to do and boys to get to bed. “Well,” she says, “good luck.”

“They’re lucky to have you,” I say at last. “They’re lucky to have you for a mother.”

She scratches an eyebrow with her pinky, then gives me a wry look. “Thanks,” she says, and shifts from foot to foot, “but they were born addicted to smack, you know – so I’ve got some ground to make up.”

“Well, for my money you’ll do it and then some,” I say.

This avuncular platitude seems to make her nervous. She wants me to leave. The truth is I’m having trouble moving because I’m depressed by the prospect of heading back to the Drop Anchor.

“Well,” Emma says. My hesitation on her doorstep is only adding to her second thoughts.

It’s with some effort that I toss a little salute and turn away from her door. Yes, I’ve confirmed my guess that the abductor of the Sandling boys is the same man who took my sons, but where does it get me? Am I any closer to finding them?