The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 2

Kevin and Sean are on their best behavior at the station, where I turn over the segment to Kathy Straight, one of the techs.

Back in the car, they point out the monuments as we head out of town.

Taking the curve off the parkway, they shout, “Lincoln Memorial.”

A few minutes later, they yell, “Big french-fry!” This bit of enshrined toddler wit celebrates Sean’s keen observation, at age two, of the similarity between the shape of the fast food staple and the Washington Monument. It never fails to trigger a cascade of cackles.

Then there’s the one whose name they’ve forgotten until I tell them: the Jefferson Memorial. “Jefferson, Jefferson, Jefferson,” they chant, as the Jeep passes the Tidal Basin.

“Can we go on those sometime?” Kevin asks, pointing to the flotilla of blue-and-white paddleboats.

“How about right now? We could skip the festival.”

“Daaaaaaad.”

They don’t mind my lack of excitement. I used to fake it, revving up bogus enthusiasm on those occasions Liz guilt-tripped me into going along on some kid-centric outing. It didn’t fly, so it’s a relief to realize that they don’t actually care if Dad is having a good time. They’re kids; it’s about them.

The stop at the station means we end up taking the long way out of town, looping down along the river before heading out the Southwest Freeway to New York Avenue. Volleyball games on the Mall give way to the Mint. Five minutes later, we’re heading east through a canyon of crumbling town houses and burnt-out stores.

“Is this the hood?” Sean asks.

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

Soon, the zoning changes from gang-related residential to light-industrial. Abandoned warehouses with punched-out windowpanes, fast-food restaurants and welfare motels with drawn curtains. Sean can’t get enough of it.

But Kevin couldn’t care less. “Are we almost there?” he asks. And laughs. “It’s a joke – get it? Becuz: we just left!”

An hour-and-a-half later, we are there. I park the Jeep amid thousands of other cars baking in an open field in tiny Cromwell, Maryland. The boys are excited, running ahead toward a pair of crenellated towers (don’t look close, they’re made of plywood). Banners flutter from the ramparts on either side of a lowered drawbridge across a “moat” that seems newly enlarged. A muddy backhoe sits outside a shop where costumes can be rented for the day. “Slow down,” I tell the boys as the three of us join a stream of families ready to cross the bridge into another world.

“One lord, two squires, is it?” the costumed woman at the gate asks, taking my credit card. “On Her Majesty’s royal Visa.” And then we’re in.

Suddenly, it’s four hundred years ago. Wood-chip paths wind through a forested Elizabethan settlement of shops and food stalls, open-air amphitheaters and “living chess” games. The dividing line between imagination and reality is blurry, at best, with many of the fairgoers also in costume, some simple and homemade, some as elaborate as those of the actors – and probably rented from the shop near the entrance. It’s like one of those Civil War reenactments, I decide, thinking that it might be interesting to make a film about people who have given their hearts to another age.

Meanwhile, the boys dash this way and that, tracing in the air a sort of five-pointed star that connects a falconer to a shop selling armor, a magician doing card tricks to a jester, a group singing madrigals to a man making candles. And everyone, even the foodmongers and shop clerks are in costume, holding forth in a semblance of Elizabethan English, with lots of yes and thees and thines.

The boys’ excitement is contagious and before long, I realize that I’m actually having a good time. The place is interesting and impressive, half amusement park, half time machine. And educational, too. Liz would approve. And she’s right: it’s great to be with the kids when they’re having such a ball.

Liz, sweet Liz. She should be here; she’d love it. For a moment, my longing for her nags at me. She left only after a series of failed promises about how I was going to change my workaholic ways, but I still felt blindsided by her departure. I knew she was right, that’s the thing… but I just never quite got around to making the changes I promised to make. News can become all-consuming. You can always do more, edit a little better, write better, check out one more source – but you always have to do it now because you’re always on a deadline.

So yes, Liz was right, I concede that. I’m a workaholic. I neglected my family. I admitted all that to the marriage counselor. I just thought we had time; I thought we were making progress. I guess I never thought she’d actually leave. And then she and the boys were gone, leaving a hole in my life the size of the Grand Canyon.

The campaign to get them back is not going so well, either. This summer is kind of a last shot.

In the meantime, I’m worried she’ll find someone else, some new age guy. Attentive, sensitive, one of those guys who wears a T-shirt that proclaims I’M THE DADDY. One of those guys willing to carry a baby around in some marsupial pouch. This is a repulsive thought – Liz and some other guy with their baby – and I cast it out of my mind. “Let’s go get some food,” I say.

“Yeah!”

We line up at a stall selling hot dogs. “Would the young squires like a widgeroon of the King’s mustard on thy flaming mongrels?”

The boys look stunned, then collapse into paroxysms of laughter. Get it? Mongrels? Dogs? Hot dogs? Flaming mongrels!?

Me – I’m surprised they know what mongrel means.

The three of us spend the afternoon wandering from surprise to delight. Kevin and Sean gasp at the sword swallower, a handsome sweaty man in a leather vest who leans back and gulps down the blade of an outrageously big scimitar. Along with all the other kids, they can’t decide whether they’re impressed or grossed out. A street magician tears up a card picked by an onlooker, does some elaborate shuffling and fanning of the deck, then plucks the magically restored card out of a woman’s hair. Kevin gapes at Sean. (“How did he do that?”) They watch wide-eyed as mud wrestlers dump one another in the muck, and stare at the bulb of glowing glass expanding at the end of the glassblower’s tube.

The three of us watch as fairgoers, kids and adults, try their luck at climbing the Jacob’s ladder. No one makes it more than two rungs up the wobbly affair before a failure of balance causes the whole contraption to pivot with a savage twist. Dumped hard, challengers land on a big pile of soft hay, most of them laughing in surprise. Some keep at it two or three times before moving on. It’s a buck a pop, and even though the twins are strong and athletic for their age, it’s pretty clear they don’t have a prayer. Still, they want to try it and I give in. Wiping out is obviously half the fun.

They both get to the third rung before they lose it and they both beg me to let them go again. I think about it, because at a dollar for thirty seconds, it’s pretty expensive entertainment. “One more time,” I say, and they get back in line. Kevin wipes out immediately, but Sean actually negotiates the swaying rope loops and makes it to the top. The crowd, which has seen every contestant defeated, goes crazy. Kevin is a little jealous, but happy for his brother and proud, too. “Way to go, way to go, way to go!” The guy running the concession makes a big deal of giving Sean his prize, a huge “silver” medallion embossed with a fleur-de-lis. I adjust the leather thong, shortening it so that the medallion rests on Sean’s chest. Sean’s success has encouraged the crowd and several onlookers join the growing line.

We watch for a while, but then we move on. All three of us try our hand at juggling and archery (without much success), and we make messy brass-rubbings of knights in chain mail. The boys are wired. They’re bored. They’re excited again. They really go crazy when a raggedy man who identifies himself as the Groveler hurls himself at my feet, beseeching “milord” for “a bit of silver.” Seizing an ankle, the mad actor sends the boys into a delirium of grossed-out laughter when he actually licks one of my dusty Tevas. Then smacks his lips, as if savoring the grit.

So it’s a blast – or at least it is until I reach for my wallet to pay for snow cones and find that it’s not there. My mood goes into free fall as the coming hassles stack up in my head. I’ll have to replace all my IDs, my credit cards, my driver’s license. Is there enough gas in the car to get us home? I keep an emergency twenty in the glove compartment, but I spent it a couple of days ago at a pizza place that didn’t take plastic. I don’t even have any change – I gave it all to the Groveler.

We retrace our steps – and then Kev, walking behind me, finds my wallet. “It’s in your pocket, Dad,” Kevin says. When I reach back for the wallet, Kevin says, “Nuhuh, the other one.”

And he’s right. There it is. I pull it out. “Duh,” I say, “in my pocket. Why didn’t I think of that?”

The boys respond with a nervous laugh. I’m left shaking my head. “I always keep my wallet back here.” I slap the back pocket, left side.

“Not this time, I guess,” Sean says.

“I guess not.”

It seems strange to me that I would change the habit of a lifetime, so strange that I open the wallet to check. “Looks like everything’s here,” I tell the boys. “And you know what – feeling stupid is a big step up from the way I felt when I thought I’d lost it.”

“So let’s gooooooo,” Sean bellows.

“To the joust, good sir!” adds Sean.

And so we’re off to the pièce de résistance of the waning afternoon. The boys have been hectoring me for the last hour about this, Kevin checking the time every ten minutes. The jousting match is scheduled for four-thirty. As we turn down a lane and enter the amphitheater, I can see that it’s good we came when we did. There’s already a big crowd gathered; we have to sit quite a way back from the action. The seats consist of bales of hay, arrayed on the shallow concentric tiers surrounding the central arena.

The joust involves four knights, decked out in full armor. As they prance around the ring on their beautiful horses, presenters dressed as squires work up pockets of support for the different contestants. Each part of the arena sports flags and pennants of a different color – red, green, white, black – and these match the colors worn by the knights and their respective mounts.

We’re sitting in the green zone. Each squire rouses support in his section by cuing the crowd for cheers and leading it in taunts. “The Black Knight is a clumsy oaf. Together now…” As part of the buildup, young well-wishers for each knight are summoned forward to the fence surrounding the ring.

The boys clamor to join “the Green Machine,” a band of children assembled to cheer the Green Knight. I hesitate.

Liz would never let them. She knows she’s overprotective – she even worries about it. “I know it might make them feel insecure,” she admits. “I’m sending the message that the world is full of danger.” But she can’t help herself. Even I have been the focus of this kind of worry. I used to love rock climbing, for instance, but Liz just hated it. After the boys were born, she begged me to give it up. I didn’t put up much of a fight. I saw her point, for one thing, and for another, I was so busy at work by then I didn’t really have time for it.

As for the boys, it’s worse. She can hardly bring herself to let them get into another mother’s car for the car pool without checking the seat belts, the car seats, the car’s safety record, the driver’s apparent skill.

“Daaaaad, please.” Down in front, the green squire is handing out emerald pennants and green balloons. The “Green Machine” kids wave the pennants, jump up and down. I tell myself this is exactly the kind of thing they should be allowed to do. I’m right here, after all; I’ll be able to see them. What could happen?

I give in and enjoy their exuberant delight.

“Okay! Let’s go!”

“Yesss!”

I watch their blond heads bob down the aisle as they make their way toward the fence to join the cheering throng of children. The squire hands each of them a green pennant. Then the joust begins and, to my surprise, the horses are as spirited as they are large. You can sense their power. The ground seems to tremble as the red and white knights charge, leaning over their lances, eyes locked on each other’s hearts. When the riders come together, the clash is loud and violent. A roar goes up from across the arena as the Red Knight tumbles from his mount and goes sprawling. The White Knight plants a kiss on his lance and raises it into the air. The white cheering section goes crazy. I check for the kids and spot them toward the right of the cheering section. Along with some other children, they’re petting a little dog. Even the dog is in costume, wearing an Elizabethan thing – a ruff – around its neck.

All eyes return to the arena as a trumpet heralds the next match. Green and black charge toward each other. After a tremendous collision, the Black Knight crashes to the turf. Even I have to admit it’s exciting. These are real jousts, and I’d be surprised if the riders didn’t keep track of winners and losers. When the Black Knight gets to his feet and slinks away, rubbing his backside, it’s impossible not to applaud.

This is great, I’m thinking, and turn to see how the boys are liking it. My eyes go to the fence where the Green Machine is gathered, but I can’t find Kev and Sean in the crowd. Not at first, anyway.

And then: I really can’t see them.

Getting to my feet, I crane for a better view. People behind me start yelling “down in front.” I ignore them and continue to look. But the boys – they just aren’t there. A sizzle of panic surges through my chest. I suppress it.

In the arena, the victorious knights prepare for the final joust, their horses at either end of the arena, pawing the ground and shaking their massive heads. The green squire leads his kids in a chant. “Green! Green! Green! Green!”

“Kev?”

I tell myself they’re right there, right in front of me somewhere, but hidden behind some older, taller children.

“Sean!”

The squire is leading a new cheer – “Gooooooooo Green” – as I work my way through the crowd, down to the fence. “Kevin?” I raise my voice, so that I’m shouting louder than the cheering.

Arriving at the fence as the Green Knight charges toward his opponent, I realize that I’m more terrified than I’ve ever been in a war zone. “Sean?”

I’m shouting at the top of my lungs now, and looking wildly around. And I see: other kids. Lots of them. The Green Knight goes down and a disconsolate moan ripples through the section while a roar erupts across the arena. At the bidding of the squires, balloons are released en masse. I push my way to the fence and scan the mob, searching frantically for blond hair, a yellow T-shirt. I can’t see them. Kids begin to disperse, skipping back toward their parents.

After a minute, I return to the approximate hay bale where we were sitting. I fasten my eyes on the dissolving crowd, willing it to reveal my sons, but after a few minutes, except for a woman a few rows down soothing her screaming toddler, I’m alone.

It’s five-twenty-two in the afternoon, and the twins are gone. Gone. I sit there hoping the boys have gone to the restroom and will soon be back, but I have a terrible feeling in my chest. I know they didn’t go to the john. Not without telling me. Not in the middle of the joust.

So where are they?

It’s not entirely rational, but for a few minutes I can’t bring myself to leave the jousting area. It’s where I last saw them, where they would come back to – if they just wandered off. I shake that phrase out of my mind, an expression I associate with news stories about kids who go missing, who are never seen again, who end up with their faces on milk cartons.

I sit on the hay bale for longer than I should because, as I eventually figure out, the moment I leave and walk away from the jousting arena, I’ll be admitting that my sons are really gone, that something terrible is happening, something that requires the police. It’s dumb fear wrapped in desperate hope, but several minutes tick by while I’m paralyzed in this fog of superstition.

What bubbles up through me as I break my inaction and rise to my feet is an electric rush of sheer terror. Within ten seconds, I’m running full out, so recklessly that the meandering crowd parts for me in alarm and voices rise in complaint and irritation.

“What’s his problem.”

“Hey!”

“There’s little kids here, man!”

“Hey, buddy, watch it!”

It takes a while to find someone from the fair’s security staff.

“Prithee, stranger-”

“I can’t find my kids.” The edge in my voice dissolves the centuries. Suddenly, it’s 2003 again.

“Happens all the time,” the guy tells me. “People get distracted. A juggler comes along – we got a dozen jugglers, y’know? So it’s easy to lose track.”

“I didn’t lose track,” I insist. “We were watching the joust…”

Everyone’s sympathetic. Announcements go out over the P.A. system, informing “Prince Kevin and Lord Sean” that their father is lost. Would the lads be good enough to make their presence known at any of the booths?

I wait, telling myself the boys will be along any minute. But even as I try to reassure myself, I don’t really believe it.