Keeping Watch (22 page)

The adults looked at each other, relieved that it hadn't been any worse than it was, and plied the indignant, embarrassed youngster with the picnic meal the woman had brought to the clinic. No twelve-year-old kid likes strangers asking intrusive questions and poking his unclothed body, no matter how professional they are; the meal was not a comfortable one. When they left, with most of the food crammed into the camper's small fridge, Allen listened without comment as his passenger concocted an elaborate explanation of the broken bones, looping through an ever-more-detailed story of an accident when he was learning to ride a bicycle. Who knew? It might even be the truth, and it was not Allen's business to question him. He was just relieved that he could hand over to Rachel Johnson a boy with no severe physical problems.

He was also relieved that the trip was nearly at an end. This part of a rescue was always tricky, the time when a client fell in love with the rescuer. Woman with kids, woman alone, kids alone, it didn't matter—Allen took care to stay as remote as he humanely could. His job was to get them out and get them safe, not to lay the groundwork for a long-term relationship. Fortunately, Jamie slept a lot, and he seemed easily entertained by the handheld electronic games Allen had brought along. Theirs was a temporary relationship, and allowing bonds to form between them would only cause more of a wrench when they reached the boy's foster home in Montana and Allen drove away.

Jamie showed little inclination to talk, anyway. Their conversations were concerned mostly with the mechanics of the escape, getting the boy used to his new name and history, telling him all about the town in Texas he was supposed to have come from, the specifics of his fictional family. When they stopped on Sunday night, Allen asked Jamie to empty out the green backpack, so he could check that there were no pieces of incriminating evidence that he'd overlooked. He removed a printed receipt and a scribbled phone number, and with apologies cut out the front page from a paperback novel with Jamie's name on it, but he stopped at the picture of a young woman smiling down at the baby on her lap, both of them with dark eyes and pale skin. He could have guessed who the woman was, but he asked Jamie anyway.

“That's my mother. She's dead.”

Committed suicide when the boy was seven—and no doubt the kid blamed himself. Abused kids always blamed themselves, for everything. “Do you remember her?”

“Not really,” the boy said with a studied indifference, and took up his electronic game.

“Not at all?”

“She was stupid, and weak.”

“That doesn't mean she didn't love you.”

“She didn't. And I didn't care when she died. She was stupid.”

Allen knew he should confiscate the photograph, but he didn't have the heart to. He merely checked to be sure that there were no identifying marks on the back, and laid it on the table in front of the boy with a warning to keep it to himself. Jamie continued with his game for a few minutes, then shut it off impatiently and turned to shove his clothes, CDs, and comics back into the green pack. He snatched the photograph up and stuffed it inside the outer pocket, but Allen noticed the fingers smooth its corners out carefully before pulling the zipper shut.

Monday morning, working their way through Idaho and southern Montana, Jamie grew talkative, almost in spite of himself, the words pushed out by the growing tension of journey's end. He put aside the game unit, and began to comment on things they drove past. Most of his remarks were negative, even sullen, and when Allen tried to extend them, the boy would draw back into himself for a while, then venture another remark. Their conversations went something like this:

“The kids here sure dress stupid,” Jamie said, staring at a group of half a dozen boys in ordinary jeans and T-shirts coming out of a drugstore. “They look like hicks. I bet they don't even play computer games.”

“Probably a lot of them do. Not in the library, though.”

Allen felt a glance hit the side of his face. “I used to play at home. I had a great system.”

“What happened to it?”

“My father broke it.” The answer came just a bit too quickly. Allen raised a mental eyebrow.

“By accident?”

“No. Yeah. No. I mean, yeah, he meant to break it, but he could just as well have broken it by accident. He's not really very good with computers.”

“So you used one in the library.”

“Yeah.”

“When did your computer break?”

“Month ago maybe. Not long. He was going to buy me a new one, a lot better, only I couldn't decide what I wanted.”

This was such a blatant lie, Allen took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at the boy's face. The delicate features were taut, jaws clenched and eyes focused on something at once far away and deeply internal. For an instant, Allen was seeing a soldier riding a Huey out toward a hot zone, the ghost of an M16 barrel rising up alongside the boy's face . . .

The boy picked up the handheld game, and retreated into silence.

At midday on Monday, Allen pulled into a dirt road leading toward the rambling farmhouse in which lived a family of what Alice called “easygoing Mormons” (which Allen had considered an oxymoron until he met the Johnsons), the mother of whom owed a large debt to Alice's organization.

Smooth, the whole operation.

It was only later that things began to get interesting.

Chapter 20

Montana was everything Allen remembered; Rachel Johnson was even more. Rachel and he were sitting on the wide porch of the house she and her husband had built when they moved here two dozen years before. It was in a marginally fertile valley surrounded by high hills, more farm than ranch, halfway between Bozeman and Billings. At first glance it appeared an ideal setup for a survivalist militia, but Pete and Rachel Johnson were only farmers. At least, they were farmers on the surface.

Pete had a degree in history, but after teaching high school for several years, he had grown dissatisfied with a life away from the earth. Rachel had gone on to a Ph.D. in child psychology, and worked for five years in a Chicago mental health clinic before deciding that the inner city was not where she wanted to raise her own children. They had left the city and come here, to farm, and to raise a family, and to help those who needed it.

When Allen had first met them, six years before, they had struck him as somehow Quaker, but both had actually been raised Mormons, moving away from that tight-knit community during their college years. Although the habits of the Latter-day Saints were in their blood, they now simply worshiped at the nearest church, which happened to be Presbyterian. They even drank coffee, enjoying, Allen thought, the secret sin of it. At the moment, Rachel was pouring out two glasses of homemade lemonade and offering Allen a plate of spiced applesauce cookies. The youngest Johnson child, four-year-old Sally, had been overjoyed at having a newfound cousin all to herself, since her siblings wouldn't be home from their long-weekend church outing until evening, and had dragged “Jim” away immediately to admire her chief responsibility, the chickens. The child had allowed her cousin to hold the egg basket, and “Jim” was trying not to look too apprehensive about the flock of dirty, noisy, weirdly aggressive hens that squawked and pecked at their feet. With the two children out of earshot, Allen was taking the opportunity to fill Rachel in, giving her the information he'd dug out, a synopsis of his surveillance, and his impressions gathered from the drive up. Knowing what she would be dealing with in the years ahead was every bit as essential as the forged documents that Alice had provided for the boy.

“Jim's an only child,” Allen told her. “No family at all apart from the father, although he's given to inventing grandparents far away. His mother committed suicide five years ago, one day before his seventh birthday. Jim found her. She'd used a shotgun—her husband's favorite one, according to the newspaper reports—while he was away on business. Pretty emphatic statement there, as someone commented: husband's pet gun and in a place the kid was sure to discover her when he came home from school.

“The father traveled a lot, he's an investment counselor, whatever that is. A very successful one, it would appear—big house, full-time housekeeper, a new Lexus, a nice little Cessna he's licensed for. Jim was a difficult kid, acting out at school, smart-mouthing the teachers, accusations of bullying from the younger children. One of his teachers thought he might have a learning disability, but his father took him out of there before they could test him, and stuck him in a private school with a reputation for discipline. That worked for a while, even though it involved an hour-long bus trip each way, but then there was a rapid succession of catastrophes: One of his school friends drowned, the school had a fairly serious fire. This was about six months before his mother killed herself. With the fire on top of the drowning, the entire school community was in chaos, half the classes working out of portables, trauma counselors wandering the halls with their stuffed dogs, the whole nine yards. By the time the repairs were done and the teachers a little more settled, Jim was beyond the reach of any counselors. The principal had to suspend him after a graffiti incident in the boy's bathrooms, and said he'd let him back in only if he was in the care of a psychiatrist. It was the principal's opinion that Jamie had an attention deficit disorder, needed to be on Ritalin at the very least. The father flat-out refused, which as far as the Ritalin goes I'd have agreed, but the boy would have really benefited by a lot of hours with a counselor. But no—one of those macho things, you know? ‘No kid of mine needs a shrink.' ”

Rachel nodded; she'd worked with children a long time, had come across all the parents, and if she tended to avoid using labels such as “conduct disorder” and “flat affect,” that did not mean she was unfamiliar with the diagnosis. Or the reality.

“The next school was a very expensive academy, not quite military, but big on structure. Decent curriculum,” he admitted, “and only three miles away, but it wouldn't have been my choice for a kid who'd just lost his mother. Jim seems to have settled down somewhat, but I have a feeling that as soon as the tight restrictions are off, he's going to test the boundaries pretty aggressively. I'm afraid you're going to have your hands full for a while.”

Rachel merely smiled; hands full of problem kids she was also used to.

“When the father's away, he leaves the boy with the housekeeper, Mrs. Mendez. That's another odd relationship: You'd expect an older woman in a house with a more or less parentless child would bond with him, become a surrogate grandmother, but she seems remarkably uninterested in the boy. Does her job, cleans and cooks, then retreats to her room and leaves him watching television.”

“The father encouraged her aloofness, you think?”

“Almost a sure thing, I'd say. Both to keep the boy isolated and because it was less of a danger that the details of his relationship with the boy come to light.”

“How much abuse was there?”

“Physically, it seems to have been sporadic, although from something Jim said, there's been more recently than there usually is during the school year.”

“It's a controlled abuse, then? Not a drunken rage?”

“As far as I saw, the father only drinks heavily on occasion, so yes, it's a deliberate and controlled cruelty.” He described the scene with the shotgun, an act of pure psychological torture. Rachel listened without comment. He went on. “It could be escalating because of the perceived threat of the boy's increased height and maturity. And as far as I know, there's been no overt sexual abuse, although you'll watch for the signs.” Incest was always the most deeply buried secret of all, the last violation the victims would admit. Allen would not discount the possibility that Jamie's father had included rape in his litany of domination, but the bugs he had planted on the house's ground floor had not recorded any, and Allen had not picked up on the markers during the drive up here. Jamie had certainly been victimized, but perhaps not sexually.

“He wet the bed on our first night out, not since then. I have seen him with his thumb in his mouth, though he tends to chew the nail rather than suck on it. He doesn't trust women any more than men, I'm afraid, so make sure Pete spends plenty of time with him. But no hunting. In fact, I'd lock away the guns completely for the summer while he's around. It might just be the circumstances of his mother's death, or the gun game his father plays, but I noticed on the drive up here, there's something about hunting that sets all the boy's nerves to twanging.”

“You think maybe dear old Daddy used to take his boy out in the woods to slaughter a pile of bunnies?” Rachel asked shrewdly. Her husband Pete and the boys all hunted for the table, as rural folk often do, and Allen knew that their big freezer depended on killing a deer during the season, but she had no illusions about the motivations of some hunters. “That old macho thing again?”

“Blooding his son,” Allen commented bitterly, and the phrase reached in and startled up a tangle of memory from the back of his mind: the shattering
bang!
and a spew of water across his face, his fingertips with a faint smear of blood on them—his first bloodshed—and the M16 kicking in his arms as it flung death at small men in black pajamas. He blinked, and was back in Montana again, with this war-hardened farmwife in a calico blouse and blue jeans.

“Deer season's a long way off, so it won't be a problem for a while. I'll just have him and Pete Junior keep the guns locked up. And watch their tongues about it.”

“Jim's a bright boy, and once you get through that hard shell of his, I think you'll find his mother treated him well.” And Rachel would get through to the boy, of that Allen was certain, rubbing at Jamie's protective shell with easy conversation, hard work, and the strong bonds of community, until one morning the boy would wake up and find the shell crumbled around his feet. If Allen was right, if in Jamie's early childhood his mother had surrounded him with affection and respect, then freedom would come early: Trust was far easier to regain than to build from scratch.

And speaking of trust: “Don't tell him we were watching his house, will you? I'd rather he didn't know that Alice and I saw what his father did to him.”

“I won't mention it,” she assured him. “So, how long will you stay?”

“Until he feels comfortable with me leaving. I imagine three or four days ought to do it.”

“It's too bad I couldn't have been there when you first picked him up. A boy like this, it's hard to be passed from one adult to another. Not getting trust off to a good start.”

“You make it sound like geese hatching, imprinting on the nearest living thing,” Allen said.

Rachel laughed with delight. “My lord, Allen, a person would think you were a farm boy. How'd you pick up on that bit of lore?”

“Read it in a psych textbook ten thousand years ago. Look, Rachel, you really don't want to be exposed any more than necessary. The very worst thing would be for Jim to bond with you, and then have you arrested. I'll stay around until he gets used to being here, and then slip away.”

“Like shifting a sleeping baby from one lap to another,” she commented. “Come on, you conspirator, you; time I was getting dinner on the stove.”

In the end, in spite of his yearning to be away, it took until the end of the week before Allen could ease himself out from under Jamie's weight and drive off, although by Thursday, he had begun to suspect that the hesitation he felt was not entirely for Jamie's sake. Over the years he'd helped a lot of kids, but never had he met one who intrigued him like this boy. Although Jamie allowed himself to be taken into the family with more ease than Allen had anticipated, there remained about the boy a sense of reserve, a feeling that those dark eyes were watching his own interaction with his new family, standing back with a heavy dose of scorn at his own willingness to be drawn in. This deliberate distancing made Allen itch to do something to bring the boy out of his hermit's cave, but in the end, he had to admit that his continued presence was on the verge of causing more confusion than assistance. Time to leave the family to get on with it; time to turn toward his own retirement.

On the morning of the sixth day, he announced at breakfast that he would be leaving after lunch. When the dishes were cleared, he and Jamie took a walk through the pasture in the general direction of the stream that divided the Johnsons' land from their neighbor's. Pete was out on the farm tractor, pulling out the stumps of some trees he had cut down the year before. Allen and Jamie paused to watch the contest.

“Wonder why he doesn't just blow them up?” the boy asked.

“Maybe he finds this safer than dynamite.”

“Dynamite's safe, if you're careful.”

“Maybe it's just more satisfying to yank them out. And I suppose it makes for a cleaner hole than blowing the tree to a million hunks.”

“I guess.” Jamie's gaze indicated that he'd much rather have been watching pyrotechnics than a straining engine.

“You think you're going to be okay here?” Allen asked him.

The thin shoulders shrugged.

“I mean it,” Allen persisted. “If this place isn't going to be comfortable for you, it's my job to find you a place more to your liking. You're going to be spending several years here, before we can count on a judge declaring you an emancipated minor.” This was one of the things they'd talked about on the long drive north, and in the end, Allen had felt even more certain that he and Alice had been right, that Jamie was mature enough to have a voice in his own future.

The boy shrugged again. “Yeah, I guess it'll be fine. It's just weird, you know? Cows and people and chores and all. I mean, I didn't exactly see myself growing up on a farm.”

“One thing those chores will do,” Allen said mildly, “is put muscle on a man. You see the shoulders on Pete and Pete Junior?”

“Yeah,” the boy said, sounding more interested. He was just old enough to be starting to take an interest in his body, Allen thought; farm work, fresh air, and Rachel's cooking would build up the slight frame and put steel in the stooped backbone.

“Okay, if you're sure this will do, then I need you to write a letter to your father, telling him that you've run away and found a new home, and that you're happy. I'll help you with the wording, and I'll arrange to have it mailed far from here, so no one will be able to trace it. It's better if the police think you're a runaway rather than the victim of a kidnapping. They won't look so hard, if they know you left under your own steam.”

“That makes sense,” said the veteran of a thousand police television dramas.

“And Jim, you're going to have to watch yourself, every minute of every day. We've talked about this, I know, but you're going to need to remember it in the same way you'll remember to introduce yourself as ‘Jim.' Every time you make a friend, you'll want to tell them your secret so you won't feel like an absolute fraud.” Allen could feel the boy give a little grimace of disbelief, not at the thought of betraying his secrets, but at the idea that he might make friends. “You're going to make friends here, even though they're just a bunch of farmers, and you're going to feel like a liar every minute, for not telling your friends and your new cousins who you really are.”