Orphans of Wonderland (3 page)

“A few months ago, my father changed. Something happened to him, something profound. Something I could tell he wanted to explain to me but for some reason couldn't. He began acting differently, told me something bad was going to happen to him, that there were people after him. He was terrified.”

“You told the police this?”

“Of course. They allegedly looked into it but found nothing.”

“Could he have been suffering from some sort of emotional or mental issue?”

“If he was, it was a result of what he was talking about, not some figment of his imagination.” She placed her tea on the coffee table again. “I need your help, Mr. Walker—
Joel
. Won't you help me? Please?”

“Help you how? What do you want me to do?”

“Investigate my father's murder.”

“I told you, I don't do that kind of work anymore.”

“If you don't do it, no one else will.”

“I know this isn't what you want to hear, but maybe that's best. Besides, even if I wanted to, which I don't, I—for God's sake—I wrote a book twenty-five years ago, all right? If you want someone to look into your dad's death, I'd suggest hiring a private detective that specializes in this kind of thing.”

She shook her head. “In your book you talked about how, whenever people were faced with things beneath the surface, outside of their comfort levels and what they wanted and needed to be true, they shut down and in some cases even turned and looked the other way, because it was preferable to knowing the truth and how awful it might actually be. You wrote that—”

“I wrote a lot of things in the book. Much of it was speculation, and I made that abundantly clear.” He tried to collect his thoughts and remain calm. “Katelyn, my book was a sensationalistic true crime thriller, nothing more, do you understand?”

“That's not true, and you know it. And even it were, it still showed a gifted journalist determined to find the truth, no matter what that truth was.”

He forced himself to look into her eyes again, and for the first time he saw fear. It was something he knew well, because he'd experienced it himself, on levels she couldn't even begin to imagine. “I became obsessed with the story, and because of that, I allowed it to take me to depths I almost didn't make it back from. These things, they get in your head and they play tricks on you. If you buy into it, if you give it any credence whatsoever, it starts to grow stronger and more involved, and before you know it, you're seeing demons behind every tree, devils under your bed and monsters in your closets. It doesn't end, it just gets worse, stronger, and eventually it drives you down into places you do not want to go. Dark, black, bleak places you can never forget. I damn near lost my mind.”

“
Once the Devil takes you, he doesn't give you back
,” she said, quoting his book a second time.

“He never had me.”

“But he was close, wasn't he?” she asked without irony.

He stared at her, this time seeing traces of Lonnie in her eyes.

“A few days ago I came across an old video on YouTube of you and some others,” she said when he offered no reply. “It was a clip from one of those awful eighties tabloid TV shows where all the guests—
experts
so called—were talking about satanic crime and related topics. There was something different about you, though. I could tell the others were either trying to push some slanted religious or political agenda or simply selling the hype and making money from people's ignorance and fear. But you weren't like that. You were sincere. Haunted. Troubled. It showed in your writing, and it showed in your appearance on television.”

“This isn't the same thing.”

“You look all right now,” she said. “Despite your
difficulties
in the past.”

“I am all right.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“But it still haunts you, doesn't it?”

“What's your point?”

“There's still a part of you that needs truth, just like I do. Somewhere deep down that investigative reporter is still there. I'm asking you to resurrect him and to help me find out what happened to my father, to your friend.”

Joel rose to his feet, unable to remain seated any longer. “Look, you read my book and it gave you this idea that I'm something I'm not, okay? I'm not capable of doing what you're asking. And not to be rude, but you have no right to ask me to do it in the first place. I'm sincerely sorry about what happened to Lonnie, but it has nothing to do with me. I just want to live my life in peace. Please, let me do that.”

“He told me strange things were happening,” she said, as if she hadn't heard a word he'd said. “He said people were following him. Or what he
hoped
were people. Whoever—or whatever—they were, they drove my father insane and then they killed him.”

“And you don't think the police would want to know this?”

“They certainly didn't behave as if they did.” She took a moment to collect herself. “And there was something else. He had a strange tattoo—well, not exactly a tattoo but more of a
brand
really—on the back of his left shoulder. He had no idea what it was or how it had gotten there. It's a symbol of some kind, I'd never seen anything quite like it before.”

“Did you research it at all?”

“Yes. I thought it might be a satanic or occult symbol of some kind—you'd mentioned that kind of thing in your book was common when it came to these subjects—but I couldn't find anything. When I did a regular search it came back as something called a
triskele
. Apparently it's an ancient Celtic representation that symbolizes the power of life and rebirth. It combines spirals with the number three. Beyond that, I have no idea what it means or how it was burned into my father's skin without his knowledge.”

“Lonnie claimed he had no idea how he got it?”

“None. And it frightened him.”

“I'd imagine so. That's bizarre, for sure, but it doesn't necessarily mean—”

“Not long before his murder, he kept talking about…
demons
. He said he thought that's what might be after him.”

“Demons don't exist, Katelyn.” He pointed to his temple. “Only in here.”

“Maybe that's enough. Or maybe we choose not to see them, because if we do, the only thing it leads to is madness.” Katelyn straightened her posture and a cool detachment slowly overtook her. “I never believed in these kinds of things before. But my father wasn't a drunk or a drug addict. He wasn't mentally ill. He was experiencing something, and I believe it led to his murder.”

Joel folded his hands and placed them in front of him so Katelyn wouldn't see them shaking. “The human mind is complex.”

“So is evil.”

“No, in my experience it's actually pretty straightforward.”

“I want to know what happened to my father.”

“He was murdered by a person, possibly persons, who haven't been caught yet. And while I certainly hope this isn't the case, it's possible they never will be. It's not like on TV, where homicides are solved in sixty minutes every week. In the real world thousands of murders go unsolved, and stay that way. It's tragic, and I'm terribly sorry this happened to Lonnie. I always will be. But your father's gone, and no amount of investigation is ever going to bring him back. Let the police do their job. If you're not satisfied with their conclusions, or lack thereof, hire a private investigator or try to get an investigative journalist on it. But I'm not your guy on this. I'm sorry. I'm out of the game, and I plan to stay that way.”

“I've come a long way, drove over four hours to see you. There's more I can tell you, but it seems pointless if you have no intention of getting involved. Isn't there anything I can do or say that will convince you to help me?”

“I can't do this. I'm sorry.”

She opened her purse, retrieved a computer disk from it and placed it on the coffee table. “I've put everything I have, all the information and documentation regarding his murder, on this disk, along with my contact information. Maybe you could just take a look at it when you have a moment. If you change your mind, contact me soon as possible. My husband is an accountant and I'm not working yet, so we don't have a lot of money, but of course I'd be willing to pay for your services. There was an insurance policy. Ten thousand. Most went toward funeral—”

“This isn't about money,” he told her.

“No,” she said, rising from the couch. “It isn't.”

“Katelyn—”

“Thank you for seeing me.” She extended her hand. “And for the tea.”

Joel shook her hand. Her palm was warm. “I'm very sorry for your loss, and I wish I could be more help to you.”

With a curt nod, she crossed the room and slipped out the front door. It closed behind her with a dull thud.

He went to the bay window and watched as she followed the walkway to her car. Once there, she hesitated and looked back at the house.

Joel stepped away from the window.

When he looked again, Katelyn Burrows was gone.

Chapter Four

After another hour of shoveling, Joel spent the next two tidying up the house and readying things for dinner that evening. The disk Katelyn had left on the coffee table in the living room taunted him the entire time. He passed by it several times, assuring himself he'd grab it, put it away somewhere and, at one point or another down the road, take a look at it. Until then, he'd do his best to forget about the disk, because if Taylor learned what this was about or who and why Katelyn had come to see him, she'd hit the ceiling. And who could blame her? That was the last thing he needed. But he felt terrible about Lonnie, and kept picturing his old friend in his mind. They'd been so close once—all those years before—he and Lonnie and the other guys in their little circle, Sal, Dorsey and Trent, buddies since junior high, and though they'd drifted apart and gone their separate ways as they got older, it still seemed impossible that one of them could be dead. Whenever Joel thought of them—or even himself in that context—they were frozen in time, forever young, not middle-aged men of fifty, some with children as old as they'd been when they were friends, and certainly not murder victims. Why hadn't he stayed in touch? Sure, he'd had his dark times—they all had to one extent or another—but was it really so hard to pick up a phone every once in a while and check in, or to fire off a quick email? Then again, he didn't even know Lonnie's number, much less his email address. In fact, he'd lost his contact info for the other guys too.

Shame on me
, Joel thought.
Shame on all of us.

In a way, his separation from them was not only inevitable, it was also necessary; another casualty of what he'd been through, collateral damage from walking away from that life, that time and those memories. Lonnie and the others were irrevocably tied to Joel's past, and in order to recover, he'd needed to start fresh elsewhere. His healing depended on acquiring an entirely new life, and that's exactly what he and Taylor had built after leaving Massachusetts and reestablishing themselves in Maine. But how long had he been all right now? A long time—several years—so there was no excuse for not getting back in touch, or at least making an effort, and he knew it.

Still, they'd been through an ordeal together when they were younger, something no one outside their circle knew about because they'd never told.

The black car…

Joel's hands began to shake. He hadn't thought about that in a very long time, but it was always there, in the shadows and fog, in his dreams and nightmares.

He pushed that aside and refocused on Lonnie. He wondered if the others knew, and if they'd attended Lonnie's funeral. Had they wondered where he was, why he wasn't there? Far as he knew, they all still lived in Massachusetts. Joel was the only one who'd left the state. But then, he'd always been the pioneer of their group. He was the one who went to college, who made that first step away from the group and out of town. He was the one who broke free, became something more than a townie with a nowhere job and a house full of kids. But it had cost him, and cost him dearly. It had worked out in the end though, hadn't it? He'd been through hell and survived. And he had Taylor—always Taylor—the great love of his life. She saved him, and with the sheer power of her love and dedication, prevented him from forever burning in those horrible flames.

With a plethora of emotions throttling him, Joel took a shower, got dressed, then wandered back downstairs to the living room. Standing over the coffee table, he stared at the disk for several minutes, trying to convince himself he could take a quick look, then put it aside. But he knew the truth. Once he looked, there'd be no turning back. Not for him. He simply wasn't wired that way. He could already feel it rising in him, this need to investigate and get to the bottom of what happened to Lonnie. Maybe there could be a redemptive quality to looking into this and possibly even solving it. Last time he'd been buried, drowned in the madness, but maybe this time could be different. Or maybe it would end him, finish the job once and for all and send him plunging off the edge of the cliff he'd been hanging from for so long.

A memory of Lonnie came to him, one from just after high school. He was laughing that big, booming laugh of his, eyes alive and mischievous as ever. Could that rambunctious kid really be the same person who would later father Katelyn Burrows? How could Joel have ever imagined that in some bizarre and distant future, Lonnie's child would seek him out to help solve his murder? Like so many other things from Joel's past, it all seemed impossibly beyond belief.

But there it was.

“Fuck it.” He grabbed the disk, hurried across the room to the hallway and ducked into their home office. Heart racing, he dropped into the chair and fired up the computer. While it booted, Joel opened the clear plastic case, popped the disk free and fed it into the tray before he could change his mind.

A box appeared on the screen with a list of items, files and photographs contained on the disk.

The first several files were either links to newspaper articles online or actual newspaper reports that had been scanned and enlarged, then saved to the disk. In all but two, a photograph of Lonnie dominated the page, along with the headline describing his murder. Words like
senseless
and
random
appeared liberally throughout. LOCAL MAN VICTIM OF APPARENT RANDOM SHOOTING… VICTIM OF SENSELESS SHOOTING IDENTIFIED… MOTIVE IN LOCAL SHOOTING LIKELY ROBBERY COPS SAY… NO CLUES IN MURDER OF MAN SLAIN IN STREET…

Despite the lurid headlines, Joel's eyes kept returning to the photograph. It was one they'd obviously obtained from the family, a head shot of Lonnie smiling that had been cropped to remove whoever else had been in the picture with him. It looked fairly recent, as he was much older than the last time Joel had seen him, but it was hard to tell exactly how old he'd been when it was taken. Joel guessed middle forties.

“What the hell did you get yourself into?” he asked the photograph.

Even with the articles and photos in front of him, none of it seemed real. How could Lonnie be dead? And although Joel didn't read every article thoroughly, he scanned them enough to know the authorities had no leads or clues as to why Lonnie had been executed or who might have done it.

Oddly, the more Joel looked through the articles, the more vaguely familiar the whole thing sounded, and he began to wonder if he'd somehow heard about the case without realizing Lonnie was the victim. Perhaps he'd caught the tail end of a news report on TV, or had seen the story come over the wire at work. Sadly, homicides weren't exactly big news these days, and one out of state in a city like Fall River was hardly headline news in Maine, so unless he'd heard Lonnie's name or there were specifics of the murder that caused it to stand out, he wouldn't have paid much attention.

Moving the mouse, Joel closed the articles file and double-clicked the next choice. A drawing of the brand Katelyn had told him about appeared, along with a note that read:
This is a sketch of the brand my father had on the back of his shoulder
.
It was quite small, no more than an inch in height and width, and at first glance looked like a mole or possibly a birthmark. When I made this sketch I was careful to draw it exactly as it appeared. The lines weren't as clean as they are in the sketch but the basic design was the same as below.

Joel minimized the disk window and opened a new one for his browser.

A quick Google search returned examples and information on the symbol. As Katelyn said, it was a Celtic symbol known as a triskele or triskelion. It apparently symbolized life and rebirth, as she'd told him, with the use of spirals, which illustrated the cycle of life, and of the number three, a sacred number that referred to the phases of the Triple Goddess, three female deities who, in many different versions and incarnations, were worshipped by numerous cultures and appeared in several mythologies, including the Celtic, Norse and Greek traditions. Although the versions of these goddesses varied somewhat from culture to culture, there was a consistency as well, along with the basic meanings and powers of the number three in various forms of magic and numerology.

What any of that had to do with Lonnie Scott was anyone's guess, but how the hell could someone be branded and not know it?

Joel closed the browser and returned his attention to the disk.

In addition to the newspaper reports, Katelyn had included some links to television news stories the three major Boston stations had done on Lonnie's murder. Joel hit each link, listened to the reports showing Lonnie's apartment building, as he'd been killed only a block from his home; the crime scene; and more stock photos of Lonnie. Several featured brief interviews with local detectives working the case, as well as interviews with Katelyn speaking about justice for her father's murder. But there wasn't anything new in the reports, or much of anything he could use. Everyone seemed perplexed by what in the end seemed little more than a senseless crime of violence. Just the same, he grabbed a pad and pen from his middle desk drawer and jotted down the names of the detectives and the reporters and their station affiliations, then did the same with those who had penned the newspaper and online stories.

Only one file remained, a JPEG. Joel double-clicked it and an old photograph appeared on his monitor screen. He recognized it immediately.

Taken in 1982, the year after they'd all graduated high school, it showed Joel with Lonnie and the rest of their circle of friends: Sal Valano, Trent Pierce and Dorsey Hill. They stood side by side near a stone jetty at the beach, laughing and mugging for the camera, arms slung over each other's shoulders. He and Lonnie with their long hair, Sal with his mullet, Trent with his Mohawk and Dorsey with what they all affectionately referred to as his “big-ass 'fro”.

Happy. Young. Carefree. Yet there was something else there too, just beneath the surface. Something dark that tied them all together, bound them, forever. And when Joel looked hard enough, he could still see it.

My God
, Joel thought,
look at us.

He remembered the day it was taken. Dorsey's girlfriend at the time had snapped it just as Sal had made one of his typical wisecracks. Joel stared at the photo, letting the memories wash over him. He could almost hear their laughter.

Clearly the photograph was one Katelyn had found among her father's things, and had been included on the disk for the sole purpose of playing Joel's heartstrings. And it was working. If something like this didn't elicit the emotions needed to convince him to help her, then nothing would.

“Kid's good,” he muttered.

Joel's eyes came to rest on Lonnie. None of them—least of all Lonnie—had any idea what was waiting for them out in the world. He thought about it a moment, did the math. They were all nineteen in the photograph, which meant that when it was taken, Lonnie had thirty-one years to live. Sounded like a long time, but it really wasn't. Most of it had come and gone in what felt like the blink of an eye.

Gone. So many years just…gone.

Hey, what are you gonna do?
Lonnie's favorite expression; he could almost hear him saying it across all these years.

You're gonna die in the street, that's what you're gonna do.

Joel clicked closed the photograph, spun his chair away and forced himself to his feet, wanting—needing—to get away from it. His emotions were getting the better of him, replaying a conversation he'd had with Lonnie a few months before that photograph was taken. Joel's girlfriend and high school sweetheart had dumped him, and Lonnie, even more than the other guys, was right there to let him know everything would be all right.

What are you gonna do? The hell with her, bro, plenty of babes out there. You'll meet somebody else, somebody better, and before you know it you won't even remember that bitch's name.

What they hadn't realized was that in an even shorter span of time their lives would lead them in different directions, and they'd no longer play the integral parts in each other's day-to-day existences they'd all been so sure they would. Everything was about to change, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Time was coming for them. Life was coming for them.

And Death was hitching a ride.