Keeping Watch (26 page)

And indeed, in that family, nobody thought to check, not until it was too late.

Chapter 23

The letter came late in the afternoon on the third Monday of August. They had spent most of the afternoon hanging some cabinets Rae had built—Allen was becoming a halfway competent woodworker's assistant—and Rae decided it was time to think about dinner. She moved around the kitchen, chopping onions and bacon and dumping them into a heavy pan, accepting a beer from her assistant. Allen leaned against the door frame, looking out, savoring the day.

The house Rae had spent the past two years rebuilding was the “folly” that her great-uncle had originally built here eighty years ago. Uncle Desmond might have had some odd ideas about architecture, Allen reflected, but the man knew how to choose a site. The house rested on stone foundations between a pair of impressive stone towers, halfway up the side of a hill overlooking the island's small wooded cove; from the upstairs window, a person could look straight south along the Straits of Juan de Fuca to the Olympic Peninsula. On a summer's afternoon like this one, sailboats were a common decoration.

Allen set his beer bottle down on the porch and walked back inside to wrap his arms around his woman. She answered his embrace with a rhythmic sway as she stirred the wooden spoon through the browning onions.

“Steer it up,” Allen sang in a vaguely Jamaican accent, his chin hooked over her shoulder. “Leettle darlin'.”

“I take it Ed's on a Bob Marley kick?” The two men had been out on Ed's boat the day before, picking up supplies in Friday Harbor.

“Rasta rules, mon. God, that smells great,” Allen murmured into the side of her neck.

“It does, doesn't it?”

“Oh, the food smells okay, too.”

He felt her chuckle under his arms, felt her shoulder blades press back into his chest. He nibbled his way down beneath the collar of her shirt, tasting salt and the faint flavor of sawdust that always permeated her clothing, waiting for the little shiver that she would give when her attention was well and truly caught. It came when his lips were a half inch from her spine; she let the spoon fall against the side of the pan and turned around to meet his mouth.

After a minute or two, Allen reached past her to shut off the stove. No point in wasting propane, after all.

But in another minute, Rae pulled away from him. “Did you hear something?”

“A bomb going off?” he said, unwilling to be distracted, but she stepped free and walked over to the open front door.

“Damn!” she exclaimed, and hurriedly stuffed her shirt back into her jeans as she moved to turn the gas back on under the onions.

Before Allen could get to the doorway himself, the top of a well-known head appeared, coming up the steps. Ed De la Torre paused on the narrow porch, shuffling his feet against the mat and squinting into the darkened interior.

“Anybody home?”

“Hello, Ed. Watch the bottle.” Allen walked over to pick up the abandoned beer. It was still cool. “Want a beer?”

“No thanks, I've got a date on Orcas, just wanted to drop off this stuff from the post office, thought it might be important.”

He came into the house to lay the mail on the table, Rae's oversized express mail envelope on top. He took one look at the side of Rae's face, shot Allen a glance that took in his rumpled shirt and his ill-concealed irritation, and a grin spread over his leathery features.

“I won't interrupt you kids any further,” he told them. “See you in a couple days.”

He tromped down the steps, whistling, and halfway down the hill started singing one of Jimmy Buffett's ruder songs. Rae, blushing like a schoolgirl, turned to the mail. She opened the envelope that had looked so important, found in it just a copy of an already signed contract, and dropped it on the table to sort through the other things. One of those she held out to Allen.

Surprised, he took it from her hand. One glance at the printed address and his heart stuttered: Alice's writing. He ripped the envelope open and glanced at the tidy script that covered both sides of three sheets of paper, which was not Alice's but that of a stranger. He flipped over the last page to read the signature: Rachel.

A letter from Rachel Johnson, forwarded by Alice, omitting Rachel's last name with her usual care for anonymity. He had, he realized the moment he saw that precise hand, been expecting something from her.

Without pausing to read the words, Allen took the few strides onto the porch and shouted out Ed's name. The man was nearly to the little dock, but he turned around in inquiry.

“Can you stop in on your way home?” Allen called.

“You need a ride?” Ed shouted back.

“I might.”

“I could take you now,” the boatman offered.

“Morning's fine.” Ed's dates were rarely confined to dinner and a movie.

Ed waved his understanding and continued on his way.

“Allen?” came Rae's question from inside. “Are you going somewhere?”

Dear God,
he thought,
I hope not,
but he said only, “Let me read this first, and I'll tell you.” He sat on the top step of the porch and, with mounting apprehension, began to read about the state of Jamie O'Connell.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

I know that you had not expected to hear from me again, and trust that, knowing your concern for our young friend J, my letter does not trouble you. I write because I am having problems that I find myself uncomfortable about facing alone, and wish to consult the only other person who knows the child well.

I will not lie to you—we had some initial difficulties in getting J settled here. As you yourself indicated, terrible experiences teach terrible behavior, and although I persist in believing that love conquers all, I will admit that there is in our young friend a great deal to conquer. However, as the summer holidays came on and the others were home more hours, J began to emerge from the distant state and make tentative forays into the unfamiliar business of becoming a family member. There is, as you suspected, a great turbulence in there, and much testing of boundaries must take place before J feels safe to let the anger surface. But as you know, behavior such as that is a thing we are well used to, and it does at least indicate that J begins to trust that there are rules to test, and not just the random dictates of an abuser. J has succumbed to the charms of my youngest, whom you will remember as the official gatherer of eggs in the henhouse.

I should perhaps note here that I have so far seen no signs pointing at a history of sexual abuse, although I believe that J is somewhat dyslexic (a vigorously concealed problem that I shall take notice of before school begins) and also, as you told me, slightly deaf in the right ear. J tells me that the father was right-handed, so if the deafness comes from blows, they were delivered from behind. As I think about this, I find that much as I detest a man who will strike a child to its face, it is even more unsettling to envision the man in the habit of giving a hard slap when his child is unawares.

These, however, are concerns for the longer term. I first noticed a change in J a couple of weeks ago, when the child began to appear at the breakfast table looking tired, and was occasionally short-tempered. I would have assumed the latter at any rate a positive sign—that J had become comfortable enough in this new setting to feel able to express emotions and be mildly self-assertive (and truly, thus far the ill temper has been very mild, nowhere near that of the average two-year-old)—except that it was joined with a certain secretiveness and a habit of meeting my questions with that wide-eyed innocence which children imagine conceals all wrongdoing.

Again, hiding things from authority is not in itself either unexpected or even undesirable at this point. However, before I could sort out what was happening, two events occurred which together seem to have precipitated a crisis in J's mind. The first was when my elder son decided to go out and shoot some rabbits and, without thinking, brought them home uncleaned. J walked in on him at the very goriest part of the operation, when my boy was up to his arms in blood and the shotgun was propped against the table in the summerhouse. J was shocked into near immobility, so much so that I thought I would have to call the doctor, but a night's rest, with me and my husband reading aloud from one book after another, seemed to calm the child, and after sleeping half the day away, J was quiet, and slightly wary around my son, but more nearly normal.

Then on Monday—the twelfth—my youngest disappeared for half a day. I know that to you, the place appears a bedlam of people and children, but I assure you, my children do not wander off—there are too many dangers on a place like this, mechanical and natural, to allow a casual attitude toward that. J was the one to discover her missing, and came running into the kitchen where I was working, white of face and trembling too hard to get out words. I finally understood that J had seen my daughter at the edge of the far field, talking with a stranger, yet when J ran out to be sure all was well, child and stranger were gone. J was convinced that my daughter had been kidnapped.

My immediate impulse—to call in the police—would, I knew, inevitably bring about questions about J's history. I was also aware, even in the concerns of the moment, that considering J's own history, the idea of kidnapping could be a more automatic assumption than it would be for the general population of children that age. Nonetheless, if my girl had actually been abducted, even if she merely had met with accident, there would be no time to waste. So instead of phoning for the police, I sent out my family and called our neighbors. Within ten minutes we had more men and women than the police could have brought to bear, all of us beating the bushes for her.

We found her in less than an hour, unharmed but for some scratches on her arms from the blackberries she had been picking when the man appeared. For there was a man, that much was clear; however, a four-year-old's powers of description and communication are inadequate for much more than that. He had light hair, wore a necktie and sunglasses, was maybe as tall as my husband, and told her he had found some kittens and needed her to help rescue them. She assures me he did not touch her, except once to help her over a ditch, and I could see no sign that her clothing was disturbed, nor her state of mind—and I assure you, had some strange man tried to do more than walk with her through a field in order to show her kittens, I have no doubt that I would see the result in my daughter. Her greatest distress is that the man had left her before he could show her where the kittens were, so that she thinks the poor things are now out there alone.

But the most peculiar element, and the one that J seems to find ominous, is that before the man left her, he told her to say hello to “her new cousin J.” If she was even a year older and told me this, I would believe that the man actually knew J's name, and would indeed worry. But she is so young, she doesn't know the difference between what the man said and how she interpreted it. He might easily have said something along the lines of, “Say hello to your brothers and sisters,” and when she added that she also lived with a new cousin, J, he could have repeated the name, and that was what lodged in her mind.

You see my dilemma? There was a man, someone my daughter did not recognize, who led her away and then turned her loose unharmed. Everything else is uncertain (except the necktie—that foreign object I am sure she could not have invented!) and I would hate to introduce another disruption in J's life on the merest suggestion that a threat has appeared. I would almost be tempted to resort to nothing but a regimen of extreme watchfulness on the part of the adults here, were it not for J's extreme state of mind.

J is frightened—no,
terrified
to the point of incapacity, and although I cannot get any details from the child, it is clear that it is not so much for J's own safety that the fear lies, but for ours. In fact, J's immediate response to my daughter's story was to offer to pack and leave, lest trouble plague our door. It is a most generous and responsible reaction, but of course, we cannot have it. I have told J I would write to you immediately, and ask for your advice.

I believe what troubles J is the possibility that the father may have discovered where his child went, and be out to exact revenge—a fear, I would say, akin to that raised by the airplane you two saw that last day. My friend, I know it is asking a great deal of you in your current state, having moved on from us and our problems, but if you could simply check on the father's whereabouts—or arrange to have someone reliable check for you—and make certain that he has remained in place during the past week, it would go far to soothe J's worries. And, frankly, my own—fear has a terrible contagion to it, does it not?

Until we hear from you, my husband and older son will remain doubly vigilant, and J will not be allowed out of our sight. (J, in the meantime, refuses to go very far from my young daughter, and seems to take her safety as a personal responsibility.)

Again, I regret having to ask this of you. And in case you think I am asking to be relieved of J, I say vehemently that I will not permit you to remove the child unless it becomes a clear and immediate necessity.

With respects and well wishes,

Rachel

Yes, he thought, Rachel had omitted her surname through concern for security; why else never give Jamie's name, or even his sex? She was taking as few chances as possible, revealing nothing that might lead back to her family were the letter to be intercepted. He read the letter a second time, folded it away, and stood. His bones ached, he thought.

And Rae wasn't going to be happy.

He handed Rae the letter, and went back outside so as not to watch her while she read it. The pages rustled, a passing boat trailed happy voices in its wake. It seemed to take her a long time; Allen spent most of it thinking about fingers, and trust, and vulnerability: the insane lengths adults will go to in teaching their children self-respect.