Torn (7 page)

I did talk to God, you bet I did, but God didn’t respond, being too busy directing typhoons, earthquakes, epidemics, and ethnic cleansing. So currently I’m no longer speaking to Supreme Beings, and I refuse to take comfort in pretty notions like heaven. Not when I know in my soul
that my little boy is alive somewhere. Alive and missing me almost as much as I miss him.

That’s what I believe.

After pocketing his phone, Randall Shane circumnavigates the house. Eating up yards with his long legs, swinging his long arms. Ignoring the dusting of snow on the partially frozen ground. Might as well be walking a warm beach in the sunshine instead of this cold, soggy reality. As he comes by each window he smiles and waves as if to say, look at me, I’m stretching my legs, just like I said.

Trying to figure out how to make his excuses, beat a hasty retreat.

I have the front door open as he comes around the house for the third time.

“Enough,” I say, and he enters, somewhat sheepish.

“The air is good up here. Gives you a real clean feeling in the lungs.”

“I’m
not
crazy or delusional,” I announce, marching around the leaf table the way he marched around my house. Hugging myself to force calm as I make my argument. “I know children can die. It may go against nature but it happens all the time. Disease, accidents, even murder. It happens. But it didn’t happen to Noah. It just didn’t.”

“Mind if I get some water?”

“Help yourself,” I say, gesturing at the glass-fronted cupboard.

He pours a glass from the tap. Drinks it, every drop. “Good water, too. I can see why folks live up here, this close to the North Pole.”

“Say what you’ve got to say,” I urge him. “I can’t stand this. Not knowing if you’ll help.”

He leans against the sink. “
Help
is a big word,” he says, very carefully. “I’m going to look into something but it may not help. You should know that.”

“Look into what?”

From his hesitation I pick up that he’s not sure whether or not he should be specific, to safeguard my feelings. Finally he nods to himself and goes, “The lab. I made a call. Confirmed that the DNA lab the State Police used has an excellent reputation. State-of-the-art facility, supposedly. Very unlikely they’ve been compromised or somehow got it wrong.”

“But possible,” I insist. “If Noah is alive they could plant a sample of his blood, right?”

Shane looks skeptical. “We’ll see. If I’m satisfied the lab work is correct, and your son was killed in the explosion, that’s the end of it.”

“It will never be the end.”

“Let me ask you this, Mrs. Corbin. If your son was hit by a car crossing the street, would you blame the grandfather or his cult followers? Bad things happen sometimes, regardless of wealth or connections.”

“You don’t have to tell me that! I know that! But if Noah was hit by a car his body would still be here!” I point out, aware that my voice has gone high and loud. “Noah
wasn’t killed
in that explosion. Nobody believes me, but I know he wasn’t.”

“Okay,” he says.

“You want to know how I know?”

He nods.

“Because of what Jed said. Months before the plane went down he said if he ever disappeared, ever vanished
without an explanation, it would be because of his father. Because he’d been taken.”

“Your late husband knew your son was in danger?” he asks, looking startled.

“No. No. Jed meant if
he
disappeared. Jed himself. Then he laughed, because it was such a crazy idea, that he’d be abducted because of his own father. That the Rulers would want him, of all people—a man who disinherited his own father, cut all ties. What would they want with him? But it wasn’t crazy, was it? Jed died and they took Noah instead—Arthur Conklin’s only living descendent. And they did it in a way that means nobody will look for him. Nobody but me. I know it sounds like a fantastic conspiracy, sending a madman into a school to blow it up so they can steal a child. But it happened. They did it.”

Oh yes, I’m aware of how it must all seem, the paranoid rant of a mother driven mad by loss. But give him credit: Randall Shane didn’t flash me that look. The look I’d seen on the faces of so many cops and detectives. The look that said, best get away, leave this one to her misery.

Instead he nods and says, “I’ll look into it, Mrs. Corbin. Whatever I find, I won’t lie to you. Good, bad, or terrible, I won’t lie to you. That’s all I can promise.”

3. Letter Of Proof

A few minutes later he’s driving away in his black Lincoln Town Car. A big boat of a vehicle that tacks slowly out of my long, unpaved driveway, bumping carefully over the frost heaves before finally turning onto the main road and vanishing around a long curve.

Anybody else, I’d figure he’s gone for good. But Shane looked me in the eye and promised that whatever he decided he would return and tell me in person.

Which gives me something to cling to. He said it would take a day or so to check out the lab. So I’ve got one more day’s worth of hope. Hope that he’ll find something, maybe just a hint that maybe the crazy mom is onto something.

He did say an odd thing before folding himself into the big car. “You sure your husband told you the truth? That Arthur Conklin really was his father?”

My first reaction, knowing Jed, was to blurt, “Why would he lie?”

The big guy shrugged. “People have their reasons. Rich, famous people, it’s not exactly unusual when someone makes a claim to be related. They may even believe it. It happened with Howard Hughes, James Brown, JFK. Lots of famous and powerful people. I’ll bet, you go back far enough, it happened with the pharaohs.”

“Jed didn’t
want
to be related to that horrible man. He was trying to get away.”

“Have you ever been contacted by Conklin or his organization? Any of his so-called Rulers?”

Shivering in the cold, I shake my head.

“Something to think about,” he says before powering up the window.

Hours later that’s all I can think about.

Midnight finds me in the attic, going through boxes. Not in a frenzy, nothing like that. I’m being very cool and methodical. Some rational, robotic part of me has taken over and begun conducting a search for evidence that Jedediah
hadn’t invented his connection to the father he sometimes called Monster Man. Monster Man not because Jed had ever been physically abused, but because his father had such monstrous ideas about human behavior.

There will be no recent correspondence, no original birth certificate, of that I’m almost certain. Jed burned all of that, his little hoard of what he called “sick memorabilia,” before we moved upstate. Eventually he obtained a legal passport—he had to have one for his job—but the required birth certificate had been altered from Conklin to Corbin. And that document he had forged before we met, while he was still attending Rutgers, already planning for a complete break with his cold and domineering father and the devoted followers who called themselves Rulers. According to Jed, no contact had been attempted in years. Not from his father or any of the Rulers. Certainly not since Noah was born. So it’s not as if we had saved Christmas cards from dear old Dad.

Jed had wanted a clean break and part of it was giving up the things that linked him to his past. But he hadn’t thrown everything away, because shortly after he proposed, after confessing to be the son of Arthur Conklin,
the
Arthur Conklin, Jed had read me a letter the legendary man had written to him years before, when Jed was twelve years old. A letter that pretty much explained what happened between them, although the actual, final break didn’t come until several years later, after Jed’s mother died and his father remarried.

The letter certainly existed at the time, of this I am certain. I have a clear image of it in my mind. It was creased, well-worn, resided in a tattered, folded envelope.
For a long time Jed carried it in his wallet, as a reminder of why he’d made the break. That much I recall, Jed flapping it around as he read—come to think of it, he had it pretty much memorized—offering it as proof positive that cutting himself off from his famous father was something he had to do. Within the last few years he’d stopped carrying the letter. I know this because I bought him a nice ostrich skin wallet for his last birthday and watched as he transferred all his cards and cash, and I recall thinking to myself, he’s finally put away the letter, that’s good.

Unless he threw it away. But somehow I don’t think so. Somehow I think that if it ever came up with Noah, why he’d never met his grandfather, Jed would have wanted to show him, just as he’d shown me.

One o’clock in the morning comes and goes. Amazing how much stuff we’ve stowed in the attic. Boxes of canceled checks, bills, credit card receipts, tax forms. Tons of my own family junk, from broken dolls to obituary notices for both my parents, plus all the condolence cards, neatly sorted and bound with elastic bands. Which had, no surprise, disintegrated in the summer attic heat. The elastic bands, I mean, not the cards. Hallmark greetings live forever, apparently. Plus every sketch and coloring book Noah had ever made, from day care on.

I spend hours going through Noah’s drawings, reliving kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and so on. Right up to the last, furious drawings he’d made of a black plane falling from the sky. Not crashing—never crashing in Noah’s drawings—but falling like an angry leaf.

Eventually I get back to the task at hand, and just after dawn it finally reveals itself.

Jed had tucked it into one of the graphic novels he collected as a teen.
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
Of course, I should have known. Although he’d carried the letter as an adult, it dated from his boyhood, and so he’d stowed it away with something else that made a big impression on a twelve-year-old, namely Batman.

I hold the thing reverently, this tattered, wrinkled, finger-smudged envelope. Jedediah’s name and address is handwritten, inscribed in a firm hand. The boarding school where he had been sent against his mother’s wishes, and where he had been, for the first several months, miserable and homesick. Enough so that he had written to his imperious father begging to be allowed to come back home. This letter, the letter he saved as a reminder, is in response to that request.

That’s it. No formal closing, no
yours truly
or
sincerely yours
. But the handwritten signature is clear enough:
A. Conklin.
Not
Dad
or even the more formal
Father,
because terms of affection and familiarity are signs of mental weakness.

The manual he refers to is his bestselling book
The Rule of One.
All answers lie within. No ego at work there, eh? Jed almost always referred to the book itself in sarcastic or derogatory terms.
The Sociopath’s Bible,
or
How to Be Selfish and Justify Your Greed in 900 Hard-to-Read Pages.
Wisecracks covering the pain. He’d grin and roll his eyes, but deep down he meant it. He’d been a late child and an only child, born after his father had already become a reclusive cult figure, and in any case the old man believed that children were meant to be observed and perhaps, if they exhibited interesting behavior, studied. But not loved. Never loved. That had been made clear.

I have to fold that horrible, inhuman letter away quickly, store it back in the envelope before my tears dissolve the only physical proof I have that Jedediah didn’t lie to me about who he was and what he’d been through.

It’s a relief, really, to find that I can still cry.

Randall Shane might not consider the letter proof of anything because letters can be forged, but I know it’s real because I know where Jed hurt. Exactly where, and how to heal it, too.

You can’t fake a thing like that, not for ten years.

Not for ten seconds.

4. A Few Drops Of Blood