The Captive, page 2
The porch light went on after he had pressed the door buzzer. The door opened, revealing a bulky, square faced man in a rumpled white shirt who stood blocking the opening. He looked like a disheveled palace guard who had not had time to put on his uniform coat. He glared at the stranger from beneath heavy, dark brows that met over his nose.
"Hi. You're Mr. Hegel?"
"Yeah. But if you're selling something, I don't -"
"No." The stranger laughed in a disarming way. "I'm only after some information about my lost nephew." He paused for the big man to catch up with the situation and then went on. "Maybe you remember him, a six year old boy, brown hair, skinny, named Robert Lee Burney?"
"Little Robert? Yeah, the kid that ran away from my sister-in-law's house almost a year ago." The big man allowed the door to swing wider and took a step back as if he had been accused of something.
"Right. That's who I'm looking for. The sheriff of Cassius County said you folks might be able to help."
"Renee," the square faced man called over his shoulder, not taking his eyes from the stranger's face. Then, as he heard his wife's footsteps, he seemed more certaini of himself, as if regaining his place in the world. "Renee, this man wants to know something about Little Robert." He stepped back and said, in what sounded like an imitation of civility, "Won't you come in, Mister, ah -"
"Golden, Barry Golden. Yes, thank you." Barry stepped past the big man, handing him his hat which he placed carefully on a hall table. "And you are Renee," Barry said, aware that he was being a bit forward in so quickly addressing her.
She had perfectly black, glossy hair, and the contrast with the whiteness of her skin was startling. She was wearing what he at first took to be some kind of pajamas, but later realized was an oriental style lounging suit with flared trousers and a tight fitting smock embroidered with a large dragon. It became her beautifully. She had a calm, impassive expression, as if any powerful emotions she might possess had withdrawn to a different world. But when she spoke, her dark brown eyes looked straight into his, and he felt rather than saw there a passionate desperation.
"Please come in, Mr. Golden," she said, holding out her hand. "We'll help you if we can."
He felt his heart hitting his ribs heavily as he took her hand by way of greeting, holding it in his as if it were a gift.
"Mrs. Hegel, I'm sorry to bother you and your family, but I'd like to think that I've done everything I could to clear up the mystery. I hope you don't mind."
"Not at all," she said, looking down at her hand that Barry still held and flushing slightly.
Her husband stepped almost between them, looming and urging them into the small living room.
"We didn't really know Little Robert," Renee said, turning and walking ahead of the two men. "He lived with my mother and then my sister in Cassius." Her voice trailed off as she smiled back at him.
"Robert Burney is, or was, my nephew," Barry said. "My brother's little boy."
Her mouth was like her sister's, the same enticing curve with the upturned corners. He stayed at her shoulder as they walked to the sofa in the living room. The place looked uncomfortable, chairs too modern and square, hard looking backs too low and seats too long. Over the cheap sofa was an ugly modern painting full of sharp noses and doubled eyes that one could not avoid looking at unless one sat directly under it. She sat on one end of the sofa, and Barry sat with a decent distance between them, hearing the sharp intake of her husband's breath behind him as he stopped at the couch. Hegel turned so abruptly behind them that his shoe squeaked on the polished floor, and he walked across to the chair by the window that faced the couch. His square face was a combination of grudging acceptance and what appeared to be poorly concealed hatred of anything outside his normal routine. Perhaps Barry's looks did not please him. He seemed always on the edge of the chair, his arms hanging at his sides as if he were getting ready to leap. Barry ignored him after a brief look, directing his comments to Renee, but the husband's presence remained in the corner of his vision like an ominous block of stone balanced on a height.
"Was that you I heard singing as I came down the street?" Barry asked her.
She smiled, her lips parting slightly so that he shivered, finding himself almost falling into a daze watching her face as she spoke. "'The Animal Fair'?" she said.
"Yes, something about an unfortunate monkey and an elephant."
"It's very popular," she smiled. "Surely you've heard it. I sang it for Mina's bedtime song."
Barry made an effort to concentrate on his supposed purpose, for her low voice was as exciting to him as the clean odor of her hair, the white of her teeth glimpsed between her lips, the smooth, alive pressure of her hand in his.
"Mina is our daughter. She is five, and she loves all sorts of animals."
"Are you saying that the little boy, Robert Burney, was a relative of yours?" Hegel said in a cracked voice. He cleared his throat as if that speech contained the greatest number of words he had spoken for weeks.
"Yes. His parents, my brother and his wife, were killed last year, and Robert disappeared at the same time." Barry looked troubled. "We thought they had all been killed together. Natural enough to think so under the circumstances. They -"
"You ought to talk to my wife's sister," Hegel said sourly. "She kept the boy for a couple of months last summer. We don't know much about it."
Barry felt Renee's anger at her husband's rudeness, but he faced the man. "Yes, I realize that," he said, looking down as if in apology. "But the sheriff down there said that things weren't exactly ... uh, he said it was sort of a touchy subject." Barry paused, looking to the woman for help. She responded at once.
"The sheriff has known our family for years. He's very kind, and my mother, well, did you know that while your little nephew was staying with my parents their home was entered by some vagrants and my father was killed?" She paused, wondering how to fill in so much of that strange story. "It was such a terrible time. Mother and Dad were very close, and she really couldn't accept some things about the tragedy. We were all so shaken by it, but it was strange to hear her talk later about what happened. And my sister Vaire actually said she had seen it." Renee stopped, looking across to her husband for help. He said nothing, keeping his eyes on the other man as if he were memorizing his face.
"It?" Barry said. "What happened to the little boy?"
"Oh he was all right. He disappeared for a few days, and they thought the animal had carried him off, but he said he had been hiding in the barn." She stopped again, but this time she did not look at her husband.
"Yes, the story about the animal was pretty odd, I thought," Barry said. "I got on the trail of my lost nephew from a news clipping a friend gave me. He, I mean the friend, clips for a news service in Albuquerque where I used to live, and he called me one night with this story from the Grand Rapids Examiner about a boy named Robert Burney. We had thought he was dead." Watching Renee's face, he saw the chance to help her by giving her more time with his own side of the story.
"Let me fill in my own background a bit. I'm trying to be a free-lance writer, live in the Southwest, mostly Phoenix now, and my brother and his wife were at a dig in Guatemala, a Mayan ruin there. He was finishing his graduate work in archeology at the University of New Mexico, and his wife and little boy had gone down to the dig to be with him. They wrote such fascinating letters about the people and their ancestors. They had found a small lake full of treasures, they thought, and were excavating what they believed was a pre-Mayan site, and then, May sixth of last year there was an earthquake. It wasn't a bad quake as those things go in Central America, but it opened a fissure into the lake that flooded the whole excavation in a matter of seconds, according to the report. My brother and his wife were both drowned, and I had assumed their little boy with them. I went down there." Barry stopped and put his hand to his face, surprised to find his eyes filled with tears.
"How terrible," Renee murmured.
"Guatemala?" said the husband, clearing his throat again. "The little boy came all the way from Guatemala?"
"Apparently," Barry said, using his handkerchief. Far back in his mind he felt astonishment at this uprush of emotion. Was he so caught up in his own lies that he believed them? "I guess we'll never know how he made it all that way up here, if it really was my brother's boy who was here. I went down to Xachitito, the nearest village to where it happened, and they couldn't find the native woman who had been caring for the boy. I assumed then that she and the boy had been killed also, although some of the bodies were never found. The excavation had caved in badly and was part of the lake by that time. We thought they were down there somewhere. It's almost supernatural to think the boy would turn up here." He stopped again, fixing his attention on the woman sitting next to him, pulling together his feelings again from that unaccountable lapse into sorrow - as if it were all true, this fabrication he was using as an excuse to get back into the family circle again. Something was amused far down inside him, amused to find him caught up in his own lies.
"Supernatural," Renee said. "That's what Mother thinks." She was about to go on when Hegel interrupted again.
"How come his name's Burney and yours is Golden," the big man said, leaning forward.
Barry was aware of a sudden tension from Renee, but he spoke easily. "We, I mean Leonard and I, had the same mother and father, but our mother married again after our father died. I took his name, Golden. Leonard kept our real father's name, which was Burney." He smiled innocently.
"Bill," Renee said, her voice tight and careful, "would you get us something to drink? Mr. Golden, would you care for something, wine? a whiskey?"
"A glass of wine would be great, thanks," Barry said.
The husband heaved himself out of the chair and almost stomped from the room. Barry wondered if he had entered in the midst of an argument, or if the man was habitually so ill at ease, almost surly in the presence of a stranger. Renee had taken a cigarette out and was lighting it. He could not offer a light, since the clothes he had stolen had no lighter or matches in them. He watched her frankly as she lit the cigarette, noting the sleek satin of the oriental smock glisten like water as she moved. She was fascinating to him, perhaps as much so as her sister had been to the little boy, but then that was a different life, not something he even remembered directly.
"Do you believe in the supernatural?" she said suddenly, startling him.
He smiled. It was so naive a question that he was at once drawn to her innocence, wanting to take her hands as if she were a child, say to her, my dear lovely woman, what have you asked of this creature sitting beside you, this young man who is the visible extension of a monster who would petrify you with fright? Can you really suppose the universe is limited to the range of your own senses? But he put on a thoughtful frown.
"You mean ghosts, that sort of thing? I'm not at all sure that I don't," he said with a smile at the end of it, as if discovering his own thoughts suddenly to himself.
"I'm trying to think of a way, Mr. Golden," she said, "to tell you what you are going to run into when you meet my mother and my sister." She smoked nervously, in little sips, with a lot of tapping of the cigarette on the ashtray, and waving the smoke away as if she didn't like it even though she was responsible for it. "They seem to believe that the little boy, your nephew, was some sort of supernatural, um, thing."
She stopped and squashed the cigarette in the ashtray angrily. Between her brows were two vertical marks, which he watched, fascinated by the subtle change they wrought in her calm expression.
"In my work, Mrs. Hegel, I do a lot of researching in newspaper morgues, and there are plenty of unexplained happenings. Of course, sometimes they are just lousy reporting or hoaxes or hysterical people. But you say your family, who took my nephew in and kept him for, what? two or three months? thought he was a ghost or something?" He pushed his hand through his thick blond hair as if amazed.
"I'm so, I mean it's not an easy thing to talk about, really," she said. In her need to find some way of explaining it, she reached out one hand and gently touched the back of Barry's right hand where it rested on his knee. The touch sent an electric thrill through him, although she was so caught up in her attempt to articulate the situation that she hardly noticed she had touched him. He wanted to put his palm very softly against that white cheek, press the fingers back into the black hair. He caught himself and carefully repressed the rising awareness of that force inside himself.
"I guess there's no way but to tell you what they said."
At that moment her husband returned, placed a glass of red wine before Barry on the low table, handed a glass of whiskey and water to Renee and carried his own drink, which appeared to be straight whiskey with ice, back to his chair by the window. His presence seemed to make things harder for the woman. She looked once at her husband as she took a sip of the drink, but Barry could detect no expression as she looked at him, almost a controlled absence of expression. Her face became more determined as she turned to Barry again.
"They thought, at least my mother thought, that the little boy was really a supernatural monster, an incarnation of evil." She picked up her glass and held it half way to her lips, lost for the moment in the strangeness of that time.
Barry picked up his own glass and held it in a similar fashion, sipping from it and watching Renee's face to see if she would respond to the mirrored position. It was a pleasant game, but she did not notice. And then he answered.
"The boy was barely six, I think. Let's see, he would have been six last June. And your mother thought ...?" He hesitated, looking at Renee and then across at her husband, who sat with his legs wide apart, elbows on his knees, studying them with his brow furrowed.
"Funny business," the dour man said, looking at Barry as if he were the one engaged in it. "I never believed that story about the stray dog that mangled those men. The one man died, and the other one can't walk. If that was a dog, it was a monstrous big one."
Barry looked across at the frowning man with some attention. He was not the usual sort of fool, even though he was something of a boor.
"Do you think too that my nephew is some kind of supernatural thing?"
Hegel shook his head. "Nothing ghostly about those injuries, or my father-in-law's getting shot either. But it's not the simple minded thing Walter says it is."
"Walter?"
"My sister's husband," Renee said. "Mr. Golden, I'm afraid we are beginning to seem ..."
"Slap-happy." said Bill Hegel, drinking down the whiskey in his glass.
Renee looked at her husband with such plain hatred that Barry saw at least one cause for his moroseness. "It's not funny, Billy," she said.
"I didn't say it was," he said, getting up.
"You're having another drink?" Renee said to him with a sharp tone.
"Join me?" he said, passing beside the sofa.
"No thanks," she said, very definite.
There was an embarrassing hiatus for the space of two breaths. Barry was unsure whether the conversation would go on or if there would be a marital scene, but the big man walked on out of the room and could be heard making clinking noises in the kitchen. Renee looked back at Barry, her face assuming again an unruffled coolness.
"My sister and my mother are neither of them superstitious fanatics, or believers in spirits or anything like that." She looked down and then met his eyes again. "At least my mother wasn't before my father was killed. Now, I don't know. Since the little boy ran away, she has felt even more sure that he was some kind of demon. She had brought in a spiritualist who hypnotized the boy one evening at Vaire and Walter's house, and the man claimed he had brought out the demon and that it had clawed him. He did have some scratches on his hands, but Walter said he did it himself. It was pretty awful."
Listening to her, Barry allowed the memory that drifted up to him from the Beast's own recollection to play through his mind, so that he hardly noticed Bill Hegel enter the room and sit down again with another drink in his hand.
"And then the boy ran away. Vaire had the police out all over Michigan looking for him but he was gone, vanished. Mother has been just impossible on the subject since then. I tried once to talk with her. Well, to give you an idea, when our grandmother Stumway took in a young boy down in Illinois, a boy about thirteen who asked her for work and a place to stay, she let him live in her house while he went to school. Mother sent my grandmother a magic amulet to ward off evil in case that poor boy was a demon in disguise. She wears one herself around her neck."
"I understand this is pretty hard for you to talk about," Barry said sympathetically.
"Pretty damn tough on the kids, I'd say," Bill put in.
"Your mother still thinks my nephew was a demon?" Barry said.
"I suppose so. It's been months since I've seen her. She's on the farm again with old John who used to help Dad years ago, and they're trying to run it. Vaire won't even talk about it because Walter makes such a fuss whenever she tries to say anything." She turned and looked across at her husband and said, "Walter is a person with strong opinions."
"He's a dope is what he is," Bill said, his drink half gone.
"He's a nice guy," Renee said quickly, "and Vaire and he have a good home, but he won't think about some things. Mr. Golden, this isn't helping you, is it?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact it is," Barry said gallantly, smiling and taking the chance to look straight into her eyes for a long look. He was rewarded this time by her eyes faltering and a flush creeping into her cheeks.
"It's all been strange since Leonard and Caroline died. I don't know if you get what I mean, but their deaths have changed things. It's not the same world it was a year or so ago. I had never thought of Leonard dying. He was always there. We had no other family, and I haven't married. He and I were the family, and it's not the same world without him. I feel like it couldn't really have happened." Barry found himself genuinely moved again and wiped the corner of one eye. He took another sip of wine, glancing up, not directly at Renee but catching her look of intense compassion. He felt a warmth rising inside him at this first real sign of communication. She was still looking at him sadly when he looked into her eyes again. This time they did not falter.
