Chapter Four
It wasn’t a half hour later when the end of Norrah’s street was lit up like a ski resort at night. Reds and blues and cruiser high beams made daylight of the area, not to mention the light created by light-alls on stanchions provided by news teams. There were several news personalities standing before camera crews, and I would bet there were a dozen more news vans speeding up highway 18 at that very moment. I heard a helicopter arrive within that first hour. Every single soul employed in my precinct was present. The San Bernardino Sheriff was in transit. The boys-in-blue had done a good job pushing back the insanity of the reporters, and eventually made a barricade. There was a steady stream of emergency vehicles and cruisers funneling in. By ten all reporters were having to zoom in to get a shot of her house worth half a shit.
The kids were scared senseless. Their many questions went unanswered. All they had heard was that something was royally fucked up and yes it was a big deal. Nobody dared try to leave. More and more officers entered the house. I took charge of Norrah’s well-being and escorted her up to the third floor, led her to the bed and laid her down. She was all kinds of wrong in the head. I suppose I’d have been in the same dire state if my policing mind hadn’t taken over as my governing force. I was acting on some instinctive level. Part of me was the man who was newly dating Norrah, but a larger part of me was a cop who was caring for a woman so utterly distraught.
Dan Oliver is a sergeant and friend of mine. I asked him for a huge favor, to stand outside the bedroom and be considerate of who entered. Soon would come the time when we’d both have to give statements to detectives, but that time hadn’t yet arrived. I told Oliver the gist of it all, that it was seven days probably to the minute when the missing kids reappeared, and they have no knowledge of having left. Oliver looked at me like I was some kind of idiot.
In the back of my mind was a little nugget of knowledge that I clung to, that of the man who asked me the date. I debated myself whether I should tell anyone. It was a huge thing, I grasped that. But did I want it to be known to everyone just then? As I mentioned, cops act on instinct more times than not, and my visceral reaction was to keep it to myself for now, until I could dissect the matter at length, and get Norrah involved. I could tell my boss about him later. I could say it slipped my mind, that I was too upset by the phenomenon that is vanished people being un-vanished to have given the guy’s speculative words any consideration. Aaron had asked me what day it was, and I couldn’t conclude any differently, that he knew damn well that they had lapsed in time somehow. I’d have to get Aaron alone soon enough to ask him some questions, with Norrah at my side.
We were alone in her bedroom for twenty minutes when Norrah requested that I go downstairs to get her purse. I sent Oliver to get it, a white purse on the kitchen counter. A minute later I had the purse in hand. I could see dozens of my brethren down in the living room. Williams waved me down: I shook my head at him with an apologetic grin. I went inside the room and closed the door, went to the bed and turned on a second lamp. Norrah dug in her purse for her cellphone. I had a good idea who she was calling.
“Paul, it’s me, Norrah. You need to call me right away. Your friends have all been found. Call me. Now.”
She ended the call and looked over at me. “What do you think happened?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“I know you don’t know, but tell me what you think happened. Give me the possibilities, because I can’t think of any.”
“Neither can I. But I think one of the guys downstairs might have an opinion. Maybe.”
“Who?”
Her cellphone rang. She answered it, it was Paul. She put it on speaker-phone so I could hear.
“Where were they found?” Paul asked. He didn’t sound as shocked as I figured he would be.
“Downstairs.”
“What do you mean, downstairs?”
“I mean downstairs. They are downstairs. How many ways are there to interpret that?”
“You mean to tell me that they’re alive?” Now he sounded shocked. It was as though he half expected them to be found, only it would be their lifeless bodies discovered, not living people.
“Yes they’re alive.”
“Impossible.”
“Tell me about it. Why are you so surprised that they’re alive?” In her voice was accusation.
“I don’t know. I just figured. I heard what you heard, their screams.”
“Yeah, I suppose so,” she conceded. “You’d better come home.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, it just seems appropriate, don’t you think?”
“I’d rather not be stuck in the middle of this mess.”
“It’s too late for that,” she said crossly. “And why should I suffer through this shit alone? You’re more responsible for this than I am. Own up to it. At least nobody will question you as if you’re a possible murderer anymore. They’re safe, so just come home.”
“Nah, I’m going to stay here. See ya.” He hung up.
“You little shit!” She flung the phone on the bed.
I touched her knee, waited for her to look me in the eyes before saying a guy downstairs might know they had disappeared. I explained what had happened. She thought I should tell my boss, that it was no minor thing. I had mixed feelings about it. I said I would tell my supervisor, but only after we spoke with the guy first. I felt we deserved that much. Nobody deserved answers more than Norrah, after all she went through. She thought I’d better get his phone number, because once he left the house it was unlikely I’d get a second chance at questioning him. I asked if she’d be all right alone for a few minutes. She said hurry back and meant it.
I went down the first flight of stairs. Several of my co-workers approached me and asked what the hell happened. That was a question asked with the same high tone by everyone, and worded exactly the same. What the hell happened? I just shook my head at them. On the dining table were our plates, a casserole mostly intact. To think we ate there contentedly so recently ago that the lasagna would still be warm… it seemed like days ago that we were giggling at each other over dinner like a couple of horny teenagers. Jerry Bagwell—a rookie on the force—mentioned that Lieutenant Daniels was looking for me. I said I’d find him in a minute, and sped off down to the basement.
The kids down there looked miserable. Some looked annoyed. One girl was crying. A few sat on the bed, a few in the chairs, a couple sat on the carpeted floor with their backs to the wall, heads hung low. A couple kids sat on the stone hearth, and they were whispering to one another with brooding eyes. You wouldn’t imagine kids dressed so smartly could be so collectively put out. Every boy was adorned in a tux, girls wore dresses befitting of a prom. None wore masks. Poor kids must have been really confused. I felt for them, I really did. And they didn’t know the half of it, yet. They were surely being asked where they’d been over the last week, and that would make no sense to them. Well, it might make sense to one of them, the one I was seeking. The rest would be thinking back two weeks, not one. A couple cops were interviewing randomly chosen masqueraders. I went straight to the oldest looking one of the lot, Aaron, who was by himself, leaning a shoulder against the wall. I went to the back door and gestured at him with a nod to follow me. He did. Together he and I went out the back door; I closed it behind us.
I extended my hand and said, “I’m Jay.”
“Aaron,” he said and shook my hand. “Aaron Mendelssohn.”
Judging books by their covers is second-nature to cops. We’re the judge and jury. This guy was straight in the head, and a good guy. Either a good guy or great guy: it was too soon to peg him to that degree. We stared at one another for a moment. It was mostly dark, the single weak light trying its best to overcome the oppressive darkness of the winter night. It was well below freezing, our breaths balloons of vapor. It wasn’t long before his teeth began chattering. Most people who live in the mountains grow hardened to low temperatures. People who live in t
he flatlands can’t last five minutes in sub-freezing weather without chattering their teeth and rubbing their arms and asking if it’s normal for it to be this cold out.
“It’s the twenty-first of February,” I said. “Seven days after the party.” I gauged his reaction. It didn’t seem to surprise him in the least. He simply nodded. I had confirmed to him what he already knew, or at least suspected.
“Where were you during those seven days? Without food and water and shelter? What the fuck, man?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and it was a candid answer.
“But you do know you were… gone.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Dude, what happened? This stays between us, unless you don’t want it to. I got to know what happened, or what might have happened. You seem to be the only one who has any idea that you all disappeared. How do you know that, and why just you? Or maybe it’s not just you. Might others know?”
He sighed, looked away from me. “I shouldn’t have asked you that. They’re going to think I had something to do with this, aren’t they?”
“Like I said, this stays between you and me. For now, at least. Come on, man, tell me what you know.”
He rubbed his blue-white hands together, breathed on them, looked up at me. “How many kids did you count in there?”
“I didn’t count.”
“Well I did. There are twenty-three including myself. If it had been nine months instead of a week that we went missing, maybe there’d be twenty-four: a couple were actually screwing in the bathroom, shamelessly. Proudly. Can you believe that?”
“So there are twenty-three. What are you driving at?”
“I made it a point to count them earlier this evening.” I thought it was strange he would do so, but said nothing. He amended, “I mean earlier in the evening a week ago. There were twenty-five. I counted them, Jay.”
“Twenty five? Are you sure?”
He nodded. “Paul was the twenty-fourth.”
“Who was the twenty-fifth?”
He faced me more squarely, stepped closer to me, hugged tighter his shivering body, and in a hushed voice said, “That’s the question for the ages. The twenty-fifth is who pulled the strings here. He’s the one.”
“How do you know that? You don’t know who he is?”
Aaron didn’t answer. He looked over his shoulder at the closed door. “There’s no need to mention him, no reason to begin an investigation; we won’t see him again.”
“Buddy, what you’re telling me isn’t helping for shit. What aren’t you telling me?”
He shook his head once, blew into his hands.
“Could you at least give me a description of him?”
“Sure. That I can do. He was the only one masquerading as a man. That truly is a disguise, a facade.”
I stared stupidly at him. The back door opened. It was the Lieutenant. I said give me just a moment. When the door closed I asked Aaron for his phone number, and entered it into my phone, said I’d be calling him in the very near future.