Allen skipped most of the material Gina had assembled on Jamie’s disappearance, having seen it before. The police, he was interested to see, had looked at Mark O’Connell as a potential suspect, but the man’s alibi for that day had held. Their most active lead was a gray-haired woman in her late fifties who had been seen talking with Jamie, but since Alice was only forty-seven and had naturally brown hair, Allen did not think he needed to warn her that the police were closing in.
The final pages in Gina’s masterwork concerned the plane crash, and were frustratingly sparse. A statement from the airport employee who had helped O’Connell fuel the plane, another from a flight controller, and preliminary reports on the O’Connell finances and state of mind. Too early for the police to be thinking anything in particular, Allen knew. But they’d be looking.
He wondered if O’Connell had left everything to Jamie, or if someone else was now looking at a juicy inheritance. No doubt the police would be asking the same thing.
He turned over the last page, and looked at the leather diary.
Allen did not want to read Mark O’Connell’s journal of his son’s life. He knew it couldn’t be any worse than some of the tapes he’d watched, but the words would be before his eyes the next time he looked at Jamie, and he did not want to give O’Connell that small triumph.
However, he had to read it.
Just not in the same place where he would later try to sleep.
It was only when he saw the lake that it struck Allen: The park he’d chosen was the same site where Jamie’s towheaded classmate Able Shepherd had drowned. He stood on the grass, the O’Connell journal in his hand, and thought about going elsewhere. However, the air was cooler here and smelled of lake instead of freeway, and the summer-worn lawn was a place of comforting normality, thick with beach umbrellas, Frisbee players, and toddlers. Stupid to get back in the car and fight the roads to somewhere less pleasant, just because of past associations. He found a bench in the shade, and opened the diary.
The writing was precise and controlled, changing little over the twelve years from first entry to last. Only a handful of words had been corrected or crossed out, two of those in a contrasting color of ink, which suggested that O’Connell had been in the habit of rereading his earlier entries and making small changes or clarifications.
Disappointment permeated the early pages, in O’Connell’s sour assessment of his son’s chances, first of mere survival, then of relative normality. He was unhappy with the boy and furious at the huge, ever-mounting bills, but he viewed his wife’s part in the fiasco with a facile concern overlying a growing impatience. He couldn’t understand her affection for the disgusting object in the ICU, and wanted her to get on with building up her health for another try. He’d clearly written Jamie off as a failed attempt.
But then Jamie was released to come home. O’Connell wrote:
December 19th
The hospital has decided to let us take the boy home, they think he’ll live. It’s hard to believe anything that feeble can even breathe on its own. Paula is dancing around in happiness, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she fell apart before the baby did. She should be hospitalized herself. I don’t know how I’m going to keep on working with the two of them on my hands. Great Christmas this will be.
On Jamie’s third birthday, he wrote:
The boy cries all the time, and he never seems to settle to anything. His mother spoils him. She doesn’t even see a problem that he’s still in diapers.
When Jamie was five:
The boy is finally growing a little, so he looks less like a hairless monkey. He still clings to his mother more than is good for him, and cries when she leaves him at preschool. I take him now, whenever I can. He seems more in control of himself when she isn’t around. He still wets the bed at night. At Paula’s urging, I got him a dog, a dirty creature from the pound that I’m sure won’t last a month before I have to take it back. But I do my best for him. He is, after all, my son.
At six:
As I expected, the dog died, although I don’t suppose Jamie is to blame for anything but neglect. He let it out at night, a thing I expressly forbid, and something got to it. Paula is convinced it was one of those mountain lions they’ve been seeing in the hills in recent years, but I pointed out that a mountain lion would have eaten the thing whole, it was barely a mouthful. Personally, I think the mutt must have tangled with a real dog. Whatever it was, I made the boy bury it himself, to teach him what happens to a neglected animal.
And at the beginning of the new year:
I don’t know what’s up with the boy. Christmas vacation was one long round of crying and tantrums, and he disappeared three separate times, once for long enough that Paula wanted to call the police. I told her that we should go out driving and look for him, which was how we found him the last time, but as we were arguing about it we heard sirens. She was convinced that the boy had been hit by a car and took off running down the street, but it was only fire engines going to a fire at the school. Then she was absolutely certain that he’d somehow been inside his classroom and was burned to death, but just then I saw the boy watching the fire engines, and pointed him out to her. That was the end of his disappearing acts for that vacation.
In March:
James had a friend drown while they were on an outing today. He’s terribly upset, it’s hard to know what to do for him. It seems the other boy was allowed to wander off alone, and was playing at the edge of the lake when he must have slipped and hit his head, and drowned. James had been with him earlier that day, the teacher said, and seemed to have taken the death personally, as if he could have protected the boy. One of the parents who was around when they found the kid said James heard the news and kind of blurted out, “It’s my fault, it’s all my fault.” Fortunately, no one has taken any notice.
August:
I decided James would be old enough for hunting this year. He’s older than I was when I had my first gun, and I thought maybe having some time with me would counteract his mother’s influence. Seven years old and I found them baking cookies in the kitchen the other day, for Christ sake. So I bought him a .22 like the one I grew up with, to see what he made of it, and I have to admit the kid’s a natural. He hit the target his third try, and can’t wait to go back to the range. He’ll be ready, come pheasant season. And in a year or two, maybe he’ll grow enough to handle a deer rifle.
December 1, shortly after Jamie’s eighth birthday:
Paula killed herself two weeks ago. I still can’t believe it, can’t believe that she’d do it the way she did. Pills, even a razor in the bathtub, those wouldn’t have surprised me. That sounds hard, but she’s been threatening to kill herself for years. I’d never have thought she would put a shotgun to her mouth. And she chose a time when nobody would be home, so James found her. Poor kid, by the time I got back from Vegas he was practically catatonic, what with the shock and the drugs they gave him. Still, he seems to be taking it okay. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but I can understand that. His teacher called yesterday and asked me if I wasn’t concerned that the boy seemed so cheerful about his mother’s death, like she wanted him to sit in class crying or something, and I told her it was none of her business. He isn’t cheerful, not really. He’s just getting on with his life. Although I’ll admit I’m a little surprised he isn’t more down about it, he and his mother spent so much time together. I’m staying in town a while longer, but I’ll have to find a babysitter for when I have to be away. Maybe some kind of a full-time housekeeper who lives nearby.
Paula’s death was followed in short order by a new house, another school, and the hiring of Mrs. Mendez. Entries were spotty, every six to ten months, and brief, usually a June review of “the boy’s” progress in school that year or a winter description of one of their hunting trips. The airplane was purchased eighteen months after Paula’s death, when Jamie was nine and a half, and O’Connell found pleasure in his son’s interest in the new toy:
T
he kid’s clever, give him that. I had to go to Vegas on Saturday, and took him along, and he spent the whole time asking questions and practicing at the controls. Then when I had to meet with my guys to sign some papers, he asked if he could stay behind with the plane. The mechanic’s a good guy with kids of his own and he wasn’t too busy that morning, so I left the boy there for a couple of hours, and came back to find him in a set of overalls with grease to his eyeballs. Looked funny, I have to admit. The mechanic said the boy could get a job with him any day. Nice to know the kid has a future, even if it is at union wage.
There was nothing at the time of Jamie’s disappearance, although Allen supposed that could be a normal enough reaction on the part of a grieving parent. The final entry, the only one since May, was just four days old—written the same day Allen had received Rachel’s letter, a scant thirty-six hours before O’Connell’s plane had dropped off the radar. It read:
My son has been gone nearly three months. Not knowing what happened to him is the worst, a torment day and night. I must force myself to carry on. I’ve decided to fly to Mexico to stay with friends, and when I get back, I will start anew. The boy’s things are still in his room—maybe I will start by putting them in boxes, so they are not a constant reminder.
This will be the first time I’ve had the plane up in months. In fact, the last time I saw the thing, my son went with me to the airport, and played happily around it while I had a meeting with some associates. He got greasy then, too, just like he did in Vegas that time, so I had to make him scrub off before getting into the car.
At least my last memory of him is a happy one.
And that was it. When he reached the end, Allen flipped back and forth among the early pages for a minute, reflecting on what a peculiar document it was. The very fact of its existence had struck him as unlikely, given his impression of O’Connell. The journal’s sole subject was Jamie, a child the man had consistently either neglected or actively tormented. Yet the entries seemed designed to present the other side of their relationship, that of a busy man who was yet very concerned about his son’s well-being. It was almost as if O’Connell was aware of the criticisms the world would level against him, and he was writing for posterity. The words themselves seemed as stilted as the handwriting, highly self-conscious: Referring to business contacts as “associates” didn’t strike Allen as the sort of thing a person would do in a journal meant for himself alone. And if he hadn’t known what went on inside the O’Connell house, he would have thought that Mark O’Connell’s protestations of affection were just a bit cautious. Almost, he thought, as if the man was nervous around his son.
It was an odd thought.
He stared unseeing at the busy lake, turning the implications over in his mind, while the park filled with its evening crowd. When the first smell of charcoal smoke hit the air, Allen looked at his watch, startled: nearly five, and he’d told Alice he’d call her at four.
He trotted toward the parking area and located a pay phone near the entrance kiosk.
“Alice?”
“I thought something had happened to you,” her voice said in his ear, sounding more worried than he’d have expected.
“Did you hear the news?”
“About the plane crash? Yes.”
“What do you want to do?”
“If the father’s gone, the boy needs to come back.”
“I agree, but there’s a lot here I don’t understand. Could we leave it a day or two, until we’re sure?”
“What’s not to understand? The man’s plane went into the sea.”
“And if he turns out to have miraculously escaped, we’d be in a hell of a place.”
“You think that’s likely?”
“I just want to be certain. Alice, the guy’s a con man.”
“You think the father faked his own death?”
When put as starkly as that, Allen had to admit that short-timer’s jitters were a more likely explanation for his suspicions. “I know it’s far-fetched. I’m probably seeing things.”
“What sort of things?”
He was not about to go into the subtle overtones of the O’Connell diary over the phone. “It just occurred to me that maybe if a con man knew that the cops were closing in on his scam, he might . . . Oh, hell, I don’t know, Alice. Except that you and I need to go over some of this stuff together.”
“I can be down there tonight.”
“No, I’ll come back. I think I’m about finished here, anyway. Give me ’til Sunday.”
“If you’re sure?”
“I’m not sure of anything.”
“What about calling our friends on the farm?” Rachel and Pete Johnson, and through them, Jamie. Yes, that was the question. Allen rubbed his face as if he could scrub away his confusion.
“You know, I really think we ought to wait to break the news until you and I have put our heads together. It’s unlikely that there would be mention of his father’s . . . presumed death on the national news.”
“We can hope.”
“Yeah. Okay, then. See you Sunday.”
Allen got into the car and gravitated back to his motel room, where it was at least cool and relatively quiet, to brood over all the oddities piling up around the case of Jamie O’Connell. He had come to San Jose merely to look into O’Connell’s whereabouts, either to reassure Jamie that the mystery figure who had briefly abducted little Sally Johnson could not have been his father, or else to find cause to remove him from the Johnson house immediately. Instead of that, all Allen had found was uncertainty and contradiction, even concerning things he’d taken for granted.
He couldn’t get the reactions of Gina and Karin Rao out of his mind: two so different women, both of them all too ready to label Jamie as dangerous. How could Karin not like the boy in her care? Why would Gina assume that someone ought to be watching him closely? Allen found that he was pacing the worn motel carpet, four steps to the door, then back to the desk; he forced his legs to stop their restless movement and sat down in front of the desk, where the boxed Rings trilogy rested beside his laptop. Karin Rao’s gift was as much of a conundrum as the boy she had given it to.
Absently, he picked up the case and let the three books slide out into his left hand, laying the box aside and opening volume one to its title page. Nothing there; no teacher’s dedication inside the cover, just the books, a wordless gift that Jamie had interpreted as love. Damn the woman, anyway. Allen slid the first book back into its box and picked up the remaining two, but in the process of trying to thread the covers into their snug holder, he saw something sticking out from the upper edge of the third volume. He held the book’s spine and gave it a sharp shake: A sheet of paper, folded into quarters, dropped onto his knees and then to the floor. He laid the books on the desk and picked up the piece of paper, unfolding it.
He wasn’t sure what he expected to see. A woman’s handwriting, perhaps—a long-treasured message from Paula O’Connell, hidden by her son in one place he might reasonably hope that his father would not find it. Or a secret letter packed with anger, or a childish last will and testament, or the instructions for a computer game, or a gynecological drawing, or—
Almost anything but what it was.
It looked to be a printout from an undisclosed Web site. At the top of the sheet, two partial sentences continued from some previous page, but an inch and a half down from the upper edge stood a phrase in bold, below which was a crude mechanical sketch and a list beginning with the number “1.” Allen started to skim the list of terse instructions, smiling at this latest illustration of the gaming industry’s ever more realistic plots and machinations. This story line seemed to involve sabotage, he decided, but as he read on, it dawned on him that this was no mere electronic fantasy. The smile began to flake off his face like dried paint, revealing an expression of disbelief shading into horror.
This looked like no game Allen had ever seen.
It looked like no game at all.
Hidden within
one of Jamie O’Connell’s meager possessions, in a book given him by one of the few adults who had ever shown him kindness, the boy had secreted a printout, a thing that appeared to have come from some sort of terrorist Web site. (Christ, a small part of Allen’s mind said beneath the roaring sensation that was beginning to build in his ears; is there anything you can’t find online?)
The heading in bold read:
TEN WAYS TO MAKE A SMALL PLANECRASH AFTER TAKEOFF.
BOOK FOUR
Man and Boy
Chapter 28
A small white plane, riding the blue air above the calm Pacific Ocean, flashed and pattered down to the water; as if in echo, a flash and the sensation of shattering glass jolted through Allen’s mind, and he was twenty years old again, skin crawling with prickly heat and leech bites, the beat of helicopters throbbing through his veins.
“I am your mama and your papa,” chanted Brennan. “Let’s go kill us some gooks.” The pounding syncopation of the approaching Hueys drowned out the actual words, but none of the platoon needed to hear Brenda, because the lieutenant used the same words at the outset of every patrol. They tossed their smokes and shouldered their packs, lining up to climb through the chopper doors. Allen wedged himself against his squad-mates and wrapped his arms around his rifle, sweltering in silence.
He didn’t think about the heat, or the upcoming patrol, or anything much. He’d found it was much easier not to think, better just to keep on keeping on. He was, however, fully aware that Brennan was not in the Huey with him. The freedom from that blue-eyed gaze lifted his burden enough that his mind began to turn over, dully.