‘If you’ve all this evidence, then why speak to me at all? I can see why you came to Carvel – you wanted to see me in my summer setting; and then seeing me in my uniform would give you perspective.
‘But why bring me here today? You’re not armed. I could smash that window right now, call out. You know they might kill you?’
Jake asked, ‘Do I strike you as a man who takes unnecessary risks?’
‘No.’
‘So, why do you suppose I brought you up here?’
‘I don’t know, other than to gloat about knowing the secret.’
Jake got up and paced around,
‘And risk my life just to “gloat over” you? Of course not. Of course that’s not the reason you’re here today. It’s because, for all of my enquiries, for all that I can tape and photograph, what would the world believe I have here? A sad tale of two children’s deaths? A few blurred snapshots of men in black jackets? Rumours of a doctored accident report?
‘And all linked together by a fairy story about a strange illness, backed up with a couple of mad-people’s affidavits. A classic case of cabin fever if ever there was one, brought to you by the people up the mountain.
‘That could be enough to whip up an Internet storm, to get a local news crew buzzing, to bring a few other investigators here next winter, and make things mighty hard to keep a lid on. Enough to bring an end it to maybe, if not next winter then one or two or three or four along the line.
‘But let’s make a break, Toby. Let’s not let this drag on, with your people digging ever-deeper holes for themselves. Lies upon denials, until the whole thing is so sordid. Let’s make this the last.’
‘So what do we do?’
Jake answered thoughtfully,
‘While I’ve been up here in this room these recent weeks, I’ve made a list of what would kill the secret stone dead. The first thing would be proof of what happened to the boys in the faked crash. But Sarah already tells me that you keep no paperwork?’
‘She’s right. It’s all in the memory.’
‘It must be exhausting.’
‘You don’t know the half of it.’
‘But can you think of anything at all we can use?’
‘I might have to disappoint you.’
‘You’re not doing that, Toby. You’re doing great. Now, keep it up.’ Jake flicked through a notebook, looking for his cues, ‘What about the Doctor, though? He has records?’
Toby had to think. Before answering,
‘The Doctor and the Sheriff and the Mayor are scrupulous, and good at this stuff now. There won’t be a true report buried somewhere before a fake one is created. They’ll fake it the first time, make it clean and neat and with the right docket numbers. The Doctor isn’t arm-twisted into this, he’s there from the start. He’ll keep them on the slab until the Sheriff’s Office tell him what to write.’
Toby felt guilty talking of his friend that way; but none of them were innocent, not even he. This was a personal betrayal, but no worse that Toby’s betrayal of his own duties. And he told himself that it was for the town’s good.
Jake pondered, ‘Hmm, what you’ve told me confirms my feeling that we’ll never find written proof. Which leaves us with verbal testimony. Yet, the people who know will never tell, and I daren’t approach them – I took risk enough with you. Though that risk paid off, I think?’ Jake smiled, and Toby raised a weak one in return.
‘So, where does that leave us?’ Toby knew he wasn’t off the hook yet. Jake continued,
‘Yes. As I say, I might not be able to play Nancy Drew on this one. It might be beyond me – even a researcher this long-in-the-tooth knows his limits. But there may be another way of breaking the secret, of stopping the winters.
‘And that would be the testimony, not of an actual murderer or conspirator in those murders – we’ll never get that – but of a true insider nonetheless. One who wore the badge, who knew the names, the history, could go through the whole season from the first town meeting to the day the roads re-opened. The testimony of someone young, attractive, bright, professionally successful and generally respected, a member of the modern world who presents themselves well.’
Jake flashed a smile, ‘Now, does that sound to you like anyone we know?’
Chapter 32 – Toby’s Mission
‘Right.’ If ever a word could also be a groan, it was that one.
Toby slumped; but Jake enthused,
‘This wouldn’t be a mother wracked with grief and looking for someone to blame. Or a juvenile shoplifter with a beef against the Sheriff’s Office. This would be someone Joe and Jane Public would hang on every word of.
‘So no, Toby. You’re not going to go outside and call your colleagues. Not because you know what they’d do to me, although I know you wouldn’t want that. But because I know you hate it, even more than the rest of us.’
Jake stood up and put his hand on Toby’s shaking shoulder,
‘If there’s a break, let’s make it a clean one. Let’s save those kids another winter.’
Jake bid Toby to ‘Take a breather’, and disappeared to bring fresh drinks. When he reappeared on the staircase, he stated quickly, as if to pre-empt any forming questions,
‘We’ll institute a series of meetings. We’ll meet here, as it’s easier for you to move than I. What time of day would you say?’
‘The dead of night. What days?’
‘Any you like – I’m here all winter.’
But Toby was still confused, and for some reason chose that moment as the one to think he might start crying. Barely holding that urge back, he asked,
‘But why now?’
‘Because I had to take the risk of speaking to you sometime, and winter’s half-over. I’ve got a lot of photographs now, I can afford to concentrate on you.’
‘No, I mean why wait till winter? We’d have had all the time in the world to talk in Carvel.’
‘And would it have been the same Toby I was speaking to there? You’d have been as dumbstruck as Sheriff Thornton was when I telephoned him in the middle of summer. You’d have denied it. I needed you in uniform, and you know it.’
And Toby did know it. He thought of Sheriff Thornton, happy in his role as the custodian of Stove summer season – climbers, campers, sightseers coming to enjoy the mountain views. And to have that punctured by a call out of the blue asking about dead teenagers... In his mind’s eye, Toby saw the man’s face drop; and he pitied him.
Jake knocked back his second drink, and stood up,
‘Well, you’ve five minutes of your hour left. After that, I’ll meet you here at midnight. And we can’t risk you coming here any time that isn’t necessary. If there’s an alarm, then leave a note for Sarah at the Sheriff’s Office, about anything innocuous but marked for her attention. She’ll come and find you. But don’t try any spy stuff, no code words or cryptic messages. Just one short note.’
Toby didn’t get up. Instead he asked,
‘But Jake...’
‘Yes?’
‘What will happen to us?’
‘You and me?’
‘No, I mean the Deputies. The town.’
Jake sat back down and answered softly,
‘Well, what do you think will happen, buddy? These are criminal acts.’
Toby was silent. Jake went on,
‘And if there’s hell to pay, then we’ll turn our interviews in as State Evidence. You’ll have an easier ride.’
It was all sinking in for Toby,
‘And what of the others? What of Eddy, with his family? What of Fitch and his wife?’
‘What can we possibly do for them, Toby? It won’t be in our hands.’
‘But it will be! We can give them a break, a chance to get away, to start again and forget about the sickness.’
Jake chose his words carefully, ‘But that’s just it, Toby.’
‘What is?’
‘Well, if we let them get away, then... what redress?’
‘Re
dress? They’ll have this on their conscience for the rest of their lives.’
There ended Jake’s understanding. Still standing, he gasped before delivering an oration,
‘That’s the trouble with you guys in these closed systems. You make up your own rules. And when you’ve gone too far, you decide if you feel punished enough. There’s no justice, no authority greater than yourself.’
‘The town are our authority.’
‘The town are in your hand. They’re terrified.’
‘They want us here.’
‘Why are you arguing this, Toby? You know you’re on my side.’
But Toby couldn’t bring himself to face what Jake was saying. It was all too much. He suddenly felt that the town, and the sickness, and the Winter Restrictions, and the Sheriff’s Office, were all so deeply imbedded in himself, actually built into his body, that to tear them out would pull his very essence apart, that there wouldn’t be enough of him left to survive.
Jake only watched his new partner writhe in anguish, before saying thoughtfully, and a little regretfully,
‘It makes no difference. It makes no difference if you can face up to it or not. All that matters is that you go through with the things I’ve asked you to do. And then you can choose if you want to go the same way as the rest of your town.
‘Come now. We’re pushing time.’
Chapter 33 – Old Stories
Jake moved for the stairs again, and Toby followed. As he did so, Toby asked,
‘When did you first learn it?’
‘The secret of the sickness? From Sarah.’ Jake paused at the top of the stairs, then seemed to decide they weren’t leaving at that moment after all, as he settled in to tell the tale,
‘I knew I wouldn’t reach the victim’s families through Sheriff Thornton, so had to find them out myself. I wrote letters to both addresses given in the accident report. I couldn’t risk being open about it, so sent important-looking letters “To the Family of...” each victim, purporting to be from a firm of lawyers, and alluding to possible outstanding compensation payments as a result of the auto wreck.
‘Why was I so dishonest? I don’t know exactly. I hoped they might be more likely to get back to me directly if there was the lure of a reward, and not tell the Sheriff’s Office or whoever.
‘In the end, neither letter was replied to. So I sent follow-ups, and this smoked them out. The ex-neighbour of the Richters caught the mailman in time, to tell him that the only family Tommy Richter had left in town was his Aunt Sarah, who he promptly went around and gave the letter to. She phoned me that night.
‘That would have been that, you know, had Sarah only told me to sling my hook, or stop intruding in her grief, or any of the other things the Sheriff had said I was doing when I rang him. Instead, she was dead-set to tell me all of it over the phone. It was all I could do to have her hold on till I could meet her in person. I told her who I really was, and she said good, that she’d guessed as much, and that a child wouldn’t have been fooled by my letter.’
Jake laughed, ‘And she went on to tell me everything, Toby. Absolutely everything.’
Toby thought that fact might take a while to sink in. Jake went on,
‘As Sarah related her story, I knew it to be as true a tale of abuse as any I had heard. Everything from her own childhood winters, kept shuttered in that School for Girls. All the way through to the covered-up death of her nephew, the bullying of his parents, and they not even being allowed the dignity of a true verdict and an honest burial for their son. Not to mention the mangling of his corpse in an auto wreck.
‘She told me of the sickness and the methods for containing it. It fitted in with the Sheriff’s nervousness over the road accident, and why he was so keen to control its investigation.
‘It was too much to take in at first.’ Jake paused and shook his head. ‘You’ve had your whole life to learn about it, Toby – it took me a week to believe it was real.’
Toby guessed that Jake was holding back a genuine hatred of the Stove Sheriff’s Office, and its representative in the room. Yet Jake only said,
‘It also means that you were wrong about me not being here before. I was, this summer, but only for a day and a night to meet Sarah; and even that scared me to death. But by then it was as clear as water – your town was to be my working life, for however long it took and however much it cost me. Especially when I saw how scared Sarah was. She could have broken down at any point in the intervening years – I’m only glad she held on for me.’
Jake reflected, ‘You know, I’ve wondered what might have become of her, had she cracked before, started blabbing.’
Toby had little time left for umbrage, yet he gathered enough affront to ask,
‘You’re saying that we would... silence... a bereaved woman?’
‘Don’t tell me that the people of this town are all as strong as yourself, Toby. That no one’s ever come close to breaking. What do you do with them?’
‘For God’s sake, I’ve never...’ and then Toby paused, for he had once silenced a doubter. Or at least he had seen it done. Nor had it been a woman, but a townsman, a storekeeper in the main street, a friend of his father during his days as a Deputy.
Toby had been eighteen, his first winter free of the sickness, his first winter not under the club. He had been shadowing his father, and a younger meaner Sheriff Thornton, still not long in the job and eager to impose himself.
The storekeeper’s crime had been to break down at the sight of his son clubbed so hard that Doctor Lassiter had spent the whole next day repairing his eye socket. ‘No more,’ the man had cried. ‘No more for my boy’.
That night he somehow managed to kidnap his medicated son from the clinic, and also his sleeping daughter from the School for Girls. He had put both into a tyre-chained station wagon, when the Sheriff and his men arrived to place him under house arrest.
Toby had been there when they’d bullied and cajoled this man, slashed his tires, smashed his lights out, kept a sentry outside his house. The next day, the stupid guard had woken to the sound of wood cracking, and entered to the sight of the storekeeper swinging from the beam across the sitting room ceiling in the flat above the shop. His daughter didn’t leave the School for Girls with her classmates that spring. She became a year-round boarder, paid for by the town.
Toby had been on the scene that morning with the other Deputies, and had seen the body before his father could hold him back. His father then decided that his son was old enough to see it, to understand it, especially with the new role he was being trained for,
‘This is why we do it,’ he explained to his son. ‘This is why we have to be so tough.’
‘“No room for sentiment.”’ Toby quoted him aloud now, in mock booming tones. ‘“Gives people room for acting irrationally. We’re Deputies, son. If we can’t keep our heads, then the town will lose theirs.”’
Jake let these words echo long after they were silent, before he continued,
‘So yes, to answer your question, calling Sarah was my serendipitous moment. At that point I knew I’d found a townsperson all about ready to crack and let her insides flow into my tape recorder. I knew from then on that there’d be something. Maybe a novelisation written off as fiction, or a web log purporting to be fact, but something.’ He leaned in towards Toby, ‘You knew it couldn’t go on forever?’
Toby wasn’t sure if he’d ever dared to think of it ending – the terror of the town’s secret being revealed was too big to consciously contemplate. Yet, in the room with Jake, the matter could finally be raised by another person and his unconscious could respond.
‘Didn’t want it to.’ mumbled Toby.
‘What was that?’
‘Too... scary.’ A stupid word from horror novels, but the only one that fit.
‘Too scary to imagine?’
‘It’s not your town, Jake. It’s not your secret, not you thrown in the loony bin, or prison. You walk away.’
‘We don??
?t choose our situations, only how we deal with them.’
‘Well, bully for you.’
‘You quite finished? As I have, and time’s almost up.’
Toby roused himself, by now utterly transformed. He followed Jake down the stairs. The echoed clumping of his boots belied the gentleness of his step now he was back in his civilised mode. At the foot, Jake turned to ask,
‘“The loony bin”? Is that where they told you children you’d be going if you ever told? Poor little devils.’
In the ground floor room the women watched Toby silently and accusingly. He whispered ‘Good day’ to them anyway. At the door, he took the handle. Jake stopped him though,
‘It might be better leaving this way.’ Jake led him to the back door through the kitchen. ‘And get your game face back on. We’re not at the Carvel canteen now.’
Shocked at the mood he had fallen into, Toby said quietly, so the women wouldn’t hear, feeling small and quiet as a mouse,
‘You know, Jake. This is me, the true me. Not them.’ He pointed outside, as if to a bunch a black-shirts stood around the house – which thankfully there weren’t.
Jake could have been kind, if only as a balm to Toby wracked self-image. But he didn’t believe in false kindness, didn’t have mollifying in his nature. And, for all his deceit at getting Toby where he wanted him, and for all the support he would give him in his mission, Jake knew that in truth was beauty. Being cruel to be kind, Jake said to Toby,
‘You tell yourself whatever you need to to get yourself through this. Now, you, raus raus!’
Jake caught Toby’s shoulder with the kitchen door as he shut it behind him.
Chapter 34 – Verity
Toby cursed Jake, as he trudged off through the snow along the street’s back alleyway – hating Jake was easier than facing up to what he’d heard. Toby knew that Jake’s last slur and the door-slam had been to rile him, to get him back angry – Jake didn’t care that the anger was directed at him. Meanwhile, Toby also knew that he was Jake’s now, that Jake had him as completely as a beau had his teenage bride. Toby noticed he was scowling; then he remembered to retain that grimace as his natural visage. And he wasn’t only angry at Jake.
There was also the unfairness of it all. At this point he, Toby, had ninety-nine percent of the power. With a word he could have had Jake’s hideout destroyed, had his tormentor himself tormented. The women would be treated who-knew-how badly. What’s more, finding and destroying this hornets’ nest of agitation would have brought Toby good favour in the eyes of leaders who had never quite trusted him since his three years away.