There was, though, one poignant historical case file: a report of a ‘nauseous illness’ suffered by the daughter of an exploratory engineer in Nineteen Fifty-three. She liked to travel with her father on his work when school holidays allowed, and so was there with him in his trailer as he prospected that region for the proposed pipeline.
The notes concluded that the illness ‘passed quickly after returning to the nearby town,’ and that ‘it could be put down to a combination of excitement and vertigo.’
That girl would be in her seventies now. I think I’d like to find you. If you’re reading this, please write to the publisher.
Chapter 81 – You Really had to be There...
My conversations with Agent Carter didn’t quite end that day. And the next time we spoke he began with,
‘There’s still the matter of your friend Toby...’
You see, with many of the major players either dead or incapacitated, Carter and his colleagues had the common difficulty ‘after the disaster’ of having only a chorus of cowards and pedestrians to talk to, with the villains missing from the courtroom.
And the cherry on the mystery-cake was this odd fellow Toby.
Allow me to attempt to explain. There are those formerly of the town who, freed of the sickness, were at liberty to hate Toby.
‘He destroyed our town.’
‘He made us criminals.’
‘He turned us all in.’
‘There must have been some other way?’
And other variations on the theme. I hear it often. Though what this ‘other way’ was, I’d love to have known.
I suppose it is one of those criticisms you can’t answer, as it is more of an emotional release for the speaker than a statement they want a response to. They want to hold on to their point of view as a comfort. It is therefore an accusation that you have to learn to absorb and not take too personally, and I won’t let it tarnish Toby’s memory.
Yet among a kinder element of the townsfolk, none would hear a bad word said or printed about their last town Sheriff.
‘This man beat your children,’ reporters or barristers would begin. ‘Yet you still defend him?’
‘But he’s the one who ended it,’ they’d answer. ‘It’s because of him we’re here.’
And this ambiguity didn’t stop within the people formerly of Stove.
The facts of Toby’s recent life, as any could pertain them, looked bad – he was on record as an attacker and imprisoner of young people, assisting their parents in enforcing house arrest. Both the Doctor and myself had to admit under oath that we had suffered an assault at his hands – albeit, in my case, a very minor one.
A published photograph, taken from a helicopter above the town square, showed him neatly dead in his black uniform. Nearby was the ragged figure of Eddy as he’d been left by the crowd. The one was shot, the other beaten – so, asked the newspaper’s headline, ‘Who Had Killed Whom?’
The net result was that Toby was becoming a figure that neither the judiciary or the general public understood.
During one of the subsequent hearings, I met with the Professor and Merrill from Carvel Tech. They seemed so sad, though not at all embarrassed to be there. They were only worried for the memory of their friend; and troubled by it also.
‘But it’s like we didn’t know him,’ said Merrill.
‘How so?’ I asked.
‘Well, the things he was doing in that town every winter.’
‘He hated it though,’ I explained. ‘Carvel was where he was happy.’
‘But it’s as if he was two people, and that the Toby we knew was a lie.’
‘Oh no,’ I implored. ‘Carvel was the real Toby, the one who cared and helped. You saw the best of him.’
The Professor asked, ‘And I hear that it was he who ended it?’
‘He did. You should be proud.’
‘And this teenage illness – he suffered it too?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the beatings?’
‘It’s how he got the scar above his eye.’
The Professor flinched, ‘Then I am proud; and also sorry that we couldn’t help him.’
It was then that I decided to write the book.
Toby was an enigma to anyone not there that season. And when I thought about it, I was surprised to find I was probably the one best placed to do something about that.
Janey knew his past, but not his present. Carvel knew one half of him, Stove the other. Eddy had been Toby’s childhood friend, but secrets had driven them apart long before that friendship was so brutally terminated. The Doctor was a good bet to produce the most-rounded portrait, but with what he’d gone through after being struck off, you really couldn’t ask it of him.
(The last I heard, he was retreating in Tijuana under the advice of other doctors – apparently the warmth reminded him of summer, keeping thoughts of winter at bay.)
So, with Job and Fitch under caution, it was down to me. There wasn’t much else I could reasonably be doing, and any official story I wanted to write was placed on judicial ice. And so I wrote the book in a fever in two weeks – like how Jack Kerouac had written ‘On The Road’. However, in my case, instead of Mrs Kerouac bringing me coffee and changing the shirt on my back as I sat at the typewriter, it was Sarah. We’d grown close over those months, and had each gotten used to the other one being around. So when it came to it, we stuck together.
My tapes were all with Agent Carter, but Toby’s words flooded back – night after night of endless talking. I really think he was the best friend I ever had.
What he hadn’t told me, I found out from others. I’ve interviewed every person in the narrative still available to be so. His parents were very gracious, and Margaret especially was a rock.
Over time I’d also gotten to know how Toby thought. And don’t forget that I was right at his shoulder for a lot of that last day. At the shooting, for instance, I was yards from him, hearing every word of his intonation, scared to reach out as he took that step. He was the only one among us not frozen rigid. I suppose that’s what makes him a hero. It still scared me to write that passage.
As for the remainder of the tale, what I didn’t know I made up. For isn’t that what we wannabe story-tellers do, make things up?
And so, with as long again for re-reading and editing, I had completed a fictionalised account of all of it. And then released it anonymously to every television station, news agency, and web blog I could think of. I titled it, ‘Written by one who knows...’
I needed Toby’s character known, I needed his contribution... no, his sacrifice recorded. Had I not done so, then that fateful scene may have gotten lost in the weight of counteracting statements being read out in court. I had to say how he came to his decision, and how that left him facing a gun. And how he still stepped forward.
I let the original anonymous story end at the first point that anyone in the wider world knew anything about Stove, which was the rolling news teams filming the bodies on the mountain. I trusted readers to join the dots, and jump straight from Toby having Eddy’s gun pointed at him, to the flood of media coverage they’d been watching since. And what a flood it’s been – I swear, there’s been nothing like it since the live broadcast of OJ Simpson being chased in his Ford Bronco.
Agent Carter didn’t like the book. I knew he wouldn’t, and he guessed I was the author. He told me that an emotive account could prejudice a trial. But what trial was that going to be, when Toby was already out of their reach?
So the hearings and the court cases dragged on, and were eventually wound up. And thanks to me, then hopefully Toby was a little better understood. That ended some segment of the saga, and leaves us where we are now. Where I’m free to take back my early effort and add the epilogue I’d always wanted. Thus the full edition is born, which is what you picked up in the bookshop, and is what you’re reading now.
We’re nearly done for this chapter, but allow me one final flight of fancy: that when I thin
k now of Stove-Toby lying there in the square, I imagine Carvel-Toby in his loafers and trailing white labcoat coming and kneeling down by the body, before standing and turning and disappearing forever. I think Carvel-Toby might have understood. In my mind, this brings the two halves back together as one man. I miss him.
Chapter 82 – The Townspeople of Stove
And so what of those characters whose threads I’ve left hanging? These last pages really need to go to them.
Crawley was found in his bloodied cell – an image beamed around the world that the town could have done without. He was patched up, and instantly committed to the highest-security facility in the land.
The old Sheriff, Lloyd Thornton, looked too frail to have ever done anyone any harm. He was wheeled into court with a blanket over his knees. Even a sentence in a minimum-security penitentiary felt harsh, the way he’d seemed by the end of the trial.
They found the Mayor dead in his car with a bottle of scotch. He’d been there for a while too, pretty much from the time he’d put Toby in his place with harsh words outside the Sheriff’s Office. There then was a perceptive man: he knew the game was up hours before it ended.
The upstanding local business-owner and Councillor, whose family Toby had visited that first evening, left his family in Gaidon after the exodus, and disappeared. He later turned up in Florida with a twenty-year-old mistress. She was then ‘horrified’ to learn that he’d had ‘anything to do with that awful story in the papers,’ as she declared in a five-figure interview carried in one of those same publications.
Job and Fitch only earned a year or two off their sentences for wilfully presenting themselves to justice. And this for the men who brought the children and the injured down the mountain...
They were tried along with half-a-dozen others of that final roster of Deputies. Some had handed themselves in that extraordinary day, while others had been picked up wandering around Stove or Gaidon, not sure what they were meant to be doing in that brave new world. One was found buttoned up, sitting in the Sheriff’s Office awaiting his instructions. A couple ran, but didn’t get far – one was caught two towns on from Gaidon, still in his gleaming boots and decorated uniform.
All were sent down on a general Violence Against Minors beef. Although the option was left open for other charges to be brought, should such be identified during the Byzantine legal processes then being gone through. Ridiculously, awaiting trial they were held in different prisons in different states, as if they were a Mafia gang. If nothing else, this made my job of keeping up with them all an Air-Miles freebie giveaway.
Memories of their trial linger: like when items of the Deputy’s uniforms were held up in court. The state’s attorney stood and described them as, ‘Like remnants of a Nuns and Nazis fancy dress party, cast aside in the host’s back garden and found the next morning by the pool.’
Those Deputies who did appear at the stand had a very hard time. Yet any hope of the truth being found again foundered on the horns of wildly conflicting testimonies.
The women always have it worst though, don’t they; in the tireless manner of that half of the population who have to keep going for families, children, themselves, no matter what. Men are almost expected to act like brutes – there’s no surprise when it happens. But the women... people ask the unknowing wives of criminals and deviants, ‘How could you live with a monster? How could you stand by and let them do it?’ They who had been lied to worst of all.
Yet the women of Stove knew precisely what had happened.
Eddy’s wife and children had stayed up on the mountain, and were picked up by the Bureau when they arrived. They didn’t dare go down to Gaidon with the others, and were placed under protection, some degree of which they’ve remained under ever since.
Margaret, the tireless secretary of several Sheriffs, left the state as soon as she was able, and has been living quietly with relations.
The Town Clerk, even before I got down to the task, had written her own angst-ridden self-immolating account of ‘The Last Year’. She had presented herself to the police, and seemed disappointed that they couldn’t pin a crime on her that carried a sentence to match the weight of guilt she placed upon herself. She has a second book out soon, called ‘Moral Crimes: the Punishment we Carry Within’. I can’t say I’m expecting it to be a light read when I get my reviewer’s copy.
The Head Mistress of the Stove School for Girls appeared unrepentant, as haughty and upright in her public appearances as a Dickensian dowager. ‘I have nothing to apologise for,’ went her only public utterance outside the court. ‘I gave those girls a future.’
She was of an age though where she had nothing to lose. Yet some of the younger ones made a bid for freedom. Lana, the Junior House Mistress, was shown on the rolling news struggling against her arrest at a friend’s house in Toledo. That grimace was on the front of every paper the next morning. The last I heard though, she was married – though not to sweetheart Eric – living in a small town I won’t name, and working as a hairdresser. Lana then embodied the town’s fondest wish – to be re-absorbed into national anonymity. So maybe happiness was possible for Stovians after all?
In general though, what of the former townsfolk? Giving nothing away, those I know are by and large: widely dispersed, out of work, and often outed on national television. A lot bear horrible secrets and guilt: at what they suffered as children, and later inflicted on other children. Mark my words, in future years you’ll hear their stories – this is a wound that won’t stay sutured.
Despite Eddy’s prophecy that final day, for the most part families were allowed to stay together. And even where the father was a Deputy or other bully, mothers were still trusted to keep their children; for it was an unacknowledged truth of the town that in such homes there had been a lot of husband-on-wife violence.
And so the families... endure. And they all ask themselves the same question: did they want the Sheriff’s Office punished for past crimes, or were they actually glad at the service they provided in keeping their children safe? It is a tough one, with strong voices on each side. But no consensus has been come to.
One person who might have had an opinion in that debate was Andrew Sippitz, had he ever woken to the world. Against the Doctor’s best prognosis, he hasn’t improved. He stays within his healing coma to this day. In that state no harm can come to him, no more clubs will be raised. His body may still be repairing, and at some point be strong enough to re-emerge. His parents will never see the machines turned off. Yet with every year that passes, his chance grows slimmer.
A part of me wonders if it isn’t purely psychological, and that Andrew is working through his traumas in there. Like hysterical blindness, perhaps he is only hiding from the world until he can bare to face it again? I retain an absurd hope that one day he’ll come right out of it.
Chapter 83 – The Promise
I made a promise to Toby on that last day. And here I come good on it:
I took Margaret’s advice to ‘check the registers’, and there he jumped right out at me. ‘Matthew Tasco’, real name Gerard McCord, a nineteen-year-old first-year returnee. He was reduced to seventeen on the death certificate, to make him seem a little more of a teenage tearaway, one who might take a younger friend out joyriding one night.
He wasn’t missed in Stove, as he was raised by an aunt and uncle who’d already left. (There’d been rather a lot of leaving those final years, hadn’t there. Toby hadn’t been the only one who’d noticed it.) Gerard McCord’s absence wouldn’t have been noted in Stove until the next winter. Yet in his new home, his summer home, was a girlfriend, and a flatmate as close as any brother. I know because I met with them to confirm the facts. They hadn’t even heard of a town called Stove – Gerard had told them he was leaving that winter to work as a ski instructor. Lor, the lies these people told...
When they saw his Stove school photograph, his new friends cried. They’d been running a campaign for four years: printing posters, calling every sk
i centre in the USA, and spending thousands of their own money having private detectives track his bank card and phone. They couldn’t know that neither of these objects would work in Stove at winter.
Before I left their town, I stopped in at a restaurant where Gerard had waited tables. It must have been a good employer, as several of the staff from Gerard’s time were still there. They had missed him too – talk about a fellow leaving an impression.
I left that happy little place hating Stove, really cursing it. It left these people with a friend who never got to say goodbye. While all the time he’d been in the churchyard of a town they didn’t know, no flowers on his grave, buried under an assumed name. To me that feels almost as heartless as putting a child’s lifeless body through the trauma of a car crash. It’s still so sad for me to think about.
So, a young life, but not an uneventful one. There you go, Toby. Promise fulfilled, and friends informed. Gerard McCord had his part to play in the story like we all did.
The last word of this epilogue I think needs to go to Janey. She among them managed to become a kind of tarnished heroine. She gave a television interview where she openly – and unrehearsedly – wept for her dead lover, and the women of America folded.
She confessed to everything that went on at the School for Girls – the drugging of pupils, and strapping them to beds. She is now technically a criminal, although no court has issued sentence yet (and if you ask me, none will). I’ll not forget the final time we spoke, where she was repentant for all she had to be, and for so much more besides. Truly a personification of sainthood.
She spoke of Toby, and their meeting at the Sheriff’s Office that last evening after Toby had been put in charge,