Surrender, New York

  “Ambyr.” I put my right hand atop the one of hers that held my left. “You don’t have to explain anything. Your life is your own, to do whatever you want with—you’ve earned that, God knows. And you certainly don’t want to go messing around with a sick old man like me.”

  She paused for a long moment, and we both sat listening to the sounds of Lucas and Mike, somewhere upstairs, going through one of their arguments. When I dared glance up again, I saw that Ambyr’s eyes had teared up, and that her mouth was slightly agape. “What kind of person do you think I am, exactly?” she murmured.

  “Oh,” I sighed, running for my life inside my head and feigning a smile that I forgot she could not see. “To tell you the truth—my judgments in this area, at least so far as they relate to my own life, have generally been so stunningly bad that…that I had to admit, long ago, that I just don’t know why most people who enter my orbit do the things they do. Not deep down, I don’t.”

  “So…” Ambyr pulled her hand away and folded her arms, becoming the very tough matron of the house once more; but just then Kevin came back downstairs, entering the kitchen with a smile.

  “I don’t know what those guys are fighting about,” he said, “but they’re going at it, all right. Anyway, I signed the paper.”

  The awkwardness of being alone with Ambyr was only heightened by Kevin’s reappearance; and I needed to come up with some reason for him to leave, in part because I needed to be able to talk freely with Ambyr about Derek’s disappearance, in part because I didn’t feel like getting caught up in some struggle of wills with the young man, a struggle that, for all I knew, could simply have been a product of my imagination.

  “Okay, then—practicalities,” I said. “Kevin, I realize it may sound rude, but you do not want to be around when the law gets here. Suspicion will fall on anybody present, if the BCI has its way.”

  “He’s right, Kev,” Ambyr said. “Please don’t get into trouble.”

  “You’ll be okay if I go?” he asked her.

  “Sure, of course—but I won’t be if they suspect you of anything.”

  “Take some back road out of here,” I advised. “The law will use the most direct route. What do you drive?”

  “Got an old Dodge truck I fixed up,” he said. “All-terrain tires, can go just about anywhere.”

  “Good. Then get yourself home quickly, staying off the highway.”

  “Or do you have to be at work soon?” Ambyr asked.

  Checking an old, yellowing plastic clock on the wall, Kevin said, “Yeah, I guess I will have to start heading over to the Center in an hour or so.”

  “Better still,” I told him. “They’re not going to mess with someone who works there. So head home, then to Fraser, but keep an eye out, in case somebody’s watching and sees you leave.”

  Ambyr had read my subtext quite accurately. “You’ll do that, right, Kev? I’ll feel a lot better.”

  Nodding once, Kevin replaced a blaze orange cap with the Remington Arms logo and a camouflage pattern splashed across its visor on his head. Then he said, again very dutifully, “Sure—it was good to meet you, sir.”

  “Absolutely,” I replied. “And thanks for the help. Get there safe.”

  Ambyr accompanied him to the door, mumbling a few things that I couldn’t hear: intimacies, my mind decided, and I became further irritated—and injured.

  Once he was gone, Ambyr returned to the table and sat beside me, though the chill was palpable. “That’s what you really think?”

  “What’s what I really think?” I asked, ready to go on; but at that instant I heard the short squeal of a tire on hardtop, and an ugly thought flashed across my mind: I mumbled some vague apology, ran to the door, heedless of Ambyr’s asking why, then dashed outside and down to the county road. I knew what had made the sound, of course: it was Kevin’s truck. But what I didn’t know, and couldn’t tell from the quickly vanishing sight of his running lights, was what color that truck was, and whether or not it bore a white cap…

  Convincing myself that this was one more manifestation of my jealousy, I hurried back to the kitchen, explaining to Ambyr that I’d thought it might be a cop tailing Kevin. That seemed to wash, and then I sat next to her again, finding that she was ready to pick right up where she’d left off: “You think I’d go ahead and kiss you while I was keeping some kind of secret boyfriend down here in my ‘normal life’? You really think I’d do that?”

  “I think,” I said, retreating once again, “that your friend Derek, a minor for whom you are legally responsible, whether you like it or not, has gone missing. And I think we’d better concentrate on figuring out what happened to him…”

  Thankfully, Mike came downstairs and swiftly into the room at just that moment, bearing the prepared document. “Well, I don’t know what I had to go up there with the kid for: his computer skills are fine, though getting him to let go of the thing was—” He stopped talking abruptly, as he observed the scowl that still dominated Ambyr’s features. “Of course,” he said quietly, “I could always go back up and make sure that he doesn’t, you know, start running off extra copies…”

  “No, Mike,” Ambyr said coolly, even icily, as she stood suddenly and grabbed her cane. “You two are the experts, you go over Derek’s note, and I’ll go up and make sure Lucas is behaving. Besides, I’ve listened to what Derek said a dozen times, I know it by heart—but maybe Lucas and I will go through his room again, see if we missed anything there.” She headed for the doorway. “It seems like I’ve been off about a lot of things, this week, though I really didn’t think so.”

  As she moved toward the stairs—which were located between the living room and what I would later learn was her own room beyond—Mike watched her go, and I began to spread Derek’s note out carefully on the table beneath the small lamp.

  Letting out a low, quiet whistle, Mike shook his head as he sat down. “Nice work, L.T.; usually it takes a woman a year of being in an actual relationship with you to get that pissed. What’d you do, tell her the one about the three blind guys who walk into a bar?”

  “Michael,” I moaned, “can we please go over this note? We’ve got a complicated situation on our hands, and—”

  “No, we don’t. You do, apparently. As far as the note goes, whatever it says—and Lucas told me some of it—Derek was a kid who was troubled on a whole lot of levels, and something like this was bound to happen. You knew it. Even Clarissa knew it. No reason to suspect that somebody magically snuck into the house and snatched him.” Then, seeing that I was almost writhing in discomfort, Mike pulled his chair closer, saying, “All right. Let’s go over it, word by fucking word…”

  We began to dissect the sheet of paper that sat atop a pile of disheartening household bills, credit card charges inevitably on top. Written in pen on lined notebook paper in a simple block writing style, the lone page represented Derek’s attempt to explain exactly why he was making his mad run toward an irresistible but perhaps deadly beacon of what he believed was hope…

  {ii.}

  Even a detached analyst could have seen that the message betrayed an emotional struggle: the words had first been drafted in pencil to make corrections less conspicuous, and the paper was stained by a number of tears that had fallen as the work was done. The most immediate and conspicuous fact about the message, however, was that it had been written to Lucas alone. Seeing this, I glanced up at Mike quickly, understanding why Ambyr’s look of devastation had been so complete when we came in. “Jesus, Mike,” I said. “I mean, she may not have asked to be his legal guardian, but she never shied away from the job, either. And he doesn’t even address his goodbye to her?” I stared down at the wood grain of the kitchen table, not yet prepared to move on.

  “Feeling kind of like a heel, hunh?” Mike said. “Well, don’t worry—based on the way you two have been behaving, I’m sure she’ll forgive you.”

  I just shook my head dubiously at that, then started reading the note from the top once more:
r />   Dear Luke,

  I know you never believed me, but I did always tell you that one day it was gonna be my turn to go. And now it is. I can’t tell you anything about it, except that you don’t have to worry, I’m going to someplace really nice. I mean, REALLY nice, you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you, anyway. But alls I wanted to say was that it’s just no good for me here, anymore. You know that. You’re moving on, and that’s good, but I’ve been stuck waiting my turn. Well, no more waiting. I won’t have to be in this lousy town my folks left me in anymore. And I know how much trouble I been for you and Ambyr, so at least that’ll be over. It just sucks that it has to happen this way, all secret, but that’s the only way to do it, they say. And it ain’t such a secret, anyway, you and Ambyr both know why I’m going. Anyway, as soon as I’m there and settled in and it’s safe, I’ll let you know where I’m at. Until then, I hope everything keeps going good for you guys, and sorry again for leaving like this. But it won’t be for that long. Soon we can get together, and you won’t believe where. So, anyway,

  See you later, Luke,

  Derek

  p.s. took some stuff from the refrigerator—tell Ambyr not to be mad. Now she’s only got you to feed, after all, Ha, Ha!

  “Whoa,” Mike breathed, sitting back once I’d finished. Neither of us spoke for a moment, and then he added, “Do you suppose they all sounded that way? Shelby—Kyle, Kelsey, Donnie?” He seemed to be absorbing the possibility that we might soon be adding Derek’s name to that grim list. “Do you think they all sounded so—happy, once they knew they were on their way?”

  “More than likely,” I murmured, finally pulling myself away from the table. “At any rate, several things are immediately and plainly apparent—first, he makes mention, just as Latrell did, of ‘they’—not one person, but at least two and probably a group. That’s strong reason to believe the note’s genuine—it’s consistent. And, just as vitally, we now know whoever’s on the next rung up the ladder, whoever’s the point person for the ‘they’ in question, and is delivering these kids to the organization, so to speak—he or she’s got serious Pied Piper credentials.”

  “Like a child molester?” Mike asked. “By which I mean, the kind of person that really knows how to ingratiate himself with kids. Like that teacher in Brooklyn, the one who handed out cigarettes and got high with his kids, and groomed new ones every year for sex—remember the case?”

  “I’m not likely to forget it. Oh, the hipness of Brooklyn…” But I waved Mike off, still considering the note. “No, no. This guy or woman—and we have to keep the option that it might be a woman open, based on Derek’s reaction to those photos of Diana—is on a whole nother level than your average child molester. This person’s got something else. Nothing material, that’s almost certain, whether we’re talking about bags of drugs or dough. Consider what each dead kid had, after all, Mike—the things they were either found with, or that we know they spent time around during the time they went missing, like Kelsey and the thoroughbreds. What do they all have in common, what do they all represent?”

  Mike’s brow tightened. “Well, each one was pricey, we know that.”

  “But money wasn’t the key,” I countered. “Sure, the books, the horses, the clothes, they were expensive, but what about Donnie? We’ve known since we found out the details about those jerseys that he didn’t really care about them for their monetary value, or as collector’s items. I mean, he seemed to treasure the one he was wearing most, but for status. And the others? He kept them in that bag with his other stuff and slept on it all, as if he stole them to punish the people he was staying with, as we’ve already talked about. But it’s more: based on my talk with Latrell, I’d say any value the boy himself found in the jerseys was simply what they represented: not money; punishment, yes, but he could have thrown them away and achieved that; no, it was the experience of being at the games, of meeting the players and hanging out with the biggest names in basketball as if he were on some fantasy playground. And I’m betting that, to greater or lesser extents, it was the same for the other kids: despite the cost of the objects they were found to either possess or to have been in contact with when their bodies were found, possession itself—at least in terms of resale value or whatever—wasn’t the point. They were symbols of what the kids had always fantasized about, and had finally been offered, as a way of enticing them into their new lives; and symbols, after the arrangements had failed, of what they’d enjoyed in those lives. All those diverse objects and memories, they were…”

  Mike gave me a minute, then demanded: “They were what, damn it?”

  I looked at him a bit self-consciously—for my next words were not my own: “ ‘The, uh—stuff that dreams are made of…’ ”

  Mike’s brow wrinkled even more. “The Maltese Falcon? Bogart’s last line?”

  I nodded slowly. “The last line of the movie itself, actually.”

  Mike nodded a little blankly. “Hunh—Dashiell Hammett, right? I could check on the list of what Kyle had, see if there was an early edition.”

  “The only problem being that that line’s not in the book. John Huston wrote the script, along with directing the picture, and he lifted the line from Shakespeare. Has to be the only time that one line has been the signature of two otherwise unconnected hits written three hundred years apart…”

  Mike’s forehead finally relaxed as he considered what I’d said. “The black bird,” he murmured. “Yep. Whoever this piece of shit is, he—or she—snatches the dreams right out of their heads, uses them to get the kids on board and compliant, so that when they meet our mysterious ‘them,’ who do the actual placement downstate—not to mention those people that they eventually get placed with—no questions will be asked, and they won’t be scared. Hell, that’d work better than drugs.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So—” Mike had one more issue he needed to wrangle to the ground: “Was Derek the dream stealer, then? Because whatever else I’d say about the kid, I wouldn’t have called him a piece of shit.”

  I could only shake my head. “No. Derek certainly was an enigma—we saw that much. I think he would have done it, because he genuinely would have thought that he was helping the kids he approached. But at heart, he was a moderately autistic kid who had moments of real intelligence: indeed, when he talked about rifles, he displayed all the qualities of a savant. Did he have another area of particular brilliance—interpersonal brilliance—that he employed when approaching the other kids? Possibly. And did that talent not only allow him to pick out the ones that would fall for some very powerful lure, but determine what that lure was, and to proceed to dangle it so effectively that they would bite?” I shook my head. “It’s sounds like an awful lot, doesn’t it, for him? True, the note tells us that he was operating on levels that not even Lucas knew about—and Lucas was supposed to be not only his best friend, but the sharper of the two, but that’s not conclusive. One thing is clear, however: if we look at the way Derek addressed this note, along with the way he was behaving at Clarissa’s before dinner, we get a clear idea of what dream he himself was pursuing, along with at least a hint of who the ‘dream stealer,’ as you say, might have been, if it wasn’t him.”

  “If I’m following you correctly, L.T.,” Mike offered, “you’re headed back to the idea of a teacher. But one way more sophisticated than that schmuck in Brooklyn.”

  “I’m not thinking as much of a teacher,” I answered. “Although a teacher is certainly the most obvious type. But there is something that takes even more primary importance than a teacher, based on what we observed with Derek.”

  Mike began to nod. “A woman,” he said uneasily, knowing the minefield of political correctness onto which we were setting foot.

  “Not just a woman, but a maternal figure. She doesn’t need to be a teacher; indeed, I’d favor someone with even more intimate knowledge, who can blur the lines even more readily. A school counselor, maybe, above all, an idealized maternal figure.
Derek’s farewell note is the last piece that tells us that.”

  “Because,” Mike ventured, “despite the way that Ambyr took him on and looked after him, he didn’t address the note to her, and there’s no message, not even a thank-you, to her. So she never filled that role…” With that we both fell silent for an instant, absorbing the sorrowful weight of what had been said.

  Not surprisingly, as Mike and I had studied the note and engaged in our ensuing conversation, we had been facing the table with our backs to the doorway that led from the kitchen into the living room and then to the front door of the house; and neither of us had heard anything that indicated that Ambyr and Lucas had returned from upstairs. It was therefore all the more disturbing when we were both struck, at almost the same instant, by the distinct feeling that we were being watched. We looked at each other and nodded slowly—the kind of nod we had learned to trust in dangerous situations, over the years—and then started to turn our heads still further toward the doorway. When we’d gotten far enough to see that there were human shapes there, but not to make out who they were, I shouted, “Go!” And before we had time for the action to become more than reflexive, Michael was in a kneeling position with his .38, while I was standing with my .45. Both guns were trained on the kitchen door—right at Ambyr’s and Lucas’ heads.

  “Jesus-H.-fucking-Christ, don’t shoot!” Lucas screamed, stepping in front of his sister in an act of utter selflessness, yet at the same time shielding his own face comically with his hands.

  “What the hell?” Mike managed to say, as he holstered his .38 and I did the same with my Colt. “You guys were supposed to be upstairs! What’s with sneaking up on us like that?”