Christian sat forward in his chair and opened his hands. They were very clean, the nails cut so short that I could see the soft, pale flesh at the fingertips.
“Look, we deal with eight to nine hundred children every year. In terms of sexual abuse, maybe five percent of those children will have positive physical findings—say, small tears in the hymen or rectum. Many of those kids will be teenagers, and even if there are indications of sexual activity, it can be hard to tell if it was consensual or not. A lot of adolescent females can even be penetrated and still have a normal exam that reveals an unbroken hymen. If we do establish nonconsensual sex, then we often can’t tell who did it, or when. All we can say is that sexual contact did occur. Even in a very young child, there may be little or no evidence, especially taking into account the normal anatomical variations that may occur in children’s bodies. Physical findings that used to be considered abnormal have now come to be regarded as nonspecific. The only surefire way to establish sexual abuse is to test for STDs, but that assumes that the perpetrator was infected. If the test is positive, then abuse is a done deal, but even then you’re no closer to establishing who did it, not unless you have DNA marking. If the perpetrator wasn’t infected with an STD, then you have nothing.”
“But what about the child’s behavior. Wouldn’t that change after abuse?”
“The effects vary, and there are no specific behavioral indicators to suggest abuse. We may see anxiety, difficulty sleeping, sometimes night terrors, where the child wakes up screaming, inconsolable, yet will have no memory of the event in the morning. There may be nail biting, the pulling out of hair, refusal to go to school, an insistence on sleeping with a trusted parent. Boys will tend to act out, becoming more aggressive, while girls will tend to act in becoming withdrawn and depressed. But those types of behavior may also occur if, say, the parents are going through a divorce and the child is becoming stressed. By themselves, they don’t offer proof one way or the other of abuse. At least a third of abused children will have no symptoms whatsoever.”
I took off my jacket, then continued making notes. Christian smiled. “More complicated than you thought, isn’t it?
“A little.”
“That’s why the evaluation process and the interview techniques employed for it are so important. The professional can’t lead the child, which is what I believe Clay did in a number of cases.”
“Like the Muller case?”
Christian nodded. “The Muller case should be offered as a textbook example of all the things that can go wrong during the investigation of alleged child abuse: a child being manipulated by a parent, a professional who sets aside his objectivity as part of some misguided crusading impulse, a judge who prefers black-and-white to shades of gray. There are those who believe that the vast majority of sexual abuse allegations that arise during custody disputes in divorce cases are fabricated. There’s even a term for the child’s behavior in such disputes: Parental Alienation Syndrome, where a child identifies with one parent and in so doing alienates the other. The negative behavior toward the alienated parent is a reflection of the alienating parent’s own feelings and perceptions, not the child’s. It’s a theory, and not everyone accepts it, but looking back at the Muller case, it should have been clear to Clay that the mother was hostile, and had he asked more questions about her own medical background, he would have discovered that there were indications of personality disorder. Instead, he sided with her and appeared to accept the child’s version of events unquestioningly. The whole affair was a disaster for everyone concerned, and damaged the standing of those who work in the field. Worst of all, though, a man lost not only his family, but his life.”
Christian realized how tense he had become. He stretched and said: “Sorry, I got us kind of sidetracked there.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I asked you about the Mullers. You were talking about interview techniques.”
“Well, it’s pretty simple, in one way. You can’t ask questions like ‘Has something bad happened to you?’ or ‘Did X touch you somewhere special or somewhere private?’ That’s particularly the case when you’re dealing with very young children. They may try to please the evaluator with the right answer just so they can leave. We also have instances of what’s called ‘source misattribution,’ where a kid may have heard something and applied it to himself, perhaps as a way of seeking attention. Sometimes, you may get a good disclosure from a younger child initially but find that the child then recants under pressure from, say, family members. It happens also with teenagers, where Mom has a new boyfriend who starts abusing the daughter but Mom doesn’t want to believe it because she doesn’t want to lose the guy who’s supporting her and would rather blame the child for telling lies. Teenagers in general bring with them their own challenges. They may lie about abuse for gain, but generally they’re pretty resistant to suggestion. The problem with them is that, if they have been abused, it can take a couple of sessions just to get the details from them. They won’t want to talk about it, maybe out of guilt or shame, and the very last thing they’ll want to discuss with a stranger is oral or anal abuse.
“So the evaluation has to be conducted with all of these elements borne in mind. My position is that I don’t believe anybody: I only believe the data. That’s what I present to the police, to the prosecutors, and to the judges if the case gets to court. And you know what? They get frustrated with me. Like I said, they want definite answers, but a lot of the time we can’t give them those answers.
“That’s where Daniel Clay and I differed. There are some evaluators out there who have almost a political position on abuse. They believe that it’s rampant, and they interview children with the presumption that abuse has occurred. It colors everything that follows. Clay became the go-to guy to confirm abuse allegations, whether in the first instance or where a lawyer decided to seek a second opinion on abuse. That was what got him into trouble.”
“Okay, can we go back to the Muller case for a moment?”
“Sure. Erik Muller. It’s a matter of record. The papers reported a lot of the details at the time. It was a nasty divorce case, and the wife wanted custody. It seems like she may have pressured her son, who was then twelve, into making allegations against his father. The father denied the allegations, but Clay offered a pretty damning evaluation. There still wasn’t enough evidence for the D.A. to indict, so it went to Family Court, where the burden of proof is lower than at criminal level. The father lost custody and killed himself a month later. Then the child recanted to a priest, and it all came out. Clay went before the Board of Licensure. It took no action against him, but the whole thing looked bad, and he ceased to do case evaluations shortly afterward.”
“Was that his decision, or was it forced upon him?”
“Both. He decided not to conduct evaluations again, but he would not have been offered them even had he decided to continue. By that time, we had been up and running for some time, so the burden of evaluation in most cases fell on us. Well, I say ‘burden,’ but it was one that we were willing to accept. We’re as committed to child welfare as Daniel Clay ever was, but we never lose sight of our responsibilities to all of those involved and, most of all, to the truth.”
“Do you know where the Muller boy is now?”
“Dead.”
“How?”
“He became an addict and died of a heroin overdose. That was, um, about four years ago, up in Fort Kent. I don’t know what happened to the mother. Last I heard, she was living somewhere in Oregon. She married again, and I think she has another child now. I hope she does better with this one than the last.”
It sounded like the Muller angle wasn’t going to lead anywhere. I moved on to the subject of the abuse of some of Clay’s patients. Christian seemed to have the details at his fingertips. Maybe he had gone over them before I arrived, or it could simply have been one of those cases that nobody was very likely to forget.
“Two cases of alleged abuse were referred to us in the
space of three months,” said Christian, “each with similar elements: alleged stranger abuse, or abuse by someone apparently unknown to the child, and the use of masks.”
“Masks?”
“Bird masks. The abusers—three in one case, four in the other—disguised their faces with bird masks. The kids—the first a twelve-year-old girl, the second a fourteen-year-old boy—were abducted, one on the way home from school, the other while drinking beer by a disused railroad track, taken to an unknown location, systematically abused over a period of hours, then dumped close to where they’d been abducted. The alleged abuse had occurred some years back, one in the mid eighties and another at the start of the nineties. The first case emerged after a suicide attempt by the girl shortly before she was due to be married at the tender age of eighteen. The second came about when the boy went before the courts on a whole range of misdemeanor offenses and the lawyer decided to use the alleged abuse as mitigation. The judge wasn’t inclined to believe him, but when the two cases came to us the similarities were impossible to ignore. These kids didn’t know each other and came from towns fifty miles apart. Yet the details of their stories matched perfectly, even down to details of the masks used.
“You know what else they had in common? Both children had been treated by Daniel Clay in the past. The girl had made allegations of abuse against a teacher that turned out to be untrue, motivated by a belief that the teacher was secretly attracted to one of her friends. It was one of the rare instances where Clay’s evaluation did not find reason to support the allegations. The boy was sent to Clay after he’d engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with a ten-year-old girl in his class. Clay’s evaluation suggested possible indicators of abuse in the boy’s past, but went no further. Since then, we’ve uncovered six more cases with the bird element to them: three of those involved were former patients of Daniel Clay, but none of the cases took place after his disappearance. In other words, there have been no new reports of similar incidents since late 1999. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t occurred, but we haven’t heard about them. Most of the children involved were also, um, slightly troublesome in certain ways, which is why the allegations took so long to emerge.”
“Troublesome?”
“Their behavior was antisocial. Some had made allegations of abuse before, which may or may not have been true. Others had engaged in criminal activity, or had simply been allowed to run wild by parents or foster parents. Taken together, it might have made authority figures less willing to believe them, even if they had made an effort to talk about what had taken place, and police, especially male cops, tend to be reluctant to believe allegations of abuse from teenage girls in particular anyway. It also made the children in question vulnerable since nobody was inclined to look out for them.”
“Then before anyone could ask Clay about all of this in detail, he disappeared?”
“Well, most of the cases emerged subsequent to his disappearance, but that’s about right,” said Christian. “The problem for us is that we’ve had to wait for indications of similar abuse to come to us instead of being able to seek out the children for ourselves. There are issues of patient confidentiality, sealed records, even the natural dispersal of families and children that occurs over time. Any child who had undergone abuse similar to that I’ve outlined to you would be in his or her late teens at least by now, given that the victims of whom we’re aware were aged between nine and fifteen at the time when the abuse is alleged to have occurred. To put it simply, we can’t really place an advertisement in the newspapers asking people who may have been abused by men in bird masks to come forward. It just doesn’t work that way.”
“Any suggestion that Clay could have been one of the abusers?”
Christian let out a long breath. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? There were certainly rumors, but did you ever meet Daniel Clay?”
“No.”
“He was a tall man, very tall, six-six at least. Very thin. All in all, he was quite distinctive-looking. When we went back over those cases, none of the children involved described any of their alleged abusers in terms that could be applied to Daniel Clay.”
“So it could be a coincidence that some of these kids were his patients?”
“It’s certainly possible. He was well known for dealing with children who claimed to have been abused. If someone was sufficiently committed, then it’s possible that children could have been targeted because they were his patients. Perhaps someone among the various professions involved with the children along the way might also have leaked details, whether deliberately or accidentally, although our own inquiries have proved negative on that front. It’s all supposition, though.”
“Do you have any idea where these children are now?”
“Some of them. I can’t give you any details. I’m sorry. I could, perhaps, show you some reports of their allegations with the identities removed, but it won’t tell you much more than you already know.”
“I’d appreciate it if you would.”
He led me back to the reception area, then returned to his office. Twenty minutes later he returned with a handful of printed pages.
“This is all that I can give you, I’m afraid.”
I thanked him for the papers, and for his time. He told me to contact him if I needed anything more, and gave me his home number.
“Do you think Daniel Clay is dead, Dr. Christian?” I asked.
“If he was involved—and I’m not saying that he was— then he would not have wanted to face ruin, disgrace, and imprisonment. We may have disagreed on most things, but he was a proud, cultured man. Under the circumstances, he might have taken his own life. If he wasn’t involved in some way, well, why did he run? Perhaps the two events, the revelations of possible abuse and Clay’s disappearance, were entirely unconnected, and we are besmirching an innocent man’s reputation. I simply don’t know. It is strange, though, that no trace of Daniel Clay has ever been found. I work with the available data, and nothing more, but from the data I have before me, I’d have to say that Clay is dead. The question then is, did he take his own life, or did someone deprive him of it?”
I left the Midlake Center and drove home. At my kitchen table, I read the sections of the case reports that Christian had given to me. As he had promised, they added little to what he had told me, except to make me despair, if I ever needed reminding, at what adults were capable of doing to children. The details of the abusers’ bodies were vague, especially given that, in a number of cases, the children had been blindfolded throughout the abuse, or had been so traumatized by it that they were unable to recall anything about the men themselves, but Christian was right: none of the available descriptions matched the physical appearance of Daniel Clay.
When I was done, I took Walter for a walk. He had matured a lot in the last year, even for a young dog. He was quieter and less skittish, although he was still but a shadow of his ancestors, the big hunting dogs owned by the original planters and settlers of Scarborough. My grandfather once told me of a traveling showman who stopped for a night at the house of the local ferryman. The showman was carrying a lion east, and a hunter proposed, after some liquor was taken, to match one of his dogs against the lion for a wager of a barrel of rum. The showman agreed, and in front of a gathering of townsmen, the dog was put in the lion’s cage. The dog took one look at the lion, sprang for its throat, then forced it onto its back and set about killing it. The showman intervened and paid the hunter the barrel of rum and $50 to be allowed to shoot the dog in the cage before it tore the lion apart. Walter wasn’t the lion-killing kind, but he was my dog, and I loved him nonetheless. My neighbors, Bob and Shirley Johnson, looked after him for me if I had to go away for a few days. Walter didn’t mind staying with them. He was still free to roam his territory, and they spoiled him. They were retired and didn’t have a dog of their own, so Bob was always happy to take Walter for a stroll. It worked out well for everybody.
By now, we had reached Ferry Beach. It
was late, but I needed the air. I watched Walter tentatively dip a paw into the water, then withdraw it rapidly. He barked once in reproof then looked at me as if there was something that I could do to raise the temperature of the sea so he could splash away. He wagged his tail, then all of the hairs on his back seemed to rise at once. He grew very still and stared past me. His lips parted, exposing his sharp white teeth. He growled very low in his throat.
I turned. A man appeared to be standing among the trees. If I looked directly at him I could see only branches and spots of moonlight where I thought he was standing, but he seemed to appear more clearly when I looked at him with my peripheral vision, or if I tried not to focus on him at all. He was there, though. Walter’s reaction was evidence of that, and I still recalled the events of the night before: the glimpse I had caught of something at the edge of the forest before it faded away; a child’s voice whispering from the shadows; words scrawled on a dusty windowpane.
Hollow Men.
I didn’t have my gun. I had left the .38 in the car while I was talking to Dr. Christian and had not retrieved it before taking Walter out, while the Smith 10 was in my bedroom. I now wished I had either one of them with me, or maybe both.
“How you doing?” I called. I raised my hand in greeting. The man didn’t move. His coat was a dirty tan in color, so that it blended with the shadows and the sandy earth. Only a little of his face was visible: a hint of pale cheek, of white forehead and chin. His mouth and eyes were black pools, fine wrinkles visible where the lips might have been and at the edges of the dark sockets, as though the skin in those places had become shrunken and dried. I walked closer, Walter advancing beside me, hoping to see him more clearly, and he began to retreat into the trees, the darkness embracing him.
And then he was gone. Walter’s growls ceased. Warily, he approached the spot where the figure had been standing and sniffed at the ground. Clearly he didn’t like what he smelled there because his muzzle wrinkled, and he ran his tongue over his teeth as though trying to rid it of a bad taste. I walked on through the trees until I came to the boundary of the beach area, but there was no sign of anyone. I didn’t hear a car start. All seemed quiet and still.