The pure, naked longing on Jamie O’Connell’s face was obscene, as raw and tortured as a scream from out of the jungle night. No, not this time, you bastard—but the protest in Allen’s mind was so weak, he was not even aware that it had passed through. For the first time he saw the physical resemblance between father and son, the shape of the mouth and chin, the way their shoulders leaned toward each other across the table, yearning. Oh Christ, oh shit, why had he imagined any good could come of this? O’Connell was as smooth and seductive as a polished stone, and in a minute Jamie would reach out and pick him up, and be lost.
But Jamie was looking down, a faint line puckering his forehead.
“I . . . I was thinking I should go back to Montana. I’m missing school.”
“Why the hell would you want to go to Montana?” Halfway through the sentence O’Connell caught himself and modulated his voice from irritation to puzzlement, but that time, Allen saw Jamie’s wince, and was grateful for it. O’Connell had seen it, too, and made haste to cover it over. “Well, if Montana is what you want, that’s fine—they tell me you’ve found yourself a nice family there, lots of animals to fool around with. And I suppose I’ll be pretty busy with legal problems for a few weeks. So sure, why don’t you go back there and enjoy yourself, and when Christmas vacation comes we can see where we stand?”
Jamie was silent, his head bowed. His father leaned forward, too, bending over until they were nearly touching, and he spoke in a quiet voice.
“It’s just, son, that you’re going to need to be really careful what you say to those policemen, and especially the FBI. They have a way of twisting a person’s words around, and you’d hate to have something unimportant you’ve said turned into some major piece of evidence, now wouldn’t you? James?”
The boy took a shaky breath, loud in the bare room, and pushed back his chair to reach for his father. O’Connell was startled, but as soon as his arms had closed around his son, his gaze locked on to Allen, his pale eyes triumphant and amused as he held the boy to his heart, murmuring endearments into the dark hair.
The boy pulled back a little, to say to his father, “From now on, I’m going to use the name Jamie. Like Mommy used to call me.”
“What? Oh, sure, son. Jamie it is. And you promise you won’t tell those men anything, Jamie?”
But something was wrong. The boy was continuing to pull away from his father’s arms, disengaging himself from the insistent hands, taking a step back, then another. O’Connell’s face changed as he felt his son slipping away from him; his eyes blazed with disbelief and fury, and only the presence of Allen in the room and guards behind the glass kept him in his chair. Watching him, Allen thought it was a near thing. Jamie backed quickly away, exquisitely sensitive to his father’s moods, and circled the long table until he was beyond reach of those hands, standing in front of Allen. Only then did he transfer his gaze from his father to Allen. The child’s face looked like a man fresh from combat, haggard beyond his years with experience and understanding. He spoke to Allen, for the first time since he’d come into the room, his voice rough with emotion, but sure.
“He’d never give way like that,” he whispered to Allen. “He’d never let me live in Montana unless he wanted something. The only reason he says I can go there is because he thinks that if he does, then I won’t talk before he can get someone to come after me.” He took a shaky breath, and the tears slipped down his face. “You can tell your brother that I’ll tell him what he wants to know.”
After
Allen Carmichael and Jamie O’Connell sat on the rock promontory of Sanctuary Island, waiting for the morning fog to lift. The late October sun was out there somewhere, but down here by the water the swirls of gray and blue persisted, and the boy leaned in to the man as much for warmth as for shared solidarity. Jamie wore on his head a red baseball cap embroidered with the words ORCAS ISLAND. His suitcase waited on the boards of Rae’s dock.
Neither of them had spoken for several minutes. They had talked so much over the past few days, about all that had happened and all that would come next, it was a relief just to sit on the cold boulders, small waves lapping near their feet, wrapped in mist and stillness.
It was Jamie who broke the silence, to say in a dreamy voice, “When I was a kid, I used to believe that if I tried hard enough, I could conjure up a magical cloak that would make me invisible. I even had a name for it: The Quiet. It was just those colors, gray and white and silver.”
Classic dissociative technique, Allen noted—but picturing the shattered frame of the boy’s door, that small and bloodstained storage room between his room and his father’s, he could well imagine how appealing such a garment would have been to the child. He still didn’t know precisely what had gone on inside that small room, although Jamie had gone so far as to admit that it was something he didn’t want to talk about with Allen, which in itself was a big admission. Better to leave it in the hands of the expert, scheduled to meet with Jamie twice a week for a long time. It was not Allen’s business. He was not the boy’s therapist, nor his rescuer any longer; just his friend.
He wrapped his arm around the thin shoulders and hugged the child to him.
“He really doesn’t love me, does he?” Jamie asked.
How to answer a question like that? He loves you like the hawk loves the squirrel? Like a mad platoon leader adores the men he wields? Like a bullet cleaves to flesh?
“I think he does, in his way. But he’s just not equipped for anything more. I suppose you could call him an emotional cripple.” More comfort than truth, but sometimes that’s what was needed.
“And I’m not.”
Allen’s arm tightened, and he rested his face on Jamie’s red hat. “No, thank God, you’re not.” Hugely handicapped, yes, but not entirely crippled.
The mist was thinning, lifting free of the water’s surface. Not long before Ed came, to take them to the mainland.
“You’re really sure about going back to Montana?” he asked Jamie. The bending of fostering procedures and the government’s willingness to overlook the wildly illicit nature of the Johnson link was directly tied to Jamie’s willingness to testify. Allen wasn’t about to tell the boy what to do, but he was very good at telling him how to get it done. And the boy had proved remarkably unencumbered by blood relatives to take the Johnsons’ place.
“You sure I can’t stay with you?”
“Jamie,” Allen began; they’d been over this before, more than once.
“I know, I know,” the boy cut him off. “ ‘Maybe I can come visit during summer vacation.’ No, I’ll go back there. I don’t have anywhere else I want to go. Anyway, I can see what it’s like to have a real winter.”
“Even if it means only half an hour of online time a day?”
Jamie ducked his head. “Yeah. I don’t even know if I’ll play for a while. The whole thing, knowing that my father was one of the players—it’s just too creepy to think about. I somehow feel like, every time another player comes on I’ll be wondering, Is that him?”
Silverfish, the ubiquitous, had been O’Connell’s online name, the man’s means of keeping track of his son, of coaxing out information, entering the boy’s mind and life as surreptitiously as the insect occupied a house. Creepy, indeed.
Allen raised his head, hearing the first vibrations of a familiar engine across the water. As his head moved, the corner of his eye caught a dark shape on the opposite side of the cove. He looked closely, startled, but after a moment relaxed: only a tree trunk, enshrouded by the mist. Not a squatting figure in jungle fatigues, gazing approvingly across the water at him. Not a man with a white streak in his hair. Allen smiled to himself, and turned to the boy. “I think that’s the Orca Queen.”
Jamie was hunched over, arms wrapped around his knees, and seemed not to have heard. “I’ve been . . . remembering,” he said. “It’s like, there were things I knew, but I sort of forgot. Like I didn’t want to see them or something. One of them is, my father did k
ill my dog, I know he did. His name was Snowflake—Mom named him, kind of a dumb name because he was always so dirty, but he was an okay dog. And then one day he peed on the rug and Father just kicked him and kicked him until he died. I was right there. And he made me clean it up, the blood and the pee, and made me bury Snowy. I never told anyone, because who’d believe me? But the weirdest thing was, he acted like I’d done it. Used to whisper that my secret was safe with him and then he’d laugh. It almost got to the point that I believed him, I could almost remember my foot kicking Snowy.”
“The mind is a mysterious thing, isn’t it?” It was the only comment Allen could come up with. But Jamie didn’t seem to hear; he wasn’t finished.
“And I’m not sure, but I think maybe my father was there, the day my mother . . . when she died. I don’t know why, but it just came to me the other day, I suddenly remembered walking down the block, going home from school. I remembered hearing this big noise just after I’d crossed the street, a bang that I thought was somebody backing into a garbage can or something. But when I got home, I was just sure there was someone else in the house. I don’t remember why I thought that, whether I heard someone walking around or what, but when I went up and found her, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew someone was there, ’cause I remember thinking, ‘Why didn’t he stop her?’ And Father had the only other key, and everything was locked, and when the police went looking there was nobody else inside. I never said anything, and after a while I just . . . forgot about it. How could I forget something like that?”
Because you’d taught yourself to forget, Allen answered silently. One trauma in a happy childhood gets remembered; after a lifetime of them, the habit of repression is strong. Too bad his own childhood had been happy, Allen reflected with black humor; there were a few things he could have done with erasing from his memory, only he’d learned the techniques too late. “Talk to Dr. Marian about that,” he suggested. “She’ll help you figure it out.”
The Orca Queen’s engine was near enough now for Jamie to raise his head and watch for the shape to emerge from the fog. Allen gave the skinny shoulders a last squeeze, then rose, but Jamie, his eyes on the fading mist, said, “I never cried, you know. Not when he hit me, not since I was really small. Not even when . . . in the hunting game, when he’d drive off and leave me, even then I didn’t cry, not after the first couple of times. I knew he’d come back, he wouldn’t let me starve or freeze to death or anything. It was only when he hugged me that I couldn’t help myself. He’d pick me up and hug me and kiss my hair and call me ‘son,’ and I couldn’t help it, I’d start to cry. I hated it and I’d tell myself, Not this time, but I couldn’t stop. And it always felt then like he’d won.”
Allen’s impulse was to pick the boy up and hug him and kiss his hair and call him son, to overlay one man’s acts with another’s; instead, he squatted down in front of the boy, to take hold of his shoulders and meet his eyes. “Jamie, you cried because you’re human. Not because your father won, but because you couldn’t let him. You cried because you were missing your mother, and because you were waiting for us to find you, me and Alice, and Rachel and Pete and the kids, and for Ed and Jerry and Rae and everyone. He never won, Jamie, you did. You won because you never forgot what your mother taught you: that you’re worth loving.”
You won because you didn’t kill the pale-eyed bastard, Allen added to himself. You won because you were strong enough not to go along with his game, because even though he carved a great fissure down the middle of your soul, a wound that will never, ever completely heal, and even though you’ll never take a single step in your whole life when your feet don’t expect the ground to fall out from under you and swallow you up, you’ve managed not to let it twist you. Somehow, you’ve managed to make the right choice every time.
All that was too much. So Allen simply leaned forward to give the boy’s cold cheek a kiss, and say, “Jamie, you’re very possibly the bravest person I’ve ever met.”
The boy didn’t believe him, but that didn’t matter as much as having said the words. Allen reached down to pull Jamie to his feet, and walked with him down the promontory to the future.
Glossary of Vietnam war terms
AK47—Soviet rifle used by NVA and VC
C4—plastic explosives (chunks also burned to heat C-rations)
C-rations—Combat rations, canned and eaten cold or heated individually
Charlie—from Victor Charlie, call letters for VC
Claymore—portable antipersonnel mines
DEROS—Dates Eligible Return from OverSeas
didi; didi mau—run; run fast
dinky dau—crazy
FNG—Fucking New Guy
Grunt—foot soldier
KIA—Killed In Action
LAW—Light Antitank Weapon, single-shot rocket in fiberglass tube
LZ—landing zone
M16—semiautomatic rifle issued to American troops from 1967 on
M60—American machine gun
NDP—Night Defensive Position
NVA—North Vietnamese Army (collective or individual)
REMF—Rear Echelon Mother Fucker, who fights his war behind the lines
VC—Viet Cong (South Vietnamese insurgent, usually guerilla fighter)
Other Mystery Novels by Laurie R. King
Mary Russell Novels
THE BEEKEEPER’S APPRENTICE
A MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN
A LETTER OF MARY
THE MOOR
O JERUSALEM
JUSTICE HALL
Kate Martinelli Novels
A GRAVE TALENT
TO PLAY THE FOOL
WITH CHILD
NIGHT WORK
A DARKER PLACE
FOLLY
Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to reprint “September 1, 1939,” copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden, from W. H. AUDEN: THE
COLLECTED POEMS by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
KEEPING WATCH
A Bantam Book / March 2003
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Laurie R. King
Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon
is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Laurie R.
Keeping watch : a novel / by Laurie R. King.
p. cm.
1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction. 2. Children—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Custody of children—Fiction. 4. Kidnapping—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.I4813 K46 2003
813′.54—dc21 2002034266
eISBN: 978-0-553-89726-5
v3.0_r1
Laurie R. King, Keeping Watch
(Series: # )
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