Second Glance Part 29

Before Ethan could answer, Shelby pulled into the driveway. An enormous box was in the hatchback of her car. "What's going on here?" she asked.

"Nothing," all three men said simultaneously.

"Then what's a policeman doing at my house at midnight?"

Eli stepped forward. "I, um, came here because I knew you'd be up. With Ethan. But when I got here, you weren't. Here, I mean."

Shelby stiffened. "Did you need more help with research?"

"No, I wanted to ask you out."

The words seemed to surprise even Eli. Ethan nudged Ross in the side, and he shrugged to show that he didn't know what was going on either. But in that moment, when Eli did not rat out Ethan, Ross's respect for him doubled.

And that wasn't even taking account of what it did for Shelby. She pinked, then looked away, and finally met Eli's eyes. "I'd like that," she said.

From the way they were locked onto each other, as if a homing device had pinned them both, Ethan and Ross might as well have been on Jupiter. "You would?" Eli said.

Ethan snorted. "I'm gonna hurl," he announced, and slipped into the house.

His departure broke the spell. Shelby cleared her throat, then opened the hatchback of her car. "Carry this in for me, will you?"

"What is it?" Ross hefted the box, stumbling under its weight.

Shelby dusted off her hands on her shorts. "History."

"It was called An Act for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization An Act for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization," Shelby explained, "and it was pa.s.sed on March 31, 1931. Vermont was the twenty-fourth state out of thirty-three to pa.s.s sterilization legislation. From what I could dig up, it seems like Henry Perkins was the mastermind behind the genealogical surveys done on families believed to be a burden to taxpayers . . . and Spencer Pike and Harry Beaumont were his right-hand men."

They had spread out a few of the pedigree charts on the floor of the kitchen, and were sitting cross-legged around them. "They thought that delinquency and degeneracy was something you could inherit from your parents, like eye color or height. And the best way to make Vermont a showplace for the nation was to make sure its gene pool was as strong as possible. Which, following that logic, meant preventing the folks who were diluting it from having any more kids."

"Why would anyone have believed them?" Ross asked.

"Because the eugenicists of the thirties were doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges. They were people like Oliver Wendell Holmes, President Coolidge, Margaret Sanger. People who truly felt that what they were doing, in the long run, was best for everyone." She pulled out papers from the Vermont Industrial School, the Waterbury Hospital for the Insane, the State Prison. "They started out targeting three families whose individual members kept cropping up at state inst.i.tutions. The Ch.o.r.ea family was chosen because of a recurring neurological disorder. The Pirate family lived on houseboats and in waterfront shanties and was known for loose living and abject poverty. The Gypsy family was nomadic and often in trouble with the law . . . and there were so many many of them. They weren't even necessarily related-the eugenicists called them 'families' just to create that closeness where it didn't always exist. of them. They weren't even necessarily related-the eugenicists called them 'families' just to create that closeness where it didn't always exist.

Anyway, in the late 1920s, six thousand people were recorded by the survey's field workers, and organized into sixty-two notorious lineages. The idea was to sterilize these people, so that they wouldn't create more like themselves."

"Who would be naive enough to talk to them? Eventually, even these families had to figure out what was going on," Ross said.

"I imagine that when you live in a tent and have ten children and no money, and a fancy white woman arrives one day and asks to talk to you, you are too surprised to do anything but let her in. And when she asks to see pictures of your children, you show them out of pride. And when she asks about your relatives, you tell family stories. You never know that the whole time, these women are writing down comments about how slovenly your home is and how stupid you are because you can't speak English well."

Eli had told Ross and Shelby everything he'd learned from Frankie-genealogy, again, of a different sort. Shelby's discovery had been the missing link, the reason why Gray Wolf and Cecelia Pike's kins.h.i.+p might have led to her death. Pike's reaction to that news, given his eugenical convictions, would have been extreme. But would it have made him commit murder?

He hunkered down over one wheel-shaped chart. It was hard to read, but simple to understand-dotted from generation to generation were all the flaws that had made this kins.h.i.+p network a target. Some of the relations at the tail ends of the chart were men and women Eli still knew, most of whom had suffered more than their share of hard times. Was this just a matter of bad luck . . . or had shame kept them in their place? "How many people were sterilized?" Eli asked.

Shelby shook her head. "That was the one piece of information I couldn't really find. As of 1951, there were 210 reported sterilizations in Vermont-mostly in inst.i.tutions for the feebleminded, or the insane asylum, or the jail. Of course, the people who were in those inst.i.tutions were there in the first place because they weren't living the way society thought they should: their marriages weren't valid, for example, under Vermont law . . . so social services would take their children to the industrial school, the wife to a mental inst.i.tution for having loose morals, and the husband to jail for being a s.e.xual offender."

"But the operation was voluntary," Ross said.

"In theory. But there were different levels of 'voluntary.' Sometimes the only consent needed was that of two doctors. The patient apparently didn't always know what was best for himself."

Eli could feel a headache building behind his left eye. In all the years he'd been in this town, he'd never heard of the eugenics project. The site of the survey office, 138 Church Street, was now a shop that sold incense and candles.

He thought of old Tula Patou, who lived down by the river, and had no children in sixty years of marriage. Of uncles and aunts of his own who had remained childless, though not for lack of trying. Had they been sterilized?

Did they even know know?

There would be people in Comtosook still haunted by the memory of what had happened in the 1930s. People who'd straddled both sides of the debate. Victims who were too afraid to speak of it, for fear that it might happen again. And proponents who kept silent out of guilt.

If the dispute over the Pike property had seemed volatile, then this discovery was incendiary.

Suddenly Eli remembered standing with his mother in line to register for school. He couldn't have been more than five, and the sun was strong on the neat part she'd made in his hair. She held his hand like all the other mothers, but when they were coming close to the secretary at the table, she kissed him on the cheek and told him she would wait for him outside.

"With your looks, you can pa.s.s," she told him cryptically, when he caught up with her afterward.

It was not that the Abenaki didn't remember the days when they were mistakenly christened Gypsies; it was that they remembered too well.

Eli bent over another pedigree chart. "What if Pike didn't know? What if his beloved wife gave birth . . . to a baby a little too dark-skinned?"

"And she was in Gray Wolf's company, because she'd found out he was her natural father-" Ross interrupted.

"And Pike a.s.sumed, incorrectly, that the baby was Gray Wolf's."

To a man who had spent his career proving that the Abenaki were genetically inferior, this would not sit well. It explained why Pike might have buried the stillborn before any authorities could see its face. And it explained why he might have killed his wife.

"What happened to the project? Why did it stop?" Ross asked.

Shelby began to gather some of the doc.u.ments again. "They ran out of funding. And then along came Hitler. The n.a.z.i Law for Protection Against Genetically Defective Offspring was based on American models for sterilizing the unfit."

"So when was the Vermont law repealed?"

"That's the thing," Shelby said. "It wasn't, entirely. It was challenged by the ACLU in the seventies . . . and the original language has been changed . . . but there is is still a sterilization law in effect." still a sterilization law in effect."

Suddenly a name on this particular chart leaped out at Eli. Pial Sommers, married to Isobel DuChamps, who was feebleminded. Their children: Winona, Ella, and Sopi, who had died at age seven. Ella Sommers had married a man she met while working as a waitress in Burlington. His name was Robert Rochert, and he had been Eli's father.

Pial Sommers had been one of seven children, the only one who was not, according to this chart, insane or criminal or perverse. One short dotted line separated him from his mother's side of the family, and ten first cousins, the youngest of whom was named John "Gray Wolf " Delacour.

Ethan rolled over on his bed as his uncle opened the door to his bedroom. "You still up?" Ross asked.

He had been staring out the window, watching the sun come up. As always, a thick pane of gla.s.s was protecting him. He knew he'd totally lucked out; if Eli Rochert had decided to be honest and if his mother hadn't come home with that box of old papers, he'd have been reamed up one side and down another for sneaking away.

"I know what you're going to say," Ethan sighed. "And it's not like I wanted you to get in trouble too." He picked at a st.i.tch on the quilt that covered his bed, a lame blue thing with babyish trucks on its hem. Didn't anyone except him realize that he was growing up? "It's just that she doesn't get it. Not like you you would." would."

Ross sat down on the bed, and put the laptop he'd been carrying on the floor. "Why me?"

With s.h.i.+ning eyes, Ethan turned to his uncle. "Because you've skydived, and played chicken with a train, and fought back when someone pulled a knife on you. All those stories you tell me about things you've done. Sometimes I wake up and think I want to run until there's nowhere left to go, and that if I don't don't do it I might as well just croak right here and now." do it I might as well just croak right here and now."

Ross shook his head. "When I do those things, it's not for the thrill. It's because sometimes I get so down that I need to feel something, anything. And since a pinp.r.i.c.k isn't cutting it, I've got to try a meat cleaver."

"I know," Ethan breathed. "And that rocks rocks."

"The thing is, Eth, I'd give anything to be sitting on a bed in a house that was safe, knowing that on the other side of the wall was someone who would rather die than think of me being hurt." He pulled at the same st.i.tch on the quilt that Ethan had toyed with, and unraveled one appliqued truck. "Don't try so hard to be me," Ross said, "when all I'm trying to be is someone else."

Suddenly Ethan felt like a sock was stuck in his throat, and those stupid tears were coming. "I just want to be normal," he said.

"Yeah, well . . . if it weren't for you and me, normal people would have nothing to measure themselves against."

Ethan hiccuped on a laugh. "I guess we'd better stick together."

"That's good," Ross answered, opening the laptop so that Ethan could see the screen. "Because I'm counting on your help."

By the time Eli got home from Shelby's house, and this new package of nightmares, it was after three in the morning. The blasting at the quarry started at five, but he managed to get back to sleep with a pillow over his head. So when his doorbell rang at 6:30 A.M. A.M., he seriously considered taking his piece and shooting in that general direction, just to make the caller go away. Then he weighed the time he'd be stripped of his s.h.i.+eld, and the ridiculous amount of paperwork he'd have to file for the simple discharge of a bullet, and dragged himself out of bed in his boxer shorts.

Frankie exploded into the apartment the minute he unlocked the door. "Wait'll you hear this," she said, making her way into the kitchen, where she held up the empty coffeepot and tsked. "I tested that nightgown at the state lab for you."

"Frankie-"

"You know that stuff you thought was the victim's blood?"

"Yeah."

"Well, it wasn't. Don't you keep your coffee in the freezer, Eli, like the rest of the modern world?" She turned around, holding the coffee-pot aloft. "You're wearing your underpants, for G.o.d's sake."

"Underwear. Grown men don't wear underpants."

"Grown men usually get dressed before they answer the door."

"Frankie," Eli sighed, "I've had about three hours of sleep. Don't screw with me."

She unearthed the coffee, which was-of all places-in a box with his black shoe polish on top of the fridge, and began to measure it out. "It's meconium."

"No, I think it's Colombian."

"The stain, you jerk. On the nightgown."

Eli yawned and scratched his chest. He was too tired, at this point, to even care about covering himself for Frankie, who was far more interested in whatever her tests had yielded than his body anyway. "So what's meconium? Something radioactive? You're not gonna tell me aliens hanged her, are you?"

"It's feces. Baby p.o.o.p."

"Yeah, well, we already know she gave birth that night. So what."

The coffeemaker sputtered, and Frankie found two mismatched mugs. "You told me the woman gave birth to a dead baby. Dead babies don't pa.s.s stools."

Her last sentence cut through Eli's senses, and he swam out of his fog. "Hang on-"

"h.e.l.lo," Frankie said. "That baby was alive."

Today was Bingo Day, and although Eli had absolutely no intention of playing, some well-meaning staffer at the nursing home had plunked a card in front of him. "B-11," said the activities coordinator, a large woman in a jumpsuit that made her look like a prize-winning pumpkin. "B-11!"

He saw Spencer Pike before the old man saw him, and approached the intern who was wheeling him into the room before he reached the table. "I can take care of this," Eli said, taking the handles of the chair and repositioning Pike in a corner, away from the grainy speakers of the Bingo caller.

Eli was unprepared for the way hate spread through him viscerally. This was the man who had tried to erase his family. This man once thought he had the right to decide what kind of life was worth living. This man had played G.o.d.

Eli had cringed when he'd read the 1932 police reports, where brutality was the order of the day and Miranda wasn't even a gleam in some detective's eye. But cruelty came easily, it turned out, when you had so much anger swimming in you that you risked floating away on the tide.

"Go away," Spencer Pike said distinctly.

Eli leaned closer, pinning Pike's shoulders to the back of his chair. "You lied to me, Spencer."

"I don't even know who you are."

"That's bulls.h.i.+t, and you know it. Your brain's just fine. I bet you remember everything you did in your life. I bet you even remember their names."

"Whose names?" names?"

"O-75," the activities coordinator chirped. "Do we have a Bingo?"

"You thought you were so smart, telling the cops you'd only just cut down your wife's body. But you'd cut it down hours before you called them."

A vein throbbed in the old man's temple. "This is ridiculous."

"Is it? I mean, I wasn't there. I wasn't even alive alive. So how could I possibly know?" Eli paused. "You ever heard about forensics, Spencer? You know how many things a dead body can tell us these days? Like when she was killed. How it was done. Who was stupid enough to leave clues behind."

Spencer pushed at him ineffectively. "Get away from me."

"Who'd you kill first, Spencer? The baby, or your wife?"

"Nurse!"

"It must have made you crazy to know that you'd married one. That your child was one."

Pike's face had gone white. "One what?"

"Gypsy," Eli said.

Almost immediately, Pike struggled halfway out of his chair. His skin darkened, and his watery eyes fixed on Eli. "You . . . you . . ." he wheezed.

"I-20. Anyone?"

Pike clutched his chest and scrambled to grab at the armrests, but missed and fell forward, landing on the floor. The activities coordinator cried out and came running from the front of the room. Two burly interns headed toward them. Eli leaned down beside Pike. "How does it feel, not being able to fight back?" he whispered.

In the melee that followed, Pike battled the staff trying to help him, shouting obscenities and scratching a nurse deep enough to draw blood. Pandemonium broke out in the activities room, with some patients egging Pike on, others weeping, and two coming to blows over who had called Bingo first. Eli slipped out of the room unnoticed. He walked down the main hall of the rest home and out the front door, whistling.

Maylene Warburton moved a crystal an eighth of an inch to the right and lifted her face to the sky with expectation. A moment later, she swore and turned to her husband. "Curtis, I can't conjure anything with him standing here. The negativity is keeping all the spirits away."

From his spot on a folding camping chair, Rod van Vleet exploded. "It's been four hours, and Wakeman didn't seem to have this much difficulty. Did you ever think maybe it's you you?"

"You see what I mean?" Maylene cried.

"Cut!" Curtis called, and he clapped the cameraman on his shoulder as he walked into the clearing of the Pike property. "Johannes, take five." He smiled at his wife, placating, and pulled her toward Rod. "If we aren't all on the same page here, it's no wonder the spirits won't come."