Caller unknown, p.1
Caller Unknown, page 1
CALLER UNKNOWN
CALLER UNKNOWN
OLIVER JOHNSON
To Caroline
PROLOGUE
THE LETTER
The note on the envelope was addressed to a man who had been declared officially dead three years earlier. It read: “To Ed Constance. If you’ve come this far, that is your name.”
He had had another name only yesterday: Martin Cruz. He had a wallet with credit cards, a driver’s license, and a social security card to prove it. He had a photograph of a woman who, only last night, he could not remember. But now he did: Sarah, his wife. His pregnant wife. They had taken her. How long ago? Two, three days?
So, here he was. Yesterday’s man was gone. The contents of the wallet were a lie. All he had were the photograph, this letter, and the slowly returning memories.
Memories of all the events of ten years before, when he’d last had his true name: Ed Constance. It had been the same then: he’d been alone and desperate; the killers had been close; his time was nearly up.
The only thing that could save him now was the letter. He opened the envelope and read.
PART ONE
THE MAINE WOODS
SUMMER 1970
CHAPTER ONE
That last evening at Eriksson’s Lot it was warm, and the late June sun was still falling westwards at 7.30 p.m. Outside the cabin nothing stirred. All that existed was the falling light and the endless trees of the forest.
The seven children waited in their cots, four on one side and three on the other, under the sloping roof of the loft. At the far end, away from the solitary, sealed window, two of the cast-iron beds had been pulled close to one another in the shadows. In one lay a boy, in the other a girl. He was called Ed, she Shannon. Like the other five children, both were nine years old and skeletally thin.
Ed and Shannon held hands across the space. In their free hands they clutched the single personal possession they had been permitted in all their years at this place: his was a one-eyed teddy bear; hers a black nylon jacket with a yellow cartoon of a dog on the back dressed in a pilot’s outfit. They had decided this creature must be called Snoopy because of the scrawled, loopy signature below the cartoon. The jacket was much creased by age and overhandling.
For the last two hours there’d been loud noises in the cabin’s concrete basement two floors down. The children knew what this meant: Mr. Frome was positioning the seven wooden chairs with their leather restraints, the trays of drugs, the cine equipment, and the loudspeakers ready for the evening lesson.
As if in confirmation, the wooden stairs creaked. “The witch’s coming,” Shannon whispered, and instantly closed her eyes. It was forbidden to look on Mrs. Frome until she permitted it. Three times now in the years they had been reading the Bible they’d come to the place in the Commandments where it said: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Ed and Shannon had wished their captor’s end with the fervent devotion only nine-year-olds possess, but their wishing hadn’t been enough, for here she was again, ready to take them to the basement.
Unlike the others, Ed kept looking through batted eyelids long enough to see the woman’s head rise up the stairwell. Her auburn hair flared in the shaft of evening sun from the window. As usual her face was fixed and expressionless. She placed a large shopping bag on the floor.
“Get up,” she said.
The kids, all of whom had only been pretending to be asleep, sat up uncertainly, then, as she clapped her hands, got out of bed. They stood on the bare boards, hair and pajamas disheveled, staring at their feet. One or two of them shivered, though it wasn’t cold. One of the shiverers began to sob. She was a thin, waif-like girl with a kidney-shaped birthmark on her right cheek.
“Stop sniveling, Catrine,” Mrs. Frome snapped, and Catrine’s sobbing ended in a strange, strangled hiccup.
Mrs. Frome bent and took some things from the bag and placed them on the table under the window.
“Come here,” she said. The kids shuffled forward obediently.
Mrs. Frome had placed seven bags on the table: they were square and blue with white shoulder straps. The sides had a globe decal in the same colors: a white line of longitude through the poles, and curved lines of latitude radiating out from the central logo text, all against the background blue. The logo text “Pan Am” was stenciled across the globe.
All the kids could read. They had been through the Bible many times, from infanthood. But “Pan Am” was unfamiliar. Unfamiliar, too, was the globe: they, from their limited observations from this mountaintop, which they had never left, believed the Earth was flat. Neither did they know what an airline or airliner was, though they had seen the contrails of planes high above in the blue summer sky: they had thought them to be God’s chalk marks on the blue board of heaven.
There were price stickers on the bags. The children looked at the dollar symbols as uncomprehendingly as at the Pan Am logo. They had never seen a dollar or the symbol that represented it.
Next to each bag were cardboard placards, a length of butcher’s twine looped through the holes in their tops, and crayons.
Mrs. Frome gestured to the bags. “Pack one extra set of clothes and toilet items. Nothing else. When you’re done, write your names and the scripture I taught you this morning on the cardboard.” The children stared uncomprehendingly. Was there to be no lesson this evening? She clapped her hands again. “Go on now.”
That started them. There was an old chest of drawers in the dormitory containing a spare set of summer clothes: blue Airtex shirts, khaki short trousers, white socks, washed and ironed by the kids themselves, as they had been taught when very young. “Cleanliness is next to godliness” was one of Mrs. Frome’s favorite axioms.
When they came to put the clothes in the bags they found that each already had a copy of the Bible in it, taking up half the space. Then they wrote their names and the passage that they had learned that morning on the placards:
“For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men.”
The words were meaningless to them. Their hands shook as they wrote; there were quite a few mistakes.
When they were done, Mrs. Frome looked upon their misspellings and smudges with a frown. Ed expected her to tell them to do them again. Such was the way of the Lot, endless repetition of verses, chapters, even entire books of the Bible.
But instead she said, “Now get dressed. We’re leaving in an hour.”
The second surprise. The kids couldn’t help glancing at each other. One of them tentatively raised a hand.
“Yes, David?” Mrs. Frome said.
“Leaving, ma’am? What do you mean?”
He was a tall, dark-eyed boy, and, despite the Lot’s meagre diet, bigger than any of the other kids. He was normally cocksure and had a cruel streak, which he took out on the wings and limbs of captured insects and fledglings and, also, on his slighter, less muscular companions. Mrs. Frome had done nothing to correct this behavior.
She had named him well: David. A king and, one day, a giant-slayer.
But this evening David didn’t look tough, only scared.
She smiled thinly. “It’s time for you to go out into the world.” She gestured at the forest through the window as if willing it to disappear and reveal this mysterious “world” behind.
David looked in that direction. All that could be seen were trees, which, naturally, looked no different to how they always looked. His eyes welled. He swallowed but didn’t let the tears flow.
As Mrs. Frome had taught them: for hadn’t the Lord in his short life wept only twice: once for dead Lazarus and once for sinful Jerusalem? Why should they, mere children, have the luxury of tears?
“Now get dressed,” she said.
The children discarded their pajamas and pulled on the underpants, pants, shirts, socks, and sneakers they had worn earlier.
When she saw they were all dressed, Mrs. Frome nodded and said, “Wait here,” then went back down the stairs. The kids looked at each other again. What was about to happen?
CHAPTER TWO
An hour later the children heard the engines of the two vehicles start outside. Some of the kids had lain back on their cots and begun to doze; it was way past their normal bedtime. But they woke immediately at the noise.
Mrs. Frome appeared moments later. She was dressed as if for one of her fortnightly supply trips: sunglasses, a flower-patterned scarf that complemented her yellow and red house dress, and a pair of black leather gloves. She had applied her makeup with some care: plenty of foundation, the red lipstick matching the red in the dress pattern. She was carrying a small blue handbag on her shoulder. It was not so unlike the blue airline bags she had issued to the kids earlier.
She told them to pick up their bags and the signs and follow her down the stairs.
As she disappeared, some of the kids tried to save their personal items. Shannon stuffed her Snoopy jacket in her bag. Ed looked at his large, languidly limbed teddy bear. The bear’s name was simply Bear. Bear had only one remaining goggling eye rotating in its white plastic socket. To Ed, it made Bear seem both vulnerable and heroic at the same time. He had made up a little rhyme about the eye, which he recited to Bear every night before sleep: “As long as I can see your eye, I cannot die.”
But Bear wouldn’t fit into Ed’s bag; he was just too big. He was not coming with him, wherever they were going.
Ed looked at him sadly. “Bye, Bear,” he said. He hugg ed him, then tucked him under the threadbare blanket on his cot. The toy’s remaining goggling eye stared up at the ceiling beams. Maybe after he was gone Bear would go on sleeping here, forever and ever?
Ed followed the others downstairs to the kitchen. There was no bread or orange juice on the checkered tablecloth as there would have been at breakfast time. Mrs. Frome stood at the open door. “Into the bus,” she ordered.
The yellow school bus, which had never been out of the outbuilding next to the cabin in all the preceding years, was idling outside in a haze of blue diesel exhaust. The red Chevy pickup was parked behind it, engine also running.
By now the sun was casting a slanting blaze over the house and the vehicles. All appeared to be on fire in its last light.
Mr. Frome grinned down at the kids from the driver’s seat of the bus, his red lips showing through the black bush of his beard. His eyes were recessed, shrike-like. For some reason he was wearing thick workmen’s gloves.
Ed went up the three steps and past Frome. A sour body odor came off the man’s stained mackinaw.
There were six rows of seats and a wide bench in the rear. Ed went right to the back and sat down on the hot buttoned cushions. He stared, unseeing, out the window at the side of the log house. For a moment he thought about Bear. A cold shiver went through him. He played the mantra in his head: “As long as I can see your eye, I cannot die.” But in that moment he was sure he would never see Bear again.
There came a slight pressure on the seat next to him and then the press of a warm side and he turned from the window, and there was Shannon. He reached out and squeezed one of her hands.
David climbed into the bus and swaggered toward the back. He was grinning now, though earlier, when Mrs. Frome had told them they were leaving, he had been terrified.
“Just look at you two,” he said, flopping down in the seat in front of them. He leaned over into their space.
“You gonna kiss her, Ed?” he asked.
Ed knew how these situations ended. He let go of Shannon’s hand and balled his fists, ready for a fight.
“Why don’t you sit somewhere else?” he said, hating the sound of his voice, which, to his ears, was small and whispery.
“What, and miss you two making out?”
The other kids were now all on the bus.
“Hey, you, knock it off back there,” Frome yelled from the driver’s seat. He yanked the lever by his side and the bus door shut with a hydraulic whoosh and thunk.
David sneered. “See you later, lovebirds.” He stood and made his way back down the aisle just as Frome rammed the stick into gear and the bus lurched forward, nearly throwing David onto the floor. He grabbed a seat back, then sat next to his buddy, Carl. They were behind Hope, the timid blond girl. David leaned over to her, said something inaudible that made her flinch away. He laughed and back-slapped Carl.
The sudden, surging movement of the bus made Ed feel sick. He swallowed bile.
Shannon didn’t seem to have the same problem. “Where’re they taking us?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“I dunno.” He swallowed again.
“Maybe it’s like the witch said,” she said, “we’re goin’ to see the world. Maybe there’ll be no more movies, or readings or ’noculations, no under the stairs…”
The bus was rolling down the unmade road in a huge cloud of dust. Ed looked back through the fly-specked rear window. The sight of the rapidly receding log cabin where he had slept every night of his conscious life made him light-headed.
The Chevy was following. He wondered how Mrs. Frome could see to drive through the dust.
Ahead was the gate in the fence. It had always been padlocked, the limit of their world until now, but this evening it was open. The bus swept through it. Ed was surprised that in the instant they passed it the world didn’t change completely, revealing some remarkable new vista. But all there was beyond were more of the endless trees.
The bus plunged down a steep track in the forest, juddering and shaking with the sudden gear changes and braking required to negotiate the switchbacks. Ed retched slightly, shut his eyes and clutched the back of the seat in front in a death grip.
After twenty minutes the gradient eased. Ed tentatively squinted forward. They were on the flat; the bus rolled up to a junction with the Chevy right behind. Frome brought the bus to a stop. There was another gate in a fence ahead and a gravel road beyond it. Frome opened the door, got down and pulled aside some heavy limbs of brushwood obscuring the inside of the drive entrance, then used a key on the padlock on the gate and pulled it open.
He returned sweating, swearing and swatting at a cloud of blackflies that had materialized around his head. He climbed back into the driver’s seat, engaged the door mechanism, jammed forward the gearstick, gunned the engine, and, with a roar, swung left onto the gravel road.
Behind them Ed saw Mrs. Frome drive the Chevy through the gate, then get out to pull the branches back over the track. Maybe they were leaving her behind—maybe that was the end of the witch? He felt a faint tick of hope in his chest. He stared out the rear window, hoping it would be so, but five minutes later the Chevy reappeared, hurtling around a corner behind the bus like a furious red hornet. The bile rose in his throat again.
The new world was the same, yet terrifying. The bus was full of the noise of tires, the slanting orange light, the roar of the wind through the window vents, the flapping of the faded curtains. A lake flashed past, large boulders stood hunched by the roadside, a large Prussian-blue river rushed by, then the bus labored up an avenue of pines to a pass between two mountaintops. Frome pulled down the visor against the dropping sun.
Ed shut his eyes against the light and held tight to Shannon’s hand.
CHAPTER THREE
They drove for over an hour. Shannon was asleep on Ed’s shoulder. His own eyes opened and closed as he dozed then woke abruptly. Suddenly the tire noise went from a gravelly roar to a hum. He looked out and saw they were now on a black-road surface. The bus braked. There was a boarded-up building on the side of the road with a shot-scarred red and green star sign on a high pole. Four rusty, red metal boxes sat under a sagging canopy on the weedgrown asphalt.
The bus pulled in, circled the boarded office and parked on the back lot, and the Chevy came to a stop behind. Frome turned off the engine and opened the door.
“OK,” Frome said. “Out of the bus. Leave the bags and signs.”
Silently, the seven children stepped down to the hot, cracked asphalt, blinking at the last rays over the trees and staring at the alien vision of the gas station. The cicadas sang in the long grass, a pulsing chorus, loud then subsiding, loud then subsiding—the pulse of a summer evening. There were birds singing the evening chorus. The curious whistling song of the white-throated sparrow sounded: Ah, te,e,e,te,e,e,te.
Mrs. Frome was out of the Chevy. “Follow me,” she said. She walked toward the woods at the back of the lot, around a mound covered with Johnson grass and white and yellow flowers. The children followed unhesitatingly. They plunged into the semi-dark canopy of trees and after fifty yards came to a rusted chain-link fence. There was a gate set into it with a padlock; both were rusted and apparently disused. Beyond, Ed could make out the faintest of paths disappearing into the trees.
Frome, who had been at the back of the group, pushed through and went to the gate and shook it with his fists. Flecks of rust fell from the fence but the lock held. He took hold of the padlock and rolled the tumblers. Despite the rust they moved freely, as if the mechanism had been oiled recently.
“All good,” he said to Mrs. Frome.
“Alright, come here,” she said. The kids dutifully arranged themselves in a semicircle around her. Mr. Frome positioned himself behind them and Ed felt his sour breath on his neck. Mrs. Frome reached into her handbag and drew out a crucifix on a silver chain and held it up in her gloved hand. It flashed in the light through the tree canopy.
Ed closed his eyes. Bad things happened when the crucifix was out.
“Look at the cross,” Mrs. Frome said.
On more than one occasion he had refused to look, but each refusal had brought pain and humiliation—beatings, or the closet under the stairs. He reluctantly opened his eyes. All the other kids were staring at the shining metal as Mrs. Frome began to swing it from side to side. It flashed in the dim light of the forest canopy and he found his eyes matched its oscillations, rocking his mind… His eyes began to get heavy.
