Dark riddle, p.1
Dark Riddle, page 1
Dark
Riddle
By Deborah Madar
NFB Publishing
NFBPublishing.com
Dedicated to the parents and teachers who care enough to ask the important questions and are brave enough to heed the answers
“For love’s sake, we must never stop trying to know the unknowable.”
-Susan Klebold, 2016
Prologue
NOVENA A SAN JUDAS
When Gina Clayton was four years old, she and her mother would board a metro bus once a month to go to the “funny farm.” That’s what her father had called the place. But those Saturday morning visits had been disappointingly unfunny to the little girl. The one clear memory from those trips to the Buffalo State Hospital was of trailing close behind her great-aunt Concetta up and down a long hallway while the old lady, holding a beautiful blue rosary in her wrinkled hands, muttered to herself in Italian.
”What’s she saying, Mommy?” Gina had asked in a whisper.
“She’s praying. She’s making a novena to Saint Jude. She’s asking him for his help,” her mother had said.
“His help? Why does she need help?”
Her mother listened intently to the old woman’s murmuring before she answered. “For us. For you and me. She’s asking Saint Jude to protect us.”
Decades later on a stormy November morning, Gina repeated that same prayer she heard all those years ago in the halls of the mental institution.
Just moments before, she was sound asleep, but a blast of shrieking static jolted her head off the pillow. She turned and squinted in the direction of the sound, listening for several seconds before she could discern its source. The police scanner in the twins’ bedroom across the hall, a relic of her former life with her felon of a husband, had rarely been turned on since his arrest. One of the boys must have been listening to it while she had been at work. She sat up and strained to make out the dispatcher’s hiccupping transmission. “Lake Hinon School ....shooter....all responders.....”
Before she realized it, Gina was praying.
“Saint Jude, protect Luke, John, Tom, and Lisa.”
Frantically pulling on her jeans, she begged the saint to safeguard her four children who were at the school. She collapsed to the floor and tugged on her boots. The phone in the upstairs hallway was ringing, but she ignored it; instead she worked at tightening the rawhide laces, fighting her crazily trembling hands.
The answering machine blared as she stumbled out of her bedroom and into the hallway. “This is the Emergency Notification System from the Lake Hinon School District. We are in lockdown due to a crisis situation. Parents and family members are NOT to go to the school. The authorities will decide when it is safe to end the lock-down. When we are advised to do so, we will transport our students to the Langston Fire Hall on Oak Street. Households will be informed when this happens. Again...”
She recognized the robotic voice. It was Wendy, the school secretary, the first person she had met when she had registered the kids. As Gina flew down the stairs, she heard the woman’s mechanical tone repeating the words that would change everything. “This is the Emergency Notification System from the Lake Hinon School…”
“Saint Jude, protect Luke, John, Tom, and Lisa.”
She knew as she prayed that she would not follow Wendy’s dictum. She would go to the school. She had to see her children—to make sure that they were safe.
Where had she put her purse? She looked for it on the entryway bench where she thought she remembered dropping it, but it wasn’t there. She couldn’t recall going into the kitchen when she got home from work earlier this morning, but she had been so tired, maybe she had.
Then she saw it on the table and grabbed it, intent on retrieving her car keys. She fished for them in every compartment of the bag. “God damn it!” she said, clenching her fists in an attempt to halt the bizarre shaking. With a clatter that echoed throughout the empty house, she dumped the contents of her purse onto the table. Her keys were not there. Did Luke leave them in the car this morning after their driving lesson?
She tripped over a kitchen chair as she bolted back to the foyer. Grabbing her red parka from the hook, she opened the front door to the sound of wailing sirens. At first a duet, and then a trio, the alarms beckoned all emergency volunteers from everywhere along the twenty mile shoreline.
“Saint Jude, protect Luke, John, Tom, and Lisa.”
A mini blizzard had been well underway as she slept. Gina fought the wind as it snatched the knob from her hand. She grabbed at it and managed to slam the door closed. Blowing snow blinded her as she pulled on her parka and fled down the porch steps. Halting as she reached the bottom stair, she put her hand over her eyes, attempting to shelter them from the blustering flakes as she made her way to the car.
But there was nothing to see. The Pontiac was gone. In its place was a foot of snow. As she stood in the white drifts staring at her carless driveway, Gina frantically continued to mumble her novena to the patron saint of lost causes.
“Saint Jude, protect Luke, John, Tom, and Lisa.”
She was renacting the old lady’s slow march down the halls of Buffalo State Hospital, pacing up and down the length of the driveway, from the street to the small shed in the backyard, desperate to put her thoughts into some kind of order. She had to get to the school. She closed her eyes and fought the panic that threatened to engulf her. Opening them, she glanced up and down her street. Which neighbor’s door should she pound on to beg for a ride? It would have to be Mr. Simpson’s, although the old man had never been neighborly in any sense of the word. With her head down in order to brace herself against the strong gusts of wind, and still praying out loud, she turned toward the old man’s house.
“Saint Jude, protect…”
When she heard tires crunching snow behind her she turned and saw the flashing lights. The state trooper got out of his car and walked toward her. Gina’s knees buckled.
“Mrs. Clayton?” he asked. “Is Luke Clayton your son?”
Gina, kneeling in the snow, nodded, closed her eyes and continued to pray.
PART I
Chapter One
PROBLEM ONE
Gina stifled a yawn and hurried back to the largest table in the dning room. Thank God the ten rowdy hunters were her final customers of the overnight shift at the Linwood Street Diner. The men took their time with the menu and then dawdled over huge breakfasts and multiple cups of coffee.
“Hey, sweetheart, how about a warm-up?” one of them asked. As she carried the carafe to the table, several more beckoned her.
“Can I get a little more syrup, honey?”
“I’d like Tabasco if you have it. Can’t stand the taste of that Red Hot.”
“Of course,” she replied. The men watched appreciatively as she moved from one to the other of them. Today, like most work days, her thick mane of dark brown waves was banded in a ponytail and pinned into a tame bun. Throughout her life, she had often been mistaken for Irish because of the green eyes she had inherited from her Sicilian grandfather. Petite and trim, mainly due to waitressing and worry, she buzzed around their table like a perpetual motion machine.
She knew these guys were definitely from the city. The locals who had grown up hunting would order without looking at the menu and efficiently swallow their eggs and coffee and head to their tree stands with no unnecessary banter. Gina put on her game face for the out-of-towners. She smiled down at them and tried to imagine how a woman who didn’t have teenagers at home on this Monday morning might respond to their small talk. All during the meal they shouted over one another, arguing about who would be the first to bag a deer on opening day, but their good-natured repartee caused Gina to punch out twenty minutes late. Oh well, she thought as she headed into the cold morning, she could use the overtime pay.
She traipsed through the foot of overnight snow that had fallen in the parking lot, her headache bouncing from one temple to the other. Listening to the hunters’ raucous laughter for the past hour had caused it. On this morning Gina felt eons older than her forty years. Her back hurt, and her feet throbbed inside her boots. Thank God the city guys had tipped well.
As she drew closer to the car, she was relieved to see her son sitting in the driver’s seat. Now she wouldn’t have to worry about nodding off at the wheel during the drive back to Langston. Gina yawned loudly as she opened the car door and slid onto the cold vinyl seat. Concentrating what little strength she had after working two shifts, she slammed the stubborn door closed.
“Morning, Mom,” Luke greeted her quietly and turned the key in the ignition. As soon as the engine turned over, she was reminded that a new exhaust system was the next item on her constantly growing list of unaffordable necessities. Before the dome light dimmed, it cast its glow on her son’s handsome face. Gina was startled by what she saw in those few seconds. The years had flown since Luke’s birth; in her mind’s eye, his infancy and childhood were limited to a few shadowy scenes. The birth of the twins eleven months after Luke’s had usurped his place in the family photo albums and in Gina’s memory bank. As she glanced at him, her tired brain woke up to an epiphany: my boy is a man.
She recognized, too, the confidence in his posture as he sat in the driver’s seat. Was it possible that he had grown taller over the past sixteen hours? He was wearing his new varsity jacket. Maybe that was it. “Hi, honey,” she said as she placed her purse in the space between them and pulled on her seat belt. Gina turned away from her son and watched for cars in her side view mirror as he
“Pretty much. I shoveled the driveway, so I should be able to pull the car in, and I woke Lisa up so that she could get into the shower before the twins,” he explained.
“Thanks,” she said, too tired to add how grateful she was for his taking responsibility for his younger siblings. “It was nice of Travis’ grandpa to drop you off here on his way to work.”
“Yeah.”
“Any trouble finding the keys?” she asked.
“No. They were under the mat, like you said they’d be.”
She raised her hand to shield her eyes. They were headed into the rising November sun, brighter than usual for this time of year in the Northeast. It was supposed to snow again later, but you could not tell from this early morning sky. She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.
Before she had left for work yesterday, her son asked if she would take him out for some driving practice before school. Luke’s desire for a license so soon after his sixteenth birthday was a reasonable one. Gina worked so many hours at the restaurant—her own shifts and those of the “slackers,” as Linda, her boss, dubbed them, those who called in sick “whenever they had a fart caught crossways”—she couldn’t be counted on to take her son to his job at Sumner’s Groceries in Lincoln. The city was ten miles away, too far from home for him to bike. After football practice throughout the fall, Luke relied on his friend Travis’ grandfather, who worked the third shift every other week. When that didn’t work out, and when Gina’s schedule prevented her from taking him, he had admitted to his mother that he had actually resorted to hitchhiking. The last time he had stuck his thumb out on Route 44, he told her, a middle-aged man had pulled over, and within five minutes, Luke had felt a hand on his knee. Gina had forbidden him to do that again. She was looking forward to him passing his driver’s test, possibly more than Luke himself was.
Now he sat beside his mother, tracing the curvy lake road with the ancient Pontiac. He reached for the dial and turned the radio down. The rotten egg smell of the paper mill invaded the car’s interior. Even though the plant was down to a one shift operation, the odor was noxious and ubiquitous on this part of the lake when the wind blew from the south. But Gina, like all residents of the area, was used to it, and so she kept her eyes closed. In spite of the fact that he had just recently gotten his permit, she trusted Luke’s driving, as she trusted everything about her son.
Luke was an anomaly in the Clayton family. Her other kids brought her constant worry; her two younger boys, fifteen-year-old twins, were already known in the county’s juvenile court system, mostly for chronic truancy, although recently Johnny had been caught shoplifting. The two girls, her oldest and youngest children, had problems too. Luke was different. Mature beyond his years from early childhood, he seemed to understand how difficult his mother’s life was, and he did not want to burden her further. His quiet reserve bothered her sometimes. But he was a good student, an athlete, who had a part-time job. Luke asked for nothing, and because she had nothing, that’s what he usually got. His sobriquet, given to him by his four siblings, was “Problem One” because Gina often proclaimed while scolding or lecturing the others that that was what Luke had never given her.
Last night Gina worked her three-to-eleven shift and when another waitress had called in sick, she took the overnight too. Three years into it, the job was becoming more and more physically taxing and less and less mentally stimulating. Gina was too tired most days to realize the extent of her boredom, but on her rare time off, she daydreamed about going back to college to finish her bachelor’s degree. When she mentioned it to Linda one day, her boss agreed to hire her part time if she decided to enroll. The schedule would be exhausting, Gina knew, but then again, she probably hadn’t slept more than four hours a night since she had left her parents’ house decades ago. And she knew she could count on Luke to pick up the slack at home.
Her inhalations deepened as her son guided the car along the winding road. Gina dreamed she was climbing a lakeside cliff, not an actual precipice, but one conjured by her tired imagination. In her dream she grabbed onto rocks and underbrush in a long, slow-motion ascent toward the apex of the steep hill. Suddenly, the earth gave way beneath her feet. She gasped and startled awake just before her dream-self plummeted into the water.
Shaking her head to clear it, she turned toward her son. His window was opened an inch or two in spite of the frigid morning, and he clutched the steering wheel so tightly, his knuckles were white. “Everything okay?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” he answered, staring straight ahead. “There was a deer on the shoulder back there.” Something unfamiliar in his tone, a cold detachment, startled her. For a fleeting moment, she felt like she was sitting next to a stranger. She shook her head again, attempting to remove the cobwebs that still clung to her from the dream.
She looked at the dashboard clock, trying to focus. The kids had to catch the school bus in the next half hour. “Head home, honey,” she said, and Luke turned left at the next intersection.
A few minutes later, he pulled slowly into their narrow driveway, the Pontiac mere inches from the rail of their next door neighbor’s porch. Gina could see the disgust on old man Simpson’s face as he lumbered down his front steps, snow shovel in hand. He shot a disapproving glance toward the Claytons’ bungalow, obviously for Gina’s benefit. Her too-small rental was filled to overflowing this morning with the sounds of music blasting from someone’s speakers and Luke’s sisters and brothers bickering loudly. She and Luke were going to put the storm windows in this weekend, so in spite of their being closed, their mother could hear the commotion as soon as she opened the screechy car door.
Gina shook her head and grabbed her purse. She climbed the porch steps, her head bent, her bed on the second floor her goal. Behind her, Luke had already picked up the shovel that had been left at the bottom of the stairs by one of his brothers and was pushing snow off of the steps.
“Hey, Mom, I need some money,” Johnny said, as she walked through the front door, his hand held out in the universal salute of the teenager.
“I’m not paying for your cigarettes, John...” She took off her jacket and hung it up. The morning aroma of burnt toast combined with the odor of the several pairs of not-quite-dry sneakers on the rack in the tiny foyer assaulted her.
“It’s for a lab fee! Jesus!” Johnny shouted. These days he and his twin seemed to have little control over the register of their changing voices, and John’s curse had come out as a high-pitched squawk.
“Or your pot,” she answered skeptically. This kid of hers, the most charming, the best looking of the lot had been in trouble both in school and with the law, taking after his father in this and so many other ways. “Turn the volume down!” she shouted up to the second floor.
Her oldest son closed the door and stomped his feet on the mat. “Luke,” she said, turning her back on her pissed-off fifteen-year-old. She started to climb up the creaking wooden staircase. “There’s a grocery list on the refrigerator. Get them before you leave work tonight, okay?” She dug into her purse for her wallet and handed him several wadded up bills over the railing, tip money from her shifts. “And don’t hitch—call me when you’re ready to come home.”
“Sure, Mom,” he said, picking up her parka that had fallen on the floor. He carefully hung it back up on the crowded hook. Their eyes locked for a second as he handed her the car keys. “Get some sleep, Mom,” he said. Her son’s smile assured her that everything – their nasty neighbor, her smart-ass twins, her own physical exhaustion – would all pass and they would be fine. He took the cash from her hand and headed for the kitchen to retrieve the list. “And thanks for the driving lesson,” she heard him say. Too tired to respond, she tossed her keys into her purse and shoved her wallet into her back pocket so that John wouldn’t be tempted by the few remaining bills. She dropped the bag over the railing to its usual place on the bench below.
