The chair was still wedged in place. Spielman and Rita had to work together to push it out of the way.
Once the door was clear, Rita ducked her head inside while Spielman kept a lookout. She nodded to Jeff and went ahead of him as he carried Emma down to the kitchen. Using some of Spielman’s blankets, Rita fashioned a bed on the floor of one of the store rooms. This room had no windows and so seemed the most secure. Jeff laid Emma down and covered her with another blanket.
“Jeff, why don’t you stay in here with her while I check the other rooms again?”
“But the chair hadn’t been moved.”
“Just in case.”
Jeff nodded.
Rita went to each of the basement rooms in turn and reassured herself that all was in order. Only then did she let herself relax.
Spielman called from the top of the stairs.
“Everything OK down there, folks?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
“Then hows about yuh help me block this door again?”
Both Rita and Jeff went to help the old man. They managed to push the reception desk further back, so that it partially blocked the way to the door. Then Rita took a marker pen from the desk and began to write on the notice board above their heads. She wrote, ‘Pinders College, Class of 86’, in large letters and drew an arrow pointing to the door. Both Jeff and Spielman gave her questioning looks.
“So the others will know where to find us,” she explained.
Once the sign was written and the door locked shut, they dragged the large filing cabinets from the office and wedged them into place behind the door. Then, going down to the basement, they checked all the windows and used blankets to cover those in the kitchen so that the light couldn’t be seen outside. Finally, they allowed themselves to sit and have a cup of coffee.
“We should try to get us some rest,” Spielman suggested, setting down his cup.
Rita and Jeff looked at the old man. They had been too engrossed in their own worries until now but, seeing his weary, dark-ringed eyes, it was clear to them now that he was quite exhausted.
“I’ll take the first watch,” Rita volunteered.
“No, Hon. You go get washed up. There’s clean clothes in the laundry room. I’ll take the first watch. And you get some rest, Mr Spielman.”
Spielman was only too happy to take a later watch. He curled up in a corner and wrapped himself in a blanket. When Rita checked on him, moments later, on her way to the laundry, the old man was already fast asleep.
It had taken Rita some time to wash and wipe herself clean, but she felt so much better to be free of the dried layer coating her skin and matting her hair.
Looking through the washing baskets, she found some clothes that obviously belonged to a woman somewhat shorter than herself. The jeans ended several inches above Rita’s ankles, but otherwise the fit was good and she also picked out a shirt and a sweat top. Wearing them she now felt deliciously clean.
She checked on Spielman and Emma. They were still asleep, he in his corner and she in the store room. Rita poured two cups of coffee and took them up the stairs to Jeff.
“Thanks. Hey, you’re looking good.”
“Yeah, I feel human again. Anything happening?”
“No. It’s been absolutely quiet out there, as far as I can tell,” Jeff waved a hand over a pile of papers on the filing cabinet, “I’ve been reading through some of these to pass the time. There’s some weird stuff in here. God knows why the Cousins collected it.”
“Yeah. Neil and I had a look through some medical reports earlier.”
“The Boes?”
“Yeah, father and son. But we couldn’t find a link between them and the Cousins.”
“Did you read the interviews?”
“What interviews?”
“A whole file of them, going back years. The earlier ones were written by Mrs Cousins, but our friend Spielman got involved later on. It looks like they quizzed any Californian tourists that came through Losien.”
“Only Californians? Why? What about?”
“It’s a bit obsessive; they wanted to find out everything these people knew about a child killer who went on a killing spree in LA in the late forties. They were interested in the gruesome details: when he started killing, how he killed, how many he killed: his MO. And, as well as the interviews, there are these cuttings, from the LA newspapers of 1950.
The story made the front pages for weeks. It was obviously big news back then and the press milked it for all it was worth. The stories are inventively lurid, as you’d expect, and they seem to have elaborated freely in the absence of hard facts; there’s a lot of editorial comment, opinion pieces and speculation. They came up with a catchy name for him though; they called him the Baby Doll Killer.”
Rita shook her head.
“Never heard of him. What did the tourists say about him?”
“Well, don’t forget that most of them probably got their initial information from the same newspapers that were hyping the story to boost their circulation figures. And, over time, they probably enlarged and exaggerated the stories in the telling. But most of them seem to agree on the basic facts; that over three or four years the killer lured young children to his house and then killed them. They also said that he later kidnapped a young woman and forced her to help him. He got her to approach the kids first, to allay their suspicions.
When it comes to what happened to the kids once he had them, the stories begin to vary. Most agree that, having kidnapped the children, he buried them in his basement. They said that each child was put in a small box and had a carved wooden doll put in with them, and at least seven children had died before the young woman escaped and went to the police. But some said the kids died in the boxes, some said he killed them before he buried them, some said he sexually abused them, some said he tortured them, and one couple said they’d heard that he cut out parts of their bodies once they were dead. Whatever the truth of it, all of them remembered his name, even many years later. He was kinda like a bogeyman; all the more scary for being real and in their own back yard.”
“And what was his name?”
“Boe. Ezra Boe.”
“Shit! A relative of the Cousins was a child killer?”
“Looks that way. Now we know why they kept all this stuff about him.”
“What happened to him?”
“This last cutting is from, let’s see, the LA Times, Tuesday, December 12, 1953. It says that Boe was arrested on Saturday, October 28, 1950, when his reluctant accomplice, 17 year old Rosa Maria Lopez, escaped and raised the alarm. On June 20th, 1951, after months of psychiatric evaluation, Boe was pronounced incapable by reason of insanity and committed to life in a secure hospital for the criminally insane. But only two years into his incarceration, he escaped while being transferred to another facility.”
“Then what?”
“There aren’t any later cuttings in this file, but there’s loads of other documents in the other drawers.”
There was a sound on the stairs below them.
“There weren’t no sign of him for the next four years.”
Spielman had heard them talking and was climbing the stairs to join them.
“Karen, that is Mrs Cousins, and me kept lookin’ for evidence, but most folks back then thought Boe must be dead. Karen and me, we wrote to the newspapers and had ’em go back through the archives. We got us some press cuttings on missin’ children from places between California and Losien. Over those four years there were five kiddies disappeared from towns along that route and ain’t none of them ever bin found. We tried to tell the sheriff, but he said that we couldn’t prove nothin’, on account of how there weren’t no bodies and Boe hadn’t bin seen. So five kiddies disappeared between California and Losien, after Boe escaped, then in 1957 Suzie Bower and those other kiddies was stolen away and killed right here. Boe didn’t die: it took him four long years, walking, but he came back home.”
“Home?”
“Yeah, he was born in Fairfalls. His ma died young and Boe was put into a orphanage by his pa. There’s some papers from the orphanage in here somewhere, on yella paper.”
“Yellow? Oh yeah, I see. St. Hilda’s Orphanage. It’s an internal memo, from a Sister Veronica,” said Rita, reading aloud.
“Ezra Boe (3 yrs and 7 mths) has been with us since his poor mother succumbed to pneumonia, two years ago. He is a cheerful little boy, rarely cries and is content and obedient at all times. On the 12th of last month, Sr Josephine was approached by the Whitneys who expressed their wish to adopt Ezra. I took it upon myself to notify his estranged father, Mr Henry Boe, of the Whitney’s request and I regret to have to tell you that Mr Boe has now removed Ezra from St Hilda’s.”
Jeff shrugged.
“Well at least Henry loved his son.”
“If he loved him why was he in an orphanage?”
“Weren’t no welfare, ma’am.”
“No, I guess not.”
They fell to silence for a few minutes.
“Why yuh reading Mrs Cousin’s private papers, son?”
Jeff was surprised by the question.
“I don’t know. To keep myself awake I guess, but also as it turns out, because the stuff in these files might have something to do with what’s going on here. How long have you known about all this?”
“I lived in this forest near all my life, son, an’ I seen an’ heard some strange things. There’s stories go way back before white folks drove out the injuns. The injuns understood; there’s things, ancient things here, spirits an’ the like, that ain’t got no rational explanation. Things live here that shouldn’t. But Mr Cousins, he can’t see it, says it’s all hogwash. That’s why Karen confided in me, an’ we worked together to find all this evidence.”
“Evidence? Of what?”
“Don’t yuh see? Boe’s the killer, but look at this...if I can find it...”
Muttering, Spielman started to search through the top drawer of the filing cabinet.
“It should be here.”
“What are you looking for?”
“A scrapbook.”
“This one?”
Spielman looked dismayed.
“Yuh bin readin’ that too?”
“When I was in here with Neil, yeah. Sorry.”
Rita couldn’t look Spielman in the eye. He took the book from her with reverence.
“This is Karen’s private book. It’s got all her memories of her daughter. Her daughter disappeared.”
“What?” Jeff interrupted, “When was that?”
“Back in ‘78. Disappeared and they ain’t never found her poor body. An’ the worst of it, a reason I helped Karen all these years: I was the last person to see that poor girl alive, out in the forest, by that broken down shack. I coulda saved her. I shoulda walked her back home, but I thought she’d be safe away from that evil place. I told her to get. Told her it was private property. I shouted till she ran off and ain’t no one seen sight nor sound of her since. So when Karen asked me to help her find evidence I did everything I could t’help the poor lady.”
“So she collected all this stuff in an effort to find out what happened to her daughter?”
“That’s right, ma’am. John, that’s her husband, thought she was losing her mind. He wanted to leave this place, but Karen refused to leave. They hadn’t the heart to keep this place open, so John spent years scratchin’ a livin’ doin’ part time jobs in Losien. He used to do some work for me if I had a big timber order come in. But he weren’t never cut out for workin’ with his hands and he eventually persuaded Karen to reopen this place as a hotel, even had me build a climbing frame for the kiddies. That upset Karen and I damn near refused to make it, but it was so mighty important to John. Karen didn’t want no kiddies stayin’ here, but John had it fixed in his mind that they had to move on; get on with their lives. Yuh booking was the first they’d had here since Laura disappeared. This place bin empty all those years and Karen never gave up hope that their little girl would come back; just walk back in through the door like nothin’ happened. She kinda knew that her daughter was dead, but she never gave up hopin’ for a miracle. ”
“So it wasn’t that Boe was related to her or her husband?”
“No,” Spielman shook his head, “Why d’yuh think that?”
“No reason. I guess I misunderstood. So Karen thinks Boe killed her daughter.”
“That’s right ma’am.”
“But surely he must have been dead years ago.”
“That’s the point. Look what Karen’s writ here.”
Spielman pointed to a hand-written scrawl at the side of one of the fading press cuttings in the scrapbook. Next to an article headlined, ‘NEWCOMERS’ DAUGHTER VANISHES’, Karen Cousins had scribbled, ‘75’, underlining it with bright red ink.
“What’s it mean?”
“Boe woulda bin seventy-five years old.”
“We are talking about Ezra Boe, The Baby Doll Killer?”
“Yeah.”
Jeff thought a reality check was overdue.
“A seventy-five year old? It says here that her daughter was thirteen. Surely such an old man would have been too frail, she’d have been able to run away.”
Spielman smiled knowingly.
“Precisely.”
Rita and Jeff exchanged glances.
“Sorry, Mr Spielman, but I don’t know what you mean.”
“What I mean, ma’am, is that he shoulda bin too old, but he wasn’t. It’s like I said: things live on here in the forest that shouldn’t.”
Behind the old man’s back, Jeff rotated a finger at his ear and silently mouthed the word, ‘Looney’. Rita frowned at him.
Spielman hadn’t looked up, but he seemed to have guessed what was happening.
“Yuh don’t believe me? Think I’m crazy? Just read some the evidence we collected. Just read it an’ yuh’ll understand why Karen wanted to cancel your bookin’ when she saw y’all had kiddies. John, her husband, he didn’t understand. He said she had to get on with life and stop living in the past. He shoulda listened to her. And yuh should do the same. Read the evidence.”
“Yeah. We’ll do that. Meantime, why don’t you go back and get some more sleep?”
“There bin any action out there?” Spielman jerked a thumb towards the barricaded door.
“No. Nothing.”
“OK then. I’ll do that. Wake me when yuh need me to take the watch.”
“Sure thing.”
Jeff and Rita watched Spielman return to his corner of the kitchen and they didn’t speak again until they were certain he was out of earshot.
“What’s he on?” Jeff asked, eyes rolling.
“Shh. Don’t be cruel. He’s an old man.”
“He’s a looney tune!” Jeff laughed, “But what was that about the Cousins’ daughter?”
“Yeah it’s really sad. There’s old pages of the Losien Gazette in the scrapbook. She disappeared the same year they arrived here at the hotel. Her body was never found and, as far as I can tell, no one was ever charged with her abduction.”
“Could have been a bear, or a wolf. Do they have wolves here?”
“No, I don’t think so. But if it was a bear, wouldn’t they have found some of her belongings, torn clothing, something? There was no sign of a struggle. Nothing at all. Like the headlines said, she just vanished. And, by the sound of things, her loss pushed her mom over the edge.”
“Well, we saw that for ourselves didn’t we? The woman’s a total introvert. I don’t think she said a single word to anyone all evening.”
“Yeah, but the weirdest thing is that, after losing Laura, they had a second daughter and they gave her the same name. That is weird isn’t it?”
“Can’t have been easy for the second Laura to be her own person. But you said she seems friendly.”
“Yeah, she was more welcoming than her mom, but she didn’t say a lot more. I told you before, didn’t I: she’s a nice kid, but maybe a bit, y’know, slow.”
They sat in silence on the floor of the office, drinking their coffee.
“You done?” Rita asked, “I’ll take these back down to the kitchen.”
“Are you tired? Don’t you want to see what else we can find out?”
“You need the company?”
“Kinda.”
“Sure,” Rita smiled, “I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep anyhow.”
For the next hour or so, Rita and Jeff read through the papers that Karen Cousins had so assiduously gathered together. It was clear that the hunt for her daughter had consumed her entire life from the day Laura disappeared. Her sense of utter despair and loss ran through her annotations and comments, touching Rita profoundly. Weeping quietly as she read on, Rita felt an almost visceral, empathic link with the grieving mother
“Poor woman.”
“Who?”
“Karen. Losing her daughter has destroyed her.”
Jeff put down the document he was reading and drew Rita close. There was nothing he could say, so he just held her. Eventually, Rita sniffed and dried her eyes.
“I don’t know why this is affecting me so much.”
“Do you want to stop?”
“No, no, I’m fine. What have you been reading?”
Jeff picked up a yellowing sheaf of papers.
“It’s quite interesting. It’s the notes from the hospital in California that Boe was sent to after he was arrested,” he paused, “Are you sure you want to hear more of this stuff?”
“Yeah, go on,” she wiped her eyes, “what’s it say?”
“It’s mostly about Boe’s early life and some of it’s in his own words. There are notes from sessions with various doctors over many months,” Jeff read ahead, “I’ll paraphrase...”
Rita waited.
“OK. It says that, after collecting Ezra from the orphanage, Henry returned to his farm and brought the boy up alone. Ezra had no toys and no playmates. He was very lonely and became increasingly withdrawn. His father had little time for him and even told him that he’d wanted to leave him at the orphanage until he was old enough to be of more use on the farm. He told him that he only took him from St. Hilda’s when he did because the sisters were going to give him to a couple who couldn’t have kids of their own.”
“The Whitneys.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Jeff scanned the rest of the page.
“Ah, now this is interesting: to amuse himself, Ezra carved small wooden dolls to keep him company.”
Rita looked up.
“Like the ones he put in the boxes, with the children?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t got there yet. He says that, when his father found the dolls he apparently assumed that Ezra was involved in some kind of black magic.”
“That was in something I read with Neil: Dr Beauregard’s reports. Henry was brought up with a creole lady who was into voodoo and all that stuff. Henry believed that he’d killed his own parents with a black magic curse.”
“Yeah, I glanced through those earlier, while you were cleaning yourself up. Well Henry didn’t like Ezra’s wooden dolls and he tried to get him to admit that he was trying to catch someone’s spirit with them. Ezra says his father beat him and burned the dolls. But it looks like Henry’s efforts backfired; Ezra was intrigued by his talk of black magic rather than discouraged from it by the beatings. He tried to get more information from Henry. Henry was reluctant to say any more, but Ezra says that, occasionally, when his father was in one of his darker moods, he would apparently tell Ezra that the devil and dark spirits were all around them...Yeah, it says here that Henry told his son that he could actually see huge demons surrounding them and watching them, ready to steal their souls.”
“Great parenting skills.”
“Yeah. Sounds like Boe senior had major problems.”
“I’ll have to read Dr Beauregard’s medical reports again.”
“Why?”
“One of the papers I read with Neil; I think I got things round the wrong way.”
“D’you want me to go on with these?”
Rita nodded and Jeff found his place again.
“Looks like life on their farm was very hard. The area suffered repeated droughts and the land became too dusty to produce decent crops in sufficient volume. As his farm went downhill, Henry became increasingly remote and given to violent outbursts. Then, one day, Henry just left. He didn’t tell Ezra where he was going or how long he’d be away. Ezra only learned years later that his father had gone to the church in Fairfalls and caused a ruckus.
“After that, while Henry was in the asylum, Ezra survived by living off canned foods. Lonely, and without Henry to stop him, he carved himself another doll for comfort. He says he knew that his father would beat him and destroy the doll if he came back and found it, but as time went by he nevertheless began to wish his father would return, as he had no one else in the world. Ezra says there used to be only one photo of his father in the house: a picture of him in army uniform. Ezra took the photo out of the frame and kept it safe, with the doll, under a loose floorboard in his bedroom.”
“Why did he take the photo?”
“The doctor’s asked him that, but he writes that Boe smiled and refused to answer.”
“May be he was just missing his Dad, so he wanted to keep his picture close.”
Jeff shrugged.
“Yeah, I guess kids love their parents no matter how godawful they are. It says here that, when his father finally returned from the asylum he was furious that Ezra had eaten so much and neglected the farmhouse and the fields.”
“He was only ten years old. Poor kid.”
“Hmm,” but Jeff wasn’t really listening. He had turned over the page, “Weird.”
“What?”
“The reason he took the photo. According to a different doctor, in a subsequent session, Ezra actually believed that he had summoned his father back from wherever he had disappeared to, using the doll, the photo and the power of magic. Ezra decided not to tell his father though and Henry didn’t notice that the picture was missing from the frame for several days. When eventually he did, he demanded Ezra give it back. Ezra told the doctor that, in retrieving the photo, he was able to keep the doll hidden under the floor boards of his bedroom. And there the doll remained, known only to Ezra, for the next four years.
“So, let’s see...When Henry dies, after slipping and falling down the cellar steps, Ezra, now aged fourteen, hides in the farmhouse, with his father’s dead body, for four days until a neighbouring farmer happens by. It was Ezra who tucked the carved wooden doll and the photo of Henry inside his dead father’s shirt. The men from the funeral home, who came to collect the body, took them out. They discarded the doll and gave the photo to Ezra. They assumed that Ezra must have loved his father very much because he became hysterical and had to be restrained when his father’s body was being taken from the house.”
Jeff began to flick on, through the pages.
“Is that it?” Rita asked.
“No. There’s a note, referring the reader on to a later session...Here it is...Ezra explained to yet another psychiatrist that the doll was to capture his father’s spirit and bring him back from the dead. He believed it would work because it had brought him back before, when he’d only had a photo of his father to make the magic. Ezra apparently couldn’t understand why the doll and the magic hadn’t worked when he had, not just a photo, but the actual body of his father right there. Ezra said he became hysterical because he realised that his efforts had failed and they were taking his father’s body away, so he wouldn’t be able to try the magic again.”
“So he wanted to bring the old bully back from the dead?”
“Apparently so.”
“That was one very confused kid. And the sum total of the help he got was a week or two under sedation before being kicked out into the world to fend for himself.”
“Monsters aren’t born. They’re made.”
“Hmm. So you buy what Spielman said?”
“I don’t know about Boe kidnapping and killing children around here, but he looks guilty as hell in the Californian killings.”
“Does Boe actually admit those killings?”
“Let’s see...Give me a minute. I’ll go back over the pages I skipped...Yeah. Here’s a report of an early interview with police, in January of 1951.
“Boe was asked if he had killed before. It says here that he at first refused to talk, so they suggested to him that he couldn’t have killed before, because he wasn’t smart enough to have gotten away with it. Boe immediately became agitated and they were about to abandon the interrogation when he suddenly began talking. Ah, the clumsy psychology must have worked: he told the detectives that he had killed once before. However, Boe said it had been an accident and he stuck to that story. He wouldn’t say where or who he had killed. He just repeated, over and over, that he had taken her money and her ticket because she no longer needed them.”
“A girl? A child? Had he killed a child?”
“Doesn’t say. Maybe Boe wouldn’t tell them.”
“And what about the children they knew about: the ones in the boxes?”
“That’s not in here...Oh yeah, sorry, here it is...Boe refused to admit to killing any of them, in spite of eyewitness statements from Rosa Lopez and the two surviving children that said, from the get go, that Boe was the killer. He just kept on saying that he couldn’t have killed them because he wanted to play with them. He said they’d live forever.”
“Forever?”
“That’s what it says here. He must have meant the afterlife.”
“Who knows? The guy was a psycho. He could have meant anything, or nothing. I guess we’ll never know.”
Jeff looked up from the papers.
“You look tired Babe.”
“I am. I’m absolutely dead on my feet.”
“Why don’t you go get some sleep?”
“I’d love to, but are you OK to stay on up here?”
“I’m fine. Go. I’ll be waking you to take over in a couple of hours, so you’d better not waste any time.”
“I’m gone already. Love you.”
They kissed and then Rita went down to the basement. She put the cups in the sink and turned down the lights, before curling up next to Emma on the storeroom floor. Exhausted, she was asleep within seconds of closing her eyes.