“IT HAPPENED THAT night,” Martino told me, his bright eyes distant.
“What happened?”
He looked out a darkened window. “You have to understand. Clara knew everything. They had an understanding, even before the marriage. She had no interest in a husband. She just needed a partner. And Franklin being Franklin, he liked the show of it all. The look of confusion. He was a trickster.” Martino laughed, lovingly. “As was often the case, I stayed the night in his room. Once again, everyone knew. Except … the boy. He must have heard something. I don’t know.”
Martino paused. I waited, admittedly impatient.
“I don’t understand.”
“He must have heard something. That’s all I can think. It was late. Franklin had this charming slit of a window above his bedroom door. I remember seeing the boy’s face in it. Like a ghost, really. I had a second to wonder how he got up that high. Then the crash.
“We rushed out into the hallway immediately, but Clara was already there. The boy was crumpled on the hardwood. He wasn’t moving … He must have climbed all the way up there, then slipped. Fell to the floor. She grabbed him … picked him up. And he was so limp. I … I thought he was dead.”
He stopped again. A single tear left a track on his right cheek.
“She kept shaking him. Screaming at him …” Martino’s voice rose. “ ‘Be a man! Be a man!’ ”
I flinched. Everyone in the place stared at us. At the same time, I was enthralled.
“But he was out cold,” Martino said. “Poor little boy.”
“Are you saying he had a head injury?”
Martino squinted at me. “I believe so, yes. But she kept screaming at him. She shook him and shook him. Slapped his face. His eyes never opened.”
He covered his mouth with a hand. I had questions, but I stopped myself.
“I’m sorry,” Martino continued. “But it was horrible. I truly thought the boy lost his life. She took him away while he was still unconscious. That’s when I saw the stepladder. He must have climbed up to peek through the window. At us.”
The lines of his shining face sagged. It was as if a light had flickered out inside the man. But I couldn’t stop myself. As he faltered, my excitement grew.
“He had a brain injury. Are you sure about that?”
He nodded. Maybe my humanity should have outweighed the need I felt. But I reached out and touched the top of his hand that rested on the tabletop between us.
“You blame yourself, don’t you?”
Martino closed his eyes and nodded. “He was never the same after that. Something inside him broke. Like a lightbulb shattered in his soul.”
A lightbulb in his soul? That might have been the corniest thing I had ever heard. I imagined it coming out of some overly dramatic soap opera script. But I hid my reaction, instead focusing on the interview.
“Listen, I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve met so many people like Jasper. And I’ve learned one thing for certain. It is no one’s fault. Sometimes”—my voice lowered to a whisper—“I’m not even sure it’s their fault. But a head injury? I’ve never seen that mentioned in any of the articles about Jasper. That can be a factor. There was a study not too long ago, a highly respected one, that found a correlation between brain trauma and acquired sociopathy.”
Martino shook his head. “The boy was always a little strange. But …”
“Strange and murderer are surprisingly far apart on the spectrum of human behavior. It takes something for a person to cross that line, to stop seeing people as equals and start seeing them as something different. Experiments, toys, dolls, voices—there are so many different variants. So many different patterns to these cases. It’s true that their choice in victims tends to show something about their past. Abuse, isolation, fear—those things can influence the whos and the hows. But they don’t create a killer. Something else does. Something more … biological.”
I watched Martino for a moment before continuing. I could tell he didn’t really buy what I was saying. I could see how deeply responsible he felt for what Jasper had done. For the people he had hurt.
“Trust me. You didn’t have anything to do with it. I promise. Not to be too personal, but his victims were women, Martino. If that night had any true influence on Jasper, he’d have killed men. I’m …”
“Or boys,” Martino interrupted.
“What?” I asked.
“Boys,” Martino repeated.
“None of Jasper’s victims were male.”
His head shook slowly. “I don’t know about that.”
I leaned forward. “What do you know?”
“There was a boy once. His name was … Danny. And a book. An awful, awful book.”
ACT ONE/SCENE 13
EXT. FRONT PORCH OF RESTAURANT—DAY
Martino holds court at a café table just off the sidewalk, surrounded by smiling faces. His eye wanders and he catches sight of YOUNG JASPER. His blood chills.
After that night, Martino felt a heightened sense of responsibility for the boy. He kept his eyes open. His restaurant sat like a hub at the center of the community. Once fall hit and the season ended, however, it became an enclave. Locals wandered onto the porch or into the bar, depending on the weather. He would sit among them, holding court, each and every day, one eye on the conversation, the other on the street, watching everyone that passed.
It had been years since Jasper’s injury, and the stories filtering back to him grew more and more troubling. Odd behaviors turned strange. Strange turned dark. Dark seemed to be heading toward dangerous.
That day, as he sat at a six-top, surrounded by friends and two of his bartenders, he was almost lost in the moment, enjoying the warm September air against his taut skin. The conversation flowed easier than the cocktails. He was in his element.
Then one of the bartenders facing north craned his neck. “Isn’t that Frankie’s kid?”
His stomach jittered as he spun around. He saw Jasper immediately. Something had changed about the way he moved. His thin arms bent at smooth but odd angles as he walked, almost mantis-like. The boy with him, small for his age, dwarfed Franklin’s son. That one had wide, slopping shoulders and a massive tuft of jet-black hair atop his narrow head.
“Who’s that with him?” Martino asked.
His friend who owned the three arcades on the boardwalk answered. “That’s Danny.”
“Danny?”
“I have no idea who his parents are. Never seen them. Someone mentioned that his mom might live in Seaford. But no one even knows how he gets into town every day. But he’s always there. Spends most of the day at my place. Begs quarters from the changemakers. They like the kid, though. He’s sweet, but dull. I think there’s something wrong upstairs.”
“Huh,” Martino said.
He stared as the two boys passed the porch. Though Jasper didn’t look at the bigger boy, his head tilted closer. And Jasper’s thin lips moving constantly, almost hypnotically. For his part, Danny stared straight ahead, never blinking, nodding over and over again.
“That might be trouble,” Martino muttered.
“What?” his friend said.
At the same moment, a waiter joined the table, carrying a large silver tray loaded with fresh drinks. Martino helped spread them among the crowd. Their conversation lifted over the clank of glass on the metal tabletop, and he turned his attention back to his friends.
Less than a half hour later, Jasper returned. When Martino saw the boy turn off the boardwalk, alone, he sprang up from his seat.
“Where are you going, boss?” a bartender asked.
Martino put a hand up. “I’ll be right back.”
He raced off the porch toward the boy. Jasper never looked up. He carried a book that seemed half his size, open between his two small hands. His nose nearly touched the pages as he headed straight for Martino, oblivious that anyone was in his path.
“Hello there, son.”
Jasper startled. He slammed the book closed but recovered almost instantly.
“Hello, uncle,” he said in a monotone.
“What do you have there?” Martino asked.
Jasper appeared to consider bolting. Instead, he blinked once, then handed the black-covered book to Martino, who turned it over, looking at the cover picture. It showed the corner of a dingy room with what looked like blood splattered over every surface. Martino read the title aloud, the words slowing as he realized what he held.
“Blood Stain Evidence.”
“It’s mine,” Jasper said. He blinked again. “I found it.”
“This isn’t for you, kiddo,” Martino said, forcing a smile.
“Can I have it back, please?” the boy asked.
“I’m sorry. No.”
Jasper stood looking up at him, stricken, his disappointment palpable.
“Run along home. And tell your father I said hello.”
The boy remained frozen. With a shake of the head, Martino turned and headed back to his porch. He climbed the three plank steps but stopped at the top, wrapping a hand around one of the whitewashed posts as he turned. Jasper still hadn’t moved. The two stared at each other for a moment longer until the boy finally walked away, heading back toward Carpenter’s Beach.
“You coming back?” someone called from the table behind him.
Martino shook his head. “In a minute.”
Shielding the cover of the book from his friends, Martino headed back down the stairs. Walking quickly, he hit the boardwalk and then turned onto Rehoboth Avenue. Two blocks west, he pushed the door of the bookstore open and marched up to the counter.
“Hello, Jan,” he said.
“Hi, Martino,” the owner of the shop said from behind the register. She looked at him over the reading glasses she wore halfway down the bridge of her nose. “What do you have there?”
“I just ran into Franklin’s boy. Did he buy this from you?”
Martino passed the book across the counter. Jan lifted it, giving it a calm once-over.
“No, he didn’t,” she said. “He was wandering around the store on Wednesday, but I haven’t seen him since.”
“Then how’d he get it?” he asked.
Jan clucked her tongue off the roof of her mouth. “That other boy just bought it. Danny, I think his name is.”