“DO YOU WANT to tell us the truth now?” Test said.
Jon Merryfield sat in the interview room. He’d sat there all night, refusing to speak.
Then, an hour ago, Test had given him the newspaper to read.
She’d read the article for a second time, keeping an eye on Merryfield as he read his copy.
KINGDOM CHRONICLE
Father of Murder Suspect Killed Saving Man
Victor Jenkins, a physical education teacher and coach of Lamoille High for decades was killed yesterday evening while attempting to break up a fight between two other local men, Jed King and Gregory Sergeant on the village green.
Mr. Jenkins was killed when Jed King struck his head with a rock. King, a vocal opponent to the proposed gay marriage bill and openly vocal against homosexuality had, according to witnesses, confronted Mr. Sergeant who is one of two plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the State of Vermont.
“He saved my life,” Mr. Sergeant said. “Plain and simple.” Mr. Sergeant spoke with considerable pain and difficulty from a hospital bed where he is recovering from injuries that include broken ribs, a broken jaw, lacerations to the face, and a concussion.
Witnesses corroborate Mr. Sergeant’s statement. “He saved his life,” Larry Branch said. “He got right in there. He was the only one of us. He just did what was right. I’m not surprised. He was a good friend.”
King was arrested for aggravated assault and second degree murder and will be arraigned on Tuesday afternoon. He will be charged with a hate crime. A search of his house also revealed evidence that he may have poisoned Mr. Sergeant’s dog.
Mr. Jenkins is the father of Brad Jenkins, who is charged with the murder of Jessica Cumber, 15, with whom he’d had a relationship. Jessica Cumber was murdered in the home of Jon Merryfield, the attorney for Gregory Sargent and his partner.
“He was on his way to tell the police something about our boy,” said Mrs. Fran Jenkins, Mr. Jenkins’s widow. “He’d learned something. Was going to set Brad free. I don’t know what it was,” she said, sobbing. “He was a good father. A good teacher and coach.”
Detective Sonja Test said that Mr. Jenkins had stopped by the Canaan Police Station while she was out and left a message for Richard North, lead detective with the state police, that he had something to say that would free his boy.
“Whatever his son may be charged with,” North said, “Victor Jenkins should be commended for his bravery to protect another citizen from an act of hatred.”
Apparently, Victor Jenkins had come into the law office of attorney Jon Merryfield earlier in the day. “He was distraught. Angry,” Cheryl Bloom, the assistant to Jon Merryfield said.
Mr. Jon Merryfield himself has been brought in for questioning regarding the murder of Jessica Cumber. It is unclear why the police are interested in questioning him.
Detective North stated that he believes there is no link between Brad Jenkins’ crime and what occurred last evening on the village green. He would not comment on the questioning of Jon Merryfield. “That’s a local police department issue. Separate from us.” Junior Detective Sonja Test, who brought in Jon Merryfield and another yet to be identified man for questioning, had no comment.
Merryfield set down the paper.
“Ready now?” Test said.
Merryfield wrung his hands, his face grave.
“I—” He took a sip of water.
“Tell me about the money in the metal box.”
Merryfield put his fingers to his left eye, swollen and bruised by Randall Clark.
“I was going to pay him. Pay Randall to go away.”
“Was he extorting you?”
“Not technically. Not for money.” He touched his wounded face. “Obviously he didn’t want the money.”
“What did he want?”
Jon leaned back so his head was hanging off the back of the chair. He stared at the ceiling and moaned.
“Where did you go when you sneaked out of the restaurant the night of the murder?” None of the pieces yet fit, Test thought, but the pieces were there to be assembled.
“I—”
Test was sure he was going to ask for a lawyer. He sure could use one.
“I . . . was going to meet him.”
“Who?”
“Randall.”
“Randy Clark?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know he’s been going by the name of Daryn Banks?”
Jon shrugged. “What’s it matter what name he goes by?”
Test didn’t know what it mattered. Or how. But she knew it must. It did matter that Randy, or Daryn, had befriended Victor Jenkins over the past months, through Jed King’s inner circle. Become close to him. Close enough to learn about Brad? she wondered. Except Brad had told no one about Jessica, least of all his parents. What Randy calling himself Daryn meant, Test did not know yet. But it might come to light when she spoke with Randy, whom she’d left to simmer all night in the room down the hall.
She wanted North in on her interrogation of Randall Clark, but North was also occupied with the Jenkins murder.
“What did you see Clark about?” Test asked.
“Something that happened a long time ago.”
“What?”
Merryfield winced, as if he’d bitten rotten meat. “I’d seen something.”
“What?” He was going to make Test tease everything out of him. Not out of a game. Or a resistance to cooperate. But out of grief that was as clear on his face as if someone were pressing his hand to hot coals.
“Take your time,” she said.
“Can I stand?” he said.
Test nodded.
He wasn’t cuffed. He wasn’t a threat.
She’d never seen a more defeated man ready to talk.
He paced, swiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“I saw. I witnessed . . . Victor Jenkins raping Randy Clark.”
Test gasped. She stopped most of the gasp, turned it into a sip of air. But she was breathless nonetheless. “You witnessed this? Where? When?”
“In the parking lot where you found us. I was seventeen. He was maybe eight.”
“You sure that’s what you saw?”
He stopped pacing and looked at her and before he said it she knew there was no doubt about the veracity of what he was telling her. “I’m sure.”
“And you knew this how?”
He gave her an eviscerating look. “If you ever witness such a thing, and I hope you don’t, you won’t have any doubt. I could have told you what I saw, by the look in the boy’s eyes alone.”
“Is that all you saw? His eyes?”
“I saw more. And heard more. Too much. But I saw his eyes. And he. Saw mine.”
Test felt her stomach go greasy, and her neck grow hot.
“And what did you do?” she said.
“Nothing.”
His eyes had gone cold. Not with hatred or lack of emotion. But cold for another reason she could not quite pin.
“Nothing,” he said again. “I did nothing.”
“You must have done something.”
“I did nothing.”
“Run away, at least.”
He shook his head. Laughed. “I walked away. And I put it out of my mind. I shut it out like it never happened. And I went home. And I had dinner with my grandparents. And I slept like a baby. And I never thought of it again. Forget. Separate. Survive.”
“What?” Test said.
Another laugh escaped Merryfield. A grunt.
“So, you just walked away and forgot about it?” Test said.
“Right.”
“Saw a boy get raped and wiped your hands of it. And how exactly did you do that? How do you expect me to believe that? Because, people can’t just block out something like that.”
“No?” He fixed her with a look as hot with fury as his previous look had been icy. “How would you know the first thing about it? What a person can and can’t block out?” he said. “Have you ever seen a boy get raped to know? Are you some fucking expert on boys getting raped, Detective?”
It was a mistake not to have cuffed him, or at least to have let him stand. He pushed himself off the wall, eyes taunting her. “Just what the fuck would you know about it, Detective?”
“I—” His sudden command of the room sent Test off kilter. She stood and put her hands on the back of her chair. “I would assume that witnessing such a traumatic event would be difficult, if not impossible, to simply forget as if it never happened.”
“Not if you’ve had years of practice with willful repression and compartmentalization.”
“What?” Test said.
“Victor Jenkins raped me, too. When I was eight.”
TEST PACED OUT in the hall. She needed to find her bearings after what Merryfield had said. If it was a ploy to distract, it was convincing. But all she had was his word.
She called and left a message with North, apprising him of Merryfield’s revelation. Then she went to the canteen and drank a glass of water.
When she entered the interview room, Merryfield sat slumped in his chair, looking ghastly. His dominion leeched from him. It was as quick a transformation as any Test had ever seen.
Test sat across the table from him, set her recorder on again. “You want more water?”
Merryfield’s head trembled as if he had Parkinson’s, and it took Test a moment to realize this was the closest he could muster to shaking his head no.
“Are you hungry?” Test said.
Another tremor.
This was not the same man she’d left in the room minutes earlier.
Test opened her notebook and scratched a meaningless note to gain composure.
“OK,” she said. “So, you walked away and forgot about it.”
“I was never any good at anything, as a kid. Sports, especially. The last kid chosen and all of that. But I wanted to be. That’s all I wanted. To be good at sports. Be good at anything.”
She could only imagine the astonishment on her face at hearing this confusing non sequitur.
“One day during gym class, I pulled a muscle during floor hockey,” he said. He seemed nearly catatonic.
“When was this?” Test said.
“Fourth grade. After class, in the locker room, I remember how much it hurt. God. My groin felt taut as guy-wires about to snap. And on fire. I couldn’t bend to untie my shoes or take off my shorts, let alone put on my jeans. So. I’d sat in a toilet stall until the locker room emptied, then slipped into the equipment cage to find a pair of baggy sweatpants to slip on over my sneakers.”
Test had the sensation she wasn’t present to Merryfield. That he was speaking aloud what he had harbored inside for a long time. Too long. Festering. Corroding him from the inside out. That was the word that struck Test now, the mutation Merryfield had seemed to undergo while she’d been out of the room. It was as if he’d been corroded. And now that he was starting to tell the story, to confess, there would be no stopping it, and his memories would corrode him until there was nothing left of the man who’d entered the room.
“A sign on the cage door said: ‘Do not enter cage without coach or coach’s permission.’ ”
“Can you speak up a bit, please,” Test said. “For the recorder.”
Merrryfield blinked and looked at her with as pained an expression as any Test had ever seen.
“I remember,” he said, and made a choking sound. He folded his hands in his lap, in the manner of a boy awaiting a scolding. He seemed to have regressed even more. “The cage stunk of sweat, and socks and jocks and the wet leather of footballs left in the rain.” He said the stink made him think of bodily fluids, spit and phlegm. Blood and piss. He sighed. Rubbed his hands together as if they were stained. Beneath the bodily stink, he said, lingered the faint odor of ointment. He was fishing through old gear for the sweats— “when his hand clasped my shoulder.”
“Whose hand?” Test said.
“Coach’s.”
“I need a name, please.”
“Victor Jenkins.”
“Could you speak up again please,” Test said.
“Victor Jenkins. Victor fucking Jenkins. He startled me and asked, ‘What are we up to? You shouldn’t be here.’ ” Merryfield sighed. “Right away I was scared.”
“Why?”
“Because I wasn’t supposed to be in the cage. And I liked Coach. I idolized him. I didn’t want him to be mad. He was a big-time star. He played football at Syracuse. He might have gone to the NFL if not for an injury.”
Even now he spoke of Victor Jenkins with a bizarre sense of misplaced reverence, his voice taking on a soft tone of juvenile adulation.
“I told him about my injury and that I was after some sweats. I could barely breathe.” Jon was whispering, lost to memory.
Instead of asking him again to speak up, Test slid her recorder closer to him.
“Coach relaxed his grip and turned me around so I was facing his chest. I remember.” Jon’s eyes went dead. Not cold. Dead. “There was a sharp bite of aftershave, masking something animal, glandular. And Coach pointed to the sign and said, ‘You think the rules don’t apply to you?’ ” Merryfield said with a voice tinged with guilt, complicity.
“He started to rub my shoulders. I tensed up, terrified. But he kept at it. And, involuntarily, after some time, I relaxed. He asked where I’d hurt myself. And I told him inside my leg. My groin. He said, ‘Let’s get you on the table.’ He lifted me up like a doll, and laid me on the table. He was strong. He shut the gymnasium door, locked it. He put a hand on each of my knees and said, ‘Which side?’
Jon peered up at Test, eyes alive now, manic with shame and guilt. And rage. “He told me he was trained. It was physical therapy. That NFL players had it done all the time.” Jon closed his eyes. “He told me to close my eyes.”
The room seemed to be closing in on Test, she felt claustrophobic and filthy.
“ ‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘Tell me when it hurts.’ He said—” Jon laughed, a sad, sickening laugh. “He said, ‘It’s important to isolate your pain, keep it separate from yourself.’ And he had me remove my shorts and started in with the massage. Telling me maybe he could be my personal trainer. How’d I like it if he got me into shape for the baseball team? Got me a spot on the team. How’d that be?’ I was thrilled. You can imagine. I was a homely, weak, scrawny kid, athletic as spit.
“He must have sensed my nervousness. My innate fear. Because he said he could take me to see Nurse Jill. ‘You rather have a woman look at your privates?’ I didn’t want that, of course. A woman. I was eight.”
Jon shook his head.
“He told me to shut my eyes and to think of something I liked. Pain shot down my inner thigh. The muscle was livid, but slowly it loosened, the muscle warmed, and blood flowed. The pain—” He put his face in his hands. “The pain wasn’t pain anymore.”
He took his hands from his face, his cheeks and forehead florid.
“He asked if it was good. And I nodded. Fuck if I didn’t. Fuck if I didn’t nod. Fuck if I didn’t. Fuck fuck fuck.” His voice splintered and pitched with an agony that can only come from wanting to claim back a moment that alters your life for the worse, forever, but cannot be reclaimed. “Fuck if I didn’t.”
He stood suddenly, kicked his chair back so it slammed against the wall. Test nearly fell back out of her chair at the suddenness of it. Her hand went reflexively for her weapon. Jon wiped at his mouth, his chest heaving. Test relaxed.
“You know what the worst of it is?” he said, pointing at her now, waving his hands around wildly, towering. “I liked it. I was eight. Fucking eight. It took a long time for me to realize what was done to me. What I’d allowed to be done.” He looked around behind him, as if he’d heard a sound that startled him. But nothing was there. “In time, living in my own skin sickened me. I’ve felt unnatural ever since. With myself and with others; suspicious of everyone’s intentions, what they really wanted to pry out of me. What they wanted to use me for. Everyone uses everyone else for something. Nothing is free. I was fucking eight. But I was an accomplice to the crime committed against me.”
“No you weren’t,” Test said, spooking herself with her own voice.
“I was. I allowed it.”
“You were coerced. Manipulated. He was an adult. A mentor. He had the power, he—”
Merryfield slammed his fist against the wall and Test jumped.
“I liked it!” Merryfield shouted. “I fucking liked it!”
This was beyond Test’s expertise, this was out of her realm. This was not a confession of a crime of the murder of Jessica. This was a purging of the soul.
Jon’s left eyelid spasmed as his behavior grew more erratic and he stalked about the room shaking his finger and head furiously.
“Please,” Test said. “Sit down and take a breath. Please.” She got up and picked his chair off the floor. She was aware that this still could be a ruse. She needed to get him back to tonight. To what had transpired between him and Randy Clark.
Merryfield paced, but he finally sat down.
He rested his head in his hands.
“It happened other times,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I could have said no to any of them. But I didn’t.”
Test did not know much about such abuse, but everything she did know indicated that being groomed was not an easy thing to break from, especially if the victims were victimized by someone they admired and trusted. It went far beyond Stockholm syndrome. After everything he’d said, Test remained no more or less certain that Jon had killed Jessica. What was the motive? Had she come on to him, or him to her and he’d been rejected? Was what Test was being told only meant to manipulate her into sympathy?
“Everything that happened during that time, has led to this moment,” Jon said. “Led to the murder of Jessica.”
“What do you mean?” Test said quickly. Was he confessing?
“Jessica would not be dead if I’d never let that happen to me.”
“Tell me why you met Randy Clark the night of Jessica’s murder.”
“He has nothing on me now,” Jon mumbled. “It’s all out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Two weeks ago, I got a call. It was just eight words. ‘It’s Randy. Stop what you’re doing, or else.’“
“What did that mean?”
“Stop defending Scott and Gregory.”
Test was beginning to form a picture. Just a foggy outline of it, like the shoreline of a lake just emerging from the morning fog.
“He was mad about that?” Test said.
“Raving mad. And at me because I never helped him. When I saw him in the truck that night, he saw me too. I was seventeen. And he was the age I was when I was with Coach.”
With Coach. The phrase shocked and repulsed Test. It was a euphemism one would use for dating. Test was speaking to a wounded boy.
“I was in high school. A senior. And he was in maybe third grade. And, the look on his face.” Jon was silent for a minute, collecting himself. Several times he seemed about to continue, only to hold a hand up: Give me a second.
Finally, he said, “The look on his face. What I buried for years, but what won’t stay buried now, is not the misery and shame, which were there, but his look of hope. When I appeared outside that truck window and he saw me looking in, a big kid, nearly a man, big enough to take on Coach and stop what was happening, his face of agony lit with hope. He would be saved. Spared. And I walked away and I left him.”
Test looked at the clock. It just after eleven in the morning, but her body had the logy and lethargic torpor of the middle of the night, 2:30 or 3:00 A.M. Her throat was sore, her glands swollen, and it stung to swallow.
“So,” she said, “This was the first you’d ever heard from him since then?”
“I ran into him, once. In Charlottesville, Virginia, when I was at law school. He must have been twenty or so. He saw me in passing one day. He seemed vaguely familiar, but I thought he was just someone I’d seen around campus. Then I saw him at a diner. He sat right beside me. I didn’t recognize him, but he recognized me. He became unstable when I insisted I didn’t know him. He was adamant I knew him. I made to leave and I thought he was going to hurt me. I realized then he wasn’t a student. He stank and his teeth were bad, his breath foul, his clothes threadbare. He was destitute, possibly deranged. I pulled away and he said, ‘We have someone in common.’ And he whispered a word in my ear.”
“What did he whisper?” Test asked.
“Coach,” Jon said. “And I knew. And I left. Again.”
“When he called two weeks ago, what did he want?”
“I told you. To stop representing Scott and Gregory. He thought it was disgusting, me representing them. His mind is confused. He equates their sexuality to the likes of Coach. He can’t separate the two. It’s clear he never learned to separate, to compartmentalize like I did. I told him when we met the first time at his request a couple weeks ago that he needed to do it to survive. Forget. Separate. Survive. To succumb is to give the predator more power. To be a victim all over again. I made a choice to make a life for myself despite what was done to me. He did not. And now look at him.”
“So, you met him the night of the murder in the school parking lot. Why? And why there?”
“He chose that spot to make me feel guilty. To drum up old memories and try to soften me. Like I said, he dwells. He’s stuck in that moment. I understand it. I do. It took me years. To escape my memories. And I still trust no one. Not my wife. Not myself. Worse. I don’t care to trust. What’s the point? So what if someone betrays me. So what if a wife cheats or friend backstabs me. What could possibly be done to me that is worse than what happened to me when I was eight years old?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Test pondered it anyway. There was nothing worse. Nothing at all.
“So, he wanted you to stop, and, what?” Test asked. “Why did you go through the woods? The school is practically across the street from your house.”
“It was the direction I’d come from that night, years ago. The restaurant was an arcade back then. It was like he wanted to re-create that night. The ten days prior to our meeting, with his calls coming in and e-mails, I was so scared and confused about what he might want that I couldn’t leave home. I pretended to be sick. I didn’t want this ever getting out. Ever. It made me sick, too, literally. I lost sleep. I lost my appetite. And he wanted to tell everyone. The press. Everyone. He said he’d go to the police about it if I didn’t stop the case, stop representing perverts. I wasn’t going to stop. No one is ever going to make me do anything I don’t want to do ever again.” Spittle flew as he spat the words. “No one. I certainly wasn’t going to let him push me the fuck around.”
The way Merryfield spoke of Randy Clark felt like he was talking about a brother, a sibling relationship polluted by the bonds of anger and resentment.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone what happened to you years ago?” Test said.
“Are you serious?” Merryfield looked at her as if she were an idiot. “Back then? I was eight. He was a legend. It took years for me to even understand what happened, that something wrong had been done. And when I finally understood, I blamed myself. Have you seen the media circuses around this shit? These kids get excoriated. I was raised by my grandparents. I was an only child. I was already alone and lonely. And—” A distant look came over him. “I remember after it happened, my grandmother telling people ‘He’s grown so shy. So . . . serious.’ Other kids seemed so ridiculous and pathetic and spoiled to me after that. I was no longer a boy, but something else. Not a man. I’ve never become a man. I was a nameless creature. I lost the few friends I had and I made no new friends. And I tried to forget. I willed myself day and night to forget. To be spared a moment without memory.”
He took a deep breath.
“Still, when you realized what had happened—” Test began.
“I was going to tell. Once,” he said. “I was prepared. When I was fifteen. I had mustered the courage for months. It was the summer that news flooded the region of a teacher in Bakersfield who had had been arrested for ‘doing stuff’ to junior-high girls. The town buzzed with the words molestation, pervert, sicko. For weeks, my grandparents spoke of nothing else. They said things like ‘They should cut his balls off. A man like that should never go free. Touching young girls like that. Hang the son of a bitch.’ And I realized what had happened to me. I’d been prey. And that felt like the bigger betrayal. That hurt most. Because Coach had told me I was a miracle. And I’d believed it. I’d felt like I was. And I was so stung. I was prepared to tell. Until.” He reached across the table and took Test’s glass of water and drank from it. “Until I overheard my grandparents and their friend talking. They were entertaining friends in the kitchen below the vent in my room, playing bridge. And I heard my grandmother say, “You wonder how a man could get away with it so long. I mean for a year, three girls, and not one of them speaks up? Something’s not right with that picture.’ Another woman said it made her wonder. And that she’d seen at least one of the girls in town with no bra. Short shorts. She couldn’t believe how girls acted those days. How they dressed. So brazen. And it wasn’t like he had a gun to their heads or anything. Some of these girls today can seem so innocent but go around asking for it. They like it. They’re just plain wicked.’“
Jon peeled at a loose thumb cuticle. “Wicked,” he said. “Junior-high girls.” He laughed. “Wicked. Like me.”
Test missed her husband and her kids so acutely at the moment she had to fight back a sob of emotion. “So. You told Randy you wouldn’t stop working the case?”
“I’ve created an identity. Made a life out of prosecuting scum on behalf of boys like me, but also championing for those who are bullied and oppressed and threatened otherwise.” His face was crimson with anger. “No one, especially not Randy, was going to make demands on me and bring this to light and sully me.”
“So, you just left it at that?”
“I called his bluff. I didn’t believe he’d trot all that garbage out after all these years and subject himself to the ridicule and suspicion. Especially when it was clear I would deny it if he came forward. So, I told him no, I wouldn’t quit the case and if he brought it up I’d deny it. He was on his own. And I walked away.”
For a third time, Merryfield walked away, Test thought. What had that triggered in Randy Clark? What anger?
“And what did he do?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You left. Did he yell after you? Go after you? Just stand there and let you go?”
“He didn’t yell or go after me. I don’t know what he did. Or how long he stood there.”
“It was your wife’s idea to go out to dinner that night.”
Test’s comment seemed to give Jon a start.
“So?” he said, collecting himself.
“How did you know she would suggest it? That you’d end up going to the restaurant for you to even slip out from there to see Randall? Especially since you’d been sick, if not for the reasons everyone had thought.”
“Bethany and I always go to the Village Fare on Wednesday night. I knew she’d ask, even if I was under the weather. She’s pushy like that. And if she hadn’t asked. I would have gone out for a walk to get some air, or something. Then just walked through the woods.”
“And Randall put up the reflector tacks?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you do what he asked at all? Why walk through the woods and go through a ritual like that if no one was going to make you do anything you didn’t want to do?”
“I had to meet him in person. Assess him in person. And, frankly, slipping out of the restaurant was a good plan, or at least meeting him at night. I didn’t want to be seen.”
It made sense, to a point, if his sense of shame and life of secrecy were at stake, and if it were all to come out just as he was spearheading the case.
“Was it him you saw, leaving your house?”
Jon looked startled. He was thinking over something he should not need to think about. Either he’d seen Randy Clark or he hadn’t. Unless it had not occurred to him before that the person he’d seen might have been Clark.
Merryfield swallowed, agitated. “No. It wasn’t. I mean. I couldn’t testify to it.”
“You couldn’t testify to it?”
“It wasn’t him. He’s troubled. Wounded. And weak. But. Brad. He’s your doer, Detective. Whatever sick act played out between Randy Clark and me and Victor, and as much as either one of us, Randy or I, might have had reason to want to hurt Victor, I really don’t think he killed her.”
“He could have killed Jessica and let Brad take the fall, hurting Victor where it hurt most.” Except, Test thought, how would Randy Clark know about Brad and Jessica when no one else did? Still, she pressed. “Randall Clark had all the motive.”
“Sure,” Merryfield said. “So did I.”