Tenderness by Robert Cormier
He thought of his mother and Ginger Rowell as he held the limp body of the girl in his arms. He pictured Ginger Rowell lying close to him like this, but he immediately rejected the image. Ginger was small and blond; this girl was tall and dark. Anyway, Ginger had seen something in his eyes that Eric knew existed and he could not fault her for that, despite the humiliation. His mother had caused the humiliation when she had forced him to ask Ginger to the dance. For the first time, the glimmer of what he would someday do to his mother and Harvey, like the winking of a distant star, appeared in his consciousness.
As Eric lay beside the girl, ignoring the cheap perfume in his nostrils, he sighed with contentment. Finally, he laid her gently to rest in the bushes, carefully brushing back a strand of hair from her face. That black hair. Her left arm fell loose, pale and fragile. For some reason, he trailed his mouth along her flesh, so warm and moist against his lips. Bliss filled him. He had never known such tenderness before, his body trembling with it. He knew that he must find it again.
“Your plans, Eric. Do you want to discuss them?”
The old lieutenant’s voice had gentled. “Where you’re going, what you’re going to do. You’ve had no visitors here. Haven’t had any mail for a long time …”
Eric had been deluged with mail when he first arrived at the facility. Letters from kids who thought he was some kind of hero. Or a martyr or a victim. Most of the mail from teenage girls, who also sent pictures of themselves, cheap photos made in machines at the malls for a dollar. Some letters had lipstick kisses on them, promises and pledges. I will wait for you forever. Letters and postcards from skinheads, neo-Nazis, grotesques, and freaks that Eric tossed aside without answering.
After a while, he stopped reading the letters and postcards. Had never answered them in the first place and had ignored requests for his autograph. He distributed to the other inmates the gifts he received, homemade cakes and cookies, elaborate handmade greeting cards, neckties, a few boxes of condoms. The inmates clamored for his letters, so that they could write to the girls who’d sent them, but Eric refused to hand them over. Why inflict these sorry specimens, these losers, on poor, unsuspecting girls? Which did not earn Eric any points from the other prisoners, despite the candy and cake he turned over to them. Eric viewed his fellow prisoners with indifference. He didn’t want to make friends. Or enemies. He simply wanted to be left alone, to avoid stupid conversations, to serve his time without trouble or fuss of any kind. Which was easy. As the only murderer in the facility, he lived, for the most part, separately from the other prisoners. He shared classrooms, details, and meals with them. But his room was in a different wing of the facility. He took his recreational activities alone, strolling the grounds by himself when other prisoners were inside. He was not allowed to participate in team sports, watched baseball games from his second-floor window. He enjoyed his solitude. Most of the other prisoners were stupid, caught for petty crimes that anyone with intelligence wouldn’t commit in the first place and certainly wouldn’t be dumb enough to be caught doing.
His case had drawn national attention when authorities attempted to try him as an adult for the murders of his mother and stepfather. It was two months after his fifteenth birthday. He had remained silent during the frenzy of publicity, granted no interviews, made no statements. When he allowed himself to be photographed, he was careful to smile for the camera, not the smile of The Charmer but a sad, wistful smile that he calculated would soften his image. The clincher came when he faced the cameras outside police headquarters after his arrest. Slowly and deliberately, he pushed up his sleeves and revealed the scars from the cigarette burns on his arm, the bruise that remained from his broken arm. The wounds were silent and compelling evidence of the abuse he had received from his stepfather, abuse that, he told his interrogators, his mother had not only condoned but encouraged.
Support for him came immediately, not only from the freaks who sent him letters and gifts but from college professors, newspapers as far away as Boston. They had played right into his hands. None of those who supported him cared to look deeply into his case, letting a few scars on his arm and a sad smile convince them that he had been done wrong. Kill Your Parents and Become the Victim. What a wonderful country, he thought.
He was not exonerated, of course, simply because he had confessed to the murders. But the scars and the millions of words from professors and columnists and editorial writers caused the authorities to try him as a juvenile instead of an adult. Which meant that he would be placed in the jurisdiction of the state Department of Youth Services, serving his sentence in a youth facility instead of a state prison. He would be set free, without restrictions, at the age of eighteen, three days from now. And here was the old lieutenant swallowing his anger, asking him his plans.
He had not talked to anyone, counselors or advisors, about what he would do, where he would go when the facility’s doors closed behind him on Friday. He hadn’t talked about his plans simply because he did not have to. His freedom was complete and unconditional. He would not be on parole or probation. His records would be sealed. He would not have to report to anybody or account for his future actions. He did have plans, of course. Long-range plans. Which were nobody’s business. But his immediate plans were different. Telling the old lieutenant about them would serve a useful purpose.
“I’m going to live with my Aunt Phoebe, in Wickburg, up in Massachusetts, until I decide what to do about the future.”
The lieutenant looked skeptical.
“She’s never visited you here. Does she know about your plans?”
“Aunt Phoebe doesn’t like to travel and I didn’t want her to see me in this place. We’ve been writing to each other. I was allowed to make a long-distance phone call to her last week. She said she would be glad to take me in. She’s my mother’s sister.”
“Any job prospects? You finished high school here, earned your GED. You did very well in the machine shop.…”
Eric hated the machine shop. Had caught on fast to the demands and intricacies of tool and die making but did not plan to earn his living that way.
“College maybe. I just want to pace myself for a while.”
“The news media will be a factor, Eric. You’re going to be hounded. They’ll be waiting for you when you step out of here. They’ll follow you to your Aunt Phoebe’s place. They’ll be on the watch night and day. You’re the last of a breed, Eric. Things are changing on the outside. New laws are being passed. Stiffer penalties for juveniles who commit serious crimes. More of them are now being tried as adults—”
“That has nothing to do with me, Lieutenant,” Eric interrupted. He knew that it was time for him to make his pitch, to resurrect The Charm, and convince the old cop that he had changed.
“I want to make something of myself,” he said, allowing the wistful smile to appear. “They say your body changes every few years. Well, I came here just turned fifteen and I’m leaving at eighteen and I’m a different person. The kid who killed his mother and stepfather was somebody else. I want to make a new start.…”
Too much charm? Or too little? Had he sounded sincere?
The lieutenant gazed at him steadily for a moment without expression. He stubbed out his cigarette in a glass ashtray, tried to rub the ashes off his tie but they remained. Probably from an earlier cigarette. He reached for his beat-up old briefcase, opened it, and extracted a big yellow pad with ruled lines. He scrutinized a series of scribbles on the pad, frowning. Then began to read in a flat, toneless voice:
“Laura Andersun. Fifteen years of age. Body found in bushes near Greenhill Mall. Strangled. Sexually assaulted, probably after death occurred.”
Then looked up, straight into Eric’s eyes.
So much for The Charm, Eric thought. So much for sincerity.
“That’s old stuff, Lieutenant. I was never charged with Laura Andersun’s death. Questioned, yes, because it happened the same year my mother and stepfather died. A big coincidence. But no charges
“Psychopaths don’t need a motive,” the old cop said.
“Witnesses reported the girl was being followed by a cripple,” Eric said. “Someone with a bad leg, someone who limped.”
“A bad leg, a limp can be easily faked,” the lieutenant said, voice still flat, deadly.
His eyes returned to the pad.
“Betty Ann Tersa,” he recited. “Sixteen. Disappeared six weeks after Laura Andersun’s death. A month before your mother and Harvey died. Still missing. But believed dead.”
Eric was genuinely surprised and kept his face blank, stilling himself. No one had ever questioned him about Betty Ann Tersa. Her name had never been mentioned to him. He kept his eyes away from the pad, did not want the lieutenant to see him searching for another name, a third girl, that no one knew about.
“Betty Ann Tersa,” Eric mused, allowing the name to form on his lips and bringing back that moment of tenderness behind the dump, her black fragrant hair in his mouth. “Her name is vaguely familiar,” he said. Her name had appeared in the newspapers at the time, and denying that knowledge would only make the lieutenant more suspicious. “Didn’t she live someplace out on the West Coast?”
“Right,” the old cop said brightly, as if Eric had answered the right question and won a prize. “But she had relatives here in New England. An uncle and aunt she sometimes visited.”
“I didn’t know that,” Eric said.
“You know it now,” the lieutenant said. “Four deaths, Eric. Your mother, your stepfather, Laura Andersun, Betty Ann Tersa. All within months of each other. Extraordinary, wouldn’t you say?”
And a fifth that nobody knew about, which made it really extraordinary, Eric thought, saying instead: “But you said Betty Ann Tersa’s body was never found. Maybe she ran away.”
“Oh, she’s dead, all right,” the old cop said. “Isn’t she, Eric?”
Eric shook his head.
“Why are you doing this, Lieutenant? You’re about ready to retire, aren’t you? You should be enjoying life. How many years do you have left? You should think about things like that.”
“Is that a threat, Eric?”
“Of course not, Lieutenant.” Trying The Charm again. “I would never threaten you. All I want to do is get out of this place and lead a normal life.”
The old cop sighed, his frail shoulders lifting and falling. He turned away and replaced the yellow pad in his briefcase. He stood up, leaning against the table, his old man’s stomach bulging slightly against it.
“Guess we won’t see each other anymore, will we, Lieutenant?” Eric said. “I’m going to miss our meetings.” Surprised at the truth of the statement.
The lieutenant’s eyes flashed, the weariness and the sadness suddenly gone, replaced by—what? The sly look of success. But what kind of success? “I’ll be outside waving goodbye the day you’re free,” he said. But his eyes and tone of voice were telling Eric that he never expected that day to come.
That was the second surprise the old cop had pulled today—first, the names on the yellow pad and now that flash of triumph.
“Friday,” Eric said, and repeated the word for emphasis. “Friday. Wave to me Friday when I leave this place.…”
The lieutenant did not answer. His silence was ominous. He gathered his briefcase in both arms and pressed it against his chest as if to guard his old bones. He shuffled to the doorway and paused there, looking back, the spark gone from his eyes, the momentary triumph having passed. He looked exactly like what he was. A sad and tired old man who had gone down to defeat at the hands of Eric Poole.
Eric dismissed the lieutenant from his mind the moment the door closed. Back in his room, he checked the calendar on the wall and smiled at the red circle around Friday. Glancing at his bed, he saw his book on martial arts lying on the gray spread. The book had been on the windowsill this morning when he left the room. Opening the book, he riffled through the pages, and found a note tucked between pages 72 and 73. The note, in crude handwriting deliberately disguised, said:
A favor for a favor. Watch your step. Don’t be provoked or you might not get out Friday. Or at all.
The note was unsigned, but Eric knew who had written it.
He also had learned the secret of that flash of triumph in the old cop’s eyes.
Police Lieutenant Jake Proctor’s bad dream began again after Eric Poole came into his life. The dream always started with children crying in the distance, out of sight, their cries growing louder and nearer until they came into view. Little girls in white dresses. Running, running, fleeing some terrible object of dread, their eyes blank like unfinished drawings, their screams so fierce that he’d finally vault into wakefulness. As he did now, heart pounding, thin arms and legs trembling.
The old cop sat up in bed, trying to blink away the dream. He lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. He thought he had left the dream behind in Oregon a long time ago. But hadn’t, of course.
He crept out of bed, old bones protesting, the cries of the children finally diminishing as he stalked to the kitchen section of the apartment. Dawn, a gray phantom, lurked outside the window. As he drew water into a kettle and placed it on the stove, his thoughts went inevitably to Eric Poole. And Friday. And the plan.
Lewis had been against the plan, of course. He was the state’s deputy commissioner of youth services and went by the book, did not like to improvise. Black and white, that was Lewis, never admitting grays. Respected facts, not instincts.
Jake’s boss, Chief Harding, didn’t mind bending the rules. Which was why Harding had ascended to the top post in the department. Knowing what had happened out in Oregon, he allowed Jake Proctor latitude. “But for Christ’s sake be careful. And take care of yourself. You’re no longer a kid.…”
Jake Proctor had been a cop for twenty-six years out in Oregon and the next twenty here in New England. He’d worked all the beats, been praised and promoted regularly and was finally named a detective lieutenant, an office where his instincts and dogged working habits brought him success but never satisfaction. His one devastating failure back in Oregon had tarnished all the triumphs of his career.
That failure focused on an image he could not erase from his mind: the riverbank on the city’s outskirts as he watched them bring another child’s body up from the swirling waters. Looking at the limp form in the arms of a rescue worker, he was stunned to realize that he had seen her before. She had made her First Communion the Sunday before at St. Anthony’s Church, where he had been a parishioner all his life. He did not know her name or anything about her but had been struck by her sweet innocence as she came down the aisle in her white dress, hands clasped against her chest, eyes lowered. For the first time he felt the absence of a child in his life and wondered whether he had made a mistake in avoiding marriage or even a close relationship. The child passed by his pew, close enough for him to touch her shoulder.
She had been the third of what proved eventually to be five murders by a serial killer. Five children under the age of ten, snatched and strangled on the first Monday of the month, each murder exactly three months apart. The killer stalked the children like a ghost, leaving no clues behind. After the fifth murder, the killings stopped. That dreaded first Monday came and went without incident. No child’s body turned up. No stunned and weeping parents. Jake Proctor and his crew of detectives congratulated themselves, as if somehow they had actually solved the case, laughing out of a strange nervous relief. That night Jake Proctor dreamed of the crying children for the first time. Afterward he lay in bed for long minutes, thinking of the child walking down the aisle, those fragile fingers clasped together. He was suddenly glad that he had never married, never had children, and had thus eliminated the pain of impending loss. Why, then, this sudden ache that he finally recognized as loneliness?
Drinking his tea, he glanced out the window at the bleak buildings stark in emerging daylight. This old city in New England resembled the city he had fled
A dim recollection had stirred within him as he sat in the shadows of the interrogation room watching his colleagues question Eric Poole. He instantly recalled someone he had dismissed from his mind twenty years before, the only suspect in the Oregon murders. His name came to Jake Proctor out of the mists of memory—Derek Larrington. He’d been found in the vicinity of the river in which the body of that First Communion child, and later a red-haired child named Susan Crone, had been thrown. Derek Larrington had been polite, eager to help, answering questions without hesitation. He had recently graduated with honors from a local high school and was working that summer as a waiter to put away money toward his tuition at a state college. The questioning had been brief, simply because the boy had a logical explanation for his presence near the river: he’d been waiting for a girl. The girl, brought in later, corroborated his story. He also had alibis for the killings. He was barely eighteen—how could he possibly be a serial killer, anyway?
Jake escorted Derek Larrington to the door of headquarters after the questioning. The boy kept up a constant chatter, as if on a high, after the interrogation. Or perhaps his nervousness was manifesting itself. After a final apology to the boy, Jake watched as he went down the steps and walked briskly away. Something made Jake remain in place as Derek Larrington headed down the street. The sun flashed on the windshields of passing cars but the day remained dismal to the detective. Just before turning the corner, the boy looked over his shoulder, not directly at Jake but at the police building itself. A smile brightened his face. More than a smile, it seemed to Jake, a smirk of self-satisfaction with a hint of mischief in it. Or malice. Jake Proctor shivered a bit, despite the day’s heat. As the boy disappeared around the corner, Jake curbed an impulse to chase him down to ask him: Why did you smile like that? Then: Forget it. Three experts had questioned the boy, and he had alibis, as well as the girl backing his story. But alibis could be manufactured and witnesses coerced, couldn’t they? Stop it, he told himself, caught in a spin of emotions. Was he allowing his pain and anguish to affect his judgment, a distant malicious smile to warp his instincts?