The man nibbled on the inside of his lower lip and then shook his head. “Probably not.”
“And if the child refused to be beaten, what then? What could he do?”
John Draper shook his head.
Andy leaned back and clasped his hands on his lap. Looking at his intertwined fingers, he said, “If the boy was grown up, he could run away or defend himself. If the uncle tried to punch him, he’d have a right to defend himself, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“But if he’s five and a half, he can’t swing back, he can’t outrun a grown-up. He doesn’t have any rights, does he?”
“Not in the way you mean.” He waved his hand impatiently. “Where does the evil spirit come in?”
“Good spirit,” Andy corrected as he looked up at John. “It’s a good spirit.”
“If you say so.”
The boy looked back at his hands. “What if the good spirit showed the little boy how to open a locked drawer where there’s a gun, and what if the spirit knows how to use guns, and what if the boy had the gun and the uncle still wouldn’t stop and the boy shoots him dead? Is the boy a killer or was he just defending himself?”
John Draper stood, went to the mantelpiece, and took an empty pipe from a rack that was there. He played nervously with the dark briar for a moment, then replaced it. He glanced at Andy and said, “Stopped smoking last year. I ought to throw these damned things away.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know, Andy. Under the normal rules, it’s almost never legal to take the law into your own hands, self-defense being an exception. The boy being possessed by this spirit really places the situation outside the normal rules.”
Andy nodded and pursed his lips. “And that’s where kids are anyway, right? Outside the normal rules? All of this child protection stuff is a fraud, right? Three of them get on the talk shows to show the system works, then the thumpers and child molesters, killers, and kidnappers get to do whatever they want to the rest. Then, after the boys and girls are beat up, raped, tortured, or killed, then maybe one out of ten might be able to complain about it. How many of them ever get any justice?” Even though they were clasped together, his hands were shaking. There were tears in his eyes and he fought to keep them out of his voice. “How many of them get beaten or killed for trying to complain?”
“You made your point.” Draper returned to his chair and sat down. He propped his elbows on the arm rests and rested his chin on his clenched fists. “I’m wondering how the kid feels after killing the uncle. I assume he gets away with it.”
“He gets away with it. No one believes a five and a half year old boy can shoot someone down and make it look like a suicide. They don’t even consider it. But the boy feels terrible. All he wants to do is scream from guilt and terror, but who can he talk to?”
John Draper looked at Andy from beneath hooded eyes. “You tell me.”
The boy shrugged and held his head to one side. “A therapist, a friend of the family, is brought in. The boy needs help and the therapist agrees to keep the boy’s secret.” His eyes narrowed as an edge came into his voice. “She promised never to reveal anything about the boy, no matter what it was. She made that promise to him!” Andy looked away from Ellen’s widower. “Then it got to where she finally believed the boy about the spirit. She thought telling everybody about it, proving it, was a whole lot more important than keeping her promise to the boy.”
Andy quickly faced Draper. “What could he do? She was going to tell everyone — make him into a media freak. If he wasn’t going to be a victim, what could he do?”
John’s eyes were transfixed on a point in space. “Plead with her? Beg? Remind her of her promise?”
“He tried all that. It didn’t matter to her. She had a name to build. What was he supposed to do? I need to know … for my story.”
Suddenly John half rose, grabbed the front of Andy’s shirt, and bellowed, “Would it have been so damned unbearable? If the world knew, would it have been so bad?”
“Wouldn’t it?” Andy screamed back.
Bringing his hand back toward the ceiling, the man slapped the boy across his face, driving him back into the couch. The man stood there, flexing his fingers, his breaths coming out in ragged sobs as Andy held his face. Through his own tears, Andy saw the tears on John’s face. After a long time, John dropped into his chair and stared blankly at the floor. “So, he kills the therapist. How’d the little bastard feel about that?”
“He loved her. He loved her and she was the only person in the world he could talk to. After she died he never talked to anyone ever again about the things that were going on inside him. How do you think he felt about that?” Andy lowered his hand from his face revealing deep red welts. “She shouldn’t’ve broken her promise.”
“Yeah.”
Andy shrugged. “That’s my story.”
John Draper held his hands to his face for a long time. As the hands, at last, came down, he leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Did the kid ever take out anyone else?”
“Like who?”
John brought his gaze back to Andy’s face. “Oh, like a seventeen year old baby-sitter with a habit of punching on the kids she watched, a neighborhood bully, a couple of mob kidnappers, a reporter with more threats and deals than principles.”
Andy glanced down and bit at his lower lip. “Only if he couldn’t do anything else.”
“Jesus.” John Draper closed his eyes rolled his head back and slouched down in his chair. After a moment he shook his head and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. His face looked different. His eyes were wide, his voice barely controlled. “Andy, I guess I have a story, too. It sounds a hell of a lot like yours. Want to hear it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s all from the point of view of a therapist’s husband. He’s a retired cop, but he keeps his toe in the water. You know, he drops down to homicide every now and then to visit his friends to see what’s going on. He calls himself a writer. He’s eighteen years older than his beautiful wife and he needs all the glamour he can get. That’s what he figures, anyway. He’s so head over heels in love with his wife he feels like a damned teenager.” John Draper looked toward the window to the right of the fireplace.
“She’s a good woman — a good person. She had this hard little ambitious streak, a need to make a name, but she was a good person. Kind, loving. They never let her do any real work at the prison, and therapy on the outside was beginning to look more and more like trying to stop a flood with a dish sponge.”
“The character in your story?”
“Yeah.” The man clasped his hands together, and let his gaze fall to the floor. “One day she gets a client,” he raised his eyebrows. “A little boy who thinks he’s killed his uncle. She believes he’s been traumatized by a suicide in his family, but as she learns more, she remembers an old project she was hooked up with a few years before; a project that involved trying out a youth drug on a death row prisoner. He was turned into a baby all right, but it was so much unfeeling protoplasm with no will or life of its own. The project was a flop, but suddenly she was wondering what happened to that baby.”
He smiled and shook his head. “Her friends years before had adopted a handicapped infant, a lump that did nothing but eat and fill up diapers for years. Then the boy suddenly awakened, no longer a vegetable. That was the boy who was in front of her saying that he’d killed his uncle. She was real excited about the possibility, but her husband thought she was going around the bend. He kept telling her she needed proof, otherwise she’d go down as some kind of nut. So, every spare moment she spent tracking down leads, interviewing subjects, collating research, and being with her client, of course. Then, one day she ran across something that backed up everything; a package the killer had left for his new self.”